Bringing Home the Bachelor. Sarah M. Anderson
been the kind of sweet, good-natured woman who avoided the likes of him. And the fact that he hadn’t come up with a single decent thing to say to her?
Damn. The memory still made him burn.
Of course, she wasn’t his type—and her type never went for guys like him. Easier to let it go at that.
Now, he turned to Bobby and let his brother shoo him onto his bike and instruct him to drive up and down the gravel road to school until the film crew told him to stop. Bobby had this irritating habit of wanting twenty takes for every ten seconds of footage. Normally, it drove Billy nuts, but today he was glad to have the chance to think.
He did his best thinking on his bikes. Usually, that meant solving the latest design problem or figuring out how to work around his dad or brothers. But today, riding up and down the same mile of territory that hardly qualified as a road, the problem he found himself thinking about was Jenny.
She’d smelled of baby powder, a soft scent that matched the woman he’d met at the wedding but seemed out of place on the woman who’d threatened him. Not a hint of coffee, and he knew Josey preferred tea when she was on the rez. The guess hadn’t been a huge leap, but the way Jenny’s eyes had widened when he’d been right? Worth it.
He still couldn’t get over how she’d promised it wasn’t over. Maybe he was getting soft in his thirties, but he found himself hoping she was right.
Finally, after an hour of rolling up and down the same mile, Bobby decided they had the footage he wanted. By that time, the school was overflowing. All the kids were there, and a fair number of their parents had come to watch, too.
Back when he’d earned his reputation the hard way, people had been in awe of him. Some had wanted to be on his good side, some had tried to prove they were bigger or badder. People’s reactions had only gotten worse since this whole webisode thing started. People were watching him, expecting him to be funny or crude or what, he didn’t know. All he knew was they were here for Wild Bill Bolton. And he hated it.
His brother Ben’s wife, Josey, came up to him as he parked his bike next to the shop where they were going to be building the bike. “Morning, Billy,” she said. “Everything go okay so far?”
Right. No doubt Jenny had had a little powwow with her cousin. “Bobby’s still an ass—”
“Language! There are children present!”
It was going to be such a long day. “Twit. Bobby’s still a twit.”
Josey sighed. “Billy, remember the rules.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know—language, attitude, no throwing things.”
Josey patted him on the arm. “It’s just three weeks.”
Sure, it was only three weeks at the school, but he was stuck with Bobby running his life for the foreseeable future. He’d only agreed to do this show because Ben said this was a good way to justify the cost of new equipment for the shop, and Billy loved new equipment. Hell, testing out a new tool was half the fun of building a bike. Plus, he’d thought it was a good way to keep the peace in the family. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Sure, Billy guessed it was nice that people recognized him now, and yeah, it was probably good for his ego that someone had started a Facebook page called The Wild Bill Bolton Fan Club. But most of him wanted “Real American Bikers,” which was what Bobby called the webisodes, to fail and fail big. That way, he could go back to doing what he did best—building custom motorcycles. No more cameras, no more groupies, no more being famous.
Back to building his bikes in peace and quiet.
Although that didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon. “Real American Bikers” was getting a healthy number of hits on YouTube, where Bobby was hosting a channel for it—whatever the hell that meant. Billy hadn’t actually watched more than about two minutes of the show. It was too painful. Too much of a reminder that he could never really leave his Wild Bill reputation behind him.
“Oh, here comes Don Two Eagles,” Josey was saying as she waved an older guy over. “Don, this is—”
“Billy Bolton. You look like your old man,” Don said. Didn’t sound like a compliment, and Billy sure as hell didn’t take it as one.
Ben had told Billy all about Don. “You’re the guy who broke Dad’s jaw back at Sturgis in the eighties, right?”
“Damn straight,” Don said.
“Language!” Josey snipped as she checked to see if any kids had been listening.
“I put your old man down, and I ain’t afraid to do the same to you, so you best behave, hear?”
“Don,” Josey said under her breath. Billy got the feeling that this was a conversation they’d had before. Then she turned on the charm. “Now, the kids are going to come out and line up. Bobby thinks it’ll be a nice shot if we introduce some of the older students to you personally and you shake their hands, so we’ll start filing them past you. Can you handle that?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be watching you,” Don said before being called away by the production crew.
“Heavens, can you believe Bobby actually wants to bring your father out here and let him and Don go at it?” Josey’s voice dropped down to a whisper. “Sometimes I don’t know about that brother of yours.”
“Makes two of us.”
This was why he liked Josey. She understood how the Bolton family worked and was committed to keeping it from imploding. Ben had picked well.
Then he heard himself ask, “Will Jenny be bringing her class out?”
Josey gave him an odd look. “No, the first and second graders aren’t allowed in the shop.”
“I wasn’t trying to break her car,” he added.
“I know. Just solving a problem. That’s what you do best, Billy.” She patted him on the arm again—she had that whole mothering thing down.
Billy was about to rub the dust off his tires when Vicky, the production assistant, came up to him. “We need to get you miked, Billy.”
Vicky definitely fell into the category of women who were afraid of him. Her production company, Villainy Productions, sounded far tougher than she was. Miking Billy usually involved taping a mike to Billy’s chest, and she didn’t seem to think his tattoos were impressive.
“Well,” she said, surveying the fitted T-shirt Billy wore. “I guess...you’re going to have to take the shirt off?”
Billy grabbed the hem of his T-shirt, but before he could peel it off, the doors to the school burst open and about fifty kids came pouring out. Almost immediately, Josey was next to him, a hand on his arm. “Can we do this somewhere else?”
Vicky swallowed. She worked real hard on not being alone with him. Which was funny—Bobby was the much bigger threat to the female race. Billy hadn’t even been with a woman in...
Damn. That turned into a depressing train of thought. The fact was, it’d been a long time since he’d gotten tired of going home with the kind of woman who looked like she was auditioning for a heavy-metal music video and waking up alone. Years.
Since then, he’d thrown himself into building bikes. Which wasn’t such a bad thing—it kept him out of trouble. He was good at it, which had made him a boatload of money—also not a bad thing. However, with the money had come a different kind of woman—older, richer, more mercenary, if that were possible. Billy had no interest in those women. None. The one time he’d dated a woman out of his league, he’d gotten his heart run over like roadkill. It was easier just to build more bikes.
But now building bikes was making him famous. Hell, half the time he was afraid to leave his house in the morning. A few groupies had showed up at the Crazy Horse shop and tried to treat him like a rock