When Ronin and Ford wake up they are stunned silent by the artwork on my body. It's all in shades of black and red, just like Spencer's tattoos. The back piece, I can see in the mirror, is a bold Shrike Bikes logo. There's a crouching blackbird silhouette with red Shrike Bikes lettering inside the body and the whole thing is surrounded by a perfect red circle.
But it's the front piece that takes my breath away. It's a beautiful composition depicting a Samurai warrior and a blackbird sitting in a cherry tree. For the first time, in all the paintings Spencer Shrike has competed on my naked body, my girly parts are not emphasized. The painting flows flawlessly over my curves, hiding every inch of skin underneath. The blossoms take me back to the first day I arrived at Chaput Studios, broken, scared, and barely holding myself together.
And a gentle man named after a masterless warrior pushed me in a swing and started the healing.
But that moment in time was fleeting, just like those flowers.
That girl blew away in the wind and this girl took her place.
If I thought the catsuit made me feel beautiful and fully dressed, this is a hundred times that.
I feel like a goddess.
And when I get to town, I walk down that Sturgis strip with my head up, feeling loved and pretty.
And no one whistles or talks to me rudely. They say hello, they compliment Spencer's talent, they take pictures with me, and they treat me like a piece of art.
I see him in the crowd. Watching me, following our progress down the street, but from the opposite side. Trying to be stealthy, I guess. And a small part of me wonders if he's the real reason I took this job so quickly. I knew as soon as I saw the motocross transport trucks on the highway he'd be here. So did Spencer.
He comes to the show that night too. Stands right in front. Here the crowd is more rowdy, they are all drunk after all, but Wade stands still, his eyes never moving from me while I'm on stage.
He was my first love. I thought he was the one. I cried over losing him for years after his mom sent me away.
But when he finally lifts his hand to wave I don't wave back.
Because I'm not a runner anymore.
I'm a chaser.
To be continued…
Hey readers! If you enjoyed Rook and Ronin why not take a few moments to jot down a few words about the story and give it a rating on Amazon… just page forward and they ask you automatically! It's almost too easy! And I really need the reviews, because I'm an Indie and it's real hard to fight your way to the top of the pile where people can see you without a ton of reviews. So if you've got just a minute, I'd appreciate that.
Also - the final book in this series,
Rook and Ronin, Book Three, PANIC, is scheduled to release on October 21, 2013
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SNEAK PEEK OF PANIC
Special Sneak Peek
PANIC - Rook and Ronin #3
ROOK
The music pounds in my ear as I force myself up one more aisle of steps at Coors Field. This song always gets me trying a little harder. I hop the long step, then take a stride and pump my legs to go up two steps at once. I can't do this very long, I'm still no Ford when it comes to running stadiums, but I almost make it to the top before I have to slow down and then finally stop.
I look for Ford, but he's doing the lower sections today. Just a blur of a black shirt running much harder than me up his current set of steps. I jog in place until the song winds down and realize I've used up all my energy. So I stop and enjoy the view. This is why I come to the upper section these days.
The view. These mountains are gorgeous and I never get tired of looking at them. I'm off to the far right of first base. I'm not a baseball person, so I have no idea what that area on the field is called? Right field? I dunno. I'm not on the field anyway, I'm up in the stands, so it hardly matters.
The only thing that matters is that I can see the mountains and the way the reflected sunrise from the east lights them up all pink. Sometimes when Ronin and I are up there for the weekend or just for a ride, I have to pinch myself, that's how pretty it is here.
Colorado changes almost instantly once September arrives. One minute you're grilling outside and the nights are pleasant. The next, it's freezing ass cold. Well, fifties and sometimes forties, anyway. Too cold to hang out at night in shorts anymore.
But the new crisp air feels spectacular on my sweaty skin right now. In fact, I get a little chill because I'm starting to cool down. I enjoy the relative quiet for a few minutes. The traffic down below is pretty loud, but it's tempered by the ever constant wind whistling across my ears. Colorado should be nicknamed the wind state because it's a regular thing.
Life is so weird. I still can't get over how much things have changed for me since I stepped off that bus six months ago. I have a lot of money. Well, maybe not a lot compared to Ronin, but to me, a million dollars is too much to even comprehend. STURGIS will pay out at just under six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus the fifty grand I had from TRAGIC, plus the money the guys took from Jon when they set him up. I've got over a million, actually.
And I've bought nothing since before the STURGIS contract started besides food and gas and stuff like that. Not one extra thing. Not one article of clothing (I have way more clothes than I need) not a stick of furniture (Ronin purchased all my furniture), not even a car. Although, this is gonna change very soon. I'm just too content to think about spending right now. I've never been a shopper and money has not changed that in me.
"Why did you stop?" Ford has made his way across the stadium and into the upper level while I was daydreaming. He's even carrying burritos and drinks.
"I'm done, besides I wanted to enjoy the view. It's our last time here, Ford."
He smiles at me. He does that a lot these days. Smiles, and not just at me. Ford smiles quite a bit. I'm not one hundred percent sure if this is normal, but I'm guessing not. September rolled in and everyone in my new little family suddenly found themselves a lot happier.
Elise is pregnant, so she's one of those glowing moms-to-be. She's tiny everywhere but her stomach where she's just getting her fourth month baby bump. No wonder she was so crazy all summer worrying about Clare. She was just as surprised as the rest of us when she did the pregnancy test the day we came back from Sturgis. Good thing Elise is not a partier or she'd probably be insane with worry because her mothering instinct is already kicking in. Antoine is beside himself with pride. He even asked her to marry him but she said, and I quote, "After twelve years I refuse to accept your proposal knocked-the-fuck-up."
