Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Good. That’s great.” She patted his arm. “Well, sit tight, close your eyes for a few minutes. Your girl will be over with some cookies and juice.”

  He grinned. He’d kept an eye on Cecily since he’d gotten into the hall. She couldn’t donate, because she was still in the testing period for HIV after what had happened to her in the spring, so she was donating her time instead as refreshment girl, bringing Nilla wafers and Dixie cups of orange juice to donors.

  Whether his ‘bullying,’ as she called it, had been the thing she’d needed, or the fact of the attacks had been a sufficient distraction from her fears about the club and the clubhouse, or some combination of both, Cecily was back with the Bulls. Getting her over that threshold on Tuesday morning had gotten her all the way home. She’d sat with her family and watched television all day. She’d felt shock with them, and anger. She’d mourned with them. They’d mourned with her when she learned that the father of a college friend was one of the first dead identified.

  And riding that wave of shared feeling, she’d come home. When Caleb had told her they were arranging this blood drive, she’d already known. She’d been talking with the old ladies and had already volunteered to help.

  Dressed in tight, low-slung black jeans and a deep blue top that showed just a skim of belly when she raised her arms, her hair done in a single loose braid, she was a restorative sight. He’d noticed how many men had been noticing her, but they’d all minded their manners.

  Still, when she came to him with his dose of cookies and juice, he made a point to pull her close and kiss her hard and long, so that she was practically cross-eyed when he let her go. In case anybody around was wondering if she was available. She was not.

  “Wow,” she gasped. “What was that for?”

  “Just I love you.”

  She gave him a heart-splittingly gorgeous grin. “I love you back.”

  Pulling her into his arms again, Caleb felt two parts of his life knitting together.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Is Apollo with her?” Cecily’s mother slid into the passenger seat of her Trans Am.

  Cecily shifted into first and pulled through the gravel drive of her family home and headed back to the road. “Yeah, he is. But the whole rest of the club is on this blood run, so there’s no one to sit with them but the women.”

  “The ones without little kids of their own. It’s fucking four o’clock in the morning.”

  Jacinda was in labor, and the hospital couldn’t stop it anymore. Apollo had placed a desperate, lonely call to Mo. The Bulls were all away, and he needed support. They both did.

  “Why didn’t you pick up when Mo called you?” Cecily didn’t ask because she needed the information—she could smell the answer wafting off her mother in the close space of her car. One of the reasons she favored vodka was that her mother favored wine, and a wine drunk made a strong olfactory impression. Her mother reeked of old grapes.

  She’d asked because she wanted her mother to admit it.

  “Long night,” was all she said, raking a hand through her red hair. “And did I mention that it’s four o’clock in the morning?”

  Cecily hit the paved road and gunned it, smiling grimly as the rear tires tore at the gravel and clutched the pavement on the turn.

  “Christ, you drive like your father, like every road is Daytona.”

  There was no point in having a machine that went fast unless you made it go fast. She had indeed learned that from her father.

  “Did Mo say anything else? Is the baby okay?”

  Mo had only said that Cecily needed to go out and pick up her mother and get both their asses to the hospital, where Jacinda and Apollo had need. Cecily’s experience with pregnancy and childbirth was sketchy and secondhand, so what did she know? “She’s not due for a couple more months, right? I don’t think the baby could be okay, could she?”

  “Shit. Shit! This club has had enough bad shit happen! Enough!”

  Driving along the dark, predawn country road, the TA’s headlights reflecting back a wet autumn dew, Cecily turned and considered her mother’s dim profile. In three and a half years, that was the first time she’d spoken of the club as if she were a part of it.

  Cecily herself had turned from the club at the same time her mother and sister had—when her father had been murdered by a brother. They’d all done it in different ways: Cecily had stormed away, Clara had run away. Their mother had turned so deeply into herself that she’d simply disappeared. She’d been inching back, letting Mo draw her little by little again into the circle of club women, but she’d gone no closer to the club itself. Cecily, as full of hate as she’d been, as loudly insistent that she’d never have anything to do with the Brazen Bulls ever again, had been the first back.

  Because she loved Caleb, and he was a Bull. She’d had to go back into the fold to be as close to him as she needed to be. And there, to her profound surprise, she’d found something she’d been desperately missing: family. It had been barely a week since she’d returned to the clubhouse, and the world had gone completely batshit, but something wild inside her had settled.

  “No more death,” her mother muttered at the passenger window. Her breath plumed steam over the glass. “No more death, please.”

  Cecily turned her attention to the road and pushed harder on the gas.

  ~oOo~

  Mo. Leah. Deb. Cecily and her mother.

  That was the full extent of the vigil the Bulls could muster on this early morning. Willa was with Apollo and Jacinda. Jenny was at home with all the kids—Willa and Rad’s two boys, her own two kids, and Deb’s new baby boy. Every Bull was on the road, not due back until noon or so. Normally, the club filled a hospital waiting room so that the walls swelled. But now, they took up only a corner of the room.

