wished I could bring a little of this place with me. I needed it to keep myself alive, to keep my soul alive - what was what was left of my soul anyway.
I worked the land around the cabin, the brush and the overgrowth getting more and more unruly, not dead like all the grass in the city during summer. Here it was only growing out of control, fueled by the shade of the trees and the relative coolness that went with the elevation. I cleared brush, repaired gutters, immersed myself in the physical labor I loved to do. It was similar to riding my bike- a way to get lost in something else. I’d read about meditation, but it wasn’t my thing. It’s hard to meditate when you’re in a motorcycle clubhouse all the time, but I figured riding and chopping wood were about as close to meditation as I’d ever get.
We developed this weird relationship, Dani and I. We avoided each other a lot of the time, me working outside and her inside the house or sitting down by the lake reading. We barely said anything to each other, even in passing, like we’d reached this unspoken agreement to just co-exist. She seemed a lot calmer now, and I- shit, I didn’t care if she was Guillermo’s daughter or not, I was dealing with some seriously pent-up frustration. Being around this girl was infuriating, for so many reasons. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she’d been taunting me the past few days, wearing shorts that progressively got shorter and showed off her long legs, brushing up against me as she passed. Nothing crazy. She wasn’t throwing herself at me or anything. But still, it made me wonder.
Working the land out here, with Dani nearby, made it easy to forget all the shit going on. It was almost like we were out here on an extended vacation or something, a regular couple spending time together. Not the daughter of a crime boss and the hired gun from the motorcycle club hiding from someone trying to kill her. I needed to remind myself of that fact every time my cock started doing my thinking for me. My dick needed a reminder that Dani’s father was Guillermo Arias, and that anything with her would get us both killed.
I’d been out here chopping wood for a good thirty minutes, sweating out all my pent up sexual frustration and anger at this whole situation, trying to let go of things I couldn’t control with the club. What I wanted to do was ditch this whole thing - ditch Dani - and go back to the club. It was killing me not to be in the thick of things. I’d called Mad Dog but got nothing. They were working on it.
The ache in my arms and my back jolted me to the present. It was a good ache, the kind that said I’d had a productive day.
I gulped down a glass of water at the sink, the sweat pouring off my face and running down to my chest as I soaked in the cool liquid. A cold shower would be good. It was quiet in the house, which meant I finally had the place to myself. I must not have seen Dani run down to the lake. The thought of having a little space, being away from the tension between us, made me happy, and I whistled to myself as I headed back to the back bedroom to hop in the shower.
I opened the door and Dani shrieked. “What the hell are you doing?” She was standing there buck naked, hair dripping down her shoulders, little rivers of water running down her breasts to her nipples, down her stomach to her...I had to force myself to turn away.
“Sorry!” I wasn’t sorry. Shit, no. Seeing her naked like that brought back the memory of her in bed and all I could think about was how it would feel to be inside her, to taste her. Damn it. I could feel myself start to get hard, and I tried to focus on something else, anything else to take my mind off her.
Dani pinched her towel closed around her breasts, but it didn’t help. Her naked body was etched in my brain.
“What are you doing, coming in here like that?”
“I thought you were down by the lake. I was just going to use the shower. Didn’t you hear me come into the house?” Stop thinking about her naked.
“No, I was in the shower.”
“I mean, I have already seen you naked. I’m just saying.” I gave her my best sheepish grin.
Dani glared at me. “Go. It’s all yours.”
I lingered, and she swatted at me. “Get out! And don’t even think about peeping.”
I was pretty sure I was grinning from ear to ear as I walked into the bathroom.
And now, here I was, sitting at the creek, teaching her to fish. I didn't know what the hell was getting in to me, but I was starting to feel content here with her. That was a problem.
“So what’s the deal with all the books in your house?” Dani asked. “Are you a biker philosopher, or what?” I smiled. Her brash attitude was growing on me.
“One of my foster mothers pushed me to start reading stuff - philosophy, history, things like that.”
“How old were you when you went into foster care?”
“Twelve. Mom was a junkie, and after my grandma died and couldn’t help out, things got real bad with her for a while.” Real bad was an understatement, of course. But by ten years old, at least I was an expert at fending for myself.
“I’m sorry.” She was quiet, focusing on her line in the water even though nothing was biting.
“Not your fault,” I said. “It was bad with my mom, but foster care was worse for a few years. Creepy ass foster parents, you know? Then I got placed with Althea. She was this older woman. She had thirty-something foster kids before I came along.”
I don’t know why, but I just kept telling her about myself. “I got sent to her when I was fifteen. I was running with a bad crowd, trying to get jumped by this gang.” I shrugged. “I was trying to get away from my life, you know?”
Dani nodded, murmured something I didn't quite hear.
“Anyway, she never lost hope, even when I went to juvie.” I laughed. “Juvie is where I got the Blaze nickname.”
“What for?”
