~oOo~
When Gunner came back a few minutes later, her probably former friend Ashley was on his heels. She looked exactly the same, except for a difference in her expression. Ashley usually—always, until now—wore a kind of cynical, ‘been there, done that, got the t-shirt’ look. Leah had often pictured her with an imaginary cigarette between her fingers, to be flourished as she spoke. She didn’t smoke, except for weed, but the image was there nonetheless.
Now, though, she looked…slumped. With barely any makeup on, and dressed in baggy jeans and a flannel shirt, she seemed defeated.
Gunner hung back and let Ashley move forward, but he made no move to leave them alone, and Leah didn’t ask him to. She felt better with him close, and she didn’t know what to expect from Ashley.
Her friend glanced over her shoulder at Leah’s leather-clad protector, then turned back and offered her a smile. “Hey, Lee.”
She’d always called Leah ‘Lee,’ but now that name felt like it belonged to Gunner, and Leah suppressed a twinge of irritation to hear it from Ashley’s mouth.
“Hi.”
“Sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks. Your aunt and uncle are okay, right?”
Ashley nodded. “The house is gone, but they were in Tulsa for their anniversary, and I was in class. The dogs are dead, though.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Ashley’s aunt doted on her two mutts like they were her children.
With a shrug, Ashley came forward. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. A concussion and”—she nodded at the cast on her leg. “Some cuts and bruises, too. But I’m okay.” She knew she’d almost died, that the pressure had stopped her heart, but her father had taken the brunt of it, so much that his ribcage had burst. Yet he’d stayed alive long enough to get help.
Getting anyone to tell her that story had required an epic temper tantrum. But she’d needed to know. “My dad saved me.”
Maybe it didn’t matter that he’d been hoping she’d ‘come to her senses’ and be the daughter he wanted. He’d died protecting her, something he hadn’t been able to do in life.
“I’m so sorry, Leah. About everything. I was a bitch. I was so mad after the party, when that biker kicked me out of his bed. I’d totally forgotten about you until then, and I was humiliated and decided the whole night was your fault. Then everybody in town was talking shit about you, and it was just…it felt good to get in on it. I said some things I shouldn’t have.”
“What d’you mean?” Leah had worked as hard as she could to ignore the gossip that wasn’t aimed right at her, so she didn’t know everything that had been said.
Ashley paled and looked away, and Leah understood that she’d told stories about things Leah had done. How she’d managed it without soiling herself with the same mud, Leah didn’t know, but if anybody could work that out, it would be Ashley.
“Oh.” It didn’t matter. Ashley was part of her past, anyway. So was Grant itself. Twenty-three Grant citizens were dead, including her father and Mayor Bradford. Fifty-one were injured, including herself. Eighty percent of the town proper had been leveled, including the only church, the town hall, the library, and the park.
Whatever rose up from the rubble might be called Grant, Oklahoma, but it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be home.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I didn’t return your calls. It just got easy to hate you.”
Gunner stepped up. “I think that’s enough. You can get the fuck out, you nasty slag.”
He grabbed Ashley’s arm, and she flinched as if he’d struck her. Leah wasn’t sure whether the flinch was from his word choice, the strength of his grip, or just his looming, furious presence at her side. Maybe all three.
Before he could drag her away, Leah said, “Wait,” and he waited. “Why’d you come?”
Ashley smiled, and the jaded sophisticate Leah had once thought her to be showed in her eyes. “It feels like we survived the apocalypse. I didn’t want petty shit bogging me down. I care about you, Leah. We’ve been good friends.”
Leah wondered if that was really true. Maybe Ashley had simply been someone different from the people she’d known when she’d been nothing but The Preacher’s Daughter. And maybe Leah had just been the sweet little rube that Ashley could smarten up. In any case, Leah lived in a bigger world now, a better world than the one this ‘friend’ had shown her, and this friend had talked shit about her, feeding a gossip mill that had ground up her relationship with her father.
She didn’t know if they’d ever been real friends, but she knew they weren’t friends now.
She’d found people she had real things in common with: Deb, who understood about giving up a life for a father. Willa, who’d also had to leave a tiny past behind and discover who she was in a bigger world. Mo, who called her ‘love’ and introduced her to the wonder of tea with milk, who treated her like a daughter. All the Bulls, who treated her like a daughter or a little sister.
Gunner. She had Gunner. Who knew her and loved her and made room for her to know herself. Who protected her and defended her and took care of her. Who needed her but didn’t lean so hard she couldn’t stand.
His life had become her life, and that was good. She hadn’t been swallowed up in it. She’d become part of it.
“No,” she said to Ashley. “I know what it means to have friends now. I don’t think we ever were.”
“Okay.” Gunner tugged on Ashley’s arm. “Time for you to get the fuck gone.” This time, Ashley didn’t resist, and Leah didn’t stop him.
