Page 1 of Smoke

CHAPTER 1

BETH

It's only been a few days since my father was shot, and the road into Salvation still had the power to make every part of my life feel temporary.

The town looked the same as it had five years earlier when I drove away from Smoke and our marriage. Sun-bleached storefronts lined Main Street, dust gathered against the curbs, and the mountains sat in the distance beneath a sky that always seemed too big for the place underneath it. Salvation had spent most of my childhood looking as though its better years had happened a very long time ago, and nothing I could see suggested the intervening years had been especially kind.

I tightened my hands around the steering wheel and reminded myself why I was back.

Dad had been shot at Curtis Freight during the mess with the men trying to force their way into Salvation. The call had come while he was still in surgery, and the days since had been a blur of hospital updates, rearranged work and my father insisting over the phone that I didn't need to tear across New Mexico because he wasn't going anywhere. I had listened until the doctors said he was stable, cleared what I needed to clear in Albuquerque and come home as soon as I could.

Yesterday Holly had called and finally said what Dad had been carefully avoiding. He was still in the hospital, but the men behind the shooting were still around, and the threat hadn't ended simply because he had survived. If I was going to spend every phone call wondering what nobody was telling me, I might as well go to Salvation and find out for myself.

It'd been five years since I had seen Smoke, but that mattered less than Dad did. It had to.

By the time I reached the regional hospital, exhaustion had settled behind my eyes and my coffee had gone cold hours earlier. I parked badly, grabbed my bag and headed inside, following the directions from reception toward the ward where Dad had spent the last few days.

I stepped out of the elevator and saw a black leather cut outside his room, UNHOLY FEW MC across the leather and VICE PRESIDENT on his chest. Smoke was leaning against the wall with one boot braced behind him, his phone in one hand. He looked up before I'd taken more than two steps into the corridor, and the reaction that went through me was so immediate that it pissed me off.

He'd changed without becoming unfamiliar. At forty-two, his face was harder around the edges, his shoulders somehow looked broader beneath the black T-shirt and leather, and dark stubble covered the jaw I used to know beneath my fingertips. His hair was still cut short, and the ink on one forearm disappeared beneath his sleeve exactly where I remembered it.

Time should have made him feel like somebody I used to know. Instead, my body recognized everything about him before I had decided what I wanted to feel.

His gaze moved over my face and stayed there. "Beth." That voice was another thing distance had failed to erase.

I kept walking until I stopped a few feet away. "Why are you outside my father's room?"

"Keeping watch."

I stared at him. Dad had disliked Smoke before we married, hated the marriage while it lasted and probably considered the divorce one of the few sensible decisions I had ever made where the Unholy Few were concerned. "You're guarding my father?"

"He's not thrilled about it either."

That sounded believable enough that I pushed through the door before Smoke could say anything else.

Dad was awake, pale beneath the bruising and surrounded by enough monitors to tighten my chest all over again, but his eyes were clear when he saw me. Relief landed harder than it had over the phone since the shooting. I crossed the room, bent carefully and wrapped my arms around him.

"Hey, sweetheart." His voice was rougher than normal.

I told him he still looked terrible, which earned me a faint smile and the same claim he'd been making since he woke after surgery, that he was improving every day. "So you keep telling me," I said.

He smiled faintly, and I pulled back far enough to look at him properly. Seeing him alive should have been enough to settle me, but the hospital room kept reminding me how close we had come to a different outcome.

Smoke came in behind me and stayed near the door. Dad's expression changed immediately.

"I told you I don't need a babysitter."

Smoke folded his arms. "Good thing I'm not here to entertain you."

Dad looked toward me. "See what I've been dealing with?"

Despite myself, I almost smiled. Time had done nothing to improve the relationship between them, and I was glad. A warm reunion between Sheriff Warren White and the vice president of the Unholy Few would have worried me far more than the familiar hostility.

I pulled the chair closer to Dad's bed. "Can somebody explain why the club is running hospital security?"

Smoke answered because Dad clearly intended to make him work for every word. "The men who shot him are still in Salvation, and putting him in here didn't solve their problem."

The lightness disappeared from the room. Dad had told me the shooting was connected to the pressure around Curtis Freight, but his version had been deliberately vague. Hearing Smoke say the threat was still there made the situation feel less like aftermath and more like something waiting for its next move.