Snow in Texas (Lean Dogs Legacy #1) (8 page)

              “Hey, Daddy,” she said. “You look lonesome.”

              She couldn’t have said something worse if she’d tried.

              He picked up her hand and set it aside, “Do me a favor and don’t call me ‘Daddy.’” Maybe she didn’t have daddy issues…but he did.

              Her smile dimmed. “What?”

              Colin turned to Candy who had a waitress of his own to contend with. “When are we headed back?” he asked, not caring it if was impertinent. Screw him, but he sucked at being a prospect.

              Candy gave him the slow glance-over. “You in a hurry, prospect?”

              How to answer that? “I just don’t give a shit about being here is all.”

              Candy’s gaze sharpened. The girl at his side, running her hand down his bicep and oohing and ahhing? Not even remotely distracting. Whatever plans he had with these tarts, it wasn’t anything he gave a shit about, judging by the dark hooded nature of his eyes.

              “Nothing here that catches your eye?” he asked, voice anything but innocent.

              Colin felt his shoulders lock back, ready for a fight of any variety. “No. Nothing.”

              Candy grinned, darkly. “You think I’m just gonna give you the green light?”

              Colin didn’t answer.

              Candy laughed. “Cool your fucking heels, man.”

              Time limped forward, drink after drink landing on their table, the waitresses swapping off as their breaks ended and those of others began. The dance floor writhed with humanity, mostly girls dancing with girls, but a few brave cowboys venturing into the center so they could be rubbed against.

              Colin thought he’d grind his teeth down to nubs with impatience. Which would have been a shame, because he had nice teeth.

              They left just before closing, two waitresses given invitations to come to the next club party. Colin felt no joy in the return ride, the cold night air slapping at his face, bugs splattering against his goggles.

              The clubhouse was all quiet when they got in. Candy and Jinx shuffled off with muttered goodnights. Alone, Colin went to the bar and poured himself a generous Scotch, parked himself on a stool to nurse it.

              He’d been sitting and sipping about two minutes when he heard a door open and close, somewhere deep in the clubhouse. A moment later, Jenny entered the common room, and his pulse tripped and went wild.

              She’d tied her hair back and traded her usual cowgirl work getup for black yoga pants, a tank top, and flip-flops. The tank top was dark, but he noticed with a little thrill that she wasn’t wearing a bra beneath it, the natural shapes of her breasts drawing his eyes.

              She paused in the doorway like she hadn’t been expecting to see him. Her eyes widened just before she shielded them with a careful blankness. “So the Armadillo,” she said, stepping behind the bar and going for a bottle of red wine.

              “The Armadillo,” he repeated, watching her fill a glass nearly to the top.

              “Did you enjoy the T&A parade?”

              “Not really.”

              She snorted.

              “Would you care if I did?”

              “
No
.” Which meant
hell yes
.

              He suppressed a sudden laugh. “Jenny.”

              “I wouldn’t,” she insisted, one hand on her hip, the other tipping back her glass. She swallowed the wine down like it was water. Three long gulps and then she fixed him with a hard stare over the glass.

              Smiling, he said, “I think you’d care a whole lot after what happened today.”

              She swallowed, muscles in her throat rippling. “Remember what I said about it being a mistake?” she asked, but there was no bite to her voice.

              “Remember how bad you wanted it?”

              Her eyes flicked away, but she didn’t deny the accusation. Yes, she’d wanted it. Hopefully, she still did. But with a bar between them, he didn’t see the moment transforming to something heated anytime soon.

              So he said, “What’s going on with your ex-husband?”

              Her eyes came back to him, full of hurt, of betrayal. “Candy told you?” No doubt there was going to a nasty brother-sister argument to follow.

He nodded. “Yeah. He was asking some guys about him tonight.” Softly, he added, “I didn’t know you used to be married.”

“Wish I hadn’t been,” she said bitterly, and drained her glass. She gave him a challenging look. “Does that change your opinion of me?”

“Not even a little. But I’ve got questions. What happened?” In his mind, he added,
How badly did he hurt you?

“Why do you think you’re entitled to know that, as a prospect?”

              “I’m not asking as a prospect,” he returned. “Just as a man.”

