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  “Come with me,” Slick repeats, more urgently.

  The crowd stirs as Clint makes his way through. I know I shouldn’t go with Slick, not after this, not when Clint is here to report back to my father. But the way he looks right now, with his sky-blue eyes intense, his hair over his eyes from the fight, huge and sexy and handsome and dangerous in his leather . . . I shake off the shouldn’t and grab his hand. He smiles, and then leads me to the back, behind the bar and out the back door. Dimly, I hear Clint calling, but I no longer care, not when Slick pulls me out into the street and together we run toward his bike.

  I’m laughing, I realize as I climb onto the back of his bike. For the first time tonight, I’m having a real good time, a good time that doesn’t have to be forced. As he fires the engine, I remember being a teenager, giggling just like I am now, arms wrapped around Slick just as they are now, feeling more excited than I ever had before. When Slick turns around to pull the helmet onto my head, that same excitement comes over me.

  Chapter Five

  Bri

  As Slick drives us away from the city and toward the mountains, the wind whipping at my dress and my hands gripping his leather, I feel exhilarated. I remember feeling this way as a girl, a tomboy with an older friend who I had yet to fall for. I remember riding the bus with a fifteen year old when I was a young girl, innocent and playful, just pals then. I remember exploring the mountains, how Slick would protect me; I remember one time I cut my foot on a rock, and Slick cleaned and bound the cut and brought me home. These were times before I had responsibility, a baby girl to take care of, a life that needed to be maintained. These were wild times, Eden times. As the bar, the city, and my life becomes smaller and the mountains become bigger, I begin to feel like a little girl all over again. Only Slick can have this effect on me. Nobody else.

  When we begin winding our way up a mountain road, I know where he is taking us. When I turned eighteen, Slick and I began to journey to the mountains more and more, me on the back of his bike, or sometimes me on my own bike riding beside him. We would go up to the mountains to this one spot, beneath a large old oak tree which provided shade from the sun and privacy from the road. There we would sit, sometimes saying nothing, just looking down at Denver. Watching it. Sometimes he would hold me; sometimes we’d make out. But it never got further than that, not until that one night stand.

  When the tree comes into view, looking like a many-limbed creature of darkness in the half-moon night, the past rushes into me. Emotions long dormant swirl around my chest. A hundred days and nights of a hundred intimacies with Slick rush into my mind. I grip his jacket harder, his returning finally hitting me as hard as it should have when I first found him in the garage. But I was too stunned, too cynical, too adult. Here, in our teenage refuge, all of that falls away.

  He stops the bike, killing the engine, and I whisper, “I’m glad you’re back.” But I can’t kill the adult in me, not entirely, and I follow it up with, “But there was no reason to do that, Slick. You could’ve gotten yourself hurt. Hell, you could’ve really hurt one of the guys.”

  Slick kicks the stand and we climb from the bike, moving with instinct and memory to the trunk of the tree, where sometimes he’d lean into the tree as I leant into him, his arms around me. We don’t hold each other now, just stand in the deep darkness of the shade. “I went a bit crazy,” he admits, without shame. “I just couldn’t stand the way that Pascal fuck was leaning over you, Brat.”

  “So you killed the jukebox and started a fight with three men? What were you thinking?”

  He laughs bitterly. “I wasn’t thinkin’, I guess. Which is a damn shame, ’cause I promised myself I’d try and think a bit more from now on.”

  I approach him, lay my hand on his arm. “Listen, Slick. If something happened in Seattle. If something bad happened . . . if you had to do things you’re not proud of . . . you can tell me. You know that, don’t you? We’ve always been friends.”

  “Friends,” Slick mutters. “Since you were eighteen years old, we’ve never just been friends.”

  “It would’ve been sooner, if I had my way,” I say, glancing away from him, embarrassed by my words. But needing to say them, unable not to say them. “Ever since I was a teenager, if I had my way.”

  “That would’ve been wrong,” Slick says. “So let’s be thankful I was the responsible grownup.”