~oOo~
Over the course of two weeks just before Thanksgiving, the dead of the Grant Tornado, as it had come to be called, were buried. Before they could be, the standing grave markers had to be reset over their proper graves. By the time Leah’s father was buried, three weeks had passed since he’d died.
With Heartland Baptist without a building or a preacher, the services were held at the closest Baptist church, in nearby Wheaton. Reverend Allerton wasn’t exactly a stranger to the HBC congregation, or to Leah; her father and he had been friendly acquaintances and had worked together on several charity events. But it felt wrong to sit in an unfamiliar pew in an unfamiliar sanctuary and stare at a glossy wooden box that held her father’s body.
With Gunner at her side and all her Bulls family around her, though, she managed. She even managed to speak, and the scope of her loss seemed to have tempered the judgments of the congregation toward her. They listened, and they nodded, and afterward, they offered hugs and sincere-sounding condolences.
Gunner stood at her side all the while. He rode in the car with her, letting his brothers ride along, providing a somber escort back to the Grant Cemetery.
By the day of the funeral, Leah had been upgraded from a wheelchair to crutches, but the ground of the cemetery was uneven, and she struggled to make it to the gravesite. About twenty feet from the car, Gunner simply swept her into his arms. He didn’t ask or seem to hesitate, and she didn’t resist. She let the crutches fall to the ground, laid her head on his shoulder, and let him cradle her until he set her on the chair closest to her father’s casket.
Griffin came up and, with a sweet smile, showed her that he’d collected her discarded crutches.
Everybody was taking care of her. It made the day bearable.
At the short, quiet graveside ceremony, Leah didn’t speak. She stared at the box hovering over that terrible hole and listened to the Reverend Allerton speak words she’d heard many times.
And then it was over. When she walked—or was carried—away, her father would be lowered into the ground and buried in the earth.
She found that she couldn’t leave. All of the mourners left. Most of the Bulls family walked away. Reverend Allerton came and patted her shoulder, said some trite words of condolence, and then he left. Only Gunner and she were there, sitting on the folding chairs covered in black felt, and the groundskeeper who waited to lower the casket, standing a res
pectful distance off.
Gunner sat quietly, holding her hand. He didn’t pressure her to leave or to do anything at all.
“We’ll always be broken,” she finally said, needing to hear the words out loud.
He squeezed her hand but didn’t answer. She was glad; she hadn’t meant to start a conversation or seek a rebuttal.
“I just needed to say that out loud.”
He let go of her hand and put his arm around her, drawing her close. Pressing his lips to the top of her head, he said, “Love you.”
“Love you, too.” Leah noted a woman standing off a bit, leaning against a tree. She probably wanted to visit a relative buried nearby and was waiting for the burial service to be over. “We should go. Will you carry me again?”
Gunner smiled and kissed her on the mouth. “I’ll carry you anywhere, anytime. I’ll carry you forever.”
~oOo~
“Leah?”
Leah had been getting into the back seat of Willa’s Explorer. She grabbed the car door and halted her momentum, standing back up on her good leg and turning to face the person who’d hailed her.
It was the woman who’d been standing against the tree.
“Yes?”
The woman pushed up her sunglasses, and Leah’s knee gave out.
Gunner was standing right there, or she’d have fallen. But he caught her and held her firmly. “Lee? Baby, what’s wrong?”
Leah’s attention was on the woman, so she didn’t answer him. “Mom?” She was older, and heavier, and her hair was red now, but that was her mother, standing maybe ten feet away from her.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
There was no soft sentiment in Leah’s reaction, no sense of a fantasy being fulfilled or a gap being closed. The only thing Leah had felt for her mother in ten years was anger. Not loss, not regret. Not love. Not even hate. Just anger. And to show up now, literally minutes after she’d left her father in the ground? Hell, no.
She squared her shoulders. “No. You don’t get to call me sweetheart or anything like that. You gave up that right. Why are you here?”
Her mother dropped her sunglass back on her nose. Hiding, Leah thought. Her smile trembled and disappeared. “I heard about your father. I wanted to pay my respects.”
Pay her respects. Right. “Okay. Respects paid. Go back to California or wherever you live.”
“Arizona. I live in Arizona now. Tempe. Leah—”
“I couldn’t care less.” She got into the Explorer and slammed the door so fast that Gunner had to jump back not to get hit.
Outside, the tableau seemed frozen for a few seconds, with Bulls and old ladies locked in place, all pointed at Leah’s mother. Then her mother turned and walked away, and Gunner came around and got in beside Leah.
“Fuck. C’mere.”
Leah hadn’t thought she would cry. She hadn’t cried over her father yet. But as soon as Gunner’s arms coiled around her, she was full of tears.
~oOo~
Leah stared at her father’s attorney and laughed. “Of course.”
