Chapter Three

It was weird to see Patrick behind the wheel of a pick-up truck, since everyone who knew him was so used to seeing him astride his Harley Davidson Dyna Street Bob, custom finished with matte black paint and two wailing Claws airbrushed on the sides. He even seemed fidgety in the truck, like he didn’t quite know how to sit. He slung his elbow out the window and drove with his right hand. A few times he caught me casting furtive glances in his direction, or perhaps he was simply caught casting furtive glances in mine, and when he pulled into a packed dirt parking lot, he paused when he turned off the ignition.

“Are we… here?” I asked, peering around him to a flashing neon sign on the front of a rather plain-looking brick building: The Golden Harp.

“It’s not…” he hesitated, his gaze locking on mine, “it’s not quite finished yet…? I mean, it is, but it’s… I’m still working on it, and I had hoped I’d have a little more time before showing it to you.”

“What is it…?”

“It’s your bar.”

I furrowed my brow and opened the door to the truck, hopping down and coming around to get a better look at the place. There wasn’t much to see out front: a red brick face, green roof, two large picture windows that depicted a warm, if common, scene. And the neon sign that flashed The Golden Harp in bright yellow.

“What do you mean, ‘my bar’?” I asked, and he placed a gentle hand on the small of my back to urge me forward. He opened the door for me, and we were met by the happy din of a well-served patronage. It was a cozy little dive with low-hanging green glass lamps, a pool table and a couple of dart boards. The room was half full, and boasted considerably more men than women, most of whom wore the same black leather vest that Patrick wore, marking them as members of the Steel Claw. And that meant I knew most of them as well.

“Claire Grace!” Came a shout, accompanied by a friendly cheer. I smiled, waggling my fingers in greeting to these men that had watched me grow up. These were my father’s friends and colleagues, my brother’s closest compatriots, my husband’s family. Ex. Ex-husband. Or, very nearly ex — all I had to do was file the paperwork.

There was a gin gimlet on the end of the bar for me before I even had the chance to order it, and I couldn’t help but grin as I hopped up onto a bar stool. I sipped happily as the members of the MC came over one by one, pressing kisses to my cheek, clapping me on the shoulder, expressing concern about my father, telling me how good it was to see me home again. Patrick watched them file up, smiling, like he’d found the missing piece to a puzzle and he could finally see the whole image. For my part, I shrank under the weight of so much attention.

After the commotion had calmed down somewhat, Patrick reached over the bar to help himself to a beer and slid onto the stool beside mine. “This is one of our — how did you put it? — legitimate businesses.” He grinned, and took a drink. “I opened it about a year ago, but the deed is in your name.”

“Mine?” I quirked a brow. “Why?”

“You know, just in case anything should happen, I wanted to make sure you and Scottie were taken care of.” He leaned in, peering at me through a forrest of thick, yellow lashes, and brushed the back of his knuckles over the flushed skin of my cheek. “I know why you left, and I get it. I do. But I still—”

The back door burst open then, granting admittance to a very large, shirtless man with a deep and bloody laceration over his right eye. And that wasn’t his only injury: his chest bore a number of bruises at various stages of healing, and his left elbow was scabbed over, as though he had been dragged across the floor on it. Even as battered as he was, there was something magnetic about him, as though he commanded the attention of everyone in his immediate vicinity. His hair was a rich mahogany brown, his eyes were the color of a glass of sherry. And I got a good look at him because he was headed straight for us.

“O’Reilly,” he said, and Patrick turned to look at him.

“Declan?” Patrick said, rising to his feet. “The hell are you doin’, man?”

“I agreed to fight,” he said, “but no one told me anything about throwing matches.”

“Patrick?” I asked. “What is this?”

“Give me a minute, Claire,” Patrick said, and gripped the man’s arm as he directed him toward the back of the bar. I jumped off of my seat and followed. The three of us escaped into the back room of the bar, which was essentially just cold concrete and a folding card table and metal chairs. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling and cast a sort of sickly yellow glow over everything. The man — Declan — wiped at the blood on his face and his hand came away red.

“What the hell is this about, Declan?” Patrick demanded, his arms crossed in front of him. “You can’t just come barging into a place of business and start screaming about this shit.”

“I agreed to pay off Jimmy Pierce’s debt. But I’m not here to let some half-wit beat on me. You want me in that ring, I fight until I can’t stand up anymore.” Declan glanced at me, then, registering my presence of the first time.

