Ride with the Widow

Nadine Reyes buried her husband in the spring. By fall she's cleaning out his workshop alone, and there's a safe in the back wall she can't open, and a twenty-nine-year-old ex-soldier on her porch who says he can. Hollis Quade is the son her husband never mentioned — a sapper with a limp, a ledger of his own, and the only set of eyes that saw the Talladega Spurs' founder die. What's in the safe is worse than grief: deeds the club thinks are gone, and proof the new president has been stealing from the men who call him brother. Nadine doesn't want a biker in her kitchen. She doesn't want the way Hollis looks at her across a table of paperwork, or the way her own hands shake when he hands her a wrench. But the club has already split, and Nadine has already chosen the side with the smaller riding group, the honest ledger, and the man her husband trusted enough to keep a secret. Two chairs on a porch. One bike in the yard. A woman learning to change her own oil.