Rough Ride

  He was all warm for me.

  It was a hair down day for Everett “Snapper” Kavanaugh, slicked back, whatever he used making the light blond seem darker.

  It was also an intent day, I could tell by the serious look on his face while he was listening to Tack speak.

  He wasn’t going to invade my space because I’d kicked him out of my hospital room (God, that was so Snapper).

  But he wasn’t waiting even for a phone call to learn how I was. He was getting a briefing on me. Everything. From how I looked to how I held myself to how I behaved to how I reacted to what they’d offered me (or, more accurately, what I’d been forced to accept).

  You’re gonna be in my life and I’m gonna be in yours. Bank on it.

  “Is that him?” Mom whispered from beside me, standing so close our arms brushed.

  She knew everything. Everything about everything. Around the time I turned seventeen, she started the long process of morphing from just my mom, to my mom and sometimes friend, to my friend and sometimes mom, to my best friend who was also the precious being who had birthed me.

  “That’s him,” I whispered back.

  He nodded and I knew by the movements of his body he was going to disconnect, so I quickly moved out of the window, doing it watching and seeing his head turning my way.

  Standing out of sight, thus losing sight of Snapper before he caught sight of me, I watched my mother wave at him.

  “Mom!” I hissed.

  “He’s really cute,” she said.

  He was. He was really cute in a hot-guy, badass biker kind of way. Take off the leather cut, trim his hair, shave his beard, and he’d be the boy next door.

  The boy next door you were itching to get in your bed and would sell your soul to earn the honor of having his ring on your finger.

  To escape what was happening at the window, I turned so my shoulders were against the wall and looked down at the paper in my hand.

  Elaine Kincaid, CEO of an advertising agency.

  Hop had married a business lady.

  Surprising and interesting.

  And cool.

  I stared at the address under it, focusing on it rather than the fact that Snap was right outside.

  Suddenly, my eyes narrowed on it.

  As they did, I recollected a conversation I’d had with Snap, one of many I shouldn’t have had when he was just supposed to be my contact with Chaos, sharing with him what I’d heard Beck say his brothers were up to when it came to antisocial activities, not to mention I was living with another guy.

  How many properties? I’d asked, aghast at the intel about himself he’d shared over the course of our by then hour-long phone conversation.

  Five, no…six. But, babe, it isn’t a big deal. All the brothers get a cut of Ride and both the store and garage do a huge turnover. It is what it is but the way I live my life, what am I gonna do with that kind of money? he’d answered.

  I could think of a lot of things to do with that kind of money, I’d told him.

  Yeah, well, I’m not big on shoes, he’d replied. So I buy houses.

  I’d laughed.

  I had to admit, I liked shoes.

  What I didn’t admit was that I liked that Snapper had noticed.

  He’d listened to me laughing for a while before he’d said, I can’t just sit on it. I got it, gotta make it work for me.

  So I guess you buy six properties and let it work, I’d teased.

  Yeah, he’d said with a smile in his voice. Comes time, I’ll be good. My woman will be good. Our kids wanna go to some expensive college, they’ll be good. They want big weddings, that’ll be good. We wanna take crazy huge family vacations, that’ll be good. Or if a shit storm hits, we’ll be covered.

  I didn’t remember my reply to that, just that I’d turned the topic of conversation.

  But I remembered how what he’d said made me feel.

  I stared at the address on the paper.

  Tack had said the place they’d put me in was Chaos.

  But I knew it wasn’t just Chaos, as such.

  It was Snapper.

  He had six rental properties, a couple were condos, the rest small homes.

  This was his.

  He was giving this to me.

  He probably had someone evicted so he could give it to me.

  I drew in breath as I heard a motorcycle roar to life.

  “Rosalie?” Mom called.

  I shifted just enough I could see out the window and watched Hop pull out with Lanie at his side in his truck. Tack and Tyra in their huge SUV were already out and driving away.

  I shifted more and saw the curb was empty but I knew that already, the sound of Snap’s pipes were fading.

  “Honey,” Mom murmured and I looked to her. “You okay?”

  “This,” I waved the note in the air, “is Snap’s.”

  “Sorry?” she asked.

  “This place they moved me into without my permission or agreement or even really acceptance. Snapper owns it.”

  “Oh,” she murmured, her eyes drifting reverently to the paper.

  Yep.

  Reverently.

  She’d always liked Chaos too. She used to party with them with Dad back in the day before I came along.

  The thing I was worried about was that she’d start to get to like Snapper, especially before she’d even met him.

  This could happen. He was just that likable. An all-around good guy. Easy on the eyes. Easy to talk to. Easy to be with. Sweet, smart, thoughtful.

  It was my turn to call her attention to me.

  “Mom.”

  She looked right into my eyes.

  “Please, Rosalie, let them take care of you.”

  I closed my eyes.

  I opened them.

  “You did the right thing with Beck and his club,” she said when I did. “I’m proud of you. Your father would have been proud of you, though he wouldn’t have let you do it.”

  That made my lips quirk.

  Then again, Dad would have been on me about being with Beck at all. He’d let me make my own decisions, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have something to say about it.

