Colin studied his boots, which Mercy took as a good sign.
When it stayed quiet, Mercy said, “Evie never told you, did she?”
Flicker of lashes as dark eyes searched the room.
“That Larry wasn’t your old man.”
A line of tension unfurled between them, humming with the strain of holding onto each of them.
And then it snapped.
Colin heaved a deep, weary sigh. “She did. Right before I drove up here.”
“Yeah?”
“She told me what happened. Then, the morning I left, she got up all hysterical and crying in her bathrobe. Sat me down, told me about…” He swallowed. “Remy. She thought I’d come up here and hurt you. ‘Don’t kill your brother,’ she told me.’ ” He snorted. “Didn’t say anything about you killing me.”
Mercy felt a faint smile tug at his mouth. “Yeah, well, Evie doesn’t know what I do for a living.”
Colin’s brows went up. “Fix bikes?” he asked, mockingly.
“Far as you know.” Suddenly, he was exhausted. He slumped down in his chair, legs spread to hold his weight. “Look – I never liked you growing up. You were a shit.”
Colin twitched a grin.
“Still are. I thought little brothers were supposed to be respectful. Reverent, even.”
“You’re shit outta luck there.”
“Obviously. But no matter what I thought about you, you’ve gotta believe that I always loved Larry and Evie. I hate what happened. Shit, I hate it. But…I wouldn’t change what I did in that moment. This life…” The way he was slouched, he could read the patches down the front of his cut. “It doesn’t lend itself to happy endings.”
Colin was quiet for a long moment, picking at loose threads on the knee of his jeans, the fading sunlight painting his battered face in gruesome bas relief. “It’s not like it is in movies, is it?”
“No.”
His head lifted, and even though he only had part of one eye open, Mercy could read the intensity of his gaze. “The guys who killed Remy…you took care of them?”
“Big Son bait.”
Colin nodded. Glanced toward the window. “You know,” he mused. “You were always a scrawny, weird kid. I didn’t think you’d turn out bigger than me.”
“You tend to miss stuff when you’re stuck so far up your own ass.”
“Yeah.”
“Both our fathers are dead. I don’t see much of a reason to keep on putting people in the ground on their behalf.”
Colin took a deep, deep breath…and let it out in a rush. “Yeah.”
The shadows stretched. Evening birdsong filtered through the window, light and trilling. Evidence that the world turned and retained its beauty, despite the ugliness of men.
“You know,” Colin said, easing back so he rested on his elbows, his frame relaxed now, the last aggression bleeding out of him. “I have no idea what it’s like to care about shit the way you do.”
Mercy smiled. “Hurts like hell, but it’s worth it.”
He thought of what awaited him at home: the magic of his girl and their boy that kept him from self-destructing on a daily basis.
“You got enough money to get wherever you wanna go next?”
Shame-faced, Colin shook his head.
“I think I can help with that.” Then, on impulse: “What are you eating for dinner?”
“Whatever they got in the vending machine.”
“Come back to the house with me. We’ve got leftovers, but they’re warm, and homemade.”
“Oh…okay.”
Eleven
Girls Gone Wild
“I have grapes. Do you want some?” Holly asked as she popped the plastic lid off the Glad container of fruit she’d packed. There was a full-size fridge in the Dartmoor trucking office, and she was making a point of packing nutritious lunches. Usually, what had sounded good at six that morning while she was prepping no longer sounded good by lunchtime, but she made herself eat anyway. Lots of vitamins, protein, and calcium.
Most days, much to her delight, Michael wandered over from the body shop and ate with her. So she always packed enough for both of them, sure to include things he liked – iced down red Gatorade on a hot day, chocolate-dipped granola bars, peppered tomato sandwiches.
That’s what he was eating today: sliced red tomatoes on wheat, light mayo, lettuce, red onion, and lots of pepper. Holly thought they were disgusting; Michael’s eyes always brightened in silent thanks when she presented him with one.
