“Hey,” Lara said, keeping her voice mild. The girl stopped, but didn’t turn around, and her hand was gripping the banister a little too tightly. “Can you show me the way to your dad’s shower? Is that upstairs?”
“Sure.” Kaylee looked over her shoulder at Lara then, her gaze old and knowing and somehow stark as well. And the exact same whiskey shade as her father’s, to make it that much more disconcerting. “But don’t fall in love with him, Ms. Ashburn. He’s not made for that.”
That haunting statement stayed with her as Kaylee delivered her to Chaser’s bedroom door on the second level of the house. Lara wanted to ask a few follow-up questions as they walked up the stairs, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. And it shamed her that she didn’t know if she refrained because she wanted to protect Kaylee from more inappropriate musings about her father—or because she really didn’t want to know the answers. She stood there for a moment, rooted to the floor of the little hall, and watched as Kaylee flounced into her room at the other end and slammed her door shut behind her.
She was alone for the first time since she’d found Chaser at her door. The truth was, Lara didn’t feel like the same person who’d made that long, lonely drive down from Mississippi earlier. She hardly felt like the same person who’d sat in that damned prison visiting room and had tried—as ever—to pretend her brother was who she wanted him to be instead of who he was.
And she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to shove the genie back into that particular bottle.
The problem with realizing that a great many of her biker club concerns were largely specific to her uncle was that it meant so many of the truths she’d clung to all her life weren’t necessarily true at all. They’d just been a convenient way to feed her hurt and anger and all those terrible feelings her uncle’s treatment of her had fostered. Was she addicted to terrible men? Or had her uncle simply been a truly terrible specimen—and therefore, with only him as a role model, Lara’s teenage choice of boyfriend had been equally awful?
If she was entirely honest with herself, she’d never considered the possibility that Mikey was a bad person. Even today, when she’d finally allowed herself to see her brother for who he was, she hadn’t seen a villain. She couldn’t. Mikey had never protested his own innocence—Lara had done that. He’d simply accepted his fate and had gone about serving his time, because, as he’d been trying to tell her for years, he was a man who knew who he was and what choices he’d made, and the consequences of both.
And she certainly didn’t seem to think Chaser was any kind of bad guy, either. Or her body didn’t, anyway, no matter what her mind might try to tell her. She’d seen the ultimate proof of that with her own eyes. Because Lara had wanted to punch Chaser’s sister in the face, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t even looked mad, just stern. He’d obviously taught his daughter how to protect herself, which was a smart move given the kind of problems that could potentially show up at his door, and he kept someone around so she wasn’t alone no matter how sure she was that she could take care of herself. And when a teacher had called him about Kaylee’s worrying behavior in school, he hadn’t blown it off. He’d shown up to discuss it.
All that and he wanted Lara to trust him. He made her come almost with a single glance. And he’d claimed her.
He’d chosen her.
Don’t fall in love with him, Kaylee had said.
Lara had never been in love with anybody. She’d wanted, desperately, to be in love with Lowdown when she’d been seventeen. She’d reacted to his inevitable betrayal as if she had been, because she hadn’t known how else to handle it. And she’d tried so hard to fall in love in the years since, with all those nice, unobjectionable guys who’d bored her silly despite her best efforts. Including the local sheriff here. But maybe she wasn’t as broken as, deep down, she’d always assumed she was. Maybe she’d spent all this time looking for the right combination, a man who was a badass but was never, ever bad to her. Which didn’t make it easy, of course. A man like Chaser was never going to be easy. But that didn’t make him terrible. And it didn’t make her a junkie.
And maybe this crazy thing taking over her heart and her body and her mind—making her reel and stagger and do things she’d have sworn she’d never do without a single shred of regret—wasn’t an addiction. Maybe it was that other thing she had no earthly idea how to identify.
She fished out her phone and pulled up the ongoing group text she had with her two best friends back in San Diego.
Will you still love me if I succumb to Stockholm syndrome? she texted.
Of course we’ll always love your crazy ass, Dani replied almost instantaneously. However, I might not leave you alone with my kids in case you confuse them for demons or whatever the voices tell you.
How hot is he, though? asked Marcella. Because if he’s ugly, absolutely not, I’m staging an intervention. In a few months when it’s less humid there, because my hair.
Lara was grinning as she typed. He is definitely not ugly.
Then you have my full support!
She was still grinning as she pushed open the door and walked into Chaser’s room, looking around cautiously, because she felt a little bit as if she was peeking into his private diary. And like the existence of this whole house in the first place, it wasn’t what she expected. Not that she knew what she’d expected, really. Something along the lines of the common room in the clubhouse, maybe? Another version of a very male college dorm or locker room situation, except with a little biker flair?
Instead, she was standing in a very nice master suite that she could imagine was just about big enough for a man of Chaser’s size. His bed was huge and raised on a platform with two high iron posts at the head and two shorter ones at the foot, which made it impossible not to remember him threatening to chain her to his bed. The floors were a smooth, weathered hardwood and felt good beneath her feet when she pulled her boots off. The walls were painted a shade of dark blue that kept the stark furnishings—only a large chest against one wall, a dresser, and a clean, flat desk with a few books between upright bookends—from making the place feel too stark. The bed was made roughly, as if he’d tossed the sheets back up into place but hadn’t bothered to do the extra smoothing and tucking, because, of course, it was highly unlikely that Chaser would care about that shit.
