HORIZON MC Page 2

  “Must be nice,” Chuck said, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows meaningfully at me.

  Jack could afford to make statements like that. He didn’t want for money. He’d gotten some kind of windfall at some point that filled his bank account, even if he couldn’t remember where it came from. It was more than enough money to buy the old building that now housed the Horizon MC Bar and fix it up into what it was today. And now that the bar was turning a nice profit, Jack had more money than he knew what to do with. He’d had the recent bright idea of hosting events to help revitalize historic downtown Rio Seco, where the bar was located, and that’s what the club was currently focusing its attention on.

  “Man, Ace, that redhead hasn’t taken her eyes off of you since I’ve walked in,” Chuck complained. “Don’t tell me we all need to grow out our hair and beards to get that kind of attention.”

  “She’s looking at me?” I gulped, more than a little fascinated by how that set my pulse racing. I had something of a reputation in the club as being popular with women, and it felt strange that this mystery redhead was having this kind of an effect on me.

  I was actually…nervous. And I had no idea what to do with that information. I was popular with women because I was usually so self-assured. I knew what I liked, and I knew what I wanted. The mystery redhead fit both of those desires, but there was something about her that took me completely out of my element. I wasn’t used to not being in control of the situation when it came to women. I was really, really good at taking control.

  I glanced as casually as I could over my shoulder just in time to see her quickly look the other way, taking a determined pull of her beer, studying the rows of liquor bottles lined up on the shelves behind the bar like they had some kind of message to impart to her.

  “Break’s over,” I announced, sliding out of the end of the booth. “I’ll talk to you gentlemen later.”

  “Good luck,” Jack said, toasting me with his beer bottle.

  I threw away my empty one and walked as casually as I could behind the bar, edging around Haley.

  “You good?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I’m going to take off for dinner,” she said. “I should be back in an hour or so.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I’ve got this covered.”

  “If you think you’re going to screw me out of tips, you’d better think again,” she warned, a glint in her eyes. “I’ll be back in exactly an hour.”

  “I’m not going to steal your tips,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. “We have the perfect racket going here, remember?”

  “I’ve got all the male patrons wrapped around my little finger, and you have all the female patrons,” she recited, smirking. “Well, most of the time. I flirt with everyone, just in case.”

  I leaned close, conspiratorial. “Me, too.”

  Haley laughed. “Good luck with that redhead.”

  “Close your tab with her before you go, if you want,” I said. “That’s your customer, not mine.”

  “She’s only ordered one beer,” Haley said. “And I can’t really get a read on her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know which team she swings for. She didn’t really respond to my flirting.”

  “Then it’s my team.”

  “I don’t know, Ace.” Haley slid her eyes over, and I knew she was studying the redhead. “She kept looking at you a lot, and when she would turn back to the bar, she would seem a little bit… I don’t know, angry? Afraid?”

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” I said. “Unless she’s got something about beards and beautiful men, I don’t understand what I possibly could’ve done to make her angry or afraid without even meeting her.”

  “That’s why I told you ‘good luck.’” Haley tapped the watch on her wrist. “See you in an hour.”

  “Have a good dinner.”

  I fidgeted for a few long moments with the glassware Haley had washed a bunch of glasses before going on her break, so there wasn’t much to do and examined the stash of limes and cherries and olives to see if anything needed replacing on the tray before moseying down the bar toward the redhead. She was even more beautiful the closer I got to her, a work of art from every angle.

  “Are you doing okay?” I asked her, giving her what I hoped was a pleasant smile. I was so nervous that it was hard to tell. From her reaction, though, I was afraid that I’d bared my teeth instead.

  “No, thank you,” she said, turning to look elsewhere, her eyes falling on the television, which was showing a football game.

  I waited for a few moments, certain that there had been a miscommunication and it would just take her a handful of seconds to realize that she’d answered my question in a way that didn’t make sense. But if it ever did dawn on her, she didn’t let on, her gaze burning holes in the TV.

  “You a football fan?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “I can turn it to any channel you like,” I offered, tapping the remote control in front of her. “Or I could give you the power to choose.” I didn’t know what she would do with even more power than she already had over me. If she would’ve told me to dump the margarita mixture over my head while singing a song, I would’ve done it happily. I would’ve done anything she wanted.

  She took the remote, pointed it at the TV, and turned it off. One of the regulars actually watching the game lodged a faint vocal protest that faded at the look the redhead gave him. She still looked resolutely at the darkened screen, away from me, and that was the second indication I had that things weren’t going exactly to plan for me.

  “Not a fan of TV, then?” I asked, keeping my voice friendly, but it was as if I hadn’t spoken at all. The redhead didn’t even react to me. I tried to assess the situation, God, I tried. Was there something wrong with my face? Something in my teeth? Did I smell bad? Was my zipper down, and my dick hanging out? What in the hell had I done to irritate her so thoroughly that she refused to even acknowledge my presence?

  I turned around for a moment to look at my reflection in the mirrored paneling behind the bottles of liquor on the shelves, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with me except for the fact that I was crashing and burning. I hoped Jack and Chuck weren’t witnessing this, but when I checked the reflection of the booth in the mirror, they were chatting about something else, apparently, not even looking at me.

