So she’d face whatever was coming and try to make right the things she could. The things in her control, she’d handle, and the rest of it she’d leave to God.
Before she’d gone into the bathroom, Max had helped her fix her foot—which wasn’t badly hurt, once all the glass bits were out—and then he’d given her an obviously new set of black sweats. The word BULLS was spread across the front of the sweatshirt in orange block letters. Pants and top were both significantly too big for her, but she wasn’t in danger of anything falling off.
He’d showered, too, in some other bathroom. When she came out of the room, his hair was wet, he smelled of the same Dial soap she’d found in the shower, and he was fully dressed. And so, so, so wildly good looking.
The good Leah felt being with Max was bigger than her trepidation about going home. Even the comedown from the Molly wasn’t so bad. She felt okay.
He kissed her. “You ready?”
As she could possibly be. She gave him a smile and a nod, and he took her hand and led her downstairs.
~oOo~
His bike was an enormous silver thing, and it roared like a jet plane when he started it up. The passenger seat was higher than his seat. She’d imagined wrapping her arms around his waist, but she couldn’t quite reach around him there, so instead, she held onto his chest and rested her head on his shoulder. He seemed to like that.
The first few minutes on the street were a little scary. He’d told her what to do, to follow his body with her own and not to resist or move against him, and she understood right away, on the first turn, what he meant, but it was an odd feeling to be so exposed at such speed.
Just as she got used to the feeling of riding on the street, they merged onto the highway, and that was a whole new kind of scary. They were going so fast! The landscape hurtled by, and the wind buffeted her head, throwing her ponytail around behind her. A glance at the speedometer told her he was going only about five miles over the limit, but it felt supersonic. At first she could only hold on and pray. She could barely breathe.
But then, something happened. As they left the clutter and crowd of the Tulsa area, and Oklahoma began to spread out around them, Leah felt the weight lift from her chest. She was facing all the same trouble at home, she hadn’t forgotten any of it, but it didn’t seem to matter as much. She didn’t fear it. Riding with Max, speeding over the road, exposed to the wild wind, she felt strong. She felt right.
It made her giggle, and he turned his head. He was smiling, too.
“Faster! Go faster!” She kissed his cheek and squeezed him as hard as she could. With a wild laugh, he turned his hand on the handlebar—he wasn’t wearing his brace today, but black leather gloves covered his hands—and the engine between their legs roared.
They burst forward, flying past the other vehicles on the road, and Leah threw her head back and cheered at the sun.
CHAPTER NINE
Gunner had woken to the rattling bang of a slammed door. The first thing his foggy eyeballs had seen was his kutte swinging back and forth on its hook, and that had brought the whole night back to life with a vengeance.
Leah. Holy fucking shit. Like a hand of cards being dealt, images had slapped down on the surface of his mind: her spitfire spin outside the bathroom, ready to throw down with Cheryl, who was two hundred pounds if she was an ounce and worked as a security guard downtown; her yelling at Eight Ball from behind his shoulder; the taste and scent of bubblegum all around him; her legs and arms clinging to him as he fucked her; her nails and teeth digging deep into his flesh; the sweet, sweet sensations of her coming, again and again and again; the blasting fire of his own climaxes.
Her tears. Her screaming wails. Fuck—he’d hurt her? Had he hurt her?
That wasn’t his memory. Totally fucking epic sex—even by the standards of MDMA—was what he remembered. He was full of a perfect kind of soreness. He hurt all the way down to his cock—which had gone rock hard while he’d remembered the night. He’d tossed back the covers and chuckled when he took a look at it. The tip was red and a little raw. Well goddamn.
And she’d left the room with such enthusiasm that she’d slammed the door and made the walls shake. What the fuck?
Gunner had leapt up and grabbed his jeans, running out of the room after her while he was still pulling them up over his bare ass.
Now he was shooting down the highway, on his way to some kind of showdown with her father and the fucking Sheriff of Osage County. There was a zero-percent chance he wasn’t going to end up on Delaney’s shit list again.
But Leah was wrapped around him, laughing in his ear, and he couldn’t care about anything else. He hadn’t felt this good in…years. Maybe ever. The long list of reasons he was wrong for this girl, the longer list of reasons he was just plain old wrong overall, the growing list of things he was going to get in shit over—none of it mattered, at least not right now. Right now, he felt good, and this wonder of a girl was holding onto him, trusting him, happy to be with him, and if she was dumb enough to want him, he’d keep her.
As they passed the sign marking the upcoming exit to Grant, Leah quieted behind him, and Gunner knew why. He felt it, too—the looming return to reality and all the things that were wrong, that had gone wrong, that were about to go wrong. He pulled off the interstate and slowed on the off-ramp that would put them on the little two-lane state road to their hometown. At the stop sign, with no traffic around them, he took a beat and twisted in the saddle, in her arms, so he could get a good look at her face.
