Mason said nothing, backing up from the car and turning around inside the garage. I got inside my car, adjusted the mirrors, and caught myself staring in the rearview.
As soon as Mason had thought that I’d gotten in the car and wouldn’t be looking back, he’d started staring at me.
I felt a warm flare in my stomach. Maybe there was something more to us. Maybe…
Of all the people in this town, it seemed evident that very, very, very few, perhaps as few as a number I could count on one hand, could understand the nightmare I’d been through the last decade. Brock was one—but by definition, we couldn’t work out again. Connor was another, but he had Katie, and in any case, I was genuinely happy he’d found love. After that…
Well, I guessed it was Mason.
It would take an awful lot of time for me to build up the courage to let myself like him like that. I hadn’t had any intimacy in the years since; I think only once had I even cuddled with someone. Everything just felt…dangerous.
But if I was at the Santa Maria Auto Repair shop, if I was meeting old faces that could have triggered a lot of awful memories, if I was putting myself out there…
Maybe, just maybe, it was a danger I was willing to put myself into one more time.
Mason
That hit me in a way I did not expect.
No, that hit me in a way I did not allow myself to expect.
How the fuck could I allow myself to think that the girl who’d been the victim of an ugly gangrape ten years ago, an event that made us fear she’d kill herself, want me? Could anything be more despicable and fucking callous than that? I was a fucking Bandit for thinking that.
And yet, I was bullshitting myself if I said I didn’t feel anything from the way she looked and talked with me.
Anyone else? Yeah, I was probably asking for her number, seeing what she was doing later that week, and planning how to get laid. With Rachel, that didn’t just seem wrong; it seemed offensive—and it took a massively fucking high bar for me, as a biker, to call something “offensive.”
But I cared more about the truth than whatever I found offensive. And the truth was, with the way she was looking at me…
“Never thought I’d fucking see her again.”
I glanced over to see Connor standing in the doorway of the office. Dude looked like he’d just seen the fucking ghost of his grandmother. I’d gone on runs with Connor where people died, and I had never seen him look this frazzled.
“I don’t think any of us did.”
“And she seems so…normal,” Connor said. “I don’t fucking get it.”
I’d never heard Connor talk this much about anything that wasn’t killing Bandits or fucking them up in general.
“Guarantee you she ain’t forgotten a damn bit of that day,” I said.I would know. Not literally, but I would know.“But takes a lot of balls for her to show up here.”
“We were so afraid she’d kill herself, and even to this day, I always wondered if she did,” Connor said. He wasn’t really speaking to me anymore, mostly just talking to himself. “And…don’t you fucking dare say a word to Brock.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“She specifically said she’d find him herself. He’s going to lose his fucking mind when he sees her. It’s going to be…I don’t know.”
Neither of us knew. And why the fuck would we? We were bikers, not psychologists. Not even fucking close. Here was my psychological profile of myself—I’d dealt with some dark shit in my life. I fought the Bandits to make up for it. I figured out everything else as I went along and tried to keep others away from me so they wouldn’t get hurt like my parents, and—
“What have you got going on later?” I asked.
“You’re asking me?”
“Long fucking day deserves a long fucking drink,” I said. “We’ve been cooped up here in this compound for some time, and it’s a weekday? Let’s go to Southwest Dine. Not Buckhead. Bandits could pick us apart there. But figure Southwest will have some drinks and be more crowded.”
I didn’t care where we went. I just needed to shut my brain the hell up before it went places I didn’t want it to.Like how on that day—
“Sure, why the fuck not?” Connor said. “Might be the last meal we eat out before Brock comes back and tells us we’re going to war with the California Reapers.”