On the table next to his bed there was a single picture in a nice big frame. Lara recognized his hard profile and his throat tattoo, though his beard was much longer. He was standing, cradling a tiny baby she knew was Kaylee, gazing down at her with a fiercely tender look on his face that made Lara’s chest ache.
She felt as if she was staring at his secrets. His beating heart. The truth about him.
And she had the strangest urge to do…nothing. To crawl into that wide bed, pull the covers over her head, and see if the pillows smelled like him. To stay cocooned in his scent and his things until he came back and told her she was safe from whatever he thought was out there, stalking Lagrange.
But even as she thought that, she knew she couldn’t do it. Kaylee was here. Chaser had trusted her enough to leave her with his daughter, and she didn’t think he’d meant hiding herself away and hoping for the best. She refused to let him down—and she didn’t really want to examine herself to figure out why the very idea filled her with horror or worse, why she was so invested in making sure he was happy with her.
She moved to the bathroom instead and started stripping off her clothes, trying her best not to remember that the last time her jeans had come off, Chaser had been the one removing them. Trying not to feel much of anything, if she was honest.
Trying and failing.
Go ahead, Mikey had said while he was still in jail in California, before they’d relocated him and a huge swathe of other California prisoners back East. Keep your head in the sand, Lara. You’re more comfortable there anyway.
She hadn’t thought about that bitter conversation in years. It had been one of their few actual fights during
a visiting session back in California, where members of the BGMC had often come and visited him, too, leading to awkward encounters in the prison parking lot.
Lara had made the mistake of commenting on those encounters, and not kindly.
You can call them assholes all you want, Mikey had said. But they’re my family. I don’t let them talk shit about you, either.
I’m your actual family, Mikey. And there’s no comparison between me and those people. How can you pretend otherwise?
You see what you want to see, Mikey had said, his hard-ass tone brooking no opposition. And good for you, if that’s what you want. But some of us live in the world as it is.
And then he’d told her she had her head in the sand.
Lara had dismissed that comment a long time ago. But she hadn’t forgotten it. And tonight she stood in Chaser’s shower, and finally, reluctantly, she took her brother’s advice. She let the water pour over her. She used Chaser’s soap so her skin smelled like his. And she accepted that maybe something was wrong with her that she found it an intimate, very nearly erotic experience.
More than that, she knew exactly what was wrong with her. Her head wasn’t in the sand. She knew why she wanted Chaser to think highly of her. She knew why the idea of his claiming her didn’t fill her with horror or the desire to run away, the way it probably should have. She knew.
“It’s too soon,” she muttered to herself out loud as she turned off the water. “It’s way too soon.”
But she knew.
Then she stepped out of the slick, hot shower and toweled herself off with the towel he’d left hanging on the rack to dry, which also smelled like him. She went commando as she pulled on her jeans and boots, and tugged her same tight tank top back on, too. She twisted her hair back into a wet knot at the nape of her neck in an attempt to look a little less biker chick and a little more competent teacher of bright young local talent, and then went to find Kaylee to see if she could help with that.
“Can I borrow a T-shirt?” she asked, poking her head in the door across the way, then went still.
Because Kaylee was doing exactly what Lara had wanted to do in Chaser’s bed. She was curled up in as little a ball as she could make of herself on her bed, her face white and her eyes filled with tears.
Lara reminded herself that she barely knew this girl. She couldn’t race in and grab hold of her as if they were family or friends. It wasn’t app—
Oh, fuck appropriate, she snapped at herself. She was already so far past that line, how could anything else she did possibly matter at this point?
She pushed the door the rest of the way open and went inside, going over to sit down on the bed next to Kaylee. The girl rolled a little toward her as the mattress dipped and Lara ran a comforting hand along the stiff line of her side.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”
“I’m fine,” Kaylee said, through an obviously stuffy nose and what sounded like a tear-clogged throat.
“You’re distraught,” Lara corrected her mildly. “And you’re probably giving yourself a headache besides.” She patted Kaylee’s waist gently. “Come on. Get up.”
Lara hadn’t received a whole lot of mothering in her life, so she’d studied her friends’ relationships with their mothers, and she thought she might have committed to memory every last anecdote she’d ever heard about a mother’s loving care. She’d used it in her teaching positions for years. In this case, she got Kaylee to stand up and then brought her across the hall to the bathroom at the top of the stairs. She urged her onto the closed toilet seat and then ran a washcloth under cold water.
“Is my face dirty?” Kaylee asked, still sounding stuffed up with sobs.
“Just put this on your face, please,” Lara said in the same way she told students to take their seats when the bell rang. “It’s soothing.”
Kaylee didn’t look as if she believed that, but after a second she took the washcloth anyway. And something about that broke Lara’s heart wide open. Because she knew that hesitancy. And she knew that determined sort of hope, too, because what was the worst that could happen?
