The Saloon was, according to taxes, a bar. The liquor license had a layer of dust on it, and the bar was so well worn that it shined. The jukebox, several decades out of date, was silent tonight. Each bar stool, worn to perfection, was occupied by one of the men of The Beasts.
Each one, save for the center stool. That stool’s lone occupant was a leather vest, worn to crackling, with the full set of patches across the back, and the front. The topmost one read President.
Joe poured out drinks, Phantom at his side. They passed them out without the normal banter that came with slinging whiskey and beer. Not that Phantom was ever much for banter, but even his silence had a sadness to it.
The first few moments were nothing but twenty some-odd men sharing a drink and the memories of a dear friend. It was too damn much, and every quiet moment that fed into the next made Kellan feel itchy.
“Shit,” Kellan snorted, dragging a hand down his face. “Just shit.”
“I ever tell you how I met Mac Ketchum?” Leon asked. He shifted in his seat and took a long drink.
“Tell it again,” a voice called.
“You gonna buy me a drink, Vinny? You want a story, you gotta buy me a drink.”
“You ain’t a woman.” Vinny chuckled. “But you got a pretty ass. All right, get him a whiskey, maybe I’ll take him home.”
Everyone laughed. Suddenly the mood was lighter. More drinks were passed out, some conversation sprung up, but most of the eyes were on old Leon.
“We were nineteen,” he started. “Young, dumb, and full of…well.” He waggled his brows.
There was more laughter and a lot of lewd innuendos.
“Shut up! Shut up if you want to hear the rest. We were nineteen and graduated and didn’t have anything to do with our lives. So, like any stupid kid we signed up for the military.”
“Damn right!” Vinny snorted, slapping his chest. Beneath his leather vest he wore a Semper Fi shirt.
“Shut up Vinny, or I’ll make you take Michelin home instead.” He took a long drink and leaned back against the bar. “So here I was, from nowhere California, and there he was, from nowhere Oregon, and we were shaved and scrubbed and getting yelled at. It was like being a freshman all over again, with a lot less women. I’d like to say we were friends from day one, but that’d be a lie. See, there was this one girl, a military secretary, with tits all the way out to here.”
He held his hands out far from his chest and gave a great big smile.
“We were both desperate to get under that uniform, turned into a fight on more than one occasion. Well, one of those times we disrupted the entire mess hall, and our drill sergeant did not much like it. It’s bad enough that we were fighting, but to disrupt the steak day, well, that was a sin that the sergeant, who had been born in Texas, could not forgive.”
“Your sergeant was right.” Joe tossed a rag on the bar and gave it a wipe. “No one should interrupt red meat.”
Leon lifted his glass in salute. “That’s the goddamn truth, ain’t it? Still, that’s exactly what we did. We had bloodied one another’s lips, blackened one another’s eyes and got tore into by our Texan sergeant. Then we were put on cleaning duty for weeks. I can’t tell you how many dishes we washed, how many toilets we scrubbed, but somewhere between it all we looked at each other. He gave me this goofy damn grin and starts laughing at me. Laughing! Can you believe it?”
There was a riot of enthusiastic yeahs.
“Yeah, yeah,” Leon continued, shaking his graying head. “Like I was saying, he gives me this goofy grin and starts giggling like a girl at her first boy band concert and he asks me if any tits are worth cleaning up this much shit.”
Wild masculine laughter echoed off the worn walls. Someone moved over to the jukebox and put on an old Skynard album. A mixture of dixie and rock-n-roll joined the voices of other men, each telling their own story about Mac Ketchum, and The Beasts Motorcycle Club.
Kellan listened to it all. It felt good to hear all of the guys talking through their memories, and their grief. Silently he wished it would work on Emma. He had left her with Hannah and some of the other old ladies.
“Mac Ketchum was a good man, and a good president. He’s gone to the great garage in the sky!” There was a chorus of cheers as Rudy lifted his glass and took a drink for the memory of the man who was. Twenty others, all wearing the patches of The Beasts, drank with him. When he had finished his glass, he let out a loud belch and shouted, “Long will he be remembered!”
“Long will he be remembered!” they parroted back, Kellan along with them.
