Redemption Road

Book 12: Wolf Harbor

by L.J. Breedlove

Genres: Shifters; Paranormal

Synopsis

Some Things Haunt You Forever

There is trouble in the Okanogan.

Benny and Ryder Garrison grew up there, a part of their father’s shifter pack. But their father has disappeared, and the pack has slowly disintegrated — and it wasn’t the most stable of packs to begin with.

The neighboring Penticton pack in British Columbia is causing problems — again — and the Penticton Alpha is thought to be a part of the pipeline that allowed Vancouver to amass a young shifter army. That fell apart when Hat Island Alpha Abby Stafford killed the Vancouver Alpha, but there are still all those young shifters, just waiting for a leader. The whole region is about to go up in flames — just days before the big meeting of the World Council of Alphas in Seattle.

Fix it, Abby ordered. And really, Benny and Ryder are the only two who probably can. Interlopers to the region aren’t welcomed in the best of times.

When Jessie Nickerson insists she’s coming along because there’s a rumor her missing fiancé might be up there, the brothers barely muster a protest.

The region’s mess might be easier to face than their own demons, however — Ryder with nightmares of the Iraq war, Jessie with her search for her missing fiancé, and Benny with his fears of the Hat Island pack has done.

A book in the Wolf Harbor universe, Redemption Road follows Girls School.

 

Read more

Release date: January 23, 2024

Print pages: 419

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Day 156 of the re-emerged Hat Island pack, Sunday, Nov. 10, I-5 freeway

The day was like the day before — and the day before that — misty, overcast, gray. Benny Garrison was grateful, really, because the alternative would be windy, rainy and gray. Such was winter in the Puget Sound. He realized he hadn’t checked what the weather was like in Penticton — or the Okanogan, for that matter — where they were headed.

He was rusty at this — it had been a while since he rode out on a motorcycle with Ryder. Well, Ryder wouldn’t have forgotten to check. For the first time in a long time, Benny relaxed. He wasn’t in charge. He really was just along for the ride. Ryder was in charge, and the guards looked to him. Oh, if he asked something of them, they’d probably obey — all of them had been chosen because they’d ridden with Benny in the past. But they were Ryder’s men, not his.

Who knew his kid brother would turn out like this? Benny smiled, a bit wistfully. Ryder had been a stubborn handful even as a kid. Growing up Native American in the Okanogan region wasn’t easy. The schools were a mix of rural white kids, migrant Mexican-Americans, and members of the Colville tribe — and a whole lot of kids with mixed heritage like Ryder. Of course he hadn’t been Ryder then, just one more stubborn, belligerent George boy.

Ryder’s mother, Naomi George, had been the high school guidance counselor when Benny showed up in the Okanogan schools. And for all of the diversity in the district, a half-Cambodian teen with PTSD was in a category of his own. Benny credited Naomi for getting him through high school in one piece and off to college at the University of Washington where he found his feet.

She was as close to a mother figure as he had. He called her regularly. She accepted that he didn’t come to visit — after all, she thought he was in his 60s, just a handful of years younger than she was. He shook his head a bit. The truth was, he didn’t visit because he looked 25. It was hard to maintain relationships with humans.

But Benny’s father, Tom Garrison, had fallen in love with his son’s high school guidance counselor. They’d married, and at 26, Naomi had decided she wanted a child. Benny didn’t think his father had been consulted, which he had always found amusing.

Ryder looked like his mother. Warm brown skin, dark, almost black hair, stocky and strong. Benny looked more like his mother, a Cambodian woman who died in childbirth. They were actually about the same height — just under 6 feet tall — but Benny was slimmer, more limber. Part of the differences were genetic, but it was also because Benny practiced Muay Thai, and Ryder lifted weights for the upper body strength needed to manhandle a Harley Davidson motorcycle — and his men. Nurture did matter.

