Killian
I ride north out of the Cove. Hope’s arms are wrapped around me and her head is on my back, hugging into me. I was right, back in the car park. She wants this. Maybe she doesn’t know why, but she does. I’ve seen that look in a woman’s eye before. The look that screams out for a man. The look that screams out for a strong man to take control. And I’ve never had problem being that man.
But as she hugs into me, I wonder if there’s more. She didn’t submit instantly, as so many women have before her. She didn’t gush or smile like a minx or dance over to me and throw herself onto the back of my bike. There was resistance, sarcasm. She spoke in a biting tone. No, Hope has brains, and I’m not a toy to her. Do you know that, or just hope it?
I ignore the thought and speed us through the night.
After around fifteen minutes, I turn onto a dirt track in a bumpy stretch of dusty mud land, and head into the darkness. I have to go slow because of the bumps—we jostle up and down again and again—and the engine grows quiet.
“Where are we going?” she says.
There’s no worry in her voice, no panic. There should be panic. I’m Killian O’Connor. I’ve done things. Bad things. I lead a group of men who’ve done bad things.
“You’re not scared,” I comment.
“Huh, I guess I’m not.”
She sounds as surprised as I am.
“This is a killer on the bum, you know,” she giggles.
“Tell me—”
We go over a large bump, the bike dipping and then rising so quickly that both of us are jolted upward. We grunt in unison.
“The great Killian O’Connor, bested by a bump in the road,” she teases.
There’s a pause, and then I laugh. I laugh loudly and with genuine amusement. It’s the most I’ve laughed all night.
“There would be worse ways to go,” I say, once the laughter has stopped. “Much worse ways.”
The night sky is clear, the moon a crescent, the stars bright out here in the middle of nowhere without any light pollution. As we approach the amusement park a ten-foot-tall statue of a clown, one of its hands rotted away and its face warped and scratched away, is lit up by stars and moonlight. The clown stands beside an archway, which once upon a time was home to countless families laughing and shoving and pushing to get into the park.
I bring the bike to a stop.
“Here we are,” I say.
“You know,” Hope says, “if you were going to murder me, this would be the sort of horror movie place to bring me, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe so. But I’m not going to murder you.”
She swivels off the bike and I do the same. When I turn to her, she’s taken off the helmet. She runs her hand through her brunette hair, smoothing it out. I take the helmet from her and place it on the back of the bike. We stand next to the Harley, watching each other for a moment.
Then Hope giggles. “Don’t go back to your restaurant ways,” she says, a cute pout on her lips. But not a judged pout, like the women before her—the women who saw me as a new plaything. No, I think she doesn’t even realize she’s pouting. “You’ve done enough staring for one night.”
“Is that so?”
I shrug and turn toward the park.
“Shall we go on, then?”
“Won’t there be anybody here?” she asks. Her heels scuff the dirt behind me, and then she’s standing right next to me, her sexy body close enough to touch. But I don’t touch, not yet.
“It’s deserted,” I tell her. “Look at the place. Don’t worry. I come here sometimes, to think . . .”
“I thought you didn’t make a habit of going places just to think?” she shoots.
“Ah,” I say, and then smile.
“You are an expert wordsmith, Killian O’Connor. That was about the best response I’ve ever heard.”
“And you, Hope Warren, are an expert ballbuster. Come on.”
Without waiting for her reply, I walk toward the dilapidated clown.
In reality, the place smells of dirt and rotting wood and old metal.
But in my mind it smells of cotton candy and French fries and perfume: the perfume of the countless mothers who mill about at the entrance, buying tickets and herding children. It’s dark, but in my mind it’s bright. Lights shine out from the stalls that border the walkway. Gypsy men stand behind the counters jeering at you, begging you to play their game. The shelves behind the stalls are empty apart from dust. But I see rows and rows of teddy bears and soccer balls and water pistols. I see the park as it was when my father brought me and Patrick here.
Hope and I walk in silence for a time. Her eyes roam over the abandoned place, taking it all in. It gives me time to think. Dad comes to mind. My best memories of my father are at this place. Maybe that’s why I come here so often when the club is getting hectic. When I come here, it’s like, for a few minutes, Dad is alive. It’s like Dad didn’t die when I was a ten-year-old kid. It’s like Dad is still living and I can see him as clearly as I could see the clown at the entrance.
