Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) (30 page)

He lifted his hand to her face, but dropped it when she flinched away. “Can I sit with you?”

She nodded and stepped back, and he came into the room and closed the door. She was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of pink sweatpants, from Bibi. Bibi had more curves than Sid, so the clothes sagged on her a little.

“I’m okay, Muse.” She spoke quietly, turned away from him as she walked to the bed and sat down.

He followed and sat at her side. “No, hon. You’re definitely not okay. Don’t try to put up a front. Not with me.”

She looked down at her lap and said nothing.

“Sid. What can I do?”

She shook her head. Muse knew he should leave her alone. If Bibi were in the room with them, she’d probably slap him for what he was about to do, but he had no choice. He couldn’t just sit here and let her build a wall between them, and it felt like she was doing exactly that.

So he reached out and cupped her face. When she tried to pull away, he put his other hand on the other side of her head—gently, not wanting to hurt her, but not allowing her to get free, either. He made her turn and look at him, her one working eye wide and suspicious. He held her and stared hard at her.

“I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

With a shake of his head, he leaned forward and put his forehead to hers. “I love you.”

Her shoulders began to shake. And then she began to cry. Muse scooted as close to her as he could get and folded her into his arms. When she clutched at his hoodie and pulled him even closer, he knew that she would, they would, indeed be okay.

He held her while she cried, and then, when she was spent, he held her while she settled. Against his damp chest, with a sniffle that told him she was recovering, she asked, “How’s Cliff?”

“They’re keeping him overnight, just to make sure, but he’s awake and doing fine. Just got a lot of rest today is all. And a package of bologna.”

Earlier, Demon had texted Muse a photo of Cliff, awake and alert, being loved on by a pretty vet assistant. Muse’s tearful relief at knowing his buddy was okay had been overwhelming, and he’d needed a minute in the bathroom to get ahold of himself.

Now, Demon was back here, sitting in the living room talking with Hoosier and Connor. Bibi was in the kitchen making coffee and snacks. It was nearly four in the morning, and the only person in the house who was asleep was Tucker.

“I’m glad he didn’t get too hurt. And Dinny’s going to be okay, right?”

“He’s banged up, but yeah. He’ll be okay.” Muse wanted to know who had helped Green. That name, he’d find soon.

“I’m sorry about all of this.” Her words were muffled by his hoodie.

“What? Hon, you got nothing to be sorry for.”

Her answer surprised him. “I should have told you his name.”

Yes. That was true. He’d been thinking that all night—that she should have told him, that he should have tried harder to find out, that Dinny should have stayed closer, that he shouldn’t have trusted her safety to a fucking hangaround—careening wildly from crushing guilt to maddening frustration to explosive rage.

Now, though, with her soft concession, he couldn’t agree with her. “I know why you didn’t.” And that was the truth. Putting Muse in the position to kill had been too much for her to contemplate. She was too new to this world to contemplate it. Or she had been, anyway.

And kill he would have, because Kevin Green had been a bad guy. Not just an outlaw. Fuck, not just a woman-beater or a rapist. But a very bad guy. Now that they had his name, it had taken minutes for Bart to run him. He’d been a thug for the Berdoo Kings, a notoriously violent street gang that had ruled the county twenty years ago. They’d been busted down to near-insignificance when a turf war had coincided with a crackdown and most of their leadership had ended up dead or inside.

Green’s rap sheet made Demon’s look like a bedtime story. And women were his favorite victims. He’d been excommunicated from his gang several years earlier. They didn’t yet know why, but there were few reasons a member would be excomm’d and not killed outright. If Muse had to bet, he’d say Green’s extracurricular violence had been pulling too much heat on a gang trying to get back on its feet.

And that fucker had a wife and three kids. Women could be really fucking stupid.

Muse assumed that Sid had known some of what they’d found out—his criminal record and his affiliation, at least—but if she had known it all, she would have been more careful. He had to believe she wouldn’t have been going blithely through her days knowing what kind of threat Green had really posed. Green’s old lady was an idiot, but his was not.

She unwound herself from him and sat back. “I thought I could handle myself. I thought I knew what to do, that I knew how not to let that happen again. But I didn’t know anything.”

Her hands were slack in her lap. They were bruised, too. He reached over and picked one up, being as gentle as he knew how to be. She let him, watching as he pulled her hand to his thigh and held it there. “Sid, you fought him. You tore him up. He was a huge guy. I don’t think
I
could have overtaken him on my own, and I’m twice your size and been fighting for thirty years.”

“I let him get into the house. I let him hurt Cliff. I let him…” Her sentence faded out. “I’m so stupid. I thought I was strong, but I needed to be rescued.”

“We all need to be rescued sometimes, hon. You rescued me. I just returned the favor.”

She looked up. “What?”

