Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  The first thing she’d let him read had been a poem she’d recently had accepted to The Sou’wester—her first acceptance since the literary journal at her own college. It was easier to share something that first time that had been deemed worthy by other poets.

  “Hey. You’re quiet. Do you need a traffic cop in there?” He tapped her head.

  She caught his hand and kissed his fingers. “That’s what I’m doing. Directing traffic.”

  “You got anything new I can read? Or I was thinking—how about if I try to put some of your poems to music?”

  Surprised, she looked up at him over her shoulder and saw he was in earnest. “They’re not songs.” And she didn’t think she liked the thought of Caleb, or anyone, getting their hands in her words.

  “Why not? You said you like poetic lyrics. Why not lyrics that are poetry?”

  She turned and stared at the table, with its scatter of papers, her current journal, her cluster of pens. Did she write poems that could be songs? Would she want them shaped by someone else, made into sound in a voice that wasn’t hers? She didn’t think so.

  He bent down and pushed her ponytail off her shoulder. When his lips brushed over the sensitive skin behind her ear, and then trailed lightly down her neck, she couldn’t think. No touch in the world got her like that one. His breath, his scent, his soft lips, slick tongue, smooth cheek, the brush of his hair—God.

  “Caleb,” she moaned.

  “Yeah, baby?” He sucked on the knob of her bare shoulder.

  “Please don’t let me down.”

  He stopped. She turned to look at him again, and he moved to her side and crouched down. “Hey. What happened?”

  She couldn’t tell him. Like Maverick said, there was no point in anyone knowing what had happened between Eight Ball and her mom. It couldn’t do anything but harm. Her mom had been through enough, and Eight was facing a murder charge. Because he’d killed the man who’d dosed her and left her to be raped.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is that an incomplete sentence?”

  Only one other person had ever made her feel so known, so understood, and he’d been killed in the Bulls clubhouse. And he hadn’t been the man she’d thought he’d been.

  She nodded.

  “Okay.” Caleb folded her up and let her rest.

  He wouldn’t let her down. He was the man she knew him to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The chainsaw roared and split the early morning quiet apart. Before the sun had risen fully and stretched its arms, the day was as muggy as breath and beginning to simmer. Vicious storms the night before had left a sodden world to boil in the next day’s sun like a pot on flame.

  Caleb loved summer, but he hated August. Left too long in the heavy Oklahoma heat, the season had gone stale by August, lost its flavor. The house here on their ranch had no air conditioning, so Caleb and Levi usually slept outside in the summer, stretched out on the covered back porch. In May and June, that felt like childhood reborn, a reliving of the days when they’d hike out into the woods and sleep under the stars. By August, it was just hot. Hot and hard and unpleasant.

  This summer, Caleb had spent more nights in Tulsa, cuddled under the comforter in Cecily’s room. She liked a cool room at night, and turned the thermostat down to almost frosty, but they were snug under the covers together. That cozy comfort made his nights at the ranch, out on the porch with only his brother and the dog for company, harder to bear.

  Last night, with the storm, they’d slept indoors, the windows closed against the rain. The house had been like a sweat lodge. Caleb thought he might have taken a fucking spirit walk, but he hadn’t gotten any sleep.

  Now, he and Levi were out on the back pasture, soaked to their knees, cutting up an elderly sycamore the storm had brought down. The earthbound crown of its root structure lay on its side, its diameter stretching higher than Caleb could reach. The tree had landed on the pasture fence and pulled down a twenty-foot stretch.

  So, instead of a shift at Delaney’s Sinclair, Caleb would spend the day with his brother, undoing the damage of Nature’s temper.

  Levi worked the chainsaw, and Caleb gathered up the results and threw them in the truck. They’d hitched the utility trailer to the back of Levi’s pickup, and Caleb sorted the pieces for the chipper—leafy branches, roots, and other parts that wouldn’t burn well—from the logs they could split for cordwood. Because the house was heated with a big wood stove. They liked it rustic, the Mathews family. Or some of them did. If Levi had his way, they’d probably be without electricity, too. But you couldn’t run a ranch in the year 2001 without electricity.

  As Caleb heaved an armload of logs into the truck bed and considered whether it was time to jump in there and start stacking more neatly, the chainsaw went quiet, and Levi yelled, “FUCK!”

  Caleb swung around and saw that his hotheaded big brother was about to slam the saw against the downed tree. “Hey! Hold up!”

  “The fucker’s jammed again!” Levi threw the saw on the muddy ground and gave it a kick.

  “Stop it, asshole! Let me look.” Caleb ran up and shoved his brother away. “You can’t beat it into submission. Let me see what I can do.” He picked up the weary Stihl gas-powered saw, a workhorse almost as old as he was, carried it to the truck, and set it on the hood.

  Levi came up as Caleb swung up into the bed and opened the truck box for his tools. “If you were around like you’re supposed to be, things would be working right around here.”

