Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Read online

  Although she was being perfectly professional, Ashley was sending out waves of excitement. Lorraine half expected her to bounce up and down. She herself simply smiled. “I’ll give you a call. Is there a time that’s better than another?”

  “Right now, my time is my own. Call at your convenience.” He held out his hand, and Lorraine shook it. “It really has been a pleasure, Ms. Milligan.”

  “Lorraine. And yes, it has, Mr. Winter.”

  “Donovan,” he corrected. “And this is my son, Tristan; my friend, Gavin; and his daughter, Eudora.”

  Lorraine made the circle, shaking hands and making the proper responses to the introductions. She thought Ashley was going to pass out at her side. She wouldn’t leave, because as soon as Lorraine could leave the table, Ashley would want to take their order for after-dinner drinks, and she had a recommendation for a liqueur to complement the dessert.

  Finally, after Donovan asked whether they might be able to exit from a less visible entrance, and she said that Ashley would show them out the side door when they were ready to leave, she escaped back into the kitchen.

  Peter and Cameron both stood a few feet in from the doors, as if they’d been peering together out the round windows the whole time.

  Her son grinned. “I guess he’s chatty—you were out there forever.”

  “He wants me to call him about catering a party at his house.”

  Peter clapped giddily and raised his hand. Lorraine stared at it, confused, but Cameron slapped it. Oh. High five. Right.

  “Holy shit, Mom! Holy shit!”

  It was pretty exciting. But, “I don’t want our attentions to get too divided. We’re not caterers. We own a restaurant. They come to us, not the other way around. The catering truck is for special events only.”

  “Donovan Winter’s private party is about as special as they come, Mom. Come on! Be excited!”

  She was, a little. And scared. All of a sudden, things in her life were moving very quickly.

  ~oOo~

  After the restaurant was closed and cleaned for the evening and the staff had gone home, or out to party, or whatever the cool kids did, Lorraine and Cameron sat together at the bar, each with a snifter of cognac. At least once a week, they took this time to sit in the quiet and chat about life and work, before Lorraine went home and Cameron went out, or over to Mac’s, or whatever her cool kid was off to do.

  On this night, they had one big topic between them: Cameron’s father. The restaurant had been too busy too quickly to talk while it was open, but Cameron had sent a whole raft of meaningful looks her way all night. He had some things to say.

  Cameron lifted his snifter. “To Mythic,” he toasted.

  “May she be legendary,” Lorraine responded. It was a thing he’d come up with, a dumb little toast he’d said on the first night they’d taken possession of the place, when they’d sat on fruit crates in the gutted kitchen with a bottle of supermarket champagne.

  As Lorraine took her first sip, Cameron said, “You named me after him.”

  She swallowed hard and then took a breath. “Yes. I loved him, and he’s your father. I still love him. I’ve told you that.”

  “But you never told me that my middle name was his name. It’s so bizarre that you never said. Why didn’t you?”

  “We’re not going to ease into the conversation at all are we? Right for the heart.”

  Her son didn’t answer. He simply stared steadily at her with his father’s eyes.

  Why hadn’t she told him? She’d never meant it to be a secret. She’d tried to answer any question he’d ever asked with honesty, whatever honesty he could handle at the age he’d asked. But Douglas had been his dad since he was five years old. The truth was that Cameron had rarely had any questions about Ronin. He’d had a father, and, even knowing that Douglas was officially a stepfather, he hadn’t felt the need for more. He’d never asked about his name, and Lorraine had simply never brought it up. Every time she’d called him his full name—when he was in trouble—or filled out a school form, she’d had a moment of memory for what she’d given up, but that had been her private memory, part of her past, not of Cameron’s.

  How to say all that now, though? “It’d be easy to say that you never asked, but I think the truer answer is that I wanted that for myself. I mean, I’d have told you if you’d asked, but I guess it was some sort of private thing for me. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

  “Not really, no. But a lot of this doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Chuckie. It was a bad mistake I made a long time ago. But we are where we are because of the choices we made along the way. I like where we are. Don’t you?”

  “I do. But I feel like I am where I am because of the choices you made along the way.”

  “That, my son, is the plight of every child. You’re just starting out, just starting to make your choices. You made choices in school. If you’d decided to stick with an English major, I don’t think you’d be sitting with me in a restaurant we own together.”

  “No. I’d probably be in grad school.”

  “That’s a choice you made. Do you regret it?”

  “No.”

  “And now, you’re not beholden to other people’s choices so much. Now you set the course of your life.”

  “What would things have been like if you’d stayed with him—with Ronin? Do you ever think about that?”

