Chaser rubbed his hands over his face, muttering a few choice curses, and was headed toward his bike—and the long, hard ride he knew he needed to clear his fucking head of this mess—when his phone started buzzing in his pocket.
He fished it out and saw it was Roscoe.
“It’s too early for phone calls,” he grunted into the phone. “What the hell.”
“Rise and shine, asshole,” Roscoe replied, sounding amped and a little manic, which could only bode ill. “Digger just rolled up to the clubhouse.”
Chapter 6
Saturdays were Lara’s preferred day to visit Mikey in prison. Fridays she was in school all day. Sundays she needed to herself to prepare for the next week of teaching—and sometimes to make an appearance in church when she didn’t feel as if her sins would invite instant incineration the moment her toe touched the threshold of Our Lady of Mercy. So Saturdays it was, week after week.
Lara told herself that was the reason she felt jittery and strange the next morning when her alarm went off a little after seven and she woke to find herself alone in her apartment. Alone and naked in her bed. If her body hadn’t presented her with unmistakable evidence—the scrape of his beard against her thighs, faint marks from the firmness of his grip on her hips, a mouth that felt almost as swollen as her pussy—she might have been tempted to imagine she’d dreamed the whole thing.
But she knew better.
Chaser had more than marked her. He’d taken her again and again, his greed as dark and as deliriously wild as her own. He’d taught her things she didn’t know about herself. What she sounded like when she begged. How many times her body could come beneath the big, faintly rough hands of a man like him. That desire was endlessly renewable, as easy as a brush of his lips against the side of her neck. What it felt like when a man decreed he would learn every single inch of her body, and then did.
Oh yes. He did.
And then he’d talked to her and she’d heard the pain in his voice that she knew he’d hide in the light of day. It had made her…silly. It had made her ache. It had brought her a little too close to treating him like someone she could trust instead of who she knew damned well he was—an outlaw biker. No different from all the other outlaw bikers she’d known.
But with nothing but prison in front of her today, the work of the sort of outlaws who would never have held her tenderly no matter what, Lara wasn’t so sure she believed that.
She sat on the side of her bed in the morning light, already balefully hot as it hit her skin, and felt herself shake from the inside out.
Lara had no time to moon around her apartment, wallowing in either buckets of shame or the other, more complicated emotions that washed through her. She marched herself into the shower and grimly scrubbed the night off her, wincing as she hit certain tender spots. She refused to acknowledge the twinges because she didn’t know if she’d regret them or celebrate them. She refused to let herself get dragged under by leftover sensation—not to mention the emotions she was fighting to keep at bay but that she knew surged there, just beneath the surface.
And then she had the dubious pleasure of dressing herself for a day in a maximum security prison. Closed-toe shoes. No underwire in her bra, or jewelry anywhere, so she wore neither. No blue or khaki in deference to the gang members incarcerated inside, who might react badly to the sight of it. A modest neckline and nothing sleeveless, skimpy, or see-through. Mandatory underwear, though it couldn’t be visible in any way.
Lara had her prison outfit down. Every week she imagined she might wear something different, and every week she wore the same jeans, boots, and appropriately loose T-shirt with nothing written on it, nothing showing except her arms and neck, and in a permitted shade of green. She tossed the plastic baggie of quarters she was permitted to bring her brother every week into the extra bag she always packed, with a loose, long-sleeved white shirt, a pair of black pants, and a different pair of closed-toe shoes for the inevitable occasions when a prison guard was feeling full of himself and decided to be a dick. Entry to the prison was at the guards’ discretion no matter how many official papers anyone filled out, and lord knew those psychotic assholes liked to fuck with people just because they could. Lara had learned the hard way to always, always have a backup plan.
This is your life, she told herself firmly as she ducked into the nearby diner on Main Street for coffee and a quick breakfast before she hit the road. You chose it. You can’t blame anyone but yourself if you don’t like it.
Or if the day after betraying herself with a biker—again—she had no choice but to dowdy herself up and head on up to Mississippi to have the same old painful and sometimes awkward visit with her brother she always had.
You have a choice, she snapped at herself after she placed her order and was gulping down her coffee with entirely too many of those little cups of creamer. You just don’t like the choices you have.
She was picking at her usual omelet and well into her third cup of coffee when a woman slid into the empty seat opposite her. Lara blinked. In the month she’d been in Lagrange, she’d seen this woman before, usually driving around in a sporty little convertible with the music turned up loud like she wanted to cause a commotion. She had biker bitch written all over her, though without the usual weathered appearance that went hand in hand with long hours on the back of a bike in all that wind and sun. From afar, she’d been remarkably, noticeably attractive down here in the bayou where folks tended to look a little more real than back in the nicer parts of Southern California where Lara had lived before following Mikey east. When passed by that convertible on her muggy walk home, Lara might even have harbored a catty thought or two that up close, the driver of said shiny sports car probably looked a little less altogether splendid. That she’d have cracks around the edges, at the very least.
Sadly, that was not the case. She was straight-up gorgeous. Prettier from a foot away than she was from a distance, the bitch.