He regarded the red grapes from his chair across the desk and then reached for a bunch, transferring them to his paper plate.
Things had been warm, and simple, and easy between them since the rope incident, their particular brand of intimacy revived not by the sex, but the truths traded afterward. Holly felt a small measure of triumph – they’d had a marital awkward moment, and they’d pushed past it. It was so normal and boring and…wonderful.
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the tidy stack of handwritten pages she’d left beside the keyboard.
She was distracted a moment by his tongue curling around a grape and plucking it off the stem, then refocused. “It’s one of Ava’s stories. One of her old ones. Sam found a box of them while we were unpacking, and she said we could read them, if we wanted.” She gestured to the tomblike office around them. “We were having a quiet day, so…” She shrugged.
“Can she write worth a damn?”
Holly frowned. “I don’t have much to compare her to, really. But…” She pressed her lips together as she stared at the handwritten cover of the story. She’d worried, at first, that she’d be unable to identify with the characters in any story. Not that she wouldn’t like them or understand them, but that she would have no idea what they were talking about.
But on page one, she’d been sucked in. The office had faded around her as she tumbled into the life of a girl trying to find her place in a cruel, unsympathetic world. The phone had rung three times before she noticed it.
“I think she’s good,” she said, glancing back at Michael. “You could probably read it, if you wanted to.”
He shook his head emphatically and picked up his sandwich. “Nope. Not reading something somebody else’s old lady wrote.”
She laughed. “Why not?”
He sighed, elbows braced on the desk, sandwich dripping pink tomato juice onto the plate. “Because if she’s writing about…what she wants to do to Mercy or something” – he shifted in his seat – “and I read it, that’s…a violation, or something.” He frowned at his own awkwardness and Holly bit back her smile. “No.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
A silhouette swept past the closed blinds before the door was pushed open. Holly was sad to have their lunch interrupted, but she hitched herself upright in her chair when she spotted Maggie.
Michael saw her stiffen and turned to look over his shoulder, dismissing the head old lady with a fast nod and going back to his food.
Maggie was in a loose A-line peach-colored sleeveless top and denim Bermuda shorts, leather flip-flops, blonde hair wavy and thick over her shoulders. She looked like she’d just walked off a beach somewhere.
“Hey, you busy in here?”
Holly shook her head. “It’s been quiet.”
“Can you take the rest of lunch and come help me? Jasmine’s supposed to be taking inventory at the clubhouse, and I need to go verify before I send her shopping.”
Holly nodded and pushed her chair back. She didn’t want anything to do with the Lean Bitches, but when the groupies were put in charge of housekeeping, it necessitated contact sometimes. And she wasn’t about to tell Maggie no. “Sure.”
Sorry, she mouthed to Michael as Maggie turned her back on them.
He shrugged…but his eyes said he’d miss her company.
She dropped an impulsive kiss on his forehead on her way out.
On a good day, when asked, Jasmine would say that she much preferred her status as
most important Lean Bitch to that of a club old lady. She would have said that she was her own mistress, with no one ragging on her about dinner and cold beer in the fridge, with a bed all to herself when she chose, and plenty of company when she didn’t. The old ladies were the wives; she was the exciting, exotic thrill. The old ladies waited hand and foot on just one man; she had Tango, and Aidan, and Candy when he was in town – not to mention those three little new prospects weren’t so little where it counted. She would have said that she was a sexual creature, and she could never tolerate being someone’s little missus.
These were all flagrant lies, of course, but who had to know that save her and the pillow that accepted her tears at the end of the day? She had, after all, chosen this road. She’d ride it – literally, most of the time – without too much bitching. Her poor grandmother was spinning in her grave somewhere; her mother was…wherever she’d gone off to twenty years ago. And she was in charge of kitchen inventory at the clubhouse, because despite the suck-fest that was her personal life, she did love all her boys, and she liked cooking for them.
“Seriously?” she asked herself, surveying the clubhouse pantry with hands on hips. Nothing but Oreos, potato chips, and boxes of taco shells stared back at her from the shelves. “Bottom of the barrel.”
