Wild Fire: A Chaos Novella Read online

  “Yeah, Dutch.”

  “See you tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  “Rush wants a word, I gotta go.”

  “All right. Later, honey. Love you.”

  Dutch stilled.

  “Dutch?”

  She was over it, she sounded casual now, calling out to him because he hadn’t said his final goodbye.

  But she’d just told him she loved him.

  He knew it was going there, for both of them.

  Hell, he knew it was already there for him….and her.

  But neither of them had said it.

  “Later, baby. Love you too,” he replied.

  “Cute,” she said and hung up.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat and turned his attention to his brother.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “You got a second?”

  He had all of them that day that didn’t involve time with Georgie.

  He nodded.

  “Right, well, I got a situation,” Rush declared.

  Dutch tensed. “What kind of situation?”

  “The thing, with your boy, Carlyle…”

  Dutch tensed even more.

  “…it’s made it clear the brothers are restless.”

  That wasn’t what he expected.

  “Sorry, Rush, don’t get what you’re sayin’,” he told him when the man said no more.

  Rush put his hands on his hips and stated, “Brother, we had decades where we were men with a mission. Now we got a few years under our belts where things are copacetic. Situation is, the men are not men who are good with managing an auto supply store and building rides for customers, the majority of whom are assholes who got money with the occasional joe who knows cool.”

  Dutch just stood there, staring at the president of his MC, knowing he had not once thought he might be the only brother in his Club who felt adrift.

  But maybe he wasn’t the only brother who felt adrift.

  “They jumped in for you, for Carlyle, and I know that,” Rush carried on. “But it was not lost on me they jumped in. Chompin’ at the fuckin’ bit to have something righteous to turn their minds to.”

  “I still don’t get what you’re sayin’,” Dutch told him, though he thought he did.

  He felt it in his gut.

  A heat.

  The good kind.

  “Chaos needs a righteous cause and I have no idea what that is and how to give it to them, but I have a feeling you can help me,” Rush replied.

  “Fortunately, there are not many Carlyles in this world,” Dutch pointed out.

  “Yeah. So I suggest you and me go talk to Beck.”

  Dutch blinked in shock. “Say what?”

  Beck was the president of Resurrection, another Denver area MC.

  And Resurrection was to Chaos what Nightingale Investigations was to the Denver Police Department.

  For the most part, the causes they took on were just, but their route to resolving them was seriously direct, nebulously legal, and in Resurrection’s case, if need be, brutal.

  “The brothers who want something to sink their teeth into, they’ll get it. The brothers who want to kick back and enjoy life without that shit can do that,” Rush told him.

  “You know all the brothers will kick in,” Dutch said.

  Rush shrugged.

  Then grinned.

  After that, he got down to business.

  “It’s not once, but a number of times Beck has come to me to ask if we’d wade into shit they got goin’ on.”

  “I know. You bring that to the table. And it’s always voted down.”

  “We weren’t ready. I think now we’re ready.”

  After their own dance on the dark side, Resurrection had leapt so far to the good, they were on the other edge of the dark.

  It was understandable. They had all, but mostly Beck, lost hold on their decency.

  A man with something to prove was a man to keep an eye on.

  A biker with something to prove was a man you didn’t take your eyes from.

  An entire fucking MC with that was a force of nature.

  Chaos knew that all too well.

  The last situation Rush had brought to the table from Resurrection had been about a woman whose husband had cleaned her out—every dime in their accounts, every stick of furniture—left her with a mortgage, a toddler, a baby in her belly, but not one thing else, and disappeared.

  Dutch hadn’t paid much attention, because he knew in the end how the vote would eventually go, but discussion had been intense around the Chaos table before that was voted down.

  Though he had been one of three—him, Jagger and Hound—who had voted “in.”

  Word was, the guy was found.

  And when Dutch heard, he’d thought distractedly, because it wasn’t in his sphere, that he wished he knew how it did, and he wouldn’t have minded being a part of that.

  “We’d be assist,” Rush said. “Not up to our necks, but enough to give the men something to feed that need. And I think you’d be a good go-between. Know what we’d want, bring it to the table, even know if Resurrection passes on somethin’ we’d pick up.”

  “Rush, you were totally against this vigilante shit the entire time we were doin’ this vigilante shit,” Dutch reminded him.

  “That was then, this is now, and this is entirely different.”

  “How do you reckon?”

  “We’ll have control of what we get involved in and we won’t get involved in anything that will get our women kidnapped, for one.”

  There was that.

  “For another, this won’t be about attacks on the Club we gotta defend against. We won’t be on our back foot. Ever. We can go in knowing what we’re facing, discuss it and decide.”

  And there was that.

  “And last, this isn’t us going out and possibly buying trouble in an effort to keep our patch clean. Risks will be measured and discussed. And we can cut loose if shit goes somewhere we don’t wanna follow.”

  And yeah, there was that.

  Rush studied him acutely. “You’re not into this idea.”

  “I’m one hundred percent into this idea.”

  And he was.

  He was no cop and no private investigator.