He's still working on her, but she never took his ring.
Ronin is happy too. He's in charge of the GIDGET contract, which is not erotic modeling. Well, not really. It's a retro pin-up catalog shoot for a new lingerie company. They aren't really 'new', they're some subsidiary of another huge lingerie company, hence the cash flow for this kick-off.
Spencer is back up in Fort Collins doing his thing. But I'll see him tomorrow when Ronin moves me up to the shop for filming of the first season of Shrike Bikes for the Biker Channel.
Ronin and I talked about this decision ad nauseam after Sturgis. I won't go into the boring details, but he was managing the GIDGET contract so it was only fair that I got to do the show with Spencer because they start at the same time. It's perfect really. Our last two jobs in this crazy world of modeling, then on to vague new things.
We haven't gotten that far yet, so I'm not sure what that means other than not what we're doing now.
"Here," Ford says, handing me a water and my partially unwrapped burrito.
I take it and dig in.
"We'll find something to take its place when we get up north. Don't worry."
"Hmm," I say with my mouth full. "I don't see what, Ford. That place is in the middle of nowhere. And winter is coming."
He smiles at the movie reference. "Snowshoeing. Cross country skiing. Extreme croquet."
I spit out some eggs as I laugh. "What. The. Fuck. Is. That?"
"It's croquet, but not. " He sighs. "It's relative, I guess."
"Sounds like my kind of game, actually. It's for stoners, isn't it? Like Frisbee?"
Ford laughs. "Maybe. We can skip the extreme croquet then. I'll figure something out. How's school coming?"
School. I'm in school. Sometimes I have to pinch myself, that's how excited this makes me. Ford, ever the stealthy hacker genius that he is, rigged my mandatory placement test for the community college up in FoCo and got me registered for fall semester. It's all online, so it's not really life changing like if I was living on campus at Colorado State, which is the big FoCo university, but I'm stoked. I'm taking basic shit. English composition, History of Western Civ, biology, and pre-algebra.
Yes, I'm a total math loser, but what can you do? One baby step at a time.
"How's math, in particular?" Ford asks, like he's reading my mind. "I know you hated that I put you in a non-credit class, but it was the right decision, wasn't it?"
"Yes," I reluctantly admit. "I'm barely keeping up to be honest. It's confusing for me. I'm not a math girl."
"Well, luckily you need very little of it for film school, so don't dwell. Just do your best."
Ford is very supportive of my academic pursuits.
Very
supportive. It makes me wonder sometimes. It's not like Ronin isn't supportive, he is. He wants me to follow my dream. But Ford is supportive in a different way. Like he's invested in it or something. Like his success is dependent on mine and that gets me thinking back to what he said a few months ago. About how patient he is. About him giving me the tools I need to fix my life, so I'll stop looking for Ronin to do that for me. "How come you don't have a girlfriend, Ford?"
"What makes you think I don't?"
"Oh," I reply, embarrassed. "Do you?"
He looks away. "I have… women." He looks back smiling. "But they're not girlfriends."
I'm not even sure what to say to that, so of course I choose something totally inappropriate. "Are they… whores?"
He laughs. "No comment." And then he takes a big bite of his burrito and shuts that conversation down.
"Clare's coming home tomorrow." I'm not sure why I fill in the silence with that tidbit of information—
"You're nervous about meeting her."
—but apparently Ford has a pretty good handle on my psyche these days. "Yeah. I still think about what you said, you know."
He shrugs. "I'm not going to say any more about it. Ronin's your boyfriend, you like each other. That's all that matters."
I stare at him for a few more seconds and let this sink in. "Good, that means you've lost interest in me and all that shit you said last summer about wanting me to leave Ronin is over."
He laughs. "We're friends, right? I'm happy with how things are going between us. It's perfect actually."
Hmmm. That's weird. In fact, I'm weird right now. I shouldn't be asking him this stuff but I can't help myself. "Because you're… what? Emotionally incapable of intimate relationships? This friendship is as far as you go? There's nothing after this but the physical act of sex?"
"Yes, yes, and yes. You missed your calling. You should've been a psych major."
"I cheat. Ronin told me about… well, he told me why he was so insistent on me not talking to you."
"And do you agree with my diagnosis?"
"Not really," I say shaking my head. "You're a bit on the strange side—"
He laughs again, his eyes darting around the stadium, like he's thinking about this.
"—and I'm guessing you really are some scary smart genius. I totally see that. But you've done a lot of very nice things for me, Ford. And I never asked for it. I'm not always nice back to you, but I hope you know, I really, really appreciate it."
He drops the smile now and slowly directs his gaze to me—staring hard just past my head, like he's thinking. I hold my breath as I wait for him to say something and when he finally begins to talk, it's soft and low. "We fucked Mardee up pretty good. We were all tight—Mardee, Ronin, Spencer, and me. A sort of unit. Even though Ronin and I never got along well, it was different when the
four
of us were together. It was… just different. And you stunned me last summer when you asked me that question, Rook. I didn't know what to say."
"What question?"
"Who was I chasing." He lets out a long breath. "Her. I'm chasing her. I'm trying to catch up with all the mistakes we made. It's funny how you take people for granted." He looks me in the eye for this part. "We took her for granted. We used her, we…"
I wait him out, patient, like he is with me.
He takes a drink and swallows hard before continuing. "Ronin blames himself for not paying attention to her, and Spencer blames himself for bringing her around the drugs, but we all played a part. You two really have nothing in common but every time I look at you, I see her. And it just…" he stops to shake his head. "I just want you to succeed so badly. It feels good to watch you grow stronger."