Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (4 page)

As she walked in, she tried to think of herself as beautiful. She’d read that somewhere—if you thought you were beautiful, other people would, too. Today, she thought she’d made a good effort. Her good-ass jeans and her favorite boots, and the leather jacket Shannon and her dad had given her last Christmas.

It was a weeknight, so it wasn’t as wild inside as it could get. As she scanned the main room, which the Horde called the Hall, Iris saw members and club girls and a few hangarounds. The club wasn’t currently recruiting and didn’t have any prospects. People were just hanging out—drinking, playing pool, making out.

She didn’t see her dad or any of the older members she’d always called ‘uncles.’ The younger guys waved when they saw her and called out a ‘hey,’ but otherwise, she was left alone. That was disappointing, actually. She liked coming in and being greeted with a bunch of bear hugs.

But Nolan was there. He was at the bar, talking to one of the hangarounds—a guy she didn’t know. She knew he was a hangaround because he wasn’t wearing a kutte. Members always wore their kuttes in the clubhouse. It was a rule.

Standing up a little straighter, putting her best assets a little more out front, she walked over to the bar. “Hey, Nolan.”

He put on a big, warm smile. As was often the case, she had the impression that he was
putting on
the smile. It wasn’t that it looked fake or insincere. It was more like smiling wasn’t on his menu of common expressions. It always made Iris feel a little sad, even when he was laughing.

“Hey, Iris!” Catching her arm, he pulled her close and kissed her cheek. He was sitting on the barstool, but she was short enough that he still had to lean down a little bit. “When’d you get to town?”

“Yesterday.” She took her jacket off and hung it on the back of the stool next to his.

As she climbed up and sat, Nolan said, “Get Iris a beer, Mug.”

It wasn’t until she had a bottle of Budweiser in front of her that she understood that Nolan hadn’t asked for a
beer mug
. Mug was the guy’s name, apparently. “Thanks.”

“Now get lost.”

At Nolan’s command, Mug nodded and got lost.

“Congratulations on graduating. That’s cool.” He lifted his own bottle, and she knocked hers with his.

“Thanks. Took long enough, but I got it done.” Feeling nervous, she took a long drink and set her bottle down. There was a Christmas doodad on the bar—a plastic headband with a springy pole sticking up from it. A little plastic sprig of mistletoe dangled from the top. Iris rolled her eyes. One of the club girls must have left it behind.

“That’s a big deal. Did you do the whole big walk in a Hogwarts robe and all that?”

She laughed. “Nah. My school only does a ceremony in May. I could go back to Indiana and walk then, but I don’t see the point. I got what I wanted out of college.”

“And what’s that?” he asked and took a long swallow from his beer, killing it.

Normally, she kept her real answer to herself. It pissed her mom off, and most people just didn’t get it. She’d gone to college without knowing what she wanted to do with her life, and she’d graduated without finding the answer. But she told Nolan with a shrug, “It was interesting. I learned stuff. I guess that’s all I wanted.”

When Nolan laughed, she thought he was making fun of her, and she blushed and started fidgeting with that stupid Christmas headband.

But he was nodding. “If everybody thought of school like that, maybe it wouldn’t suck so bad.” He put his empty down and stood. “You want another?”

“Sure.” She still had half of the first one, but, as Nolan walked around to the other side of the bar, she put it to her mouth and tried to chug it.

He noticed, and the smile he gave her looked like it belonged on his face. While he opened two fresh Buds, she finished her first with one more try.

“So what’s next?” he asked as he sat and pushed a bottle toward her.

“Huh?”

“Now that you’re done with school? Or is that a shitty question?”

“It’s kind of a shitty question, actually. Everybody asks.”

“Sorry.”

Because it was Nolan, and they were having a real conversation that didn’t have anything to do with the club or their parents, and she wanted it to keep going as long as possible, she gave him another real answer. “It’s okay. I just don’t have much of an answer. I guess…I guess I just…don’t want much. People always want to know about my dreams and plans, and I don’t really have any.”

He considered her quietly, long enough that she began to feel self-conscious about blabbing too much about herself. “No?” he finally asked.

She dragged the headband thing back and forth over the bar. “Uh-uh. The future is just empty to me. I don’t understand how people can decide what their life’s going to be like five years from now. I’m excited to know what I’m going to be doing on Monday.”