Benny followed Ryder out of Everett to I-5. Jessie Nickerson rode pillion behind Ryder, and she looked more comfortable; she had gotten the hang of riding after a long day yesterday. Ryder had been right to insist that she ride with him on that wild trip from Vancouver to Hat Island if she was going on this mission.

Jessie was a concern.

An unknown variable in an already complex equation. Well, they’d just have to see what happened.

Benny suspected Jessie didn’t know herself what she would do. She was just following her promise to find her fiancé after escaping from the Vancouver Alpha’s house. That he might have switched sides and was now a member — perhaps even pack Second — of the Penticton pack didn’t deter her. Benny thought it was about having a goal, as much as anything. Jessie didn’t have to deal with what she was going to do with her life — she had a mission: find her fiancé. It gave her purpose. And right now, Jessie Nickerson needed a purpose.

Benny liked her. She’d worked with him at Margarite’s house for the last week, counseling the once-human women who had been rescued from that same pack house she’d escaped from. She needed counseling herself after all she’d been through, but she was holding it together better than most. Benny grimaced. Jessie was 23, a recent college graduate in psychology, whose grandfather had handed her over to the pack Alpha to be a fourth woman in his household. Who did that kind of thing?

Shifters, unfortunately. During a career as an intelligencer for the Northwest Council of Alphas, Benny had been in and out of more pack houses than most — and concluded there were more ways to abuse women than he’d ever dreamed. He’d quit after finding out that the Council used his intelligence to build power, not help the victims. Eventually, he’d ended up in Berkeley getting a PhD in psychology.

Physician, heal thyself, he mocked. Jessie wasn’t the only one who desperately needed the therapy they were being asked to give others.

Not going to think about that, he reminded himself.

The other guards of Ryder’s motorcycle club followed behind Benny, stringing out in the slow lane. There was no hurry. For them, it was just another day’s ride behind the boss.

No hurry, Benny thought with pleasure. Two hours to Abbottsford, and they’d be in Canada. Get lunch there — shifters, like armies, marched on their stomachs — and then head east. Beautiful rugged country

 along Highway 3, but the road was good. There might be snow, and that was always tricky on a bike. But that was later. Now? Just the road, and the freedom to think.

Although he found he didn’t want to think either. All the questions that Cujo had posed over breakfast this morning, plus all of his own, swirled in his mind, until finally he shut them all down. Today, he would ride. He could think later.

And if he felt like he was running away? Well, it was with his Alpha’s blessing, wasn’t it?

He carefully avoided thinking about what he was running away from.

His wolf whined a bit. Benny automatically reassured him that they weren’t literally running away from anything. No one was chasing them.

His wolf. One of the long list of things he didn’t want to think about. It felt like he was in a constant dominance fight with his own wolf, and that was a sign of impending disaster for any shifter. You lost that fight, and you went wolf. Supposedly there was no coming back from that. There were stories of insanely large wolves in the Canadian forests, smart, fierce, wolves. Wolves that had once been human — shifters. But they went wolf, for whatever reason. Some deliberately. Some because they stayed in wolf form too long. But there was no coming back, once you’d gone wolf.

Except Benny had.

The shifter world celebrated him for it. It had all the feel of the original Iditarod. Benny ran across Russia in wolf form to deliver the news of what caused all the deaths of young shifter girls when they faced first shift, and to call the shifters of Russia to a gathering that would decide the fate of the world.

Great stuff. Except he’d gotten trapped in wolf form for too long.

So, he and his wolf had bargained. Find pack, find the Alpha, friend-mate. Save the stories he was sent to deliver, save the stories of the Cambodian pack he’d been entrusted with decades before, jettison anything else the wolf needed to throw out, and go on.

His wolf whined again, troubled that he had done something wrong. No, Benny assured him. We’re heroes. You’re a hero.

But the truth was, Benny hated to shift now. He was afraid he couldn’t shift back. Just days ago, they’d been attacked, and Benny had shifted to fight. It had taken a command from Cujo to regain control of his own wolf. And he knew his reluctance to shift was causing his wolf to fear returning control to him — his wolf was afraid Benny would never shift again. And his wolf wanted to run. Wanted — needed — that freedom.