His own beer was ice cold, but he couldn’t taste anything but the temperature on his lips as he drank it down. Mac was dead, well and truly so. It was two days ago, but that didn’t stop it from hitting him in the chest every time the realization popped up.
Still, he was taking it better than Emma was.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent her a text asking if she was doing all right. It was a habit now, to check in with her, check on her really. And why not? That was what Mac asked him to do.
“And now we gotta get ourselves a new president!” Vinny shouted.
The cheers were louder this time. Kellan felt his stomach go cold and dark. He knew what was coming next. He had wanted this, for years he had thought of putting on the president’s patch. It had always been a daydream, a hope, and fantasy. Now it was reality. Now it meant Mac was dead.
“My dad was an asshole,” he said suddenly. “I dunno if it was the alcohol or just him. But he liked to use his fists.”
The room went quiet again, but it wasn’t mournful. There was a subtle shifting as the attention fell on him.
“Mac hired me at the shop when I was eighteen, I guess he didn’t want me getting my face bashed in over a set of tits. I was good with fixing things; machines always made more sense than people. I didn’t have a lick of experience outside of fiddling on my own and he just…I dunno. He gave me a chance. My dad started getting angry about how much time I was spending at the shop. He said it was turning me into a criminal.”
There was laughter and a few shouts of agreement.
“Oh no,” Kellan said. “It totally did. Not gonna lie. But my dad was sure his position at the pizza place was better than mine at the shop and started getting angrier and angrier, showed up at the shop to tell my boss I was quitting. But Mac was there doing some paperwork. He just stood there, arms crossed, listening to my father rant at him. He was like this big damn statue, just looking at my dad, letting my dad call him all these names, and accuse him of everything from selling drugs to killing kings and Mac just took it.
“When my dad just ran out of air or anger Mac looked down at him and then looked over at me. I was standing there trying to apologize and Mac just asks me if I want his spare room. I must have just looked at him for a whole minute before I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ My dad flipped; he didn’t go after Mac, nope, he went after me. He does this dive thing right at me and I am fully expecting to get hit. But Mac has just scooped him up and tossed him out. Like a goddamned sack. My dad looked so shocked, like, hit in the face with a pan shocked. He starts to get up and Mac shakes his head. He tells him to crawl away, that any man who strikes his son for making a decision he doesn’t like doesn’t deserve to have a son.”
There was a long moment of silence. Kellan wondered what the other men were thinking. Were they remembering their sons, their fathers?
“Mac was my father,” Kellan continued. “And if y’all want me to take his place, I’d be honored.”
It didn’t take long. There was a cheer, and a vote from any man who could ride his bike. It was unanimous. He was handed a president patch, and suddenly the club was his. He thought he should have felt something, intimidated or unsure. He didn’t. It felt right, good even.
“First thing we gotta do is pick a VP,” Kellan said. “I need someone I can trust, who I can count on. I nominate Rudy. He was born into this life, and the club has always been able to count on him.”
Rudy looked shocked, but pleased. His cheerful face lit up and he raised his glass and nodded. “I can accept that nomination.”
Leon slapped his son on the shoulder, “I second it!”
The voting for the vice president was even faster. Everyone liked Rudy, hell, Kellan thought, even Emma liked Rudy. Kellan couldn’t blame her, not really. The two of them had grown up together, and it was well known that Leon had taken a large part of raising Emma. They were nearly brother and sister. A brother and sister, he thought, who aren’t related, who had gone to prom together. He ignored the small surge of jealousy that welled up.
Rudy was married to Han, and they had kids, and Emma didn’t belong to Kellan. He didn’t want a wife. He didn’t want a family. He was good.
He embraced Rudy and slapped him hard on the back. “I’m counting on you, man.”
“I’m all yours.” Rudy slapped him back.
There was another round of celebratory beers and then Kellan brought them back to business. There were things that needed to get done.
“Our biggest concern is Gabriel and his people. It isn’t just that they are going after Emma, it’s that they are showing up at personal residences and trying to intimidate. They need to learn that The Beasts cannot be intimidated. They want to come on our turf, fine, let’s go see theirs. Phantom, Rudy, I want you to hunt down where Gabriel and Michael kick up their feet. Scout it out and let’s put together a plan.”
