taking me home and right taking me to an unknown future, knowing that either one would change my life forever. I looked up at the sky, at the open field of blue, there wasn’t a cloud in sight. The cry from a lone hawk drew my attention. I was rapt by its beauty, watching it swirling gracefully in large circles, gliding free on the wind, like a sign telling me what I needed to do. I took a deep cathartic breath as I punched my destination into the GPS and with an indomitable smile, I hit go.
Jennifer Rose lives the glamorous life in Canada working as a writer and part-time office clerk/manager. A mother of three grown boys, she decided to give up cleaning, cooking and day to day household chores in favor of sitting with a favorite beverage, be it coffee or wine and her trusty laptop, after a friend and author convinced her that she had what it took to write romance novels, so she took a creative writing course and finally started writing.
The Spark
AJ Downey
Cutting through the night-heavy slipstream was an ever loving bitch. I hated the cold, and despite how layered up I was, it went right through me. I had been pretty much forced to ride home for Thanksgiving and really, I should be thanking my lucky stars it was just cold, and not raining, snowy or icy. I was up in the mountains, which was dicey in dry, clear conditions, what with all the switchbacks and all, but it couldn’t be helped. I’d promised the fam-damn-ily that I was coming and there wasn’t any way to know my cage was going to crap out on me the day before I left. Fuck that old thing, anyhow.
I gave the handlebars to my V Star Custom a gentle twist and leaned into the steep curve. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, A Yamaha? Ew… But I’d had a Harley before her that had died a sad death when a car had made a rogue left turn in front of me three summers before. It’d taken me almost a year to recover physically from that accident and a whole two more to recover financially, and once my lawyer had landed me a hefty settlement? The first thing I’d done the summer before this last one was I’d gone out and bought me Betsy. She’d been a brand new model, right off the showroom floor, her tank a sleek silver just dark enough to kiss the color classification of ‘gun metal’ and I’d loved the way she’d handled more than my Harley before her.
Sacrilege, I know, but hey? Me and my club were sort of all about that. We were a bunch of lapsed Catholic girls that went under the moniker of the Saintly Sinners. There were seven of us and we’d all been classified with road names that were one of the seven deadly sins. The sin that best fit our personality, well, after a fashion…
None of us girls wanted to be known as gluttony outright or in my case, sloth. So instead, we’d gotten creative a little, and I’d ended up with Dreamer , which honestly fit me better. It wasn’t like I was lazy, I just had a really bad habit of letting my mind wander and take me places that were far removed from the task at hand. Which , by the way, is how I almost missed him. I caught a flash of brown to my right, along the side of the road that faded into light blue jeans. He was limping slightly and when my headlight swept past him, he turned around, wide eyed.
“Oh hell- o,” I uttered, although he’d never be able to hear it over the purr of my engine. I downshifted and slowed my roll and made to pull up alongside him when I saw the blood. He had a gnarly cut above his eyebrow, and it bled freely down the side of his face. His Jacket was scuffed in an all too familiar pattern to me and one check of his boots pretty much confirmed it for me.
“You lay your bike!?” I called out.
“Yeah!”
“Shit, man; you okay?”
“I think so,” he called back, but he looked seriously dazed. Didn’t detract from the fact that he was seriously handsome though.
“Think you can ride!?” I called, walking my bike alongside him. I didn’t even