Nolan dropped his hand over the headband, which by now Iris had arcing wildly back and forth. Embarrassed, she pulled her hand back and set it in her lap.

Then he picked the headband up and, with both hands, he reached over and pushed it onto her head, catching her hair and pulling it tight from her forehead.

He smiled—just a little one, a corner of his mouth drawing up a bit. “Merry Christmas, Iris.”

He leaned in and kissed her.

Iris’s heart completely stopped, and then it began to bang like a bass drum in her ears.

The kiss wasn’t much. He just laid his lips on hers for a couple of seconds and then backed off.

But he was staring at her, and something in his eyes—which were a dark, totally not-average shade of blue—was different. He put his hand on her face. His fingers slid over her cheek, under her ear, until he was holding her head. When he leaned in again, Iris leaned in, too, and the kiss was a lot more. His tongue slid into her mouth, and the stubble around his lips scratched her skin lightly, and Iris thought she might just pass out right there, just drop right off the barstool and onto the clubhouse floor.

He ended the kiss but didn’t go far, and they stayed like that, sort of leaning on each other, for a second that never seemed to end.

“Papa Bear coming up on your six.” Len’s voice, right at their side, blew the moment into fragments, and Nolan and Iris both reared back. She saw her dad talking to Badger and Isaac at the back of the Hall, near the side hallway. He didn’t seem to have noticed them yet.

Iris wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “Hi, Uncle Len.”

“Hey, beautiful. Glad to have you home.” He kissed her cheek and turned to Nolan. “We gotta roll, brother.”

“Yeah, okay.” Nolan stood and met Iris’s eyes. “I’ll see you later.”

When she nodded dumbly, he also kissed her cheek, and he headed for the door.

Confused and actually, literally dizzy, Iris could only watch while Nolan walked away.

When she turned back, her father was standing at her side, staring at the door Nolan and Len had just passed through.

“Hi, Daddy.”

He turned to her, frowning. “There something goin’ on between you and Nolan?”

Everybody knew that her dad had almost killed Badger when he’d started seeing Iris’s stepsister, Adrienne. Badge and Adrienne had been married now for years, but her dad had beaten the hell out of him a few times at first. Iris knew that, if that kiss even meant anything—and who knew if it did—her father would not take it well if she got with a member of the Horde. Not that that would stop her.

She laughed, and she heard that it was way too high-pitched and manic. “No, Daddy. We were just talking.”

He stared hard at her, then reached out and pulled the stupid mistletoe headband from her hair and dropped it onto the bar. She’d forgotten all about it.

“Let’s take a look at your truck,” was all he said, and he held out his hand for her keys.

CHAPTER THREE

Len had pulled Nolan from the clubhouse because they were on patrol together. There wasn’t much to being on patrol, not these days. Since Signal Bend had no police force or sheriff substation, the Horde kept order. That had been true since long before Nolan had been Horde, or had even heard of the club or the town.

They could afford a small police force now, and about once a year or so, somebody at a town meeting floated the idea, but it never got any traction. Since the Horde had put down Julio Santaveria and gone straight, Signal Bend was a safe, quiet place. Almost no crime happened here, and that was because the Horde was the law, and when people got out of line, it wasn’t a courtroom they were in when the penalty came due. So far, most of the townspeople, even the newcomers, were content with that arrangement.

The business owners all paid the club for protection, but the residents got it for free. There were some people among the newcomers who didn’t quite know what to make of bikers riding around town, enforcing the rules, and those were usually the ones standing up making an issue of needing the police or the county sheriff. Once they saw the numbers and understood the bargain they were getting, most of them shut up, too.

If no one from away ever came to Signal Bend, then they’d have had themselves a little utopia. But a big part of the town getting better and stronger was attracting people from away to spend money in Signal Bend businesses. Not everyone from away was down with the rules. The Horde handled that, too.

During the day, the Horde assigned a couple of members in four-hour shifts to be present in town—hanging out on Main Street or sitting in Marie’s Diner with a cup of coffee, whatever. Just visible. During the night, they did the same thing, but they checked every few hours on the closed shops in town, they did a circuit over all the residential streets, and then they parked their asses at Tuck’s, where shit, if there was any, almost always went down.

Tuck’s had been the roughneck bar for decades, and it looked it. There was a level of violence that was expected, even welcomed, within its beer-soaked walls. A lot of town tension had been worked out in neighborly brawls, and the Horde had participated in most of them. It was their job to keep things neighborly: no weapons, no serious injuries, and no destruction of property. When things got going, everybody moved the furniture out of the way first, and when things calmed down, everybody put the tables back and had a drink together.