Her hair was the color of honey, many different blonds cascading down over her bare, toned shoulders. She wore something vaguely bohemian—a flowy sort of tank top over a pair of battered jeans and a pile of bracelets on one arm and necklaces pouring down her neck. She smiled, bright and sweet, but Lara noticed it didn’t quite reach her hazel eyes.
“Hi,” the woman said before Lara could swallow her coffee, much less ask what was going on. “I’m Lanie Latour. You’re new here, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yes.” Lara blinked again, because, apparently, long nights with problematic bikers made her dull. “I’m Lara Ashburn. I teach at the high school. But I don’t remember a Latour in any of my classes…”
“Oh, I don’t have children.” Lanie smiled, though Lara thought it looked a little edgy. “I just wanted to meet you. You can consider me the Lagrange, Louisiana, welcoming committee.”
Lara forced a smile, and then wondered why it was so hard suddenly. She was tempted to chalk that up to Chaser, too, because she knew small towns. She knew the surface friendliness and the darker undercurrents and the way they twisted together in surprising places, like the checkout line at the supermarket. The long, often tangled histories that danced in between the seemingly casual words longtime residents exchanged. The fascination with new people that could cut either way. Maybe this was more of that.
But she didn’t think so.
“Aren’t you sweet,” she murmured.
Lanie smiled. “My friend Merritt and I eat here all the time and you’re always in here by yourself.”
Lara smiled wider. “I enjoy my own company.”
She didn’t really intend that to come out the way it did, she didn’t think. Or maybe she did mean it, on this, another bleak prison morning. Either way, there was no mistaking the faint challenge in it.
Maybe she had more Ashburn in her than she liked to admit to herself.
“And the sheriff’s company, too, I believe,” Lanie said, and beneath her seemingly pleasant words, there was something harder that Lara couldn
’t quite read. “From time to time.”
“You caught me,” Lara agreed, keeping her voice light as she pushed her plate away. She had no idea why she felt tense. “Sometimes people come over and sit down with me, like today. Lagrange is a friendly place, I guess.”
The other woman laughed as if that was a very funny thing to say. And as she did, Lara asked herself what would inspire a woman to get up from her own table to drop by and say a weird, kind of aggressive hello to a total stranger. And then drop the sheriff into it. She could only think of one possibility.
“Is there something going on between you and Grady?” she asked carefully, her tone a little milder than before. “Because I moved here a month ago. I don’t know anyone’s business and I certainly don’t know if I’m stepping on toes.”
“Don’t be silly,” Lanie Latour murmured, a little smile on her face that made Lara’s skin prickle. “The sheriff is a fine, upstanding citizen. He’s a force of good in this dark little swamp town, as he’ll be the first to tell you. And did I forget to mention that I’m a stripper down at that club on the highway? The nasty one. I’m sure you passed it on your way in. Everybody does.” She leaned forward. “I’m dirty straight through, I’m afraid. Tainted from my head to my fake tits to my toes. What could I possibly have going on with someone so squeaky clean?”
Lara swallowed. Carefully. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Lanie. My god. Leave the poor woman alone.”
A dark-haired woman was standing beside the table then. She was dressed in battered old jean shorts and a tank top, and she tucked her hands into the back pockets as if she was a lot more at ease than she sounded.
She smiled at Lara, too. “I’m so sorry. She’s been up all night and hasn’t had enough coffee, clearly.”
“I’m perfectly caffeinated, bitch,” Lanie said, without heat. Like “bitch” was an endearment. It made Lara miss her friends back in California with a sudden sharp pang. They hadn’t exactly supported her decision to follow Mikey. To put it mildly.
Maybe this is a good time to make a permanent break, Dani had suggested at their goodbye dinner in a restaurant near the San Diego marina.
You could always not go, you know, Marcella had said the day she’d come over to help Lara pack up her life in San Diego for the dubious charms of backwater Mississippi and Louisiana. You could let go of that whole world. Stop looking over your shoulder. Live, for a change.
But of course, Lara hadn’t taken her friends’ advice.
The dark-haired woman was still talking, her tone as friendly as her smile, with no hard light in her gaze to undercut it. “This is what happens when she works the late shift and people hang around past dawn. I’m Merritt, by the way.”
She surprised Lara by sticking out her hand, forthright and matter-of-fact and wholly unlike the many other ladies Lara had met since moving here. Lara took her offered hand and shook it, trying to make sense of a rural Southern woman who acted more like someone she’d expect to encounter in a city. It wasn’t that such women couldn’t exist, of course. It was just that she’d spent a month here and had seen a variety of locals, and none of them were quite so…direct.
“Merritt’s not a stripper,” Lanie supplied from across the table, that edgy note wrapped up in her drawl, which had gone extra sugary. A warning Lara recognized, though she didn’t know what it meant. “She’s a lawyer. Lara here is a schoolteacher.” She was pretending to speak to Merritt when she said that, but her gaze stayed on Lara. “She molds young minds and contributes positively to the community. Isn’t that great?”
Merritt shook her head. “I think you need to get some sleep, Lanie.”
Lanie only shrugged. “Who needs sleep? This is Lagrange, Louisiana, where the only thing around to end the nonstop partying is the gators.”