The two men nodded.
“Leon, you need to handle the businesses with Vinny and Joe; we want to keep clean money coming in, pay our taxes, be good little boys, for at least the next few weeks. We take no new contracts, we run guns to no one. We don’t take anything stolen, and we do no stealing. Just for the next few weeks.”
“I’m all for a vacation,” Vinny said. “But why?”
“Oh!” Joe smirked. “I think I get it, oh captain, my captain. May I?”
“Go for it, Shakespeare.”
“If we keep things on the up and up, the local law enforcement is going to ignore us, they are going to focus their attention on Gabriel’s people. We want their spotlights on Gabriel, get him riled.”
Kellan nodded. “That’s the truth right there.”
Leon nodded and finished the last of his beer. “All right, we scrub ourselves up for a couple of weeks. Take the heat off. Maybe they’ll think Mac’s death shook us up.”
Kellan nodded. “Put that out there, go to your favorite bar or strip joint and mourn openly. Bury yourselves in beer and women. Gabriel may even get a whiff of it; he might back off a little. But let’s find out. That’s it, let’s get out of here.”
“All right. President.” Rudy slapped his hand on the counter. “Come on, Phantom. Let’s go infiltrate the enemy.
Phantom followed like a pale shadow.
# # #
“I know I keep saying this,” Emma said into her cell phone, “but I honestly have no idea.”
Emma hated to admit when she didn’t know something. It was normal, she knew that. No one was born knowing everything. It was perfectly all right to not know the digestive cycle of a Labrador. It was different entirely when she wasn’t sure if her father wanted to be cremated or buried. She didn’t know if he wanted a traditional coffin or something modern. She didn’t know anything.
She only knew there were a lot of questions and she couldn’t answer any of them.
“Mrs. Mathers, I know this is a difficult time for you.”
The voice was so soothing, gentle. It was a voice of someone used to talking to people who were on their way to breaking down and bawling their eyes out. Even so it struck her to hear him call her Mrs. Mathers. It was her name, according to the state of Oregon, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to her.
For some reason that made her want to cry even more. She felt her shoulders sag forward and her eyes close.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, cutting the soothing voice off. “I just don’t know anything. My father and I weren’t…close until very recently. We didn’t talk about this.”
“I understand, Mrs. Mathers. Perhaps he talked with someone else?”
The voice cracked with just the smallest bit of frustration for the first time. Emma couldn’t blame him, no one was infinitely patient. She felt herself sag a little more. “I’m sorry, I—”
Hannah’s hand touched her shoulder. Emma reached back and grasped the other woman’s fingers.
“Hon,” Hannah said gently. “Why don’t you take a break? We can figure everything out and call him back. You don’t need to do this right this second.”
The voice on the other end of the phone must have heard Hannah talking. He offered to call her back first thing in the morning. Emma set the phone aside and covered her face in her hands. “I am a terrible daughter.”
“Sweetie, no, you aren’t.”
Hannah took Emma’s hands in her own, dragging them away from Emma’s face. Emma found herself looking into Han’s perfectly made up face. She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t know anything about my dad.”
“You do.” Hannah gripped her hands tighter.
Emma shook her head and flopped back against the sofa. Rocco jumped up and flopped against her side. Hannah released her hand so Emma could pat the dog.
“Okay.” Hannah stood up. “I’m going to pour us some wine.”
“Drinking when you’re depressed can lead to alcoholism.”
“And?” Hannah asked, heading towards the kitchen. “I know some fantastic alcoholics.”
Emma laughed, and she wasn’t sure why. It was a dry laugh, only half amused. It sounded more exhausted than anything else. She heard Hannah rustling around in the kitchen drawers and a couple moments later the pop of a wine bottle.
Hannah handed Emma a glass and settled herself into a chair.
“So, what’s the problem?” she asked, taking a sip of her own wine.
“I don’t know my dad. Here I am, I’m supposed to decide all these things and I haven’t got a clue what would make him happy.”
Hannah took another long sip and sat back. “Okay, I’m going to ask you a question and I need you to be very honest with me. Can you do that?”
“I can.”
