Chapter 11 #3
Knowing that Bernice had left me the house had really fucked with my head, but finding the rooms unchanged after all these years was a new level of hell.
Why the hell had she kept them like that for so long?
Had she thought we were coming back after everything that happened?
It didn’t make any sense. She should’ve burned our shit in the backyard.
Thrown it in the trash. Anything but keep it as some kind of shrine for boys that hadn’t deserved a single thing they’d been given.
I’d spent a lot of years making up for the shit in my past, and most days I thought maybe I’d gotten there, but today had thrown me right back to the feeling of complete worthlessness that I’d been drowning in the first time I’d walked into the Aces clubhouse.
I would need to go through the house and decide if there was anything I wanted to keep, get rid of everything else, and put the place on the market. Keeping it wasn’t an option. I’d never sleep under that roof again.
First, though, we needed to figure out who the hell was after Harper. That was priority number one. After I knew she was safe, I could deal with the rest of it.
Kissing the top of her head, I thought about the look on her face when she’d found Bernice’s letter to me. Of course, the woman had left it out on the counter like that, no envelope or anything. She’d known that I wouldn’t open it, so she’d forced me to see it.
I should’ve expected something like that.
Harper inhaled sharply and then let the air out slowly. Shifting, she lifted her hand toward her face and didn’t wake when I gently caught it before she could touch the wound.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hurt Harper.
It made absolutely no sense. If sunshine were a person, that would be her.
She didn’t talk shit, she was polite to strangers.
Hell, I’d even seen her talk guys down from a bar fight once.
The place had been so crowded that it had taken us five minutes to reach her, and by then the guys had wandered off to be pissed at someone else.
She was quiet, unassuming. And sure, I’d noticed that when we were alone she came out of that shell a bit and was as obstinate as the rest of her family—but that wasn’t the face she presented to the world.
It gave me a little satisfaction to know that whoever had been trying to hurt her was on borrowed time.
Gray had contacts everywhere, and where he didn’t, Casper did.
Between the two of them, I wasn’t sure how the person had gotten away with it so far.
Maybe they’d been looking in the wrong direction, thinking that it must have something to do with the club instead of Harper herself.
Now that they knew what kind of truck to look for in the security footage they had of the car Harper had been driving, I figured it would be a matter of days before we found out who’d been following her.
Turning off the TV, I carefully slid out from under Harp and then lifted her against my chest. I left all the lights on downstairs in case we had any midnight visitors, but didn’t bother turning any on upstairs.
The light filtered upward enough that I could see just fine as I walked her over and laid her in bed.
“Is the movie over?” she asked hoarsely, lifting her head. “Did I miss the entire fucking thing?”
“We can watch it again,” I assured her, pulling the blankets up to her shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, gripping my wrist.
“Bathroom.” I leaned down and kissed her softly. “Be right back.”
I left her in bed and did my business, expecting her to be passed out again by the time I got back. Instead, she was wide awake and watching as I stripped out of my clothes and dropped them to the carpet. I climbed into bed beside her in my boxers and extended my arm so she’d cuddle in beside me.
While I was gone, she’d stripped out of her bra and pants. Her bare legs rubbed against mine as she threw a knee over my thigh.
“I’m so glad you followed me home,” she said after a few minutes, her fingers tracing patterns over my chest. “I was pretty confused there for a second after I hit my head.”
“Sorry I didn’t see it,” I replied, resting my cheek on the top of her head. “Shoulda been right behind you.”
“You were there when it mattered,” she argued. “It’s not like you could’ve stopped that truck from hitting me.”
“Coulda been a deterrent.”
“The guy was a psycho,” she said with a yawn. “I doubt he would’ve cared if anyone saw him.”
“Maybe.” She still thought it was random. Part of me wanted to tell her that I thought the guy had targeted her, but I hadn’t been given the all clear. If it came down to it, they could order me away from Harp or, at the very least, make it difficult as fuck to see her. It wasn’t worth it.
“I’ll go with you back to the house when you’re ready,” she said, changing the subject. “Just let me know when, okay?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t want you to do it alone,” she mumbled, her voice groggy. Her arm squeezed me around the middle. “You got me.”
I lay there wide awake while her breathing evened out in sleep and for a long time afterward.
I’d been an asshole that morning. I’d lost my shit and hadn’t had the ability to hide it from her.
If anyone else—even my best friends—had seen me wild-eyed and panicking like she had, I would’ve been embarrassed as fuck—but with Harper I wasn’t.
I was glad she’d been with me, even though it had gone sideways.
I liked having her by my side. I liked that she’d seen where I grew up, it was almost comforting.
Someone else had seen it now. For the first time since I became an adult, someone important to me had a memory of the little yellow house with the white trim, the twin bed with the blue comforter, and the hallway with the creaky board right in front of my bedroom door.
I was glad that person was Harper because I had a feeling that this was it.
We’d been seeing each other less than a week.
We’d known each other for years before that.
And, knowing that after the day we’d had, neither one of us had wanted to spend the night apart? I was pretty sure that sometime in the future, I’d be sweating bullets when I let Leo know I planned on marrying his daughter.