This woman had a fuck ton of security in a neighborhood not known to need it. Rad found that interesting.
Ollie was keeping track of Rad, but Willa seemed to have forgotten him as she reunited with her dog. “I missed you, Olliegollie. Did Mrs. Abrams spoil you with cookies while I was gone?”
“That’s a beautiful dog,” Rad said, mostly to remind her he was there.
She twitched as if she really had forgotten, then smiled. “Thanks. He’s my baby.”
She reached over and stroked her hand down the full length of his arm. Surprised by the gesture and by the warm silk of her touch as she reached his bare forearm, he almost twitched himself.
“He’ll be okay with you now. He’s not a fan of strange men, but that’s a signal that you’re not a danger.”
Sure enough, Ollie came over and snuffed at the hand he’d held out. When Rad scratched behind his ear, he set that big block of a head in his hand and closed his eyes, giving himself over to the pleasure of Rad’s touch.
Willa was watching. “You know your way around animals.”
“Farm boy. Always had a knack with ‘em.”
Again, she narrowed her eyes and examined him like a specimen pinned to a board. Then she smiled. “Animals are the best judges of character.”
“Heard it said, yeah.”
She gave her head a brisk shake. “I’ll get you that beer. Rolling Rock okay?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Ollie gave up the ear scratch and followed after his mom. Not having been invited to follow, Rad stood and looked around.
Willa had turned on some lights as she’d moved back toward the kitchen, so Rad could see a good portion of the front rooms—in typical bungalow style, the front door opened into the middle, with a living room to one side and a dining room to the other. This house was probably fifty or sixty years old, so it might have had a narrow hall here in the center at some point—yeah, it had; Rad could see the breaks in the floorboards—but somebody had removed most of the walls, making the front space open.
The décor was completely intentional, no haphazard, hand-me-down feel. Neutral furniture and area rugs, wall colors in soft, earthy tones, carefully chosen accent pieces. The wood trim was painted white. Built-in bookcases, filled with books and curios, framed a fireplace on the far living room wall. A big sheepskin dog bed took up the space between the sofa and the fireplace.
The dining room was the same—simple, tidy, comfortable. It looked like a chick’s house, but not like a girl’s house. No frills or fringe, none of the flowers and fuss that Dahlia had liked. The vibe was restful and calm.
Until he turned around and saw the fortress of a front door.
She was gone quite a while, long enough for Rad to wonder if she planned to come back out—and then to wonder how he’d get back to his bike, what with all the locks being double-keyed—when he heard the tags on the dog’s collar jingle and the tap of claws on the floor, and then Ollie trotted in from a doorway in the dining room, and Willa was on his heel, holding two green bottles of Rolling Rock beer, uncapped and frosty with cold.
She’d washed up and changed—that had been the holdup. Her face was clean, and her hair was brushed sleekly back. No longer in her riding leathers, she wore a pair of black knit shorts and a white beater. A red bra showed under the thin cotton knit.
The first thing he noticed: Goddamn, what a body. Her top half suited that miraculous ass just right. Great rack—not too big, but full and perfect. Slender shoulders, but not bony. Firm gut. Sleek limbs. Nice.
The second thing: she was really hurt. Her right arm was purple and blue, her right leg was even more bruised, and scraped up, and her right knee was at least twice the size of its left mate.
Definitely too hurt for fucking. Rad felt equal portions of relief and disappointment.
“Bike landed on your leg. You really should get that checked out,” he said as she handed him a bottle. Ollie stood between them, wagging his tail. The fierce, wary guardian who’d greeted them had taken off his armor and shown himself to be a sweet family pet. Rad dug this dog.
Willa shook her head and took a sip from her bottle. “Just scuffed up a little. I’m okay. If anything was really injured, I wouldn’t be on my feet. I took some ibuprofen, and I’ve got some stronger stuff if I need it. Still got a few days off, so I’ll take it easy and be fine.”
He begged to differ, but it wasn’t his business. “You’re the medical professional.”
She smiled. “That I am. You want to sit?”
“Sure, thanks.” He followed her over to the living room and stood and waited as she sat sideways in a corner of the sofa and stuffed a throw pillow under her hurt knee. Then he took a seat at the other end. When they were settled, Ollie stretched out on the rug before the sofa and set his head on the cushion next to Willa’s leg.
“You got yourself a good dog there.”
She smiled and scratched a black ear. “Yeah. My buddy.”
From his seat, Rad had a clear view of the front door. He had to ask. “You got some kind of trouble?”
“Hmm?” As she fully processed his question, her tone changed. “What?”
He took a long swallow from his bottle before he spoke. “That is some heavy security you got on that door. You got a pitty trained to protect. Not much trouble in this neighborhood, so I’m guessin’ you brought it with you. You got a bad ex?”
That narrow-eyed stare burned his face. “I’m a woman who lives alone. Maybe I’m just cautious.”
And yet here he sat, a stranger to her. “Maybe. That it?”
