Maybe that was something I had in common with my mother. She had grown up in a well-respected, well-off family out east (a fact that my Aunt Tamara never let me forget for a moment). But my mother had chosen something else. She had chosen my dad over wealth, over comfort, over everything she had known. And then her life was cut short, before she’d barely even begun to live it. I wondered if she had ever regretted the life she had chosen. Did she ever wonder to herself who she really was? Did she feel like me, astride between two worlds? Or did she feel that she’d found her real home with my father?
I had expected at least to learn more about my mom from living with Aunt Tamara. I had hoped that getting to know the woman who was my mother’s only other living blood relative would give me a connection to her. But all I had found out was the family had been devastated by her choice. Her father had disowned her, forbidding my aunt or my grandmother to ever mention her name in his presence again. Tessa never went back to Vermont after her marriage to my father. My aunt had never even known of my existence until, so many years later, my father called her out of the blue to take in her sister’s daughter.
As I sat there on the side of the road with the windows rolled down, sweating in the heat, I thought about what awaited me in Cheyenne. It was going to be tough enough seeing my dad again after all this time – a father I hadn’t spoken to in years before calling him yesterday to say I was coming for a visit. Now I also had to worry about the man who was apparently my dad’s new VP. My stranger’s icy blue eyes flashed again in my memory, sending a wave of heat through my core. Oh, man. Like I didn’t have enough problems already. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about not even going at all. I could just turn around. Go back to the next town and find a hotel for the night, then figure out where to go in the morning. Yeah, right. Like you even have money to do that. Don’t be a damn coward, Hadley. In the end, though, I sighed and turned the key in the ignition.
For better or worse, it was time to go home.
Chapter Four
Ryker
I had just finished up with Sherilyn when a head poked through the door of the back room where we were. “Ryke, Randi’s lookin’ for ya,” Gonz said, nodding his head back toward the clubhouse bar.
“Got it, brother, thanks,” I replied. I pushed Sherilyn off me and zipped up, then made my way down the hallway. “Hey, ma,” I called as I saw her seated on one of the bar stools. She lifted her hand in a small wave.
At forty-three, my ma still looked pretty damn good for her age. Good enough to attract and hold the well-known pussy hound Lon Cooper’s attention, anyway. The president of The Throttle MC had hooked up with my mother a little over six years ago, right around the time I joined the club. Didn’t take long at all for him to decide she was old lady material.
It wasn’t like my ma had been a stranger to the MC life when she met Lon. My dad had been a member of an MC himself. Not that I ever knew him or anything. When I was conceived, Randi was the old lady of a guy named Jake who belonged to the Steel Soldiers of Northern California. Not long after I was born, things heated up between the Soldiers and a rival club, and my father was killed in a shootout. Randi took me and left, moving us out here to Cheyenne, where she started doing hair and nails at one of the local salons to make a living.
Still, even though I had never known my father, the biker lifestyle seemed like it had been baked into me from birth. I just couldn’t stay away from motorcycles. I bought my first Harley before I was even legally able to ride, an old fixer-upper that I learned to fix even as I learned to handle it.
When I made the decision to prospect with The Throttle, I was seventeen years old and wild as hell. The men of The Throttle became my brothers, and Lon Cooper became the father figure I never had. When I was patched in, Lon clapped me on the back and told me I had a great future with the club. No one had ever told me I had a great future before. I had never been so proud, or so determined to prove someone right.
I had thought my ma would be totally against my prospecting with the club, given her past with my father and the way he had died. But in fact, when I told her I was going to prospect, a strange thing happened. She looked at me with a small smile and said, “I figured you’d end up in the club someday. Did I ever tell you why I chose to come here to Cheyenne?”
Turns out my ma had grown up here, and she never told me. She had gone to high school with a few future members of The Throttle, Lon Cooper being one of them. They had even dated briefly back in the day. My ma implied, but didn’t say, that Lon had been her first love. All the time we’d lived in Cheyenne, and I never had the slightest idea the two of them knew each other. But one day not long after I was patched in, Randi showed up at the clubhouse. And Lon didn’t seem at all surprised to see her.
