Son of a Beard

by Lani Lynn Vale

  Instead of worrying about how my ass was hanging off the back, or anything else pertaining to my ass, I wrapped my arms tightly around Truth, and let the wind take me.

  And when Truth pulled up in front of the same pub, I realized that he was giving me a gift.

  He was sharing his world with me, and I was going to let him.

  Two hours later, I took him to my house.

  Well, I gave him directions, anyway.

  The moment he saw it, he stopped at the end of the driveway and stared.

  “This is a big fucking house!” he yelled over the din of the motor.

  I snorted.

  “Call it what it is! A monstrosity!” I yelled back.

  He put his foot back up onto the pedal thingy while turning the throttle with his hand, and we were off again, setting off through the gate and straight up my driveway, coming to a stop next to my car—which somehow had magically appeared.

  Though, really, I knew it was Randi.

  Her and her husband likely were responsible for it, and I made a mental note to thank the both of them tomorrow.

  I’d do it today, but I had a feeling we were about to be very busy.

  He shut off the bike and stared up at the house, his jaw going slack as he took it in.

  “It’s big,” he murmured, holding his hand out for me to take.

  I did, sweeping my leg off of the bike and staring up at the house, trying to see what he saw.

  I didn’t know what he saw, though.

  I’d been coming to this house for my entire twenty-nine years of life, and I didn’t see it as anything but home anymore.

  “How many rooms does this place have?”

  I gestured for him to follow me while placing the helmet on the seat he’d just vacated, and he fell in step beside me as I started to explain.

  “This is what they call a Colonial,” I murmured. “It has thirteen bedrooms. There are eight bathrooms, a kitchen, two living room areas, two formal dining rooms, a ballroom, and an indoor pool,” I explained.

  “Did the pool come original with the house?” he asked as I led him around the side of the house.

  I used the back entrance instead of the front.

  Mainly because I had to walk all the way through the house to get to the kitchen, and usually had groceries of some form or fashion.

  Not to mention my great-grandmother always used to use this door, so it seemed only proper that I used it, too.

  “No,” I fished my keys out of my purse. “The pool was added during my GG’s time here. She moved out a few years ago, and now she lives in the little row house next to the lake.”

  “There’s a lake?” he turned his head to search behind him.

  “Yes,” I pushed the door open and led him inside, hearing him close the door securely behind me. “It’s beyond the trees that you see at the end of the lawn.”

  “Who mows this place?” he asked.

  I started to snicker.

  “That would be me,” I said. “Every Saturday that I’m off.”

  “When are you not off?” he asked as he looked around. “I haven’t actually seen you work yet.”

  I knew what he was asking.

  How the hell did I afford a place like the one I was currently living in.

  “My great-grandmother was one of the original Cassidy Winemakers in Mooresville County,” I started to explain.

  His eyes closed, and he started to nod.

  “That explains the CW on the gate,” he surmised.

  I smiled softly.

  “When my great-grandmother died, she left my GG this place, and me a sizeable trust fund that I was able to access four years ago.” I walked to the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Want any?”

  His brows rose, but he nodded anyway.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That bottle looks old,” he murmured.

  “My GG and great-grandmother were wine connoisseurs. You can’t expect a person, such as my grandmother and great-grandmother, to not have wine just lying around the house.”

  “Touché.”

  I nodded firmly and handed him the bottle and the corkscrew.

  He took it deftly, easily removing the cork and handing it back to me.

  I placed two glasses in front of him, and he poured them not halfway like most would, but all the way up to the top.

  “You know me already,” I giggled. “I thought it was only Randi and me who didn’t waste any time or effort when it came to wine. It’s good to see you have the same thought processes.”

  He winked.

  “The house?” he reminded me.

  “My GG gave it to me three years ago when she moved out, although I’ve been living here for most of my life.”

  He nodded silently.

  “Your grandmother or great-grandmother ever have any men here?” he questioned. “This is a big ass place for someone like you to run on your own.”

  “Yep,” I confirmed. “Though my grandfather’s health declined to where he couldn’t help in the later years. They hired a caretaker who came out once a month to do any major repairs before he passed.”

  He winced, and then picked up a vase, causing me to giggle. “That’s my paternal grandmother.”

  He set it down and backed away.

  I snorted.

  “I know you’re wondering why my mother didn’t get this place,” I said. “And I’ll go ahead and appease that curiosity. My mother is a squanderer. She’s selfish and greedy, and that sets her up for failure which is why she is barely holding onto her wedding planning business by the skin of her teeth.”

  “Teeth don’t have skin…” he looked up to study the kitchen cabinets. “And your place really needs a complete remodel.”

  I snorted.

  “Yep,” I confirmed. “It needs one yesterday, but I don’t have time. I work full-time for the newspaper, and when I’m not working, I’m trying to keep my mother’s business in line, and stop the whole thing from imploding.”

