About a mile from the interstate, the deputy pulled the cruiser over, into a wide turnout. Gunner saw his bike parked there. The deputy who’d absconded with it had his dick out and was pissing all over his beautiful Fat Boy.
He didn’t bother to ask what was going on again. They were going to beat the shit out of him, obviously. When the deputy grabbed him out of the back seat, he was sure of it. While he was cuffed. Okay, then.
The part of Gunner that was most fucked up could not have custom-ordered a better scenario. This whole mess had made that part of him ravenous, and it sent a thrill through his body that stood all his hairs on end.
The sheriff pulled up and parked behind the cruiser that had been his ride, and Gunner wondered if that would put a damper on the deputies’ plans, or if the sheriff himself intended to get some more licks in.
Gunner watched the man, probably twice his age but with the bulk and heft of someone who’d spent most of his life doing heavy work, take off his sunglasses and drop them through the open driver’s-side window to the seat. Then he took off his gun belt.
The sheriff had come to party. Gunner laughed, and the deputy at his side gave him an angry look.
“What’s funny, shithead?”
Gunner grinned at him. “You know what, man? Life. Life is fucking hilarious. Don’t you think?”
Deputy Dawg answered with his fist.
~oOo~
They held him against the lee side of the deputies’ cruiser, each deputy holding an arm and a shoulder, while the sheriff used him for a punching bag. Right on the side of the road, a mile from the interstate.
The old dude was strong, and his fists were made of brick. When Gunner couldn’t keep his feet anymore, the sheriff stepped back and let his minions get their licks in. The grand finale, when he was fully down, was a volley of kicks to his back and legs that would have him pissing and shitting blood for at least a week.
Gunner laughed through most of it. He couldn’t help it; it was like the way other people laughed when they were tickled, whether or not they enjoyed the experience. Just a reflex. It always made beatings worse, unless he was fighting back and had the upper hand. People hated to be laughed at more than anything else. But he always laughed, no matter how bad it got, until he was unconscious.
And he liked that crazy thing that happened in somebody’s eyes when his hilarity got to them. Even with his hands cuffed behind his back, even held in place by a set of two-hundred-pound bookends, even while he drooled blood, he got to these guys, and he loved it.
Plus, that really fucked-up thing inside him finally shut the fuck up while he was lying on the gravel. It would stay quiet as long as the pain had his attention.
The sheriff crouched behind him and leaned over, putting his fleshy face at Gunner’s ear. “I know who you are, boy. I know your people. Your dad and sister—they’re good people. You, you went wrong. Maybe it’s because you lost your ma and brother. Maybe I even felt sorry for you once. I guess the Reverend still feels sorry for you, or he’d be pressing charges. But he is a good man, and his girl was a good girl. You went and covered his good girl in your bad shit, and that won’t play with me or anybody around here. So you get on your flashy bike, and you turn that ugly-ass Bull on your back to this town. You ride the fuck away, and you stay the fuck away. Next time I see you will be the last time anybody ever does. Are you and me on the same page right now?”
Gunner laughed, and the sheriff slapped him upside the head. Then he freed him from the handcuffs and walked away. As Gunner lay in gravel and dirt becoming sticky with his blood, the cruisers started up and pulled away.
While he waited for the strength to sit up, or possibly stand, he began to catalogue his aches and pains and try to guess at his injuries. Cracked ribs, for sure. By now, his ribs had been broken so many times they probably looked like a damn road map. Internal bruising, at least. Maybe more than that. His head was bleeding in about five different places. A tooth was loose. And fuck, his belly hurt.
But hey! His hands were okay. His wrists were sore from the pressure of the cuffs and the drag of his body while he’d been pressed against them, and his shoulders ached, but nothing there was broken or even sprained.
He thought he could ride, once he could get to his feet. He didn’t really have a choice, now, did he? It was ride or wait for a stranger to pull over and pick his bloody pulp up and get him to a phone.
Okay, then. He worked his way to his feet, then stood there for a minute or two, until the world stopped swaying and his knees stopped shaking.
That turned out to be the hard part. Once he was steady enough to walk to his bike, he didn’t have too much trouble mounting it and getting it started.
When he pulled onto the road, he turned back to Grant, because he wasn’t going any-fucking-place until he made sure Leah was safe.
Better yet—he’d bring her with him.
~oOo~
By the time he made it back to Nightingale Lane, the gapers and gossips had moved on with their lives. Though it was a nice Saturday afternoon, nobody was on the street or in their front yards—like the earlier drama had tainted the street. As before, Gunner parked behind Leah’s sunbeam of a car. The hurt of his beaten body barely registered in his head or anywhere else as he stomped up her porch steps and pounded on the front door.
Her father answered, his face still showing remnants of blood from Gunner’s fists and beginning to bruise. Clearly, he hadn’t checked the sidelight first to see who was at his door, because his eyes went wide, and he tried to slam the door.
