All Chapters of The Captain and her Younger Biker: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 12Rory’s POV“I’m listening,” I said, stepping out onto the porch and pulling the door shut behind me, because whatever Sabine Cole wanted to say to me at nine in the morning, I wasn’t about to let Kian hear half of it through a wall and fill in the rest with his own imagination.All I knew about Sabine Cole before that phone call was what I’d picked up in pieces over the past week. She was twenty four, the only daughter of Victor Cole, who owned Cole Freight, the biggest shipping company on the east coast after the Ashcrofts. She had dated Kian for a few months when they were teenagers. And she was the woman Julian Ashcroft had decided his youngest son should marry so two shipping families could become one very rich one. I’d pictured her as someone polished and cold, a girl who’d grown up with drivers and never once carried her own bags.“Good, because I only have about five minutes before my father’s driver comes back from getting gas, and he reports everything I do to Juli

Chapter FourteenRory’s POVI didn’t sleep after Elena’s call. I sat at my kitchen table until the sun came up with that scanned page open on my laptop, zooming in on my father’s signature until the letters broke apart into gray squares, because some stupid part of me kept hoping that if I looked close enough it would turn out to be someone else’s handwriting.It wasn’t. I knew that T. I’d seen it on every birthday card he ever gave me, on the back of every school form, on the little wooden sign he carved for his boat when I was seven. Thomas Vance, with the T crossed so hard it nearly ripped the paper.Kian came down around six in one of my old t shirts, looked at my face, and didn’t say anything for a while. He just made coffee, set a cup in front of me, and sat down across the table.“You were sixteen,” he said finally.“Sixteen. He went out on a Tuesday. The weather report said clear. By four in the afternoon it wasn’t clear anymore, and by the next morning the Coast Guard found h

Chapter 16 Rory’s POVThe storm hit the island a little after four in the morning, and it hit the way storms always hit up north, all at once, no warning, just a wall of wind slamming into the side of the cabin so hard the whole place groaned and dust came down from the ceiling beams in a gray sheet.I was awake for it. I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the rest of the night sitting on the floor in front of the woodstove with my father’s logbook in my lap, reading the same five words over and over until they stopped looking like words. They knew. They let him drown.Kian had fallen asleep around three on the old couch behind me, one arm hanging off the side, his hand resting on my shoulder like he’d been afraid I’d disappear if he let go. When the wind hit, his hand tightened, and he sat up fast.“What was that.”“The storm.”“That was the storm? I thought something hit the house.”“Something did. The storm.” I closed the logbook. “Welcome to Gull Island.”He rubbed his face and looked at th

Chapter 18Rory’s POV“Get your boots on,” Kian said, already throwing the blankets off.“Absolutely not.”“Rory, somebody is in that lighthouse.”“I know somebody is in that lighthouse, I’m the one who saw it.” I grabbed his arm before he could stand up. “And it’s three in the morning, and there’s a gale blowing sixty knots off the water, and the path to the point runs along a cliff that’s been falling into the sea since before you were born. Nobody is going out there tonight.”“So we just sit here.”“Yes. We just sit here.”“While some stranger watches us through a window.”“While we stay alive, Kian. That’s the other option. Staying alive.”He pulled his arm out of my hand, not hard, but he did it, and he stood up and started looking for his jeans in the dark. “I’m not going to sit in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin while someone walks around this island doing whatever they want. You can wait. I’m going.”“You’re going to fall off a cliff in the dark because your pride got

Chapter 20Rory’s POV“Don’t,” Kian said, catching my wrist as I swung my legs off the bed. “Rory, you don’t know who’s out there.”“I know exactly who’s out there.”“You know who it sounds like.”“It’s him.” I pulled my wrist free and grabbed my father’s sweater off the floor. “I’d know that knock in my sleep. He did it every night for two years.”“Rory.” Nate’s voice came through the door again, lower. “I know you’re angry. I know you’ve got every right. But the weather’s only quiet for a few hours, and I need to talk to you before it comes back, and I can’t do it through a door.”Kian was already pulling his jeans on. He grabbed the flare gun off the counter and held it down by his leg, and he looked at me, and I nodded, and I went to the door and opened it.My brother was standing on the porch in a wet canvas coat with the hood pushed back. Nate was thirty five now, and the last ten years had not been easy on him. He’d always been the bigger one of us, broad through the chest like