It happened pretty naturally after that, and no one seemed to question it one way or another. One day, Randi was Lon’s old lady, and that was it. They even decided to get married. “I gotta provide for your mom, in case something happens to me,” Lon said to me gruffly of their decision. They tied the knot one hot summer day, and the party the club threw that night was epic. Long after the sun had gone down, Lon ambled up to me with a couple of shots of whiskey. He handed me one and raised his. “To my son,” he intoned with a twinkle in his eye.
I nodded. “To my father,” I grinned at him, and we drank.
In the six years that passed, a lot of shit had gone down in the club. We’d had some major shakeups, some bad deals gone down, and somehow, I’d ended up as the club’s VP. Things were starting to look up lately, but there was still some major shit up ahead to be dealt with. Some of that shit was on my mind as I walked up to my ma and sat down next to her. I nodded at Cal behind the bar and he brought me a shot and a beer. “Hey, Randi,” I greeted her.
“Hey, baby,” she smiled.
“Gonz said you were lookin’ for me?” I grabbed the shot glass and slammed it.
“Yeah,” she began, and as she did I noticed the crease in her brow. “Ryker, I just wanted to give you a heads up. You know you’ve heard that Lon has a daughter?”
Sure, I had. Though I’d never met her, I’d heard bits and pieces about her over the years. Hadley, her name was. The club members would talk about her from time to time, though not when Lon was anywhere near. Apparently, Lon had sent her out east to live with an aunt when she was fourteen, to get her away from the club. She had gone to high school in Connecticut or Vermont or some shit, and stayed out there for college. I figured she would be about twenty-one or twenty-two now, from what the other brothers had said.
Lon himself never talked about her. Apparently, Hadley had been so pissed off at her dad for sending her away that she cut all ties with him. Lon hadn’t seen or heard from her in years, from what I understood.
“Yeah, sure. What about her?” I couldn’t imagine why Randi was bringing her up now.
“Well,” Randi sighed, “apparently, she’s coming for a visit. Lon didn’t even know about it until a couple of days ago. He just told me about it this morning.”
“Huh,” I grunted, taking a swig of my beer. “How long’s she gonna stay?”
“I don’t know, baby. A while, I imagine.”
“How’s Lon feel about it?” I asked.
Randi scoffed. “You know Lon. He doesn’t do ‘feelings’. But I know he’s a little worried about her. She was supposed to show up yesterday, but she called and left a message on his phone that she had been having some car trouble. She said she was getting close, though. Probably be here sometime this afternoon.”
Something clicked in my slow lizard brain then – like two and two locking into place to make four. I opened my mouth in a daze and murmured, “Car trouble...?”
“Yeah,” Randi replied absently, her gaze flicking up to the TV where two guys were doing their best to knock each other senseless. “Burning oil, or something.”
Just then, the door to the clubhouse opened, and in walked a fiery brunette in a pair of daisy dukes, with legs that w
ouldn’t quit. Hadley Cooper. Apparently, my stepsister.
Jesus fuck. This was going to get complicated.
Chapter Five
Hadley
I knew he was gonna be there, of course. I just didn’t know his would be the first damn face I saw.
I pushed the door to the clubhouse open and walked in, trying to push down my jangling nerves. I had sat in the parking lot taking deep breaths for the last five minutes, steeling myself for this moment. I wasn’t sure what made me more nervous: seeing my father again for the first time in seven years, or seeing the man who had kissed me like the world was ending and then just left me there hanging, with nothing but the memory of his heat pressed up against me.
There he was. Sitting at the bar, looking at me with a mask of indifference that covered something else I couldn’t quite read. He sure as hell didn’t seem surprised to see me, which was awfully strange. I did my best to show no sign that I recognized the man who had helped me top off my oil and had almost lit my underwear on fire just a couple of hours earlier.
