Chapter 17
Unsteady – X Ambassadors
Wilder
The rage inside me was nothing like I’d ever experienced before. It wasn’t red, it was white. White, putrid and insistent like a wound that would never heal. I wanted to pull his head off and feed it to Davis Quinton’s pigs, but I knew that would only make things worse.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I checked, my eyes raking over Tally once more.
Chewing on the end of her thumbnail, she nodded. Distracted eyes looked through the window into the dimming light. Toward the stables.
“Brownie, he’s going to be fine. I swear, that little pixie won’t get his hands on him.”
“He won’t take care of him properly. He’ll probably get Bernard to sell him.” Her voice cracked like glass under a boot.
“He’s not going to get him.” My mind whirred over the options. How I could make Dream Maker safe for her. “There’s every alarm possible on those stables and he’ll have to get past me, Nash and Gunner first.
“He won’t give up. I know exactly what he’s like.”
The look in her eyes took my breath away. Nothing I’d seen in her before. It looked like loss. She was not going to lose that damn horse. Not while I had a breath left in my body.
“I wish I’d never damn well married him. I was so stupid.” She dropped her forehead to my chest and groaned.
“Got to admit I think you’ve had better ideas, Brownie. He’s only an inch taller than you for starters.”
She snorted a laugh and instantly relief seeped through me. Always so calm and strong, her worrying made me feel uneasy. And that thought made my world tilt on its axis.
“Do you know how damn cute you are when you laugh?” I blurted out. “How your nose crinkles.”
She blinked and blushed simultaneously. “I think you’re seeing things.”
“Nope, Brownie,” I said, resigned to the fact I was turning into a pussy around her. “My eyes are in great working order. Now, why don’t you go back to your cabin. There’s nothing here that can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
She looked determined so I agreed. “Don’t stay too late. I’m going to make sure the leprechaun has left the property. Lock the door behind me.”
“He won’t come back tonight,” she told me, backing away. “He’s not brave enough.”
“Did he say how he got in here? Gunner and I were in the house, but there were plenty of other people around.”
She shrugged. “He’s so small he could easily have walked right under their noses.”
The burst of laughter from us both was short and loud and lessened some of the unease left by her ex.
“Go,” she said, patting my chest. “I’ll finish up here.”
I gave her a nod and turned for the door. When I reached it I paused and turned back to face her. “I-I erm, won’t be able to come over tonight.” I pushed my hands deep into my pockets, scuffing my boot over the floor. “I have stuff to do, I’m going to Sterling tomorrow.”
“Sterling?”
I wanted to go back and rub away the frown lines between her eyes. The two little lines puckered her brows. My feet refused to move. Probably because I knew if I touched her, I’d never leave.
“Yeah, I’m going to see my dad. I have an early morning flight from Montrose to Denver.”
“I thought that was where you were today.” Tally cleared her throat. “Not that I was stalking you or anything.”
“I was going to, but I didn’t realize I’d need preapproval. And,” I sighed heavily, “I kind of need to talk to my brothers.”
Tally’s head lifted sharply. “You haven’t told them yet?”
“Nope.” I lifted my shoulder in a shrug. “I was too chicken.”
She gave me a soft smile. “You don’t strike me as a scaredy-cat, Wilder.” The glint in her eye told me she liked the brave, ballsy side of me. Another reason why I was surprised she’d ended up with the tiny guy. I was all man and Brownie loved it.
“I’m not, which is why I’m going to talk to them tonight. And, well, it may take a while.”
The quiet giggle made her tits bounce and my eyes were instantly drawn to them. I had to get out of there before I decided to fuck her on my brother’s desk. I didn’t have time for it. I needed to talk to my brothers and organize with the guys what needed doing on the ranch tomorrow.
“How are you feeling about seeing your Dad?”
My chest squeezed. My stomach somersaulted. Petrified wasn’t even the word. “I need answers, you know.” I needed her too, and that terrified me more than my father’s lies ever could.
She nodded. “I do. And for the record I think your brothers will understand your need to see him.”
“I hope so.” The concern was brief because I had two incredible brothers. Even if they had no desire to see him, they wouldn’t stop me, but that didn’t make it any easier to be the one who walked through that door.
There was one thing I could always count on my brothers for: support.
Even when they didn’t like my choices, they stood behind me.
When I insisted that I didn’t want to go to business college, they didn’t like it, but they supported me.
When I had a scare with my high school girlfriend, they supported me.
When I took Dad’s car without his permission and scratched all down one side, they supported me.
Now, sitting at the dining table, with them both staring at me expectantly, I was nervous as hell. Gunner was smirking, tapping his fingers. Nash on the other was frowning, concern dripping from him.
“What’s going on?” he asked, placing his forearms on the table.
“Do we have a repeat of the high school sex scandal?” Gunner chuckled.
“I was fifteen, drunk on beer, and I didn’t know I hadn’t even put it in.” That was my big scare, convinced Morgan was pregnant because I got off on her thigh. Gunner had never let me forget it.