There was a notepad and pen on the counter, and she began a list that was basically from scratch, given the current state of supplies. They needed bread, pasta, rice, ground beef, luncheon meat, olives, hot dogs…
A light rap on the doorjamb pulled her attention, and she glanced up. “Yeah?”
The woman standing in the threshold wasn’t anyone she’d expected to see again. The shy brunette who’d responded to the online dating profile she’d set up for Tango. Today, she was wearing painted-on jeans and a purple tank top; her hair was shiny and flat-ironed, dark sheets down her back. Heavy makeup, lots of perfume. She propped one foot up on its toes and cocked her hip in a pose that managed to be both hesitant and bold.
“Hi,” she said, a slow mile curving her lips.
“Hi,” Jasmine echoed, without emotion.
“The, uh, the guy out front said you were back here.”
That would be Littlejohn, mopping the floor. Jasmine felt an instant stab of irritation that he’d given some random chick directions back here to the kitchen. Yeah, they’d had a fun afternoon, but she was busy. And she didn’t want to make a habit of helping doe-eyed things discover their kinky sides.
“Yeah, well” – the smile was fake and surely the other girl could tell that – “I’ve got kind of a busy day, so…” She made a dismissive gesture, flicking her fingers toward the door.
Little Doe didn’t get it. “Is Tango here?” She took a step inside the kitchen, hand braced on the jamb, attempting that pose that turned a woman’s body into an enticing sequence of curves.
“No.” Jasmine turned back to her list. Canned corn, canned peas, canned baked beans. “I’ve got no idea where he is.” She hadn’t seen him at all that day, come to think of it; she’d glimpsed him swinging a leg over his bike about eleven, but to her knowledge, he wasn’t back yet. That was a long lunch.
Soft scuffing footsteps told her the girl came into the room and moved to stand beside her. She could hear her breathing through her mouth, quick, excited little breaths. “Is he coming back? Will he be here in a little while?”
“Dunno.” Jasmine lifted her head and was startled by how close the brunette was, hovering right at her elbow.
The girl smiled nervously, chewing at her lip. “Maybe…maybe we could wait for him. You and me.” Uncertain laugh. “We could…get started. And then he could join us.”
“What? Like, you and me?”
More lip chewing, emphatic nodding, a certain hazy glazed desire clouding the girl’s eyes.
“Oh, honey,” Jasmine sighed, “that’s real flattering, but the other day, that was just a one-time thing.”
She was totally crestfallen, brows plucking together, teeth catching hard in her lip. “But Tango…”
“Sweetie” – she wasn’t trying to be patronizing, it was just happening – “Tango isn’t big on change. What we did before – that’s not gonna be a regular thing.” Nor did she want it to be, she realized. It was shocking to feel the way jealousy tightened her gut. For the most part, she knew that Tango – fragile, gentle baby boy that he was – needed an old lady. He needed a wife, who was devoted, who understood his unspoken hang-ups. But there was a part of her that wasn’t ready to let him go, and that part of her was pissed the hell off that this chick had showed up.
“But, the ad said–”
“Yeah, I know, but I wrote the ad. Tango had nothing to do with it. I thought – well, I thought wrong, okay? And he’s not here.”
“But–”
“Look, I can tell him you came by, and if he’s interested, I can call you. Maybe we could…” Not gonna happen, she thought, but there was so sense crushing her.
There was a quick, dark glimmer in the girl’s eyes, something other than the hope and reticence she’d shown so far. “Call him,” she suggested, voice hardening a fraction. “Call and see if he’s coming back soon.”
Jasmine shook her head. “Sorry, honey, I’m not his keeper.” She bent her head over the grocery list again – and a tinny warning sound pulsed in the back of her mind. A metallic ping, ping, ping, like sonar bleeping in sea monster movies.
“Um…” the girl said. “What?”
“I’m not calling him. I’m not bothering him with this.”