  Sitting back on his haunches, Caleb turned and glared at his brother. Levi was six years older and about a hundred years more traditional. He was taller than Caleb, and though he was strong and broad-shouldered, his face was carved like their grandfather’s, with high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks that made him seem gaunt and always angry. Actually, Levi’s constant anger contributed to the always-angry look a fair amount. He wore his never-cut hair in two braids. Levi walked through the world daring white men to confront his indigenousness.

  But he hardly ever left Hominy or Pawhuska, much less Osage County, so his Osage ass wasn’t all that controversial. The Osage were decidedly a minority on their own reservation, but they were a sizeable, noticeable minority. Levi stayed with his own kind.

  It was Caleb who faced real bigotry and prejudice out in the world. Levi considered his wandering beyond Osage land a betrayal, and he carped every chance he got that Caleb was leaving who he was behind. But Caleb faced his difference every single day, and fought for his right to be who he was. He fought that battle here at home, too.

  He grabbed his tools and hopped down, making his brother step back. “Fuck off, Levi. Give it a rest.”

  Levi followed him to the hood of the truck and stood there while Caleb worked on the saw.

  The chain was jammed—easy fix. One day, this old beast would crap out for good, but Caleb was sure he could get another year out of it. Certainly, he could get this day out of it.

  Levi stood silently for several minutes, watching him work. Caleb sensed a fight rising up in his brother, but he focused on his work and let him stew.

  Finally, it bubbled out. “You’re home one night a week at the most. How long since you had supper with Grampa and me? I don’t know why you don’t just pack your shit and quit pretending you call this home.”

  “Listen to yourself. You sound like an old woman.”

  “And you sound like a traitor.”

  Caleb spun and jabbed the screwdriver at his brother’s face, stopping an inch from contact. Levi didn’t flinch. “You need to shut the fuck up, bro. I’m sick of you dropping shit like that on me because I don’t want to live the way you do.”

  “The way I live is who I am. It’s who you are, too. We are Wazhazhe.”

  The indigenous name for their tribe. When Levi started dropping words in their Native language, he was brewing a diatribe, and Caleb meant to cut that crap off before it got started. “That’s such bullshit. The Osage weren’t ranchers, you fuck. Ou
r ancestors were warriors. I don’t see you running around in a scalplock and breechcloth, taking over people’s lands. You’re standing here in your BVD t-shirt and Wrangler jeans that you bought at Walmart. So don’t start in about how your way is the Osage way. Fuck off.”

  “It’s about that girl. You’d give up all you are for a taste of sweet white pussy. Does it taste like candy?”

  At least Caleb had the sense to drop the screwdriver before his fist flew forth and crashed into his brother’s jaw. Levi slammed into the truck fender and bounced off, staggering a couple of steps before regaining himself. Caleb was ready when his brother flew at him, and they both crashed to the ground, wrestling and punching and shouting until the angry burst spent itself, and they lay side by side on the rain-soaked earth, soaked and muddy, panting.

  Levi spat on the ground and stood up, still flashing furious black eyes at him.

  Caleb stood and stared right back. “That girl has a name. Her name is Cecily Nielsen. She’s my girl. And you will speak of her with respect, or not at all.”

  “Shit, it’s true. You picked a white woman.”

  He let that statement go unanswered.

  Levi shook his head. “Grampa cries over you.”

  Their grandfather cried over nothing. Caleb laughed bitterly and picked up the screwdriver from the grass. “You really do sound like an old woman.”

  Levi spat again, this time rhetorically, and stalked off to the downed tree. Caleb turned his attention to the chainsaw.

  They got back to work.

  This was what they did, Caleb and his brother. They fought like this, over and over, bitterly, in circles, until one wore the other down. For most of their lives, Levi had prevailed far more often than Caleb. But in this fight, Levi wouldn’t get his way. If Caleb lost, they both would.

  Because Levi was right. If he had to, if his brother and grandfather made him do it, Caleb would choose Cecily.

  ~oOo~

  “Hey there.”

  Caleb smiled at the sound of Cecily’s voice. She was distracted. “Hey, beautiful. You hear the news?”

  “About Deb? Yeah.”

  Simon’s old lady was in labor with their first kid, a little boy they’d named Samuel, for Deb and Gunner’s late father. It was club tradition to sit vigil when one of their own was in the hospital, for good news or bad—an old lady in labor, a brother in surgery, whatever. If they were able, they were at the hospital.

  “I thought I’d swing by and pick you up on my way to the hospital.” When she didn’t answer and seemed willing to let the silence age, Caleb ended it. “Cecily. Deb is family. You like her.”

  “I do. Don’t lecture me, Caleb. I’m happy for her, and I’ll go see her and the baby. But not now.”

  Because she didn’t want to be around the Bulls. They’d been together all summer, and still she wouldn’t go to the clubhouse or willingly be around any Bull but him and Maverick. She’d gone to Deb and Jacinda’s joint baby shower, she’d had lunch with Leah a couple of times, and she was over at Maverick and Jenny’s all the time, hanging with Jenny and the kids. She was fine with the old ladies, but she wouldn’t find her way back to the Bulls.