And god help her, she was in deep already. Too deep.
She settled herself down on the edge of the tub and waited.
Kaylee kept the washcloth on her face for a while. Until the stray water had dripped down her neck and dampened the filmy little shirt she was wearing. Eventually she moved it around to the back of her neck, lifting up her hair to let it rest at her nape.
Her eyes were red and puffy. She looked miserable.
“I want to help you,” Lara said. And as she did, she had a flashback to that day she’d had to keep Kaylee after class and had smelled the alcohol on her breath. She’d said the same thing to the girl then. “But I can’t if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”
In school that afternoon, Kaylee had shrugged. Her mouth had taken on a sulky, vulnerable look and she’d stared at the tip of one shoe. A lost cause, in other words. Lara had let her go, not without reservations—and then called her father.
And here they were, practically knee to knee in a bathroom together. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since that fateful afternoon. But this girl was still coming apart at the seams and the only difference was, Lara was now in a much better position to help her. Or try, anyway. And maybe it was the fact of that proximity that helped her understand why she’d over-related to Kaylee from the moment she’d walked into school that first day.
Back in San Diego, she’d taught at a regular high school, filled with civilian kids. Not kids caught up in the biker life whether they wanted to be or not. It was only when she’d followed Mikey into the Deep South that she’d decided she had a higher purpose than that. That she had a duty to use her experiences to help, not to hide.
Was it any wonder that the first student to rip her heart out was a motherless girl operating on bravado and attitude like it was all she had in the world? It was like looking in a mirror. Except this girl had something Lara had never had growing up. Kaylee had Chaser. And Lara had to believe that meant that whatever was going on with her now, Kaylee had a much better chance of figuring herself out and doing what she wanted in life than Lara ever had.
Kaylee took the damp washcloth from the back of her neck and leaned forward to place it on the rim of the sink. Then she sat back on the closed toilet seat, and her lip trembled when she took a deep breath. She looked at Lara as if it hurt her, then dropped her gaze to the fingers she kept lacing and unlacing in her lap.
“I know why there’s a member of the Black Dogs here,” she whispered.
At first the words didn’t make any sense. Then they did, and Lara felt a chill go down her spine. But she didn’t freak out, the way she imagined anyone else in Kaylee’s life would if she said the same thing to them.
“How can you know that?” she asked calmly. And she had to bite her tongue to keep from asking anything else.
Kaylee let out a long, shuddery sigh, as if she was letting go of something she’d been holding tight for far too long.
“People can change,” she said fiercely, still directing her attention to her lap. “Just because they were one thing—even if it’s a bad thing, a really bad thing—it doesn’t mean they’re always that thing.” She looked up then, her gaze searching Lara’s face. “Don’t you think?”
“I think humans always have the capacity for change,” Lara agreed. But when Kaylee let out a sigh of relief, she continued. “But that doesn’t always mean they want to change.”
Kaylee shoved some of her hair behind one ear. “Sometimes you can want to change and not be able to do it, though. There are some things that are so hard, wanting to change isn’t enough. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want it. And it’s the wanting that matters, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think anyone can change if they don’t want to.” Lara worked hard to keep her voice even. Level. As if this was a philosophical conversation with no personal ap
plications tonight. “But wanting isn’t enough on its own. You have to do something, too. Or it’s not change, it’s just a lot of big talk. Wishes and maybes don’t change anything. Only change does.”
Lara waited then. When Kaylee didn’t say anything else, she bit back her urge to launch into an interrogation and forced herself to stay calm. As if there wasn’t a rival biker gang situation happening right now that this poor girl was caught up in, somehow. And as if Chaser wasn’t out there in the middle of it, doing god only knew what.
She reminded herself it was his job. His calling, even. It was what he did. And she made herself sit there in silence, though she thought that really, it was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.
“You know what my dad does,” Kaylee said after what felt like approximately twenty-five thousand years, and then some.
“I do.”
“Who he is, I mean.”
Lara made herself take a breath before she tackled that. “I think I have the full picture.”
“He’s tough,” Kaylee said, and she wasn’t looking at her hands any longer. She was frowning straight at Lara. “If you disappoint him, forget it. He’s done with you. No second chances, no do-overs, nothing.”
“I’ve only known your father a short time,” Lara replied, as carefully as she could, “but it’s pretty clear to me that he loves you. A lot. I can’t imagine that he’d ever be done with you. No matter what.”
“And not everybody lives by his code, because they can’t,” Kaylee said as if she hadn’t heard Lara, her voice starting to shake a little. She pulled herself upright on the toilet seat, alive with indignation. It made her eyes shine over-bright and hot. “He’s so rigid. So black and white. His way or the highway, except maybe for everybody else in the world things are a little more complicated than that.”
“Kaylee.” And she tried so hard to keep her tone cool. Professional. Instead of filled with all the emotions she shouldn’t have been feeling if she’d actually been either one of those things. “I want to help. I do. But I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is there a Black Dog brother here because of you? Is that what you’re afraid to tell your father?”