Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

remember how to do the thing that makes it record when I’m not home. Can you come this weekend?
     
    He knew full well how to work all of his home electronics. He wasn’t a moron. He used complicated electronic equipment every day in his work. He just wanted her to drive all the way to Huntington Beach to spend the day. He could have just asked, but in his mind he had to have a reason, trumped up though it might be.
     
    Those were the only messages, of course, because civilized people of the twenty-first century used mobile phones. She looked at the clock—almost eleven. And she was drunk. Although she knew he was probably sitting up waiting for her to call him back, she decided that the censure she’d get in the morning for making him wait and worry would be easier than trying to have a sober conversation with him now. He’d want a story about her day that she hadn’t written yet—the clean, happy, I-love-my-new-job version.
     
    Since her parents’ divorce ten years before, and especially since her mother’s remarriage six years before—and possibly still more in the weeks since she’d moved to Madrone—Sidonie’s father had become heavily reliant on her. It didn’t make much sense. He was a dentist with a thriving practice in Orange County, fully capable of running his own life. But he had a rigid way of living and old-fashioned ideas about marriage and family, the role of the husband and the role of the wife, and he had mated for life. After all this time, he still hadn’t been able to get himself settled as a bachelor, or even begin to consider finding a new mate.
     
    Her mother, on the other hand, had had different ideas about marriage and commitment. And now Sidonie had a stepfather younger than some of the men she’d dated, a stepbrother and stepsister who were young enough to be her own children, and a father who might as well be.
     
    She sighed, wishing her brain got as slurry and vague as her body did when she was drunk. But no, all of her thoughts seemed sharp and logical, the pictures in her head considerably clearer than the images her eyes were making out.
     
    She scooted out of her jeans, shrugged out of her sweater, and lay back on the pillows, not bothering to take off her bra or get into one of the comfy old t-shirts she liked to sleep in. Closing her eyes, she gave in to the thoughts her brain wanted to think, the pictures it wanted to show her. Apparently, there just wasn’t alcohol enough in the world to hold them off forever.
     
     
    ~oOo~
     
     
    She woke just after three o’clock, with the room spinning and her stomach churning in that awful, still-drunk, but here-comes-your-hangover-right-on-schedule way that she’d known intimately during her undergraduate days. So, leaving all the lights off to protect her eyes, she ricocheted her way to the bathroom and made herself sick up anything left. She’d heard it was a myth that puking eased a hangover, but she always felt better afterward. And this time was no exception. When she was done, and she’d brushed again, she felt brave enough to try some ibuprofen. Then she went back to bed with a cool, wet cloth to put over her eyes.
     
    When she sat down again on the side of her bed, she noticed that her curtains were still open. That would suck when the sun came up, so she went over to close them. As she reached to pull one side from behind its brass hook, she saw a big motorcycle across the street, just outside the halo of a sodium arc lamp. She blinked and forced her eyes to focus—yes. A huge bike, she thought, though it faded into the shadows.
     
    There was a man leaning on it, dressed all in black. Bald.
     
    Or with hair so fair and short he might as well be.
     
    She stepped back, her stomach rolling again. Tucker’s father was standing across the street from her house. Tucker’s angry father. Tucker’s angry, biker father with the mile-long violent record and the scary nickname. Tucker’s father who’d thrown a full