Biker’s Temptation

The bus dropped me at a gas station with a flickering sign and nothing else around for miles. I had eighty dollars, a duffel bag, and a name that wasn't mine anymore. Cedar Hollow looked like the kind of town that swallowed people whole and never gave them back. Exactly what I needed. I found the only bar in walking distance by following the sound of a guitar riff bleeding out into the night. The Iron Choir. Neon letters buzzing red against a black sky, motorcycles lined up outside like soldiers waiting for orders. I almost turned around. Almost. But my feet were blistered, and my stomach was hollow, and I hadn't eaten since the bus station in Ohio, so I pushed the door open and walked into the kind of silence that comes right before a storm. Every head turned. Leather jackets. Tattooed knuckles wrapped around beer bottles. A jukebox skipping mid-song like even the music wasn't sure what to do with me standing there. And then I saw him. He was sitting at the far end of the bar like he owned the whole building, the whole town, maybe the whole world. Dark hair pushed back, a jaw that looked carved out of granite, eyes so pale they seemed to glow under the neon. He wasn't the biggest man in the room. He didn't need to be. Everyone else had gone quiet the second he set his glass down. "You lost, sweetheart?" His voice rolled across the room low and unhurried. "Just need a seat and something to eat," I said, proud my voice didn't shake. He studied me. Not the way men usually studied women, hungry and obvious. He looked at me like he was reading a file, cataloging every detail. The dirt on my boots. The way I kept my bag pressed against my hip. The bruise I hadn't quite managed to cover on my wrist. "Sit," he said, and somehow it wasn't a request. I sat three stools down. He moved one stool closer. "Kane," he said, like that one word was supposed to mean something. "Wren," I answered, because lying about my first name felt pointless when I'd already changed everything else about myself twice this year. A bartender slid a plate in front of me without being asked. Fries, a burger, something that smelled like heaven after three days of gas station crackers. I didn't ask who paid for it. That was my first mistake. Three men peeled off from different corners of the bar and drifted toward us like they'd been summoned. A big one with a shaved head and ice in his stare took the stool to my left without asking. A second, lean and golden-haired with a smile that belonged on a magazine cover, leaned against the bar in front of me. The third hung back near the pool table, arms crossed, watching me like a puzzle he intended to solve. "This is Ryker," Kane said, nodding at the bald one. "Jasper." The golden one winked. "Asher." The one by the pool table didn't move, didn't blink. "Why does it feel like I just walked into something," I muttered. Jasper laughed, bright and easy. "Because you did, sweetheart. You just don't know what yet." Kane's hand landed on the bar beside my plate, not touching me, just close enough that I felt the heat off his skin. "Where you headed, Wren?" "Nowhere in particular." "Good." His pale eyes didn't blink. "Then you're not in a hurry to leave Cedar Hollow." It wasn't a question. Around us, the bar had gone back to its noise, glasses clinking, the jukebox finally finding its rhythm again, but the air at our end of the counter stayed tight as a wire pulled too taut. I should have grabbed my bag right then and walked out into the dark. I'd learned the hard way what happened when men decided things about me without asking. But something about the way these four watched each other, the silent agreement passing between them like a current I couldn't see, made my pulse do something traitorous and warm instead of afraid. That was my second mistake. "I don't even know what this town is," I said, trying to sound steadier than I felt. "You will." Asher spoke for the first time, voice quiet enough that I had to lean in to catch it. "Soon enough." The way he said it made the back of my neck prickle. Like he already knew something about me I hadn't told a single soul in this room. I was halfway through my last fry when the door of the Iron Choir banged open again and a man in a different colored vest stepped through, cigarette already burning between his lips, eyes sweeping the bar until they landed on me. He smiled. Slow. Knowing. "Well, I'll be damned," he said, loud enough for the whole room to hear. "Wren Sutton. Long way from home, aren't you." Every man at my end of the bar was still. Kane's hand finally closed around my wrist, gentle but absolute, like he was making a decision the rest of the room had no say in. "You know her?" he asked the stranger, his voice gone dangerously soft. The man in the doorway just kept smiling. "Everybody's looking for her."