“I’ll keep you both in mind,” Lara said then, throwing some money on the table. She nodded at Lanie. “Should I need to take the kids on a field trip.” Then she inclined her head at Merritt. “And should I need to argue with the school board that it was for educational purposes when they fire me for that field trip.” She stood up, already feeling a little emotionally pale, and this wasn’t helping. “It’s been so nice to meet you both. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”
“Oh yes,” Merritt murmured. Her hand came down on Lanie’s shoulder as if the other woman had started to say something and Merritt was holding her back. “Because everyone loves an ambush by a crazy woman first thing on a Saturday morning.”
Lara pushed away from the table and kept her smile welded to her face as she walked out, but she could feel Lanie watching her as she went. And then the steam of the morning was smothering her in an instant, snapping her out of whatever mood she’d fallen into inside the diner.
So it turned out the sheriff of St. Germain Parish wasn’t perfect after all, if he was sneaking around with one woman while dating another. Or had an angry ex, maybe, if that was what Lanie was. Lara didn’t quite know where to put that. Or if she should care, given what she’d gotten up to after her date with Grady.
Was it funny if he’d done the same thing? Or just kind of sad for the both of them?
Lara had a long time in the car looming ahead of her and that wasn’t good. Hours upon hours to do nothing but think. To play music and sing as loud as she could, as if that could keep the ghosts and the regrets and the edge of grief at bay as she drove up to see her baby brother trapped in yet another grim steel cage. But if she refused to think about what had happened to Mikey’s life the way she usually did, there was too much else to knock her sideways as she sat there with nothing to do but reflect. She could replay last night in all of its parts. The date. The kiss. Then Chaser’s thrilling, maddening appearance and what had come after. On the stairs. Over the kitchen island in her small apartment. On the bed, in the shower, and somehow in a tangle on the floor of her bedroom, too. Then back to the bed with a little too-raw near-confession time on top of a few more rounds. Over and over and over again, all night long, so that really, she should feel glutted and done.
She didn’t.
But still, Lara thought as she pointed her car north toward Mississippi and settled in for some quality time with herself that she really didn’t want today of all days, she had too much real shit to worry about. A random woman in a diner, who might or might not have ties to a man Lara wanted to date but didn’t want, hardly signified.
Which, obviously, made Lanie Latour and her possible connection to that man the perfect thing to obsess about, for as many hours as she could.
—
It was after nine o’clock that night when Lara finally pulled back into her little parking slot behind the bakery. She felt as if she’d aged twenty years over the course of the day, which was par for the course. It was yet another reason she preferred to visit her brother on Saturdays, not Sundays. Because sometimes it took her the whole of Sunday to feel anything like human again, after the long drive both ways and the institutionalized depersonalization that prisons did so well.
She shut off the car and sat there for a moment, feeling as empty as she did tainted. As if the stench of that place had gotten into her skin, making her as gray and dull and anguished as the prison itself.
And then she hated herself, because she could go inside and shower for hours, then try to sleep it off. She could take all of Sunday to feel like a person again, no longer subject to the cruel indifference of the guards or the opaque, bewildering rules or the stifling human misery pressing in on all sides. She could even take a week or two off from visiting, if she felt like it.
But Mikey was stuck there.
I think you keep telling yourself I’m a good guy, he’d told her today, the way he often did when she went too far down roads he didn’t like—like any road that put the responsibility for what had happened to him on his stupid club. And their vicious uncle. Lara. Come on. You have to know I’m not.
You don’t belong here. You didn’t do this.
T
hat doesn’t make me a good guy, does it? Mikey had countered. Then he’d changed the subject, because he had a very limited amount of patience for her grief. On some level, Lara thought he was afraid of how furious he might actually be, down deep in a place he refused to access because he still had years on his sentence yet to survive. And they both knew she was his only visitor now that he’d been transferred to Mississippi. His only link to the outside world. There was no point fighting. Why make a shitty situation worse?
Tell me about your classes, he’d ordered her gruffly, settling back on his bench with that cool look on his face, like he was hiding from her in plain sight. She’d gritted her teeth, but let it go. She was used to it. Any kids giving you trouble?
Lara had filled him in on her week of teaching as if there’d been nothing emotional said between them, because what else could she do? She already refused to call him by his dumb road name, Cid, that he’d gotten when he’d started prospecting for the club before he’d finished high school. Short for Rancid, for reasons no one had ever told her. They’d all laughed in that maddening male way, but none of them had ever clued her in and at a certain point it had dawned on her that she probably didn’t want to know. But that meant she was pretty much the only person alive who wasn’t an employee of the correctional system or somehow involved with the law who called her brother Michael. Or in her case, Mikey.
No one else, she’d realized today, would dare.
Maybe her unfortunate interactions with Chaser had changed more things inside of her than she’d realized, but she’d been entirely too aware of her brother today. As the big, mean-looking biker-turned-convict he was, not the gap-toothed little sweetheart she’d played with when he was little. Mikey had tattoos all over him, declarations of war and intent. They covered his arms. She knew they were all over his torso. She even knew what most of them meant. She usually looked past them. She usually saw the Mikey she wanted to see instead of the scary biker everyone else saw.