“When Carrie passed. That night after we buried her was…empty for me. If you hadn’t held me where I was, I don’t know where I’d’ve ended up.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I think it is. And if it’s not, then you saved me more. I was fighting myself. How weak is that?”

When she only shook her head, without looking up, Muse lifted her chin and put an arm around her again. “He can’t hurt you again, Sid. And you did that. You ended him. You doin’ okay with that?”

He would have died anyway, but there was no question that Sid’s shot had ended him first. She had killed a man. The first kill was a burden. For somebody like Sid, it was probably a heavy one.

But she surprised him again. “Yeah. I think that’s the only reason I feel like I
am
going to be okay. That I didn’t just give up when you got there. I held on. I aimed and fired. And that fucker is dead. I don’t feel bad about that at all.” She paused, and he could see a thought occurring to her. “Do you think the Sheriff’s office is done with me?”

Hoosier had talked to the Sheriff at the hospital, so Muse had an answer for her. “It’s still an open case, but that’s a formality. Green’s history with them is long, and he’s on record threatening you. He was in your house, and he obviously hurt you. Once you cleared me, they had the story of what went down. They’ll take their samples and write their report and call it a closed case. Montoya says the house will probably be released late tomorrow—or, today, I guess.”

“I can’t go back there. Not with—not like—the blood. I can’t…”

She was getting agitated, and Muse held her more tightly. “Easy, hon. Next time you see that house, it’ll look like it did when you left for work yesterday morning, I promise. Meantime, we’ll stay here for a couple of days, and we can go to mine if it gets to be too much here.”

She nodded, and they were quiet for a few minutes. Then, with her head again on his chest, she said, “My parents are going to flip. My father might literally have a stroke.”

“What do you want to do about that? We can spend all of Thanksgiving right here. Bibi won’t mind at all.”

She sat up again, pushing back from him a little. “No. I can’t cancel. That’ll just cause a bigger thing. I’d have to tell them why, and then they’d be here. If I tried to lie and give them some other kind of excuse, they’d still be here, sure I was hiding something from them. They might be divorced, but when it comes to me, they’re still like a tag team.”

With a serious look in her one good eye, she continued, “They’ll think you did this. I have to tell them the truth, because my mother will see the way I look and she will dig deep first thing Monday morning, no matter what I say. But first, they’re all going to think you beat the shit out of me—and that I let you. It’s going to suck. I understand if you don’t want to go.”

“That pisses me off. I’m not fuckin’ leaving you on your own, and if you don’t know that, you better know it now.”

“Sorry.” She smiled a little. “Okay. We’ll take on the family together.”

“Damn straight we will.” He held her close again. “You ready to try to sleep?”

With a little nod, she got up from the bed and pulled on his hands until he, too, stood. While she turned down the bed, he toed off his boots, and pulled his hoodie over his head. He stopped there, wearing a beater and his jeans and socks. He didn’t wear underwear, and he wasn’t sure how she would feel about him being naked with her.

She shimmied out of the sweatpants and climbed into bed. Seeing him standing there like a dolt, his hoodie in his hand, she cocked her head. “Muse?”

“You want me to leave my jeans on?”

He had no word to describe her look.
Touched
was the closest he could think of. “I love you.”

“I love you, hon.” He smiled. “Still not sure what to wear to bed, though.”

“I’m not afraid of you. I can’t…do anything. I need to get my head straight before I can do that again. But I’m not afraid of you. Come to bed like you always do.”

He stripped naked and slid in at her side. She nestled on his chest, and he held her.

“Hey—today’s your birthday.”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“I ruined it.” She tried to sit up, but he held her where she was. “I’m so sorry. I was going to make you a cheesecake. You said you like cheesecake. Maybe Bibi will help me later.”

“Hush, hon.” He kissed her head. “You didn’t ruin anything. You’re with me, so it’s still the best birthday I’ve ever had.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Davis opened the front door as Muse and Sid were still coming up the walk. His welcoming smile shifted when he got a load of Sid’s face. She knew it was bad—in some ways, it was worse now, after a couple of days, than when it had happened. Probably she should have warned her family about it, and she’d considered doing so, but she hadn’t been able to figure out what she’d say. At least, this way, she could respond to their reaction and maybe find the right words then.

“Jesus, Sid! What happened?!” Davis gave Muse a dark look, colored with suspicion and caution both.

Muse grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. She stepped up onto the low front porch, and Davis kissed the cheek that wasn’t bruised. “I’m okay, Davis. I only want to tell the story once, though. Are they both inside?”

Because Sid’s father had few friends and no other family in the U.S., Davis and her mother had always invited him to spend holidays with them, and he always came. It gave an odd, stilted vibe to every holiday event, and her father, who still thought of Sid’s mother as his wife, was especially awkward in the home she shared with her husband, but Sid had to admit that it was one of the nicer things her mother did. Her father would have sat alone in his condo otherwise, or he and Sid would have had a sad little vegetarian meal on their own. And Davis was very cool with it. Sid wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it had been his idea in the first place.

