Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) (15 page)

He responded by wrapping her up in his arms. He didn’t try to kiss her; he just held her, his cheek resting against her head. Just a hug. Comfort. And she was comforted. Almost to the point of tears. But there was no way she was going to cap off this shitty day by behaving like a weepy chick around a caveman biker who already thought she couldn’t handle herself.

No matter how much she liked him. No matter how good it felt to be enclosed in his muscular arms and pressed to his sculpted chest.

After a few minutes, still holding her, he asked, “You ever ride a Harley?”

She shook her head.

“You wanna?”

She wanted to be where he was, wherever that was. Without lifting her head from his chest, she answered, “Um…I don’t know. Yeah. But I need a helmet, right?”

He took a step back and lifted her chin. “I brought an extra. I came here to ask you to ride with me—hoping you were dressed for it.” He looked her over. Since this class had been about professional comportment, she dressed professionally to lead it. She was wearing a pair of dress pants, a knit wrap top, basic, mid-heel pumps, and a leather blazer to ward off the late October chill. “And you are, or close enough. C’mon. I want you to meet my best friend.”

~oOo~

Muse’s bike was more old-fashioned than some of the other bikes Sid had seen at the clubhouse. He called it a “Knuckle,” but she didn’t know what that meant. It was black and chrome, with high handlebars, and the seat at the back seemed small and flimsy. But she got herself as close to Muse as she could and held him as tightly as she could. He’d told her,
Just hold on and move with me
, and that was what she did. Since she’d already met Michael and his other brothers in the club, she assumed that he was taking her to his house to meet his dog, and she was okay with that. Someplace quiet. Someplace safe.

Most of the day, she’d wanted to be alone. Now, alone felt scary and, well, lonely. But she wanted to be with only Muse.

Riding with him, once she got through the first couple of turns, Sid felt better than she had all day. They didn’t ride more than ten minutes, but the brisk wind soothed her face, and his strong body in her arms soothed the rest of her.

He took her to a neighborhood on the far edge of Madrone, where the city’s irrigation system trickled off, and the pastoral sweeps of landscaped avenues and boulevards gave way to the natural scrub and dust of the desert. The streets here had no sidewalks, and only about half of the small houses had green lawns. Others were nothing but dirt and broken toys.

Sid knew this neighborhood and others like it. For most of her cases, this was the best kind of neighborhood they could manage. And Muse lived here, too?

The driveway he pulled into ran along the side of one of the well-tended little houses. The light over the front door was on, showing a narrow porch with a white spindle railing. Like most of the houses in the neighborhood, the windows of Muse’s bungalow were covered with decorative iron bars, these painted white. The lawn was green and neatly mown, and there was a bed that ran around the foundation of the house, framed in half-buried red bricks, in which some desert plants had been cultivated. Yucca and agave, Sid thought.

He pulled up and killed the engine, and she heard a dog barking in the house—a big dog. As he had when she’d gotten on, he held his arm out, and she used it to steady herself while she put her foot on the driveway and swung the other leg off. He dismounted right behind her and helped her out of the helmet, being careful not to brush against her sore cheek.

When he’d put the helmets away, he took her hands in his. His eyes fixed on her cheek, but he didn’t ask again what had happened. Instead, he said, “I want to kiss you, hon. But I don’t want to piss you off again.”

What he’d said was really sweet to her in some way, and she smiled what felt like her first real smile all day, not minding the stretch of the stitches in her cheek. She pulled him close and wrapped his arms around her; then, with her hands on his chest, under his kutte, she rose up on her toes and tilted her head up. He smiled and met her the rest of the way.

In the clubhouse, he’d kissed her almost savagely, both times, as if devouring her had been necessary to show his brothers she was his. Now, he was gentle, more than he’d yet been, his lips just brushing hers, his tongue barely tasting her skin.

He pulled back. “Cliff’s big, but he’s friendly to friends. You afraid of dogs?”

She’d never had a pet; her father couldn’t abide them. But she loved animals and had often spent more time at her friends’ houses playing with their animals than with her friends. “I love dogs. You named your dog Cliff? Like Clifford, the Big Red Dog?”

“I don’t know who that is. Is it a kids’ show or somethin’?”

“Sort of. Television and books and toys. You don’t know Clifford?”

He shook his head. “His name’s Heathcliff. For a guy in a book.”

Sid was well and truly shocked. “You named your dog after Heathcliff from
Wuthering Heights
? You know
Wuthering Heights
?”

“Yeah. Is that bad?”

She was delighted, honestly delighted, and she laughed. It felt good, like she was shaking off the rest of whatever shit Green had coated her psyche with. “No, it’s not bad at all. I love that book. I’m just surprised you like it, too.”

The dog was still barking. Muse took Sid’s hand and led her to the porch as he answered. “I don’t. My sister does. It’s been her very favorite book since she was a kid. I don’t understand why a twisted love like that is supposed to be romantic. I get Heathcliff, though.”

She wasn’t sure what to respond to in that little speech. Should she ask about his sister? Try to explain the romance of Heathcliff and Catherine? Or push him on the surprising point that he ‘got’ Heathcliff?

As he slid his key into the lock on the metal mesh security door, she picked a topic and asked, “You
get
Heathcliff?”

