Rest & Trust (16 page)

“Okay, doll, relax. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Diaz is going inside, and he’ll hunt up Sherlock. I’ll wait out here with you.”

“Fuck that. I don’t know you. Why would I let you babysit me?”

“Your choices here are go home, or wait with me.” He smiled a brilliantly white, straight smile then. “I’m Lakota. And you are?”

“Sadie. I’m Sadie.” At that, Lakota turned to Diaz. The short jerkface assaulter asshole nodded and went to the door.

As soon as he opened it, Sadie yanked her hand from Lakota’s and bolted into the clubhouse, ignoring the shouts of the men she was escaping.

Once she was in the dark, dank, loud, crowded space, though, she didn’t know what to do. She had to keep moving; Diaz and Lakota were right behind her. So she pushed her way in, past even drunker, hornier, naked-er people than had been outside, and tried to disappear into the crowd while she searched for Sherlock.

She didn’t get far before there was a big hand on the back of her neck. “Sadie, Sadie, Sadie,” said a voice at her ear: Lakota. “Not a good idea. Come on.”

Sadie thought he was going to push her back outside, but instead, he ushered her to the bar.

Where Sherlock was sitting. There was a blonde standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders, kneading, and moving up to scratch at the undercut part of his hair and then comb through the longer top. She seemed to be glitter from her hair to her feet, wearing a blue sequined halter that barely covered anything at all and a white skirt that covered even less. Seriously—Sadie could see the woman’s butt cheeks.

Sherlock was talking to a guy sitting next to him. Skinny, blond, big ears, his hand inside the shirt of a busty redhead sitting on his lap. He had a patch on his kutte like Sherlock’s, but it was different, too, in a way Sadie couldn’t identify.

Again, Lakota leaned down to Sadie’s ear. “Which direction you want to go, baby doll?”

She walked forward, out of Lakota’s hold, toward Sherlock and his sparkly pet bimbo.

Bimbo saw her coming and turned out to face her, positioning herself smack between Sadie and Sherlock. She looked like she was ready to piss on his leg and mark him for her own. “You need something, little girl?”

Even in the din of the crowd and the band, the woman made the words ‘little girl’ sound synonymous with ‘assface.’

Standing in the middle of this weird place, surrounded by people she didn’t understand and who all seemed hostile to her, confronted by this sparkly, woman with great tits and ass, Sadie lost her nerve and her verve. She held her position for one more second, staring up into glitter-framed blue eyes, and then turned away. Fuck all of this. Sideways and hard.

Having a boyfriend sucked.

Just as she turned, she caught Sherlock’s eye, and under the din, she thought she heard him say her name. But it didn’t matter. She pointed herself toward the door, and Lakota, smiling kindly, stepped out of her way.

~oOo~

She got out of the building and around the corner before Sherlock started shouting for her. She picked up her pace and got almost halfway down the block before some big, bald mountain of a biker stepped into her path and caught her by the arms.

“Hold up, missy. Looks like somebody wants a word with you.”

Hah. Wasn’t that a laugh and a half. And what the fuck was this, anyway? She struggled to get free, but then Sherlock was behind her.

He took her arm. “Thanks, Eight.”

The mountain nodded and let her go. He gave Sadie a wink and then headed toward the clubhouse.

Feeling an odd pressure on the arm Sherlock held, she looked up at him and saw that he was completely fucked up. His lids were at half-mast, and he kept blinking like he was trying to focus. He swayed on his feet—that was the odd pressure she felt, like he was holding her for ballast.

When she yanked her arm again, he wasn’t quite quick enough to keep hold of her. “Why is everybody around here so
grabby
? And you’re drunk. Go back and be drunk. Be all the biker you can be. Looked like Sparkle Pony was ready for a ride.”

Before she could turn away, though, he had her again. “Sadie, fuck. Hold on. Jesus fuck.” His tongue made words like it had been shot full of Novocain.

He pushed her against the wall. The pushing and grabbing and generally being manhandled was starting to put her into old-fashioned freakout territory, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“What are you doing here? I told you this was no place for you.” She could barely understand him, he was slurring his words so much.

