Her father paid no heed to Gunner’s outburst. He kept his eyes on Leah’s. “I’ll hear you now, angel. I heard the truth buried in all Max’s obscenity. Talk to me.”
She wanted to find a way for them to be okay together, so there was no choice to be made now. He was her father, and she loved him. “Okay, Daddy.”
“Leah…” Gunner tugged on her hand.
“It’s okay. I’ll be okay. Maybe you can get to know Joan. She seems nice.”
His blue eyes flashed warily. “You sure?”
“Yeah. I want this, Gun.”
“Okay. I won’t be far. You call out if you need me. Love you.” He kissed her lightly on the lips, then turned back to her father. “Don’t you fucking hurt her again.” There was no humor, not even that twisted, angry kind, on his face or in his voice. He was pure menace.
He walked toward the front of the house, and Leah and her father were alone again and face to face, hours after he’d told her they had nothing left to talk about.
Leah didn’t think she could take it if they ended up in the same place again.
Yes, she could. She could handle whatever her father said or did, because Gunner was just outside. Gunner, who took care of her, protected her, defended her. From the night of the party, from the beginning of them, he’d been her protector and defender. He loved her. He wanted to marry her.
He saw her as she was, as unformed and incomplete as she was, as imperfect, and he loved her.
She could handle anything.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The woman on the porch jumped when Gunner came through the door, and he tried to rein himself back in.
He wanted to pull that fucking bastard into all his separate parts. Leah was in there, alone with him again. Fuck!
The woman—what was her name? Joan? Yeah, Joan—stood up from a wicker chair and took a step to increase the distance between them.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, ma’am.” When her expression didn’t relax, he held out his hand. “I’m Gunner. Leah’s…boyfriend.” What a strange word. It didn’t feel like him at all. He hadn’t been anybody’s ‘boyfriend’ since high school, and it seemed like a word best left in high school.
What was he, then? He knew what he wanted to be, but she wasn’t ready for any of that.
Oh shit—he’d said it right out in front of Leah. He’d never said it to her yet. Well, fuck.
Joan was eyeing his hand warily, but she obviously had no intention of shaking it, so he let it drop. “I’m sorry for barging in and scaring you. There’s some shi—stuff going on. Family stuff.”
“I know,” Joan said. “Edward has told me about his troubles with his daughter and her…friend.”
He liked ‘boyfriend’ a fuck ton better than the way this woman who didn’t know shit had just said ‘friend,’ like it was something sticky on the bottom of her shoe.
Gunner knew this woman’s type. They came to the station occasionally, usually when they got lost or had some do-gooder business on the wrong side of the tracks. With her hair done just so, each strand lacquered so it couldn’t budge, and her perfectly coordinated outfit and little pearl jewelry, he knew her exactly. She was the kind of woman who would pinch her lips together at the thought of taking the charge slip from his work-grimed hands, who would fuss if there was the barest streak across her windshield after he’d washed it. She was the kind of woman who called one minute after the time her car service had been estimated to be done and sniped furiously if it wasn’t. The kind of woman who couldn’t consider a day complete until she’d demanded to see at least one poor slob’s manager.
And she was comfortable enough with Leah’s father to call him by his first name. Gunner had never heard anyone call him by his first name.
Just for fun, to make himself feel better, he took a sharp step toward Joan, and she flinched.
Yep. That made him feel better.
Smirking sarcasm at her, he walked to the other side of the porch. He sat on the railing and stared at the front door, willing Leah to open it. No sound came through the walls or the open windows.
Gunner crossed his arms over his chest and worked on staying calm—but not too calm. If that son of a bitch made Leah cry again, he definitely would take him apart.
~oOo~
His ass had gone numb before the door finally opened. Gunner jumped forward as Leah pushed the screen door out, and snatched her hand as soon as he could get it.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
She looked okay—she also looked like, yes, she’d been crying again, goddammit, but there was a little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. A brave smile. That didn’t usually mean things were going great.
Her father came up behind her. Gunner glared at him, and Reverend Campbell glared back. Before Gunner could say anything to him, Leah turned around and said, “Bye, Daddy. I’ll…I’ll see you?”
He nodded. “Yes. Be safe, Leah. Be well.”
“You, too. I love you.”
“And I love you.”
Leah turned, nodded at Joan, and walked down the porch steps, leading Gunner toward his bike.
He let her pull him away, but he was deeply confused.
At his bike, far enough from the porch that they could speak quietly in privacy, he made her face him. “What’s going on? What happened in there?”
“We talked. We’re going to take it slow.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Take what slow?”
“Figuring out who were are to each other.”
“You mean he needs to figure out who you are to him. You’re his fucking daughter. He doesn’t need to figure that shit out.”
“Gunner, stop. Please. This is progress. It’s okay. It’s better than it was.”