“You do what I tell you to do,” Patrick insisted. “If Fitz says throw a fight, you throw it. In fact, if any of the Claws tell you to throw a fight, you fucking throw it. Understand? You’re here to pay off a debt, nothing more, nothing less.”

“I won’t do it. You’ll have to fuckin’ kill me.” He wiped at the blood again, and I gave a shake of my head.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. If looks could kill, the one Patrick shot at me would have knocked me dead. “Throw it if they tell you to throw it. Because they will kill you.” I knew they would. I’d seen it. “And that cut is gonna need stitches.”

“We don’t have time to get him stitched up, he’s got another fight in half an hour,” Patrick said, pacing the length of the small room.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” I asked, rolling up the sleeves of my sweatshirt. Patrick bobbed his head in a nod. “Well, go get it for me.”

He hesitated, but ultimately excused himself, and I was alone with the bleeding, shirtless brute. “Sit down,” I said, and he complied, dumping himself onto one of the folding chairs like an old sack of potatoes. I bent forward and peered intently at his face, assessing the damage. It was deep, and had hit a major vein in his forehead. He must have been feeling light headed, from all the blood he’d lost.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” He asked, and I noted the gentle lilt to his manner of speech.

“Claire,” I said. “And don’t call me sweetheart.”

“I’m Declan. What’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a place like this?” I rolled my eyes, tugging down one of my sweatshirt sleeves and pressing it against his forehead in an attempt to stem the bleeding.

“I’m not such a nice girl. And if you don’t quit being so goddamned smarmy, I’m just gonna let this bleed until you pass out.” He smiled up at me then, a bright, earnest thing that lit up his entire face. I found myself smiling back.

Patrick returned with the first aid kit and I set to work laying out my supplies on the card table. It looked like he even had a needle and some sutures.

“So you can patch me up, eh, doc?” He asked and I arched one shoulder in a shrug.

“I could, but it’ll leave one hell of a scar. I’m no plastic surgeon.”

“Leave a scar. Women like scars.”

“Do they?”

I tugged my sweatshirt off over my head, wiping gently at his forehead with the previously unsoiled sleeve, and began to disinfect the area. Declan winced; I smiled.

“So,” I said, “you can take a beating, but you can’t handle a little hydrogen peroxide?”

“Apparently.” I dried the skin around the cut and examined it closely, trying to ensure that no foreign materials had made their way into the wound. Leaning in that close to him, I could smell the sweat and the subtle pulse of endorphins and adrenaline that radiated from his glistening skin.

“You should come watch me fight some time,” he said as I leaned in with the needle and sutures. “I’m actually quite good.”

“Calm down, champ,” Patrick said, a distinctive edge to his voice. “You’ve only had two fights.”

“Yeah, but they were good fights,” Declan said, tensing as I pierced his epidermis, as gently and deftly as I could. But the fact of the matter was that I had only ever practiced this move on models, or on pieces of fruit. Not a fact I was going to share with my erstwhile patient.

“The first one was good,” Patrick begrudgingly agreed, “but you were supposed to fucking throw the second one. I don’t think you understand the kind of take we were banking on.”

“You conscripted me to win fights,” Declan said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

“Stop talking,” I said. “Both of you.”

I worked slowly, but diligently, and after a long stretch of silence between the two men and myself, I tied off the suture, cut its end, and put a bandage over the whole thing. “Have a professional look at that, but it should keep your blood on the inside for the time being.”

“Thanks, love,” Declan said, and rose to his feet. He was stiff, I could tell, but his muscles rolled and flexed under skin that had almost no fat on it whatsoever. Something about him was magnetic, and I wanted to stay close. Patrick, of course, had other ideas.

“Come on, Claire,” Pat said, “I’ll take you home.”

~ * ~

Patrick held my bloodied sweatshirt as we headed back to the pick up truck. I couldn’t help but scoff. “So,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat, “my bar is connected to your underground fight club, or whatever.”

“It isn’t a fight club, Claire,” Patrick grumbled, suddenly looking and sounding incredibly tired. He turned on the ignition and headed back toward my mother’s house.

“Well, then what is it? Because it seemed to me like you took me out tonight to try to prove that you’d, like, gone all legit. But it’s just the same old crap with you, isn’t it?” I shook my head and crossed my arms under my breasts, turning away from him to peer out the window as my hometown passed by outside.