Her stepfather, who was younger than Muse, nodded. “Your father’s on the terrace. He and Claude had a thing about the sweet potatoes. Anita put marshmallows on them, I guess.” He turned to Muse and held out his hand, still looking like he was face to face with Charles Manson. “Davis Townley.”

Muse shook with him. “Muse.”

“Just Muse?”

“That’s enough, yeah.”

A hint of a sneer lifted a corner of Davis’s mouth. Sid had hoped that he, at least, would be moderately civil. He was a decent guy, pretty down-to-earth, considering how loaded he was. But then, she was standing there with a broken face next to a big guy with ink on his neck and rings on his fingers, wearing a kutte. They’d ridden to Newport Beach on his Knuckle. That had been her idea, because she’d wanted to start the visit with the sense of peace she got from riding with him, but it might not have been one of her best ideas ever.

Looking at the two men side by side, Sid wondered whether bringing Muse here at all had been such a great idea. When she’d called her mother and told her that she was bringing a guest and that, yes, it was a man she was involved with, she’d left out key details about who Muse was. It was just easier to fight with Claude in person, so Sid had told her that she’d met him through work—which was true—and let her think they worked together. Considering Davis’s open shock, maybe she’d misplayed that one.

“Can we come in, Davis?”

His eyes shifted back to hers, and he winced a little again at the sight of her. “Yes, of course. Come on in. The kids are in the media room. Why don’t you see your mother in the kitchen, and I’ll go talk to them, prepare them for…” He gestured at her face.

“Sure. Sounds like a plan.” Still holding Muse’s hand—or, more accurately, being held in Muse’s iron grip—they went in. Davis headed to the left, and Sid started off to the right.

But she stopped when Muse wasn’t budging. He was frozen in the foyer, staring around.

“Fuck, hon.”

‘The foyer’ was too modest a name for the space they’d walked into: a vast expanse of marble that fed into the even more vast entertaining space of this floor. Not really a living room or a family room. Closer to a hotel lobby. From the street, the house looked like a comfortable Tudor home. Inside, it was the Ritz. She hadn’t really prepared Muse any better for this meeting than she had her parents.

Well, she’d had a rough few days.

“I know. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a house.”

He turned to her with a rueful laugh. “No, it’s not.”

She dropped his backpack on the floor at the foot of the sweeping center staircase. “Yeah, it is. C’mon. Let’s get this over with.” With that, she pulled again, making him move, and led him to the kitchen.

Her mother was in there with Anita, the housekeeper, and two young women Sid didn’t know. Probably help she’d hired for the day. It looked like these women didn’t get the day with their families. Claude paid her help well, and for that she expected to get her way in all things. Sid wasn’t sure she herself would think it was such a great trade-off, but maybe it was.

Her mother had her back to them, delivering a complicated instruction about one of the dishes, so Sid took the moment they had to check in with Muse. The kitchen wasn’t any less ostentatious that the rest of the house. It had two long islands, three sinks, four ovens, and a refrigerator bigger than Sid’s closet. The pantry was its own room. Muse was taking it all in, looking a little pale.

“I didn’t grow up like this,” she muttered. “My parents did fine, but all this happened after she married Davis.”

He nodded, staring at the ten-foot-long built-in cabinet where they kept the barware and spirits. “I don’t guess I could get a drink?”

Just then, Sid’s mother turned around. Her expression went from stunned at seeing Sid’s face to pinched when she took in Muse, the change happening so quickly it seemed painful.

“Sidonie! What on earth!” She stormed over and grabbed Sid’s chin, yanking her head to the side to get a close look at the damage. “Darling, what happened?”

Sid yanked her head free. “I’m okay, Mother. I want to tell you and
Baa
at the same time, though.”

Giving Muse a contemptuous once-over, her mother said, “He’s sitting on the terrace with a cup of tea and the
Times
. And who is this?”

“This is the man I told you about. Muse, this is my mother, Claudine. Mother, this is my…” She didn’t know what to call him. “My…”

Muse held out his hand. “I’m her old man. Good to meet you.”

Claude stared at Muse’s offered hand, and even before she spoke, Sid knew that this day was going to be even worse than she’d expected.

Still staring at Muse’s hand, her mother called out, “Anita, call in Mr. Tuladhar, please.”

Muse dropped his hand just as she turned icy blue eyes on him. “What kind of a name is ‘Muse’?” She gave him a sneering, condescending smile, the kind she turned on the help when they’d stepped out of line in some way. “Welsh, perhaps?”

