Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lina
I didn’t wait for questions.
I needed to get out of there. Needed distance.
Air. Space. Needed to get back to the farm, back to Tatum, back to the only part of my life that still made sense when everything else started bleeding together.
My little girl was waiting for me, probably asking Mrs. Patterson too many questions, probably curled up with one of those oatmeal cookies she loved, trusting without hesitation that I would come back to her.
That trust was sacred. It was the one thing in my world I refused to break.
The air hit my face the second I stepped outside, and I dragged in a deep breath like I had been underwater too long.
Gravel crunched beneath my heels. Somewhere nearby, an engine ticked as it cooled, metal settling with soft pings into the dark.
The sky above the lot was velvet-black and endless, the kind of night that used to make me feel small in a comforting way.
Now it only made me feel exposed. My hands were trembling, so I tightened them around the handle of my briefcase and told myself to keep moving.
One foot in front of the other. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just go.
My car sat near the gate, exactly where I had left it, dark and waiting under the wash of a security light.
Close enough that I could be gone in under a minute.
Close enough that if I didn’t stop walking, if I didn’t let myself look back, I could put this whole night behind me before it had the chance to sink its teeth any deeper.
I wanted that more than I wanted my next breath.
I wanted distance between me and John, between me and the clubhouse, between me and the past that kept rising up like a ghost with my name on its lips.
I was halfway across the gravel lot when I heard his voice behind me.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
I stopped so abruptly that the gravel shifted beneath my heels.
My whole body went rigid, every muscle locking tight.
For one dizzy second, I was twenty-three again, heart in my throat, every nerve in my body tuned to the sound of him.
It made me angry—how quickly my body remembered what my mind had spent years trying to bury.
I closed my eyes for the briefest moment, forcing the ache down, forcing the old weakness back into the dark where it belonged.
I didn’t turn around. “Home,” I said, and my voice came out clipped, cool, maddeningly steady. “I have a daughter to get back to.” Saying the words grounded me. Daughter. Tatum. Mine. Real. A whole life that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the woman I’d forced myself to become.
His boots crunched against the gravel as he closed the distance between us, each step deliberate, each one scraping against my already frayed nerves.
I could feel him before he touched me—feel the heat of him at my back, feel the force of his presence like something physical pressing against my skin.
God, I hated that I still knew him like that.
Hated that some part of me could pick him out in the dark by sound alone, by the shift in the air, by the way my pulse stumbled and then kicked hard against my ribs.
“We need to talk,” he growled.
I turned slowly, because if I moved too fast, I was afraid all that fury and grief and old love would spill out where he could see it.
The security light cut across his face, sharpening every hard line of him, and for one brutal second, all I could think was that he was real.
Alive. Standing in front of me after years of mourning a ghost. It should have felt like a miracle. Instead it felt like being split open.
I met his gaze with all the ice I could summon.
“We have nothing to discuss,” I said. Cold.
Flat. Precise. “You’ve made yourself very clear.
You told me exactly what you think of me, and I was paying attention.
So no, John, we do not need to talk.” I shifted my briefcase higher in my grip.
“And if you have even a shred of sense left, you’ll let me walk away before either one of us says something we can’t take back. ”
His hand shot out and closed around my arm, his grip firm and unyielding.
Heat burned through the sleeve of my blazer, instant and electric, and hatred flared right alongside the ache.
I jerked against him, not hard enough to get free, just enough to let him know I felt every second of it.
“Let my arm go,” I said quietly, the anger in me so sharp it made my voice softer instead of louder.
“You are not going anywhere until I get answers,” he said, his voice low and dangerous.
I yanked against his hold, fury flashing through me so hard it almost made me dizzy. The pressure of his hand on my arm felt like a violation all by itself—too familiar, too possessive, too much like he thought he still had any right to touch me. “Let. Me. Go!”
“No.”
Before I could get another breath around the rage building in my chest, he bent, wrapped an arm around my waist, and hauled me up and over his shoulder like I weighed nothing.