  “I do. Sometimes. More lately, since he’s back in my life. The path we were on was pretty flat and straight—he would’ve wanted things to be what they were, just farther along the path. Married, a little house outside town, kids. Him working as a logger, me working at the hotel restaurant, maybe eventually opening a diner.”

  “Logger? You mean he was a lumberjack? And a motocross racer?”

  “And an underground fighter. The testosterone wafted off him like dirt off Pigpen from the Peanuts comics. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “He hardly said anything about himself. Just that he rode with the Night Horde. He talked a little about stunt riding. Mostly he let me talk. Which I did. A lot.”

  Lorraine laughed. From the time Cameron figured out that words could be strung together, he hadn’t stopped stringing them together. When he was excited or nervous, they came so fast he was sometimes hard to understand. He had few secrets; if people asked something of him, he’d tell them and give them context and explanation, too.

  “Eddie was never very talkative. He could get rowdy as hell, but he never had patience for small talk. If you had something worth talking about, he’d be right in there with you. That’s a change in him. Getting Ronin to speak a full sentence is a chore now. At least that’s how it feels. But maybe it’s just how new and strange everything is right now.”

  Cameron was quiet then, sipping his cognac. After a moment, Lorraine put her hand on his arm. “Quarter for your thoughts.”

  “I’m trying to picture you loving a guy like Ronin. I mean, he’s cool, and he seems like a good guy. I’m glad I get a chance to know him. But he’s so different from Dad. It’s like you found the most opposite guy who existed.”

  Douglas Archer was very different from Ronin, it was true. A wealthy man born into a wealthy family, whose tree bore the fruit of politics, business, and even royalty, Douglas was a refined, garrulous man with a great deal of influence. He knew how to work a room, whether it be a conference room or a ballroom.

  He’d met Lorraine in a way very like how she’d met Donovan Winter: he’d asked to see the chef. She’d only been the sous-chef at the time, and hadn’t been in that kitchen for long. Louis had brought her down to San Diego only the year before. But Louis had been in the hospital with pneumonia, and she had the kitchen in his absence.

  When she’d left that night, he’d been waiting for her in the lobby. Within a year of that night, they were married.

  She had loved him. He was warm and funny, and he loved Cameron enthusiastically, right from the start. He’d offered them a strong, s
table, comfortable life, and he hadn’t begrudged her work at all. In fact, he’d encouraged her and directed work her way.

  He was good looking, in a way totally different from Ronin’s rugged looks. Douglas looked like a wealthy man who spent a lot of time on the golf course, or on the deck of his yacht—which was accurate. He was the kind of man who did big deals with a drink or a golf club in his hand. He was fit because he had a trainer, and he had good hair and great skin because he spent five hundred dollars every two weeks at the salon.

  Lorraine had never felt critical of any of Douglas’s vanities until after their breakup. She’d thought it a bit precious, but not annoyingly so. But then he’d dumped her for a child bride, whose name was Summer, for Pete’s sake, and whom he’d been banging for a good long while. With some pharmacological help, she assumed. Douglas was in his sixties, and it had been a few years since he’d been what anyone might call randy.

  Unless, of course, he’d just been spending himself elsewhere.

  Buried in those thoughts, Lorraine huffed an annoyed sigh.

  “Mom?”

  “Sorry. Yes, Ronin is different from Douglas. A lot different. In good ways, I think. But I don’t think I had that in mind at all when we met. He was nice and charming and attentive, and he was great with you from the start. We were good for a long time. I wasn’t trying to replace Ronin.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I don’t know, maybe I’m nuts. But I was thinking about this on the drive in. You say you’ve always loved Roe.”

  He looked at her, brows up, for confirmation, and she nodded. “Yes.”

  “And you say you loved Dad.”

  “Yes. Cam, I know that’s hard to believe—”

  “It’s not. Not now that I’ve met him. That’s what I’m working out. It’s like you picked a guy so different that you could love them both at the same time without slighting either of them. Their Venn diagrams only overlap at you.”

  Lorraine had never thought about why or how she’d been able to love them both. She’d only known it was true. But she thought her son was right. It eased some of her guilt.

  “You’re a smart guy, Chuckie.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, the way she’d done when he was small.

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “I am.”

  ~oOo~

  Two nights later, Lorraine drove home feeling low. Everything was fine at work, and she’d called Donovan Winter and, by the end of the call, had the job to cater his party. But she hadn’t heard from Ronin since he’d ridden off down her driveway.

  She hadn’t contacted him, either, because she was trying to wait and give him time to work out whatever he need to work out. A lot had landed on him at once, and she didn’t want to lean on him unduly. But she was really starting to worry that she wouldn’t see him again.

