All the Sky (19 page)

The woman blinked at that information, then recovered with a patently insincere smile. “Well, isn’t that sweet. Isaac a daddy. Do me a favor, then, sugar, and tell him Cin stopped by, wants to see him. He’ll be glad to know it.”

Then she left. Cory watched her go, appalled. Not at Isaac—it was pretty clear from everything the woman had said that she hadn’t seen him in years—but at the woman herself. Quite the piece of work.

“You okay?” She turned around to see one of Isaac’s friends she’d met the day before…a leatherworker…Duncan.

“Yeah. Fine, thanks. Nobody’s tried to dicker with me yet over Isaac’s stuff, so I haven’t lost him any money, I don’t think.”

Duncan chuckled. “I been doing these shows with Isaac a long time. You call me, you need some help with that. Or anything—I saw you meet Lucinda.”

“Um, yeah. Interesting.”

“That she is. You know, there’s nothing…”

“Oh, that was clear. I wouldn’t rat him out anyway, but there’s nothing to say.”

“Good. She likes trouble. Especially the kind she made.”

“That was clear, too.”

“Okay, well I gotta get back, but I’m just across the way. Call for anything.”

“Thanks, Duncan.”

He nodded and tipped an imaginary cap.

This show was a lot different from anything she’d every done before. She’d sold at silly little town fairs and carnivals, just a card table and a folding chair, sitting next to the ladies who made clothes for ceramic porch animals, or crocheted toilet plunger cozies, or stitched inspirational sayings into pillowcases. This was an art show. These people were professionals. They were true artists. And they were treating her like she belonged—most of them, at least.

She liked it.

~oOo~

When Isaac came back, only Havoc was with him, and neither man looked happy. But Isaac still smiled when he came into the booth.

“How’d it go, sweetheart?”

“Good. Really good.”

He scanned the tables. “Looks like you cleared some stock for us both—and a chess set, too. What you get for that?”

“Tag price. They didn’t even try to dicker, and they paid cash. I was relieved.”

“Nice.”

She opened her cash box and handed Isaac the stack of bills that was his. As he took it from her hand, his eyebrow raised, she said, “There was a woman here looking for you. Cin? Or, I guess, Lucinda?”

He looked up, his eyebrow even higher. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if she means to cause you trouble.”

He laughed, but Cory could see something darker than humor in his eyes. “No worries, sweetheart. No trouble she can cause. Thanks for lettin’ me know.”

Havoc came up to her and put his hand on her back. That was better. “You need me to handle anything, boss?”

“Nah, brother. It’s nothing. You take care of your business. I’ll see if I can’t do Cory as nice as she did me. You want to fill out your stock before you go?”

“That’s all I’ve got left. Mostly higher-priced stuff. And the green beaded pieces. I should stop making green. Nobody seems to like it but me.”

“That’s all? You’re havin’ a good show, then.”

“Yeah, I am. Thanks, Isaac. Really.”

“Anytime, sweetheart. I’ll see ya later.”

Isaac turned to his main display, and Havoc took Cory’s hand and led her away.

~oOo~

“Fuck me. I hate this shit.”

They were standing in the airy main room of a winery on a hill overlooking the town. The town was small, and most everything was walking distance—which was good, because there was no seat for Cory on Havoc’s bike.

The winery was fairly crowded with fairgoers who’d made the trek up the hill, but they were waiting for a private tasting, and Havoc was glowering darkly. He’d been in a mood since he’d picked her up at Isaac’s booth.

“What’s wrong?” She took his hand, and he twitched, as if she’d surprised him. He looked down at their hands.

“Fuckin’ wine bar. Do I look like a guy who should be running a fuckin’ wine bar? Goin’ to a damn tasting?”

He was standing there in his kutte, denim, and boots, his head shaved and his beard thick. Wearing long sleeves, he had no visible ink, but no, he did not look like the kind of man one might expect to find at a winery. And the nervous looks the people working the main tasting counter were giving him attested to that fact.

“Do you want to go?”

He shook his head. “Can’t. Let’s just get it done. Two more after this.” With a nod of his head, he indicated something behind her, and she turned to see somebody coming efficiently toward them, in business casual dress, his shirt embroidered over the left breast with the insignia of the winery. After a greeting in which he was obviously trying not to notice Havoc’s attire, the man led them back to a private tasting room.

