President Reaper's Old Lady

Chapter 5: New Faces

Willow woke before her alarm, which hadn't happened once in the three weeks since she'd arrived in Yellow Creek.

She lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling of the small apartment above the tavern — her grandfather's old rooms, still smelling faintly of his pipe tobacco no matter how many windows she opened — running the last twenty four hours through her mind like a film reel that refused to stop looping.

Nathaniel's smile curdling into something colder. Ronan's hand at her waist. Four words that had rewritten what an entire tavern believed about her life.

‘She's my Old Lady.’

She groaned and pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes.

At least the tavern would still be hers. Whatever chaos Ronan “Reaper” Kane had dragged into her life, Harper's Tavern was still her space, her rhythm, her responsibility. She knew what she was doing here. Nothing about that had changed.

She held onto that thought as she took her bath, got ready for the day and all the way down the narrow back staircase connecting her rooms to the tavern below, through unlocking the front door, through flipping on the lights, through the familiar comfort of checking the liquor stock and wiping down the counter one more time even though it was already clean.

For a few minutes, the world narrowed back down to something manageable.

Simple.

Hers.

She even let herself feel a flicker of relief.

No Ronan yet. Maybe today would just be a normal day.

Then she heard it.

One engine, low and distant.

Then another, getting closer.

Willow closed her eyes.

"Of course, I celebrated too early."

The bell rang before she'd even set the rag down. Two men walked in wearing De'Vil MC cuts, and she recognized them instantly from the crowd that had filled her tavern the day before.

One had an easy, open face, the kind that looked like it had never met a stranger it couldn't win over in under a minute, definitely the talkative one.

The other trailed a step behind him, quieter, his eyes already moving across the room like he was cataloguing every exit before he'd said a single word.

"What are you two doing here?" Willow asked.

The talkative one grinned. "We're here for work."

She looked at him. Then at the quiet one. Then back down at the leather cut stretched across his chest, the winged skull patch stitched over his heart.

"Work?"

"Yep."

"Doing what?"

"Whatever you need us to do."

"You know this is a tavern, right?"

He glanced around, unbothered. "I figured."

She stared at him, waiting for the joke to land somewhere, waiting for him to admit this was some kind of prank.

It never came.

The bell rang again, and Ronan walked in behind them, calm as ever, as though dropping two bikers into the middle of her workplace was the most ordinary thing in the world.

Willow rounded on him immediately.

"This wasn't our agreement," she said, "It was that you'd protect me. I never agreed to turn my tavern into a De'Vil MC outpost."

She made sure to choose her words carefully. She wasn't about to announce to the whole world that she was in a fake relationship with Ronan.

"They're not an outpost." Ronan's voice stayed level, unbothered by the sharpness in hers. "They're temporary employees."

"Two giant bikers in club cuts are not exactly subtle, Ronan."

"They'll be working ordinary jobs."

The talkative one raised a hand. "I'm excellent at carrying things, talking to people, and looking handsome while I do both."

"I didn't ask," Willow said flatly.

He grinned wider. "You're going to like me."

Beside him, the quiet one muttered, barely audible, "She already doesn't."

Willow's mouth twitched despite herself, a laugh nearly escaping before she caught it.

"This is Cole, also known as Torch," Ronan said, tipping his head toward the talkative one, "and Tyler, also known as Razor." A nod toward the quiet one. "They aren't here to interfere with your business. They won't tell you how to run this place, touch your staff, or make decisions for you. They're here to watch the tavern. The people coming in. The people going out."

"I have staff already," Willow said. "Meredith works here. Ava works here. I managed this place before you showed up, and I can keep managing it."

"Then manage it."

She narrowed her eyes at him, waiting for the catch.

"Cole and Tyler will handle whatever happens around the edges," Ronan continued. "Someone suspicious walks in, they'll notice. Someone follows you home, they'll notice. Something happens outside these walls, they'll deal with it. You don't stop being the owner just because someone's protecting you."

Something in that landed differently than she expected. He wasn't saying I'm taking over. He was saying I'm making sure nothing gets through.

She let out a long and reluctant breath.

"Fine. But there are rules."

Cole perked up. "I love rules."

"Inside my tavern, I'm the boss. Not you." She pointed at Cole, then Tyler. "Neither of you bullies my customers. Neither of you scares them. No fights. You don't interfere with Meredith or Ava. No drinking on the job." She paused, narrowing her eyes further. "And absolutely nobody turns my tavern into a clubhouse."

Cole raised his hand again. "Does that include card games?"

"Especially card games."

He let out a long, dramatic sigh, shoulders slumping like she'd just crushed his entire week.

"You haven't even worked here ten minutes, Torch," Tyler said.

"I'm negotiating my benefits."

Willow bit down on a smile and lost.

Ronan watched the exchange with that same quiet, barely there amusement she was beginning to recognize on him — not quite a smile, but something close enough to count.