“Good. Take a drink. I need you to tell me if you are better with a pretty lie or an ugly truth.”
Emma thought about it for a moment while the bitter sweet taste of wine flowed over her tongue and into her belly. “Right now? Ugly truth.”
“All right.” Hannah put her glass aside and folded her manicured fingers across her lap. “The ugly truth of it is that your daddy is dead. He doesn’t care what you do now. You could toss him in a dumpster and it won’t matter to him at all. Ugly, but true.”
Emma decided to take another sip. “All right.”
“Now, funerals, all that pomp and circumstance and whatever, that’s all for the people who are alive enough to care about what’s going on. It’s for them to get together and celebrate and cry. So you don’t need to ask yourself what your dad wants, but what you want. Do you want him to be in a big pretty box in the ground or do you want to scatter his ashes?”
Emma thought about it. “I think that it’s pointless to put a body in the ground. We only started doing that as a society because we believed the ghost could come back and use the body so we buried with it. There is proof that Neanderthals put tools and meat with dead bodies…”
“See, there you go. You don’t want to bury Mac.”
Emma nodded slowly. “All right, I guess I don’t. But I’m not the only one who is going to care. I mean, I have the least right to make any of these decisions. Hell, Kellan was closer to him than I ever was.”
Hannah’s brow shot up. “Bitter much?”
Emma sighed, looking at the dark wine swirling around the bottom of her glass. She decided she wanted a second one. She got up and Rocco followed her to the kitchen while she poured. “Maybe a little. I mean, this is my dad. We weren’t close, but he’s the only family I’ve got. Mom walked out. I like to blame him for that, but she didn’t take me with her, did she?”
“No,” Hannah agreed from the living room. “She didn’t.”
“I hate her for that. I mean, Dad and I had our problems. I never liked what he did for money, or how he chose to live his life, but he never abandoned me.”
“He was proud of you,” Hannah offered when Emma came back to the couch. “Said so all the time.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. He carried a picture of you from your graduation with him. He would pull it out whenever the opportunity presented itself. He’d flash it about and say, ‘That’s my girl! She’s in college, gonna be a vet. Take more brains to be a vet than it does to be a doctor. Animals can’t tell you where it hurts.’”
Emma found herself smiling. “He’s not wrong. Wait…wasn’t…he wasn’t wrong.”
Suddenly her smile collapsed on itself. The fact that he was gone, well and truly gone, hit her like a boulder. It wasn’t just frustration with decisions, or uncertainty with her future. It was the fact that he was gone and there was nothing to be done about it.
“My daddy is gone,” she whimpered as big fat tears rolled over her cheeks.
The door opened and Kellan walked in. “Shit, Hannah, what did you do?” He charged across the living room and stopped in front of Emma. “What happened?”
“I dunno,” Hannah said with an edge of bitterness “Maybe her father died and she’s overwhelmed.”
Kellan glared in Hannah’s direction. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Stop,” Emma pleaded. “Just stop. She didn’t do anything. I just…I realized he is gone. That’s all, he’s just gone. He’s not somewhere else, waiting for me to give him a call. He is all gone. My daddy is gone.”
Kellan closed his eyes. “Sorry, Han. I got this.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks for hanging out with her today.”
Hannah nodded. “Bye, Emma, call me if you need anything.”
Emma just gave a mute nod and pulled her knees up to her chest. She felt that she was very near breaking, like a thin glass bubble, floating on the miasma of her own sadness. She had been holding everything together since she got back, but she couldn’t anymore.
“Daddy,” she whispered. “Kellan, he’s gone.”
“I know, sweetie,” he said with a gentleness she hadn’t known he had. “I know. Come here.”
She felt Kellan sit next to her. She scrambled closer to him, desperate for the nearness of a living person. “He loved me.”
Emma curled up into a ball and started to sob. Her chest ached with the struggle to keep all the tears in. For some reason the hallway in her dad’s house popped into her head. The pictures of her from being born to gradating. He hadn’t moved them, hadn’t replaced them. He left them where they were, cheap frames and all.
“Yeah.” Kellan wrapped an arm around her. “He did.”