“Sure. People fucked him hard. When he could, he fucked them back. I get that. That book’s not a romance. It’s a revenge fantasy.”

“Well, yeah. It’s both. But the revenge devours him, too.”

“It always does. But some things need to be avenged, even so. Revenge isn’t about winning or justice. It’s about balance.” He opened the doors, and a huge black dog bounded off the couch to the right and nearly flew at them. A little anxious, after all, Sid took a step backward on the porch, but Muse went to his knees and embraced him. “Hey, buddy. Sorry I’m late.” He ruffled the dog’s thick coat. “Somebody I want you to meet.”

Still reeling from the fresh thought that she and this biker with the neck tattoo had just analyzed a classic British novel, not to mention that she’d gotten some deeper insight into his moral code, Sid stepped back to the door and watched him love on his dog. He was unguarded and unabashed in the affection he showed the animal, and Sid realized that he was that way with her, too. He didn’t try to hold his feelings back, just like he didn’t play games or do the ritual dances of mating. He was comfortable in his skin, and he didn’t seem to fear that being open made him weak.

He looked over his shoulder with a smile. “This is Cliff.”

She held out her hand to Muse’s best friend. Cliff gave her a cautious sniff, his tail wagging slightly. “Hi, baby. You’re beautiful.”

At her words, or her tone, or both, Cliff decided that she was welcome. His tail began to move more strongly back and forth, and he licked her hand.

“C’mon in, hon. It’s not much, but this is where I live.”

She stepped in as he hit a switch and turned on the overhead light in the living room.

He was right. It wasn’t much. There was a long, worn couch and a black canvas director’s chair, and a Seventies-era coffee table in the narrow living room. The only adornment on the walls was a television, hanging opposite the couch, the wires hanging down from it and plugged into the wall without any effort to camouflage them. The windows were covered with white mini-blinds. The walls were white, the floors bare wood. The room was perfectly tidy, though.

Muse took off his kutte and laid it over the arm of the couch. “I need to let Cliff out. He’s been cooped up for a while today. Can I get you anything? I got beer and Jack. Water, too. Or I can make coffee.”

“Beer’s fine.” She followed him the short distance to the back of the house. In the kitchen, he opened a sliding door, and Cliff ran out.

His kitchen was just as spare as the living room. The walls here were also white, as were the appliances. The countertops were common white tile, and the cabinets were the kind of plain oak veneer that showed up everywhere in apartments and rentals, the kind of homes that the owners didn’t much care about. Though there was a space for a table and chairs, that space was empty. A few clean dishes sat in a rubber-coated metal drainer on the counter next to the double sink, and there was a coffee machine and a microwave, and a blue towel hanging from the handle on the oven door, but otherwise, the walls and surfaces were blank.

On the floor near the slider was a wrought-iron stand holding two large, glazed stoneware bowls, each one painted with the name ‘Cliff’ in black. So far, the dog had the nicest thing in the house.

Muse opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of Budweiser. He uncapped one and handed it to her, and she took a sip. It was good, and soothing, and she took several more sips—gulps, actually—and pulled the bottle away with a satisfied sigh.

“Why’d you bring me here?”

He took a long drink of his beer before he answered. “I wanted to see you. And I needed to be home for Cliff. If I went to yours, I didn’t know whether I’d be home tonight.”

“Making a pretty enormous assumption, considering I threw you out last time.”

“Not an assumption. Just playing out the possible scenarios.” He drank down the beer, rinsed out the empty bottle, and put it in a bin under the sink. “Usually I walk him when I get home. I at least need to throw his ball for a while. You want to come back with me?”

She nodded, and they went through the slider and stepped onto a plain slab patio, on which sat two fold-up lounge chairs and a small Weber kettle grill. From a plastic laundry basket sitting just outside the door, Muse pulled a tennis ball.

From seemingly out of nowhere, Cliff came barreling toward them, pulling up short as he hit the patio. Muse threw the ball, and the dog spun and tore after it. Sid thought she saw a cat in the yard, too, big and black, also chasing the ball. But it was dark not far past the patio, so maybe it was a trick of the light.

“Do you have a cat, too?”

“Nah. That’s just a neighborhood hobo. But Cliff likes him.” Cliff brought the ball back, and Muse threw it again. Yep. Definitely a cat running behind the dog.

“He missed the memo on the whole dogs and cats thing, I guess.”

Muse laughed. “I guess they both did.”

After he threw the ball again, he said, “Sid. Tell me about your face. Please.” He didn’t turn to her. He’d spoken while he’d looked out into the dark of his yard.

“Why?”

“Can’t it just be because I want to know?”

“Not if you’re just my latest fuck.”

He turned at that, at the way she’d shaped the words of her sentence. She’d done it on purpose, made him the fuck, not her, because she wanted to see him react. He smiled and stepped toward her, but he didn’t touch her. “Is that what I am?”

“I don’t know. You’re not my boyfriend.”

Cliff came back onto the patio with his ball. Seeing Muse distracted, he dropped the ball and trotted back into the dark yard. “No, not that. I’m too old to be a boyfriend. Haven’t been a boy in a long time.”

Well, that was something she’d been wondering about. “How old are you?”