“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I know I don’t.”
“I mean you’ve already done enough. The car, the tow, the diner. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I know that too.”
More silence. I could hear the weighing up. How much to accept. How much obligation it would create. What it would cost.
“Ruby would love it,” she said finally. Giving herself permission by giving it to her daughter first.
“Saturday. After lunch. Rosie knows the way, she’ll give you directions.”
They pulled up around two.Ruby was out of her car seat and across the gravel the second Trixie opened the door, her teddy swinging from one fist, her eyes already trying to take in everything at once. Trixie followed at the pace of a woman who wasn’t sure what she’d agreed to, her hands in her back pockets, her shoulders tight.
The compound was loud and alive, the way it always was on a Saturday. Bikes being worked on in the shop, the clang of ahammer from somewhere behind the lodge, music from a radio someone had left on. Ruby stood in the middle of it with her mouth open, taking in every sound, every movement, every man in leather who walked past and gave her a nod. And this kid was fascinated. Utterly, completely fascinated.
“There’s so many bikes,” she breathed.
“Yeah. There’s a few.”
“Which one is yours?”
“The black one. Right there.”
She looked at it the way other kids looked at ponies. With her whole body leaning toward it.
“Are there other men with bikes?” she asked, watching two prospects cross the yard carrying engine parts.
“The best kind,” I said.
She looked up at me. Considering. Then she put her free hand in mine, casual, the way kids do when they’ve decided you’re safe, and said, “Show me.”
I looked at Trixie. She was standing by her car, watching her daughter hold my hand, and the expression on her face was the most unguarded thing I’d seen from her since I first met her. A mother watching her child trust someone and trying to decide if it was safe to let it happen.
I showed Ruby the workshop. The tools, the parts laid out on benches. She wanted to know the name of everything. Wrench. Socket. Spark plug. She repeated each one with the grave seriousness of someone learning a foreign language. When I lifted her onto the seat of my bike, engine off, her feet dangling a mile above the pegs, she gripped the handlebars and made a vroom noise so committed that Hawk, passing through the workshop behind us, stopped walking.
He looked at me. I looked at him. His eyebrow did plenty.
“Don’t,” I replied.
“So, your MC… Forsaken Angels, is that right?” Trixie asked.
“Yeah, that’s us,” I replied. “We own this whole compound, and that garage over there too,” I said with a nod over in its direction.
She looked over at the shop.
“The Forsaken Iron Works,” she said quietly with the realization slowly creeping over her in real time.
“Yeah. We fix bikes and anything anyone brings in really,” I replied.
“That was where the tow truck came from though. I thought you said you were owed a favor? But it was from your club’s shop, wasn’t it?”
I kicked the gravel at my feet. “Didn’t think you’d let me help otherwise.”
Callie foundTrixie on the lodge porch while I was showing Ruby. I came back to find them sitting together in the late afternoon sun, Callie with baby Ryan on her hip, Trixie leaning forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees and her guard halfway down for the first time since I’d met her. They’d been talking for an hour. Something about Callie did that to people. She’d walked through the same gate Trixie had, running from something, scared, and she’d found the same thing on the other side. She knew. You could see it in the way Trixie sat with her. The relief of being near someone who didn’t need the whole story to understand the shape of it.
“I told her I’d watch Ruby tonight,” Callie said to me, later, while Trixie was getting the kid’s sweater from her car. “She really needs a night off, Duke. One night where she’s just a woman having a beer and letting her hair down.”