Black Dogs Motorcycle Club: Full Series Box Set (47 page)

“Go to dinner with me,”
said Ghost.

“No,” she said, with
absolutely no heart in it.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t date
soldiers.”

“Who said I was a
soldier?”

Bridget gave him a look.
“You guys are nothing but trouble. I know you up and down.”

“You can’t say that in
front of a school!” he teased, then leaned in and added in a lower voice. “Say
it again.”

Bridget laughed and gave
his shoulder a little shove. “Seriously, I don’t meld well romantically with
soldiers.”

“I’m not technically a
soldier,” he said. “You really think I’d take orders from someone?”

She hummed. “Good point.
But don’t you have a boss at your biker club?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I do,”
said Ghost, rubbing his neck. “But that’s not the same. Any drill sergeant
would crucify me for saying the shit I say to Henry. In fact, Henry might
crucify me one day for it.”

“Sorry, was this part of
you making your case for why I
should
go out to dinner with you?” she
said with a disbelieving smile.

“Delete all that!” Ghost
waved his arms around and dirt from the flowers scattered across the walkway.
“I’m serious, though. Let me take you out. I promise, I’m not some military
jagweed.”

Bridget didn’t reply. She
was looking up at him with those big, blue eyes, thinking. He could almost hear
her brilliant mind turning.

“I have to run out of town
for the next few days. Let’s have dinner when I get back. And if you don’t say
yes, I’ll come back here and make Toby give you love notes every day until you
surrender, or until I’m bankrupt. And then I guess I’ll just become a
panhandler outside the school.”

Bridget gave a cute little
giggle. “You know these kids are rich, right? He’s probably just going to use
those twenties to wallpaper his treehouse.”

“See what I’m already
sacrificing just to get near you? This is the total package, babe,” said Ghost,
doing a little twirl on his boot heels.

Bridget rolled her eyes,
but she had really never stopped smiling, not once during the entire visit. She
looked off into the distance for a moment, thinking, until a high-pitched
artificial bell sounded in the schoolyard. She gazed casually toward the kids
as they began to gather up to return to class.

For a moment, she just
looked at Ghost, watching him, like she was trying to translate something. Then
she glared, and snatched the flowers out of his hand. Dirt showered on the
cobblestone at their feet.

“Gimme your hand,” she
said.

Ghost smiled and held his
right hand forward. Bridget took it in hers and he felt a jolt of fire race
along his nerves, through his chest. He watched her as she pulled the black
sharpie from the lanyard dangling around her neck and wrote her phone number on
his hand. His eyes traced the delicate line of her jaw and neck, and he
imagined nibbling on both of them.

Bridget said nothing, but
only gave him a sassy look as she recapped the marker on the lanyard. Ghost
looked at the number, and then back at her with a satisfied grin. She turned
and sauntered back into the school without looking back at him, and Ghost
couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so lightheaded around a woman.

~ SIX ~

Bridget

Heels clacking on the burnt orange tile, Bridget
headed down the hallways of the Academy, smiling to herself and feeling a
million miles away. That feeling became a bit more literal when she looked up
and realized she’d taken wrong turns back to her classroom, and somehow wound
up outside the girl’s locker room, in the area of the academy that had been
added to the original structure. She whirled around, self-conscious, but the
hallway was devoid of witnesses. Bridget laughed at herself and shook her head
before righting her course.

The classroom was still
empty when she arrived. It usually took a mighty effort for the yard matrons to
gather the kids in orderly lines when recess was over, so what was supposed to
be a fifteen-minute break went closer to twenty, and Bridget was glad for it.
She sat down in her cozy, wood and leather chair and tried to gather her
thoughts back to the tasks at hand.

Ghost’s note sat on the
desk, distracting. She smirked as she picked it up and read it again:

Look, if you have a
problem with my love for Squirtle, I’m willing to challenge you to a Pokémon
match right now outside by the fountain. Bring your best cards. XOXO

Instead of writing his
name, he had hastily drawn a tiny little ghost with hearts for eyes. Bridget
couldn’t help but crack up at the note, even if it was completely ridiculous.
It also occurred to her that if some other, wimpier dude had tried this same thing
on her, she would have rejected it outright as mushy nonsense. Flowers and nice
dress-up dinners were one thing, but love notes? Bridget wasn’t sure she was
that type of romantic.

