Gravel (MC Biker Romance) (3 page)

I stood in the dining room awhile
longer,
examining some figurines that lined the glass
shelves of a random curio cabinet, but couldn’t help but feel
creeped
out. I felt like I had walked into someone’s
private life, like I had stumbled upon someone’s secret collection.

Maybe it wasn’t so much as the clocks and
figurines that bothered me, as it was the fact that this dining room had no
windows and was in a room at the end of a hallway. It just didn’t feel right. I
made a beeline for the door when I noticed another door inside the dining room.

I gave into my curiosity and went to what
was behind that door. Expecting a closet of some type, I instead was introduced
to a completely different room. I stepped into a bedroom that could only be
accessed by a dining room at the end of the hall of a huge house out in the
middle of nowhere. The light, as expected, switched on as soon as I walked into
the room. A single queen-sized bed with a dusty blue comforter rested against
the wall.
A white, Queen Anne dresser stood across from the
bed.
I opened the drawers to find nothing but some old undershirts and
dingy socks.

There were narrow doors to the left and
right of the dresser. It didn’t take long for me to discover that one was an
empty walk-in closet reeking of mothballs and behind the other door was a
spotless toilet room with a working toilet.

I couldn’t help but feel like I was being
watched. I felt safe in the house, but I felt like I was encroaching on someone
else’s life. I didn’t like the feeling of knowing the bazaar secrets of a
stranger. The peculiarities I had witnessed in the past few minutes already
made me feel like it was going to be a challenge to make this place feel like
home. The only thing I wanted in that moment was to be fast asleep in Ash’s
arms. I needed something that felt like home, because this sure as hell didn’t.

I walked as quickly as I could out of the
bedroom, out of the eerie dining room, and back to the hallway. As I passed the
vintage kitchen on my right, I noticed something shiny on my left behind
swinging doors. I pushed one half of the swinging door open just a peep and
couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said
aloud. I hated to swear, but I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

Before me was a completely renovated,
gourmet kitchen. Stainless steel industrial appliances, swirled granite counter
tops, maple hardwood floors, and dark cherry cabinets with crown molding filled
this expansive, hidden space. The cupboards, refrigerator and pantry were all
completely stocked. I was starting to forget about the creepy dining room. I
didn’t ever have to go in there if I didn’t want to anyway.

With a bit of a hop in my step, I left the
luxurious kitchen and headed straight for Ash’s temporary sleeping quarters. I
tugged off my jeans and sweater and crawled under the fuzzy blanket with my
snoring-like-a-bear husband. I slipped behind him and gently forced my arm
under his, resting my hand on his warm stomach. His stomach moved up, then
down, then up again. The steady rhythm of his breathing relaxed me. I buried my
nose in the back of his head. I loved the smell of his hair
;
a mix of his natural musk and my organic, sandalwood shampoo.

Soon I found myself unable to fall
asleep. I tossed and turned as quietly as I could on the stiff sofa bed. The
dead silence of the old house didn’t help much either. Ash’s snoring was like
music to my ears, like listening to the drone of an old box fan to fall asleep
on a sticky summer night. Ash was my old box fan.

My mind raced with the realization that
he would be leaving us the next day. I tried telling myself it wasn’t so bad. Ash
would be gone for five or six days at a time, then return for two or three
days. It would always depend on his work assignments. Sometimes he went on club
missions for weeks at a time, and I was not allowed to contact him even for
emergencies.

“The logistics are all worked out,” he
told me in the days leading up to this night.

“There’s not one thing for you to worry
about. Think of it as an extended vacation.”

For days I gathered books, magazines and
movies for me, games and toys for Tucker, and projects I knew would keep me
busy for an indefinite amount of time. I was told we would be here for an
unknown amount of time and there was a slight possibility we could be here for
a full year if they couldn’t remedy the situation fast enough.

In the shadows of the living room I saw
two bright lights dash across the wall. I pushed Ash to wake him up. “Someone’s
here. I just saw headlights.”

In half of a second Ash had already
sprung up out of the sofa bed and threw on his pants. He grabbed his sidearm
out of the interior pocket of his jacket and headed toward the side door where
the car had stopped.

“Are you going out there?” I asked.

Ash said nothing, like he always did when
he was on high alert.

“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“Tell me what you’re doing.
 
You’re
starting to scare the shit out of me.”

Ash turned around and shushed me. “Go
with Tuck. It’s fine.”

I looked outside. By now the
fifty-thousand
motion sensor lights had flickered on to
reveal a black Crown Victoria parked next to our Ford. Ash was outside by now,
standing next to the driver’s side. According to my watch, it was 3:30am.

I watched as Ash was talking to some man.
He slowly put his gun back in his jacket. He looked like he was smiling. He
seemed at ease.

Fifteen minutes later he was back inside
the house. “That was Green.” He said. Green was a local member of a cousin club.
He’d helped hook us up with the safe house.

“What the hell was he doing here this
time of night?”

“Came to check on us and make sure we got
here alright,” Ash said.

“Did you know he was coming? Why would he
just randomly stop by a three thirty in the morning?”

