by Kati Wilde
“All right.” Mama gives the other woman a reassuring pat on the arm. “We’ll be just a minute, dear.”
I head toward the kitchen, the old floorboards squeaking under my feet in the same spots they always did. The kitchen’s all the same, with the big pine table where we ate our informal meals, the pots hanging above the butcher block island, the fresh flowers in the window above the white enamel sink.
Mama doesn’t like anything to change. But it’s about to.
I just have to figure out how to lay it out for her without jeopardizing Anna’s safety. Because I’m not taking a bride.
The night Anna sent me away at the brewery, I walked out of there thinking that I’d have to. That I’d have to take a bride as part of falling in line. But the moment Anna ripped my heart out, I also thought it was the end of my fucking life. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was forced to be with someone else if Anna never wanted to see me again. Nothing matters when everything inside is dead.
But since the moment I saw that photo of her mouth taped and her face bruised, I haven’t given a single thought to any bride. And I started living again when I kissed her in the shower.
Since then, there’s not been a single moment where I’ve considered any other option for my future. Because other women don’t exist for me—and I won’t touch anyone but Anna.
Ever.
But saying that would make things harder for Anna here than they already are. So I have to come at it another way.
“Mama.” Just inside the kitchen, I turn and face her. She hasn’t changed much, either. Just a little gray in her hair, just a few faint lines around her eyes. And still seeing everything the way she wants to see it. “Do you think I give a fuck about a woman when Stone is out there, still missing?”
Disapproval thins her lips—because I said fuck. All the rest is nothing to her, because it doesn’t fit with her agenda. Me refusing to be with this girl is just something to be rolled over. “You cannot do anything for your friend at this moment.”
“I can keep his sister safe while he can’t.”
“We can do that. Don’t return to the city tonight. Anna can stay with me. And you can finally take your place in your own home, start creating your own family.”
Jesus. It always comes back to this bloodline shit. “I told you the last time I was here—I can never start a family. You didn’t believe the report I gave you showing my sperm count? All right. Erin’s in that living room. She’s still inseminating the cows? Then she can take a good look at my sample and tell you it wasn’t a damn lie. You don’t trust my doctors, you can believe her word. And she’ll tell you that I could fuck every bride every night from now until next Christmas and you still aren’t getting a baby out of me.”
She sighs. “Even if it’s true, we will simply ask your brothers to step in after you’ve claimed her.”
“Then why don’t you ask Erin to inseminate her with their cum now? You want a breeding program, might as well treat her like one of the cows.”
“Zachary!” Voice sharp, she frowns at me. “You insult Grace with such talk. And you insult me.”
I grit my teeth. Because that’s where this always goes with her. She won’t address the point I’m making—that we’re nothing but sperm donors and baby incubators. She’ll just take offense to the way it’s said. “If you intend to send all my brothers into her bed, you could do that now. You sure as hell don’t need me to marry her first.”
“You do need to marry her. Because if she’s chosen to continue your father’s bloodline, then she deserves the honor of his name and the protection of his son.”
“There’s a simple solution to that,” I say, my voice hard. “You need to go up in front of a judge who’ll change her name to Cooper, and ask my brothers to extend their protection. Unless you’re saying my brothers are too weak to take care of more than one woman?”
The way I see it, they aren’t taking care of their wives at all. They’re just fucking them. It’s Mama who’s taking care of them.
She lifts her chin, ready to redouble her arguments.
Before she opens her mouth, I tell her softly, “Mama, I’m here. I’m wearing this kutte. That’s as far as I’m willing to go. Either you’ll accept that it’s enough or you won’t—I don’t give a fuck. But it’s all you’re getting from me.”
Anger snaps through her eyes. “All right. But you stay on the farm tonight. Don’t mate with Grace, if you don’t want her. But you will stay at your home. I’ll keep Anna with me and we’ll keep her safe until your business regarding her brother is done. There’s no need to waste the time you could be using to find him by watching over this girl.”
