My Biker Chose His First Love novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Announcement
At the club's anniversary party Rhett Kincaid ends his marriage in front of everyone and chooses his first love. Rhona takes off her ring, and Mae hands her a memorial card with her name on it, printed three days ago.
Rhett Kincaid tapped a beer bottle against the microphone until two hundred bikers stopped talking.
It was the club's anniversary party, and I was standing by the keg with a tray of plastic cups.
My husband was about to thank the bar owner for the food. That was what I thought.
Earlier that afternoon his vice president had found me stacking folding chairs behind the clubhouse.
"Whatever Rhett says tonight, stay where you are," he said. "Don't run off. Let me deal with it after."
I laughed. "Is he finally giving a speech?"
"Something like that."
He squeezed my shoulder and went to check the generator.
In fourteen months he had never once been unkind to me.
A new woman had been in town eleven days.
She had walked into the bar one night asking for work.
By the end of the week she had shown me how to fix a stuck zipper with a pencil.
That afternoon she had brought me a coffee with two sugars, because she'd noticed I took two.
Her name was Dahlia Reeve, and now she stood at the foot of the loading dock in her denim jacket, with no coffee and no smile.
Rhett looked down at the crowd.
"Fourteen months ago I married a woman to settle her father's debt," he said. "Rhona knows that. Everybody in this lot knows it."
Phones came up all over the gravel.
I kept holding the tray.
My name was on the lease of his house.
His toothbrush stood next to mine.
Every night for fourteen months he had slept with one hand on my back.
He had never said a word about it, and I had told myself that was just how he was.
"That was business," Rhett said. "It was never supposed to be more."
Someone near me whispered, "Oh, no."
"Dahlia is my first love," he said. "She's back. I'm choosing her."
He held out his hand, and Dahlia climbed the steps and took it.
She looked at me across the lot.
"Rhona, I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't want it to happen like this."
She sounded like she meant it, which was worse.
The whole club turned to look at me.
I looked at Morton, the vice president.
He was by the generator, and he gave me a small nod, the one that meant stay put.
I looked at Rhett.
"You could have told me in the kitchen," I said.
"I'm telling you here," he said.
His face gave me nothing.
I had spent fourteen months learning to read that face, and it was shut.
"You have a room at the Pinecone Motel through Monday," he said. "Morton will take you."
So I took off my ring.
It was a plain gold band his father had picked out.
I set it on the tray between two cups of warm beer.
Then I put the tray down on the dock beside his boots.
Then I walked off the gravel.
Nobody said a word.
I walked past the long row of bikes at the end of the lot.
His Road King was the last one in the row.
Its left mirror had been cracked since before I knew him.
He had refused to replace it for eight years.
I didn't stop at it.
I went through the gate and down the road in the dark.
My phone was already buzzing with videos of me walking away.
I got as far as the back door of the bar.
Mae Dorgan was standing in the light of the doorway, smoking the cigarette she told everyone she had quit.
She is fifty-eight and she doesn't hug.
She took my hand and put something into it.
"Don't read it out here," she said. "Come in the back."
I read it under the bare bulb in the supply room.
It was a small white card with a lily on it.
In loving memory of Rhona Kincaid. Beloved wife and friend. Gone too soon.
Under that was the date.
It was tonight's date.
"A box of two hundred came to the back door Wednesday," Mae said. "Nobody here signed for it."
I turned the card over.
On the back, printed in neat gray letters, was the service time.
Saturday, noon, here at the clubhouse.
"Wednesday," I said.
"Wednesday," Mae said. "Somebody ordered you dead three days before anyone said a word to you."
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