“Yes, I knew he was coming. I guess I
forgot. Just tired, that’s all,” he said. He had a point. “Let’s try and go
back to sleep. We have a lot to go over tomorrow.”

“This is kind of a strange place isn’t
it?” Ash said, waking me up. “Good morning.”

“What time is it?” By the heaviness that
remained in my eyelids, I hadn’t slept a wink.

“Ten,” he replied. “Thought I’d let you
sleep in a little bit. I know you had a rough night last night. I’ve made a few
phone calls. You should have
internet
access in the
next day or two. I’ve activated a prepaid cell phone for you to use, though I
don’t think the signal’s all that great out here.”

“Why are you going over everything right
now? I just woke up. Can’t we at least have breakfast?”

“I have to leave sooner than expected,” Ash
replied. He looked away, then over at Tuck who was playing quietly in the
corner.

“What?” I normally tried to hide my
disappointment, but I couldn’t. “I was hoping we’d at least have the entire day
to get to know the house, the area, the safety precautions…”

“We can still do that. We just have to be
finished by two.”

“Ash,” I said. “I’m not going to have a
car, am I?”

He laughed out loud, something I rarely
heard these days. “You’re just now realizing that?” He scooped up Tuck from the
corner and walked towards the fancy kitchen. “Your mommy’s a true blonde, isn’t
she?”

I loved seeing the silly, goofy side of
him. It reminded me of what we had before our life got so crazy. The Ash I grew
up with. The Ash from before that night in the country when life as we knew it
got flipped upside down.

I followed him through the swinging doors
and into the luxurious kitchen of my dreams. The room was flooded with light.
The sun coming in through the huge picture window made everything
extraordinarily bright, shiny, and sparkly. For two seconds, I forgot why we
were even there.

Standing in that room, I didn’t feel like
I was in an old, stately, peculiar mansion in the middle of nowhere. I was
starting to feel, like Ash said before, like I was on an extended vacation.

“Let’s see. Cheerios and bananas it is,” Ash
said as he rummaged through the pantry. Tuck squealed in his high chair.

I started to get up.

“No, Mama. You stay there. I’m cooking
for us this morning,” Ash said. He was clearly trying to ease my mind, and I
wanted nothing more than to ease his too. It was going to be difficult to be
separated from him, but it was nothing compared to the pain of dropping off your
wife and child in the middle of nowhere.
 

“Sounds good to me,” I obliged. “What’s
gotten into you this morning? I haven’t seen you this happy in forever.”

He cracked an egg on the side of a
skillet. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know that you two are safe. You’re
pretty much off the grid here. Untouchable.”

Sometimes I wondered if he was just
extremely paranoid or if actual threats had been made against our lives. There
were times over the years when it was hard to distinguish. Ash didn’t take killing
Tripp lightly. It gnawed away at him from time to time, manifesting itself in
night terrors and denying himself happiness.

“So I was giving myself a tour of the
house last night,” I began. “There’s a really creepy room down the hall. It’s
like a dining room with no windows. It has these grandfather clocks in each
corner of the room. Then there’s another door that leads to a bedroom and
half-bath.”

“Houses like these, people are constantly
changing up and remodeling and adding extra rooms here or there. I’m sure it
was just some former owners who wanted a private dining room or something.” Ash
tried to come up with some sort of logical reasoning to pacify me. He had more
important things to think about anyway.

“Wait until you see it,” I continued. “I
just felt like I was being watched in there.” I shivered just thinking about
the room. “I hope the upstairs is semi-normal.”

“I’m sure it is,” Ash replied.

“Do you know the history of this place?”

“Nope. Guess it never occurred to me to
ask.”

“Can you find out? I’m just curious.”

Ash looked at me as if I had asked him to
do me a huge favor. I knew he was busy. I knew he had more important things on
his plate, but if I was going to be living here for an indefinite amount of
time, I wanted to know as much as possible about it.

“You never wanted to know about the other
places we’ve lived.”

 
“The other places we lived were normal.
Let’s see, there was your parents’ basement.
Then the cottage
on Olive Street.
Then the little rental house on
Callahan.
Then our other apartment on Fourth and
Grand.
All perfectly normal, boring places.”

 
“Trust me. This is just another boring
place to add to the list.”

I looked at him in disbelief and gave an
audible sigh. With Ash, actions always spoke louder than words. The more I
spoke, the less of his attention I seemed to receive, especially when he was
stressed.

“Look. I’ll try and dig up some dirt on
this place when I get a chance,” Ash promised. “I’m not sure I’ll find any, but
I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you.”

“You
gonna
eat
your breakfast?” He stared down at the cold plate of scrambled eggs situated in
front of me.

I pushed them around with my fork and
took a bite. “I appreciate you cooking breakfast this morning. I’m just not
that hungry.”

“What’s wrong now?” He shook his head
when he thought I wasn’t looking. Growing up in a family of four boys who were
raised by their father, he never learned how to truly be patient, especially
when it came to women. “Are you going to start crying? You know I hate it when
I’m about to leave and you start crying. Here we go.”