When assholes from away got to breaking those rules, the Horde took care of it. And they were on the hook for any damage, too. That was part of their end of the protection deal: They made right what they couldn’t control.

Nolan’s favorite club work was patrol, and since he’d taken the SAA flash, he was in charge of it. He’d been sitting at the bar waiting for Len to come out of that meeting with Badger, Isaac, and Show so they could take their shift.

That hadn’t been the first time that Badger had sat down in his office with the old leadership of the club. Nolan had asked before why they were meeting out of the Keep like that, and Badge’s answer had been that he was just getting some advice. It made sense, Nolan supposed: Isaac, Show, and Len had a lot of years in kuttes, and they had shepherded the club through times of quiet and chaos. They were also major leaders in the town itself, in business and in the community. Badge had only had the gavel for a year and a half.

Still, Nolan would have been happier if those ‘advice’ meetings had at least included the rest of the current officers: him; Double A, their VP; and Dom, their Intelligence Officer. He loved Isaac, Show, and Len about as much as it was possible for him to love, and he liked the thought that the Horde table was balanced by leaders on each side—the old and the new—but Badger wasn’t the sole new leader of the current club.

As open as Badge was about sitting down with them, as much as Nolan trusted all of those guys, he didn’t like it.

While he and Len rode their patrol on this frosty night a couple of days before Christmas, Nolan kept his mind turned toward that topic. He wasn’t working out a solution so much as trying to decide whether a solution was warranted. He decided he was going to call Badger on it again.

He was also trying not to think about kissing Iris. He felt quite sure that Len would be on him about that as soon as they dismounted at Tuck’s, so he figured he’d deal with that problem then.

~oOo~

He was right; he hadn’t even gotten his helmet off before Len said, “You and Iris?”

Nolan ignored him and locked his helmet down. As he walked around the bikes, Len put his tattooed hand on Nolan’s arm. “You know you can’t play around there.”

Nolan stopped and faced his brother. “Fuck you. You think I’m a moron? Or just an asshole?”

Len smirked, his eyes alight with good humor. “I think you had your tongue in Show’s little girl’s mouth, and I think you like your pretty face just like it is, so I’m wondering if you’re one or the other, or maybe just nuts.”

Nolan didn’t know why he’d kissed Iris. He never had before.

Back in the day, while he was still prospecting—and still a moron—he and
Rose
had made out a few times. They were almost exactly the same age, and she was pretty, and he’d thought, for a minute and a half, that he’d have liked to be with her. But the more he got to know Rose, the less interested he got. She was nice enough, but her interests were nothing like his. He’d found her boring. Luckily, the feeling had been mutual, and they’d easily fallen back to club-kid affection for each other. He liked Rose better as a sister or cousin or whatever.

He’d always thought of Iris as the little sister. She was cute; it wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive. She was short and had more curves than Rose, with a really great rack. Her weight fluctuated a little bit from visit to visit. Tonight, he’d noticed that she was pretty damn fit, and those tits had been hard to miss.

She changed the color of her hair all the time—really changed it, not just different shades of red, the way Shannon did. In the past few years, Nolan had seen Iris’s hair in black, brown, a few different reds, and several different blondes. Tonight, as far as he could tell in the weird lighting of the Hall, she was a pale blonde.

There was nothing at all wrong with the way she looked.

She’d been away at college when he’d come back from SoCal. Since he’d been back, she’d actually spent more time in Signal Bend than she ever had before, spending breaks and whole summers with Show and Shannon, so he guessed he’d gotten to know her a little, but he’d never before had the urge to kiss her.

Of course, in the years since he’d been back from SoCal, he hadn’t had that kind of urge to kiss anyone. When his body got restless, he found a club girl, but that was about calming his body down. His heart had not been paying attention for a very long time.

Maybe that was why he’d kissed Iris. The urge had come on him when she’d said that thing about not having any dreams and plans. Memories of Analisa had swarmed up and filled his head and heart. Ani had had a whole list of dreams and plans. All the time they’d been together, she’d been trying to live them all, to live a full, complete life as fast as she could, while the bomb inside her body was ticking away its countdown. She’d done it, too. She’d crossed off all the items on her list. And he had helped her. And then she’d died.