“I didn’t know that. I didn’t believe it. I thought he loved that life more than me. I thought he would have given it up if he really loved me.”
Kellan blew out a breath and stroked a hand down her back. “I don’t…I don’t think love is ever as easy as ‘if you love me, then you’ll do this.’ You know?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I think I do. I didn’t. I’ve never been in love.”
“That’s surprising.”
“What?”
“Here you are, pretty girl, smart brain, you’d think love would be falling at your feet.”
She shook her head, her tears beginning to abate. “I haven’t. I’ve had boyfriends, but never love. I thought I loved you when I was younger. But that was teen feelings, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
She looked up, and he looked down. They hadn’t been close since that afternoon in the kitchen, when they’d almost torn each other’s clothes to ribbons. The death of a loved one tended to put the brakes on lusty feelings.
At least, until now. If he kissed her now, she’d drag him into her. She’d use him to forget all this hate pain and fear. It was tempting, oh so tempting to think of it.
He cleared his throat, and shook his head as if he had heard her thoughts. “You need to eat.”
“What?” she asked.
“Food, you need it. You’ve been sitting in this house for weeks, basically waiting for nothing but bad things to happen. You’ve been cooking, cleaning, studying, who knows what you do. But you’ve been stuck here, and then all this happens? No, come on. You need to get out, and you need to eat.”
“There is a psychological connection between mood changes and food. That’s why there are foods everyone labels as comforts.”
He laughed. “You know, you say the weirdest shit. I like it.”
He stood up and offered her a hand. She took it and he levered her into a standing position. “Take a shower,” he said. “Get dressed, and do all the makeup stuff. Set aside all the crap that’s happened. I’m going to take you out for dinner.”
“Really?”
“Really. What is your comfort food?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. “Steak, maybe seafood.”
His grin widened. “I knew there was a reason I married you.”
# # #
Somewhere between her crab cakes and the porterhouse Emma realized she was falling in love with Kellan. She could blame the wine Hannah had given her at home, or the beer she had ordered when she arrived at the restaurant, but she didn’t really think that was it.
He was telling her about his first bike. She only understood half of it. Something about the pistons and the engine, and something else. She wasn’t actively listening to him, rather, she was focusing on the way he lit up when he was talking about it. The way his eyes took on that soft look.
“You found it where?” she asked.
“A yard sale! Can you believe it? This guy was getting rid of his bike. His wife didn’t think it was safe. I dunno. But it had been sitting in this dude’s garage for like five years. So it was half together to start with. So I plunked down two weeks’ worth of wages and walked it all the way back to the shop.”
“Oh god.” She laughed, tearing apart a piece of bread and dipping it into some honey butter. “My dad must have been thrilled.”
“He called me an idiot. Flat out. Like, there I was, not even twenty years old, still scrawny as hell. I was shaking from dragging that thing thirty blocks, and he just tells me to take it back.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. He just points with one of those big fingers and tells me, ‘We don’t have room for junk.’”
She shook her head. Her golden locks, styled with gentle curls and held out of her face with butterfly pins, bounced with the subtle movement. “I can’t believe he ever called any bike junk.”
“You apparently never heard him talk about ninja bikes.”
She snorted. “Okay, that I do remember.”
“So anyway, there I was, standing all defiant. Saying I bought it with my money, I’d fix it with my money. I was going to do it. He rolled his eyes at me and told me I was wasting my time.” He paused as their dinner plates were set down in front of them. Hers had a steak covered in mushrooms and shrimp, his was another steak smothered in grilled onions and butter. “It took me weeks. Every night I was in the shop, fixing this or fiddling with that. I learned more about bike working on that junker than I did in the two years I had been working in the shop.”
“Did you fix it?”
“After replacing like ninety percent of the parts, yeah. It would have been cheaper if I had just bought a new bike by the end of everything. But I was young and proud.”
“I like that.”
“That I was young and proud?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “No, genius. I like that you got stubborn about it. It meant something to you. It didn’t matter what anyone else said about it. You wanted to rebuild that bike, you did it.”
“Like you with school.”
“Well, everyone thought I was going to go to college.”
He shrugged his shoulder, and dug into the steak. “Yeah, but you wanted to do it by yourself. You didn’t want anyone else’s time or their money. You wanted it to be on your own terms.”