  What he was, was Graham Black and Shepherd Ironside’s son.

  And he’d been thinking it was either go to Jules and see if he could work with other kids on a volunteer basis or suck it up and enjoy building things with Georgie while he sold fan belts.

  This was better.

  Way fucking better.

  “I’m glad you said that. Because what I haven’t told you yet is that Lee has also been in touch. They got so much business, it’s comin’ out their ears. In that, there’s a steady stream of people who need him, approach him, but when they find out his rates, they gotta take a hike because they cannot afford him. He told me he does a shit-ton of pro bono work, but he needs a good place to punt. What you did with Carlyle, he reached out and asked if we wanted to be a receiving team. I said I’d take it to the table.”

  Dutch was back to staring at his brother.

  It didn’t take long before he started smiling, slow.

  It took even less time for Rush to return it.

  And his was fast.

  “I’ll call a meet,” Rush finished it.

  “And I’ll be there. But just sayin’, I got as far as I got with Carlyle’s case mostly because of Georgie.”

  “Is she going anywhere?” Rush asked.

  “Fuck no,” Dutch answered.

  Rush smiled again and this one was bigger.

  And Dutch returned it.

  They clasped forearms, Rush turned and jogged back to the Compound, and Dutch finished making his way to Cherry’s office.

  He barely entered it when Elvira declared, “I love your girlfriend, and me gettin’ to do this isn’t the only reason why.”

  With that, she slapped a little black shopping bag against his c
hest that had white writing on it and a pretty flower stuck to it.

  “Now, I gotta get back to the commandos,” she said and walked right out.

  Dutch looked to Cherry behind her desk.

  “I think Georgie will really like them. But if she doesn’t, she can take them back and get what she wants. Don’t open the box and look, though, honey. They tie it up really pretty and she’ll want to undo it,” Tyra said.

  He nodded and said, “Thanks.”

  “Anytime. Seriously,” she replied.

  He lifted his chin to her, walked out to the steps that led up to her office and looked into the bag.

  At the bottom was a little black box tied up with white fabric ribbon and it had another of those flowers stuck on top.

  Such total class, even if Georgie didn’t dig what was inside, she’d like the packaging.

  He’d stowed the bag and was back behind the counter of Ride, shooting the shit with Chill and a prospect they called Hugger (and they called him that because the dude hated to be touched) when his phone rang.

  And he saw from what was on his screen, if it was what he thought it was, that day was going to be a very good day.

  “Yo,” he greeted Eddie.

  “Thanks for the heads-up, man. Dropped a few lines in a few ears, people started opening their eyes and watchin’, then a coupla supervisors called in a few female employees, and Jackson Stamper has been creepin’ on them somethin’ sick. They didn’t want to say anything because they thought they were bein’ too sensitive and it was only them he was gettin’ too close to, pushin’ for dates, and findin’ ways to rub up against them that couldn’t exactly be called sexual harassment, even when it totally was. He was let go this morning, and so they didn’t do that ugly, he was warned not to ask for a reference, and told, in a nice government HR way, he could go fuck himself for severance.”

  All right then.

  Dutch didn’t know if that was cerebral.

  But he hoped like fuck it’d be long-lasting.

  “Right.”

  “We got any other issues we don’t know about that you do that you can help us solve?” Eddie joked.

  “Not right now,” Dutch told him.

  “You know my phone number when you do. Later, Dutch.”

  “Later, Eddie.”

  Dutch tucked his phone in his back pocket.

  “Why you grinnin’ like that?” Hugger asked.

  The kid was surly. Big. Beefy. According to Carissa, he was “teddy-bear good-looking.”

  But he was a teddy bear to teddy bears like Chucky was to dolls.

  None of the brothers knew what was under his skin.

  Except maybe Rush.

  Rush had put him forward and Rush read—and the man had done nothing since they took him on five months ago to contradict it—that the core of Hugger was decent, solid.

  So he wasn’t lovable.

  Hound had hidden he was that for two decades.

  Catch the man with his mother, or Wilder, for two seconds, you’d know where he was at.

  “It’s just a good day,” Dutch answered.

  “Yeah, I’d have a good day every day, I woke up next to your tail,” Roscoe declared while strolling up to them, giving Dutch his usual shit about Georgie.

  Dutch opened his mouth, but Hugger got there first.

  “You wanna taste your gonads in your throat after I punch them up there, you keep talkin’ ’bout his woman like that.”

  And there was the solid.

  “Relax, mountain man, I’m just givin’ him shit,” Roscoe said good-naturedly, “mountain man” being what Roscoe called him since Hugger was blond, with a massive, bushy light-and-dark beard, like Grizzly Adams.

  “Find somethin’ else to give him shit about, leave his woman out of it,” Hugger warned.

  And Dutch had to hand it to the guy, he was prospect, and he didn’t hide he wanted the patch and was willing to work for it, but he was not backing down from a patched-in brother.

  Roscoe was assessing him, unoffended, but with interest.

  Then Coe looked to Dutch. “You good?”