              “A man who wants to get me naked,” she said, but without aggression. The hunger had come back into her eyes.

              “You can’t tell me you got any use for a man who looks at you and doesn’t wanna get you naked.”

              A slow smile transformed her face, made her look younger and less tired. “Well…I can’t argue with that.” She took a deep breath and let it back out again. Her expression told him she’d decided something. “Fix yourself another drink, prospect, and come with me.”

              He tipped the Macallan bottle over his glass and nodded. “Alright. But only if you stop calling me ‘prospect.’”

              “Fine. Colin.”

Thirteen

Jenny

Her therapist, the one Candy had muscled her into visiting after she was released from the hospital seven years ago, had insisted that reliving the events of her abuse was the only way to move beyond it. Mrs. Briggs, her name had been. Jean Briggs. She’d wanted Jenny to use her first name, for comfort’s sake. Jean.
“You have to take the power away from your memories,”
she’d said.
“You have to revisit them in order to learn from them and move forward in a new direction.”

              No offense to Jean, but she hadn’t known shit.

              When Jenny opened up the bolted fireproof door in her mind and stepped into the past, there was no controlling the onslaught of remembered pain, fear, and grief. It washed over her, all of it, and suddenly she was back in that dorm room, or on the back of his bike, or in the loose dirt of the parking lot, on her knees and spitting blood.

              That was why she hadn’t wanted to tell Colin about Riley. Not because of pride, not to preserve some false image of herself. She didn’t understand romance; couldn’t recognize it. She still couldn’t search through the moments of the past and figure out exactly where it had all started to go wrong. There had been no moment, no single event that had sparked the turning tide of hatred. Little by little, her teenage sweetheart had morphed into a monster.

              If that was possible – if someone she’d known most of her life could grow to hate her – then how could she seek out any honesty and valor in another man? A new man. Colin. She had to at least be that honest with herself – she wasn’t talking about men in general; she was talking about the big Cajun sitting beside her on the picnic table out front, his presence entirely too arousing in her current intoxicated state.

              “Where do you want me to start?” she asked, sipping at the fresh glass of wine she’d poured inside.

              He lifted his own glass to his lips – a move that reminded her of their kiss earlier – the ice cubes clinking together. “The beginning’s always good.”

              “Right. The abridged beginning, then. And then you’re gonna have to return the favor.”

              “You’ll show me yours if I’ll show you mine?” he asked with a low chuckle. The sound moved through her, left her warm and chilled all at once.

              “Something like that.” Another fortifying sip, and she decided not to look at him, however shrouded by the dark he was, as she spoke. “I’d known Jud Riley for a long time. We’d flirted. And then he really started putting the effort in…”

              She’d intended to keep things very brief and to the point. She fell in love, she got married, it turned to shit eventually. But as she spoke, the words seemed to become slippery in her mouth, falling out one after the next in a great rush that she couldn’t control. And with them, the snapshot images of her life: The simple gown she’d worn to her backyard wedding; the hearty bark of Riley’s laugh as he slid an arm around her waist; the whiskey taste of his kiss and the demanding way he pressed for entry between her thighs. She remembered standing on the porch and waving as Candy rode off for New York.

              “It was after that that Riley started spending time away from the clubhouse. Outside interests,” she explained.

              Just here and there at first, but then more often, late night rendezvous with men who weren’t his club brothers.

              “He wanted the club to start up its own porn business. Rented a studio and everything. The girls started coming around.”

              The first night he’d struck her in the face had been in front of his new studio friends, and two of the silicone-enhanced bimbos had laughed.

              “It got bad,” she said, beginning to rush, not willing to go into too much detail. She felt unbelievably exposed suddenly, stripped down in a way that had nothing to do with clothing or physical nakedness. “I was stupid, and weak. I should have left, but I…”

              “You don’t expect the people you love to turn on you like that,” Colin said, tone low and soothing.

              She forced a humorless laugh. “Love isn’t supposed to be an excuse, though, is it? Haven’t you learned anything from pop-culture novels? The damsel in distress is so passé.”

              “I read approximately zero books a year, so I wouldn’t know. But if you’re letting chick books make you feel bad about yourself, that’s a real problem.”

              “Don’t need a book for that.”