  “He still would have been glad you considered it,” she carried on. “It went bad. He’s not here to keep you safe and I—”

  “Mom—”

  “But they can,” she finished determinedly. “I’m here to listen, you want to talk. I’m here to hold on to, you want to let it out. I’m here to get angry right along with you, you want to rail and scream. Whatever you need from me, I’m here. But I can’t give you that. I can’t keep you safe. You can’t keep you safe. But they can and…” she swallowed then pushed it out, “Bounty is not done with you.”

  I drew breath in through my nose, ticked my mom was worried, ticked at Beck, ticked at myself, but she was and there was nothing I could do about it so I nodded.

  “We’ll go look at it soon, okay?” I offered.

  “We should ask Tyra and Lanie to meet us,” she suggested.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think getting deeper into that crew is a good idea.”

  To that she stated, “He’s handsome.”

  She was talking about Snap.

  “Yeah, he is, but—”

  “He’s yours.”

  I shut my mouth.

  Mom didn’t.

  “Standing outside in the cold, waiting for word about you, putting you in his place so he knows you’re safe, he’s yours like Beck never was, like that other one never was. He’s yours. He’s yours to break or he’s yours to hold safe.”

  “Chaos men are unbreakable,” I informed her.

  “If your father lived to see his daughter in that hospital bed like I saw her, he’d have shattered,” she retorted.

  And that’s when the tears started to sting my eyes.

  “Men are breakable, Rosalie,” she said in her calm, serene voice. “They just hide the cracks better than we women do.”

  “I thought he was going
to kill me,” I whispered.

  She stood solid and held my gaze, hers suddenly bright like mine was, filled with wet, knowing I was now talking about Beck.

  “He’d kissed that neck he’d nearly squeezed the life from so many times, I couldn’t count them,” I told her.

  My mom stood there and kept hold of me, warm and safe, using nothing but her gaze.

  “Do you think I want to jump into another situation with another biker?” I asked.

  “Your father was a biker,” she reminded me.

  “My father was one of a kind,” I reminded her.

  “He died and you went searching,” she stated.

  This, I couldn’t handle. I knew it. I understood it. I was coming to terms with the mistakes I’d made.

  But hearing it come from my mother’s lips, I couldn’t deal with it.

  So I looked out the window at our dead winter lawn, our empty driveway, the curb bare.

  “You found that Chaos boy, the first one, as a replacement,” she said, careful, gentle, sweet.

  I swallowed.

  She was right.

  Dad had died.

  I’d been lost.

  Then I found Shy.

  “He wouldn’t keep you, you went reeling,” she kept on.

  I saw nothing but clear, hot waves rippling before my eyes.

  “Then you latched on to the next thing that reminded you of what you lost,” she said.

  I’d done that for sure.

  My voice was trembling when I replied, “I messed up.”

  “You were grieving.”

  I turned to her, shaking my head fiercely to shake the tears from my eyes, and repeated, “I messed up.”

  “Okay, that wasn’t what I was trying to get through to you, I was simply trying to guide your way to understanding the path you’ve been on. But if you have to look at it that way, sure, okay, you messed up,” she agreed half-heartedly. “Though it burns me that any woman takes responsibility for the callous brutality a man can inflict, that burn runs deeper I hear that come from my own daughter’s mouth, but for now, I’ll let that be and just say, my beautiful girl, don’t mess up again.”

  “Life is not about finding a man,” I told her.

  “Life is about finding happy,” she told me. “So don’t,” she jerked her head to the window, “mess up.”

  “They all went at me, Mom.” Now I was talking about Bounty.

  She’d pulled it together.

  With that, it killed, but the water hit her eyes and she couldn’t contain it.

  It started leaking down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t lay that on you. Not you.”

  “Rosalie, honeypot,” she began, lifting her hands to brush away the tears, “pray to God you learn, and when you do, trust me, you’ll learn that as difficult as it is to take, as heavy as any burden might be, when a woman becomes a mother, she can bear anything for her child. So lay it on me.”

  “I’m scared,” I told her.

  “Of course,” she told me.

  “I can’t think of another guy right now,” I shared.

  “That’s understandable,” she replied.

  “I just have to get through today.”

  “Then we’ll get you through it.”

  “I loved him before,” I whispered the admission. “Before what happened happened to me.”

  “What?” she whispered back.

  “I wanted to make Beck into Snap.”

  “Oh, Rosie,” she breathed, finally coming toward me, and if I wasn’t wrong, there was a grin playing at her lips.

  “Mom, it was stupid,” I said as she lifted both hands and held my jaw carefully.

  She tipped her head toward me, eye to identical eye.

  “I just need to get through today,” I restated.

  “How can I help with that?” she asked.

  “Do you have Tillamook salted butterscotch ice cream?”

  “Is my little girl in the vicinity?”

  My grin was shaky and my nod in her hands was jerky.

  “Spoons and the container and a marathon of Jason Bourne?” she proposed.

  My grin got less shaky and my nod was far more definite.

