Heart of Steel (Demon Riders MC Book 2) (3 page)

“What do you mean it has nothing to do with me?”  The little blonde is now jabbing her index finger into Dane’s chest.  “I’m the one who’s had to put up with you moping around like a kicked puppy for the past week, and believe me, it’s not cute.  And yeah, I figure it does have something to do with me when my best friend throws the best thing that’s ever happened to him away.”  Suzi’s chest rises and falls, as she rides her anger.  Elyse feels her heart warm at Suzi’s words, but Dane clearly doesn’t want to know.

“Now isn’t the time for this, Suze.  Not here, not now.  I’m not having this conversation with you!”  He steps back from her and absently rubs his chest, no doubt sore from her incessant poking.

“You’re here; she’s here.” Suzi gestures behind her to where Elyse and Jen are standing stock-still, powerless to do anything but observe Suzi’s attack.  “I’d say it’s the perfect time.”

“She doesn’t belong here, Suze.  She can’t be trusted.  She’s proven that already.”  Dane’s words hurt more than Elyse could have prepared for.  She doesn’t even realize she’s digging her fingernails into her palms until Jen slaps her hands away.

“She belongs here because I’ve invited her.”  Suzi crosses her arms over her chest, projecting an image of an immovable force. 

“And I want her to stay.”  Rick’s voice pipes up, as he appears behind Suzi, and Elyse feels a surge of gratitude that he would stand up for her. 

CHAPTER FOUR

Dane seems to want to say something.  Elyse watches the internal struggle play out over his face, and she sees the moment that he realizes he won’t speak out against Rick, not when he’s the man who has done more for Dane than anyone else.  Dane looks between Rick and Suzi, clearly not believing that he’s being ganged up on by the two most important people in his life.  Once he gets the message that neither of them will back down, he throws his hands up in despair.

“Fine, do what you want.  But don’t expect me to stand around playing nice.  I’m done here.”  He doesn’t even look at Elyse before he turns around, leaving them all staring after him.

“That boy is more stubborn than a damn mule.”  Rick shakes his head in despair, as Dane strides back to the pool table, purposefully ignoring Elyse’s corner of the bar.  “Don’t take it to heart, beautiful.  He burns fast and hot, but he’ll cool down soon enough, and when he does, he’s going to realize what a grade A ass he’s been.”  Rick gives her a comforting pat on the shoulder before rejoining some grizzled bikers in a corner booth.

Jen lets out a low whistle after the drama has passed.  “Gotta say, hun, I’m not sold that this guy is anywhere near deserving of you.  If it were up to me, I’d shove that holier than thou attitude where the sun don’t shine.” 

“I can’t say I blame you.”  Suzi heaves a deep sigh, signaling Joe for another beer.  “If that was all I’d seen of Dane, then I’d probably feel the same way.  But what you’ve just seen is about as far away as it gets to the whole story.”

“So he had a bad childhood, join the freakin’ club!  That doesn’t give him any right to treat people like they don’t matter.”  Jen plants her hands on her hips, looking at Dane’s back as if she wants to pick a fight with him.  “Elyse is the best person that I know. He doesn’t deserve to breathe the same damn air as she does!”

Suzi raises an eyebrow at Jen, clearly impressed at how protective she is of her best friend.

“Calm down, Jen.  I’m fine.”  Elyse settles a hand on her friend’s shoulder.  “I appreciate the whole lioness thing, but you’re going to blow a blood vessel if you keep staring at him like that.”  Elyse nudges her friend playfully until Jen drops her gaze. Elyse has no desire for her to go off half-cocked in front of the whole club.  If that happens, there is no way that her little secret that Dane has so far managed to keep would stay on the down low.

“And Suzi’s right.  That guy, he’s not the Dane that I know.  You’d like the one that I know.”  Elyse shrugs sadly, wondering what she needs to do to get him back.

Suzi gives her an appraising look, as if she’s seeing another side to Elyse, and Elyse realizes that Suzi is just as protective of Dane as Jen is of her.  “Thank you for what you said to Dane, you know, about me.  Thank you for standing up for me.”  Elyse hugs Suzi in the impulsive way that she has, pulling away before the other woman gets uncomfortable.