Yet the butterflies in her
stomach made her feel like a school girl, reading a note from a boy she had a
crush on who passed it to her in class. Whatever it was about him, she liked
this treatment from Ghost. It was a very foreign feeling.

But this was probably all
a setup, she told herself. Biker guys, men like Ghost, why else would they
cultivate such knock-‘em-out charm except to bed as many women as fast as
possible? After so many years of it, they probably got bored having willing
pussy handed to them and started chasing after the more difficult game—the
married housewives, the preacher’s daughters, the upper-middle class elementary
school teachers. It wasn’t hard to imagine them making an actual, club-wide
competition out of shit like that. Soldiers did it all the time.

The competing thoughts and
feelings wouldn’t settle in her gut. They just sloshed around, refusing to
blend, a grumpy mixture of oil and water that left her with more questions than
answers.

Tiny, excited voices
echoed down the hallway, and soon after the kids started filing into the room,
trying and mostly failing to come down from their exercise high and settle at
their desks. Bridget smiled at them as they passed, tucking the note from Ghost
into the thin top drawer of her desk. Near the end of the procession, Toby Cary
came in, glowing and grinning and swooping his Batman doll around in dizzy
circles.

Toby. Bridget was shocked
when he brought her the note. All morning she had been a wreck, trying to teach
the class and simultaneously watch him for signs to confirm that he was the one
who had called her the other night. Hours of internet searching and phone calls
had yielded nothing about the number, except that it was local. She couldn’t
see any signs of trauma on the boy, but he’d always been pale, quiet, and
tired. She felt like she was starting to understand why.

She had tried to catch
Toby’s eye throughout the morning and somehow signal to him that she knew, and
that it was safe to talk. It was hard not to let the thoughts become obsessive;
she felt like she was tied up and watching a lion stalk up to eat him. The
recess bell had been a respite, and as she sat at her desk trying to compose
herself, Toby had come running in with the note, looking happy as a clam, like
he did now. Before Bridget could use the alone time to talk to him about the
phone call, he had shot back outside to the playground.

Toby was not an outgoing
child, but for some reason, he had walked right up to Ghost and spoken to him.
The revelation was mind-blowing for Bridget. What had Toby seen in Ghost to
trust him so quickly? Why couldn’t she replicate it and get Toby to open up to
her so she could help him?

She almost hadn’t answered
the note. But it occurred to her that if Toby had taken so quickly to Ghost, it
probably meant something. Maybe Bridget could use that to help him somehow. She
wasn’t sure how, but she couldn’t ignore it, not when she was so certain Toby
was in danger. So she took a chance on Ghost.

As she stood up to quiet
the class down and launch into the day’s history section, Bridget heard a
little voice in the back of her head argue:
That’s not the
only
reason.

It was seven thirty, and Bridget sat at the shiny,
mahogany bar of the Red Door, working on her third draft beer. Her hopes to get
home and in bed by eight had been shattered when Muriel Green, the third grade
instructor, came rushing into her quiet classroom not an hour after the
students had been dismissed for the day. She’d misplaced a pile of tests and
mistakenly thought she handed them back, but found them ungraded in the
backseat of her SUV when she went looking for her pair of spare sneakers.
Together, they huddled around clustered desks in Muriel’s classroom and quickly
graded the science tests before throwing them into each student’s cubby box.

Muriel offered drinks to
thank her, and Bridget decided it had just about been that kind of day and
accepted. Her fellow teacher was one of Bridget’s small social circle, and it
had been a while since they had spoken outside the Academy. They didn’t spend a
lot of time together, but she valued the woman’s insight and willingness to
always help Bridget out of a jam. They were different in a lot of ways—Muriel
had grown up in and around the richer parts of LeBeau and was genuine upper
class—but the profession seemed to have a way of smoothing out a lot of those
differences. Having someone to share the pressures of teaching made the days
much easier.

Next to her, Muriel was
flagging down the bartender to order her third martini, and Bridget shrugged
and put in for her fourth beer early.

