Talon - A Warriors MC Romance novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One Night

June cleans her up, Talon stitches her brow at the kitchen table, Dane gives her one night, and in the morning Terrence's truck is at the gate with a deputy.

"She's bleeding on my porch, Dane," Talon said. "Move."

My brother did not move.

He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame, and his eyes went from my brow to my bare foot and back.

"Alexis," he said again, quieter. "Who did this?"

"My husband."

"Terrence."

"You know his name?"

He didn't answer that.

Behind him a woman's voice said, "Dane Hourigan, if you don't get out of that door, I will put you out of it."

A small woman in a gray hoodie and scrub pants ducked under his arm.

She had dark curls piled on her head and a face that had clearly just been woken up and had decided not to mind.

She took one look at me and said, "Okay, sweetheart. Kitchen. Now."

"I'm June," she added, steering me by the good elbow. "Your sister-in-law. I'm so sorry we're meeting like this."

I had not known I had a sister-in-law.

I wanted to say that out loud, but my teeth had started to chatter.

The house behind the clubhouse was a long, warm place that smelled of coffee and motor oil.

June sat me on a kitchen chair under a bright light and turned my face one way and then the other.

"Head hit something hard," she said. "Did you black out?"

"For a second."

"Do you know what day it is?"

"The first Friday. It's Saturday now."

"Good enough." She turned. "Talon, I need the kit from the hall closet. Wick, stop hovering and make coffee."

A skinny kid with a buzz cut and a plain leather vest, who had been hovering in the doorway, vanished.

Talon came back with a white metal box and set it on the table.

"That brow needs stitches," June said. "I could do it, but my hands are shaking, and I'm not going to put in a crooked line on your face."

"I'll do it," Talon said.

"You will?"

"I've done more than you'd think."

He pulled a chair around so that his knees bracketed one of mine.

He smelled like cedar and cold air.

He washed his hands at the sink first, slowly, where I could watch him do it.

Then he took my chin in his fingers.

His hand was big and rough and warm, and his thumb rested against my jaw.

Terrence had held my chin like that an hour ago.

I went rigid.

Talon felt it and went still.

"Alexis," he said. "I'm going to take my hand away."

He did.

He put both hands on his knees, where I could see them.

"This is your face," he said. "You say when."

My throat was tight.

"Go ahead," I said.

He lifted the needle, and then he reached out again, slowly, and rested two fingers against my cheekbone.

This time I let him.

It took six stitches.

He didn't talk, and he didn't make a joke to cover it.

He worked in total silence, with his dark eyes on my brow and his breath moving on the side of my face.

I looked at the tattoo on his forearm, the three black hawk claws, feeling every tug of the stitches.

"Done," he said at last, and taped a square of gauze over it.

His thumb stayed on my jaw a moment longer than it needed to.

Neither of us said anything about that.

June put a mug in my hands.

Over the rim I saw Dane standing in the kitchen doorway, arms folded.

He had been there the whole time.

"One night," he said.

"Dane," June said.

"One night. Tomorrow we get her to a motel in Pittsburgh with a room paid up for a month, and then we talk."

"A motel," I said.

"It's safer."

"Safer for who?"

He looked at the floor.

I put the mug down very carefully.

"I drove forty minutes with a broken wrist because you're my brother," I said. "I haven't heard from you in five years, and the first thing you say is that I can't be here."

"I know how it sounds."

"Then tell me how it is."

"I can't."

He said it flat, and he did not look at me.

June stared at her husband as if she didn't know him.

Talon didn't look at anybody.

He gathered the needle and the gauze and wiped down the table.

"She's not going to a motel," he said.

"Talon."

"I said she's not."

"She gets the night," Dane said. "I said that already."

"Then I'll sleep outside her door."

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"I know I don't."

June showed me to a bedroom at the back of the house with a quilt on the bed and a pair of her sweatpants folded at the foot.

I lay down in my clothes, and I could not sleep.

I could hear a chair creak out in the hall, and every time I stopped listening for Terrence, I started listening for it.

Somewhere around five I fell asleep to that sound.

I woke at nine to June shaking my shoulder, and the first thing I saw was her face.

"Honey," she said. "Get up. Don't look out the window."

I looked out the window.

Terrence's white company van, with KINGSWOOD ROOFING on the door, was parked behind the truck I had left, and the man standing next to it wore a county deputy's uniform.

Terrence stood beside him in a clean blue polo shirt, holding a piece of paper.

He looked up at the window, found me, and smiled.

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