“Bothering him?” The girl’s voice twisted, became shrill. “I responded to the ad. I came here. Because he wanted me. How is that fucking bothering?”
Some self-possessed women cursed with a natural fluency, that sounded neither vulgar nor out of place. Women like Maggie Teague. But fuck coming out of this girl’s mouth sounded raw and nasty. It startled Jasmine, brought her head up with a jerk. “What?”
The girl’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. Her lips quivered over clenched teeth and her cheeks colored with anger. “I’m bothering you, right? Not him. He doesn’t even know I’m here, and you won’t tell him, because I’m bothering you.”
Jasmine lifted a placating hand. “Don’t get all upset, okay? This isn’t personal–”
“Yes it is!” the girl snapped. “After what I…what we…” Her cheeks flushed darkly and she batted her lashes. “It was personal.”
Oh, this was so not supposed to have happened. Right about the time that girl’s hand had slipped under Jasmine’s skirt, she should have realized this wasn’t a one true love situation.
“No,” Jasmine said, as gently as she could. “That was just fun. That was just crazy sex.”
The brunette snarled. Actually snarled, like an angry dog, and Jasmine staggered back a step, the alarms screaming in her head now. “Are you rejecting me?”
“I’m saying there’s nothing here for you. Go home.”
“Call Tango!” the girl shouted, and it was an awful sound. “I want to talk to him, not you.”
Jasmine took another step back and felt the pantry door bump into her shoulder. “You need to calm down, and think about what you’re saying,” she said in as soothing a voice as she could manage, given the anxious flutter in her chest. “You came here and got naked with two strangers. How did you think that was going to play out? Did you think we’d, like, date you or something?”
Wrong thing to say.
“If it were up to me, I’d just give her a credit card and send her, but Ghost wants me to go over the list and pre-load the club debit account with the cash, let her use that,” Maggie explained as they walked across the shimmering mirages on the Dartmoor asphalt. “The woman’s been the designated shopper for years, but oh no, boss man can’t trust anybody.”
“Well…” Holly didn’t have an answer to that. Personally, she wasn’t very trusting of the groupie who’d mistaken her for one of her own the night they’d met. To be fair, she didn’t know her. And
to be more fair, it wasn’t her business – if Maggie had faith in the woman, then she ought to as well. The Lean Dogs MC was a massive organization, and if Jasmine was a cog in the mechanics, then Holly could be thankful for her help.
“One of the other girls,” Maggie continued, not noticing Holly’s noncommittal answer, “is supposed to be doing a housekeeping inventory. Bleach, Lysol, that kinda stuff. Here.” She handed a printed-out list to Holly. “If you can add this to what she’s got, that’d be great.”
Holly took it. “Sure thing.”
The interior of the clubhouse was a cool, dark respite from the heat outside, their footsteps echoing hollowly off the hardwood floor in the common room. It smelled fresh – lemon cleanser, wood polish – and Holly took a deep breath of the AC-chilled air.
“Jasmine?” Maggie called, surveying the quiet room. Packed wall-to-wall during multi-chapter parties, it seemed cavernous now. “You in here?”
No answer.
“Come on.” Maggie fanned herself with the list she carried, honeyed hair rustling. “She must be back here.”
Holly followed her down the hall toward the kitchen –
And they both froze.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
A gasp.
A grunt.
A half-strangled scream.
Scuffling.
Maggie’s hand fluttered back, grabbed at Holly’s wrist. Hold tight, her squeeze said. Stay right here with me. It struck Holly as maternal, and she tucked in close behind the matriarch as they peered around the edge of the doorjamb into the kitchen.
Holly bit down hard on a gasp.
There was a brunette woman she’d never seen before with her hands wrapped around Jasmine’s throat. Jasmine was no fainting flower, and she clawed at the woman’s hands, kicked and bowed against the pressure at her throat. But clearly, the other woman had gotten the drop on her, and her face was a terrifying shade of purple as she struggled for air.
Half My Blood Page 13