Benny couldn’t blame him. Hell, he wanted to run again like that. That was the lure — the real reason shifters went wolf, he suspected. The freedom to run and not be troubled by the world again? He desired it, like an addict looking for his next fix.

Riding a bike like this might be as close to that as you could get in human form.

He grinned. Back on that first trip out with Ryder, he’d experimented with letting his wolf surge to the surface and take control — shared control, really. His wolf had better motor skills, but no regard for things like speed limits or rules of the road. Remember? He asked his wolf. His wolf grinned back at him. Remember, it’s shared, Benny warned the wolf. I do the speed limits, you run the bike. His wolf agreed and surged closer to the surface.

Benny laughed as his wolf steered the bike, and Benny kept an eye on the speedometer and on the others on the road. They experimented with shifting levels of control — playing really, almost a form of tag. They ceded control back and forth, both of them laughing at each other.

This was exactly what he needed. Benny let go of all of his worries — except for speed limits and cops — and sank into the pleasures of the ride.

They ate at a bar in Abbottsford — one of Ryder’s regular stops. A good home-style hamburger with lots of meat, hand-cut fries, and good beer. There was a lot of banter among the men until the food was served. They seemed to ignore Jessie, and she was quiet, staying close to Ryder, as

she’d been instructed. Benny approved. She was playing this right. He would have liked to have checked in with her — ask her how she was doing. But she was staking her position as Ryder’s girl — did she know that? — and he wasn’t going to interfere with that message just because he was snoopy.

He grinned as he got back on his bike. He was always snoopy, he admitted cheerfully. It had made him a renowned intelligencer back in the day, and it served him well as psychologist. And having an Alpha who was as curious as he was, was a joy. She had a tidier mind, he admitted. Her questions went onto lists, and often had bullet points. His were more of a jumble, like he tossed them into toy bins to be taken out and played with later.

His wolf sent him an image of a kid’s room with brightly colored bins, overflowing with toys, and a question mark. Exactly like that, he told his wolf. His wolf laughed. Benny grinned. The ride up I-5 had been good for both of them. A shared balance of power. Was that the way forward?

Something to consider. He envisioned tossing this idea into one of those bins, and it made him laugh. Well, they said that those who could laugh at themselves would never lack for amusement.

They slowly went through town, and then merged onto Highway 3. Benny could feel the ride already in unused muscles, especially in his abs used unconsciously for stability on the bike. He didn’t know what Ryder had planned for the night. He hoped it included a hot shower.

Ryder was taking the southernmost route, Highway 3, which had fewer towns, among other things, but it was slower. It was a winding highway that often had deep canyons to one side, and a steep mountain to the other. Taking the curves was a pleasure — Benny let his wolf do some stretches, but the wolf’s confidence in his reflexes made some of those curves a hair-raising experience. They traded off.

This was high desert like the Okanogan, with sagebrush and scrub pines, and the brown remnants of bunch grass, amid outcroppings of rock. Bu

t there was also the towering peaks and the canyons with dark forests and at the top, snow. Magnificent country. You could go for miles and see no evidence of human habitation besides the road itself. This land hadn’t changed since the gold miners had first worked their way north. Not since the fur trappers had come from the east centuries before that.

Except for this road, the tribes who had roamed this land from time memorial would find it familiar. And Benny figured it would stay like this for generations to come. Some things you could count on.

This land was gray, too. Unlike the misty grays of the Puget Sound that played over the ubiquitous greens of the rhododendrons, this gray was dustier, and the browns of rocks and dirt substituted for those evergreen shrubs. He knew Yui could probably tell him a half-dozen different species that he was lumping into rhododendrons, and he was glad of it. Her knowledge, along with Okami’s, made Hat Island a garden masterpiece. But for his purposes, they were rhodies. And here? There was sagebrush instead — which probably was also more than one species, now that he thought about it.