  The same could not be said for the redhead. She was looking at my reflection hard, her brows drawn together, but when she realized I was studying her, too, she lowered her eyes again.

  I turned back around, perplexed enough to blunder onward, trying to draw something out of her.

  “Can I get you something else?” I asked, ducking my head down to try and catch her gaze, which was pointed purposefully downward, away from me.

  “I still have plenty of beer left,” she said, tapping a fingernail on the glass bottle. “And I can buy my own drinks, thanks.”

  I chuckled at her assumptions. “You have plenty of beer left because you haven’t been drinking it. You ordered that thing almost an hour ago and you’ve only taken a couple of sips. What, you don’t like it? Fruity little things more your number? I can get you a piña colada, if that would sit well.”

  “I told you that I can get my own drinks.”

  “You would be getting your own drinks. I’d just make them.”

  She looked directly at me, then, and I could see her eyes were blue as day, beautiful, and dawning with realization.

  “I’m the bartender at this joint,” I said, because I was feeling magnanimous.

  “You’re the bartender,” she agreed. “That’s why sorry I assumed.”

  “No apologies necessary.”

  “Though I probably would’ve guessed sooner that you were the bartender if you had been, you know, tending bar, instead of drinking in that booth over there.”

  Oh. It seemed like she hadn’t been really sorry after all.

  “Not much
bar to tend in the middle of the day,” I admitted. “Haley had you.”

  “And so what are you doing again, exactly?”

  “Checking on you. You don’t seem happy.”

  “I’m doing just fine.” She took a drink out of what had to be a room temperature beer at this point. “I don’t know that it’s in your job description to make sure that I’m happy.”

  She really wasn’t going to make this easy, was she?

  “I like for everyone to be happy in this establishment,” I said. “And if we’re being honest, outside this establishment, too. Are you all right?”

  “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m just fine, now.”

  She held my gaze and chugged the rest of the beer, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand before tossing a bill on the counter. Did that imply that she wasn’t doing fine before? Why was I puzzling over this? She didn’t look away until she was walking across the floor, toward the exit, and even then, I couldn’t rip my stare away.

  “What am I doing wrong?” I wondered aloud, watching the door slam shut. I brightened when it opened again, but it was just to admit Sloan and Brody, the other members of the motorcycle club. The latter checked over his shoulder a couple of times, frowning, as he approached the bar.

  “Man, that chick is not happy about something,” Brody said by way of greeting.

  “You are just in time,” Chuck called from the booth. “Ace just got rejected.” Dammit. So he and Jack had been watching.

  “No,” Sloan crowed. “By that redhead that just stormed out of here?”

  “Didn’t even get her name,” I admitted, slack-jawed, too dumbfounded by my failure to be self-conscious about it.

  “Well, did you proposition her before you even asked her name?” Brody asked.

  I slid a pair of beers across the counter to him, and he gave one to Sloan.

  “Give me a little bit of credit,” I said. “I was just being friendly.”

  “We know your brand of friendly,” Sloan said, taking a sip from his beer. “It’s can be a little too much for some people.”

  “No, I’m trying to tell you that I didn’t even get past small talk,” I said. “Didn’t even get to a point to tell her my name. All I was able to establish was that I was the bartender, and she didn’t want to be here.”

  “Well, good riddance, then,” Brody said. “If she doesn’t want to be here, we don’t want her here.”

  Brody was speaking from a practical point of view. He was the manager of the bar, taking care of the ins and outs of the business so Jack could sort of sit back and enjoy the success of his investment. Brody liked things to be orderly around here. He didn’t like fights or unfriendly patrons. If someone got too drunk, he even took them home himself. It made sense that someone like the redhead, who no one could get a read on, wouldn’t be welcomed here, but I couldn’t banish her from my mind, too. What had rankled her so much that she couldn’t even be blandly polite? Had my very presence made her act like that, or was that just her personality? I found it hard to believe that someone could be that patently unfriendly. It had gone beyond unfriendly, really. She had thrown me off everything. I still felt off balance, even with her gone from the bar.

  “Welcome to life for the rest of us,” Sloan said, clapping me on the shoulder with a look of commiseration. “You’ve been living a charmed life with the ladies thus far, Ace. Maybe your charm just ran out.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered, though I wasn’t convinced. There was something else there, and the cop I used to be wasn’t able to let that kind of thing go.

  For a weeknight, the bar was pretty busy, and I was able to push the redhead from my mind by necessity. I was holding multiple conversations with people who had bellied up to the bar, as well as maintaining an ongoing banter with the rest of the guys in the booth. Chuck retired early he was an early riser, due to the mechanic’s shop and Brody ducked into the office after a while, probably to put in orders or check inventory. The bar did well for itself, but that was to be expected. It was the only place to drink in town, so there wasn’t any competition. The tips kept coming in strong until closing that was one of the perks of a small town, since everyone knew everyone and we all helped each other out.