So she’s shifting the blame. But not to Grace. It’s coming down on Anna.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, struggle for calm. “We’re not staying here. Not in a place where she wouldn’t be safe if the end comes.” It’s a stupid argument, but if Mama’s going to stick so hard to these beliefs of hers, this need to see me at home and breeding, then I’ll use them against her. “Unless you can tell me she’d be safe here if that race war started up overnight? You going to tell me that you’d trust her not to side against the brides and their children, betraying you before running off to join her own kind?”
Silently she stares at me, rage pressing her mouth tight. But she doesn’t contradict me. Because she does believe it. She’ll shelter Anna right now. But if all the shit they’re waiting for came down? That protection she promises would disappear fast.
“Yeah, I thought so.” I sound so damn tired. I feel so damn tired. “So you need to accept this: I’m not taking a bride, and I’m not staying at home. Ever. What you’ve got now is all you’ll be getting out of me. And that has nothing to do with Anna—it has everything to do with you, and you pushing your breeding nonsense on me. It has everything to do with David, and how he died because of all the bullshit this family believes.”
Flinching away from me, she draws a shaking breath. Tears spring to her eyes—and that pain’s real, and it hurts me to see it, but I’m not sorry she’s feeling it.
She thinks I should be sorry, though. “You say that to me? You don’t think I paid enough when I lost my son? You don’t think I paid enough when my own son killed my husband?”
“I don’t think any of us have paid enough.” We brought it all on ourselves. “Maybe we deserve how much it hurts. But David didn’t. And Anna doesn’t.”
Mama just shakes her head, turning away from me, breath shuddering. And I can’t stop myself from wrapping my arms around her, holding on until her crying stops.
I stroke her soft hair, say quietly, “I’ll be at the clubhouse again first thing. But I’m leaving now. I’m tired and I’m sure Anna’s tired. I’ll bring her again tomorrow if she wants to come—and if you’re still willing to look out for her on the farm.”
Mama pulls away, wiping her face. “I said we’d look out for her. Whatever else you think of me, Zachary, I won’t go back on my word.”
I know. That’s often the problem. She always follows through. No matter who it hurts.
But I only tell her “Goodnight, Mama,” and head for the hall.
“Zachary.” Her bleak voice stops me at the kitchen door. “The next time you boys feel the need to wrestle, perhaps for my sake you will refrain from hitting Adam in the face. Of you all, he looks the most like your father.”
As far as I’m concerned, that’s all the more reason to hit him. But I simply nod and go.
And pray I can persuade Anna to start looking at me again.
25
Gunner
Anna still doesn’t meet my eyes when I collect her from the living room and we head out to the motorcycle. The need to make her look seethes in me, the need to put my hands on her and force her to face me, but I can’t say to her what I need to say now. Not with the family looking on.
So instead my gaze eats her up as she silently buckles her helmet. She does look tired, her eyes dark and hollow, her mov
ements slow, as if her entire body feels heavy. I expected a little argument from her inside the house, that maybe she wasn’t ready to go, but she just mutely got to her feet.
“You all right, Anna?”
Her shoulders lift on a shrug and her mouth curves into an unconvincing smile. “Of course. I’m fine.”
She’s not fine. I know she’s not. If she was, then when she swung her leg over the bike and settled in behind me, she wouldn’t be sitting with an inch of space between us instead of scooting up tight. I start the engine, waiting to feel her hands on me and realize she’s leaning back instead, gripping the seat behind her for support and balance.
Holding onto it instead of holding onto me. As if she can’t bear to touch me.
Pain slams through my chest and shoves out a harsh command. “Put your goddamn arms around me.”
She touches me then—but just her hands gripping my sides, not wrapping her arms around me and clasping her fingers over my stomach like she did this morning. Behind me, her body’s rigid. Because I hurt her. I swore I’d never do it again, but I did. By keeping my fucking mouth shut so tight.
I open the throttle, eyes fixed on the splash of lighted road ahead, my chest a burning ache. I hurt her—
And she shrugged.