A big clock was the centerpiece on the mantel. It ticked several seconds by in silence as Willa stared at him, sucking on her bottle and scratching the dog’s head.
“No,” she finally answered. “Bad ex.”
“He cause you trouble?”
“Not here. I don’t think he’s found me in Tulsa, and I’ve been here a while. Maybe he stopped looking.”
“Stalker?”
She sighed, finished her beer, set the empty on the coffee table, next to a short stack of art photography books, buried a belch behind her hand, and then returned her attention to him. “Can I ask why you care?”
“If you need help, I’m offerin’ it. Don’t much like men who hurt women.”
He could almost hear Dahlia’s snide snigger at that—but what had gone on between them was different. And he’d never hurt her physically, even when he’d badly wanted to. He’d been loud, yes. Destructive. Mean, even. She knew every button he had, and by the end she’d been pushing them all like a starved lab rat at a food slot.
He’d done some damage to his brothers in the ring in those days, burning off the violence, but he’d never mussed a strand on her scheming red head.
“So you’re, what, my knight in shining armor?”
Willa’s tone was sharp and sarcastic, and Rad took offense. “I do somethin’ to earn that sneer?”
She had the grace to blush. “No. Sorry. Just…I’m not sure why you’re here.”
More offense. “You invited me.”
“I know. I don’t know why.”
Okay. He was tired and sore and drained in body and mind after the night they’d had. He didn’t appreciate her putting him on the defensive when he’d done nothing but be decent to her, and he’d fucking known better than to come into the home of a woman who made him hard. Warning bells finally started to sound, and he drained the rest of his beer and stood up.
“I don’t know why, either, darlin’. Thank you for the beer. I hope your leg feels better. Ollie, it was nice to meet ya, fella.” He ruffled the dog’s head and walked to the front door.
Which was deadbolted with double-keyed locks. Fuck. So much for controlling his exit.
He heard her working her way to her feet. She limped to a box on the sideboard in the dining room and got her keys, then limped back to the door. Rad stood, feeling like a dick, while she unlocked each lock and, last, released the security bar and the
chain.
“You know double-keyed locks are more danger than help, right?” he muttered. “What if there’s a fire?”
She ignored him and opened the door, and he stepped around her and into the wedge the door had made. Before he could cross the threshold, he felt her hand on his arm.
“Rad, wait. I’m sorry. I just—I don’t like to talk about my shit to anybody. And I don’t know you.”
He turned back and looked down at her upturned face, into her wide, light eyes—they were neither green nor blue, but rather both, rays of blue and gold on a green field. “No, you don’t. You take it easy, Willa. Rest your leg. Call in the mornin’ about your bike.”
The right thing to do, the thing he meant to do, was to turn and walk out the door. Instead, he brought a hand up and caught her chin on it, and he bent his head to hers and kissed her on the mouth.
Her lips were soft and full and pliant, and she didn’t resist him at all. In fact, she tipped her head back and swayed toward him, and he knew he could turn things around between them by simply following his strongest impulse and pushing his tongue between her parted lips.
He stepped back. “Take care, darlin’.”
She closed the door before he’d stepped off her wraparound porch. He heard her turning all those locks as he strode down her walk to his bike.
~oOo~
Rad slept for shit that night, his brain throwing all manner of images from the day before at him, and six-thirty came both too slowly, as he stared up at the dim ceiling in his shitty bedroom in his shitty rented house, and too quickly, as his alarm clanged him back to consciousness about forty minutes after he’d finally gone under.
He’d showered the night before, washing away the grime, soot, blood, and general bad vibe of the night, so he shoved his legs into a less-dirty pair of jeans, yanked a t-shirt and a hoodie over his head, pulled his boots and kutte on, and headed out.
There was a little donut shop a couple of blocks down from his place, and he stopped there first for coffee. They hadn’t had decent coffee at the clubhouse on weekday mornings since Charlene had gone and gotten herself married. None of the Bulls could brew for shit, and all the old ladies worked. They needed to find a new sweetbutt with weekday mornings off. Or learn to make a fucking pot of decent coffee.
Backing his bike into its spot at the clubhouse with two minutes to spare, Rad picked up his step as he headed into and through the party room to church. The place was empty, and Rad knew he was last in. Delaney was an asshole about being on time. He opened meetings on the dot when he called them, and he fined anybody whose butt wasn’t down when the gavel hit.
Rad’s chair was still moving a bit when Delaney called them to order.
The Brazen Bulls weren’t a large club—only the single charter, with eleven current patched members, including Maverick, who was doing a bid in the state pen, and two prospects—but they were influential in and around Tulsa, and they held some sway on the dark side all around the Great Plains and the Midwest because they had some partners with big reps. The Volkov family, for one.