The high desert was colder and drier than the Puget Sound. Benny could feel it on his jaw left exposed by his helmet, and one strip of flesh left bare above his right glove. He grimaced. Rookie mistake. He’d do better tomorrow. He had a balaclava in his pack. He’d need it.

There was wind too. Not enough to make riding difficult, but the cold reached him even through his leather jacket and wool sweater beneath.

It took nearly four hours to reach Penticton. Penticton was a town of loggers and farmers, overlaid with a booming tourism economy. The town sat on a lake that provided year-around attractions, and there was skiing in the winter. It used to be a party town, although Benny had heard it had cleaned things up for an older, more affluent crowd.

Pity. Benny had been up here many times when he’d been in high school. Later he’d been up here for the infamous MC Hammer concert where the street party after the concert got so out of control the local cops had called in the Mounties for help, and they’d eventually had to use tear

gas. Benny grinned. Good times.

So while the fancy hotels and trendy restaurants faced the lake, there were plenty of seedier bars along the highway. Benny doubted they’d even bother to go look at the lake, although it was gorgeous. Some of the clearest, deep blue waters he’d seen. No, these men would be looking for a beer. And bonus if the bar had a big-screen TV to watch the game. He was sure there must be a game of some kind — there always was.

This was Canada — maybe it would be hockey. He grinned again.

Ryder pulled into the parking lot of a rather run-down, two-story motel, built in the ‘60s, with doors that faced the parking lot. While Ryder went into the motel office, everyone else stretched and undid their helmets and gloves. Benny stationed himself near Jessie. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust these men to behave themselves with her. They would, especially since Ryder had basically staked his claim. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be intimidating; they were rough, hard men.

Jessie didn’t seem intimidated, Benny conceded. Well, she’d been through hell. These men probably didn’t even score in the top 10 of her nightmares.

And he was going to see to it that it stayed that way. He liked the men — Trip and Kev, Mucho and all the rest of them. He’d drank with them, fought alongside them, and even fought them. Sometimes a good brawl cleared the head. But he was clear-eyed about Ryder’s Wolves too. They weren’t a bunch of townies out for Sunday rides. They were all men who had a violent past, who couldn’t quite fit in with the norms of society, who had found Ryder and the Wolves to be a way of life they could live with. Much as a different generation of men had found his father in the Okanogan, Benny realized. For all practical purposes Ryder was their Alpha, although Ryder himself looked to their father as Alpha.

And Ryder ruled them with a kind of tough dominance Benny had seen demonstrated just

 yesterday. He could pound all of them into the ground and had when needed. Some of them more than once. And they were comforted knowing that he was in control of them even if they lost control. Running these men was a brutal way of life.

Benny looked at Jessie, considering her. Watching her and Ryder face off this morning had been revealing. He tried to estimate her dominance, to compare it with Ryder’s. But estimating a woman’s dominance was hard, he’d found. A man? He could size up where they stood with each other in minutes. And he was the most dominant shifter here. He chose to submit to Ryder’s leadership, to place himself under him, but he was the more dominant. And both of them knew it. The others probably didn’t — Benny had always been able to hide his dominance behind a shield of the ‘good-natured playboy.’ It was what had made him an effective intelligencer for the Council back in the day. It was a shield that was hard to set down, even still.

He sighed and shook off the memories. He raised his eyebrows at Jessie. “Doing OK?”

She laughed. “I love it,” she said, surprising him. “That was great!”

The men around them grinned at that. She couldn’t have said a better line to win them over, Benny thought with amusement, especially because it was truly said, and the men could see it.

“Have to get you your own bike,” he said, teasing her.

She grinned. “I might like that.”

Ryder came out with a bunch of keys — real keys with large plastic fobs attached. He handed them out to the men. Two to a room, except for Benny who got his own room. And Jessie who didn’t get a key at all. She didn’t look surprised or upset, so Benny assumed she and Ryder had already discussed this when they laid out the plan for the trip.