A woman in her forties sat on the stool next to him. She was dressed in a tight black tank, her dyed blond hair pulled back in a loose pony. At the sight of me she stood up quickly and moved toward the rear hallway. Her eyes never left my face. “Lon!” she called down the corridor, her voice trembling a bit. “She’s here.”
I expected my stranger to say something – to make some wisecrack about the coincidence of seeing me here, maybe – but no dice. Total stone face. Nervously, I opened my mouth to say something – anything -- but just then the cadence of my father’s loud, unmistakable steps echoed down the hallway toward me.
“Hadley?” he called as he entered the bar. When his eyes locked on me, a wide, open grin spread over his face. In three strides he reached me, and my father enveloped me in a warm, powerful hug, so tight I wondered if he was trying to go back in time to prevent me from leaving in the first place. I inhaled the scent of leather and smoke that was always the smell of my dad. I had almost forgotten it, but memories came flooding back as I breathed it in.
“Hi, Daddy,” I managed to wheeze out as I struggled for breath in his grip.
If Lon was angry at me for all the years of radio silence, he didn’t say anything about it. And if I was angry with him for sending me away, well... somehow, right now with him hugging me so hard I was a little afraid he’d squeeze the life out of me, it didn’t matter quite so much.
He finally seemed to realize he was hugging me too hard and let go, grabbing my shoulders in his big, bear-like hands. He held me at arms’ length to look at me. “Baby girl,” he rumbled, his eyes shining a little. “It’s been a long time.”
I smiled, willing my voice not to falter. “Yes, it has.” Blinking back what threatened to be a flood of tears, I looked around the bar to see a handful of people had entered. A few of them I recognized from the old days. The others – younger, most of them – I didn’t. “Hey, Gonz, Benny,” I said tremulously. I waved at them as they stared back at me and smiled uncertainly in recognition. Wrench stood in the back and nodded once. I nodded back. It was weird. I had expected my reunion with my dad to be awkward, but I had somehow thought that the guys would be less hesitant. Gonz had always treated me like a little surrogate daughter, and I would have expected him to come up and give me a bear hug to end all bear hugs. Instead, the guys I knew were hanging back. They seemed to be waiting for something, but I had no idea what.
“I, uh, just graduated from college,” I said, my eyes moving back to meet my father’s. “I thought I’d come back for a visit before... well, before I made any concrete plans.”
“That’s great, baby,” my dad grinned. “I sure hope you’ll stick around for a while.” He really did seem happy to see me, I realized. His eyes were glinting with that familiar twinkle I knew so well. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe things could just be normal between us. My heart leapt to my throat as I allowed myself that thought. Maybe we could let bygones be bygones and put the past behind us. Maybe seven years hadn’t changed as much as I thought they had. Maybe we really could more or less pick up where we left off.
We stood there dopily, looking at each other. No one else said a word. In the ensuing silence, my dad’s eyes flickered toward the woman sitting at the bar next to my stranger. She looked back at him, her eyes communicating something I couldn’t identify. Something passed between them, and it occurred to me that Lon might have found himself an old lady. I hadn’t known my dad to have a serious relationship since my mother. Of course, I had to assume that as the president of the club, he had to have his share of the women who hung around the men of The Throttle, just like the others. But he had always kept that side of things away from me when I was a kid.
Lon tore his eyes away from the older woman and looked back at me. He seemed to hesitate, a frown of worry creasing his brow. I almost laughed. Surely he didn’t think that I would begrudge him his share of happiness, did he? I could hardly expect him to stay loyal to the memory of my dead mother forever, after all. I decided I needed to make the first move, to show him that I was more than happy to accept another woman in his life. “I’m Hadley,” I said, stepping forward and sticking my hand out toward the woman.
Her eyes locked on mine, and she shook my hand in a sort of daze. Smiling nervously, she said, “Hi, honey, I’m so glad to meet you. I’m Randi. I’m... your daddy’s old lady. He’s told me so much about you.”
