Page 23 of Snake

Also, he had saved her life. No figurative language in that statement; the man had literally saved her life. Maybe that was when she’d started to like him—when he’d yanked her out of the road and she’d been pressed to his broad chest, tucked inside his kutte, closed in his arms.

He smelled good, too. That had surprised her and momentarily trapped her within his kutte. Bikers should smell like body odor, motor oil, and smoke, right? Not the warm, herbal scent that had wafted up through his shirt.

“I talk as much as I want to,” he told her now, his tone defensive, like she’d found out something he didn’t want known.

“Okay.” She put conciliation in her tone, letting him know she didn’t mean to push. With a short swing of her arm, she indicated the path before them. “Should we keep going?”

For a second, two seconds, longer, he said nothing, still frowning at her, his eyes flicking back and forth like he was looking for an escape route in her expression.

Then he started walking toward the bar again.

A tempest forming on the horizon of her mind, Autumn fell into step with him.

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~oOo~

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As they strolled past Marie’s, Autumn looked longingly at her rental car, parked in the lot. If Cox noticed the direction of her attention, he said nothing, for which she was grateful.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like to walk, or that she wasn’t fit. She did an hour of yoga five days a week, three at home and two at a studio; she was plenty fit. But when she felt at all vulnerable, she wanted ready access to her exit. In Signal Bend she always felt vulnerable, and heading into No Place—okay, yes, that had been her idea, but regardless—she would have felt much safer if her car, and thus her exit, were just outside the door.

She could have said that out loud, of course, collected the Audi right now and driven it the few hundred feet between the diner and the bar, but when that thought occurred to her, her brain had knocked it aside at once. She didn’t want to admit any weakness to Cox.

Walking side by side, not saying much, they approached No Place on foot. It wasn’t a weekend night, and it wasn’t particularly late, so the lot wasn’t particularly full. No motorcycles parked by the door, and maybe a dozen cars and trucks scattered across the gravel lot, most of them near the building. Muted music seeped through the weathered wood boards that made the building’s rustic façade. Autumn recognized the country twang, but that was not her genre, so she didn’t know the song.

Cox stepped up ahead of her and opened the door. The music swelled into the air—a woman singing, something sad. Maybe a little familiar, but only in the ‘hear it in the market sometimes’ way.

He held the door for her. When she walked through, his hand grazed the small of her back—just for a moment, though the heat of his touch lingered quite a while.

The front door led directly into a small foyer, nothing more than a way to keep bad weather out of the bar. When Autumn paused in that narrow space, Cox leaned around her to open that door for her as well.

Maybe he thought she’d paused so he’d do just that, but her hesitation was about something else, and it held fast when the door was open. She couldn’t move her feet.

She felt Cox looking down at her as he let the door close again.

“Y’okay?”

Her voice failed her on her first try, but after a discreet throat-clear, she smiled up at him. “Yeah. I’m good.”

That frown-canyon deepened, but he didn’t say a word. Nor did he move for the door again.

“It’s nothing. Just a mental stumble.” She reached for the door herself.

A large hand landed on the door, keeping it closed. But he said nothing.

That hand had a thick silver ring on the index finger: a signet ring, with the symbol of the club, their ‘flaming mane,’ etched into it. Autumn stared at it as she gave him an answer, as if giving up a secret were a password to entering the bar.

“I’ve only been here once before,” she told Cox’s ring. “It didn’t go too well.”

“What d’you mean?”

She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. He was Horde, they knew everything in town, apparently, and there was no way this gossipy little town hadn’t chewed on her humiliation for weeks after.

Nor did she want to relive it now, literally on the threshold of the place again. The bravado she’d felt earlier, deciding she’d wander the town like someone who belonged here, as if she could manifest belonging, had evaporated between these two doors four feet apart.

“Let’s just say it was made clear I was unwelcome.” More like she’d been chased out, and practically tarred and feathered on the way.

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