“I told my well-meaning, annoying-as-hell friends that I didn’t want to be set up,” he said. “But that response of yours—proof that you do care.” He addressed Paget. “I’m sorry you got caught in Hannah’s matchmaking crap. Is that plate mine?”
“It’s mine,” Sofia said. “I’m claiming it. Unless you two are thinking about going forward with your date after all, Paget and I need to talk shop.”
Shaking his head, Burke left the boutique. And Sofia wanted to call him back inside, into her arms, because there were more questions to be asked and confessions to be made and mistakes to atone for.
“Hmm, hot guy,” Paget said, “but he looks like trouble. Who needs trouble?”
“It’s not always need,” Sofia murmured. Sometimes it was want. A helpless craving. A fatal flaw of attraction.
Her attention drifted to the window display featuring the panty-clad female bodies, and what hadn’t clicked before about the mannequins’ arrangement now shifted soundlessly into place as a new vision took shape in her mind.
Beautiful bondage.
CHAPTER 9
I thought this place was supposed to be a knickers and kink shop, not a storage unit.”
Sofia, speckled with gold and smeared with white, sat atop a ladder with a file folder open on her lap. The goal was to flip the sign from CLOSED to OPEN before the tourist flood ebbed at the end of the summer, so she was multitasking, working from sunup to sundown and then some, refreshing the boutique’s front room with a bolder color palette and ripping out carpeting in favor of the shop’s beautifully battered wood floors—all while processing every document her great-aunt’s lawyer had relinquished.
She hadn’t heard the bell jingle over the door. Snapping to attention, she closed the folder. Beyond the maze of furniture and shipping boxes that were left in front of Blush this morning—no walk-up delivery, the movers had stubbornly said after she begged, bribed, and pathetically threatened them to haul the pieces up to the apartment—was a curly-haired blessing.
“Caro! Please say you have nothing important going on and can use your ballerina strength to help me lug a few hundred pounds of furniture.”
“Oooh, I can’t, love. I have a date.”
“And you came here to rub it in. Did McGuinty Slattery get to you?”
“Ha, ha, ha. No. The date’s with my little boy. I promised him we’d fly kites at the beach and he wants Tish to come along. That’s why I’m here. Evan colored a picture for you to soften you up. Hopefully you like Captain America.”
“Fine, but don’t tell Tish I traded her for a picture of a superhero. She’s upstairs.” She plucked her keys from her overalls and pitched them near the door. “Got them?”
“Got them.”
“I wish Captain America and his big muscles were here to move all this stuff. It’s hard to maneuver a ladder around it all.”
“I can imagine. What’s under all this tarp and plastic? It looks like Pottery Barn threw up in here.”
“Stuff from my place in New York. Bed, dresser, bookcases, craft desk, sewing equipment, odds and ends.”
“Is this an armoire?” There was a rustle of plastic being pulled aside. “Hello, lovely.”
“That’s an antique, from Ireland. It’s one of the few things my father didn’t sell when money was tight. He knew I loved it.” Of course, the piece was profanely imposing and heavy and he would’ve had a devil of a time putting it in hock without her catching him. The little things of so much value—jewelry, art, the iPod from Burke that he’d insisted Sofia keep when she claimed to never want to see him again—had been sacrificed quickly to buy food and put off bill collectors.
That was Finnegan Mercer, always willing to make the difficult decisions to serve a greater purpose. He’d liquidated her small luxuries for her nourishment and well-being. Too bad he couldn’t be the father she deserved, so he’d left, leaving a handwritten letter taped to the very armoire Caro touched now.
Finnegan’s smudged, narrow script called his abandonment an act of honor and proof of ultimate love, but Aunt Luz had said it was cowardice and then growled something foreign about castration.
Sofia knew that her father had started anew in Wisconsin, was on a financial upswing, and was remarried with three school-age children who didn’t know her. She was forbidden to contact her half siblings. Finnegan had asked her to stop calling him Dad, as if the first nineteen years of her life hadn’t mattered. Her feelings toward him were someplace between forgiveness and stubborn anger.