I remember sitting on his shoulders, his strong hands on my shins, looking over the tops of the heads of the crowd, in awe of the stalls and the lights and the candy and the fun. I had never seen such pure fun before in my life.
“Can we go this way?” Hope says. “I think I see a ghost train. It looks spooky. Cool-spooky.”
“Sure,” I answer, and we walk toward the train.
Dad was a tough, strong man. But when he came here, his inner child emerged. If you gathered up all the laughter from my childhood and totted up where each laugh happened, this place would be weighed down with laughter, winning over every other part of my childhood life. I remember when Patrick and I were playing a game where you had to knock over a certain amount of skittles with a beanbag to win a soccer ball. A bright yellow soccer ball which seemed all the brighter sitting on the shelf on a blistering August afternoon.
We missed and missed and missed, spending all our quarters. Patrick was getting mad. He was much bigger than me back then, truly my big brother. I was scared of him, truth be told. And then I heard this rumbling behind us, earthquake rumbling, and after a second I realized it was Dad’s laughing.
“You’re both throwing it too hard,” he said.
“What do you mean, Dad?” I asked.
“Here, let me show you.”
He handed the man a quarter and the man handed him three beanbags. Three beanbags to knock over five skittles, which meant you had to somehow hit two skittles with one beanbag.
“Sometimes,” he said, smiling down at me, “you have you have finesse. You have to be gentle. You have to be smart. Brute strength won’t get you everything.”
Then he turned to the skittles, hefted a beanbag, and threw it underarm. It flew slowly through the air, feather-like, and knocked one skittle and bounced into the other. Both of them fell, and Dad grinned.
“He’s going to get us the soccer ball!” I cried, in my little kid’s naïve squeak.
“This is awesome,” Hope says, bringing me back to reality for a moment.
We stand outside the ghost train, which is crumbling to pieces. The booth’s windows are without glass and the train itself sits on bricks, raised from the ground. The wooden slats of the track are rotted entirely through and the metal bars are rusted into a dark brown which looks gray in the night.
“Awesome,” I agree.
But my mind moves back, past the amusement park, past Dad’s sudden death, to the club.
Patrick was already in the club. Patrick, my big brother, was the coolest man I knew. He was in the club and when Dad died, I joined. I needed purpose. I needed friendship. I needed brotherhood.
And then what did you do, Killian? And then what happened?
I clench my fists, my arms trembling. Hope has her back to me, taking in the ghost train.
And then what? a voice screams in my head.
And then, I remember, a member of The Bloody Fists, a rival biker gang which has given the Satan’s Martyrs trouble since before I was leader . . . Since before I was a member, even . . . A member of this rival club planted drugs on my bike and called the goddamn cops. I was facing a stint in jail. But my big brother took the blame and the time.
I’m shaking, now. I’ve done my best to blot it out while Patrick was in prison, but now he’s out and he’s causing trouble. Disciplining him is made all the more difficult by the fact he was only in there in the first place because of me.
Hope turns to me. “Is something wrong, Killian?”
“No, pretty lady,” I sigh, pushing the thoughts from my mind, burying them deep where they won’t bother me for a little while. “Nothing’s wrong. Come on. Let’s check out the ferris wheel.”
She tilts her head at me, puzzling me out, but then I turn and walk away from the ghost train. After a moment, she follows me.
We sit in the sturdiest cart of the ferris wheel, which is one strong gust of wind away from collapsing. Side by side, but we aren’t touching. I can smell her. It’s a strong animal scent that drifts up my nostrils. Not her perfume, not even the cleaning product which clings to her clothes. No, it’s her scent, reaching out to me, tempting me. I feel my cock get hard, rock-hard, but it’s dark and she can’t see.
She’s still looking at me as if I am a puzzle she’s trying to solve. Maybe she’s sensed I wasn’t completely here, that my mind had travelled back two decades to when Dad was alive and I wasn’t Patrick’s boss.