  A middle-aged couple Cecily had never met, a tall, imposing woman, and a somewhat shorter, bland-looking man, sat across the room, holding hands, exuding worry. Mo had gone over and spoken to them briefly; they were Jacinda’s parents, but they weren’t interested in joining with the Bulls’ women to sit vigil together.

  But when Apollo came through the ward doors, toward the waiting room, his arms empty, everyone stood at once, and they all went to him.

  It was Mo who stepped forward, her arms out. “Apollo, love.”

  His handsome face was pale as powder, and exhaustion had made cracks across his brow and between his eyes, but he offered them a weak smile. “We changed her name. She’s Athena. Athena Estelle. Two pounds, eight ounces. She’s so little, Mo. She almost fits on my hand. But she’s a warrior goddess, so she’ll be okay.”

  The words came out in faltering stutters as he fought a war with emotion. Mo yanked him into her arms, and he dropped his head to her shoulder and gave up his fight. “She’ll be okay, she’ll be okay, she’ll be okay,” he muttered wetly.

  “Yes, she will.” Mo crooned. “With parents like hers, she can’t help but be strong.”

  “Apollo,” the imposing woman who was Jacinda’s mother barked. “How’s Jaci?”

  He lifted from Mo’s shoulder and stepped back, swiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “She’s…she’s okay. They wouldn’t let her hold her baby, and that was hard. They gave her something to help her rest. She’s sleeping now. They took Athena to the NICU.”

  Remembering something, he looked around. “I…shit. Shit. I have to call my folks. Shit.” He turned to the closed ward doors and stared.

  “It’s early,” Mo said. “Not even six. You can wait a bit to call. Or I can call, if that’s a help to you.”

  He nodded, but Cecily wasn’t sure he’d actually heard Mo. “I don’t know where to go. I need to be with them both.”

  Jacinda’s father stepped up and clutched his shoulder, shaking him until he got his attention. “We’ll sit with Jaci. You see to your little girl. Today you start a whole lifetime of watching over her.”

  Apollo’s face drew sharply in, and tears slid down his cheeks and into his s
cuff of blond beard. He nodded and dropped his hand on Jacinda’s father’s shoulder.

  “What can we do, Apollo?” Leah asked.

  He turned and considered the club women, clustered together. For a moment, he simply looked, through eyes clouded with tears. Then he whispered, “Just don’t leave me.”

  “We’re not going anywhere, love,” Mo said and hugged him again.

  Cecily wiped the tears from her cheeks. This was the family she’d come back to. Flawed as hell, but stalwart in times of trouble.

  ~oOo~

  The Bulls were back in town before noon, and the entire club came straight to the hospital. Then the waiting room walls swelled, and the poor civilians waiting for their own women to deliver babies sat tensely on the edges, not sure what to make of so many brawny men clad in ink and leather.

  There was little new information to share with them. Athena was in the NICU; the women had all stood at the window to see the tiny, delicate girl lying naked in a clear box, her wispy, nearly translucent body covered in wires and tubes and stickers. Apollo sat in the room with her, wearing a flimsy yellow gown, his head and face covered, his forehead on the box his daughter lay in.

  Jacinda had had a C-section, to reduce the stress of birth on Athena, once it became clear that the birth couldn’t be stopped. They were keeping her sedated because she was so distraught and insistent on getting to her little girl that they were afraid she’d hurt herself.

  So nothing was happening, and that, for now, was good news. The NICU doctors were still determining Athena’s health and prognosis, and Jacinda was sleeping. Apollo stayed with their little girl, except for the times he couldn’t stand being away from Jacinda. His own parents stayed near Apollo and the baby, and Jacinda’s stayed with her, and together, they kept their girls under watch.

  As for the club, there was nothing they could do but be close. To stand and bear witness, and to be present should they be needed. That was what a vigil was: to be ready, to be present.

  Cecily tucked herself on Caleb’s shoulder, and his arm tightened around her. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  He kissed her head. “Me too. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too. I guess I should thank you for being a bullying jerk and making me come home.”

  His chuckle rumbled against her cheek. “I guess you should.”

  “I’m going to hold you to your deal, though.”

  “I know you will, iňloňka. Just remember that I warned you.”

  ~oOo~

  On a rainy day in early October, Cecily drove through the quiet streets of a small town she’d never seen: Pawhuska, where Caleb had grown up. Where his grandfather still lived.

  It was just a town like hundreds across the rural Oklahoma landscape, and it seemed just as dreary and depressed as any other. The weather added to the gloom, no doubt, but Cecily didn’t think Pawhuska burst into bright life in the sunshine.

  She’d grown up on the Nielsen family farm, ten miles or so outside the limits of a town not much different. Just a town, no big deal.

