The Biker's Second Chance

Chapter Four: Five Years Ago

The wind pulled my hair loose from its braid and I laughed so hard I had to grab onto the back of Ryder's jacket just to keep from sliding off.

"Slow down!" I yelled over the engine, even though I didn't mean it. I loved this. The speed, the feeling of everything blurring by, sitting behind him on that bike with nothing but Black River Road stretched out in front of us.

He slowed down anyway, because he always listened to me even when I didn't really mean what I said, and we coasted the rest of the way down to the lake, the engine humming low under us.

He parked in our usual spot, hidden behind the willow trees where nobody from town ever bothered looking, and turned the bike off, it got quiet after that, but not an empty kind of quiet. Birds somewhere in the trees, water moving against the bank, my heart still going fast from the ride.

"You're smiling," he said, getting off the bike and reaching back to help me down.

"I'm always smiling with you."

He held onto my waist for a second after my feet hit the ground, and we just stood there close together, close enough that I could see the little scar above his eyebrow from some accident at the garage he never fully explained.

"I want to build something," he said out of nowhere, the way he did sometimes when something had been on his mind for a while. "My own place, not just working for my dad forever, something that's actually mine."

"You will." I didn't doubt it for a second. "You're going to build something amazing, Ryder Thornton, and everyone in this town who ever looked down on you is going to have to watch you do it."

He looked at me like I'd said something bigger than I realized. "You really believe that?"

"I really do." I ran my thumb along his jaw. "I don't care about money or how things look to other people, I care about you. That's the whole list."

He kissed me then, slow, like he meant it, and for a few minutes the future felt like something we could actually hold onto.

I had no idea how fast that was about to fall apart.

******

My mother found out about us three weeks later, and the house went cold in a way I'd never felt before.

"A girl like you does not marry a biker," she said, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed so tight I thought she might hurt herself. "Do you understand what people are going to say about you? About this family?"

"I love him." It felt like such a simple thing to say, I didn't understand yet why it landed like I'd started a fight.

My father didn't even look up from his newspaper. "He can't give you the kind of life you deserve, Brielle. Grease under his nails, working a garage that isn't even his yet. Is that what you want? Struggling for the rest of your life?"

"I want him."

They didn't listen, they never really did, not once they'd already decided what they wanted to hear.

Two weeks later, Dean showed up at a dinner party. A friend of a friend, my mother's doing, obviously….dressed sharp, saying all the right things to all the right people.

He was good-looking in that clean, photograph kind of way,educated and successful. Everything my parents had already decided Ryder wasn't.

They wouldn't stop comparing the two of them,every dinner, every phone call. Dean would never make you wait outside a garage until midnight. Dean actually has a future.

I said no every single time. "I'm not marrying Dean. I'm with Ryder."

Then my dad's business started falling apart. A bad deal, bad debts, the kind of thing families like mine went out of their way to hide from the neighbors, I only found out because I overheard him on the phone one night, and he didn't sound like himself at all….begging some bank for more time.

Not long after that, Dean's family stepped in. Quiet and generous about it , on the surface. An investment, they called it. A partnership. Enough money to keep us from losing everything, offered over dinner with Dean sitting across from me like he already knew how this was going to go.

Nobody said out loud what it would cost me, nobody had to.

I held out as long as I could, longer than anyone thought I would.

But watching my dad's hands shake around his coffee cup every morning, watching my mom quietly sell off pieces of her jewelry while pretending everything was fine….that wore me down in a way no argument ever could. Then, for the first time in my life, my father actually asked me for something instead of telling me what to do.

"Please, Brielle. This is the only way, I wouldn't ask you if there was another way."

I agreed to the engagement the same week the bank stopped calling our house.

I told myself it wasn't really happening, I told myself I'd find a way out before it went too far, I tried calling Ryder that same night, but my phone had already started disappearing at weird hours….my mom "borrowing it for a second," my dad needing to check something on it.

Messages I know I sent never seemed to get to him, calls went straight to voicemail I never even got the chance to leave.

Eventually people who claimed they loved me told me, gently, that Ryder had already moved on, that he'd been seen with someone else, that a guy like him wasn't going to wait around for a girl who'd already made her choice.

I didn't believe it….not really. Not the part of me that still remembered his hands on my waist at the lake.

But believing something doesn't stop a wedding once the invitations are already sent out.

******

The morning of, I sat in the back of the car on the way to Dean's family's estate, wearing a dress I didn't pick out, a ring already cold on my finger even though the ceremony hadn't even started yet.

I had my phone hidden in my lap, screen turned down low so nobody in the front seat would notice the light.

My hands were shaking as I typed his name.

*Ryder…*

I didn't even know what I was going to say. *I'm sorry. I never stopped thinking about you. Please, if you get this….*

I never finished typing it.

Dean's hand shot across the seat and grabbed the phone before I even realized what was happening.

"Dean….." My heart jumped into my throat.

He looked down at the screen, at the message I hadn't finished, at the name still lit up there.

Then he looked up at me, and that easy, charming look he wore for everyone else was completely gone, what replaced it was something colder….something I'd end up knowing very well over the next five years.

"You won't be needing this anymore," he said quietly, and put my phone in his jacket pocket like it had never been mine to begin with.