But Gunner wasn’t having that shit. With both hands, he shoved on the door and forced his way in. “Where is she? Leah!”
“You can’t just storm into my house! You are not wanted here!”
Gunner ignored him and strode through the house, into a big, cheery kitchen, but she wasn’t there. “Leah!”
He turned and went back to the entry, where he’d seen a staircase. The Reverend was right there, and Gunner shoved him out of his way. “LEAH!”
She was coming down the stairs. Her cheek was red and swelling. Soon it would be purple and swollen. Her own father had done that. She’d been crying. A lot. Her father had done that as well.
“Oh no, look what they did to you! Did Sheriff Lucas do this? He couldn’t. He wouldn’t! Oh, Max. I’m so sorry!”
“Baby, come with me.” He stretched his arm out, toward her, wincing at the pull on his ribs.
“Don’t call me baby.” She reached the bottom step but didn’t take his offered hand. She did come close, though, and she brushed her fingertips over his split lips.
He caught her hand and gave her a smile—or tried to, anyway. His mouth didn’t currently work that well. “Don’t call me Max, and I won’t call you baby. Come with me, Leah. I don’t want you here.”
“Gunner. This is home. I can’t leave my dad. I fucked everything up, and I’m so sorry.”
“Stop saying that. You don’t have anything to be sorry about. I can’t leave you here. He hit you.”
Her eyes left his, and her glance shot over his shoulder. Gunner turned; her father stood there, a cordless phone in his hand. He didn’t seem to have made a call yet; he simply stood there, distraught and exhausted, watching them.
“He never did that before. I’m okay. I’m safe. You should go.”
She neither looked nor sounded remotely safe. She both looked and sounded afraid and devastated. “I can’t leave you here. He can’t stop you from coming with me. You don’t have to stay.”
“Leah, no,” her father interjected in a weak man’s voice. “You can’t go.”
“I know, Daddy.” To Gunner she said, “You don’t understand. I have to stay. You have to go.”
She was telling him that the thing they might have started was already over. She was telling him there would be nothing between them. But he wanted the way he felt with her. It was possible that he needed it. He shook his head.
A sad little sob slipped throug
h her lips. “Yes. Gunner, please. Please go. I don’t want you more hurt.”
Leaving without her would hurt more than anything the fucking sheriff could do.
“Then come with me.”
When she shook her head yet again, Gunner gave up.
~oOo~
His sister came out onto the porch as Gunner shambled across the yard. His chest and belly were on fucking fire. His back was a ladder of knives. After he’d left Leah, everything had hurt a thousand times more than before, and it was only getting worse. By the time he’d gotten to the interstate, he’d known he was too bad off get all the way back to the clubhouse. There’d only been one place he could go: home.
When Deb saw his condition, she ran the remaining distance between them.
“Holy shit, Max! What happened?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At an auction in Oklahoma City. He’ll be back tomorrow. What happened to you?”
Gunner meant to set his head on Deb’s shoulder and rest for just a minute as she hooked her arm around his back. But his knees gave out, and he almost took her down to the ground. Deb was skinny, but she was strong, especially her legs, and she kept him up.
“You’re white as a sheet under all that mess. Turn around. I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No, I’m okay. Just maybe need a stitch or two. And to sit for a second.” Fuck, he was tired. He just needed to rest. Just for…a…just…for…a minute…
“Max! No!”
CHAPTER TEN
Leah folded up the last of her t-shirts and put it back in the drawer where it belonged. Either her father had gone through her desk, dresser, and closet, or—a much worse thought—he’d allowed the sheriff and his deputies to do it. She’d come into a room full of open drawers and scattered clothes. Not quite ransacked, but not treated carefully, either.
Luckily, no one had yet tried to open the locked box she kept her diaries in. That lock was hardly unpickable, and her diaries were the only thing, really, in her room—or in this house—that would provide evidence of the things she’d been doing in the dark since before her seventeenth birthday.
Or maybe it would have been better if her father had found her diaries. Maybe it was time for him to know that there was more to her than the girl who stood in his shadow outside this house and kept the shadows back inside it.
She was tired. And she was sad. Not the manufactured feelings of an Ecstasy comedown, but real feelings of loss. She’d found something last night, with M…with Gunner. Something she wanted. Something she needed. Someone.
When he’d come back for her, though he’d been badly beaten for having been with her—she knew that was what had happened, that Sheriff Lucas had hurt him like that—Leah had known without any doubt that she’d found something important with Gunner.
Gunner. Not Max. She thought she understood now. He wasn’t Max anymore. The boy who’d grown up in this world, who’d come up in her father’s church, who’d gone to the same high school she’d gone to, whose sports photos and trophies were still in the case at the school entrance—that boy had been like all the other boys around here. That boy had probably died with his twin, though he’d existed for another couple of years, finishing high school and joining the Army. Certainly, though, that boy didn’t exist anymore.