Shit. This was a terrible idea. They should have stayed at Hoosier and Bibi’s, where the crowd was happy and rowdy, the television was loud, the food had been simple and delicious, and there had been a weird, affectionately violent game of football going on in the backyard when they’d left.

“Mother, please be nice.”

But Muse smiled, and it was his charming, gorgeous, panty-dropper smile. “It’s a road name, ma’am. I ride with the Night Horde MC. My given name is Darren Musinski—but everybody calls me Muse.”

“Well, I think I’ll call you Darren, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind, ma’am. I don’t answer to Darren.” He was still smiling, but his voice was firm.

Claude blinked at that. Before she could answer, Sid’s father came in through the French doors and neatly kicked his sandals off. Her mother and Davis didn’t keep a shoeless house, but her father always took his off. “Ah,
nanu
! You are here!
Namaste
!”

“
Namaste, Baa
.”

She turned and smiled at her father, who froze at the sight of her, his arms outstretched. “But your face! What happened to your lovely face? Who is this man? Did he hurt you?”

“No! Everybody back the fuck off Muse! He didn’t do this! He saved me!” She took a breath, as surprised by her outburst as everybody else in the room was, and tried again. She waved at the breakfast table. “Can we sit down, and I’ll tell you what happened?”

~oOo~

Dinner was a formal, quiet, stilted affair. The scene at breakfast table had been insane, with Sid’s father practically keening, rocking in his chair with his hands flailing; her mother’s lawyer mode in full activation, demanding every fucking detail of that horrible event, cross-examining Muse, looking for breaks in his story; Davis trying and failing to keep everybody calm; and Muse sitting there stock-still and rigid, answering every challenge with his teeth clenched and his hand locked on Sid’s knee, and Sid just trying not to lose it in front of everybody.

She’d looked up in the midst of it all and had seen Helena and Harrison, her stepsiblings, standing in the entryway, their eyes wide and avid.

This day was wrong on every level, and she and Muse were supposed to spend the night. Her birthday was tomorrow, and they were supposed to spend the day out with these people to celebrate. Maybe now that they’d seen her face, that plan would be off, and they could just get back to Madrone.

Muse was now sitting at her side, trying to eat with the kind of manners that came with fancy china and sterling tableware. He was the kind of man who wiped up his plate with a hunk of bread and brushed his hands on his jeans when he was done. She could see him trying not to stir up more trouble by being an ape among swans, and she loved him for it, but she wished he’d just be himself.

This was wrong, and all her fault.

With the children at the table, the dinner conversation stayed mainly civil, with Claude making small talk she knew would be outside of Muse’s experience. She talked about the arts events they’d been to—the opera, a gallery showing—and asked him what he thought of this composer or that artist, knowing full well that he’d have no answer. Sid kept trying to divert the talk to the kids and their activities. To his credit, Muse seemed to take it all in stride. The other men at the table stayed quiet, letting Claude misbehave. Pussies.

As the meal was nearing its end, Claude picked up her crystal wine glass and took a long sip. “Of course you’ll come home. I’ll email Edward tonight. I’ll have a realtor at that house on Monday morning.”

“No, Mother. Madrone is my home. I’m not leaving.”

“Why on earth not? How can it be home? It’s the Inland Empire, for heaven’s sake. Nobody lives there on purpose. You moved there for a terrible job, from which you have now resigned. Come home, and you can go back to school and get the degree you should have gotten in the first place. You are too smart for social work, Sidonie, and you know it. You have no business”—she looked pointedly at Muse—“spending your life with riffraff.”

Before Sid could express her outrage, Muse laughed. “You are a real bitch, lady.” He turned to Helena and Harrison. “Sorry, kids. Don’t say words like that.” He winked, and they grinned.

Claude had been rendered speechless. Davis dropped his fork to his plate with a clatter. “Watch your mouth, buddy. This is my home, and you’ll speak to my wife with respect.”

He nodded to Davis. “I got no quarrel with you. But we’re not friends, so don’t call me buddy. And due respect, your old lady needs to learn some manners.” Turning back to Claude, Muse smiled—not the charmer this time. The you’re-on-an-edge-you-don’t-want-to-be-on smile. “Maybe you think I’m an idiot who’s missing all these darts you’re throwing my way, but I’m not. I love Sid, and I’m sittin’ here because she loves you, but I won’t take your shit. You want respect, you give it.”

Blanching, Claude turned away from Muse and looked at Sid’s father, who was staring at his plate. “Rajesh? Have you nothing at all to say here?”

“
Maapha ganus, Claudine-ji.
” His voice was low and hesitant. “I’m sorry. I have nothing.” He looked at Sid. “You are happy? With this man?”

Sid smiled. Her father was difficult, but he was open-hearted, and she loved him fiercely, especially right then. “
Hō, Baa.
Yes. Very. I love him.”