She shrugged. As if it didn’t matter.
But it does. Because I can see it matters. She’s just pretending it doesn’t.
Jesus Christ. How many times has she pretended not to be hurt? How many times has she shrugged and smiled?
So many times. And I know every single one because they’re seared into my brain. I hated every single goddamn lift of her shoulders, because she shrugged and smiled every time I had to push her away. As if it was nothing to her, even though I was tearing out my heart each time.
But that shrug is a fucking lie.
Now there’s hope filling the empty ache inside me. So much damn hope. Because I hurt her—I never wanted to hurt her—but she is hurt.
I couldn’t hurt her if I didn’t have at least a small piece of her heart. Attraction, that’s something else. I knew that was always there.
But she cares. I don’t know how much. Maybe that piece of her heart is tiny. There hasn’t been enough time for her to love me yet—and shit, after today I’ll have to work my ass off to regain any strides I might have made there.
It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t love me, though. What matters is that a tiny piece of her heart finally belongs to me—and that she cares enough that I could hurt her.
What matters is never hurting her again.
So that’s the end of this, then. The end of holding back. The end of keeping my hands off her. The end of hiding from her how I feel. I was waiting to let her get to know me, but hell—loving her is all that I am. It’s all she needs to know. And I was waiting so we don’t jeopardize our chance to find Stone—but Anna’s smart, she’s careful. I will be, too. If we’re at the farm, if we’re being watched, we can make sure no one sees anything we don’t want them to see.
But as soon as we get back to the hotel, get up to our room, she’s going to know how I feel. And I’m not letting her leave that room until she’s mine.
It won’t be easy. She’s closed herself off, shut down. It’ll be a fight.
So it’s only fair that I give her some warning.
The rumble of my engine echoes through the concrete hotel lot as I pull in next to my truck. She’s off the bike almost before I’ve stopped. She’s fast, but I’m faster. I catch her hand.
“When we get up to that room, we’re going to sort this through,” I tell her. “After it’s sorted, I’m going to lay you on my bed and kiss every sweet inch of you, until you’re as wet and as hot as you were this morning. Then I intend to fuck you all damn night—slow, then hard, then real slow again.”
Her golden brown eyes stare at me, stunned and wide, before abruptly narrowing. With a furious hiss, she yanks her hand out of mine. “You’re never going to touch me again!”
Spinning away, she takes off toward the hotel.
Seeing her run from me rips a hole through my chest. Right now she must think I used her this morning like my brothers use their girls. But that’s not what it meant to me and she’s damn well going to know it.
I lock down the bike and follow her. The elevator doors are closing when I get inside the hotel lobby, giving me a disappearing view of her defiant eyes and compressed lips before sealing her inside. Helmet dangling from my fingers, I head for the stairs. She’s pushing through the room door when I hit the third floor landing and emerge into the hall. For a second I think she’s going to swing the interior security latch closed and I’ll be shouting what I have to say through the door for everyone to hear. But when I insert my keycard, the room door opens instead of catching on a latch.
Anna’s sitting on the end of her bed, taking off her boots. The defiance is gone and in its place is pleasant cordiality. There’s nothing about her expression or posture that says anything different than it did this morning, when she was confirming we were still friends.
We’re not going to be just friends anymore.
I make sure the door’s closed and secure the latch. After Strawman’s appearance this morning, we had our room keys changed but I’m not taking any chances that my brothers will walk in and see what I’ll be doing to Anna tonight.
She opens her dresser, grabs her nightshirt, never looking my way as I toss my helmet and kutte onto the luggage rack. Never glancing over as I cross the room, leaving her a hand’s breadth of space.
Though I’m crowding her, Anna doesn’t look up. “So, I met Grace,” she says like she’s my buddy. “I liked her.”
“And I don’t give a shit about her.”
“Your mother chose well.”
“I’m not marrying her.”
“She’ll make a good wife.”