“I’m sorry, Leah,” her mother said.
She hadn’t been remotely surprised to find her mother sitting in the attorney’s living room—where he was currently meeting clients, since his office had been destroyed. There had to have been a reason for her sudden reemergence after a decade, and Leah highly doubted that ‘paying her respects’ was the real one. If she’d had any respect for either Leah or her father, she would have kept some kind of contact. At the very least.
It turned out that the attorney had called her mother and told her what had happened. Because, Leah had just learned, her parents had still been married. And her father had never changed his will or his insurance policies—documents he’d had made up shortly after their marriage, before Leah Grace Campbell had been conceived.
Her mother, in other words, who’d abandoned them without a word when Leah was nine years old, was her father’s sole beneficiary.
He hadn’t had much in the way of savings or investments, but the house had been owned free and clear, it and its contents were fully insured, and he had half a million dollars in life insurance. The whole package, house and savings and insurance, came close to a million dollars.
To her mother. Who’d abandoned her. And him.
“There’s nothing I can do about the insurance, Leah. But we can contest the will and try to get the house for you. You have grounds. Or”—he turned to her mother, lifting eyes heavy with rhetoric over the tops of his glasses—“the two of you can work something out. Something equitable.”
“No,” Leah said, speaking as the thoughts formed. “No. Take it. I don’t want it.”
Her mother said nothing, made not even a token suggestion that she didn’t deserve all that money, and Leah smiled. This was good.
This was a clean break. Her past had been literally leveled. Waste had been laid. She was no longer, in any part, The Preacher’s Daughter.
Pushing herself up from the chair, she wedged her crutches under her arms. “I guess you don’t need me for anything, since I’m not part of any of this, so I’ll see you.” She looked down at her mother and put on the sweetest, least sincere smile she could conjure. “Have a nice life, Helen. Enjoy that money you don’t deserve.”
“Leah…” the attorney began.
“No, Mr. Conroy. It’s really okay. It’s better this way.”
He gave her that over-the-glasses look for a second or two, and then he smiled. “Okay. If you change your mind…”
“I won’t. Thank you.”
She hobbled out of the her father’s attorney’s house without bidding her mother goodbye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Are you mad?” Leah swirled her soda with her straw, making the ice cubes tinkle against the glass.
They sat in a roadside truck stop because Gunner hadn’t been able to wait until they got home to find out what had gone on with the lawyer. She’d asked him to wait in the car while she did that business, and then she’d lurched out on her crutches, with the weirdest fucking expression on her face. In the car, she wouldn’t talk. She’d said she wanted to be face to face when they did. So he’d found a place to be face to face.
Now he knew why.
Was he mad? At her father, hell yeah. Fuck that fucking prick for not taking care of his daughter. The one fatherly thing he’d ever done for her, as far as Gunner could tell, was shield her from the debris—and thank fuck he had. But still, he’d let her down at every other goddamn opportunity. Gunner should have beaten that bastard up a whole hell of a lot more.
And her mother! Shit, how had his girl turned out to be so amazing, coming from faulty stock like that? What a couple of selfish assholes.
It was a lot of money she’d walked away from. Even setting aside the life insurance, just focusing on the stuff she could fight for, it was a lot. Money that could put her through college. Buy them a little house. Replace everything she’d lost. The things, at any rate.
He could put her through college—except for that pricey private one she’d applied to. But he could manage OSU or Tulsa Community College. He could buy her things. A house, not yet; he’d spent too many years fucking up and paying for it to have accumulated much of a nest egg, but he was doing better with all that now.
His days of scheming for money with ideas like that stupid rave thing he’d brought up with his dad—who’d shaken his head and called it cockamamie and killed it dead—were behind him, thank fuck. The Bulls had renegotiated with the Volkovs, and the money would be rolling in—risk, too, but not unmanageable.
None of the trouble he’d been in recently had landed on his wallet, and he didn’t need to look for trouble like he had before Leah.
Financially, physically, and even mentally, he was stable. They were stable.
So someday, yeah. He could buy her a house.
He reached across the table for her hand and laced their fingers together. “I’m not mad, Lee. Two hours ago, we didn’t
know there was any money, so nothing’s changed. If you want to walk away, then walk away. Fucking sucks that your mom gets everything, though. Only reason I give a shit at all about it is I don’t think she fucking deserves anything, and you fucking do.”
She smiled. Lately, since the tornado, her smiles had taken on an ethereal, shadowy quality, as if they’d had to move through darkness to arrive on her face. Gunner worried. She seemed basically okay, overall, but there was something not quite the same. Like she was a shade less present. Only once, to his knowledge, had she cried since her father’s death: in the car after his burial, when her mother had shown herself. She’d cried long and hard then, but otherwise, she’d been brave and calm, and not quite normal.
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 33