  It wasn’t until much later, when I was back home at the apartment, when I turned back to the puzzle that the redhead had presented. It wasn’t so much a turning back, though, as it was a complete invasion of my mind. The way her blue eyes had flashed at me in disdain. The way she simply hadn’t belonged here, like an ocean in the middle of a desert. Why had she stopped in at the bar? Why was she in Rio Seco?

  I paced the apartment. It wasn’t big, and I grew more agitated the more laps I took. I heaved a sigh and fumbled on top of the refrigerator until I came up with a pack of cigarettes, the lighter jammed among the cancer sticks that remained.

  Jack had made a funny calendar for me on the refrigerator, adapted from one of those counters keeping track of how many days it had been since an accident occurred, found in factory settings. On the top of the flippable numbers, which I adjusted from “23” to “0,” Jack had scrawled, “Days since Ace smoked a cigarette.” Back to zero.

  I was supposed to be quitting. I’d gone more than three weeks without, but I was agitated to the point of breaking into my emergency stash of stress cigarettes. Thanks a lot, well, whoever she was.

  If I drank the Kool-Aid I found on the internet about smoking, though, I knew I only had myself to blame. I might not have been able to control how the redhead treated me, but I could always control my reactions to other people. I was the only one in control of my feelings and my actions, and I could choose whether I really wanted to smoke this cigarette or not. Fuck it. I could always stop after the new year, let it become a resolution for yet another year…

  “Goddammit!” I exclaimed, launching the pack of cigarettes across the kitchen. They hit a cabinet and clattered down to the floor, scattering.

  Why did I feel like this? I slid the door open to the tiny patio not much more than a pad of concrete surrounded by a dilapidated wooden privacy fence and looked up at the sky. The stars out here shone so brightly, and I concentrated on my breathing, coming out in puffs of vapor because of the cold. There were places were the stars dazzled you, and you couldn’t help but get giddy at just how many of them there were. You felt small in the best way. Small and infinite.

  I exhaled purposefully, and my urge to light up gradually seeped away. Something about watching my breath come out in clouds helped, tricking my mind, perhaps, into believing that I was smoking a cigarette.

  The real trick, though, was figuring out why I was in this state to begin with. It wasn’t the end of the world, some girl not liking me. Just because I’d had a ton of successes before today didn’t mean that I had to be so shaken up inside. There was something about the redhead that troubled me. I’d never seen her before in my life, so I could rule out some link to my past.

  With a rush of realization, I understood that the possibility of knowing her from before was what had been consuming me. I’d never seen her around Rio Seco, but she had to be from somewhere, just like I was. And I’d left that somewhere because of some pretty serious incidents. The kind that still showed up in my nightmares from time to time, though not as viscerally as Jack’s nighttime wanderings.

  The kind that had me worried that, eventually, someone would show up looking for me, searching for the man who used to be a cop, retribution in mind.

  But could it really be fear that motivated my angst over the redhead?

  I went back inside it was frigid outside tonight and reset the smoking calendar to “23,” hesitating before I gave a small smile and turned the second number to “4.” Twenty-four whole days without a cigarette. Amazing.

  I took a quick shower and laid down in bed, swathed in blankets, loath to crank up the heat and get another exorbitant electric bill. It would be nicer if I had another body to help heat up the covers, but that just wasn�
�t in the cards for tonight. Tomorrow was another day, I was living in paradise, and I’d probably never see the redhead again.

  Chapter 2

  “Great news, Ace.”

  I looked up from the cooler I’d just de-iced, boxes of beer littering the floor of the bar. Brody beamed at me, looking like he’d just won the lottery or something.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Happy to have this hunk of junk back in commission?”

  “Well, that’s nice too, of course, but I happen to know that your redhead is staying here in town. Saw her working on her bike in the parking lot at the motel.”

  I let out my breath in a whoosh and rocked back on my heels. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily good news,” I admitted.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little challenge.”

  “I thought she was just moving through town,” I said. “I didn’t think she’d be staying. I didn’t think I’d see her again.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you give up on a girl you liked,” Brody said. His eyes danced with amusement, the blue closer to corn silk than the deepness of the redhead’s blue eyes. I shook my head, more than a little horrified at the thought that had sprung into my mind, errant and unwelcome.

  “I don’t think I like her.”

  “I call bullshit. She’s gorgeous. Just your type.”

  “I don’t have a type.”

  “Yes, you do. You like women. She’s a woman. She’s your type.”

  “Laugh it up,” I told him as I replaced the beer in the cooler, arranging it by type so it would be easier to dig out for patrons when we started hitting a rush over the weekend. It was hard to find a seat in here on the weekends, because time off from work meant time in the bar. The people of Rio Seco had their priorities right, in my opinion, if I was interested in the success of the bar and the tips making my wallet fat.

  I didn’t know how I felt about the redhead staying at the motel. Well, I knew how I felt about it, I just didn’t know which feeling I should examine first. The initial shot of anxiety was accompanied by curiosity. What was she in town for? This was a place to pass through, but the most action the motel usually saw was for trysts that had to stay away from home and for people to live in temporarily after those trysts got discovered at home. I couldn’t ignore the bubbling determination at getting another chance to crack the mystery of her, to try and figure out what I’d done that first day and worm my way into her heart.