“You’re not just scarred,” Caro said to her, thoughtfully. “You’re scuffed, as if life’s tossed you around a bit.”
“Scuffs give a person character.” Though she despised her own. Everything that was broken about her made her feel dirty, and she wanted to scrub it all away. This might be her new life, but her slate was far from clean.
“That’s a naïve way to look at it, but all right.”
Sofia shrugged. “I prefer optimistic.”
“Optimism without conviction to hold it up is sort of pointless, isn’t it?” Caro chuckled. “There’s something very hidden and completely interesting about you, Sofia, behind that America’s-darling façade.”
“Who’s calling me a darling?”
“Oh, that’s drunken rubbish I overhear at the bar. Supposedly you’re cute and sweet and need some good solid therapy so you can turn around and go back to being a nice girl in New York. I think you’re naughty and corrupting, and I’m glad I’m not the only one on this block who fits the description.”
“Corrupting.” Okay, so what if she was flattered by the word? “How’s that?”
“Your window displays look like Kama Sutra demonstrations. Honestly, since you nested here, every time I stroll past this shop I get inspiration to find a man and shag him stupid.”
This time Sofia chuckled. “So why don’t you?”
“It’s not practical. I have a child and his well-being matters more than my libido.”
“Single moms date.”
“Not me.”
“So at the ripe been-everywhere, seen-everything age of thirtysomething you’re on the shelf for good?”
“Twenty-seven, and I wouldn’t say for good. More like indefinitely.”
Treading carefully—tiptoeing, really—Sofia asked, “Want to tell me why?”
“I won’t expose Evan to a carousel of men walking in and out of his life. That’s what would happen if I dated, because I’m not searching for anything serious.”
“So you require casual, but Evan needs stability.”
“Yeah, and his needs will always be what matter most. He saved my life, Sofia, and I owe it to him to be the best mum that I can.”
What did that mean, he saved my life?
“What’d McGuinty say when you told him? He must not hold any hard feelings, since just this morning I saw him swaggering to your studio with daffodils.” Hating to see Aunt Luz’s powder-blue-and-chrome bicycle retired in basement storage, Sofia used it to run light errands in town. Pedaling down Society, she sometimes noticed McGuinty bringing flowers to the photography studio. It was old-fashioned and unexpectedly sweet of him to court Caro with flowers at her door and friendly waves from his brother’s laundromat across the street.
“I haven’t told him, not in so many words,” Caro finally said. “The flowers are nice. I grew up in a little village in Kent and on weekends my brothers and sisters and I used to go to the countryside and pick flowers for our mummy. He knows I miss that and clearly he’s using it to wear me down.”
“To me it seems charming.”
“Charm’s a device people use to achieve an ulterior motive.”
“That may be. I knew McGuinty in high school and only vaguely then. But what I also know is that he runs the animal shelter with his grandpa and that place is across town. It seems unlikely that he’d be spending so much time at The Dirty Bastards because he really enjoys his brother’s company.”
“I’m nothing but a cha
llenge, and he’ll get bored soon enough.”
Sofia recalled the seriousness in McGuinty’s voice the morning he’d helped her find Tish at Caro’s studio. “Are you sure he’s okay with hanging in limbo like that?”
Caro cleared her throat. “Evan’s waiting. I’ll get Tish now. Good luck clearing out all of this, and the paint looks phenomenal.”
“Does it really?” Anxious, Sofia gave the front room a critical glance. It was a distinct, bold move to paint the pink front room in alternating thick vertical stripes of white and gold. A pink, soft Blush was too coy; a striped and damasked Blush was committed to owning what it was.
“If it looked ghastly, I’d tell you. Example, those Farmer in the Dell overalls? Ghastly.”
“Whatever. Go get the dog before I change my mind.”
“Where do you want me to leave Captain America?” Caro waved a rolled-up piece of paper in the air. “Evan wouldn’t forgive me if I let paint get on it.”