The Volkovs were a bratva, a brotherhood, the Russian equivalent of the Mafia, and they’d been making noise in the States for the past few years. Headed up by a woman, Irina Volkov, they’d landed in New York and were stirring shit up almost from the first day. Their chief businesses were guns and smack. Drugs was dirty work, so the Bulls steered clear of that, but when Irina’s son and right hand, Kirill, had come west looking for stations to extend the Volkov gun route, the Bulls had been ready.
The Eighties had been hard time in these parts. Oil had made Tulsa at the turn of the century, and for decades, the town had boomed, known as The Oil Capital of the World. Born in ‘55, Rad had come up through those times, where oilfields and cornfields took up the landscape in equal parcels, and most people had enough, if not plenty. But by the late Seventies, the oil had dried up, and the industry had moved south into Texas, leaving Tulsa to shrivel into a husk and Houston to take the Oil Capital mantle.
People had been hurting. The Bulls were from oil families or farm families, and everybody hurt. Men like Delaney and Dane had come home from Vietnam and were still trying to get their civilian legs under them when the home front went to shit. Men like Rad and Ox, with draft numbers but lucky enough to be too young to get called for more than the medical exam before the war was over, had older brothers or cousins not so lucky, who’d come home broken in body or mind—or, like Rad’s brother Chris, had come home in a flag-draped box. The hurt in Tulsa had come from every direction, home and work alike.
The Brazen Bulls had come to power in that crucible. Delaney and Dane had formed the club in 1975, a year or so after they’d been stateside. They’d taken the name from a medieval torture device, where a person was crammed into the hollow belly of a bronze statue of a bull, locked in, and a fire was stoked under the bull’s belly. The screams of the dying came through the mouth of the bull, with the smoke and stench of their cooking flesh.
Rad hadn’t had any idea what a brazen bull was when he’d signed on as their first prospect. He’d just thought the club name was tough as shit. The history of the name was part of what he’d had to learn. As a young pup, he’d learned it and thought it all the tougher.
He’d been a bit older, had felt a bit more of life’s fire himself, before he really understood the complexity of the metaphor. Metaphorical thinking wasn’t exactly his strong suit. Delaney was the poet among them.
The first couple of years, the club had just been a small group of men who didn’t fit in elsewhere—whether they’d come back from the jungle wrong, or their family had fucked them up, or whatever, they hadn’t been able to make much of a go out with the normal types. They held what jobs they could, they ran the Sinclair station, which had been Delaney’s father’s, and they rode together through town and across the state. They did some good, got into some scrapes, but didn’t stir up much attention from legal beagle types.
Then oil busted, and nobody could rub two pennies together, so Delaney went out and found a way for his people to earn. First it was legit protection work. Then it was not-so-legit protection work. Then transport protection, mainly goods lifted off freighters out of Galveston or even New Orleans.
By the time the Eighties became the Nineties, the Bulls were full-on outlaw, with a rep among law and outlaw alike. That put them on the Volkov radar. The Volkovs were still upstarts then—the Italian families probably still considered them upstarts—and they were willing to work with a club just getting up to its knees in the real dark water.
Now the Bulls ran the midline of their gun route. Everybody knew that those guns were going, among other places, south of the border, into the hands of drug lords, but the Bulls didn’t consider that their business. Their business was moving guns from Point B to Point C. Points beyond in either direction were not their concern.
“First order of business,” Delaney said, setting the gavel on the table. “Everybody good after last night?” The officers had done a whole check on scene, but the night had been too chaotic to know if everybody knew everything.
The men circling the scarred and gouged oak all nodded or made some kind of positive noise. They’d been too far back to get caught in the impacts. Apollo’s left arm was wrapped in gauze, though. That wound was worth some discussion.
Dane acknowledged that as well. “What’s the word, Apollo?”
Apollo, whose legal name was Neil Armstrong—his father was a space buff, and Apollo had been born in August 1969—and had gotten his road name in the obvious way, made an equivocal face and lifted his bandaged arm. “Pulled a kid out of one of the cars that blew, ‘bout a minute before it went up. Leaned on hot metal and left some skin behind. That’s how Gunner and me knew to pull people back.” He grinned. “Gonna have a killer scar.”
“Well ain’t you a pretty boy hero,” Ox said, in a jovial sneer.
“Any word on the asshole that caused that mess?” Rad asked. He really wanted to get a
piece of that guy.
But Delaney shook his head. “I talked to Hutch last night.” Floyd Hutchison was the Tulsa County Sheriff, who’d claimed jurisdiction over the scene. The Bulls had a decent relationship with Hutch. Symbiotic. Mutual back-scratching. “He was grateful for our help, but he wants us to stand down. Too much heat on this thing. They’ve got national press on it, and he wants to bring the guy in straight. I told him we’d let him do his job.”
Rad huffed and raked his hand through his hair. “Fuck, Prez. Hutch can’t find his ass with both hands, a flashlight, and a map. Him doin’ his job is us doin’ his job, six times outta ten.”
Delaney homed his attention on Rad. “We got no need to go in guns blazing here. None of ours was hurt.”
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 4