Havoc looked like a man walking to his doom. Cory bit down on her lip to keep from laughing aloud.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Wine made Havoc horny. Good to know.

He knew he was supposed to spit, and the previous two times he’d gone through torture like this, he had. Rotten grape juice was not his thing. But he was agitated today, and, frankly, he wanted to get drunk, and it didn’t matter how. Might as well be on free wine. So he hadn’t spit. Cory had, for the first two wineries, at least. But he’d tossed it all back from the get-go.

He’d leaned hard on Cory to make the choices, because he didn’t care, and because it was quickly apparent that she was being thoughtful and smart about her opinions, listening to the fucking endless spiels about each wine and asking questions that impressed him. She’d said she’d study up when he’d given her the job; she obviously had. So he hadn’t had to care much. Just enough to place the actual orders.

Maybe he could make her manager. He couldn’t see a downside anywhere in that picture.

He wasn’t really seeing a downside today in the picture of Cory, period. In fact, he needed to get her alone pretty soon. He’d caught himself staring at her, watching her drink, listening to her ask her questions and then turn to him for support, which he gave her, even when he hadn’t heard the conversation. She was wearing a stupid pink scarf around her neck, and he hated it. He liked the bruising. He wanted to see it. Seeing it made him hard.

Not because he’d hurt her—and he didn’t think he had, despite the pink and purple of her neck and onto her shoulder. But because he’d marked her. He saw the marks that he’d made, even what little he could see spreading beyond what the scarf covered, and his cock stood up, remembering the night before. That was probably weird, but he didn’t care. He wanted that fucking pink scarf off her. Her sweater, too. All of it.

Fucking her had been—he wasn’t good enough with words even to think the right one. Astounding. A mindfuck, definitely. They’d fucked until they’d passed out, and then he’d woken early, in bed with a woman and glad of it. Though they’d been wound together when they’d finally collapsed for good, she wasn’t a clingy sleeper, and she’d been on the other side of the bed when he woke.

He’d watched her sleep, lying on her stomach. He’d pulled the covers down to expose her back. She had a tattoo on her lower back—a tramp stamp, but not like the usual tribal wings or whatever. Two birds on a branch, one much smaller than the other. Havoc took it to mean her and Nolan. It fascinated him. That and the little blue flower on her wrist made up all her ink. So far.

Something changed in him last night, and he hadn’t figured out exactly
what
it was, but he knew
why
. Her. Like she’d reached into him and pulled up a shade or something, illuminating more in him than he’d known was there. He was still confused, but he felt like he understood part of what had happened to Isaac, and Show, and Bart.

He also felt like he understood what they were doing wrong. They brought their women in, told them too much. That was wrong. Women had no business in Horde business. They couldn’t be a part of it, and they screwed shit up when they tried. He was going to keep Cory out of it. All of it. For all she knew, the Horde owned a bar and ran the town. Period. And he was going to keep it that way. Period.

That was mostly it, anyway. Though things were looking like they’d be getting interesting again real soon.

They’d voted in the weed run. As he had suspected, nobody balked at making it two days so Isaac could ride. But Havoc had looked around the table and thought that a change of leadership wasn’t all that far down the road. A few years, maybe. Not that he wanted Isaac out—he didn’t; he thought Isaac was great with the gavel—but his injuries had aged him hard. He was only forty-three or so, but he’d lost ten years’ more endurance, minimum. And Show, too—he had a trick shoulder, and he was the oldest Horde, almost ten years old than Isaac. That left Len and Havoc—and a bunch of kids, none of whom were yet thirty but, just recently, Mikey, who’d just gotten his fucking patch. Havoc wasn’t a long range thinker. He’d rather act than plan. But he saw change coming, and he wasn’t happy about it. He had no interest in moving up the hierarchy. He’d done his bit as SAA while Isaac was out, and he didn’t want that again.

But he was glad for this new gig—money coming in, work with some adrenaline to it, all good in his book. They’d gotten some bad news, or at least troublesome news, earlier in the day, when they’d met with Sheriff Tyler, but Havoc didn’t mind the trouble as much as Isaac and Show had.