              He sighed. “Now you’re getting all dramatic.”

              She turned to him, his stern shape taking up more than his share of space on the table. He’d moved closer as she was talking, she realized. Their arms were touching. “Colin, I let my husband put me in the hospital. I let him do worse stuff than that.” A shudder rattled her, hard, as she thought about Dad. About that tear-choked, desperate phone call to Candy. “There’s no excuse for that.”

              God, she was maudlin. Must be the wine.

              In a serious, stern voice, he said, “How bad were things when Candy got back? He said something about patch-stripping.”

              She hesitated. “With the exception of Crockett…not one of the original members is still around. Every man you’ve met here is someone Candy brought on board after he cleaned house.”

              And all of the patches he’d stripped? Every one of those disgraced members was buried in a deep hole out beyond the back porch of the clubhouse. All save Riley, and that was only because of his ATF agent brother. She could still recall her brother’s handsome face, streaked with dirt, as he glanced up into her flashlight beam and asked her to bring him a bottle of water…and two fingers of Scotch. The digging was thirsty work, he’d told her.

              Colin’s hand startled her, as it closed over her own. A large, warm hand, like her brother…only so different, because its touch set her heart to beating a wild tattoo against her ribs. “Jen,” he said, “I know I’m a prospect, and probably a pretty bad one at that–”

              “You’re not good at following orders,” she consented.

              “–but I’ve learned a few things about motorcycle clubs. And no matter how tough she is, or mean she is, a woman can’t affect deep changes within the club. It wasn’t just your husband, baby. It was the whole damn club. And you can’t tell me they would have left you alive if you’d raised a big fuss.”

              She shivered and tightened her fingers around his. “Makes you wonder why a girl would ever marry a biker, doesn’t it?”

              “Because you come from a family of bikers,” Colin said. “The old ladies I’ve met are smart and scary as hell.”

              She laughed, a little more true this time. “Not me, though?”

              “Oh, you’re damn scary.”

              She laughed again, and it eased some of her tension. Then they lapsed into silence. Colin’s thumb rubbed across her knuckles, rough from work.

              “I’m messed up,” she said quietly. “I won’t pretend I’m not.”

              “Ah.” His hand tightened around hers, a compulsive squeeze. “That’s ‘cause you haven’t heard my story yet.”

              She fell into a state of rapt fascination as he described for her a shotgun house on the edge of the New Orleans swamp, a mother and father who’d grown up in the gator hunting tradition, crawfish and cornbread on the table, afternoon trips into the city and jazz clubs. In scoffing, overblown tones meant to hide his hurt, he described the way his mother, Evie, had revealed his true parentage, telling him that his father was none other than Remy Lécuyer, divorced loner who lived with his Cherokee mother, father of Felix…a.k.a. Mercy.

              In Colin’s blunt, unforgiving words, Mercy had killed Colin’s father, Larry, at close range with a shotgun.

              Jenny had heard the story from her brother; which meant she’d heard the real, bare-bones facts of it, without the taint of either Lécuyer brother.

              “He was defending his wife,” Jenny said, voice gentle. She’d met Ava when she was still a girl and a Teague. The people close to Ava and Mercy hadn’t seen the yearning and deep-seated love between those two unlikely lovers. But from her outside perspective, Jenny had seen it, had known what it was. At some point, Mercy had stopped looking on his young charge as a child…and had wanted her as a woman. For an awkward home schooled boy who’d lost his family and been forced to flee his home? There was no questioning what he’d do for his bride. “And,” she went on, “I won’t pretend I don’t admire his commitment to her.”

              Colin made a dissatisfied noise in his throat.

              She posed a question she probably didn’t want to know the answer to. “If you loved someone the way your brother loves his wife, would you even think twice about who you were hurting when you defended her?”

              A long beat of silence passed.

              “No,” he said, finally, voice ragged. His hand tightened on hers. “No, I wouldn’t.”

              Jenny’s heart throbbed, and her veins filled with fear. “You don’t feel that way about me, so don’t make it cheap and pretend,” she warned.

              “I don’t pretend.”

              “Me neither.”

              Later, she wouldn’t be able to say who turned toward who first. But suddenly, he was kissing her, and she was loving it.