She was wearing his spare sunglasses, which were quite a bit too big for her. Her hair was a wild, sweet mess; strands had pulled free of her ponytail and made a ruffled crown around her face. The wind had tinted her cheeks a showy pink. She was completely fucking adorable.
He was about to ask her if she was okay, but she spoke first. “Take it slower now, okay? I’m not in a rush to be done.”
Obviously, she was okay. “Me either. Leah—this was good. For me, I mean. I’m glad you came to the party.”
“Me too. I’m glad I found you, Max.”
He hated to hear her use that name. Without knowing why, he heard it like a condemnation or something, and it stabbed at him. “Gunner. Call me Gunner.”
Puzzlement creased between her eyes. “O-Okay. Can I ask why? You’re Max to me.”
A car had pulled up behind them at the intersection. Gunner clutched and walked the bike onto the wide shoulder at the corner, off the road. He killed the engine and twisted again in the saddle so he could face her.
“I don’t have an explanation. I just need it. It’s who I am now.”
“You care what I call you?”
There was an innocent, vulnerable shade to her tone, and Gunner recalled hearing the same thing in some of her words the night before. She was feeling insecure, he realized, and asking him if he wanted her, if there was more to them than the night they’d shared. A weird, unfamiliar jolt of something went through his chest.
Protective. He felt protective. Of her feelings, of her body, of all of her.
“I care,” he answered, leaving those two words to mean whatever they meant. Then he hooked his hand around the back of her neck and covered her mouth with his.
~oOo~
He rode the speed limit into town and then slowed even more as they moved through the streets of the place he’d grown up—the place they both had.
In the nearly five years since he’d taken off his BDUs for the last time and put on a kutte for the first, Gunner had seen a lot of the countryside in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Southwest. He’d ridden many thousands of miles over interstates and little two-lane country routes, through cities and towns and acres and acres of farmland and oilfields and desert. He’d seen almost every kind of place America had to offer west of the Mississippi. Grant, Oklahoma didn’t stand out among any of it, except that it was the town nearest home, the place he’d grown up in, where his life had started and where it had abruptly ended. It was t
he place he’d left when he’d been unable to make his life start up again.
It looked like most small towns he’d known: a town square, with a little municipal building and a park, and a few blocks of shops and businesses, arranged like rays from that center. Those buildings were the kind of old that people took pictures of for postcards. Farther from the center were less old, and less quaint, shops, and then a circle of little neighborhoods, where people lived in tidy bungalows, or in prefabricated ranch-style houses, or a few grander homes, with wrap-around porches and peaked roofs.
Rolling out from there was the countryside. Around Grant, everybody living in the country was a farmer. Oilfields dominated farther south in the state.
At the edge of the wrap-around porch neighborhood, like a gateway between the quaint shops of the town center and the quiet streets of the richest people of Grant, stood the Christmas card model that was Heartland Baptist Church—the only church in town, the workplace of Leah’s father, the Reverend Edward Campbell, and the spiritual home of the Wesson family.
Thinking of the church as Leah’s home, Gunner turned onto Swallowtail Avenue. But Leah fidgeted and tugged on his kutte.
“I live on Nightingale. Farther down, and to the left.”
Right. The rectory had been destroyed in a tornado a long time ago. When he’d been a kid and had still had a twin brother. Gunner turned wide and put them back on Sumner Street.
As soon as he turned onto Nightingale, he knew exactly which house was Leah’s. Two Sheriff’s Department cruisers were parked on the street, and people milled about on the sidewalk and nearby lawns. Since, as far as he knew, there hadn’t been a burglary or a house fire or a fucking mass murder, all those people, and all that law, were just hanging out waiting for Reverend Campbell’s little girl—his grown-ass daughter, actually—to come home.
Fucking leeches, waiting to suck on some scandal.
And they were getting it, too. Gunner saw it dawn on those watchers that he was bringing her home. He saw their expressions shift from shock to greed. He watched them turn to each other and start the talk going.
Leah had become a statue against his back, and he nearly turned his Fat Boy around and rode her right on away from the scene that loomed over them like a thundercloud.
Instead, telling himself he’d sweep her back out if things got too intense, he pulled into the driveway, stopping the bike behind a bright yellow Rabbit convertible. Despite Leah’s tension and his own, despite the people standing around waiting to pronounce judgment on them, despite the cruisers parked right there, Gunner smirked. That little lollipop of a car had to be Leah’s. She’d probably named it. Big Bird or something like that.
As Gunner helped Leah off the bike and dismounted, the front door of the house slammed open, and the Reverend ran down the porch steps. The sheriff and two deputies came out on his heels. The sheriff looked vaguely familiar, but then, a lot of the people around Grant that Gunner didn’t truly know seemed vaguely familiar.
Gunner noted that all three officers had popped the straps on their holsters and had their hands on their weapons. Fuck.