It was close enough to the mark that she squirmed. “Well, until now.”
“Yeah, but you’d be an idiot if you didn’t accept help now. Let’s be honest, I was an idiot.”
“Maybe a little.”
He laughed, and she laughed alongside him, and it was about then she realized she was falling for him. He was smarter than she’d ever given him credit for. It wasn’t in a science or history way, but in a worldly way. He knew people, and how to handle them. It was a talent she certainly didn’t have.
“Maybe a little,” he agreed. “So, why a vet?”
“Well, I could be cliché and say it’s because I like animals.”
“I’ve seen you with Rocco, I know you like animals.”
She took another bite of steak. “I certainly do.”
“That was a little dark.” He did not sound disappointed. Indeed, there was a big grin on his soft lips.
She shrugged. “Humans are animals. While I fully believe that people do overeat meat, that you don’t have to have it with every meal in order to make it a meal and all that, I also believe that our digestive systems are set up to have some meat in our diet.”
“I’m down with that.” He took a healthy bite of his own dinner.
“Me too.” She finished her food and pushed her plate away. “But that being said. I do actually like animals, but you can’t love animals too much if you want to be a vet, and that’s the hard truth of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that animals die. They die more often than people do, what with the shorter lifespans. But it’s more than that.” She took another sip of her beer, finishing it off and pushing it to join her plate. “People get pets and haven’t got a clue how hard they can be to take care of. Oh, it’s adorable to get your five-year-old a bunny for Easter, but then you don’t understand why that tiny cage has your rabbit pulling its fur out. Or you get a cute dog from the SPCA, but you don’t notice that that dog doesn’t do well with your cat, and a fight happens, and I have to stitch them up because you didn’t read a thing.”
“I never thought of that.”
She shrugged. “A lot of people don’t. They don’t research how much a bird can stress out, or how cats need a high fat diet. Do you know I had a woman come in with this dog, not too different from Rocco, big and buff and all that. Or at least he would have been if she wasn’t feeding him a vegan diet.”
“Vegan? Like…veggies?”
“Yup! Like veggies. Only veggies. Like, a couple of people have published this literature that all animals can live together peacefully without killing another animal to survive, that you can just supplement their diet with chemicals. And I won’t go into all the science, but that’s not true. There are certain enzymes that animals need that only exist in meat.”
“This is a big deal to you,” he said gently.
“Animals are to me what bikes are to you.”
He nodded. “All right, fair enough. But it still sounds like you care a lot about animals.”
“I do, but not so much that I love every animal I see. You see, if I cared about every Fluffy with a broken tail, or every Rover with intestinal cancer, I would never be able to watch them die every day. It would be like you working in the world’s worst junkyard.”
“So you care, but not too much.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s really cool.” He paused for just a moment before asking. “So, do you want dessert?”
“Are you trying to make me fat? We had appetizers, and a huge dinner and—”
“Do you want dessert?” he asked again.
“This meal is going to be, like, a hundred dollars.”
“Do. You. Want. Dessert?”
She sighed ever so softly. “Yes, yes I want dessert.”
“Good, so do I.” He waved down the waitress and they put in a dessert order. The waitress beamed at them and wandered off. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?” she asked.
“Push away the things people offer.” He leaned across the table. “I didn’t ask you to come out so long as you didn’t spend more than twenty bucks. I asked you to come out so you could relax. If that takes two beers and a slice of…god, what did you order?”
“Chocolate and peanut butter cake.”
“How are you, like, ten pounds?”
“I don’t eat like this every day, Kellan.”
“That’s a shock. I’ve watched you cook.”
“Most days I eat ramen noodles with some stuff tossed in it. Lots of sodium, but not a lot of anything else.”
“Okay, that’s cool. But that doesn’t answer why you push people away. You seem like you have to do everything by yourself. I mean, go back to our talk about money and stuff. Yeah, I get wanting to do things for yourself, better than most I think.”
Emma sighed. “My mom.”
“What?”