“The armoire’s empty. Put it on a shelf in there. After you grab Tish, toss the keys in there, too. I’ll get them when I dig myself out of the rubble.”
“Honestly, I don’t know how you’re not claustrophobic in here with all this furniture. There’s no way in hell you’re going to be able to finish painting.”
“There’d be even more, but the apartment upstairs is furnished and I felt bad about leaving my roomie with a naked home.”
“Well, if you can make it outside, go to Bottoms Up and get Bautista over here to help. I’m sure he’ll do it.”
Sofia began a descent down the ladder and lost her visual on Caro. The woman was by no means petite, but everything had been stacked so high. She began to rearrange boxes, asking, “Why would he be at the bar so early in the afternoon?”
“He stops in sometimes to check on things, usually stays in his office. Tariq’s tending, so just go down there and tell him you need the owner.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
“Bautista owns the place, though he’s trying to convince me to take it over.”
“He owns Bottoms Up but wants to sell it to you?”
“That’s right. But I can’t run it alone, so he’s sticking around…even though he acts as if he wants nothing more than to motor out of this town.” Caro cleared her throat. “Sofia, are you really putting down your roots here?”
She peeked around a tower of boxes. “They’ve always been here.”
“The circumstance is this. I don’t want to hold Bautista here if he needs to get away for a while, but I can’t run Bottoms Up alone. Tariq’s a bartender only—he’s made that plain and won’t change his mind. Luz and Bautista, they watched over Society Street. Blush and Bottoms Up are their legacies, you see. I’d need help keeping the bar open. So would you consider claiming a slice?”
Would she go in on ownership of a bar with Caro? “That’s a ton to think about. I’m not saying no. But I’m still processing that it’s Bautista’s place. What do you know about that?”
“Rumors have it he bought it and sealed the basement entry to the building next door so his motorcycle club could meet there, but they moved the location again after he retired.”
Sofia’s mind twisted, she was so confused. Blush and the Cape Foods building shared a basement passageway, so she wasn’t surprised that all three basements connected. It was the only thing Caro had said that made sense. “Why did you say retired like that, as if you used air quotes and I couldn’t see them?”
“Because I’m skeptical. I like Bautista. He and Luz took care of Evan and me. All that aside, he might have money and he might be a fucking brilliant lawyer, but under that suit is a roughneck.”
“You mean there’s an actual motorcycle club in Eaves?” Sofia had somehow instinctively known the moment she saw Javier Bautista at Luz’s funeral that he was from the underbelly of some harsh society.
“The Dead Men. An outlaw club that the police thought they busted up years before I moved here. As the story goes, some guy locked up for homicide or something in Boston beat Death Row and became chummy with some work release convicts. There were all kinds of money and high-society connections to capitalize on here on the Cape. That was, oh, about forty years ago. If you grew up here and had no idea, I’d say your family did a fantastic job sheltering you from it all.”
Her father had kept her cocooned in a nanny’s care while he worked his way to manager of Eaves Bank. Then, when she was in high school and her medical costs had exceeded his salary, the cocoon had begun to fall away until he’d lost everything that had once defined him as a man and a pillar of this little town and he’d left her to Luz.
Bautista’s bar hadn’t existed when Sofia lived here before. The space that now housed Caro’s studio had been a wine and cheese shop, so whatever club traffic the Dead Men had going then had been far from Sofia’s stomping grounds.
“Since the move, the bar doesn’t see any action,” Caro said, “but I’ve seen jackets, heard conversations, know about the violence.”
“What kind of violence?”
“Territory disputes. Fights. Shootings.”
Aunt Luz had been in a relationship with Bautista—engaged to marry him. She must’ve known…must’ve accepted his lifestyle. Pedaling a ten-speed around town and selling sex toys didn’t make a woman oblivious.
“What if I told you I was joking about the whole thing?” Caro offered. “Would that erase the fear from your voice?”