He considered whether he should offer himself as her refuge. He’d come to like and respect the young woman during the week of counseling those broken women. It was a testament to her resiliency and strength that she wasn’t broken too.

But this might break her, he feared. What was to come was going to be bad, no matter how it went down. Benny knew that Abby expected him to

pass on the intelligence they’d gathered from their attackers, but he hadn’t figured out how to start the conversation. He, Benny Garrison, at a loss for words?

But how do you tell a young woman that the fiancé she loved, and had been fiercely determined to find, was probably the man who had sent those teams of wolves after them — and not to find her either. No, he’d made no effort to find her. She’d searched the whole Vancouver area for him all week since her escape. She’d go off for a morning or an afternoon, coming back grimmer each time.

The bastard. He’d abandoned her. And if he was strong enough to become pack Second in Penticton, then he had been strong enough to sneak Jessie out and take her with him. But he hadn’t. He’d left her there.

Had he known what he’d left her to? Benny considered that. Maybe not, when he left Vancouver after being banished, Benny conceded. But Penticton had been a part of the pipeline that had supplied Chen with his soldiers. By the time he challenged for pack Second, he had to have known his fiancé was going through hell.

Benny was cold-eyed and grim as he thought about why a man would do that. He hoped he’d be the one to take the bastard down and beat answers out of him. It would be a pleasure.

“OK, listen up,” Ryder said. “We all know the bar here. Last Chance. It’s not a bar the Penticton pack frequents. It’s a biker bar. A bar for men like us.” He smiled lazily at Jessie. “And our women.” Jessie blushed and laughed.

“So we’re going to go over there, park our bikes out front, and we’re going to have a good time,” Ryder continued. “But mostly we want to know what’s going on in town? You know the drill. We just went through this in Omak and Okanogan a week ago. Collect the dirt. We’ll figure out what it means in the morning — when we’re sober.”

There was more laughter at that. “So, don’t get into a fight I can’t get you out of,” Ryder said cheerfully. “Don’t flirt with a woman you can’t leave behind. And we’re leaving town early. We’re in Penticton pack territory, and I’m not ready to take them on directly, not yet. So we

get up, eat breakfast across the street, and head out. We’ll set up camp down by Osoyoos. That’s outside of Penticton territory, and if they come for us, it’s not far to Dad’s territory where we have backup.”

The men nodded at that.

Ryder continued, “In particular, we’re looking for a newcomer to town. A man named Titus Black, although he may not be known under that name. He looks to be 40, but hard years, weathered, rawhide thin. Given to wearing cowboy boots and hat. He’s Dad’s Second, for those of you who don’t know, and we think he may have been kidnapped and held here.”

Ryder let out a long breath, and the next piece was said to the men, but he was looking at Jessie as he said it, “And keep your ears open for another newcomer, a college boy, Norwegian, 25, named Bjorn Hansen. We need to know all we can about him. We think he might be the new Second of the Penticton pack.”

Jessie met his eyes and nodded. Benny was relieved; at least she knew that much.

“I don’t have to remind you, we’re going into a human bar and we act as humans. That means pull your punches!”

The men laughed.

“All right, you’ve got an hour,” Ryder said. “Get some showers. You need them.”

The men laughed again, good-natured about the insult, and headed off to their rooms. Benny followed them slowly to his own. He felt protective of Jessie, he acknowledged. Benny glanced back at the two of them, who were heading to their own room — the one closest to the motel’s front office. He watched them carefully, worried Jessie didn’t know what she was getting herself into.

But then he caught the expression on Ryder’s face and blinked. Oh, he thought, enlighted.

My baby brother is falling in love.

Did he even know?

Benny shook his head. Well, that will add a twist to the drama ahead, he thought sourly. Shit.

