The Biker Who Married Me Without Asking novel · Chapter 35 of 48

Chapter 35: Alone in the Garage

Cade's POV

I told her I would be at the garage until late.

It was true, and it was the first lie I had told her in a year.

I did not call it that then.

I called it a small omission to carry something heavy alone, and I was good at carrying.

Rory came in at eleven with his hands in his jacket pockets.

I had pulled the bay doors down.

One light burned over the workbench, and the compressor ticked, and the whole shop smelled of oil and cold metal.

"Brother," he said.

"Sit."

He sat on the stool where Willa had told me about the baby.

I did not look at it.

"Take the ring off," I said.

He turned it on his thumb.

"Cade."

"Take it off, and put it on the bench."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he worked the thick silver band over his knuckle and set it down on the steel.

There was a scratch across the top, small and bright, the length of a fingernail.

I looked at it, and I had to put my hand on the vise.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Everything. Not the hospital. The truth."

For a minute he did not speak.

Then his shoulders came down, and his whole face changed.

The quick humor went out of it, and what was left was a man I had known at twenty-five.

He was thin and scared and ashamed, and he did not ask me to believe him.

"I owed the Tide eighty thousand," he said. "A card game in Coos Bay, the summer before. I played a bad hand and then a worse one to get it back. They gave me till September."

"You never told me."

"I told nobody. I was twenty-six and I thought I was clever." He rubbed his face. "The night I rode out, I was going to meet them. A truck got behind me on the headland road. I took the corner too fast to get away."

I did not move.

"I went into the water. I'm telling you the truth about that, Cade. The bike went off and I went with it, and the sea threw me on the rocks, and I lay there with a broken collarbone and my vest in a kelp bed, and I thought, they'll look for me."

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