“I did some arsons. It’s what got me sent there. It just stuck after that. Then I got out, got hooked up with the MC. Never looked back.”
“What about Althea?” she asked, and I remembered my first day at Althea's house, when I discovered her library.
"Oh, you like history, do you?"
I slammed the book shut, weirdly ashamed of being caught reading. It didn't seem like something a wannabe thug would be doing. "I was just looking."
"Anything you find interesting in here is yours," Althea said. No one had ever offered me anything before. Everyone else had been all about taking from me, taking anything I had. It made me deeply uncomfortable that she was offering me something without asking for anything in return.
I watched as she walked to a shelf across the room, traced her finger along it as she looked for a book. "You know," she said. "My children have used this library for years. It's yours now. You're welcome in here anytime. My eyes are getting old now- it's too hard for me to see the print on these books." She peered close, examining the spines on the shelf. "Ah, there it is," she said, handing the volume to me.
"The Art of War," I said slowly, turning it over in my hands.
"Sun Tzu," she said. "He was a Chinese military general, oh, ages ago. I think you might find this useful in your present situation."
I took it, skeptical. What did this old woman know about my present situation?
I shook off the memory. “She died last year,” I said. “But she gave me stuff to read, told me I could make something of myself. Even after I’d joined the MC, I’d go to her house, sit at her kitchen table and drink tea from white china.” I laughed, remembering how ridiculous I looked, wearing my leather cut and sipping from a delicate teacup. “We’d talk about Greek and Roman history, Buddhism, anything under the sun. When I got patched, she said it was ironic, the name of the club. Handed me a copy of Dante’s Inferno. I still go out to her grave sometimes with a book, read to her, ask her questions about life. It’s stupid, talking to her and stuff.”
“No,” Dani said. “I talk to my mom a lot about things, wonder what she would tell me to do.” She looked out at the creek, her expression wistful. “Sometimes I think she’d hate who I've become.”
“I get that,” I said. “Althea never said it, but I think she disapproved of the club. She had higher expectations for me. One time I asked her why she kept giving me stuff to read, and she said ‘knowledge elevates you, no matter who you are.’ I’m pretty sure she wanted me to get out.”
“Do you want to get out of the MC?”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “It’s my home. I don’t mind the muling, that kind of thing. There’s just certain things that go too far, you know? Smuggling stuff is one thing; people are another ballgame. That I want no part of.”
Dani nodded, and then a look of surprise crossed her face. “Hey! My line’s moving! Did I catch something?”
“I think you might have.”
“Holy shit!” She squealed, jumping up and down. “I’ve never caught a fish before!”
“Well, don’t drop it!” I put my arms around her, hands on hers, trying not to think about how good it felt to hold her. “Here’s how you reel it in. We can cook this guy up for dinner.”
Taking a pull on a beer, I watched Dani from the other side of the room. She sat reading and sipping on her wine, dark hair falling over her forehead, shielding her eyes, long legs tucked up underneath her. God, she really was beautiful. She looked up at me, eyes hooded, and I felt guilty, like a kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.
“I can see why you like it up here,” she said. The hostility that had colored our earlier conversations was gone. “It’s easy to forget about all the other stuff that’s happening. It’s like a little vacation. Even if I am stuck with you.” She smiled.
“If your idea of a vacation is hiding out in a dirty biker’s cabin because you might get killed, you have a pretty fucked up idea of what a vacation is.”
Dani laughed. It was good hearing her laugh. The sound warmed the house. “Well, a lot of my ideas are fucked up, so I don’t know why my idea of a vacation would be any different.”
I shrugged. “You turned out pretty normal for Guillermo Arias’ daughter. I mean, going to Stanford and shit.”
“Normal,” she said. “Well, at least that’s normal. My childhood wasn’t, that’s for sure.”
“No, I would guess it wasn’t.”
She smiled wistfully. “You know how I learned math? When I was in kindergarten, my father would give me stacks of bills to count. He’d smoke his cigar, and put them into piles of hundred dollar bills. Typical kids’ stuff.”
“That’s what happens when your dad is who he is, right?”
Dani giggled, putting her hand to her mouth, and I thought about kissing her, right then and there. “I feel so bad for the kids I went to school with. There was this one time- I think I was six or something? This girl- what the hell was her name? Carla, I think. She was bullying me a little bit. We got into a fight on the playground, and my parents got called in.”
“Oh no,” I said. I could imagine where this was going now that I’d met her father.
She laughed. “Yes, can you picture my dad showing up to the principal’s office? They suspended both of us, even though the other girl had started it. But the problem was- her parents had no idea who my father was.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“So she wouldn’t apologize, and I think her mother was almost proud of her or something. She just stood there. Anyway, my father didn’t say anything at all, not a word. But someone paid them a visit, and then a few weeks later, I’d heard they’d changed schools. I think her family actually moved.” Dani laughed. “I mean, it’s funny in a warped way, because it’s so terrible, you know?”
