“Oh fuck, just like that,” he muttered and then latched himself to her other breast.
With her nerves pulsing in glorious time with his mouth and his cock, Leah crossed her arms around his head and ground herself on him, feeling him deep inside her, filling all of her.
She’d thought, before Gunner, that she’d been wild and experienced, that she’d understood things about sex most people didn’t. Now she knew how much she’d been fooling herself—herself more than anyone else. Those parties and raves, where she’d been nothing but some anonymous girl frantic to get high so she could be brave enough to do the things she thought would make her different from The Preacher’s Daughter, those were nothing but new and different ways to be used. She’d thought she’d been taking charge of herself and being who she really was. What a joke.
She hadn’t been brave or wild or in control, and she damn sure hadn’t been herself. She’d been a scared, naïve little girl letting people use her and calling it her choice. If it had been her choice, she wouldn’t have needed to be high. And she wouldn’t have been so disgusted with herself most days after.
Now she knew what sex really was. She knew what love really was. And she knew who she really was.
She was so much more than The Preacher’s Daughter.
EPILOGUE
The Bulls filed out of the chapel into a nearly empty party room. Everybody’s mood was good and light.
Delaney had just announced that the Volkovs had made a truce with the Italians. Their months of hyper-vigilance and elevated threat were over—or, at least, suspended. Gunner imagined Irina Volkov and her bratva sitting down at a fancy table in a fancy room, across from some fat dude in an expensive suit and his ‘family,’ while expensive food and booze was served, and talking out their differences in ritualistic platitudes and veiled threats. Like in The Godfather.
However they’d worked it out, they’d done it without much bloodshed. A couple of message killings back and forth back East, and a few tense runs here in the heartland. Minor disruptions of business, most of which were due to increased security rather than actual attack. But no harm to the Bulls or their family.
Madame Volkov had taken on an old Mafia family and won—or at least achieved a draw. The runs hadn’t been rerouted. They went straight through St. Louis, just like always, and as far as the Bulls knew, the Italians weren’t joining the party. Everything was the same—the way the Russians wanted it.
And that was the way the Bulls wanted it, too.
Gunner followed his brothers around the corner, past the kitchen, where Mo and a couple of sweetbutts were working, and out to the back.
A blast of humid summer heat about knocked him over as he caught the door from Becker and stepped onto the patio. It was close to dusk, but the temperature on this June day had been well into the nineties, and the heat would linger long past dark.
It didn’t help the heat that Curtis, one of the longest-standing neighborhood hangarounds, had the grill fired up and full of steaks and burgers. But it sure as fuck smelled good.
The Bulls’ grill was a massive thing: a smoker, but not the usual black barrel. This one was shaped like a big bull and painted a dull gold. Closed up, it looked like a statue. It was supposed to represent the club name: Brazen Bulls. While he was a prospect, having to learn all the club history and lore, Gunner had learned about some seriously twisted torture device called the brazen bull. Delaney and Dane had named the club for that. Small wonder they’d ended up walking on the dark side.
Learning the club history had been the hardest part of becoming a Bull for him. It had been all but fucking impossible to read the binder Delaney had written, without anyone finding out about his reading problems. He’d managed it with some, if he did say so himself, ingenious questioning skills. He’d struggle through enough of the text to kind of know what it was about, and then he’d find one of the patches and get them to talk about it. It had worked. Not even Delaney knew.
Nobody knew but Leah. He’d managed to hide it from his family because Martin had helped him, and then, when Martin was gone, nobody had been paying much attention to Max’s schoolwork.
But Leah knew, and she didn’t care. In fact, she’d found a way to give him even that back. Lying next to her while she read, her sweet voice like the softest paintbrush, making pictures in his head, was one of his favorite things in life. Always, she found ways to keep him calm and centered, quiet and full.
Coming around the corner of the building, he heard that sweet voice laughing, and saw his girl talking with Patrice and Willa and some of the club’s neighborhood friends. He stopped and took a moment to enjoy watching her when she didn’t know it. She bent down to hear something Dwayne, Curtis’s little boy, was saying, then laughed and nodded.
Damn, he was proud of her. Maybe she was only twenty, but that hardly mattered. Mo said she was an old soul. He’d heard that phrase plenty of times but hadn’t really understood what it meant until Leah.
They’d been together a couple of weeks shy of a year. In that year, her life had been grabbed, spun, flung, and slammed into the ground miles from where it had been. She’d had to start over nearly from scratch.
That was the chief difference between them, Gunner thought: when God or Fate or Bad Fucking Luck had upended his life and smashed it down, he’d fallen apart and spent years searching for all his missing pieces. Leah had simply rearranged the pieces she had left and made something beautiful from them. Like that stuff Deb was doing lately, where she smashed up old china and made pictures from the shards. Mo-something.
Mosaic. Leah was like a mosaic—all of the things she’d lost, all of the experiences she’d had, all of it was still there. But instead of trying to live her old life with all the cracks showing, she’d busted it all apart and turned the pieces into a new, more beautiful life.
His cracks had been widening before he’d met her, so wide he’d been leaking out. Big chunks had been missing. But with Leah, he was whole. She’d taken his parts and made him something better, too.
The strung patio lights caught the diamond on her slender finger and made it sparkle. It wasn’t a big rock, nothing flashy like Mo’s or Joanna’s, but he’d known when he’d seen it that it was perfect for his girl: classy and delicate and deceptively strong.
Above his head, the speakers began to thump with music, and Leah turned at the sudden sound. Her eyes landed on his, and she smiled.
If he lived to be a hundred, Gunner would never stop feeling the thrill that smile, the one only for him, made in his chest. That smile said that his girl was with him. She saw him. She knew him. She was in him.
She was his girl, and he was never alone.
ABOUT SUSAN FANETTI
Susan Fanetti is a Midwestern native transplanted to Northern California, where she lives with her husband, youngest son, and assorted cats.
She is a proud member of the Freak Circle Press.
Susan’s blog: www.susanfanetti.com
Freak Circle Press blog: www.freakcirclepress.com
Susan’s Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/authorsusanfanetti
‘Susan’s FANetties’ fan group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/871235502925756/
Freak Circle Press Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/freakcirclepress
‘The FCP Clubhouse’ fan group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/810728735692965 /
Twitter: @sfanetti
Brazen Bulls MC Pinterest Board: https://www.pinterest.com/laughingwarrior/the-brazen-bulls-mc/
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Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 36