“Everybody seems to agree with you. You’re drunk,” she repeated.

He laughed. “Yeah. Absolutely. Why are you here, little outlaw?” It came out
Wh’re y’here, l’il’law?
but she caught it.

“Who’s Taryn?”

He blinked. “Huh? Wha?”

She didn’t like drunk Sherlock. “Never mind. You’re right. I shouldn’t be here. So let me go, and I’ll go.” She squirmed under his hands, but he didn’t budge.

“Don’t want you to go. Missed you. Thinkin’ about you.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious. I could see that I was right on top of your brain while Sparkle Pony was trying to get on top of your cock.”

More blinking, and that was his only answer. Then he leaned in, pushing his leg between hers, and cupped her face with his free hand. His breath was like a Jack Daniel’s distillery. She was getting a contact drunk from the fumes.

“Sadie.”

Even drunk, he managed to make that sound condescending.

And now she wanted to score.

She pushed on him, but he was too heavy to move. “Sherlock, I am so beyond fizzy right now, it’s not even funny. I need to get away from here and call Gordon. Right now. Please just go back and do whatever you’re going to do and leave me alone.”

“I can’t,” he slurred. “I love you.”

She froze and tried to meet his eyes, but they were barely open, and he had a stupid, vacant look about him. He was drunk out of his head. So there she was, with those three words in her ears, words she wanted to clutch close and never let go, and no way to believe they were true.

“Oh, you asshole. Fuck you.”

He frowned. Slowly. “Don’t say that, sweetheart. I know you love me, too. I can feel it. When I touch you.” His hand came up and landed on her boob, right where his nasty ‘brother’ Diaz had touched her.

Unbidden, her brain started combing through its old files. She was in Madrone. There was a place just outside town where she could pick up Oxy. Just a little, enough to get her through this night. If she crossed Calaveras Road, she could score heroin right off a street corner. Not the good shit, but any port in a storm, and that was maybe five minutes away, tops. She wasn’t carrying cash, but there was an ATM down the block.

No. Fuck. Fuck, no. She had to get away from here, right now, and call Gordon. Find a meeting. Something.

“Sherlock, please. Please let me go.”

He made his eyes widen and focus, and she finally, for a second, thought she was looking at the man she…loved.

“I don’t know what I did.” He stepped back and let her go.

~oOo~

Gordon picked Sadie up from her car in the accountant’s lot, took her to a late meeting, then to an all-night diner. He refused to take her back to her car, insisting that he didn’t want her that close to the Horde compound.

He spent a lot of their late meal pushing her about Sherlock and tutting about her reckless behaviors. But she didn’t feel judged. Gordon never judged.

Telling her to call the next day, when she was ready to pick up her car in the bright daylight, he walked her to her door and told her good night.

She felt better—calmer, anyway, and safer—and was able to sleep well. She rarely had trouble sleeping.

In the morning, she felt sad but calm. The night before had been an ending. It had definitely had the flavor of an ending.

But that was probably for the best. Yes, she loved Sherlock. She’d kind of known that already, but the jealous fire she’d felt had crystallized the feeling. But if his life was what she’d seen that night, then it wasn’t the life for her. It wasn’t. The outlaw stuff wasn’t the big problem. The partying, though, really was. He was right: it was no place for her.

So she tried to set thoughts of him aside. She went for a run, and took a shower, and ate her breakfast sitting out on her balcony. It was going to be a boiling hot August day, but it hadn’t hit the boiling point yet.

While she sat on the balcony reading a comic book on her tablet, her breakfast done, there was a knock at her door. Thinking that Gordon had just dropped by instead of waiting for her call, she didn’t even check the peephole before she opened the door.

And found Sherlock standing there, steady on his feet, but looking like a partially-reanimated corpse. His mussed hair flopped over his forehead, and his skin was pale and a little bit on the green side. But he smiled. “Hey, little outlaw.”

Sadie’s heart banged against her chest, but she tried not to let on. “I thought you were in L.A. today. For your big rally and party.”