  He winks at me, and I giggle. “You—a responsible grownup? Look at your face!”

  I go to him, take a packet of tissues from my pocket, and dab at his cut.

  “You just carry around tissues?” he asks, wincing.

  “When you’ve got a baby girl, the habit is hard to break. I’m sure most of my jackets have a few bits and pieces buried in various pockets.”

  “A baby girl,” Slick echoes.

  Tell him. Tell him now. I should; I could. This is the moment. And yet something stops me. This is the moment: the moment Slick and I can finally reunite. I don’t want to ruin it with a revelation that will lead to a long, muddy conversation, maybe even an argument.

  “I meant it,” I say, taking his hand and pressing it against the tissue. “Hold it there until the bleeding stops. It’s only a cut.”

  “Meant what?” he asks, pressing the wound.

  “If something happened in Seattle—if you had to do things for them, the Skulls, that you didn’t want to do—you can tell me. I would never tell anybody else. I’m . . . I’m loyal to you, Slick. I’ve always been loyal to you.”

  Slick turns to the city, to the lights shining yellow into the sky. “Do you remember the time I stole those CDs from the supermarket and that guy in the parking lot saw and was going to tell the security guard?”

  I grin, remembering. “I remember a little girl in pigtails saving your ass.”

  “You marched right up to him and said, with a tear in your eye, ‘Please, sir, don’t tell on my friend. He’s very poor and he’s going to sell those CDs for food.’ You evil, evil girl.”

  We laugh together. Then I join Slick, looking down over the city.

  “I want to be more than a courier, Brat,” he says. “That’s all I can think about right now. Not all that shit—Seattle, pain, blood. I can’t afford to think about that. I want to make my dad proud. I want to be somebody.”

  “To them, with them, be that, but with me you can be honest. You can always be honest with me, Sky.”

  “Sky.” He smiles, sadly, longingly. “I miss that night; I miss being Sky, sometimes.”

  I place my hand on his shoulder, wishing he wasn’t wearing his leather, wishing he was naked like that night: that night which seems long ago, now, a night shared by two different people, two different lives. Slick was not this Slick then, and I was not the woman I have become. I squeeze his leather, and then rest my head on his shoulder. “You can tell me, Slick,” I say. “If something happened . . . I will never judge you. You were away from home. If you were lonely, or afraid—”

  Slick turns quickly, grabbing my hand at the wrist and bringing his face close to mine. “The only thing I was afraid of,” he says, his breath tickling my face, his eyes burning blue in the night, so attractive to me that my body roars out for him, every fiber roars out for him, “was that I would never get to kiss you again.”

  It’s a cheesy line and if any man other than Slick said it, I would laugh. But there’s nothing funny about the way he’s looking at me, nothing funny about the way he brings his face closer and closer to mine, until his lips are almost pressed against my lips. “Well, I’m here now,” I whisper, though I know it’s wrong. I can’t do anything with Slick until I’ve told him everything. I can’t do anything with him until he knows the whole truth about everything he left behind when he went to Seattle. But he’s so damn sexy. And I remember too well the pleasure we shared, and the anticipation I felt when I was a teenager, watching him, fantasizing. It’s not a fantasy anymore.

  He kisses me, hard, pressing into me with the passion of two years spent a
part. As we kiss, I imagine all his longing pouring into me, all the times he wished we could be together spilling out in this one display of closeness. I want to stop it, but at the same time it feels too incredible. His lips are warm, and somehow tingling. His body is pushed against mine, his jeans thrust against me. One of his hands moves through my hair, fingers trailing over my scalp, sending more fingers trailing down my body at the tickling sensation. The other is wrapped around my waist, holding my lower back. My hands are wrapped around his neck, pulling him closer, sinking into the kiss. But more than the physical sensations, the bare fact of it drives me wild. I am kissing Slick. After two years picturing him in my dreams, I am kissing him. The older boy who became the older man who became my lover and then disappeared . . . I am finally kissing him.

