Page 189 of Reckless

I chuckle, shaking my head, and pull her back to me, kissing her with everything I have.

Later, the room falls quiet.

Sage sleeps.

I don’t.

Her hand rests over my heart while my eyes stay fixed on the ceiling, my head already moving back through the day, testing every decision for weakness.

Calloway.

Travis.

Every victory leaves something unfinished.

But there’s the beautiful woman asleep against me. Her breathing stays slow and even beneath my hand.

I spent years convincing myself I didn’t need anything beyond the club.

Turns out I was wrong.

Because now I have her.

And losing her isn’t something I know how to survive.

Chapter Thirty-Five

SAGE

Two Days Later

The desert stretches out gold and endless on every side of the highway, and I sit on the back of Ghost’s bike with my arms wrapped around him, feeling the low thunder of fifteen engines rolling through my chest like something I could set my heartbeat to now. This isn’t a run with a purpose. There’s no threat waiting at the end of it, no photograph tucked into anybody’s jacket, no encrypted message sitting unread on my phone.

It’s just Sunday.

Just the club, the road, and the wide-open sky pressing down soft and blue over all of us, and I let myself sink into the simple fact of it, the thunder of these bikes that has somehow, over the last year, become something close to home.

I think about all of it while the wind pulls at my hair.

I think about Marcus arriving two weeks early on the clubhouse floor, furious, loud, and wrapped in a flamingo towel because that was the only towel anyone could find fast enough, and how the whole room went silent for four seconds before it erupted into the kind of chaos only Defiance can manage.

I think about Marley standing at the altar with her hand shaking in Nitro’s, and how his hands were shaking, too, this mountain of a man who could break someone in half without breaking a sweat, undone completely by the sight of his woman in white.

I think about Ghost telling me about Millie’s bakery opening, which somehow became less about the bakery and more about Deek ordering enough pastries for a family of four, while the poor kid behind the register tried to keep up.

I think about Piper signing with Ghost at his workstation on the very first day she decided he was worth teaching, and how weeks later he signs back to her now without hesitation, every movement careful and deliberate, the same way he does everything else.

I think about Queenie holding court from the best chair in the room, describing love as the only thing in this life worth being terrified of, and how nobody in that room argues with her, because we’ve all lived long enough now to know that she is right.

I think about Ghost’s hand covering both of mine on a desert highway, one beat and then two, asking me without asking if I was still there.

I think about the lights he installed inside Piper’s clubhouse door. Twenty minutes, no discussion, no fuss, just Ghost showing up with a toolbox and fixing something he’d noticed she would need before anyone even questioned it. He never makes it a production. He just makes things safer, more convenient, quietly, the way he loves.

I understand now that Piper was never competition for his heart. She was part of it. Loving me meant caring about the people who came with me, and Ghost never tried to separate the two.

By the time we roll back into the lot, the sun has dropped low behind the clubhouse, and the low rumble of engines cutting out one by one sounds like something settling. I climb off the bike on legs still humming with the road, and Ghost catches my hand for a second before letting it go, the two of us walking toward the noise and the light spilling out of the open door.

The main room is alive in the way only a clubhouse can be after the dust finally settles. Music rolls low from the speakers behind the bar, tangled up with laughter, half-finished conversations, and someone giving somebody else shit from the other side of the room.