“Got a visitor this morning.”

About a dozen snippy comments about busty bimbos with glitter eye shadow popped into her head, but she kept her mouth shut and waited for him to be more specific.

“For a skinny old guy, your friend Gordon is a scary motherfucker. And ballsy as fuck.”

Her chin dropped to her chest. “Gordon came to see you? Where? When?”

“Clubhouse. This morning. Walked right in as we were getting moving. Caused a stir. I guess I was an asshole last night?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not much, no. Don’t remember you being there. Lakota verifies seeing you. But I know damn well I didn’t fuck around on you. Even if I wouldn’t’ve remembered doing it, I would’ve been able to tell this morning, and I am saying to you now that I did not.”

“There was that girl all over you.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Girls are all over everybody at a party like that. I need you to take my word that I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It looked wrong to me.” But now she wondered whether she’d overreacted. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He sighed. “Sadie, can I come in?”

“Aren’t you going to be late for your biker bonanza?”

“I’m not going. I’m here instead. With you.”

“You’re not going?” Her heart got loud and thumpy again. He’d picked her over his club?

“I got yelled at this morning for telling you I love you last night. That was a very strange experience, I gotta say, hearing that from a guy I’d never met—and in front of about fifty brothers. I’m sorry I don’t remember saying it, and I’m sorry I said it like that the first time.” He reached out and cupped her cheek. “But sweetheart, it’s true. I love you.”

Gordon should never have done that, and not only because walking into that place was probably dangerous as hell. He was supposed to keep her confidences. But Sadie didn’t care at all. “Holy shit,” she breathed.

“So can I come in?”

She nodded and let him right back into her life. He hadn’t actually ever left it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sherlock needed coffee, badly, but Sadie didn’t drink coffee. When he’d started spending the night with her, she’d bought some instant for him, but that shit was swill. So as she let him into her apartment, he asked, “Spare me one of your Diet Cokes?”

She turned and cocked an eyebrow at him. “You hate it.”

“Need the caffeine.”

Nodding, she headed to her refrigerator. Sherlock went to sit at her dining table and rest his head in his hands for a second. The vase of fresh red tulips mocked him with their bright cheer.

It had been a long time since he’d been blackout drunk, but he sure the fuck had managed it the night before. He’d woken up sprawled in the corridor between the Hall and the showroom, like he’d been on his way somewhere and had just run out of battery.

When he’d crept into the Hall, Bibi and the women had been putting out a massive, greasy breakfast, navigating around fallen bodies everywhere, and after some biscuits and gravy, a gallon or so of coffee, and a very fast, very cold shower, Sherlock had felt like he’d get through the day. Everybody had been starting to liven up; the enticing aroma of Bibi’s sausage gravy and buttermilk biscuits would bring the dead from their graves.

Most of the bodies had roused, and they’d just been starting to get motivated for the last stage of the run—from Madrone to L.A., with press coverage all the way—when there’d been some commotion at the door, and then J.R. was pushing a skinny, grey-haired black dude in a suit toward him.

Sadie’s sponsor, Gordon. Who was about five-foot-eight, maybe, and who’d stood toe to toe with Sherlock, and even popped him in the chest a couple of times, while he lectured him about treating Sadie with care and respect, and what it meant to love an addict, what his responsibilities were. As Sadie might have said, fuck a duck.

They’d had the attention—first concerned and then amused—of every conscious ear in the place. When Gordon had finished, he’d said, “That girl is strong, but she’s nowhere near as tough as she likes to think she is. She loves you. Treat her with care or cut her loose. Now’s when you decide.” Then he’d held out his hand, and Sherlock had shaken it.

Within fifteen minutes after Gordon had left the Hall, an extremely confused Sherlock had gotten bits of the blanks filled in from Lakota, taken a massive dose of shit from his brothers, and Hoosier had told him he could bail on the day if he wanted to, no judgment.

He loved this rally, and he didn’t want to miss it. But apparently he’d fucked up with Sadie, and he couldn’t let that hang out there. Especially not with Sturgis coming up right on the heels of the day.