“I’m not afraid.” In fact, she felt oddly detached. Perhaps it was the satisfaction of confirming that her first impression had been right, and she hadn’t been unfair to judge him on the spot. Or it could be that on some level she was intrigued. “And you’re not joking. This is for real. Bautista really is an outlaw motorcycle gang member.”
“Retired. Sort of. They call him Judge.”
“Semiretired.” Sofia’s mouth felt dry as she mentally flung herself at every TV portrayal and fictional interpretation of outlaw clubs. The men were beasts riding steel. “A semiretired motorcycle gang member who probably carries a gun and forced Aunt Luz to live in disgusting misogyny.”
“Oh, oh, oh, hold on a moment, okay? Sofia, listen, I realize these types of…brotherhoods, if you will…aren’t known for their gentlemanly nature, but Bautista treated Luz like a queen. I think he really did love her, and she was too much of a spitfire to let him own her.”
Was that why Luz had taken off her engagement ring, because it symbolized ownership?
“He’s not a demanding man. If he trusts you, he’ll protect you. That goes a long way with me. This isn’t something I commonly get into with people, because it’s difficult to go there, but since I rather like you it should make things easy.” Caro paused, allowing a tight silence. “After I left Kent, I bounced around the States a lot. When I had Evan, I knew he’d need a home. He was an infant who kept the craziest hours and the only place that seemed to accommodate us was Bautista’s bar. He paid me, the tips were decent on top of it, and Luz helped manage Evan while I figured myself out.”
“I’m glad they rescued you,” Sofia finally said.
“They didn’t. I told you before. Evan saved me. He’s my world. That should tell you how safe I felt with Luz and Bautista. I’ll go get Tish now.”
“Caro, wait. You told me all this, and what am I supposed to do with it? How am I supposed to feel?”
Another silence, inflating like a balloon until Caro’s melodious British voice popped it with “Aren’t you glad he’s on your side?”
*
Bautista sat in his fat, beat-up leather chair. It was all he needed. It was almost as old as his bike—and more valuable. It knew his secrets, the weariness of his body, the burdens he stored inside himself. Luz had straddled him here, whispering to him as he rocked inside her. The chair knew her secrets, too.
Ice clinked the inside of his glass as it began to melt in his whiskey. The bartender manning things today had put it in his hand when he’d come through, laser fo
cused on going straight to his office.
On the way Bautista had passed a group of young folks gathered in front of the johns—if he found out they were under twenty-one he’d haul their asses out and give the watchman hell for letting them slip through. They were split into two groups—men in front of the Gents door and women in front of the Ladies door—and pens were being passed around as they took turns autographing the wood. Each door boasted a full-size drawing of a naked body—courtesy of Rooster, one of Bautista’s club brothers, and the man deserved points for anatomical correctness and realism. When Rooster had drawn on the doors, he’d labeled them Cocks and Cunts, but Bautista had threatened to slice open his tires unless he changed the names. And because he thought he was funny, Rooster had signed his name on the genitals, and that’s how the tradition of signing the john doors had started.
Bautista had never added his signature, nor would he. It wasn’t important that he put his name on everything that belonged to him. It was why he hadn’t asked Luz to tattoo his initials into her soft golden skin. His club brothers and their forefathers had their women inked—a few branded—but some customs wanted to suffocate his morality and he always followed his morality, whether it went against the law or against the outlaws he regarded as family.
With one foot in the club and one out, Bautista knew the Dead Men had an allegiance to him, yet they were making plans that didn’t include him.
He hadn’t ridden with them in months, but that had been his choice, to withdraw slowly as he started to realize a different type of life—one that saw him in his East Millennium Tower office during the day, wrapped up with Luz at night, and keeping an eye on Bottoms Up on the weekend. Now there was no Luz, and if he reaffirmed his loyalty to the club he would be welcomed back into the fold.
If he did that, his brothers would be obligated to tell him what Luz had been planning behind his back. What he knew was enough to hurt him—she’d lied to him about needing money to buy the Cape Foods building so she could expand her boutique—but he didn’t have the full truth yet. He wouldn’t act until he did.
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