“The bar is a legitimate business,” Patrick said. “And it isn’t the club’s only venture. We have a lot in the works.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, Claire. That’s a fucking fact. What, you think we want to be criminals?” I turned to look at him then, and could not help but smile a manic sort of smile.

“Yes, Patrick. Yes. That is exactly what I think. I think you want to be criminals — I think you love being criminals.”

“We don’t love being criminals—”

“You do, I can tell. You don’t need the money from your, what even is it? Your cage matches?”

“It’s just underground MMA, that’s all. It’s unregulated, that’s all it means.” He pulled over to the side of the road and looked me square in the eye. “Why do you think we do what we do, huh? Any of the Claws. Why do you think we do it?”

“Because you were all born into it. Because you don’t know anything else.” I turned away from him and peered out the window into the empty blackness of late evening. The town was small and there wasn’t a lot of light pollution, so from where I was sitting, we could have been the only two people in the universe.

“We do it, Claire,” he murmured mildly, “because there are people we love, who count on us. And, frankly, the legitimate businesses just don’t make us enough money to take care of them all.”

“You mean me and Scottie. You blame me and Scottie for your sordid life of crime.” I glared at him, though whether or not he could see my expression in the darkness was anyone’s guess.

“No, that isn’t…” he sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as though he had gotten a terrible headache. "I just want to make sure you're taken care of.”

"I told you before, I don't want your blood money. Scottie and I are fine. We've been fine. I can get by.”

"Don't you get it? I don't want you to just get by." He reach for me in the darkness then, he took my hand. I don't know why I didn't pull away, but I didn't; I let him lace his fingers with mine. "I want you to have every goddamn thing in the world.”

I stared at him as my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, and I could just barely make out his fine Romanesque features. I remembered so clearly what it was like to fall in love with him, like I just fallen in love with him, like our whole lives were still ahead of us. His eyes were green and gold like a nebula, a swirling miasma of constellations. I knew now why I had stayed away so long: to be in his presence was to have all of my senses utterly overwhelmed.

"Come back." I pursed my lips, and gave a shake of my head, but he wasn't listening. He tugged me toward him until he could hook an arm around my waist, and draw me fully into his chest. I didn't resist him then — I couldn't. I had used up all of my willpower staying away from him in the first place. Now that I was home, I was his.

"Patrick," he lifted a finger to my lips to silence me. I peered up into those eyes that I loved so well, and he bent his head forward until his lips met mine. His hands came up to my face then, and she cradled it gently as the kiss grew in intensity. My fingers gripped the front of his shirt, and I realized somewhere in the back of my mind, that I had been excited by the bit of violence I witnessed. And what did that say about me? Perhaps there really was no room to judge Patrick. Perhaps, somewhere in the deepest part of myself, I was just like him.

Kissing him felt like coming home. I pulled away ever so briefly to tug my tank top off over my head, and before I even tossed it aside, his hands found my breasts. He cupped them tenderly at first, then, in a burst of brutish force, tore my bra away to expose my hardened nipples to the cool evening air. Leaning down, he took one nipple into his mouth, flicking it gently with his tongue. I moaned, and tossed my head back so that my hair tickled the skin between my shoulder blades. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this was a terrible idea. I knew that being with him in this way would make leaving him all the harder. And leave him I would.

His fingers fumbled then with the button of my jeans, so I reached down to assist him, wriggling free of the tight denim. I kicked my way out of my sneakers, and sat on the seat in front of him clad only in my panties while he remained fully clothed. I relished his eyes on me, reveled in the hungry expression he wore on his face, like a jungle cat stalking his prey.

"Spread your legs.” And I don't know what it was that made me obey, but I did as he bid me. When I spread my thighs, he reached forward pushed my panties aside, one finger probing my entrance. "You're already wet for me.”

"Yes. Always." He shoved his finger deep into me then, eliciting a moan from behind my lips. Although it was cramped in the truck, he maneuvered himself on top of me. I could feel the evidence of his arousal pressing against my thigh as one finger, and then two, slid in and out of my wet and swollen sex.

"Do you want me to fuck you?" He kissed me again, his tongue finding mine, exploring the cavern of my mouth. But this was all familiar. Nothing could be more natural then for a wife to lay with her husband, right?