So here he was, sitting at her table, sipping on the noxious brew that was diet soda. Guh. At least the carbonation was scrubbing off the last of the fur on his tongue.

She sat across from him. “Who’s Taryn?”

Fuck. What the fuck had he said last night? He took another long drink and forced it down. It seemed she wanted to jump right into the shark pit. Okay, then.

“My ex, I guess.” Without knowing what he’d said last night, unadorned honesty was the best policy. It was the best policy in most situations, as far as he was concerned.

“You guess?”

“It’s over. I said ‘I guess’ because I’m not sure there was ever something there to be over. It’s complicated. I’m not really in the mood to hash that out right now, but the summary is that it’s over, and it was over before we met.”

“Lakota thought I was her.”

“I never brought her around to the clubhouse. She only met a couple of my brothers. But they all knew about her, I guess.” He sighed and put up his hand before she could push him on his choice of words again. “I guess because I don’t know. But the guys gossip. A lot. Like fishwives. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they all know I was banging a chick named Taryn. Okay?”

“Okay.” She looked down at her hands. “Did you love her?”

“No,” he answered at once. “What we had wasn’t like that.”

She nodded without looking up. “Last night scared me.”

He finished the damn Coke and pushed the can to the side, then spanned the table and caught her hands in his. “Sadie, look. I’m not asking you to be in that part of my life. I know it’s not a place for you”—she went tense at that for some reason and tried to pull her hands from his, but he clamped down and held her fast—“It’s okay with me to keep my club life and my personal life separate. I’m different from most of my brothers. I like different things, my brain works differently—I don’t know. I’m just different. They’re my family, and my friends, and I love them all, but the club’s not everything to me. Hell, things have been changing a lot in the club, anyway. Half of them have wives and families now, and they go home for dinner and television like regular folk most nights. Last night was a rare kind of thing. Parties usually get wild, but not like that.”

“But you like the parties?”

“Sure. They’re parties. That’s the point. And yeah, there are women around who are there for sex and dress that way. I’m going to notice them, and I’ll probably flirt. I like to flirt. I’m telling you that as long as I’m with you, that’s where it’ll end. You need to trust me and believe I love you. If you’re that jealous, this isn’t going to work.”

“I never knew I was jealous before. But I really am. It hurts.”

Unable to think of a response to that, he sat and watched her, waiting for her to look up at him again, but she didn’t. “Look at me, little outlaw.”

She raised her head.

“I love you,” he said, offering her a smile. “Trust me.”

“How old were you when you lost your virginity, Sherlock?”

Not expecting that question at all, it took him a beat to process it. “Seventeen.” He hadn’t exactly been holding girls off with a stick in high school. He’d been a skinny geek who played Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Not a lot of girls in his anemic social circle. His first time had been in a friend’s basement, after playing D&D and getting drunk on some kind of schnapps. His friend’s older sister had pushed up on him, wanting to see his cock. Then she’d wanted to experience his cock. Like the surprised dweeb he’d been, he’d gone in unprotected and had blown his wad in, oh, about five seconds. She’d laughed through the whole short, pathetic experience. Except for the part where he’d
had sex
and had
touched
girl parts
—and hadn’t made her pregnant—it wasn’t quite the high point it could have been.

He’d come a long way since then.

“I was twelve.”

Shock made him twitch. “What?”

“My babysitter and her boyfriend got me strung out on E, and he fucked me. I remember it, kind of, in this foggy, off-center way. I bled for a while afterward, but didn’t hurt or anything at the time. It was just this thing that was happening to me. That went on pretty regularly until I was fourteen. That’s how I got introduced to sex and to drugs.”

“My God. Sadie…” He felt sick, but it wasn’t hangover. Shock and rage rolled in his stomach.

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken, and Sherlock saw that her eyes had lost focus. “I had some really weird ideas about myself and sex for a long time. It wasn’t until after it stopped happening that I started to freak about it and go looking for ways to keep my head quiet. Sex was a way to keep it quiet. So was Oxy, and later H. Cutting helped, too. Still does.”

