I rolled my eyes at him. He had no idea what he was talking about. It would only be a fight if I had something to give up and since I didn’t believe in love, or soul mates, or the kind of forever that shined so brightly out of Dixie’s dark eyes, I wasn’t at risk of losing anything.

After the lecture from Rome and securing the agreement to ride south from Dixie, as well as earning a few deadly glares from her couch surfer, I swung by the closest shop that would have women’s riding gear and picked up everything that Dixie could possibly need for the upcoming ride. The zip-up chaps that the sales guy brought out immediately had my mind diving into the gutter with all kinds of inappropriate thoughts. They were meant to be worn over jeans and zipped all the way up the sides for easy removal but all I could imagine was what they would look like on her tiny frame with nothing else. She had the prettiest pale skin, flawless and cream colored with just a few adorable little freckles across her nose and the tops of her shoulders. The idea of all black leather against all her sweetness was enough to make the fit of my pants a little tighter. The image of Dixie covered in nothing but leather and me wasn’t something that should be playing through my mind if I was going to make the effort to keep things in the friend zone but I couldn’t stop it. I never wanted her friendship, but now that I had it and needed it for my own end I knew I needed to not mess it up by letting my dick make decisions for me.

She wasn’t the type of woman that I was normally attracted to. She was too soft, both in spirit and in life experience. I tended to drift towards the women that were just as jaded and just as world-weary as I was. I’d seen a lot in my lifetime, both at home and in the far-flung places my previous career had sent me, so it was hard to look at life through anything but cynical eyes. When I first met Dixie I was convinced her “I never met a stranger because everyone is a friend” act had to be forced and fake. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that there was someone in the world that hadn’t had their spirit crushed by how truly terrible things could be. I figured she had to be working an angle, that her entire bubbly, sunny disposition was nothing more than a front to work the customers for bigger tips, but as time went on, as days turned into weeks and weeks bled into months without the slightest falter or crack in that brilliantly bright faade I realized Dixie really was that upbeat, unflappable, and positive all the time.

Being the cynic that I was I told myself that the only way she could be that happy, that cheerful day in and day out was because she had lived a life where she didn’t have to witness what a ruthless bitch fate could be. I figured she’d never had to live through loss or fight through all the things that came after. I convinced myself she’d never seen a struggle or had to battle hardships but one night after closing the bar down I’d had a few too many cocktails and let my theory slip to Asa. The other southerner had shut me down before I finished spewing all those bitter accusations.

He’d pointed out that it was much easier to let life beat you down, to put up a shield and hide behind walls when life kicked you around, than it was to keep on smiling. More truth that seriously hurt just like he’d intended it to.

I tended to think that all I had endured during my time serving my country and all the tragedy that had come before it made me invincible, and unbreakable. I’d taken the worst that fucking fate had to throw at me and I was still ticking. I told myself I was stoic and knew that the only things in life I could actually control were myself and my reaction to the things happening around me, but after Asa’s harsh, behind-the-bar truth I wondered if I’d taken my emotional lockdown a step too far and had simply stopped allowing myself to react to or feel anything altogether. Being numb served its purpose when you were in the middle of hostile territory but I was home now and that numbness and coldness weren’t getting me anything other than a lonely bed and an estranged family that I still needed to beg forgiveness from. I wasn’t stoic, I was scared and that made me feel pathetic and weak.

I wasn’t the only member of my family that had been kicked in the heart and stabbed in the guts by tragedy, but I was the only one who’d decided a war zone was an easier place to be than home. I tucked tail and ran. I purposely chased after danger and disaster because I was positive that if I made it a point to put myself in the heart of conflict and peril whoever was in charge up in the great beyond would finally leave the people that I loved alone. It made no logical sense but to an eighteen-year-old kid without many options and with way too much loss in his life, it seemed like a brilliant plan. I was surrounded by death, I might as well go to a place where all of it made sense, where there seemed to be some kind of rhyme and reason to the loss and letdown. As asinine as my thinking might have been it worked … at least it had until Elma Mae took her tumble down the stairs.

As I guided the big chromed-out bike to the curb in front of the brick apartment building I had to admit that it felt a little like I was poking fate with a stick by heading down south. Things weren’t exactly sunshine and roses after I left but no one else had been taken from this Earth too soon while I was overseas. Jules didn’t have to put another woman he loved in the ground and my younger brother didn’t have to weep over the loss of another mother while I was away. Things were good for them, and then they weren’t. It logically couldn’t be tied to my return from the desert but man, it sure felt like someone out there really had it in for me and those that cared the most about me. Six months after my boots hit American soil the woman who was our de facto matriarch, who was our guiding light, and who took care of all the Churchill men when we were unwilling and unable to care for ourselves, had gone down when nothing else in this life had been able to level her. I wouldn’t say I was a superstitious man, but I had to wonder if that was some kind of cosmic reminder of how drastically I managed to fuck things up. I got a little bit of good and I destroyed it effortlessly. It kind of felt like the universe was warning my family of how destructive love could be when I was around. That also didn’t bode well for the perky redhead that was standing on the edge of the curb tapping her booted toe as she talked to another young woman I vaguely recognized from my nights watching over the bar.