  It was a fight they’d had more than once, and he knew better than to try to have it on the phone. She’d tell him to fuck off and hang up. So he said, “Okay, Ciss. I’ll talk to you soon, then.”

  “Okay. Call me when the baby makes his appearance. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  ~oOo~

  Cecily looked up from her desk. “Oh, fuck off.”

  Caleb grinned and strode through the open door of her office at the Tulsa Ed Center. ‘Office’ was a generous term. ‘Storage closet with desks’ described the space more correctly. Half the space was filled with boxes of paper, stacked so high they blocked most of the windows. The other half was work space. She shared the room with one other instructor, a guy named Clark who was a friend of hers and decent-enough looking that Caleb might have been jealous, except for the half-dozen photos of the man’s wife on his desk. Their desks were pushed together and arranged to face each other. A raggedy vinyl chair sat at the end of each—for students, he guessed.

  Clark had those photos of his woman on his side, and a few geeky knickknacks as well. Cecily’s side was nearly bare, except for the work she was doing, her closed laptop, and a stoneware mug full of pens.

  Caleb plopped his ass on the old chair at the end of her desk. “Wow. It feels great to know you’re happy to see me.”

  “We got off the phone twenty minutes ago. You’re here to bully me to go to the hospital with you. So fuck you. No.”

  “Not bully you. Persuade you.”

  “Still no.” She turned her attention to the student papers before her and pretended to read.

  He leaned over and laid his hand on the paper. “Cecily, talk to me.”

  “You’re here at my job so I won’t make a scene. But you’re wrong. I’ll make a scene. If they fire me, I’ll just go back to Mom’s shop. So have I mentioned fuck you?”

  “I’m here because this is where you are, and I’m on my way to the hospital. What do you think is going to happen if you come with me? I get not wanting to go in the clubhouse.”

  He recalled that night years before, her drunken obsession with the details of her father’s death, the weird, furious questions she’d asked about where her father had fallen and how he’d fallen, the way she’d gone to her knees beside the pool table and laid her hands on the floor.

  But he blinked the memory away, because it ended in him being a thundering dick.

  “I get not wanting to go to the clubhouse,” he said again. “But this isn’t the clubhouse. It’s the hospital. Where our family is. No one will be drunk, no one will be angry. There’s nothing bad going on right now, except Eight, but he’s not going inside until next week.”

  On the fourth of September, the day after Labor Day, Eight Ball would start a four-year bid for first-degree manslaughter, the minimum sentence for the charge. Percy Clayton, the Bulls’ lawyer, had worked out the plea deal—a huge success, considering that Eight Ball had killed Cole Holloway in the man’s own back yard, while in commission of felony breaking and entering. The DA had opened with capital murder. If Jacinda’s father hadn’t found a mountain of evidence that Holloway, besides being a newlywed manager of a car stereo store, was a bad dude with a nasty horse habit and a nastier habit of paying off his dealer with nubile, drugged girls, Eight would likely have faced the chair.

  The club was spending Labor Day weekend at their cabin in the Osage. Sending Eight Ball off as well as they could. Caleb would have loved to get Cecily to join him, but he couldn’t even get her to the hospital.

  “What are you afraid of—and don’t tell me to fuck off. Talk to me like you love me, iňloňka.”

  She set down her purple pen, and with it, her pretense of ignoring him. “I do love you. I hate when you do this.”

  “I do this because I love you. I need the parts of my family to come together, Ciss. I really do. I feel all stretched out of joint.”

  “I will happily meet your grandpa and brother. I’ll even be charming—you haven’t seen me when I try to be charming. I’m a fucking delight. But you won’t bring me up there.”

  “I will. I don’t want them to be hostile when I do. But I’m working on it as hard as I can. Right now, though, it’s the other part of my family we’re talking about. Deb is in labor. Our family, your family, is gathering together to welcome a new member. People you love, Ciss. People who love you. Who there will hurt you?”

  “They already hurt me,” she said, but the words were soft, more plea than assertion, and he could see he’d found his way in through a crack somewhere.

  “Please, baby. If you can forgive Mav and me, who can’t you forgive? It’s time to come back. This is a good time to come back—away from the clubhouse, just family. I know you can do this. You were there for Ox and Maddie’s wedding.” She’d clung to the edges like a
shadow, but she’d been there.

  “That was different. Uncle Ox is dying. And the wedding was at their house.”

  “Simon and Deb are having a baby. At the hospital. I won’t leave your side.”

  She sighed, and Caleb knew he’d won. “I have office hours for fifteen more minutes.”

  He grinned and stretched his legs out. “Then I’ll wait. There’s plenty of time. Simon only called a couple hours ago. Deb’s not gonna have the little nugget for a while.”

  ~oOo~

  Caleb and Cecily arrived at the maternity ward half an hour later, and they heard the celebration as soon as the elevator doors opened. Simon stood in the middle of the waiting room, holding a little blue burrito in his arms.