She understood: he wanted her to call him Gunner because he wanted her to know who he was, who he’d become. Gunner was the man who’d survived what the boy had lost.
She liked the man better. Knowing it was stupid, and schoolgirlish, and everybody would say it was puppy love or infatuation, Leah thought she loved him. She thought he might even love her, too. He’d come back for her. Bleeding and broken, he’d come back and tried to take her away with him. He’d tried to rescue her.
She should have gone with him.
But how could she have? How could she leave her father alone? Five nights of any seven, he fell apart and passed out, and five mornings of any seven, Leah had to put him back together and get him out into the world. Without her, what would happen to him?
Leah went out onto her little private balcony, next to the magnolia tree she’d used so often to effect her nighttime escapes. The late June afternoon was hot and still, the air thick with humidity. The set of black sweats Gunner had given her felt heavy on her skin, and perspiration began to ooze through her scalp and down her back almost at once, but she didn’t want to change into cooler clothes. These might be all she’d ever have of him.
Gunner had made himself into somebody new, but Leah didn’t have that option. She didn’t know how she could possibly be the daughter her father needed and also a woman who could be with a man like Gunner.
“Leah.” As if her thoughts had summoned him, her father stood in the open doorway between her bedroom and the balcony. “You’re letting the air conditioning out. Come inside. I brought you ice.” He lifted the blue checkered ice bag in his hand.
Her father needed her, he had no one in the world but her, so she didn’t have a choice.
He sat down on the side of her bed and patted the space next to him. Leah sat where he’d indicated and let him study the bruise he’d made, then set the bag of ice gently on her cheek. “I’m so sorry, angel. I don’t know how I could do that. I just—I saw that man standing there, and you looking at him like that, and getting off his motorcycle? A madness came over me. A fire. I was weak and let Satan take my hand.”
“It’s okay, Daddy.” It actually wasn’t okay, none of this was, but it would have to be. She took the ice bag from him and held it to her own cheek. “But that wasn’t just a man, and you know it. You know him. He grew up in your church.”
“Our church, Leah. And I knew the boy. That man is not the boy he was.”
She’d had the exact same thought, so she didn’t counter it now. “Did you tell Sheriff Lucas to beat him up like that?”
He’d been so badly hurt—bleeding and bruised and hunched over, his breathing harsh and loud. At the least, she should’ve let him stay long enough to get him help. But her father had stood there, holding the phone, and all she’d been able to think of was what would happen to Gunner if her father called the sheriff to come back.
He’d gotten onto his bike and ridden away, so she told herself he’d be okay, that it had looked worse than it really was.
“No, Leah!” her father—also showing bruises from the impact of the day—denied, stunned. “I would never want such a thing. I told Bill that I didn’t want to press charges. I didn’t ask him to beat him up.”
“That’s all you said, that you didn’t want him charged?”
Her father looked away and studied his reflection in her dresser mirror. That dresser, a country style that had been in the family long enough to be an antique, had had a place in the master bedroom once; it had been her mother’s.
“I told him I didn’t ever want him around you again—but I didn’t tell him to hurt him. I swear on my love of the Lord, Leah. I didn’t ask for that.”
“But you knew it would happen, Daddy. You had to.” Their sheriff had a reputation for a Wild West kind of law enforcement. When her accusation went unanswered, Leah changed direction. “Why? Why don’t you want him around me?”
That earned her a look of disbelief tinged with disappointment. “I think it should be obvious. He’s a bad man. And look what he’s done to you. Leah—you were…you were special. You were pure. My angel. And now…now you’re just a sinner like everyone else.”
Calling her ‘pure’ did it. Suddenly, Leah was no longer resigned to her loss. Suddenly, she was angry. Furious. And done. Tossing the ice bag to the bed, she got up and made some distance between herself and her father. “We all have our sins. And secrets. You should know that better than most.” She found the courage she needed, catching another flickering glimpse of hope inside it, and she turned to face him straight on. “Me, for instance. I haven’t been pure since I was sixteen years old.”
His mouth fell open. “What?”
“Nope. I started sneaking out at night almost three years ago. I wait for you to pass out drunk, and then I go out and party. I get all slutted up in tiny dresses and lots of makeup. I do drugs, I fuck, all of it. Since I was sixteen.” Now that the door to her secrets was unlocked, Leah decided to fling it wide. “I fuck strangers, Daddy. I get high on Ecstasy and let anybody who wants my pussy have it. Gunner didn’t take me away and defile me. I went looking for him. Last night was the first time in my whole life that I fucked somebody I care about. Or even know.”
As she’d spoken, her father had slammed his hands over his ears. “Stop it! Stop it! You’re lying! This isn’t you! You’re angry and saying these ugly things with a vengeful spirit! To hurt me!”
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 13