He hasn’t told me anything about you, I thought with a trace of bitterness, but pushed the thought away. I had been the one to cut off ties with him, I reminded myself. And our only conversation since the day I turned eighteen had been just two days ago, when I called him to let him know I was coming back to Cheyenne. I could hardly have expected him to tell me about his old lady over the phone.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said sincerely as I took her hand and shook it.
Randi eventually pulled her hand away and looked over her right shoulder. “And this,” she said, “Is Ryker. He’s my son.”
My stranger stared at me, his expression unreadable. My eyes widened as I took in what she was saying. I stifled a gasp.
“Your... your son?” I managed to stammer.
“Your stepbrother,” my father murmured next to me. “And the VP of the club.”
“I...” My mouth opened, and then snapped shut again. My stepbrother? Ryker’s eyes were locked on mine. His jaw clenched, but other than that I saw no reaction from him.
“Your brother,” Randi corrected my father. She looked back at me warmly and smiled. “There are no ‘steps’ in this family.”
I realized that several seconds had passed, and that people were looking at us. Someone behind me cleared his throat.
“Umm... Nice to meet you,” I croaked at Ryker. I felt frozen to the spot. I knew I couldn’t shake his hand; I was afraid I would explode into flames if his skin touched mine.
“Nice to meet you, too.” His deep, rumbling voice vibrated through me, as though it was touching me in all the places I had wished his hands had, back on the desert highway. The corner of his mouth turned up in a slight smirk, but other than that, he made no sign that he even remembered what had happened between us a couple of hours earlier.
Randi’s voice broke the tension. “I, uh, made up the spare room... I mean, your old bedroom, at our place for you, Hadley. I hope you’ll stay for as long as you like.”
I glanced at her, grateful for the change of subject. “Thank you,” I said sincerely. I took a deep breath and pushed all the swirling emotions at the news of my new stepbrother away. “I really appreciate it.”
My father seemed glad that the conversation had moved on to logistics. “Hadley, you said your car was giving you trouble on the way here. What’s the problem?”
“It’s been sucking down oil,” I said, turning to him. I resisted the urge to look back at Ryker. “But it’s done that basically the whole time I’ve had it. It’s no big...”
�
�I’ll have one of the boys check it out, get it all fixed up for you,” he said brusquely.
I started to protest, but then I realized that this was his way of showing me he was glad I was home. “Thanks, Dad,” I replied, smiling at him.
“Of course, baby girl,” he replied, almost businesslike. Turning to Ryker, he said, “Ryke, grab Hadley’s bags outta her car and take her to our place to get settled in. Take the truck.”
“You bet,” Ryker said impassively. I opened my mouth to protest, but couldn’t think of anything to say. He turned and strode out the door without another word.
Lon held out his hand to me. “Give me the keys, Had. I’ll have one of the boys work on it, get it back to you soon as we can.”
Dumbly, I dug into my pocket and fished them out. As I gave them to him, he grabbed me and folded me into another hug. “So glad you’re home, baby girl,” he murmured as he held me.
“Me, too, Dad,” I said.
Though, truth be told, I wasn’t sure I was happy to be home, after all.
Outside, I found Ryker loading my bags into an aging F150 with the garage logo on the outside. “Hey,” I muttered as I walked up.
“Hey,” he replied, not looking up at me. He threw the last of my stuff in the back, opened the door to the cab, and climbed into the driver’s seat. After a moment, he rolled down the passenger window and looked out at me. “You coming?” he asked, a slight note of impatience in his voice.
Mutely, I opened the passenger door and got in. He started the engine, revved it once, and pulled out of the parking lot. He turned right out of the lot, on a route I knew only too well, toward the house I’d grown up in.
After a minute or so, it became apparent that he wasn’t going to say anything. My nerves were getting the better of me, and when I’m nervous, I talk. “Did you know Lon was my dad?” I demanded. Way to start a casual conversation, Hadley.
Throttle MC: A Stepbrother Romance Page 3