He turned and beamed hate at the house. The porch was empty; they’d gone back inside. “I fucking hate that asshole.”
“Don’t.” Leah caught hold of his beard and made him turn around. “He’s my dad. Can we just go for the ride I thought we were going on? I just want to hold onto you and feel good now.”
In her voice, he heard how tired and sad she really was, how raw, and he knew his anger was making that worse. “Yeah. C’mere.” He pulled her into his arms. “Love you, Leah.”
She snuggled up tight against his chest and heaved a big sigh.
~oOo~
“Can I ask you something?”
Gunner had been falling toward sleep, nestled behind Leah, his arm around her waist, keeping her close. At her question, he pulled himself to wakefulness and kissed the back of her head. “Sure.”
“Did…did you… Did you mean what you said to my dad tonight?”
He knew exactly what she meant. “Yeah, I did. I meant everything I said, Lee.”
“You want to marry me?”
Rising up on his elbow, he rolled her to her back and looked down at her sweet face. “Don’t be scared, but yeah. I told you what you mean to me, how you make me better. Not just a better man, but it’s like you…heal me. That sounds stupid.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she murmured and lifted a hand to run her fingers through his beard.
“Either way, it’s true. I know it’s early, and you’re young, so I don’t want to freak you out. I can wait. But you’re what I want. Someday, I’d like you to keep my flame and wear my ring.”
He’d been surprised a few weeks back to find out that she already understood about the ink Mo, Joanna, Maddie, and Willa had. The flaming heart that meant they were committed to their Bull. Turned out, she, Willa, and Patrice had been having some heavy talk at the cabin while he, Rad, and Griffin were out almost killing Sheriff Lucas.
“It doesn’t freak me out at all.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “It makes me happy. I want that, too—to be with you forever. To hold onto each other. You…you heal me, too.”
There was probably no more powerful sentence she could have uttered. Gunner had never thought he migh
t be good for someone else. He was impulsive and violent and halfway crazy, and he spent half his life in one kind of shit or another. Could somebody like him be what somebody like Leah needed? How could that be true?
It was either true, or she was lying. Or she was simply wrong.
She wasn’t lying. The possibility that she was wrong was the reason he wanted to wait to do anything permanent between them.
In the meantime, he would believe her.
~oOo~
Two days later, on a miserably rainy day thirty degrees colder than the day before, Gunner and five of his brothers rode east on I-44 through rural Missouri. In warm weather, he didn’t mind riding in the rain. The worst part was maintaining visibility through sunglasses, so he just didn’t wear them in the rain—it wasn’t like the sun would be a problem. Or bugs, for that matter.
But when the temperature was in the forties, that got pretty fucking miserable pretty fucking fast. Soaking wet at seventy miles an hour, forty degrees was cold. The rain on this day was a slow, steady shower, with occasional stormy bursts. Three times, they’d pulled up onto the shoulder under overpasses, when visibility went tits up.
By the time they made the meet with the Night Horde, on an abandoned motel’s weed-speared, cracked concrete parking lot, everybody was in a foul mood but Slick and Wally, the prospects who’d driven the empty van behind them. They’d been all cozy in the cage, warm and dry, and they knew better now than to get too close to the drowned Bulls.
And there was no Night Horde yet. As thunder crashed overhead, and lightening fractured the sky, another sheeting downpour landed on their heads. They left their bikes and ran to huddle under the tattered canopy stretched before the boarded doors and windows of the motel rooms.
“Fuck this,” Dane snarled and spun on his heel. His blond ponytail was lank and plastered to his head and neck, showing how thin it had gotten. With his gloved hands, he tried to pry loose one of the boards over a window. “Rad, Ox—give me a hand here.”
The two biggest Bulls on the run came over and put their prodigious muscles to the effort. Gunner, Becker, and Griffin soon chipped in as well, and with that concerted energy, they managed to rip the board down. It had been screwed in, not nailed, so they took a fair portion of the sill down, too.
Then they stood, while the rain slammed down on the corrugated fiberglass of the canopy, and contemplated the window.
“Should’ve freed up the door,” Ox observed.
“Door’ll be locked. This is easier.” Rad balled up his fist, still in its heavy riding glove, and punched through the glass.
They broke out the rest of the glass and climbed through the open window.
The room was empty except for a vinyl kitchenette chair and a broken mirror, its frame still bolted to the wall. Florid paper drooped in foot-wide strips on every wall, and the carpet was soaked from the rain they were trying to escape. Gunner counted at least four drips coming from the buckled ceiling. The air reeked of mildew and rotten meat.
“Fuck, something died in here,’ Becker complained from behind his hand.
“Probably a critter—but don’t go lookin’ for what it is,” Dane ordered. “Let’s just deal with this and stay dry as we can until the Horde decides to bless us with their presence.”