I can’t have her looking at me like that. I’m the one who does the staring, not the other way around.
I decide to change the subject. I decide to do something I don’t remember ever having done with a woman before: ask her personal questions.
“So, Hope, how do you like working at the restaurant?”
“Oh, it’s great.” She smiles. “It’s fantastic. I can’t think of a better situation. The best part is when my feet ache so badly I think they’re going to fall off.”
“I’m trying here,” I say. “Don’t fight me on a simple conversation, dammit.”
She smiles again, a soft smile. The kind of smile a man dreams of having aimed at him. Maybe a man, but not you, eh, Killian? Because relationships get you buried quicker than a bullet.
“You are trying, aren’t you? Why?”
“Why?” I shrug. “I have no clue. I just am. Hell, I couldn’t stop thinking about you all night. Isn’t that reason enough? Don’t make me squirm, pretty lady.”
“The restaurant pays my bills. Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes I’m deep in the hole. Other than the wage, I don’t like waitressing. But people have to do things they don’t like sometimes, don’t they?”
I nod. “That’s true.”
We are quiet for half a minute. A light breeze blows, whistling through the metal frame of the ferris wheel and kicking up clouds of dust on the walkways.
“So what do you want to do, then?”
I barely recognize my own voice. What is this, some kind of date?
“Do you really want to know, mysterious biker man?”
I smirk. “Mysterious biker man . . . yeah, I like that. And yeah, I really want to know.”
“Okay. Don’t laugh, though?”
“Why would I laugh?”
She looks at me seriously, a crease appearing in her forehead, her cheeks glowing red.
“Okay, okay, I won’t laugh.”
“It’s a complicated answer,” she says, as though warning me.
“Jesus, Hope, I’ve never known someone to give such a build up to a speech before. Just tell me.”
“You don’t have to boss me around.”
“Problem with me is, I can’t help but boss people around. Because I am the boss.”
She shakes her head, but there’s that smile on her lips again. “Fine, Mr. Boss Man. Career-wise, I want to be a chef. I want to cook amazing meals. I want . . . I want to use my skills. I think I have skills. I think I could make an excellent chef, if I was just given a chance.”
“There's nothing better than a home-cooked meal . . . You a good cook, then?”
“I don’t want to blow my own whistle—”
“Screw that!” I bark, a tad too forcefully. But she doesn’t shrink back. Man, she’s brave. Fearless. I respect her. That’s a huge thing to admit for a man like me, even if I’m only admitting it to myself. “If you’re good at something, tell the goddamn world that you’re the best at it! Never let anyone take that away from you.”
She bites her lip, swallows, and then lets out a long sigh. “Okay, I’m a good chef. A great chef, I think.”
“So why aren’t you working in the kitchen at Gourmet’s Hollow? The food there tastes like ass half the time.”
“My boss, Lucca, is a pervert. A world-class perv. A creep. He makes men who lurk in train stations in the middle of the night, in long overcoats, ready to flash anybody who passes—he makes them look respectable.”
“Oh, right.”
I tuck that away for later. Maybe this Lucca character will one day learn not to creep on a man’s woman—
But she’s not your woman! Not yet!
It’s hard to think around a woman like Hope. A smart, sexy, brave woman.
“What else?” I ask. “You said the answer was complicated. That doesn’t seem so complicated.”
“The other thing,” and she brings her hands together, interlocking her fingers, “the other thing is that I come from a family of addicts. A long line of them. What I want, more than anything, is to never have to watch someone go through that again. The drugs and the detox and the pain and the . . .” She breaks off, out of breath. She sucks in air and her cheeks bloom an even brighter shade of red.
“I just want to be content.”
“I know the feeling,” I mutter.
“You do?” She raises her eyebrows. When she does that, she gets this deer-in-the-headlights look.
I can’t help it. My cock is so hard it might explode. Those breasts, those legs, that elfin face.
“I know a way to fix it, pretty lady,” I breathe, my voice trembling with lust.
“How?” she murmurs, her dark eyes gazing up at me softly.
“I’ll show you.”
Then I lean across and place my hand between her legs, up her skirt and against her panties.
She gasps, but she doesn’t push my hand away.