 

CHAPTER 2

Day 156 of the re-emerged Hat Island pack, Sunday, Nov. 10, Penticton

Jessie surveyed the double bed in the center of the motel room. Somehow she’d always thought motels and hotels were more glamourous than this. She wasn’t going to admit it to anyone, but this was the first time she’d ever stayed in one. Not even as a kid. Her family primarily traveled to see relatives, or to camp out in places like Victoria or Prince George. No motels.

She had to say she wasn’t impressed. The room was mostly done in dirty grays and grayed browns. The bedspread was a weird floral thing where the purple flowers had long ago faded into just another part of the grays and browns. There were beige drapes at the window, the old pinch-pleat kind, and they were limp — one corner sagged.

Ryder looked around too, as if he was seeing it through her eyes and he sighed. “It’s cleaner than it looks,” he offered.

Jessie started laughing, and he grinned. “Take a shower,” Ryder ordered. “And I had Mei pack an outfit for the bar. It’s tight, and glittery, and probably not your style at all. And no, I don’t know how Mei could pull that together on such short notice. Because it most certainly isn’t her style!”

Jessie giggled, picturing Mei dressed in tight blue jeans, and a glittery T-shirt. “Not to mention I’m probably 5 inches taller than she is,” Jessie agreed. “I suppose I need makeup and big hair to go with it?”

“Not big hair,” Ryder decreed after looking her over. She felt a bit uncomfortable under his regard. “Your hair is long enough, you can wear it down. But yes, makeup. It’s in there too.” He looked at her boots. They were black with a low heel which had been great for the bike. He shrugged, and she guessed they would do for the bar too. They would have to, they were all she had, unless Mei had worked wonders there too.

“There’s some earrings in the kit,” Ryder said. He glanced at her ears, which weren’t pierced. “She figured you didn’t have pierced ears, so we’re good. I don’t know what all else she gave you.”

Shifter women had a hard time with piercing their ears. If you did it, you practically had to wear studs 24/7. Jessie had never bothered.

Jessie hauled the pack into the bathroom with her and closed the door. She showered and dressed quickly, trying not to think about how she looked. The blue jeans were really tight; she was afraid she was going to have to ask Ryder to help her get them zipped. They hugged her legs all the way down, and then slid into her boots. The button-front shirt was sleeveless, and darts made it form-fitting. Really form-fitting. It was pink. Jessie rolled her eyes. And it did have sparkly shit on it. She did her makeup, the one thing she felt confident in doing, and she made it bold. It would have to be, to go with the shirt. And the earrings, which were long and dangling and had pink coral bits in them. With clip-ons, her ears were going to hurt. They would hurt probably even before they got to the bar.

Timidly, she stepped out of the bathroom, trying not to show her nervousness. But when

she looked at Ryder, she felt braver — he liked what he saw. Liked her.

“You look great,” he said huskily.

She smiled at him. “Better get your own shower,” she said.

Ryder nodded and ducked into the bathroom. She had a momentary image of him undressing — did he really have tats? Wolves didn’t, as a rule, for the same reason piercings didn’t work — the wolves saw them as injuries and healed them.

She supposed that wasn’t quite accurate. It was their genetic heritage that predisposed them to healing all injuries quickly. But most shifters tended to think of it as something their wolves did, maybe because shifting to wolf and back often aided recovery.

Jessie roamed the room restlessly, not that there was much to explore — a big screen TV sat on a large dresser; did people really use the dresser? There was a small table with two chairs. And one oversized reading chair. An ugly one. A small nightstand was attached to the wall on each side of the double-sized bed. The lamps were sconces, also attached to the wall. Were they afraid someone would steal them? She couldn’t imagine why. There was a heater/air unit under the window. It kicked on and made such an ungodly racket that she jumped. She turned it off. It wasn’t cold in here, not really, not for wolves. And if the alternative was that noise, she’d freeze first.

But mostly she was trying to not focus on the bed. One bed. And not a particularly large one either. Well, Ryder had warned her. She swallowed hard. Her reactions were pure chaos, she acknowledged to herself. She tried to sort them out and failed. But none of them were fear, she realized.