“Yes,” came my breathless reply — I wanted him in a base, animalistic way, and my desire pulsed between my legs. He drew his fingers out of me and licked them clean, humming his delight at my taste. I grinned, abashed, and reached out to undo the button on his jeans and tug the zipper down. He lifted himself off of me then and opened the drivers side door of the truck, climbing out. I lifted my head to watch him, worried he would put a stop to our entire escapade, but instead he tugged me toward him so that I was laying on the seat underneath the steering wheel, my legs hanging out of the open door. He turned me over so that my face was pressed against the old, worn vinyl of the seat, and I could feel him run his hands up the backs of my thighs. He yanked my panties down over my ass until they slid past my knees and he forced my legs wider apart so that I was completely exposed to him.

The head of his cock found my slick, waiting opening and he thrust himself into me, filling me up with the full length of his manhood. I let out a cry, and heard him grunt as well, a noise that almost sounded like relief, the kind of sigh that coming home after a long day of work might elicit. I smiled and gripped the seatbelt buckle as he began to buck his hips, pulling out and then plunging himself as deeply into my pussy as he could manage.

“Harder,” I murmured, and he obliged, grabbing my hips and fucking me with fervor. His body slammed against mine, our skin slick with sweat and friction, and he reached forward to curl his fingers around my throat. He squeezed: not enough to cut off my air supply, but enough to show me how fully he possessed me.

All at once, he let out a cry and bent over me so that his forehead came to rest on the back of my shoulder. I could feel his cock throb as he came inside me, and I thrilled at the sensation.

A few sets of headlights passed us, me naked and bent over with Patrick’ softening prick still inside of me. Finally, he pulled away and I could feel his hot come dripping down my thighs.

“I missed you,” he gently intoned, and I stood up and turned around to face him. He picked my clothes up for me from where they’d landed — on the ground, on the steering wheel, on the dashboard — and handed them to me. He leaned forward and kissed me, a sweet, sensuous kiss that said more about how he felt for me than anything else could.

I put my clothes down and hopped up onto the seat. “I’m not done with you yet,” I said, and he smirked as I put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down to his knees in front of me.

“Someone will see you,” he said as I slung my legs over his shoulders.

“Let them watch,” I replied.

I gasped when his deft little tongue touched my clit, and sighed when he penetrated me with two fingers. Even after the years apart, he knew how to work my body, and it wasn’t long before I felt my orgasm begin to build. I opened my eyes and looked down the length of my body to watch him lick my pussy. With his brows raised, he looked up at me, sending a shiver down my spine even as the muscles in my cunt began to contract with my orgasm. I let out a cry and reached down to tangle my fingers in his hair. He carefully withdrew his fingers, pressed a kiss to my pubic mound and stood up again, peering down at me.

“God damn,” he growled appreciatively, and reached up to slide his two dripping wet fingers into my mouth. I licked our juices off of them, and felt warm under the blanket of his esteem. “You are so fucking beautiful,” he said.

Dressed and on the road again, we went back to being Patrick and Claire, the separated lovers with the three-year-old son and the complicated history, and we didn’t say much when he pulled into the driveway of my parent’s house.

“Well,” I said lamely, as I opened the door and climbed out of the truck. I left my bloody sweatshirt, deciding I didn’t need to dwell on the bizarre evening after it was over. Except, perhaps, for the moment Patrick and I were joined again.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” he said, and followed me up the cobblestone pathway to the main entrance of the house.

“Thanks for…” I began, and tilted my head to the side, peering up at him, “the orgasm.”

He laughed and drew me into a hug, rocking me gently back and forth. “Any time,” he said. “Really. Truly. Any time.”

When I opened the door to the house, I immediately saw my mother sitting on the stairs in the dim light of the foyer. Patrick peered around me curiously, and stepped into the house behind me, immediately sensing something wasn’t right.

“Mama?” I said, and she looked up at me with blue eyes ringed in red from weeping. “What’s the matter?”

She sniffled, and pressed a wadded up tissue to her nose. “Your father is dead,” was all she could manage to say.

I felt my heart drop into the pit of my stomach, felt the world seize up and freeze around me. I was anchored to nothing; I felt like the earth might shake me loose and I would go flying up into the outer atmosphere. But Patrick took my hand and weighed me back down again, and when I looked at him I saw my own pain and fear and panic and grief reflected back at me. I had lost my father, yes. But he had lost a friend, a colleague and a father as well. But more than that, the passing of Edr Channing meant something much bigger for Patrick O’Reilly: it meant that Patrick was now the President of the Steel Claw.