  “You don’t have any time for you?” he tilted his head to study me.

  He was now leaning against my GG’s china cabinet, and I realized how out of place he looked in front of it.

  “I blow.”

  He blinked.

  “That’s good news, I guess,” he drawled.

  I snickered and went back out the kitchen door, and straight to the small workroom that I used to do my hobby.

  “This,” I said, pushing open the door, “is where I blow glass.”

  He looked around the room, studying everything.

  “That’s amazing,” he finally said. “Did you make this?”

  He picked up a hummingbird feeder the color of blood, and I picked up its twin.

  “There are a lot of imperfections,” I admitted. “And yes, I did make it.”

  He fingered the small stem that was where the hummingbird would feed when it was hung.

  “Fuckin’ amazing,” he finally murmured. “I’ve always looked at these things and wondered how it was done. Will you show me?”

  I smiled.

  “Yes.” I placed the feeder back on the shelf. I had to ship them out tomorrow evening. “But not tonight. Tonight, I want to eat, kick back on the couch and watch our movie. I’m exhausted.”

  “Why are you so tired?” he asked. “I’m not saying that you didn’t kick ass at catching all those Pokémon, but you have bags under your eyes that look like you haven’t slept in days.”

  I fingered said bags.

  “It’s rained the last three mornings in a row, and in the newspaper business, that’s not a good thing,” I told him. “People call and complain about the stupidest things, but when it’s raining, it’s a relentless stream of calls that never ends.”

  He took my hand in his, and then led me back to the house.

  “You can give me a tour of the rest of your mansion. Then you can show me what you have to cook,
while you go find us something to watch on TV and I cook it,” he murmured as he pulled me along behind him. “Then we can have a Netflix and chill kind of night.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Netflix and chill doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

  He looked at me over his shoulder.

  “I know.”

  That was how I found myself becoming one with my couch while Truth made me the most delicious spaghetti and meatballs I’d ever tasted.

  My food normally came out tasting bland, but the spices and overall taste of Truth’s sauce was something that I would remember for a long time to come.

  And I would enjoy the hell out of my leftovers tomorrow during lunch.

  Now we were watching Battleship, my most favorite movie in the world. I had a How to Get Away With Murder marathon planned after this movie.

  “Why do you like this one so much?” he asked.

  I smiled where I was at, leaning with my back to his chest, my head leaning against his collarbone.

  “Because there are hot men in Navy uniforms in it,” I teased. “The Navy is my favorite.”

  “Hmmm,” he murmured. “Interesting.”

  I bit my lip.

  I told myself not to ask, but Truth just struck me as a military man, and any information about him, even the most insignificant, I soaked up like a sponge.

  “Were you in the military?” I asked.

  He seemed to hesitate, and then he nodded. “Yes.”

  Curiosity started to get the better of me, and even though I could tell that he wanted me to drop the subject, I didn’t.

  Instead, I pushed.

  And nearly lost Truth before I even had him.

  Chapter 6

  Ladies, just a reminder. There’s always another man out there with an extra inch more than the one who’s fucking you over.

  -Fact of Life

  Truth

  “Were you in the military?”

  Was I in the military?

  Hundreds of things swirled through my mind at her question.

  I should lie, because if I told the truth, then she’d want to know more.

  Especially knowing that her favorite branch was the Navy.

  But it wasn’t the Navy that was the hard part of this discussion, it was what I did after the Navy.

  A killer for hire wasn’t something that most women wanted to see on the resume of the man they were interested in. Though, I guess I wasn’t exactly a killer for hire, but I did a lot of killing and got paid for it.

  But that was what happened in the black ops unit called Crow.

  A unit I would still belong to had I not had one really bad experience that changed my life and forced me to slow down.

  Though, Crow did do right by me. However, that had a lot to do with Sean, aka Seanshine, another biker and member of The Dixie Wardens. Sean had been a member of Crow with me, and after I’d nearly died, I’d gotten out, and he immediately introduced me to the Dixie Wardens.

  The Dixie Wardens had taken me in, made me whole again, and in the process, had saved my life.

  “Yes,” I finally answered, bracing myself for the next question.

  I was sure she could feel the tenseness that had slid throughout my body, but the woman was curious by nature. She was going to ask, and I prepared myself for the onslaught of questions.

  “What branch?”

  My belly tightened.

  “The Navy.”

  Her gasp of surprise and delight didn’t send warm flurries of excitement through me like it would’ve once done.

  Instead, it sent dread and fear through me.

  Because it was inevitable now.

  She’d want to know everything.

  When I got out. Why I got out. Where I went after that. What I did.

  And those were all questions she asked, and I answered each and every one until the last one.

  “I…it’s hard to talk about.” I finally settled on as an answer for her question about what I did once I got out. “I’ll eventually tell you, but right now…at night…it’s neither the time nor the place.”

  She frowned, and opened her mouth to say something, and irrational anger surged through me.

