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The smile she gave me looked like something you’d see on an evil genius who cracked the code on world domination. “Okay, and maybe I want to cast my eyes on the man who’s got my baby girl all twisted up in knots.”

My spine went ramrod straight. “I’m not twisted up into knots,” I argued petulantly. “And even if I was, it sure as hell isn’t because of him.”

Mom snorted, knowing exactly just how full of shit I was. “Hey, don’t tell me. Tell it to your aura. Which is bright pink, by the way.” She waggled her eyebrows as if that proved her point. She hooked her purse on her shoulder and moved past me to the front door. “And just so you know, honey, no man waits outside a hospital room for six hours if he isn’t gone for a woman.”

“Mom,” I said warningly as I followed her out of the house, locking up behind her. “Whatever you have planned, don’t.”

She looked at me with that fake innocence again, placing a hand on her chest in offense. “My dear, whatever are you talking about?”

I stopped to glare at her over the top of my car. “You know damn well what I’m talking about. Don’t read his aura.”

She held her hands up placatingly.

“Or his palm. Or tea leaves,” I added on. “And your tarot deck stays in your purse. You hear me?”

That earned me a pout. “Anyone ever tell you that you can be a fun sponge? Suck all the joy right out of my night.”

I wasn’t sure how the hell it had happened, but it seemed our roles of parent and child had somehow gotten swapped. Like I woke up in some kind of Freaky Friday nightmare. “Good. You’d do well to remember that.”

North

I didn’t know how the hell she pulled it off, but as I cast my gaze over the insanely massive crowd, I found myself in awe at what Iris had managed to put together in a week.

What blew my mind even more was the fact that she had done it while going out of her way to avoid me. Something else on top of party planning that she excelled at apparently.

That hug in the hospital corridor changed something. Hell, it had changed everything. Holding her against me, filling my lungs with that lavender and sage scent as I pressed my nose and lips into all that silky hair, it unlocked the rest of those doors and threw them wide open.

Memories of that night had come bounding out at lightning speed, and fuck me, but the want I felt for her was so strong it had to be supernatural. That wasn’t even the most accurate word to describe it.

Hunger. That was what it felt like.

A deep-seated, gnawing ache in my belly that felt like it was going to come alive if I didn’t sate it. Each day I didn’t see her it grew hungrier, to the point of pain. I thought tonight might be enough to offer some relief. A quick glance here, a peek there as I did what I was meant to do, moving around the massive hordes of people who had come out to show their support. But those flashes of her across the sprawling lot between the Wraith’s clubhouse and their garage only made it worse.

If you had asked me a couple of years ago if I’d be partying with a bunch of bikers who used to wear 1% patches on their cuts, I would have called you a liar. But I’d been in this town long enough to know that looks could be deceiving, and sometimes the real criminals were the ones wearing a badge. Not a patch.

It had taken me some time to accept, but sometimes battles had to be fought in those shades of gray I had once done everything to ignore, determined to stay in the comforts of my black and white world.

Iris put the word out for the people of Ashland to turn out, and turn out they sure as fuck had. There were people here I’d known since getting to town, people I only recognized from passing, plus people I’d never met before. After the turnout Iris had drummed up, I didn’t think it was possible to lose the upcoming election.

But while I was supposed to be pressing flesh and schmoozing (Christ, I hated the politics of the job), I couldn’t stop searching Iris out. Every time I caught sight of her, I felt this tug in my chest, like a fishing lure had snagged behind my ribs and I was being reeled toward her. But every time I got close, I could have sworn she found a reason to be somewhere else.

“Fuck me, man. You’ve got it bad.”

I pulled my attention from the flash of red I’d been trailing with my eyes to glower at the jackass I considered a best friend.

“Fuck off, Arch,” I grunted. I lifted the solo cup of beer I’d been nursing most of the afternoon and drank, trying not to grimace that it had gone warm. “You don’t know that you’re talking about.”

Archer chuckled. The enjoyment he got from giving me shit was next level. “I know your eyes are about to fall out of your head, if you stare at her any harder than you already are.”

“Christ,” I grunted again. Seemed that was my preferred method of communication lately. “Will you lower your voice before someone hears you?”

The smile he shot me earned an elbow to his ribs, and I got my own enjoyment out of his grunt and the way he keeled over, trying to reinflate his lung. “Asshole,” he grumbled once he could take a full breath. “Instead of leering at her like a fucking creeper, why don’t you go talk to the woman? I mean, she did all this for you, didn’t she?” He waved his arm to encompass the event that had gone from campaign rally to party seamlessly. Everyone was having a great time by the looks of things.

If only it was that easy.

“She doesn’t want to talk to me,” I admitted, sounding like a sullen teenager to my own ears. I couldn’t really blame her, though. I didn’t mean to fuck with her head the way I had at the hospital, but I could see how my words and my actions hadn’t aligned. Talk about mixed fucking signals, I couldn’t bring myself to leave that hospital without at least seeing her.

Then the sadness that had been etched into the beautiful planes of her face . . . Jesus. It killed me to see that sadness. I couldn’t not touch her. And now that I remembered everything from that one night, there was no getting the woman out of my head. I could scrub my brain with a Brillo pad and it wouldn’t do a damn thing.