“She’s with the girls,” Tabitha yells back, her face perplexed.
The door closes, but Jocelyn’s eyes never leave it. “I’ll go check on them,” she says before hurrying outside.
Winnie shakes her head. “That girl has it bad.”
“He has a dog. He roped her in with pet love,” Tabitha replies, watching Jocelyn walk across the wooden deck and Spencer wrap his arm around her shoulders before they walk down the steps and into the grass together.
“So what has Nate done to you?” Tabitha asks once the couple is out of sight.
I consider the past few days for a second, trying to go over everything. “Nothing.”
But then as a silence sets in and the girls all stare at me waiting, a few things fall into place. Like the fact he has been reluctant to leave me alone the last few days. And on Wednesday when he had to work for a few hours, he had Pearl come over and sit with me. I asked if it was to help with Emma and he nodded but the way he said, “Yeah, Emma,” made a few strands of doubt settle deep.
And he put that tracker on my phone.
Although, he did that for my benefit.
Didn’t he?
Of course he did. And even if he didn’t, the tracker makes me feel better. But I’m not going to admit it to the room of women looking at me waiting.
“That’s what we thought,” Winnie says, nodding with understanding, but not asking for more information.
Tabitha pulls the last casserole from the oven, but there’s no room left on the island so she forces it on top of the burner. “Even though they’re crazy, something about those men keeps us coming back.”
I nod, but she doesn’t turn around to see.
“Can you help with some of these?” Tabitha asks, already handing us each a pair of oven mitts and grabbing a dish from the counter.
“Sure,” I agree sticking my hand in the thick bright pink glove.
Tabitha holds the door open with her butt, letting each of us walk out past her.
I’m halfway down the deck steps when there’s a rumble in the air. A motorcycle.
And then another. And then another. And then the sound explodes like it’s not one or two guys riding motorcycles together but an entire pack of them. A gang.
10
The noise gets louder and louder until it sounds like the motorcycles stop right on the other side of Ridge’s house. I put the casserole down on the wooden picnic table in the middle of the yard, and Nate stands beside me holding Emma to his chest. The fact he’s tense doesn’t go unnoticed and doesn’t make me feel better about the racket happening at the front of the house.
The engines cut off in unison and I hear voices.
From the right corner of Ridge’s house walk a large group of men — oversized and wearing more leather than they should in the heat of Pelican Bay summer. They stop at the edge of the yard.
One man in particular with a determined look stands with his arms crossed. His eyes drag through the crowd and stop at Anessa when he nods his head once in her direction. She nods back and then her head tips up, looking at Bennett, who stands by her side with a scowl written across his features.
“I don’t remember inviting you,” Ridge says, stepping up to the front of his crowd.
From the middle of the yard where Nate and I stand, the scene reminds me of one fromGreasewith the two sides standing off against each other. Except this time one side is nicely dressed in their matching black polo shirts and dark colored jeans and the other with hair slicked back wearing leather and looking as a rugged as possible. I bet at least one of them has a switchblade.
We can only hope it doesn’t end the same as in the movie version.
“I don’t remember inviting one of your guys to sit outside my shop all week,” the clear leader of the pack of motorcyclists says across the yard currently considered as no-man’s-land. “You’d think for a security man with such a celebrity status you wouldn’t be so obvious.”
Ridge laughs but it’s forced. “If I didn’t want you to know, Dom, you wouldn’t. Nate here has so much specialized training you wouldn’t see or hear him coming.”
I inch my head back and stare at Nate, silently asking him a hundred questions. Ones he’s never answered before. He doesn’t this time either. His head tilts down, and he smiles in my direction before giving his attention back to the standoff happening in front of us.