“Yeah, I can’t imagine him being asked to sit on the PTA.”
“No, and I wanted him as far away from me and Stanford as possible. I figured I needed some distance between us." She paused, more serious now. "Otherwise I’d wind up dead, like my mother.”
“She died because of someone who wanted to get at your father.” Guillermo had said the threat against him was connected to his wife’s murder.
“That’s the official party line.”
“You don’t believe it.”
“It’s -” She paused, then a dark look crossed her face and she shook her head. “No, never mind.”
“No, what were you going to say?”
“I shouldn’t. The wine is just going to my head, making me think things I shouldn’t think, say things I shouldn’t say.”
Maybe she wasn’t under her father’s thumb as much as I had assumed. “Say it.”
“You’re working for him.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” she said.
“Yes, you do. You’re not stupid.”
She laughed, bitterly this time. “No, just reckless.”
I shrugged. “You’ve gotten this far. You’re not that reckless.”
“No. I guess not,” she said. “My father - I don’t know, not for sure. It’s probably nothing. Last year, I hired a private investigator to look into her death. My father always said it was a business rival who killed her, but he wouldn’t tell me anything more than that. He just said it was taken care of. I wanted answers.”
“Did you get any?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I thought I could get away with hiring the guy, thought I was being smart paying with cash. But of course my father found out.” She looked down, playing with her fingers. “He didn’t say anything to me about it. I just got a call from the PI saying he could no longer investigate.”
“It might not mean anything.” It might not. Or it might mean something.
“No,” Dani said. “I don’t know what the fuck it means. My father doesn’t want me looking into my mother’s murder, and he controls everything. What you said before, about all this shit? The clothes, the car, the house? It’s all bullshit. You think I want to be trapped like this? At least you’re free.”
“I’m not as free as you think I am.” I wanted to stop her, tell her we had more in common than she thought we did. We were both trapped in our own ways. I loved the club. It was the only place I’d ever belonged, the only group of people who had ever felt like a family. But Mad Dog? He was the president, and as much as I respected the position he held, the more I knew about him, the less sure I was. He had a cruel streak that I didn’t like, that reminded me of those kids growing up, the ones in juvie you had to look out for. Mad Dog was a good businessman and a better politician- he kept that streak hidden most of the time, but it did give me pause. It was the same thing I’d seen in Guillermo. Fucked up people just seemed to have a sense for other fucked up people.
Dani studied me thoughtfully. “No, I guess not. Do you think people like us are ever free?”
“You mean freedom, like work a regular job, with the white picket fence and two kids?”
She laughed, choking on a sip of wine. “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t think I really believe in all that shit. No, I just- sometimes I want to be rid of all this, that’s all. Run off somewhere, hang out in a hammock on the beach. Cut ties with anyone from my life. Sometimes I just want to disappear.”
“This place is my way of doing that.”
“We’re a lot more alike than I thought, you and I,” she said.
I watched Blaze from the window as he chopped wood outside. I felt like some kind of voyeur, hiding inside, looking at him. He was shirtless, covered in a sheen of sweat, his muscles rippling as he brought the axe over his shoulder and down to the wood. I felt flushed just watching him, thinking of the night at the hotel. After all this time being cooped up here with him, nights laying in bed with him just on the other side of the door, I couldn’t stand it. I needed to get him out of my head. I needed to get rid of the memory of the way he had touched me, erase the way my body ached for him. My body was betraying me, making me want this man who was no good for me. He was working for my father. Even if it was the first time he was working for him, he was still tied to him and to his club. I couldn’t get involved with him.
I watched Blaze bring the axe up again, the muscles in his forearms and biceps rippling as he moved. Heat flowed through my abdomen, and I cursed my body.
He’s no good for you. Maybe not, but he is so sexy.
A cold shower. That’s what I needed.
As I stood in the shower, water pouring over me, my heart rate returned to normal, the way it was before seeing Blaze out there sweaty and shirtless. I was so pissed off at Blaze that first night, angry at him for suggesting I’d turned a blind eye to what my father was doing so I could keep collecting a paycheck. As if I didn’t care at all. Blaze had no idea. I’d tried to get away after my mother’s murder, tried to find out things about my father, things I wasn’t supposed to know. I wanted to scream at Blaze, tell him how many times I’d thought about running away. I’d stashed away money, cash for the PI, but my father had found out. Then the money had just disappeared and the account was closed. We went back to acting like everything was normal, and I got not so subtle message to stop asking questions.
That’s what Blaze didn’t understand. I’d always be tied to my father, no matter what happened. We all have our crosses to bear, and that was mine. I had anything I wanted, but I would never really be free. Being here with Blaze was the closest I’d ever felt to free, which was ironic since I was basically trapped here with him. Intellectually, I knew I needed to keep my guard up around him since I couldn’t trust that he was anything more than one of my