Then, without any further ceremony, Cole and Tyler simply started working.

Cole took to it immediately, like he'd been born behind a bar. He picked up trays, cracked jokes with regulars, learned three names within the first ten minutes. One customer, a stocky man in a trucker cap, asked if he was new.

"Very," Cole said. "Please be patient with me."

The man laughed and waved him off, already charmed. Willow watched it happen from across the room, arms crossed, and grudgingly admitted to herself that he was good with people.

Suspiciously good, honestly.

She wondered if he'd ever held a normal job in his life.

Tyler, by contrast, barely spoke a word. But nothing escaped him.

He noticed a man loitering too long outside the front window. Noticed someone step inside, scan the room without ordering anything, and slip back out ten seconds later. Noticed the back door wasn't latched properly and fixed it without a word, without asking permission, without making it a production. Noticed Willow's phone sitting unattended on the counter and slid it toward her without comment.

She found it unsettling, being watched that closely.

"Do you ever stop looking at things?" she asked him at one point.

"No."

She waited for more. Nothing came.

Cole passed by with a tray balanced on one hand. "That's Tyler's version of a full conversation."

Meredith arrived not long after, stopping dead in the doorway at the sight of two strange men already working behind her bar.

"Are these the men Ronan sent?" she asked Willow.

"Apparently."

Cole introduced himself with a small, theatrical bow. Tyler offered a simple nod. Meredith warmed to Cole almost instantly, laughing at something he said within the first minute, while Tyler's silence seemed to intrigue her more than unsettle her.

Ava arrived later, and unlike Willow, she wasn't irritated in the slightest. She was fascinated. She peppered both men with questions — what kind of bikes did they ride, what did the patches mean, had they always been part of the club.

"Ava," Willow said, "leave them alone and get to work."

Cole happily answered a few harmless questions anyway. Tyler simply watched Ava with quiet, faint amusement, saying nothing, missing nothing.

As the morning wore on, Willow started noticing the ripple effect of two bikers standing behind her bar.

Regulars whispered. Some looked intrigued. A few looked outright nervous. One older man leaned toward Willow and asked, half joking, if she'd hired herself an entire biker gang.

Cole answered before she could open her mouth.

"Not the whole gang," he said. "They're still back at the clubhouse."

Willow shot him a look.

"Too much?" he asked.

"Much too much."

But even as she said it, she felt the tension in her shoulders loosen a fraction. The humor kept the whole morning from feeling like a security briefing dressed up as a workday.

And underneath the jokes, she noticed the practical shape of it too. Cole moved through the crowd behind the bar like he'd worked there for years. Tyler had positioned himself somewhere he could watch both the front door and the hallway leading to the back exit without ever seeming to be watching anything at all.

Neither of them was disrupting her business. If anything, the tavern felt fuller, louder, more alive than it had in days.

Ronan came by near midday to check on things.

"They're doing their jobs," Willow admitted, before he could ask.

"Is there a problem?"

"Besides the fact that my tavern now employs two bikers? No."

She gestured toward Cole, currently deep in conversation with three laughing customers. Then toward Tyler, eyes fixed on the front door like a sentry who'd forgotten how to blink.

"Those two." Ronan glanced over at them, unbothered. "They're good at what they do."

Willow sighed. "I noticed."

"This arrangement isn't permanent," he said, "unless you want it to be."

"I haven't decided if I want it at all."

"You don't have to decide today. Just think of them as part timers for now."

That caught her slightly off guard. Not the words themselves, but the absence of any push behind them. He wasn't trying to convince her of anything.

He was simply leaving the door open and letting her choose when, or if, to walk through it.

By the time the afternoon light slanted gold across the wooden floor, Willow found herself standing near the register, watching Cole flip a bottle behind the bar for a delighted cluster of regulars while Tyler quietly refilled napkin dispensers without being asked.

For the first time since Ronan had walked into her tavern the day before, she understood that he hadn't been exaggerating.

He'd meant every word of it.

She looked around Harper's Tavern — her grandfather's tavern, her business, her responsibility, the one thing in Yellow Creek that had always felt entirely hers, from the bar downstairs to the rooms she now slept in above it — and realized just how much had shifted in less than a day.

Yesterday, she'd been running this place completely alone.

Today, there were two bikers behind her bar, a motorcycle parked outside her front door, and a man named Reaper somewhere close by who apparently considered protecting her a promise worth keeping, no matter what it cost him.

She shook her head slowly.

"This is going to be a long day."

From behind her, Cole's voice rang out, bright and unbothered.

"Welcome to De'Vil, Old Lady!"

Willow turned, slow and deliberate, one eyebrow already climbing.

"Cole."

He grinned at her, entirely too pleased with himself.

"Yes, boss?”

“Do you always have something to say?”

“Yes, boss.”

And just like that he walked off to serve some customers leaving Willow right where she was standing.

Yep. This was definitely going to be a long day.