  “Turn right here,” Caleb said. With the spotty rain, they’d taken her car, and he’d been grumpy the whole ride. She’d wanted to drive, and it was her car. He didn’t want to ‘ride bitch.’ Bikers were so predictable.

  Normally, she’d have given in and let him drive—it was his birthday, after all—but she’d enjoyed poking at his little macho tic this morning.

  He was also grumpy because he expected a fight at his grandfather’s house. On his birthday. Over her. He’d tried to talk her out of their deal, but she wanted to meet his family. They’d been together for months, and she’d never laid eyes on the people who’d raised him. That was too much mystery for one relationship to hold.

  She turned onto the street he’d indicated and peered past the windshield wipers at the street sign. “Kihekah? Is that right? Kihekah Avenue?”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Do all the streets here have Osage names?”

  “We just turned off Main Street, so no,” he snapped.

  “It was just a question.”

  “Sorry,” he sighed. “I’m just tense. This thing coming up will help.”

  “What? We’re not going to your grandpa’s?”

  “We are. I just want to make a stop first. Right down there at the end of the road.”

  She peered ahead, slowing down as they approached a sharp leftward bend. “Oh shit. No way.”

  “Yes way. I love this thing. I want you to do it with me.”

  “It’s raining!”

  “It’s not. It’s just been road spit on the windshield for the past ten minutes. Come on. It’ll be fun.” He grinned and gave her a look. “You too chicken?”

  In high school, she’d had a reputation that she’d take on any dare. Embracing her father’s outlaw mystique had made a way for her to wedge herself into the cliquish high school culture, so she’d cultivated that reputation pretty aggressively. She’d learned in college that being the girl who’d do anything was a great way to get oneself in bad trouble.

  With a tendency to be angry and impulsive, she’d had to learn that lesson a few times in her life. Most recently this spring.

  But Caleb knew she had a strong weakness for being called out for fear—and she wasn’t afraid, not at all. Just…derailed. She’d been arming up to have supper with people who hated her before they’d met her. That was a whole different kind of preparation.

  “Fuck you. I’m not afraid of a fucking bridge.” Not even Pawhuska’s Swinging Bridge.

  She parked, and they got out. Caleb’s mood had improved all at once. He came around the front of the TA with a big, dopey grin and grabbed her hand. “It’s perfect. Too gloomy and cold for anybody else to be around. I want to get you on the middle of that bridge and make the thing rock and roll, baby.”

  At the head of the bridge, Cecily pulled him to a stop and read the touristy sign, explaining the history of the bridge, how it was once the only way into Pawhuska when Bird Creek flooded, how it was perfectly safe, even though it moved so much. A suspension walking bridge made of narrow wood slats with tall chain-link sides, it had been renovated in the Seventies and was, the sign assured them again, perfectly safe—but they shouldn’t intentionally swing the bridge, either.

  “Come on, iňloňka. Be fierce. No more dawdling.”

  “I’m not afraid of your stupid bridge, biker boy.” She shook free of his hand and stalked onto the bridge.

  The first few steps were nothing. Once they moved from the riverbank, it started to sway a lot more, and it was a lot higher above the creek than she’d anticipated. When Caleb ran ahead of her, widening his stride to push the bridge back and forth each time a foot landed, Cecily felt a push of adrenaline and couldn’t keep herself from grabbing at the chain link sides.

  Running backward now, Caleb saw and laughed at her. She couldn’t have that, so she let go and ran forward. That was better—the bridge was really moving now, but so was she, and it was fun.

  He’d stopped where he’d said he would, at the center, and he grabbed her up in his arms as she caught up with him. Turning, he pushed her up against the chain-link and leaned in, hooking his fingers in the links beside her head.

  They were alone on the bridge, and their combined weight leaning to one side made it tip noticeably in that direction. Cecily had the feeling of floating over the creek—or hanging and about to drop. Her heart was like a timpani drum in her chest.

  She grinned up at her man’s handsome face. His hair was loose and hung around them, strands blowing up with bursts of damp breeze. He was hard; his erection dug at her hip.

  “This is cool.”

  “I’d love to fuck you right here.” He thrust at her, and the bridge swung a little more.

  “No, Caleb. What we have is not for show.”

  His expression changed, but he wasn’t disappointed. It was more like he was touched. The greedy leer shifted to a softer smile, and he kissed her, then pu
lled back and set her straight on the bridge.

  “Okay. We’re really close to Grampa’s. I don’t know how they’ll be.”

  They’d gone through all this a few times as the day had approached, but he seemed to need to do it again and again, like a litany. So she did her part. “They know I’m coming, right?”

  “Yeah, but I forced the point. I think Grampa will be okay. Maybe not warm, but not an asshole. Levi, who knows? He might be an asshole. He’ll probably try to get you to say something he can make a scene out of.”

  “I will be on my best behavior. But if your brother wants a scene and tries to make it happen…”