The world tipped sideways in one violent, humiliating rush.
My stomach dropped. My briefcase slipped from my hand and hit the gravel with a dull crack, forgotten the second panic and humiliation came roaring to life under my skin.
“JOHN!” I screamed, pounding my fists against his back. “PUT ME DOWN!”
He didn’t respond. Didn’t slow. Didn’t even tense, like my struggle was nothing to him. He just stormed back toward the clubhouse with me slung over his shoulder, his grip locked hard against my legs, fury radiating off him in suffocating waves.
I kicked. I screamed. I beat against him with everything I had, rage and helplessness turning each strike sharper than the last. “You son of a bitch! Let me go! I swear to God, I will press charges!”
He kicked open the clubhouse door and strode through the gathering room, past the stunned brothers still standing near the bar, past Kansas, whose mouth opened like he meant to stop this before whatever he saw on John’s face made him think better of it.
Every set of eyes in that room landed on me—on my writhing body, my fury, my humiliation—and something hot and poisonous crawled up my throat.
Then we were in the hallway. His hallway.
His room. The door slammed open. A second later, he threw me onto his bed hard enough to knock the breath clean out of me.
I bounced once, stunned, then scrambled upright on instinct, hair falling into my face, chest heaving, every nerve lit with rage.
“How dare you!” I shouted, glaring up at him through the tangle of dark hair. “How fucking dare you!”
He didn’t step back. Didn’t give me space.
Didn’t offer me even the smallest scrap of decency.
He moved in again, crowding me with all that heat and force until there was no air left in the space, no room left for anything but him.
His face stopped inches from mine, his eyes burning so hard that it stole my next breath.
“My daughter,” he growled.
His words hit me like a physical blow. My whole body locked.
I blinked. My throat went bone-dry. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Nothing. Just silence. Just the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears so violently it hurt.
He stared at me, jaw tight, hands clenched into fists at his sides, like he was barely holding himself together.
And when I still didn’t say a word—when I just sat there frozen because God, I had imagined this moment a thousand different ways and none of them looked like this—he grabbed my arms and hauled me to my feet.
“MY DAUGHTER!” he roared, his voice raw and broken and full of a realization that sounded like it was tearing him apart from the inside out.
I gasped, my hands instinctively gripping his forearms as he held me upright, his face so close to mine I could see the gold flecks in his dark eyes, could feel the heat pouring off his body, could see the devastation cracking something open in him. “John.”
“She’s mine,” he said, his voice splitting on the words. Mine.”
Tears burned hot at the back of my eyes.
I wanted to be angry. Wanted to shove him away and tell him he had no right to claim her now after weeks of cruelty, after standing there while Ruby put her hands on me, after accusing me of betrayal and looking at me like I was filth. But the look on his face—God, the look on his face.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t triumph.
It was devastation. Pure, unfiltered devastation. The kind that comes when grief and love and lost time all hit at once and leave a man bleeding where no one can see.
“Yes,” I whispered, my voice barely there. “She’s yours.”
His grip on my arms tightened, and for one wild second, I thought he might shake me, demand every missing year back all at once.
But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled me closer, his forehead dropping to rest against mine, his breath coming in ragged gasps that shuddered against my mouth.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice breaking. “I didn’t fucking know.”
“I know,” I whispered, because I did.
That was the cruelest part of it. I knew.
“I thought—” He stopped, swallowing hard, his jaw clenching. “I thought you moved on. I thought you—”
“I know what you thought,” I whispered, and my voice trembled because now that the truth was here between us, all the pain chained behind it was breaking loose too. “And I know what you did. I know how you treated me. I know what you let happen.”
He flinched like I had struck him. “Lina.”
“You let her slap me,” I said, my voice hardening with every word. “You stood there and let that woman put her hands on me. You accused me of betraying you. You looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was beneath you.”
“I know,” he said, raw and immediate. “I know. And I—”