I leave before I do something reckless.
In the bedroom, August is asleep under dinosaur sheets in a biker’s bed, one hand on Blue Rex, mouth open, moon night-light glowing soft over his face. I lock the door, then unlock it, then leave it cracked because Derby is in the living room and because August asked about monsters.
No monsters inside, Derby said.
For tonight, I choose to believe him.
I slide into bed beside my son, still wearing my jeans because changing feels like too much. The sheets are softer than before. They don’t feel like punishment now. They feel like another woman saw what I needed before I had the language to ask.
In the living room, the couch creaks under Derby’s weight.
Then the house goes quiet.
I stare at the cracked door until my eyes blur.
I should be thinking about Jeremy.
Tomorrow.
Blood tests.
Legal trouble.
The woman from Pearly Gates.
The gossip already racing through town.
Instead, I get out of bed and head to the bathroom. After I strip down, I press my fingers to my clit and think of Derby stopping a breath away from my lips.
Then we wait until you do.
The ache that moves through me isn’t fear. That may be the scariest part of all. Clutching the counter with one hand, I pleasure myself with the other. I’ve had sex with my husband, but I haven’t wanted a man in five years. I come hard, quietly, before getting in the shower.
Chapter Ten
Sophie
Wedding planning in Hell, Kentucky, is less about flowers and more about deciding which men are most likely to start a fight near the cake.
I have a notebook open in front of me, three pens, two bourbon samples, a list of people who should not be allowed near microphones, and a growing headache shaped exactly like the Kings of Anarchy MC.
The Lockup, the Kings’ clubhouse is an old jail, which means every attempt at romance has to compete with iron bars, scarred brick, old cell doors, and the lingering sense that someone once begged God for mercy in the same corner where Lottie is now arguing over ribbon colors.
It should not work.
Somehow, that makes it more ours.
Sunlight comes through the barred front windows in slanted gold strips, catching on dust, chrome, glass, and the bourbon samples lined up on the long table. The main room smells like leather, old smoke worked into the walls, and something buttery coming from the kitchen. Kentucky sin, locked up and poured over ice.
Cornbread is in the clubhouse kitchen making what he calls wedding cornbread samples, which is ridiculous because cornbread should not have samples. It’s cornbread. You either trust it or you were raised wrong.
He brought six cast-iron skillets over from the Fire Pit like a man transporting holy relics.
Lottie stands beside the long table with a clipboard she stole from somewhere and a pen tucked behind her ear. Janie is sorting ribbons by color, though half the colors look the same to me and all of them have names like bourbon blush and saddle smoke, which makes me want to throw the entire wedding industry into Paradise Falls.
Brittany sits at the nearest table, one hand resting on her stomach even though she isn’t pregnant, just protective of every woman within reach now that she has survived Oaks’s particular brand of love. She has opinions about seating charts, mostly that Elijah should be seated far enough from Oaks that no one has to explain a stabbing before dessert.
Becki is sprawled in a chair with one boot hooked on the rung, eating pickles from a jar and glaring at anyone who looks at her belly too long. She is pregnant with Royal’s baby and somehow even more frightening than she was before. Pregnancy ain’t softened her. It has sharpened her into a woman who looks like she might bite the father of her child for breathing wrong, then write him a love note in blood and lipstick.