“Look, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing my mommy issues, and in my amateur opinion I can say that her leaving took a toll on me. I stopped depending on people and started depending on me. I’m sure it’s not really that simple, but that’s as close as I can get. She left. Yeah, I blame my dad for a lot of it, but the truth of the matter is she didn’t take me. She never contacted me, she never came around. My dad was absent, my mom just abandoned me. So yeah, I hate taking help, and I look at all nice things with suspicion. There’s probably a good reason I’ve never had a boyfriend.”
“Shit.” He blew out a breath. “You are going to need another beer.”
“That is absolutely correct.”
An hour two more beers, later Emma let Kellan carry her into the house. She wasn’t drunk, there had been enough food and enough time between the drinks than that, but just tipsy enough that her heels were not her best choice in footwear.
“Aw,” she said with a tipsy giggle. “You are carrying me over the threshold.”
“You’re cute when you are drunk.”
“Not drunk,” she said when he plopped her down in the living room. She immediately unstrapped her heels and kicked them off. With more instinct than thought she wandered to his stereo and began looking through the music there. “You don’t like iPods.”
“What?”
“I noticed it the first night I was back. You had this iPod, it was all wrapped up nice and neat, but your CDs were strewn everywhere.”
“I like CDs.” He shrugged. “Why did you notice that?”
“No idea,” she admitted. “Just noticed it. Do you have something against modern technology?”
“I use CDs,” he pointed out. “I can’t hate technology.”
“True. If you did, you’d be one of those vinyl boys.”
“Do you not like vinyl?”
“Do you like vinyl?” she mused.
“They’re all right.”
She nodded and put a CD into the player. Moments later the smooth tones of The Eagles poured out of the speakers. With more enthusiasm than skill she swayed along with it. “Dance with me.” She offered her hand to him.
“Are you serious?”
“Am I ever anything but serious?”
“Fair point.”
He took her hand and swayed alongside her. She let her hands lay on the tops of his arms, the soft hair on his forearms tickling along her palms as she moved with him. He moved better than her, probably had more experience dancing.
After a moment his arms went around her back, pulling her a little closer. Her arms went around his neck and she looked up into his face. His hazel eyes were closed, but his lips looked soft, kissable. She stepped closer to him and his fingers dipped lower, brushing the top of the brown skirt she wore. His digits flexed, drawing her shirt up a couple inches, revealing a line of skin at her back. His thumbs caressed it, sending a thrill from the place he touched to a spot deeper inside her body.
She lifted her chin, and his mouth dipped to hers. A bolt of lightning swam through her skin. It started at her lips and trickled along her body until every inch of her skin was humming. It mingled pleasantly with the buzz in her brain until she could feel the world swimming beneath her bare feet.
“I’m not going to have sex with you tonight.”
“What?” He stopped dancing. His eyes popped open.
“Just thought I’d make myself clear.”
A shock laugh escaped his lips. “You are the strangest woman.”
“Maybe,” she answered back. “But I like to be honest.”
“I wasn’t thinking about having sex with you.”
She snorted. “Oh please.”
He frowned at her. “What do you expect, you are all…soft.”
She stepped back, but let her hands linger on his shoulders. “I am. I’m also tipsy, and I don’t like making life choices when I’m tipsy.”
“Having sex with me is a life choice?”
She shrugged. Emma knew better than to toss her budding feelings at him. Kellan had made his own thoughts on relationships more than clear, and it wouldn’t be helpful to either of them to explain that she didn’t think sex with him would be a quick romp between the sheets, or on the living room floor. “It is for me.”
He nodded and blew out a breath. “Okay, all right.”
She let her hand trail down his arm. “However, I’d like to go to bed with you.”
“I thought you just said—”
“For sleep, Kellan. Just for sleep. I am not going to have sex with you, but I don’t want to go to that temporary room and sleep on a fold out bed after the great night we’ve had.”
“Really?” He sounded suspicious.
“I need comfort, and like it or not, you comfort me. You make me laugh and you keep me from getting too caught up in my own anxiety. Tomorrow I have to get up and plan my dad’s funeral, and I don’t want to think about it tonight. If it’s too much to ask, I get it, I’ll just steal Rocco and—”
He snorted. “All right, all right, come on. Let’s go to bed. Might need a cold shower first, though.”