Her eyes sharpened again and she looked directly at him. “I started using when I was twelve. I was a full-blown addict at fourteen. I’ve only been clean for fourteen months. You’re the first person I’ve ever let get to know me like you do. You’re the first person I’ve ever tried to be normal for. Normal feels weird and scary to me. Is it normal to be okay with what happened last night?”

Still reeling from the information she’d shared, Sherlock tried to sort through his head to find an answer to the question she’d asked. As far as he knew, the only thing that had happened was Shay rubbing on his back. He didn’t remember that, either, but Lakota had told him about Sadie standing at the bar, and that was what he’d seen. But it didn’t really matter what had happened. He hadn’t fucked anybody. And he wouldn’t.

“I think it’s normal to trust the person you love. The person who loves you.”

“Love hurts.”

At that, he smiled. His heart felt raw and sore. Never in the weeks he’d known her had she seemed so young and vulnerable as when she’d stared at him with those violet blue eyes and spoken those two words. “Yeah. I guess that’s why they write songs about that.” He pulled on her hands. “Hey, sweetheart. Does that mean you love me back?”

With a little grin lifting one corner of her wonderful mouth, Sadie nodded. “Obviously, dummy.”

“So, then, you want to take a ride to a family-friendly biker rally where we hand a big check to the children’s hospital and then go to a carnival?”

She blanched. “Sherlock…”

“Come on, sweetheart. I wouldn’t ask you to come if it wasn’t safe, and we’ll leave before that changes. Whatever you saw last night, I want you to see something better.”

~oOo~

Sherlock shook his head and tapped his finger on the bar. “I’ll use my hand, sweetheart.”

The buxom bartender at one of the outside bars at the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis, South Dakota gave him a saucy shrug and plucked the shot glass out of her cleavage and set it on the bar.

“Sad to be using your hand around here this week, though, don’tcha think?”

He just grinned and pushed some cash her way. “Thanks.”

“Damn, bro. Another one bites the dust.” Lakota leaned over the bar and put his mouth around the shot glass tucked between the bartender’s tits. He lingered before pulling away with his mouth around the glass and tipping his head back. “Ahh!” he gasped as he set the glass down. “’Nother round, baby doll.”

As she poured another round, Lakota leaned down and crossed his arms on the bar. “Glad your little chick let you off the leash, dude.”

“Fuck you.” In truth, Sadie was still jealous and unhappy about this trip. But it was better. She’d enjoyed the charity rally, and then, instead of going to the party that night, he’d ridden her up the PCH, and they’d found a quiet place on the beach to sit and watch the tide come in. The water had been rough, the waves crashing heavily, and sea spray had misted their bodies while he’d fucked her.

She’d come to the clubhouse with him to see them off on their way to South Dakota. She’d been wide-eyed and somber, chewing her fingers, but when he’d kissed her and whispered, “I love you. Trust me,” she’d nodded and thrown her arms around his neck.

He thought she’d be okay. He was keeping in touch.

And God help him, but he liked that she was jealous. Having somebody care about him like she did was a fucking rush.

Currently, though, Lakota was standing in the middle of the world’s biggest biker bar during the world’s biggest biker rally, trying his damnedest to be morose. “Seriously—Con, Trick, now you. I’m all on my own. Not sure what to do with myself.”

For years, the four of them had been a little crew within a crew. They were all within a few years of age, all single, and they’d all hung out together. They’d all patched in within a few years of each other, too, so for a while they’d been the club youngsters. Lakota and Connor had even lived for years in the clubhouse, so they’d always been around.

Sherlock had always been a little bit outside of even that group: Trick and Connor had a bond of their own, and Lakota hung with Ronin some, too. The only of his brothers who truly shared Sherlock’s interests beyond booze, chicks, and the club was Bart. They were both hackers, gamers, all-around tech geeks. But Bart had been a family man nearly as long as he’d been in California. They understood each other in a way their brothers didn’t, and they worked closely together every day, but they weren’t confidants. Sherlock didn’t have a confidant. He’d never felt like he needed one.