STEEL AND SMOKE

Chapter 3 - Close Than Smart

Cage found her on the back steps of the clubhouse an hour after breakfast, watching a handful of prospects wash down bikes that didn't need washing, and sat down beside her without asking if he could .... which she was starting to understand was just how he moved through the world. Like permission was a formality other people needed.

"Tiny ran your name," he said. No preamble. "Wren Delacroix. Changed it back three days ago."

She kept her eyes on the prospects.

"That's not a crime."

"Didn't say it was." He was quiet a moment, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him, a solid, steady presence that should have made her want to move away and instead did the opposite. "Crane's people are in town. Asking around. Quiet, careful... but asking."

Her stomach dropped the way it had every time she'd thought about this moment, in the three days since she'd walked out of that house with her whole future folded up small enough to fit in a duffel bag. "What are they asking?"

"Where a runaway bride might've gone."

He turned his head, and she made herself meet his eyes, because looking away would tell him more than looking at him would. "And whether she took anything with her."

The silence went on a beat too long.

"You did take something," Cage said. Not a question.

"I took what was mine." Her voice came out sharper than she meant it, sharper than the moment probably called for, but three days of running had worn her patience down to something with teeth.

"That's all I'll say about it right now."

She expected him to push. Men like Aldous had always pushed, patient and smiling and absolutely immovable, certain that enough pressure eventually got them whatever they wanted. Cage just studied her, that scar through his eyebrow catching the morning light, and something in his expression shifted into a kind of respect she hadn't been braced for.

"Alright," he said.

"Alright?"

"You'll tell me when you trust me enough to." He stood, offered a hand down to her .... rough-palmed, warm, the kind of hand that had clearly done real work in its life

... and she took it before she'd fully decided to. The pull of him getting her to her feet put them closer together than either of them probably intended, close enough that she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes, close enough that she could feel exactly how much space he took up in the world. "But you should know. Whatever you're carrying, it's already brought Crane's men to my town.

So it's not just yours to keep quiet anymore. Not really."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a fact." His thumb moved, once, absent, against the back of her hand before he seemed to notice he was doing it and stopped. "I don't make threats to women who've already had a bad enough week."

She should have stepped back. She catalogued, with some distant, clinical part of her mind, all the reasons she should step back.... the ring still in her jacket pocket, the wedding that wasn't happening, the fact that she'd known this man for less than twenty-four hours and he ran something dangerous even by the very low bar of things she was currently comparing danger to.

She didn't step back.

"You've got grease on your knuckles," she said instead, because it was true, and because it was easier than anything true she actually wanted to say.

"Garage." His mouth curved, not quite a smile, the same almost-there expression from the bar. "You want to see it? Better conversation happens there than on these steps. Fewer prospects pretending not to listen."

She glanced past him ...three prospects, all abruptly very interested in a bike none of them were actually washing... and laughed, surprising herself with it, the first real laugh she'd managed in three days.

"Lead the way."

Cage

The garage was quieter than the clubhouse, which was half the reason Cage brought her there, and the other half he wasn't examining too closely.

She moved through it slow, curious, trailing a finger along the frame of the bike he'd been rebuilding for two months in whatever hours weren't eaten up by club business... not touching, just looking, the way someone looks at something they don't understand yet but want to.

"You rebuild the whole thing?" she asked.

"Most of it. Frame's original. Everything else has been replaced twice over." He leaned against the workbench, arms crossed, watching her instead of the bike, which he was aware was probably obvious and did nothing to stop. "Ship of Theseus. You know that one?"

"I know that one." She looked up, something warmer in her eyes than the wary calculation from the steps. "Didn't peg you as a philosophy guy."

"Didn't peg you as someone who'd get the reference." Fair trade, that....surprise for surprise. "What'd you study? Before Crane."

Her expression flickered, quick, gone before he could fully read it. "Art history.

For all the good it did me."

"Why no good?"

"Because Aldous's family doesn't believe in useless degrees for daughters-in-law. I was supposed to help run the foundation. Very respectable. Very charitable. Very...." She stopped herself, jaw tight, and looked back down at the bike instead of at him.

"Very not what you wanted," Cage finished for her, quiet.

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't have to."

She looked back up at that, and the distance between them, which had already been shrinking all morning without either of them officially agreeing to it, shrank another careless inch. Close enough that Cage could see the exact color of her eyes....not brown, he corrected himself, something warmer, gold at the edges when the garage light hit them right...and close enough that he was fairly sure she'd noticed him noticing.

"This is a bad idea," she said. Not moving.

"Which part."

"Any of it. All of it." Her voice had dropped, low, the practical, careful tone from the steps gone somewhere he couldn't currently locate. "I've known you a day. I've got a man's ring in my jacket pocket and his lawyers probably looking for me and I am the actual last thing your club needs right now, by your own logic from an hour ago."

"You're not wrong." He hadn't moved either. Hadn't wanted to, in a way that should have alarmed him more than it did.... three years of careful, deliberate distance from exactly this kind of complication, and none of it seemed to be doing him a bit of good standing three feet from Wren Delacroix in afternoon light. "Doesn't change the math much, though."

"What math?"

"The math where I've spent a full day telling myself this is a bad idea and haven't managed to actually believe it once."

Something shifted in her face....surprise, and under it, something that looked dangerously close to relief, like she'd been waiting to hear that somebody else's careful reasoning was failing them too.

Neither of them closed the last of the distance. Not yet. But Cage watched her decide not to step back, the same as she hadn't stepped back on the porch, and understood, with the particular clarity of a man watching a plan he'd meant to keep quietly fall apart, that not yet was doing a lot of work holding this thing together.

"I should go help Ruth with lunch," Wren said, not moving.

"You should," Cage agreed, not moving either.

Neither of them went anywhere for another long moment. When she finally did step back, it cost her something visible to do it, and Cage found he liked that more than he had any business liking anything about a woman with a runaway ring in her pocket and a rival's name hanging over her like weather.

"Later, Just Wren," he said, as she reached the door.

She paused there, hand on the frame, and looked back at him with something that was almost a challenge.

"It's just Wren now," she said. "Not Just Wren. There's a difference."

"I know," Cage said. "I'm working on learning it."