The Biker Who Drove Her Away novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Tarrant Cycles

Annie goes to the shop, where Krista is gracious and the Triumph sits under a tarp with a SOLD tag; Boone dares her to take it before Saturday, and Krista whispers that he told her Annie could never have a child.

I had worked at the front counter of Tarrant Cycles for fifteen years, and I walked in through the side door like a stranger.

Rafe stayed outside on his bike with the engine off.

I had asked him to.

If I walked in with him, the photo would stop being a lie.

The shop smelled like it always did, of oil, rubber and hot metal, and nothing in it had moved.

My coffee mug was still on the shelf above the register.

Krista Voight stood behind the counter in my chair.

She had her braid over one shoulder and a clipboard against her stomach.

Five months along looked bigger on her than it had under a rally jacket.

"Annie," she said, and her whole face softened. "Oh, you came."

"I came for my father's bike."

"Of course. Of course you did."

She came around the counter and pulled a stool out for me, and she did it without being asked.

"Sit. Please. You look exhausted. Let me get you some water, or there's decaf in the back."

I did not sit.

"Where is it?"

Krista's eyes went to the far corner, to a shape under a gray tarp.

I walked over and pulled the tarp off.

My father's 1974 Triumph Bonneville stood on its center stand, polished, with its tank the deep green he had picked out himself.

The seat still had his shape in it.

There was a red SOLD tag wired to the handlebar.

I read it twice.

Sold, forty-one thousand, paid in full, pickup Saturday, in Boone's handwriting.

The date on it was last Tuesday.

Nine days before the rally.

"He sold it before," I said. "He sold my father's bike before I ever walked in on him."

Krista folded her hands over the clipboard.

"I wasn't sure you knew."

"I didn't."

"I didn't want to be the one to tell you." She said it quickly, quietly, and held my eyes. "He said you'd never miss it. He said you only ever came to the shop for him."

That was a nice thing to be told by the woman who'd taken my chair.

I was angry, but she had been so gentle, and I had no way to say it without sounding like I was starting a fight with a pregnant woman.

I think she knew that.

"I'm taking it," I said.

"Annie, I don't think..."

"The title is in my father's name. Walt Gerrity. Do you want to see it?"

I had taken a photo of it on my cracked phone, years ago, for the insurance.

I held the phone up, and she looked at the screen for a moment too long.

"You'd have to ask Boone."

"I'm asking you. Where are the keys?"

"They're in his office."

"Then I'll wait."

The side door banged open before I'd finished the sentence.

Boone came in with a coffee in one hand and a nineteen-year-old prospect in his wake, and he stopped when he saw me by the Triumph.

The shop went quiet.

Two of the mechanics found something to do with their wrenches.

"Look who came to work," Boone said, loudly. "Late, as usual."

"You sold my father's motorcycle."

"I sold a bike in my shop. That's what a shop does."

"It's titled to Walt."

"Walt's dead, Annie." He said it carelessly, and the mechanics stopped pretending to work. "Everything he left you, you brought into this marriage. That's how it works. It's been mine for years."

My voice came out steady, which surprised me.

"Then put it on the floor and tell everyone here you took it. Say it. Say you took a dead man's bike from his daughter."

He smiled.

Boone always smiled when he thought a room was his.

"Tell you what," he said. "The buyer comes Saturday. If you can get it out of my shop before then, it's yours." He glanced at my stomach. "Go ahead and lift it."

Somebody laughed.

The Bonneville weighed four hundred pounds, and I was seven months pregnant.

He knew I couldn't, and everybody in the room knew he knew.

Beside him, Krista said quietly, "Boone, that's not fair."

He didn't look at her.

I walked past him toward the door.

When I passed the counter, Krista came after me with a paper cup of water, which she pressed into my hand like a gift.

Then she leaned in as if to steady me.

Her fingers went to my stomach, light, quick, almost fond.

"Ours are going to be so close in age," she whispered. "He told me you could never have one. He told me so many times."

She stepped back with her sweetest smile.

I looked down at the cup, and my hand was shaking so badly that water slopped over the edge.

"Then he told you wrong," I said. "I'm due in nine weeks, and she's his."

She went white.

It was the first time all morning that she hadn't been ready.

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