  “I gotta go,” I mumbled.

  Then I stood up, ignoring her cry to wait, and marched through her fancy-ass house as fast as my booted feet would take me without actually running.

  Because Truth Reacher didn’t run.

  Not from anyone or anything.

  Not even a half-pint sized woman with the ass of an angel who scared the absolute shit out of me.

  I got on my bike and looked at the house one last time before leaving, not surprised to see her in the window that overlooked the carport.

  She had no clue that the subject she’d touched on wasn’t just a sensitive one. I’d almost lost my life.

  Multiple times.

  Knowing that I needed to talk to someone who knew the situation but wouldn’t give me biased opinions, I rode straight to my pop’s place.

  And it gave me the perfect excuse to go there, because I knew he didn’t want me bringing up the incident that’d taken place the last time I’d been there.

  I’d meant to ask him about the incident at the bar a few days ago, but I’d been so busy with work and classes that it fell onto the back burner.

  Now, though, I was done with my current work in progress, class was canceled for the night due to no electricity, and my pop’s pub was closed.

  It was open every single day except for Tuesdays, which was the night my Grams went to bingo.

  And she would walk if she had to, but Pop never let her.

  In fact, Pop loved Grams so much that he closed down his pub on Tuesdays just so he could take her. Then he went there and sat in his empty bar and waited for ten o’clock to roll around so he could go to get her.

  Arriving in a matter of minutes, I parked in my usual spot right beside the door and used my key to get inside.

  “Pop!” I bellowed from the entrance of the empty bar.

  Pop didn’t answer.

  “Pop!” I called loudly. “Are you in here?”

  The pub was empty, the lights were on and the jukebox was playing, but the only person in the entire place was obviously me.

  Because had he been here, my pop would’ve answered with his usual bellow.

  But when none was forthcoming, I headed out the back entrance to check to see if his car was here, and frowned when I saw that it was.

  Maybe he was in the walk-in freezer.

  But when I didn’t see him in there, either, I started to worry.

  Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket, I dialed his number and waited.

  Dread slithered through me as I heard his phone going off on the bar.

  He would’ve never left that here.

  Not when Grams might call him early, because she did that sometimes. When her arthritis would start acting up, and she’d need to leave because she just couldn’t hack sitting up anymore.

  Walking over to the phone, I picked it up and stared at it like it was a snake about to strike.

  The movement placed me close to the bar, and I could just barely see over the top to the floor behind the bar.

  That’s when I saw the shoe.

  And the blood.

  So much blood.

  Too much blood.

  ***

  “What happened?”

  I turned to Big Papa and Aaron, who were staring at me like I was about to lose it, and they were there to prevent it.

  “I was at my girl, Verity’s, place. Then I left there and headed over here. I wanted to talk to Pop about a few things, found him like that.”

  My voice cracked on the word ‘that’ and both men chose not to notice my near breakdown.

  “Anything out of place when you came in?” Big Papa pushed.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I denied. “Everything was norma
l when I first came in. Nothing out of place. Lights all on, jukebox playing softly in the corner just like Pop liked it when he was by himself. I called out his name, and he didn’t answer, so I went through the back to see if I could find his car behind the building, and did. So I pulled my phone out to call, and his phone rang on top of the bar.”

  Big Papa’s eyes looked haunted as he peered over the bar at where my grandfather’s dead body lay, curled up and broken.

  “Chief.”

  I turned to see Officer Stephanie come in, a worried look on her face.

  “Yeah?” Big Papa grunted.

  It was still weird to hear Big Papa called Chief, I thought numbly.

  It’d been nearly a year since the old chief, and the president of The Dixie Wardens MC Alabama Chapter, Stone, was killed by a gang member.

  To this day, I still found myself dialing his number only to hang up before it rang.

  It was such a habit to call the man when I had problems that I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was nearly too late.

  Stone had been the one to take me under his wing when I’d come home broken. He’d been the one to bring me into his life, into his home with his wife and child, giving me the time I needed to heal from my wounds—both physical and emotional.

  So to hear Big Papa, Stone’s VP, called ‘Chief’ was hard.

  He still refused to go by ‘President’ of The Dixie Wardens. Though he technically was the president, we still called him the VP.

  “Would you mind stepping outside for a moment?” Officer Stephanie asked.

  I was surprised with the officer’s polite demeanor.

  Normally she was a ball buster, but tonight I supposed she was being nice in deference to my grandfather’s murder.

  She and I didn’t see eye-to-eye.

  She was also an instructor at the police academy, and we taught differently.

  Though, that was just because she was a woman and I was a man. We had different perspectives on certain things law enforcement wise, and that would never change.

  “Okay,” Big Papa said. “I’ll be back. Aaron, finish up here, yeah?”

  Aaron nodded and turned to stare at me.

  “You’re going to be okay?”

  I stared at the new guy, and nodded my head.