Suzi looks a little less shocked at Elyse’s outburst of touchy feeliness than she did the first time it happened, but it’s still not something that she’s used to—although Elyse doesn’t doubt that the woman needs a hug about as much as Elyse needs a kind word from Dane.  “You don’t have to thank me.  I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”  Suzi shrugs as if it were no big deal, but a flicker of understanding passes between them.  “Rick’s right about him, Elyse. He’ll come round.  But he’s hurting and when he’s like this, there’s no reasoning with him.  I should’ve known.”  Suzi seems to shake her head at her own stupidity.

Elyse reaches out and places a comforting hand on her arm.  “You tried, Suzi. You can’t beat yourself up over that.” 

“Well, this was definitely more exciting than my date would ever have been.”  Jen breaks the heavy atmosphere with a joke, and the three girls share a laugh. 

But Elyse’s is forced, still rocked by her confrontation with Dane.  “I need the Ladies.  I’ll be right back.”  Jen seems to read the truth in Elyse’s expression, that she needs to be alone for a few minutes, but she just nods mutely, engaging Suzi in conversation as Elyse slips out of their little circle.

She stares at herself in the mirror in the Ladies room, grateful that the restrooms are in the opposite direction to Dane and his little crew.  Her eyes are a little puffy from the cry that she’s allowed herself locked safely out of view in the bathroom stall.  Aside from that, her makeup is surprisingly intact.  She fusses with her dark auburn hair—although it doesn’t need to be fussed with.  It’s as if an outward display of order will go some way towards hiding the inner turmoil she’s feeling. 

Elyse looks at her reflection, unable to stop replaying the words Dane had thrown at her.  She had been a fool to think that she could just waltz into the bar and make things right; she sees that now.  But in a way, she had been unprepared for the depth of the hurt that Dane felt.  They had known each other for less than a week when the truth had come out about why she had come to Shooters that night.  But that had been more than enough time for both of them to fall for the other.  Dane didn’t trust easily. In fact, he hardly trusted anyone at all.  In a short space of time, Elyse had become one of those few people, and she had been lying to him the entire time.  A lie mostly of omission, it’s true, but a lie just the same.  It was no wonder he didn’t want anything to do with her. 

She squares her shoulders and lifts her chin up, tired of looking at the dejected girl in front of her.  Elyse has taken down men twice her size in karate competitions; she had been valedictorian of her high school and top of her class in college.  She could figure out how to make what she had done to Dane right.  Even if that doesn’t translate into things going back to the way they were between them, she has to make it right.

With renewed purpose, Elyse steps out of the Ladies room.  She’s so caught up thinking about what she can do to make it up to Dane that she almost misses a familiar face settled into a booth away from all of the action.  She does a double take, but there’s no mistaking him.  The memory of that last day in the body shop comes rushing back to her; he had been there, too. Dane had referred to him as ‘the new guy’—which hadn’t made any sense at all.  But Elyse had been so caught up in her own drama that she hadn’t been able to react to the presence of her ex.  That isn’t true of today.

“Lance.”  Her voice is low, but she’s left in no doubt that he hears her.

He starts, looking up from whatever he had been scribbling, and as recognition dawns on his face, it lights up.  “Elyse.”  He says her name the way he always does, the reverential way he’d said it when they were together. 

But Elyse isn’t thinking about his voice, she’s thinking about what he’s trying to cover up as she stands in front of him.  He shuffles the papers on the table, hurriedly trying to hide whatever he had been working on.  The way that he does it sets alarm bells ringing in her head and tells her that she needs to find out why he’s being so secretive.  The Lance that she had been with during her final year at college was über-competitive and would take any opportunity he could get to show everyone just how smart and how much better than everyone he was. 

When she’d aced their journalism class, he hadn’t been able to hide his jealousy. It was one of the reasons she’d decided to call it quits.  She couldn’t understand why Lance wouldn’t be happy for her and why if anything the opposite had been true. All he was interested in was one-up-manship, and at first she’d found his ambition and drive attractive, but it soon became exhausting.

“What are you doing here?”  She tries to read the notes in front of him, but he’s still surreptitiously covering them up.

“Thursday night’s the new Friday.”  Lance shrugs laconically, but Elyse knows him too well, and he can’t help his attention slipping back to the notes in front of him.

