The bang had not been an IED. There were no IEDs on Oklahoma highways.
Something had gone wrong in her truck. The engine had just up and stopped—probably threw a rod. Not good, but better than getting blown up in the Afghan desert. One of those per lifetime was enough, thanks.
Flashbacks were so weird. While her brain had suddenly time-traveled five-plus years backward, her body had stayed right here and done what it had to do, and it had kept a log. She could remember that minute both as flashback and as the present, two timelines happening at once.
In 2018 Afghanistan, she’d been flying through the air in a storm of fire, gore, and shrapnel. In 2024 Tulsa, the power steering of her truck had frozen with the death of the engine, and it had taken everything she had to get the Sierra 1500 and its trailer and passenger to the side of the road without taking anybody else with them. If it had been a normal hour of the day, she would very likely have caused a pileup and ended up on the news.
So ... this was a better result than either an early-morning bomb or a midday pileup. But it still sucked. She could have perspective and also be pissed the fuck off.
It was the darkest hours of the night, twenty-two degrees and windy, she was on the shoulder of the Broken Arrow Expressway with a dead truck, a sick, cold, freaked-out horse, and no goddamn phone.
They were still well within the Tulsa metro area, so even at this hour of the night there was a little bit of traffic, a few cars whizzing by at a fairly steady clip. She could flag somebody down and at least ask them to make a phone call for her. Surely somebody would stop.
First, though, she had to go back and make sure Smoky hadn’t gotten knocked around. She could hear he wasn’t calm; he was stomping in the trailer and whinnying that screechy note that meant a horse was deeply unhappy. She’d been listening to that particular tune most of the night.
Sometimes she wished she’d decided on a different kind of life after the hospital. Sold the farm and rented a little apartment, adopted a couple of kittens. Gotten a job in a quiet office somewhere, with a desk and some fake walls to call her own.
She had, however, decided on a life of rescuing and rehabilitating strays. As she herself had been rescued and rehabilitated.
Phoebe sat for a minute and got her mental legs firmly beneath her. Then she closed her coat back up, pulled on her beanie and gloves, and went to check on her newly rescued horse.
CHAPTER THREE
As he drove home from his sister and brother-in-law’s place, Duncan’s head whirred. That parting shot of Dex’s had really set him back: mere days before the Eureka run, the Bulls’ Sergeant at Arms wanted the younger patches to stay back? How did that make sense?
It didn’t. The club had been talking about this run for weeks. Planning, playing out different scenarios, doing actual drills so everybody would know how to shift things if (when) they hit an obstacle. The range of ways this move to patch over the Nameless MC in Eureka might go stretched from bloodless and easy (They convince the club to take the Bull, despite repeated votes against it.) to a bloodbath (They kill all the Nameless who resist. All-out war.) Every single patch knew exactly how dangerous the run could be; nobody had let anyone forget it.
And they needed the numbers. Every single Bull in both charters. They had to arrive in Eureka looking like an army.
Dex knew all that. Hell, with his elite military experience, he’d been the one drafting most of the plans. So why was he thinking about leaving half the club home?
Before Duncan could work out an answer to that puzzle, his attention snagged on something on the shoulder up ahead. A horse trailer. Complete with horse. He couldn’t see a human, but the truck attached to the trailer had its lights on, so maybe the guy was in the cab.
The trailer rocked and shook, and the horse’s skinny ass shifted around like the animal who belonged to that ass wanted out.
Duncan didn’t know much about horses. He liked them fine and had been around them a bit, and he’d ridden occasionally as a kid, when the fam had a party out at the Wesson farm. But he was not a horse guy. However, he didn’t need to be a horse guy to know that an occupied trailer on the side of the expressway at one o’clock in the morning, when the temperature was around twenty degrees, meant some kind of trouble.
From his earliest days, he’d been taught that Bulls help out on the road. Friend, stranger, even rival, it didn’t matter. You saw someone on the road in need of help, you pulled over and helped. So he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped behind the trailer.
As he climbed down from his truck and stepped onto the shoulder, he heard the horse whinnying—if the sound it was making could be called that. To Duncan’s ears it was more like screaming. The horse was also stomping and slamming against the back and side walls of the trailer.
Still no sign of a human to go with this freaked-out horse. Was the driver okay?
“Hello?” he called into the windy cold.
“Hey!” a feminine voice yelled back. “Thank you for stopping! Please don’t go anywhere, okay?”
A woman? Alone?
The voice had come from the trailer, so Duncan picked up his pace and got to the back of the trailer, which was a tailgate. Closed. How’d she get in there? Was somebody else driving?
“Okay,” he said as he hooked his hands over the gate. It was a two-horse trailer, but the other side was empty. That didn’t help the illumination situation much. The interior was an incomprehensible swirl of glare and shadow, and all he could see up front was a vague shape of the rest of the horse and a smaller vague, humanoid shape. “You need help?”
“I do. I just need to convince Smoky here that we’re okay. Please don’t leave!”
“I won’t. I stopped to help.”
“Thank you!” she said. Then she returned her attention to the horse. Duncan couldn’t hear much over the stomping and screaming, the wind, the occasional vehicle flying by, but he thought she was singing.
After a few minutes, the horse quieted. Another minute more, and the small vague humanoid shape came to the back of the trailer and into view.
Well goddamn. She was young, around his age, and she was fucking gorgeous. It didn’t matter that she wore a shapeless, shearling-lined barn coat, leather work gloves, and a dark beanie pulled low over her forehead and ears. It didn’t matter that the lighting sucked. Her face was all the view Duncan needed to know she was the most gorgeous girl he’d met in his life. Big, wide-set eyes, pouty lips over a pointed chin. Glory be.
Then she grabbed the top of the tailgate and pulled herself over to land gracefully on her feet before him, and Duncan was thoroughly smitten.
“Hi!” she said and offered her gloved hand. “I’m Phoebe.”
He closed his hand around hers. “Duncan. How can I help?”
“If I could just borrow your phone, that would be a huge help. I’ve been trying to flag somebody down for almost an hour, and you’re the first who’s stopped. I’m surprised you did. I wasn’t even flagging anybody down—Smoky had a little meltdown I had to deal with.”
Duncan glanced at the horse’s ass again. It was bony as fuck. That horse was skinny.
He looked down at the beautiful girl named Phoebe. “I was taught to help people in trouble on the road, and this looked like trouble.”