“What?”
“That’s Dartmoor Incorporated.”
“And that is…?”
“The heart of the MC.”
“Oh,” Ronnie said, and clearly, he didn’t understand the importance of it. Laying eyes on Dartmoor didn’t tighten his chest and shorten his breath.
Perspective, Ava reminded herself. From where she was sitting, the parking lots and industrial steel buildings looked like the Holy Land.
“The Knoxville chapter was the first US chapter,” she said. “The club started in London, and this was the first in the States. It’s the largest chapter, too, in the whole country.”
Ronnie said, without emotion, “Okay.”
Aidan and Tango slowed, and swept through the main gates in an expert swooping turn, gears growling, the bikes dipping dramatically as their weight shifted.
Ava hit her blinker and followed them, into the place that meant so much to her. To an outsider, the maze of businesses and building complexes would have been a labyrinth. Ava navigated the avenues of Dartmoor out of old habit, not needing the escort, but following it anyway.
At last they pulled up in front of the main clubhouse, a place that conducted no business but the innermost, most secret MC business. It was part sacred chapel, part home away from home, part barracks, and part nightclub. Its wood siding was painted a pleasant gray, its entrance double wood doors with glass inlay ovals; a low bed of smooth concrete took the place of a stoop. A wide portico offered shade, and beneath it lay a sequence of round iron café tables and park benches set up amongst heavy potted urns and a raised bed of railroad timbers filled with St. John’s wart. A four-by-six wood sign, painted white and emblazoned with the Lean Dogs running dog silhouette hung between two front windows, framed above and below with makeshift wood top and bottom rockers announcing the club’s name and its location of Tennessee. The house looked neither homey nor businesslike, but some hybrid of private and industrial.
The boys backed their Harleys into the row of bikes that flanked one long side of the clubhouse.
Ava put her F-150 into one of the designated parking spaces between her mother’s black Caddy and Bonita James’s Expedition. By the time she’d killed the engine and disengaged her seatbelt, she realized she was shaking.
Ronnie was shaking too, she noted, as she watched his hands fumble with his seatbelt latch. “Ava,” he said, voice thick, like his throat was clogged. “Please tell me these guys aren’t going to rape me and throw me in the river.”
“They’re not,” she said, rolling her eyes.
And then someone rapped hard on her window and she reached for the door release with a giddy smile.
Aidan had ditched his helmet and pushed his hands through his hopeless, dark curly hair. Behind his shades, the shapes of his eyes were just visible; Ava knew them to be large and dark and full of haughty mischief, his brows round and prone to lifting one at a time, little wrinkles sprouting in his forehead that she liked to tease him about, because he was thirty now, and the age was starting to show.
He stepped back as her door opened, his grin wicked and sharp. Her ladykiller brother, with the dimples and the bristled jaw and the physique he carved into shape with rigorous weight-lifting.
“Hey,” he said as her boots hit the pavement. “I’m looking for my sister. She’s about this tall” – he held his hand a scant three feet off the ground – “and she’s four-eyed and got pimples and–”
“An asshole brother!” Ava finished, and launched herself into his arms.
He smelled like leather, and wind, and that cheapass cologne he soaked himself in every morning. He hugged her tight, lifted her feet off the ground and spun her in a circle, like he’d done when she was just a baby. It still felt like flying, the world spinning past over his shoulder where she had her face buried in the soft worn leather of his cut. The edges of his patches were rough against her hands, the threads of the embroidery silky under the pads of her fingers. He’d hand-stitched these patches onto his cut, the night he’d been patched and dropped the moniker of prospect. Ava had been a witness to his first moments as a full-fledged member, a raucous party totally unsuitable for a kid her age. He was solid in her embrace, the infallible beastly brother she’d relied on her entire life.
She was laughing as he set her back on her feet and stood back, studying her with brows leaping over the frames of his sunglasses.
His hands settled at his hips, his wallet chain dancing against his thigh, throwing glimmers of light down onto the pavement. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
Self-conscious now, Ava smoothed her hands down her H&M ensemble. At UGA, she’d fast realized that if she wanted to be taken seriously by her fellow English majors, she needed to dress the part. She’d packed her own wardrobe in bins beneath her bed, and slowly acquired a whole new one. Today, she wore a flouncy yellow skirt that hit just above the knee, sleeveless white blouse, and cropped denim vest over it, brown wedge sandals that gave her feet a pretty, arched shape. The straps just covered the tiny tattoo on the top of her left foot.
“This is a cute outfit,” she defended, tugging her vest straight.
“I like it,” Tango said, joining them. “It’s got that whole innocent college girl thing going on.”
Aidan thumped him in the arm, and he grinned. “Hey, doll,” he said to Ava, and pulled her into a fast, brotherly hug. In her ear, as she pulled back, he whispered, “My question is, what the fuck did youbring with you?”
Ronnie! She’d forgotten he was with her, for a whole thirty seconds.
She turned, and saw that he had his door open, but only one foot on the pavement, his other leg, and all the rest of him still inside the truck. The breeze tumbled over the door and stirred his soft dark hair against his forehead. Sunlight caught at the fear in his eyes; if Ava could see it, no doubt Aidan and Tango could too. She hated that; she didn’t want the guys to know he was frightened right off the bat. He wouldn’t stand a chance, then.
She wasn’t sure how to play this, exactly – she’d never brought a civilian home to meet the family – but she was pretty sure walking over to Ronnie, taking his hand and walking him back would only make the situation worse.