Nash rubbed a hand over his face. “Can we just get down to why you’re sitting in front of us looking like you’re in the school Principal’s office.”
“Or like you need us to explain sex to you, again.”
Nash hit Gunner around the back of the head. “Shut up and let him tell us what we’re here for.”
“Okay, okay.” He rubbed the back of his head. “What do you want to talk to us about?”
I wasn’t scared of their anger. Not really. I was scared of what it was that saying it out loud might confirm; that some part of me still wanted something from the man who broke us. That I wasn’t done hoping for a version of him that never existed.
Smoothing my hands over the table, I took a reassuring breath. “I’m flying to Denver in the morning.”
“Right.” Nash nodded, two deep lines between his eyes. “For some ranch business we don’t know about?”
“You’re not going to work for someone else are you?” Gunner’s grin suddenly disappeared.
“No. I’m not going on ranch business, or to work for someone else.” Pulling my shoulders back I looked each of them in the eye. “I’m going to see Dad. In prison.”
The silence fell with a thud. Like a concrete block dropped from a great height. It fell and cracked the atmosphere with a bolt of lightning sparking at the edges. A spark that would either light up the sky with flames of anger or die out into a lazy ember of disquiet.
“Well?” I prompted.
My brothers looked at each other, a silent conversation between them, until Nash, always our spokesperson, began talking.
“Why would you want to go and see him?”
I knew that this would be the first question they’d ask. He was the last person that they’d want to see, so it was obvious that they wouldn’t understand why I would.
“I need answers,” I told them. “I want to know why he felt he could steal from us and think it was okay.”
“Because he’s cold and mean and manipulative,” Gunner offered. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know we’ve talked about this before, Wild, and I get why you feel the need. Just don’t expect any great revelations.”
Nash narrowed his eyes on me. “I didn’t know you’d spoken to Gunner about it.” He reached to place a comforting hand on my forearm. “Why didn’t you come to me too?”
“It wasn’t some great talk we had. I just mentioned to Gun that I wanted answers.
” The questions had been running around in my head for months, years.
It might have even been before Dad got sent to prison.
All the years he was dismissive of us as kids.
That he barely looked at us and we constantly irritated him.
“What do you need to know?” Nash asked, wringing his hands together. “Maybe I can answer them. Me and Gun.”
“You think you can tell me why he was such a shit dad?”
“He’s not just a shit dad,” Gunner said. “He’s a shit person. I know what you’re thinking and don’t.”
“What is he thinking?” Nash asked.
Gunner sighed, his shoulder’s sloping. “That Michael Miller is a crap dad because he was a bad kid.” He pointed at me but had his eyes on my brother. “He’s done such a number on him, Wilder thinks that he’s to blame.”
Nash scoffed. “No fucking way, Wild. You were a great kid. You’re a great man.
Don’t let that man’s inadequacies make you feel anything less than you are.
” He gripped my arm with his big football player’s hands.
“If you need to ask him then do it, but do not take any of his bullshit on board. He even implies that it’s not his fault you get up and you walk out of there. You hear me?”
I nodded. “I hear you.”
“He will blame everyone but himself,” Nash added.
“It’ll be my fault for not making the NFL, Gunner’s for getting a two-week suspension in tenth grade.
It might even be yours for breaking Mom’s favorite vase when you were five.
But,” he said, slamming his fist down on the table, “none of those reasons are true. He’s a rat-bastard because he was born that way. ”
“Nash is right, Wild. He was born that way. He managed to hide it from Mom somehow, until he couldn’t and then she decided to divorce him. Too damn late, but at least she realized before she was killed.”
It was pretty ironic. Mom decided to divorce him and then ended up in a road accident before she had time to get the papers signed. He hid that from us as well as her will which didn’t leave him a penny. He continually stole from us and from the ranch, hence why he was in prison in Sterling.
“I still think I want to go,” I told them. “I want him to look me in the eye and tell me why my whole life he’s made me feel like I’m a punishment of some kind.”
“Fuck, Wild,” Nash groaned, “why didn’t you tell us.”
“That is not what you are,” Gunner cried. “He’s the fucking punishment.”
“I know that, but it’s how he’s always made me feel. I’ve always been the naughty kid, the one who he sees as a joke. The one he looks at with disdain.”
“And I’m the one he hates with a passion because I didn’t get him his dream,” Nash retorted.
“He hates me, too.” Gunner pointed a thumb at his chest. “I just didn’t excel at anything that he cared about. Anything that would make him money.”
“Which is ironic,” Nash scoffed. “Since you bill people fucking thousands to train their million dollar horses.”
Our matching gazes looked at each other. I was sure we were all contemplating how lucky we were to have each other. To have this family. This land of promises and life. But I had to find out the truth behind the eyes of the man who never really tried to be a real father to us.
If I was ever going to move forward, with anything, with anyone, I had to stop carrying around the weight of never being enough.