“You know that kid, Tommy
Cavanatti?” said Muriel, leaning into Bridget’s shoulder.

“The one with the lisp?”

“Right. Last week, during
first recess, I was passing out the materials for the art project and I
accidentally kicked over his messenger bag, and a freakin’ porno magazine fell
out.”

Bridget almost lost a
little bit of her beer. “Are you kidding me? In
your
class? They’re so
young!”

“I couldn’t believe it,”
said Muriel, shaking her head. She was much smaller than Bridget, with soft
shoulders and brassy brown hair cut clean mid-neck and in choppy bangs. Her
glasses were those wide, round owl-style from the seventies that only made her
feminine features look smaller and more delicate. “I know every generation has
complained about the younger ones being more horrible, but things really
are
changing.”

“What did you do?” asked
Bridget.

“I took it out of his bag
and put it in my desk. He hasn’t said anything about missing it yet,” said
Muriel with a shrug. “Frankly, he’s such a good kid otherwise that I don’t feel
like embarrassing him to his parents if I don’t have to. I figured I’d wait and
see if he does it again before I call. Is that awful?”

Bridget took a drink of
beer and shook her head. “No. Anyway, if he hasn’t asked for it back, maybe
he’s not the one that put it there. Maybe his old man needed a quick hiding
place.”

Muriel rolled her eyes.
“Wouldn’t be the first time. Some of these guys are complete pigs.” She had a
sour look on her face as she sipped her martini.

Sharing the horror stories
of parent-teacher conferences was a yearly ritual for the Academy’s faculty;
they had a dark corner booth reserved at this bar just for the occasion. Miss
Moses, the beautiful, multiethnic dance teacher, currently held the record of
worst interaction, when a visiting father propositioned her for sex in her
ballet studio with his wife and daughter ten feet away.

“I think I’m mostly
shocked they still make porno mags,” she said. “Who’s paying for those with the
internet around? This is the fifth or sixth porno mag I’ve seen in the last
week, for hell’s sake.”

Muriel gave her a funny
look. “You don’t say?”

Instantly, Ghost returned
to Bridget’s thoughts, and she sighed with a heavy smile. She put her beer down
and rolled her eyes at herself just a little. She was a little annoyed to discover
she didn’t have the balls to actually look at her friend as she spoke about
him. “I went to visit Gramps after class Friday and drop off a prescription the
idiot pharmacist fucked up, and there was this guy there hanging out with the
vets. He was bringing them rum and porno mags.”

Muriel’s eyebrows went up
and she laughed, red-faced. “To the old folks home? He didn’t get in trouble?”

“Staff there will never
confiscate something unless it’s a danger to the residents, but they also won’t
get them certain things. Apparently, this guy’s been… taking care of their more
debauched needs.”

“That is hilarious,” said
Muriel. “An angel of sin.”

“Oh, he’d love it if he
heard you call him that,” said Bridget, laughing.

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“Ghost McBride.”

“
Ghost
McBride, you
say?”

Bridget nodded. “You heard
me correctly.”

“Is he a magician?”

“Dang, that’s what I
should have said…” Bridget stared at the ceiling wistfully.

The bartender interrupted
to drop off their fresh drinks. Muriel bit one of the olives off the toothpicks
in her martini before she continued. “You’ve got that little sparkle in your
voice when you talk about him.”

Bridget took a drink and
rolled her eyes heavily—too heavily, she realized, when Muriel’s smirk only
grew. “He’s pretty hot, but he’s also in a biker gang.”

“Jesus, seriously?”

“He’s got the leather vest
and everything,” said Bridget.
Shit, now I can’t stop thinking about
everything underneath that leather vest…

Muriel seemed to suddenly
get less jovial about it all. She looked at her martini, and even though she
was still smiling, her words were not. “So, what, are you gonna like… date this
guy?”

“Ugh, do I still date?”
Bridget said, leaning on the bar. “I can’t even remember the last date I went
on.”

“I think it was that
dark-haired lawyer who wouldn’t shut up about his visit to Nepal.”

Bridget crinkled her nose
at the memory. “Oh, right,
him
. God, he was so boring. He tried to call
me for like two weeks after that, and then he just left me a text he actually
signed ‘
namaste
.’ ”