  As she drove up Willow Glen Road and turned into her driveway, she decided that she’d call him in the morning. Just to check in. They were too old to play silly games about who should call when. They hadn’t even played games like that when they were young.

  As she made the last turn that would take her to her garage and pressed the button for the opener, her headlights flashed over a big, chrome Harley.

  He was here. At her house. Had he broken in?

  The house was completely dark, except for the light over the range in the kitchen. With a small cramp of trepidation, Lorraine parked her Volvo in the garage and headed past Ronin’s big bike, toward the steps, scanning the top of the stone wall as she went. The night was dark, with just a sliver of moon, and she couldn’t see anything but shadows.

  When she got to the steps, though, he was standing at the top.

  “Hi,” she said, relaxing at once but still curious. “You’re here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Don’t like the phone.”

  As she reached the top step, he held out his hand to her, and she took it. “Have you been here long, waiting in the dark?”

  “’Bout an hour. I liked waiting. It’s quiet here. Had a little raccoon friend with me until your car pulled up.”

  Raccoons were everywhere out here. Once, after a book club meeting—which was code for eight women getting drunk on expensive wine and decadent food and dream-casting the actors who should play the book’s characters—she’d cleaned up drunkenly and hadn’t gotten the lid locked on her cedar bin locker. Every raccoon in the Hollywood Hills had had a rave in her yard that night. Honestly—there had been one very rotund guy still reeling around in the sunshine, wearing a tattered cake doily over his head like a lampshade.

  “It’s a little strange, you lurking on my patio.”

  He didn’t respond, but even in the gloom, she could see, or sense, his frown.

  “It’s okay—I’m glad you’re here. Really glad. I’ve been thinking about you all week. I was worried you’d thought your way out of coming back.”

  His answer wasn’t exactly reassuring on that point. “Can we talk?”

  “By talk do you mean that you’re going to talk, or is it me that’s going to do all the talking while you stare meaningfully at me?”

  “Rainy, not fair.”

  “Ronin, yeah, it is. Yes, we can talk. But I need to know what you’re thinking. I don’t need a dissertation. I just need some clarity.”

  “Words get murky. I’m better at showing.”

  “Showing can be murky, too. I’d like to know if you have things to say, or if I’m going to get grilled.” She sighed and squeezed his hand. “Is this a moving forward talk, or a never mind talk?”

  “I have things to say.”

  That didn’t answer her last question, but she knew better than to push. “Let’s go inside.” She let go of his hand and unlocked her front door. He followed her in as she keyed in the alarm code and hit the switch that controlled all the canned lighting throughout the first floor. Those lights made the house glow at the top of its hill.

  She kicked off her clogs. “Can I get you a scotch?” she asked, headed to the kitchen for a glass of wine.

  “Sure.” He followed her, and sat at a stool at her island as she retrieved last night’s sauvignon blanc from the fridge and got the Macallan from the liquor cabinet.

  He watched her pour his drink. “You’re ruining me for cheap scotch.”

  “If you’re going to drink cheap, it shouldn’t be scotch.” She reached across the island to hand him his glass. When he took it, he closed his hand over hers.

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled and pulled her hand gently away, then poured herself a nice big glass of wine. Something told her she’d need it.

  While her back was still to him as she put the bottle back in the fridge, he said, “I’m having some trouble leaving the past where it belongs.”

  She froze with her hand on the refrigerator door and just stood there, staring at a jar of homemade cayenne mustard, unable to move. “Oh?”

  “He’s a good boy, Rainy.”

  “I know.” At least he was calling her Rainy. But she felt stiff with worry. Forcing her feet to move backward, she closed the door and picked up her glass. After a long drink, she made herself turn around.

  He was staring at her with those steady eyes, all the more beloved because she’d been looking into them for all these years, in their son. The only words in her head were apologies, and he didn’t want those, so she had nothing to say.

  “I missed a lot. I think I would’ve been an okay dad.”

  “You would have been a great dad,” she whispered, feeling rueful, heartbroken tears swelling behind her eyes. “It was never about that.”

  He nodded and then heaved a sad breath, and Lorraine knew where the night would end, and that it would end there soon. “I want to let it go. You’re the only woman I know how to love, and you’re right here again. I can hold you if I want. But he calls another man ‘Dad,’ another man got to see him become who he is, and that’s stuck in the middle of my head. I can’t get around
it.”

  It figured that when he finally opened up, it would be to expose the depth of the harm she’d done him. She put her hands on the island, right next to his. “Roe, I would do anything, anything, to help you get around that. I just don’t know what it is I can do.”