  “Yup,” Dutch answered.

  “Excuse me, do you carry WD-40?” a woman asked.

  They all looked to her.

  She was pretty.

  And she was stacked.

  “Let me lead the way,” Roscoe offered magnanimously.

  They took off.

  Dutch turned his attention to Hugger. “It’s his way of tellin’ me he digs I got a good woman, man. If he didn’t like Georgie, he’d keep his trap shut on all accounts. So appreciate the backup, but you can chill.”

  Hugger looked him right in the eye.

  “You don’t talk about women like that.”

  And there it was.

  What Rush read in Harlan “Hugger” McCain.

  “You’re heard,” Dutch muttered.

  Hugger grunted.

  Chill gave Dutch a look.

  Dutch shook his head.

  And a man came up to the register with three five-quart jugs of motor oil, a gallon of wiper fluid and a spray bottle of Armor All, so Hugger went to the register to grunt his greeting, scan his shit with bad humor and grunt his “I’m done with you, get the fuck out of here.”

  All of this being precisely what Hugger did.

  So the customer left, looking confused about why he’d just paid money to have someone be ambiguously rude to him.

  And that meant that, after the doors swooshed closed behind him, Dutch started laughing.

  * * * *

  Dutch lay on his back, staring at his woman who was sitting on his still-hard cock.

  Uncontrollably laughing.

  He loved her laugh.

  He loved she was doing it wearing nothing but the earrings in her ears that were interlocking CCs with dangly bits coming down that had little pearls on them. Earrings she’d barely looked at before she was pulling the ones she had in her ears out to switch them with the ones in box.

  He loved that they’d had a great dinner where he got to stare at her looking gorgeous and happy while they cuddled together in one side of a booth, neither of them giving that first shit what anyone thought about them being that far into each other.

  And he loved that he’d just watched her ride him until she came, then kept watching her ride him until he did.

  What he didn’t love was, after she gave them that, she’d leaned down while he was still thrusting the last jets into her, and said in his ear, “My new source in the DPD said Jackson got canned today for sexual harassment. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you, honey?”

  Which of course made him clamp her on either side of the head, force her to look at him, and the only thing he could manage in that moment was to force out, “Georgie, the fuck?”

  Which took them to now.

  Georgie having pushed up and she was sitting on his dick, busting a gut.

  Her laughter dwindled and he waited until she was simply smiling down at him.

  Hugely.

  “You done?” he asked irritably.

  Then it came over her.

  With a new look on her face, she bent slightly toward him and ran her fingers along his cheekbone, down his jaw, along his throat, and ended this journey with her palm pressed over his heart.

  He waited.

  He waited for her to say what was shining in her face.

  He waited for her to repeat what she’d said earlier that day.

  So he could repeat it.

  And they could stamp it clear, right there, in their bed, between them.

  Forever.

  And she did say it.

  Absolutely.

  She just didn’t use the usual words.

  Instead, she whispered…

  “Cute.”

  And right on cue, after she said that, Murtagh jumped on the bed.

  “Mwrrrow,” he called his “are you done?”

  Dutch framed Georgie’s face in his hands, her hai
r pressed against his flesh, and he smiled up at his girl.

  She smiled back.

  And it was stamped clear, right there, in their bed.

  Forever.

  Georgie slid him out and then melted into his side.

  Dutch wrapped an arm around her and reached the other out to their cat.

  Murtagh settled in, ass to bed, body draped over Dutch’s side, resting into his paws on Dutch’s abs, Dutch scratching his booty, Georgie scratching his head.

  And all was right in the world.

  * * * *

  Meanwhile

  Meanwhile…

  As Dutch slept with Murtagh on his pillow…

  Georgiana slid carefully out of bed.

  She went to the bathroom, grabbed her robe off the hook on the back of the door and shrugged it on.

  She then moved out of the room and down the hall to the mudroom.

  They’d had their minds on other things, so they’d put their anniversary gifts on the counter in the mudroom to deal with later.

  She went to them now.

  She ignored the Chanel bag that held the box and ribbon and camellia flower with her discarded pair of non-Chanel earrings.

  And she threw open the top of the box that Dutch had opened at dinner.

  What he’d discovered inside caused him to instigate a makeout session that she had to admit might have bordered on obscene.

  But from where she was sitting, it was all kinds of awesome.

  She nabbed what was inside and walked back to the bedroom.

  She set it up on the nightstand on Dutch’s side of the bed.

  Then she went back to the bathroom, took off her robe, put on her nightie, and moved back to the bed.

  She should have known.

  She should have known she couldn’t leave him without his knowing.

  And he knew.

  All of it.

  He demonstrated this by gathering her in his arms, front-to-front, and murmuring, “You couldn’t even wait the night.”

  “Is it okay?” she asked, a little worried.

  He bent and kissed the tip of her nose in the dark.

  “It’s perfect, baby. Absolutely perfect.”

  She settled into him.

  She then settled into sleep.

  Eventually, he rolled to his belly like he always did.

  And she woke enough to adjust to fitting herself to his back.