Kilian
I INVITED THEA to the clubhouse because I wanted to. No other reason. I wanted her here, so I asked.
I was supposed to meet her at the gate, but Ronan got there first. Then Soren came down from the deck. And I’m standing by a pillar twenty feet away, watching the three of them talk.
That was fifteen minutes ago, and I’m still standing here.
The clubhouse is a long, single-story structure made of concrete and corrugated stainless steel. Outside, there’s a wide wooden deck built right to the cliff’s edge. The only thing between the railing and a two-thousand-foot drop is your own good sense. Most of us are short on good sense, which is why I had the railing built to chest height.
Out back sits another corrugated steel structure, a warehouse of sorts for Sentinel, where we house the helicopters we use for the bushfire detection runs. It’s the business I built from the money attached to my name.
Every piece of this compound, I had a hand in building. It’s home. To me. To my men. Everyone here earned their place the same way I earned mine: by bleeding next to each other until the bleeding became the bond.
Today Thea is here too, sitting on the oversized leather couch, laughing at whatever Soren said, and the sound carries all the way across the room to where I haven’t moved.
Ronan hands her a beer. She takes it with both hands. Her shoulders are loose, her face open.
She’s a bruise of color against all our brown and black and steel. The pink dress she wears belongs at a tea party, not in a biker clubhouse full of ex-soldiers with scars no one can see.
Finally, I push off the pillar and walk inside. Ronan clocks me first. His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes move from me to Thea.
“There he is,” Soren says, and I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but there’s too much warmth in his voice today.
She straightens a fraction when she sees me, and the light catches the loose strands of her hair.
“She’s visiting me,” I say.
“Sure she is.” Ronan lifts his beer.
“I was just telling her about the west coast contract,” Soren adds and I nod.
Then I look at Thea. “Ready?”
She looks from the men, then back to me. “You didn’t even say hello.”
“Hello.”
She breathes a laugh through her nose, but sets the bottle down and says goodbye to them.
“Come back without him,” Soren calls after her.
Outside, the air is cool and comfortable. I hand her the helmet. She takes it, climbs onto the bike behind me, and I start the engine. The rumble fills my skull, chasing out every thought that isn’t about the road disappearing under the front wheel.
Five minutes after, I pull off at the overlook where the mountain drops and the whole of Albury Creek is below us. The jacarandas are just purple dots from up here. There are few fat clouds, and the sky is blue going orange.
I kill the engine. Thea gets off first and walks to the railing, putting both hands on it.
“Wow,” she says.
I don’t look at the view for more than a second. I already know it’s beautiful. I know what it does at this hour, when the sun turns ordinary things gold.
I keep my eyes on her instead. The wind pulls strands of hair from her clip, and she doesn’t bother pushing them back. She’s staring at the town below, at the flat farmland that stretches out beyond until it blurs into the horizon.
Thea is a stunning, stunning woman, and she’s here in the place I call home. And I’m standing five feet back from the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met because there’s a weight sitting in my gut.
It’s been there since she walked into the club and laughed at Soren and sat there on that couch with them. She looked out of place in every way, but still she looked like she belonged in my world.
It looked right.