  I jump up and Slick knows what to do straightaway. He grabs my ass and holds me up as I wrap my legs around him. We back up, hitting the tree, all the while kissing passionately. I open my mouth, hungry for him, and our tongues brush against each other. I taste him, tasting the man I’ve wanted for so long, for as long as I’ve wanted anybody. He tastes like home; he tastes like pleasure. He tastes like something I’ve waited a long, long time to taste. His hands are firm on my ass cheeks, grabbing the flesh, massaging it. Sometimes, his finger slips between my legs, to my pussy, pushing up against my panties and my clit. Fuck, this feels incredible, and I just know where it could lead . . . bent over against the tree, fistfuls of bark, with Slick sliding his huge cock into me from behind. Bouncing up and down the length of it, feeling it deep inside of me, his hands on my bare ass cheeks, spanking, rubbing.

  Charlotte . . . Charlotte . . . her name comes to me as though through a mist, a mist of pleasure, broken only by the knowledge that if I do this, I am doing Slick a great disservice. He still does not know that Charlotte is his. He still has no clue that that one steamy night resulted in something much more special. More importantly, I don’t know how he’ll react. How can I fuck a man when I don’t know if he’ll hate or love our daughter? How can I fuck a man when he has no clue what it means to me to be with him again? As far as he’s concerned, this might just be a quick tumble under the old oak tree; it might have absolutely zero meaning to him.

  As these thoughts come to me, my pleasure and my passion wane. Slick must be able to sense it because he breaks off the kiss, tilts his head at me. “Somethin’ wrong?” he asks.

  “I just . . . can you put me down, please?”

  He does so, and we just watch each other for a time. “What is it?” he says, at length.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I say.

  Slick turns back to the city. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” he mutters.

  “No?” I say, stung.

  He grins at me. “I can’t tool up three guys and then fuck the Boss’s daughter in the same night, now, can I?”

  I nudge him in the shoulder. “Shut up,” I say, laughing.

  But behind the laughter, I am aching. Aching to tell him, aching to be with him, aching to go back in time and fix everything so that right now, in this moment, we would not be standing overlooking the glinting yellow lights of the city, but standing over Charlotte’s crib, hand in hand, before going into bedroom to make love.

  “Life doesn’t care what you want, does it?” I say.

  “No,” Slick agrees, a fierce note in his voice. “It doesn’t.”

  Chapter Six

  Slick

  I sit in silence, hands folded in my lap, waiting as Grizzly and Clint decide if I should be killed, unpatched, or given a second chance. I don’t look at Clint, or at Grizzly. Instead, I watch the wall, staring at varmint rifle and wondering if that old Chekhov’s gun theory is correct. I read about that in Seattle, on one of those long, cold nights of winter, tied to my metal-framed thin-mattress bed with a length of chain, in a warehouse with no heating, hunched over some book reading about some theory which I never would’ve thought to check out before I was captured. That was my cell: a cold hovel warmed only by books. But the problem is, I know for a fact that the rifle is decommissioned. When I was a kid I tried loading it and discovered that the ammo slots had been messed with. So much for Chekhov and his gun—

  “He’s not even listening!” Clint cries, flapping his arms in a bird-like way.

  “I am,” I say, turning to them. “I was just waiting for you to choose between noose and guillotine.”

  “Funny, funny man.” Clint sneers. He is wearing a tight-fitting pale blue suit which makes him look more like a door-to-door salesman that a patched Rager. I guess that’s why Grizzly likes him. He can take care of the business end of shit. Well, so can I, and I can do it without dressing like a goddamn fool.

  “Judging from what I’ve observed,” I say, “the weekly turnover of this place is about thirty-five grand, taking into account the gun runs, the courier deals, the protection contracts. I figure that’s about ten grand shy of what this operation could really be putting out.”

  “We’re not discussing that! What are you talking about?” Clint demands.