She was not afraid of Ryder.

She had been wary of the men at Margarite’s — all of them: Chen’s recruits, the men from all the families and independents and Vancouver pack who had let Chen commit his atrocities, even Margarite’s men. Well, not Alefosio, not after she got to know him and saw his patience in working with the women who had been changed by Alpha Chen. Same with Benny. She had become easy with him, but she stayed

away from the others of Hat Island. She knew they were good men, but they were big, and dominant, and well, she wasn’t sure she’d ever trust a man again.

She wasn’t sure she trusted Ryder. But she wasn’t afraid of him, and maybe that was a start.

Reassured by that, she sat on the edge of the bed and waited for Ryder to come out of the bathroom. And my, my, didn’t he clean up nice! He was wearing black jeans that were snugger than the leathers he’d had on earlier and outlined strong, powerful thighs. A black sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped out revealed his biceps. Very, very nice biceps!

And he did have tats. She swallowed hard. She’d liked reading romances that featured bikers and billionaires and well, romances. And men with tattoos always did something for her — maybe because it was so foreign to her. She didn’t know anyone with one!

She wanted to ask about them, but then realized she was staring at this man and he was staring back. She hastily averted her eyes. She’d learned the hard way, you shouldn’t look men in the eyes. And the more dominant the man, the more dangerous it was. And Ryder was very dominant.

So was Benny, but he hid his dominance. She wondered why.

She had so many questions! She sighed a bit, wondering if she’d ever get to ask them.

“Where did your mind go?” Ryder asked, amused.

She blushed. “I was wondering about your tats; I was told wolves couldn’t get them, and then I was wondering about how dominant you are, which made me think about Benny, who hides his dominance, and I don’t know why. I have so many questions! And no one to ask.”

“You can ask me about all of those things later,” Ryder teased, still amused. “I promise not to tell you to ‘stop asking questions!’” He said that last, mimicking an exasperated mother, and Jessie laughed. It sounded just like her own mother when she’d been 6. “But we need to get out of here now, because all the men are waiting on us.”

She started to apologize, but he shook his head. “I wouldn’t have gone out until they were all there,” he said quietly so that no one outside could hear. “Being respected as the dominant one is often about the little things.”

Jessie considered that. It made sense, she conceded. The Alpha didn’t wait on someone else to show up, everyone else waited on the Alpha. She nodded her understanding, but she couldn’t help think that it seemed like a waste of a lot of time, all this posturing.

Ryder grinned, as if he could read her mind. He opened the door and escorted her out.

The bar wasn’t far, just up the block, but on the other side of the highway. Probably would have been faster to walk, given that they had to go up to the light, and back down the other side of the median. But they rode the bikes anyway. She guessed it was more about appearances again. Really, she was fascinated by all of this. If she ever got the chance to go back for her master’s degree, would they let her do her thesis on masculinity displays among shifter bikers? She had a wistful thought about her hopes and dreams of just a year ago — graduate, get married, start a family, go back for that master’s degree....

She shook her head. She’d been naive.

Not that there was really anything wrong with being naive at 22, she thought defensively. But....

Well, at 23, she wasn't

 naive anymore.

The bar was the kind she’d never walk into by herself. They added their bikes to a line of bikes already parked out front. For a Sunday evening, the place looked busy. It was a one-story wood building with only a small porch over the door, a solid steel thing. The darkened windows had neon beer signs in them: Coors, Bud Light, Molson. Jessie swallowed hard. This was no place for a good girl like her. But then she glanced at the man walking alongside her, and she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. She was safe, she was sure of it. Ryder would see to it, and she would get to see the inside of a biker bar. The thought of that put a bit of lift to her step. Ryder grinned at her.

“Good girl,” he approved. “Remember your line?”

“I’m with him,” she answered, laughing a bit. And yes, she was suddenly confident that line would solve any problem she might face. ...