“Charlie, come on,” Phillip said.
“Yeah. Sure.” He plucked something up and joined them.
“What was that?” Ghost asked.
“Picture of the man’s family.” The flashlight painted eerie shadows above his eyes. “Never know when that might come in handy.”
~*~
Sam heard the bikes approaching and it sent a foreign thrill through her. It sounded so different, all of them in symphony like that. Like an invading army.
“You feel it in your gut,” Maggie said beside her, startling her. She hadn’t heard the biker queen come up to stand beside her at the bar.
Sam turned to her and nodded, a hand ghosting over her belly on impulse. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “It’s a good feeling, actually.”
“Hmm. I always thought so.”
It was dark now, night inky beyond the windows, the jack-o-lanterns crackling brightly, inside and out. Everyone else heard the bikes too, and Sam watched the low ripples of excitement move through the room, sweeping away doubt and worry.
Their boys were back; there was no need to worry anymore. Time to party.
“It might get kinda crazy tonight,” Maggie warned, her smile almost a smirk.
Sam drained the last of her wine. “I can handle that.”
Twenty
Bare-knuckle boxing, Sam decided, had to count as “kind of crazy.” Though maybe not in this crowd.
It had started out friendly enough, RJ and Dublin giving each other shit until they’d finally decided to duke it out and see if the “old man” was really too “decrepit” to hold his own against “the younger crowd.” They’d traded jabs that were more like jokes, laughing, a crowd slowly building up around them in the parking lot.
But the atmosphere was intoxicating out here. The heady scents of cooked meat and scorched pumpkin, the acrid tang of wood smoke. The beer flowed and the lights danced primitively, exhaled breath pluming, stars twirling overhead. A wild, feral sort of night, chased with cold, colored with whatever heathen victory they’d brought in off the road. Sam could taste the violence at the back of her throat, and she leaned sideways against Aidan as they sat on the picnic table, fingers lacing tight with his, his laughter vibrating through her palm.
Several matches had been fought already, and now, she knew, came the one they’d all been waiting for. The showstopper.
Mercy versus his brother, Colin.
Something shifted the moment the two of them stepped forward. A cheer went up; sharp whispers ran around their spectator circle. And there was something in the eyes of both men that sent a shiver up Sam’s back.
“This isn’t a friendly sparring match,” she said to Aidan.
“Nah,” was all he said.
Mercy shrugged out of his cut and hoodie and turned to hand them to Ava, leaning in to kiss her, fast, hard, bringing up color in her cheeks as she hugged his clothes to her chest. In the midst of cheers and catcalls from his brothers, he peeled off his wifebeater and entrusted that to Ava, too.
Sam had never seen him naked from the waist up, and it was a little bit of a shock. He was a beast. It was one thing to see his height and breadth of shoulder and assume what was under his clothes, quite another to see it in the firelight. He wasn’t chiseled from gym time like Aidan and Tango, but lean and sculpted with naturally cultivated muscle, broader and sturdier than she’d guessed.
He had tattoos: his black dog, something geometric and foreign to her, the portrait of Ava’s teenage face on his right bicep. And something irregular just over his heart.
Hair pulled back tight in a bun, he turned from his old lady with wicked intent in his dark eyes, drawing a bead on the brother he couldn’t bring himself to love.
“Impressed?” Aidan asked, voice wry.
“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking. He doesn’t appeal to me that way.” It was more a fascination, like studying a predator up close in the field.
“Hmph,” Aidan said, and sounded satisfied.
Colin had stripped down too, also muscular, also impressive.