Ox went to the window and regarded the downpour. “This ain’t the first time they been late.”
“Better them late than us at this pickup. We don’t want them sitting ducks on top of the cargo,” Rad replied.
“When’s the last time we been late anywhere?”
“I know, brother.” Rad stepped to Ox’s side and watched the same featureless vista. “Let’s just keep cool and get this done.”
Wondering about Ox’s question, Gunner thought back and remembered. “Last time one of our runs went off time was last year, when the Rats hit you coming back from Nebraska.” He checked his watch and turned to Dane. “They’re coming up on half an hour late. Little Ike would page if they were just hung up, wouldn’t he?”
Little Ike Lunden was the son of the Night Horde’s president, Big Ike. He’d just been made VP, after the death of Reg, the man who’d held that office since the inception of the club, and by all accounts the transfer had not been smooth. Gunner could not have been less interested in the internal politics of an MC he didn’t belong to, but the Bulls worked often enough with the Horde that it was hard to miss the tensions in that crew.
Little Ike was in charge of the Horde’s role in the Volkov guns, because the Russians didn’t like his father. Big Ike didn’t participate in the runs at all.
Normally, the Horde ran the guns all the way to Tulsa, and the Bulls took over from there, running three different routes from Tulsa to points west, south, and north. But this was a special run, with special-order cargo, so the Bulls were picking it up early, and giving it a first class ride the rest of the way.
That was why they had six Bulls running escort and two prospects in the van. On a normal Volkov run, they only put four men on guard and had one driver.
This wasn’t the first time the Horde had been late to a meet, but it was the first time they’d been this late, and it was the first time they were hauling the kind of cargo they were hauling.
“Yeah,” Dane muttered, checking his pager. “He would’ve. Fuck. Okay, I gotta get to a phone. Rad—you’re on point. Beck, ride with me.”
Becker nodded, and he and the VP climbed back out the window and headed through the rain to their bikes. Slick and Wally were still in the van, but Gunner saw Dane wave them toward the room.
They’d just fired up their bikes and circled to get back out to the road when the Horde rolled onto the parking lot. The rain picked that precise moment to stop, and a streak of sunshine broke through the grey sky. It glinted off the Horde truck, and Gunner saw bullet holes piercing the driver’s door.
He wasn’t the only one who’d seen. Rad muttered “Jesus fuck,” as he vaulted through the window, pulling his piece from under his kutte. They all followed after him, everybody putting their sidearm in their hands. The Horde were friends, but there’d been trouble, and smart men went into trouble prepared for more.
Little Ike dismounted and took off his helmet. Blood ran down his face from some point on his head, smearing over his wet cheek and into his beard like a watercolor painting. All six Horde men looked like they’d had a difficult afternoon.
“Sorry we’re late, Dane. We had a little trouble.”
“I see that,” Dane said. “Clear now? Everybody whole?” At Little Ike’s nod, Dane holstered his weapon, and the rest of the Bulls followed. “What happened?”
“Picked up a tail after the handoff, I guess.” Little Ike looked back over his shoulder at Showdown, whom Gunner had pegged as his close friend. Still, it was a weak move, looking to his buddy for confirmation.
“That’s my read, too. Been on us all day,” Showdown said, stepping up.
Little Ike turned back to Dane. When he spoke again, Gunner sensed him trying to reassert some authority over the situation. “This rain’s been on us all day. It kept them clear of our notice until we were back in Missouri, but it had to be in Illinois we picked them up. Solid black van. Brand new GMC. Pulled up on a dead space on the highway and shot the truck full of holes. Vic over there”—he nodded at the skinny kid leaning on the truck, who had some kind of dark bandage wrapped around his thigh—“took a bullet. We need to get him back and seen to.”
“He’s still drivin’, with a bullet in him?” Becker asked.
Little Ike grinned sourly. “He’s a tough motherfucker. Anyway, your cargo is safe, but we got two dead guys in the back next to it, and there’s a GMC van in the woods we don’t know what the fuck to do with, so if we can get this handoff done, I need to deal with the rest of this shit.”
Now he sounded like a leader.
“You’re not on your own here, son,” Dane said and lifted his hand—way up—to set it paternally on the much bigger, much younger Horde VP’s shoulde
r. “This is Volkov business. I’ll make a call and get Irina to send a cleaner and smooth this over. She’ll want to know there’s somebody tryin’ to poach her product, and I want her to know you handled it.”
Little Ike’s posture went stiff, and his eyes wary. “We can’t afford to owe the Volkovs anything extra.”
“Relax, Little Ike. This isn’t a favor. This is her cost of doing business. C’mon. Let’s ride out and find a phone.”
“Isaac,” Little Ike said. Gunner had just turned to head to the truck and check the cargo, but he stopped and considered the guy. There’d been something in his tone.
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 28