They’d met Tyler here, in a county north of his jurisdiction, because he hadn’t wanted to risk being seen meeting with the Horde. That boded vaguely ill—the Horde had been riding a tide of goodwill for a few years now. But Tyler was running for reelection, and he was losing. The election was in just a few weeks, and to hear Tyler tell it, he’d all but lost the thing already.

And the frontrunner did not look to be a man who would play nice for a price, the way Tyler always had. This coming just as the Horde would be crossing the law in an organized way for the first time since Ellis. They’d already voted in the weed run, and Isaac had told Becker. Wheels were in motion. They’d be doing their first run the week of the election. It made things harder, and it was news they hadn’t been expecting.

Dom was going to get his ass reamed when they got back. He should have been tracking the election. Bart would have been. But Dom, good as he was getting at the technical stuff, was not an initiative-taker. He did what he was told. And no one had told him to track the county election.

Havoc thought it was less of a deal than everybody else did. Signal Bend was too far off the interstate and still way too small for law to give a cold fuck about what was going on. Hell, they could barely get an ambulance in time to help anybody out. Sure, they’d be on the interstate when they were working the run, but if everybody played it cool, they’d be out of the county quick and just taking a nice ride, and nobody would be the wiser.

He was more concerned about the fact that it turned out this was a Scorpions job they were running. Havoc hated those fuckers for what they’d done to the Horde. He knew that, since the reality show about the Scorpions had gone belly-up, Bart was into deeper shit with them than he could make right in his head, and he had a sick certainty that all the glitz and flashing bulbs Riley Chase brought wouldn’t be cover enough to keep Bart out of trouble. He was not cut out for hardcore work. Few were.

And now the Horde were back in bed with the Scorps. The Horde’s big cut of the take was supposedly Sam’s peace pipe. Whatever. First Horde who trusted a Scorpion again deserved the knife in his back.

Cory put her hand on his arm. “Hav? Do you?”

“What?” He had no idea how long it had been since he’d heard a word anyone had said.

She gave him an angry look. “Braeden is wondering if we’d like to taste their brandy. This year is their first vintage.”

Jesus Christ. Wine wasn’t bad enough, now it was brandy? And what kind of name was
Braeden
for a guy with any kind of sack, anyway? “No. Just the wine. Which did you like?”

She showed him, he signed, and then he grabbed her hand and pulled her out of there. He didn’t even bother to shake
Braeden
’s hand.

When they were finally free of the pretensions of that place, outside where he could breathe, Cory pulled her hand free of his. She was pissed; he knew it. He wasn’t sure why, but he was sure she was pissed. So here came the part where the chick was a pain in his ass. But he was fucking horny and didn’t want to fight with her.

Or maybe he did. She looked pretty damn hot, her hands on her hips and her eyes flashing in the setting sun. He wouldn’t mind it if she fought him. He remembered the first time he’d kissed her, in Bonnie’s RV, when she’d been trying to push him out. That had been hot. He thought it’d be okay to get her to fight him, now that they were…whatever they were. She wouldn’t accuse him of what she had before, if he got a little rough.

“What is wrong with you? You left me to do everything all fucking day, and I’m just a fucking
bartender
. Why was I making all the decisions? And you sitting there like you were stoned or something, staring out into space. Do you know what that was like? God, you’re such an asshole. God!”

“Yep. I think we’re clear on the asshole thing.” He reached out and grabbed the tail of that stupid scarf around her neck. He yanked, trying to be careful not to hurt her, but she yanked back.

“What are you doing?”

“C’mere. Get that ugly thing off. I want to see.” He loosened the knot and pulled the pink silk from her neck. He tossed it away, but she ducked to catch it.

“That’s Shannon’s. What the hell?”

Yeah, he liked her pissed. It was definitely hot. Club bitches didn’t talk back. They didn’t fight. He grabbed her and brought her close, pressing his face into her marked shoulder. He bit, just a little.

“Ow. Hav—we’re standing on a sidewalk in broad daylight!”

She was pushing on his shoulders, but nowhere near as hard as she had last night. He could feel her pulse quickening against his mouth, and he chuckled. “Never fucked anybody outside?”