Thinking about Ani, he’d kissed Iris.

And that was seriously fucked up. Maybe he was an asshole after all.

He tried to feel bad about it, but he didn’t. Because something old and rusty had stirred inside him during that first kiss, and when he’d gone back in for a second, he’d truly been kissing Iris.

What did that mean, though?

Len pulled open Tuck’s door, and the jukebox blared Blake Shelton into the night. As Nolan moved to step in, Len grabbed his arm again. “Be smart, Nolan. For your sake and hers.”

Being confronted with the complications of a kiss he didn’t even understand pissed him off, and he yanked his arm free. “Back off, old man.”

Len gave him an irritated look, but kept his trap shut. They went into Tuck’s. Other than the booming juke, the place was quiet and only about half full. Looked to be a cake patrol. Nolan would have some time to think.

He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

~oOo~

On Christmas Eve, the Horde and most of Signal Bend spent just about the whole day doing a gift drive for needy families throughout a wide swath of mid-Missouri. They set up a collection center in the Signal Bend Visitor and Information Center on Main Street, and several of the shops set up gift wrapping stations. The cafés offered hot chocolate, eggnog, and snacks, and they even had a country band playing on the boardwalk, keeping warm under big standing heaters.

Nolan’s job was to keep an eye out and make sure that everything stayed calm and nobody had some bright idea about sneaking off with even one package. He had Tommy, Saxon, and Mel helping him out. He was standing near the Visitor Center door, trying to tell himself that he wasn’t freezing his ass off, when his mom and Loki came up, leading Bart’s kids: Lexi, Ian, and Declan. All the Horde women had been taking shifts helping Bart out with his kids since he’d moved them all home in October.

Seeing his mom, he smiled, but before he could say anything, Lexi came up quickly and hugged his legs. She was Loki’s age, ten, but she was little and barely came up past his waist. He crouched down and hugged her, and then Ian and Deck were on him, too. He pulled the boys into his embrace as well.

He’d seen them only a week or so ago, but it was always like this when he did. They’d all been born and raised in SoCal, and since he’d spent more than a year with the SoCal charter, he guessed he was the most familiar face in Signal Bend besides their father.

“Hey, guys. You here to help with the gifts?”

“Yeah we’re helping SANTA,” four-year-old Declan answered.

“That’s great, buddy.”

Nolan kissed Lexi’s head and stood up. It always made him hurt a little to be around these kids; his affection for them was woven with threads of his memories of Analisa. One of her dreams had been to be a mother. Since there had been no chance at all that she’d ever realize that in reality, he’d found a way to give her the experience, and they had ‘borrowed’ Bart and Riley’s kids for a weekend. That memory was one of his best—and most painful.

Bart and Riley were deeper parts of his memories of Analisa for other reasons, too. Riley had been friends with Ani’s father. She had introduced them. Without Riley, he would have never known her, loved her, or lost her.

And now Bart had lost Riley. He’d moved their kids home, back to Signal Bend, because Riley had been killed in club violence—violence that David Vega was largely responsible for. That loss was still fresh, and it filled Bart’s eyes no matter what he was doing or whom he was with. Nolan could see it in Lexi and Ian’s eyes, too. An empty place where their mother belonged.

Yeah, Nolan’s feelings about Bart and his kids were deep and sharp.

Bart came up on the boardwalk, and his kids went to him. Lexi, who’d been hurt in the same violence, still limped noticeably.

Nolan’s mom was carrying a cardboard box full of new toys for the drive. He took it from her and carried it into the Visitor’s Center, where Lilli, Isaac’s old lady, and Shannon were logging in all the donations, and Tasha, Len’s old lady, and Candy, Double A’s, were sorting everything into groups to send out for wrapping.

He set the box down at Lilli’s side. When he turned, he met Candy’s eyes and smiled. She had been a club girl, once upon a time, and Nolan had had quite the crush.

He wasn’t sure he would have been man enough to fall in love with a club girl, living with the knowledge that the woman he loved had been with so many of his brothers. He thought that might make him crazy. But Double A was in deep, and it didn’t seem to bother him. They had a baby girl together now, and they seemed happy as could be.

As Nolan came back out onto the sidewalk, Ian stood just outside the door. He was staring down the way, scowling, and Nolan followed his look. He saw his mom and Bart talking, just out of hearing range. It seemed normal to Nolan, though they stood pretty close together.