“To someone else, because the only woman I’m ever going to touch is you.”
“Really?” Her voice cracks but not on a sob—instead it’s rage breaking through, as if she was containing it behind that mild expression but she can’t anymore. She turns to me and her eyes swim with so much hurt I can’t fucking breathe. “But I’m not a suitable bride. I’m barren. And full of cancer. Oh yeah—and my birth mother was probably a crack whore.”
Ice splinters in my chest. “Did Mama say that to you?”
“Whether she said it to me doesn’t even matter. Did you tell Strawman that I can’t have kids because of my leukemia treatments? That I was adopted?”
Oh fuck. “I did, sweetheart, but only because—”
“No! There is no ‘because’ that can ever make it better!” Glittering tears fall from her lashes but she stumbles back when I reach for her, as if my hands are poisonous blades. “Those are things I always thought made me a better person, stronger. Adoption gave me the most amazing family. I had cancer, and I fucking survived it. Those are the most incredible things in my life. So what if it means I can’t have kids? I never thought that made me less of a woman. Never in my life have I ever thought I’m less of a person because of those things.”
“You aren’t—”
“But you said those things made me worthless! You took something gold and said it was shit. You think I care whether you were saying it to mislead them? You throw shit on my face and I’m supposed to say it’s okay because, hey—the bigoted psychopaths in your family don’t like a woman who is covered in shit, so at least they won’t threaten me now? I knew what they would think about me, say about me. But to have you tell them to think these things? To have you put the shit in their hands so they can throw it, too? You?”
Her voice breaks and all at once she’s sobbing helplessly behind her hands, her shoulders hunched, and the devastated sounds she’s making are like bullets tearing through my gut.
Her anger was never about the brides. What she’s thinking of me now is so much worse.
“Ah, Jesus. Anna, please. I don’t think any of that makes you worthless.
I don’t think anything like that. I fucked up. I’m sorry for it.” And I can’t blame her for not wanting me to touch her. But I can’t bear her pain. Throat clogged, eyes burning, I catch her up against me, bury my face in her hair. Hoarsely I whisper, “I’m so fucking sorry. I was just thinking of protecting you and I fucked up.”
A harsh laugh breaks from her and she shoves at my chest, twisting away. “Yeah, you did. Because you seriously have a messed up idea of what protection is. ‘Hey, let’s give shit to my family so they can throw it at Anna! Hey, I’ll just lie to Anna for a week, using her brother’s phone!’ Like you think protection is standing between me and a threat and then punching me in the face.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you have no idea.” My chest a solid rotted ache, I fist my hands at my sides so I don’t reach for her again. She doesn’t want it—and she doesn’t even know the extent of how I’ve failed. Staring at her fragile shoulders, I tell her grimly, “I’ve messed up protecting you for ten goddamn years. If I’d protected you right, I’d have made you mine when I met you instead of staying away.”
Her head whips around and she looks disbelievingly at me, tears glistening on her cheeks, her arms wrapped around her stomach as if holding in so much hurt. “What are you talking about, ten years?”
“From the first second I saw you. You grinned at me and flashed me your tits and told me about your cancer and I wanted you so damn much. But I pushed you away, afraid of what might come for you. But you are the only one for me. You’ve been the only one for me since the day I pulled over to change your tire.”
“You’ve wanted me since then?” Her short, incredulous laugh hurts—but it’s the wary hope in her eyes that destroys me. As if she wants to believe, but I’ve hurt her too much for her to trust my words now. Wildly she shakes her head. “No.”
“You think I’d lie about this? You think this is what I wanted?” I blast the question at her, all the pain and frustration of a decade pushing me forward, until I’m right up in her face. This time she doesn’t run away—just lifts her chin, her soft lips quivering as I grind out, “Before you, I had more than my hand to fuck. I planned to live free and easy for a long, long time. Then you come along and I can’t touch you because of my family, because they’d see how much you mean to me. And I can’t touch anyone else. For ten fucking years!”