  But Grizzly, the man who matters, watches calmly. And, if I’m not mistaken, with a look of interest in his eyes.

  “I’m talking about making the operation more efficient. I haven’t been idle this past week; I’ve taken a look around. There are a lot of areas where things would run along much more smoothly. For example,” I go on, raising my voice because Clint keeps trying to cut in, “I took a trip up to the mountains to take a look at the warehouses there. The efficiency of that place is shit, Boss, sorry to be so blunt about it. The workers you’ve hired don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and half the time they’re not even working. Half the time when stuff goes in, it takes ’em a day to find it again when it’s needed.”

  “How is that going to raise ten grand a week?” Clint snaps, looking to Grizzly for support.

  But Grizzly waves his hand for me to go on. I’m aware that I’m talking for my life, or at the very least for my place in the club. Tooling up three fellow club members without sufficient cause isn’t acceptable in a proper club. We’re meant to be brothers, here. Brothers . . . that’s a load of shit. All Grizzly cares about—all any President cares about, when you get down to it—is the money. Within reason, money rules all.

  “It won’t,” I admit. “But I’m just talking about one aspect. Another example is the protection deals.” The Ragers have a variety of business contacts, rich folks in the city and the like, who they routinely offer out their services to at parties and meeting and nasty underworld business. “I went along to one of the meets with one of Clint’s boys. A man called Ralph, if I remember right. He didn’t even fuckin’ press the man, just took what he was given. These are a big source of revenue, ain’t they? Surely—”

  “Okay,” Grizzly says. “You’ve made your point. I’ll start you on the warehouse, Slick. Get things sorted down there and we’ll talk about further advancement.”

  “Wait a second,” Clint says, blinking between us in disbelief. “You’re going to reward him for beating up three of my men?”

  “Your men?” Grizzly turns to him. Even sat down and looking up, he still somehow towers over Clint, making him look small. “The last time I checked, I’m the President, not you, Clint. The last time I checked your title had a fuckin’ V in front of it, or am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re not wrong,” Clint mutters, averting his gaze. “But it’s just . . . the men won’t like it.”

  “They’ll like it if their shares get bigger, won’t they? Anyway, this wasn’t a random assault. I don’t think this can even be considered an assault of any kind, truth be told, nowhere near eligible for unpatching or—or worse.” Grizzly shakes his head. “Slick went up against three guys and won. From what I’ve heard, it was a fair fight, so shut your fuckin’ whining. We don’t punish men for fair fights.”

  Clint takes a step back, nodding.

  “Maybe tell your men to spend more time earning and less time drooling
over my goddamn daughter,” Grizzly says, teeth clenched.

  I don’t say anything to this, and neither does Clint. We both know better than to talk to Grizzly about Brat. Even if I still want to be with her, and even if I can’t get the thought of her out of my head. Or her kid . . . Her kid could be mine; her kid could be one of those fuck’s from the bar last night. Not knowing is the worst part about it all.

  Grizzly faces me. “Get up to the warehouse. Start working. We’ll check back in a week. If things are better, we’ll talk more.”

  I do exactly that. Leave the office and walk across the sun-dappled parking lot to my bike, and ride out to the mountains.

  For the next week, I wake up at six in the morning and get to the warehouses before any of the workers to make sure everything was left in a decent way the night before. I read about efficiency and streamlining and workflow and all that shit in Seattle, on some cold depressing night. I read about it all not knowing if it would ever come in useful. But now, I am glad I spent the time hunched over that book by candlelight. On the first day when I get there, the place is an absolute mess. I come to understand that the guys out here have been allowed to run wild, seeing this as an easy post, a job they can relax on. On the first day, many of them bring board games and cards and portable DVD players and laptops. I warn them not to do it again, and on the second day I smash anything they bring. These are tough men, mostly immigrants and convicts, men who couldn’t find work elsewhere, so a couple of ’em get brave and fight me. After I’ve beaten four of ’em bloody, the place begins to hum along.