  “You’re on TV duty, I’ll get the ice cream,” she decreed.

  She then came in, brushing her cheek against mine before she let me go and moved toward the kitchen.

  “Mom?” I called.

  She turned to me.

  “I’m sorry you have to go through this with me,” I said.

  “Something else you’ll learn, I pray, my beauty, is the good, the bad, the ugly, a mother is never sorry. Their baby needs them, there’s no other place they would be.”

  Yes, oh yes.

  I’d never manage without her.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  “And there it is,” she replied simply.

  Then she went to get the ice cream.

  I watched her go, knowing she was right.

  There it was.

  That was us. Our family. Our life.

  We’d never had a mortgage (Mom still rented). We’d never had roots.

  But we’d had each other.

  And love.

  And that was all that was needed.

  So life sucked right then, it was uncertain and scary, both of those things in the extreme.

  But I had my mom.

  And that was all that was needed.

  On that thought, I moved to the TV.

  Chapter Two

  Path

  Rosalie

  A plethora of guns lay in display cabinets before me, lined up on their sides, white tags attached to them.

  A little old man with not a lot of hair (in fact, there were about three strands wafting over his shiny dome) was on the opposite side of the case, just down, eyeing me as I assessed my options.

  I could imagine what I looked like. What with it being just a couple days after Tack, Hop, Tyra, and Lanie came to call, I was still bruised and stitched up with a taped nose, angry welts across my neck, and moving gingerly.

  He probably thought I was a woman with revenge on my mind.

  I wasn’t.

  I was a woman with protection on my mind.

  Chaos said they were going to cover me but they’d said that before and no protection was infallible (as I’d learned the hard way).

  This time, I wasn’t going to take any chances.

  The little old guy didn’t approach me, which I thought was weird. He worked there and I was a customer. I had questions. I mean, I could pick a gun that fit in any one of my purses (or at least most of my purses—I was equal opportunity with purses, and wallets, seeing as if the purse was smaller, the wallet would also have to be) but I also needed one I could handle.

  Further, I needed to learn how to handle it.

  According to the Yelp listing, Zip’s Gun Emporium was the place for all your gun and ammo needs, offering admittedly crotchety (and there were a fair few reviews that shared this information), but nevertheless expert gun and ammo advice.

  The listing also shared it had a firing range.

  And whoever Zip was, he taught classes.

  He did it grumpily, but he was reportedly good at it.

  But there weren’t any notices up anywhere about these classes. The only things on the walls were shotguns, rifles, and more handguns, as well as the odd mostly-naked-chick poster mingled with mostly-naked-chick calendars.

  I needed a gun and to sign up for a class.

  So I needed to talk to somebody.

  “You takin’ this?” I heard asked.

  I looked in the direction this came from, which was toward the old guy, who I saw was not speaking to me, just as I heard, “Yup.”

  That was when I turned even further, which was right before I froze.

  Snapper was moving toward me.

  He was doing it also doing a full body scan, up, down, back up again, down, then back up, gaze lingering on my throat, then on
my face, and finally he made it to me, stopped and looked into my eyes.

  It was a man-bun day as well as about six days past grooming his beard.

  And I knew it was six days because I felt it hit my lower belly that those six days since I was hurt were six days he spent worrying about me and not bothering with what he considered was unnecessary personal grooming.

  “Hey,” his baritone came at me.

  “Hey,” I said quietly.

  “How you doin’?” he asked.

  “Good,” I answered.

  His teeth came out and hit dead center in his full lower lip in a way I instantly became mesmerized.

  They let that lip go to whisper, “Rosie.”

  I lifted my gaze to his.

  “What you doin’ in a gun shop, honey?” he asked.

  I thought that was a stupid question and was surprised by it because Snap was not a stupid guy.

  “I think that’s kinda obvious,” I pointed out since he was looking right at me and the swelling might be gone but the rest was still visible.

  “How ’bout we go get some coffee,” he suggested.

  I shook my head. “I need to buy a gun today so I can get started on the waiting period thingie.”

  His mouth moved in a way I’d never seen before and he didn’t respond immediately. I would understand why when he did and it was tentative.

  “Colorado doesn’t have a waiting period.”

  He didn’t want me to know that.

  He didn’t want me owning a gun.

  He still told me that.

  So Snapper.

  “Snapper—” I began.

  He got closer.

  I shut up because, first, he got closer, and second, because when he did, I could smell him, leather and soap and outdoors and all of that together on Snapper smelled beautiful, and last, once he got closer, he just was closer.

  “Come have coffee with me,” he urged.

  “I need a gun,” I whispered.

  “You don’t need a gun, Rosie.”

  “I need a gun, Snapper.”

  “You don’t know how to handle a gun,” he pointed out.

  “I’m gonna take lessons,” I shared.

  He looked in my eyes then said, “Zip,” without breaking my gaze.

  The little old man showed across the case at our sides.

  “You got the binder?” Snapper asked, again not looking away from me.

  “Boy, you’re gonna blow a sale for me,” the little old guy, apparently the Zip of Zip’s Gun Emporium, said by way of answer.