The Reverend, on the other hand, hadn’t seemed to notice him at all. Looking like a man who’d spent an entire night pacing and pulling his hair, he ran for Leah and yanked her into his arms so hard she grunted, and Gunner’s sunglasses flew off her face.
“I’m okay, Daddy. I’m okay. I’m so sorry.”
“I thought you left me. I thought you ran away. I thought somebody took you. I thought somebody hurt you. I thought you left me. I thought I lost you.”
Her father was rambling almost incoherently and sobbing. Leah was crying, too. Gunner tried to keep his attention on her, but he faced three deeply suspicious representatives of the Osage County Sheriff’s office, including the sheriff himself, and he needed to keep eyes on them, too. He stood in the position he’d learned well: his body loose and his hands away from his body, demonstrating clearly that he wasn’t a threat without actually raising his hands over his head.
They hadn’t said anything at all to him yet, and he wasn’t about to start the conversation. So they stared at him, and he stood there, trying to keep his attention equally divided among Leah, the law, and the lecherous neighbors looking for some dirt.
“What happened? Where were you? Why weren’t you home?” Reverend Campbell sounded a bit more composed, and Gunner focused there. Leah stood at arm’s length from her father. His hands gripped her arms, and he looked her over like her body might offer clues to the great mystery. And there were probably lots of clues—most of which Gunner hoped her father would never see.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I was with Ma—Gun—Max. Max Wesson.” She turned to Gunner and smiled a soggy smile. He gave a drier one back. “I was safe. He took care of me.”
The Reverend Edward Campbell turned to Gunner simply stared at him. His bloodshot eyes seemed completely blank—no expression, no thought, nothing. The Reverend had gone out for a late lunch and left the windows open.
Then, without a word, he turned back to his daughter and slapped her so hard across the face that he knocked her down. She landed on her hands and knees with a squeal of shocked pain.
Gunner didn’t think; a searing and instantaneous rage slammed through him, and he lunged. He took Leah’s father down, landing on top of him, and came up to his knees. It all happened so quickly that he got in two, maybe three full-force punches right to the bastard’s face before he himself was down, his nose forced into the grass, a lawman’s knee between his shoulder blades. While a clamor of shouts and cries filled the air, his arms were wrenched behind his back, and he felt the cool, sharp bite of handcuffs.
“Stop! Daddy, please! What are you doing?” Leah’s voice showed the strain of struggle, and Gunner tried to turn his head so he could see her, but the knee in his back got heavier.
“Stay down, boy,” a rough voice ordered—an old voice. That had to be the sheriff.
Gunner fought anyway and got his head turned the other way. He saw Leah’s father dragging her up the porch steps, and he saw her fighting his pull.
“Leah!”
A hard, heavy crack on the back of his head jumbled his brains and shut his mouth. He tried to fight as he was jerked by his bound arms up to his feet, but his body wouldn’t do what his head said. Then, with a man on each side, he was dragged to the street and shoved into the back of a cruiser.
He sat there, alone, for a long time. His head cleared up again, and he realized he’d been hit by the butt of a service revolver or by a nightstick. The cloying wet of blood oozed down his scalp and over his neck. It hurt, he supposed, but he noted the pain with a scientific disinterest. He was far more interested in what was going on in that house.
The sheriff wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but his cruiser sat directly before the one Gunner was currently burning his ass in, so he was around—in the house, he supposed. Good, maybe. Maybe Leah was okay if the sheriff was in there. Maybe he was going to fucking arrest the fucking Reverend for fucking assault.
The deputies stood with the onlookers and seemed to be shooting the shit with them. People turned toward the cruiser and made faces of superior contempt, or shook their heads, or both. Gunner tried to ignore them. He sat there, staring at the door Leah had been dragged through, and seethed.
Finally, the sheriff came out—alone. Gunner watched as he met the deputies in the middle of the lawn. They talked, the deputies nodded, and then one of them went to the driveway.
And mounted Gunner’s bike. “Hey! Fuck you! Get the fuck off my bike!” He shouted and bounced and fought the cuffs, but to no avail. The son of a bitch walked the bike backward onto the street, turned the engine over and rode away.
Gunner roared in wordless fury.
The other deputy opened the driver’s door of the cruiser, and Gunner found his words again.
“What the fuck is going on? Is Leah okay? You can’t just take my bike! Are you arresting me? What’s the fucking charge?”
Once back on the main road through town, the deputy turned in the opposite direction of the town square and the municipal building with its little drunk tank holding cell. Were they taking him to the Sheriff’s Office? Of course they were. Gunner guessed her asshole father was pressing charges. Fuck.
Maybe he’d find himself hanging out with Maverick at McAlester, rung up on practically the same damn charge.
That might be a little funny, except that Leah was alone with her father, and he was trapped with fucking law.
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 12