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“There’s nothing to tell.”
We both watched Caleb get up from the table to take a phone call.
“Seemed to me she was a little upset.”
My jaw twitched as I took another drag on my smoke. I didn’t need this right now. “It was a misunderstanding.”
“I see shit like that and I get concerned.”
“There is nothing to be concerned about. Like I said, it was a misunderstanding. It won’t happen again.” My headache was drilling into my temple like a fucking jackhammer. “Look, I appreciate your concern. But it’s misplaced, okay? I’m fine.”
Bull didn’t move. He just fixed those otherworldly eyes on me as his mind worked in silence. To most people it was unnerving, but it didn’t work on me. I wasn’t about to admit anything to my president. My uncle. There was no point. I couldn’t be helped.
“Fuck me,” Caleb growled, walking back from taking his call. “That was Remy from Gunslinger. They can’t make it tonight.”
Gunslinger was the band we used for our celebrations at the clubhouse. They played raw rock and blues. Tonight’s party was to welcome Ruger into the chapter.
Ruger was Bull’s brother-in-law and was patching over from the Kings of Mayhem’s Louisiana chapter.
Bull had been married to his sister Wendy years ago. Crazy in love, their union had been cut short by a drunk driver after only three months of marriage. Back then, my father was president and Bull was vice-president. Almost losing his mind with grief, Bull had skipped town for Canada and spent the next few years riding across the provinces.
In Bull’s absence, Ruger joined the Louisiana chapter of the Kings of Mayhem and rose through the ranks to vice-president. Now he was patching over to the original Kings of Mayhem because he was ready for a change of scenery.
Ruger was a handsome son of a bitch. The club girls fell all over themselves when he arrived. Caleb’s wife, Honey, called him a silver fox. Whatever the fuck that meant. Ruger took things in his stride. He was a big man. Powerful. But he was a thinker. He listened. Strategized. And then slayed with lethal force. He was a good addition to the club.
Caleb threw his phone on the table.
“Bet this shit never happens to Mrs. Stephens,” he moaned.
Caleb had somehow become the clubs unofficial event coordinator while the club’s housekeeper, Mrs. Stephens, was on a three-week vacation in the Bahamas.
“What about Talk Show?” Cade suggested. They were another band we sometimes used.
“I’ll see, but it’s going to be hard to find someone with such short notice,” Caleb replied, picking up his phone again.
I glanced at Bull. His face was still cast in my direction, his jaw tight, probably trying to work out what to do with me.
But there was nothing he could do.
There was nothing anyone could do.
It was as simple as that.
Later in life, I would remember this moment as the before.
The moment right before I heard her.
Because that’s how it happened. I heard her before I saw her. Her voice reached out across the town square to where we were sitting outside the bar and hit me in the chest like a fucking bolt of lightning.
I looked up and there she was, perched on a wall near the statue of Colonel James Dylan, one of our town’s founding fathers, strumming her guitar and singing a song about feeling like a misfit, about being dark and twisted inside, and not fitting in.
I knew the song. It was vaguely familiar. A pop song. Probably something I’d heard on the radio when I was half-dead, lying in a hospital bed, burned to a crisp with a massive head injury.
She sang about feeling like a misfit.
Lady, you don’t know the half of it.
About being dark and twisted.
These words from a woman who looked like she’d fallen from Heaven.
About not fitting into the format.
Darlin’, I’m so far out of format not even Google could find me.
I took a drag off my smoke, trying to distract myself, but she was impossible not to notice. I studied her from behind my dark glasses. She was pure California, with a voice like sunshine and skin the color of whiskey. Her blonde hair was long and thick and tumbled over smooth brown shoulders in golden waves. Even from this distance, I could see that her eyes were as bright as sapphires. And as she strummed her guitar, the silver rings on her fingers glinted in the sunlight.
She was fucking mesmerizing.
My uncle and brothers thought so too because the conversation had stopped.
“Her voice is amazing,” Cade finally said. He looked at Caleb. “There’s your answer to finding someone to play at Ruger’s patchover tonight.”
Caleb raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you kidding? There is no way she is playing at the clubhouse. Imagine trying to keep Vader and Joker’s hands off her. Not to mention Yale. I don’t know him well enough yet, but something tells me he’s a deviant motherfucker.”