“I’d heard that.”  She smiles at him, changing tack.  “But what are you doing here? In this particular bar?  I didn’t think that biker hangouts would really be your thing.”  Elyse raises a questioning eyebrow at him.  Lance was the preppiest person that she knew, he defined the term WASP.  With parents near the top of the Oregon rich list, Lance had never had to work for anything. Whatever he had wanted, it had landed on his plate.  It wasn’t something that Elyse begrudged him, why should she?  But it influenced every part of his life.  He had a sense of entitlement that tended to rub people up the wrong way.

“They didn’t used to be.  But I’ve changed a lot recently, Elyse.  I’m not the same person that I was.”  He looks at her with doe-like brown eyes and the hopeful expression on his face tells her that he still hasn’t accepted that they’re over.  “It’s good to see you.  Take a seat.”

She smiles back at him, not able to return the sentiment.  But not wanting to be rude, she accepts his offer, sliding into the booth opposite him.  He seems to visibly relax and pushes his notes into a neat pile to his side.  That was something else about Lance, he was ordered, meticulous even.  Everything had a place; he was almost compulsive about tidiness. It was yet another reason that he and Elyse just weren’t suited to one another.  She’d left him alone in her bedroom for a morning, and he’d re-ordered the books in her shelves into genre and alphabetical order by author.  At the time she’d thought that it was sweet and thoughtful, looking back at it, with the full benefit of hindsight, she realized that it was just weird.

“So you’re working at The Shop now?  I saw you there a few days ago.”  Elyse tilts her head, taking in Lance’s new threads.  He’s wearing ripped jeans and a black t-shirt, fitting in nicely with the other men in the bar. 

“I saw you, too.”  Lance smiles at her in a way that makes her insides squirm and not in a good way.  “You were with Fletcher.”  He almost spits the words out, his gaze flicking towards the pool table where Elyse had last seen Dane.

Elyse has experienced Lance’s jealousy before; she doesn’t have any intention of explaining herself to him.  They aren’t together anymore; it isn’t as if she owes him any kind of explanation about her relationship with Dane.  “I was a little surprised to see you there.  I didn’t know you knew anything about being a mechanic.  I thought all that manual labor stuff wasn’t really your bag.”

Lance smiles at her in that indulgent way of his that makes her feel like a stupid little schoolgirl.  “Like I said, I’m not the same person I was before.  There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me anymore.”  He shrugs enigmatically, and Elyse has to resist the urge to roll her eyes at him.  Lance has always had a flair for the dramatic, acting as if there is a camera filming him at all times.

“Well, I can see there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.”  Elyse flicks her eyes towards the notes that sit by his right hand.  “You think you’re ever going to trade in your notebook for a laptop?  Or, in your opinion, is technology still the big bad that’s destroying the publishing world?”

Lance shakes his head at her, looking at her patronizingly as if she couldn’t possibly understand what he’s no doubt about to explain to her.  If there was one thing that Lance enjoyed more than coming first, it was imparting wisdom to the less gifted.  “It’s not an opinion, Elyse. It’s a fact.”  He says this as if it were a universal truth.  “I know you mean well, but blogs like yours, online news feeds, all that stuff, they’re like a disease, eating at print.” 

“Gee and I just thought that it was called progress.”  Elyse doesn’t make any effort to stop herself from rolling her eyes this time.   There was a time when she would have put up with Lance’s extreme views, thinking that he was an idealist. Now, she knows that he is just stuck in the past.  He doesn’t like change. Keeping everything the same, ordered, and in check, it is all part of his compulsive behavior.  When Elyse had suggested that perhaps he talk to a therapist about the root of his problems, Lance had gone postal.  She hadn’t brought it up again.

“It’s not progress because technology is never going to win.  You can’t undo hundreds of years of paper, the Ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus, the Romans on tablets of stone.  What will our legacy be?”  Lance looks off into the distance, posturing just like he always does.  It was as if he were giving a speech to an imaginary rapt audience.

Elyse was barely even listening.  It was a line of thought she’d heard before, any number of times from him.  Lance would constantly make fun of her blog or her posts on forums and websites.  He would tell her that it wasn’t real writing, because it only existed digitally and there was nothing tangible that you could hold in your hand.  At first his words had upset her, that perhaps he was right, later she had realized that he was just being cruel.

“Elyse?”  Lance’s tone jerks her out of her thoughts, and she realizes he must have been speaking to her while she had zoned out.  “I asked if you liked the flowers.”