Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lina
The sound hit me first.
That deep, rumbling growl of a motorcycle engine cut through the quiet Oklahoma morning like a blade, low and unmistakable.
I was standing on the front porch of the farmhouse with one hand curled around the railing and the other braced at my hip, and the second I heard it, every muscle in my body went tight.
I knew that sound. I would have known it half asleep, half drunk, halfway across the county.
There were some things a woman never forgot, no matter how hard she tried.
John.
My heart did something stupid—something soft and traitorous and completely unwelcome—as the sound grew louder, closer, until the black-and-chrome beast of his bike came rolling down the gravel driveway in a wash of sunlight and dust. The morning sun hit the metal and made it flash.
The gravel crackled beneath his tires. And then there he was, riding toward my house like he belonged on that stretch of land, like he’d always belonged there.
John “Monk” Smith. Vice President of the Diamondback MC.
Father of my daughter. The man who had torn my life clean in half seven years ago and somehow, against every law of God and reason, had started stitching pieces of it back together in the span of a few impossible weeks.
He rode with the kind of confidence that only came from years on the road—body loose, shoulders easy, hands steady on the bars, his cut lifting faintly in the breeze.
He looked dangerous. Familiar. Entirely too good.
I hated how good he looked. Hated the way my stomach flipped anyway. Hated that even now, after everything, some part of my body still recognized him before my pride had a chance to object.
“Mom! Mom, he’s here!” Tatum’s voice rang out behind me—high, bright, breathless with excitement—and before I could even turn around, she came flying through the screen door and barreled past me, her sneakers slapping against the porch boards hard enough to rattle them.
“Tatum, wait—”
But she didn’t wait. She never did. She tore down the porch steps and across the yard in a blur of denim, pink sneakers, and bouncing ponytail, her whole face lit up with a kind of pure, unfiltered joy that made something twist hard in my chest. It had only been a few days, and already she was running to him like he’d always been part of her world.
John coasted to a stop in front of the house in a cloud of pale dust and revved the engine once. Then twice.
The sound was loud, obnoxious, and entirely deliberate. I rolled my eyes so hard it was a wonder I didn’t strain something.
Show-off.
But when I looked at him, I caught the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth and knew exactly what he was doing. He was showing off. Not for me this time. For her. For Tatum. And the ridiculous part was that it was working. She looked at him like he’d hung the damn moon.
My chest tightened so suddenly it almost hurt.
Tatum skidded to a stop a few feet from the bike, hands clasped under her chin, practically vibrating with excitement. “John! You came!”
“Course I came, kiddo,” John said, and there was something rough and warm in his voice that made me glance at him harder. “Told you I would, didn’t I?”
Tatum nodded eagerly, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
John cut the engine, and the silence that followed felt almost deafening after all that thunder and noise.
He swung his leg over the bike with practiced ease, boots crunching against the gravel, then turned toward the back of the motorcycle.
I watched, suddenly holding my breath, as he reached for a small pink box tied securely to the luggage rack with black bungee cords.
Pink. My heart gave a stupid little squeeze. John walked over to Tatum, dropped down to one knee so he was eye level with her, and held the box out in both hands like he understood instinctively that moments mattered with children. “Got something for you,” he said.
Tatum’s eyes went wide as saucers. She looked at the box, then at John, then back at the box again like she couldn’t quite believe something that pretty could possibly be for her. “For me?” she whispered.
“Yeah, baby girl,” John said softly. “For you.”
Tatum reached out slowly, almost reverently, and took the box from his hands. She opened it with fumbling, careful fingers, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. Then she gasped so sharply even my father laughed from behind the screen door. “A helmet!”
She pulled it free and held it up like it was treasure. It was bright, vibrant pink with tiny white stars scattered across the shell, glossy enough to catch the sunlight. It was adorable. Practical. Thoughtful. And so perfectly her that it stole the breath out of me for a second.
“Do you like it?” John asked, watching her face with an intensity that was almost painful to witness.
Tatum nodded so hard I thought she might actually topple over. “I love it!” she said, breathless. “I love it so much!”
Before I could say a word, she jammed the helmet onto her head, a little crooked, the strap dangling uselessly under her chin.
John stood, brushing gravel dust off his jeans, and looked up at me. Our eyes met, and for one suspended beat, the whole world seemed to narrow down to the space between us—the porch, the bike, the child grinning in the yard, all of it blurring at the edges. “You ready to go?” he asked.
His tone was casual. His gaze was not. It was intense.
Focused. Possessive in a way that sent heat crawling up the back of my neck.
Like he was asking me something far bigger than whether I was ready to drive to a barbecue.
Like he was asking whether I was ready for all of this—for him, for Tatum, for whatever shape our lives were taking now.
I swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah,” I said, though my voice came out rougher than I intended. “We’re ready.”
The screen door creaked behind me, and I turned to see my father wheeling himself out onto the porch with a grin that said he had been enjoying every second of the show. “Well, well,” he drawled. “Look who showed up.”
“Mr. Wilcox,” John said, straightening a little and giving him a respectful nod.
“John,” Dad replied, still grinning. “Good to see you, son.”
I moved automatically to help him down the ramp we’d installed the week before, but he waved me off with one impatient flap of his hand.
“I got it, Lina. Go help your man.”
Your man. I didn’t correct him. Didn’t have the energy to explain that John wasn’t my man, that we were complicated, that I didn’t know what the hell we were to each other beyond tangled and unfinished and entirely too intense for a Saturday morning.
So instead, I walked down the porch steps toward the truck, pretending I hadn’t heard it, while behind me Tatum’s excited chatter rose up into the bright morning air.
“John, look! It fits! Does it fit? Is it on right?”
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw John squatting down again, those big, scarred hands of his moving with surprising care as he adjusted the strap beneath Tatum’s chin. “There you go,” he said gently. “Perfect fit.”
Tatum beamed up at him so brightly it nearly knocked the wind out of me, and then she asked the exact question I had been dreading from the second I heard his bike at the end of the driveway.
“Can I ride on the bike?”
My entire body went rigid.
“Yes,” John said immediately.
“No,” I said at the exact same time.
Tatum’s face fell instantly, all that joy dimming so fast it made me wince. John stood and turned toward me, his expression calm but firm in that infuriating way of his. “Lina.”
“No,” I said again, sharper this time, because panic was already trying to claw its way up my throat. “Absolutely not. She’s six years old, John. Six. It’s not safe.”
“She’ll be fine,” John said evenly. “I’ll keep her safe.”
“She’s too young,” I insisted, my heart pounding hard enough to make my hands shake. “She could fall off. She could get hurt. One wrong move and—”
“Lina.” John’s voice cut clean through my panic—low, steady, impossible to ignore—as he crossed the distance between us in a few long strides. When he stopped, he was close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. “You rode with me,” he said quietly. “Remember?”
I did. God, I did.
I remembered every single ride. The way he would pull me close, the warm sun at my back.
The way the wind would whip through my hair and steal my breath.
The way I had always, always felt safe with him—even doing seventy down some back road with nothing but open sky above us and thunder under us.
“That was different,” I said, but the protest came out weak.
Fragile. Like even I didn’t fully believe it.
“How?” John asked quietly. “How was it different?”
“I was an adult,” I said. “I could hold on. I could—”
“I would never let anything happen to her,” John said, and his voice dropped lower on the vow, rough with conviction. “Never, Lina. You know that.”
I stared up at him, chest tight and throat burning, because the worst part was that I did know that.
Deep down, underneath all the fear and the protectiveness and the wild animal instinct to wrap Tatum in bubble wrap and never let her out of my sight, I knew exactly what kind of man John was when it came to the people he loved.
He would take a bullet before he let harm come to her.
“She’ll be right in front of me,” he continued, gentler now, like he knew he was one frayed nerve away from losing me to panic. “I’ll have my arms around her the whole time. She won’t be able to move. Won’t be able to fall. I’ll keep her safe.”
I looked past him at Tatum, who was standing a few feet away in her too-big helmet, wide-eyed and hopeful, little hands clasped together under her chin.
“Please, Mom?” she said softly. “Please?”
I closed my eyes and dragged in a slow breath, trying to calm the frantic pounding in my chest.
Damn it. “Fine,” I said finally, opening my eyes. “But you go slow. You hear me? Slow.”
John’s mouth curved into a faint smile that was equal parts relief and amusement. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
I jabbed a finger at his chest. “I mean it, John. If anything happens to her—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to her,” John said, and this time there wasn’t even a trace of humor left in his voice. “I promise.”
I held his gaze for a long second, measuring the certainty there against the terror in my own chest, and then finally I nodded. “Okay,” I said quietly. “Okay.”
Tatum let out a squeal of delight loud enough to send birds scattering from the oak tree by the barn. John turned back toward her, and I forced myself to move toward my father before I could change my mind.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Dad said as I opened the truck’s passenger door.
“Am I?” I muttered, helping him transfer from the wheelchair to the seat.
“He’s her father, Lina,” Dad said gently. “Let him be her father.”
I didn’t answer. I just folded the wheelchair, lifted it into the truck bed, and secured it with a bungee cord that snapped tight with a sharp thunk. When I turned back around, John was lifting Tatum onto the bike.
She was so small. So tiny against the massive machine that my pulse lurched all over again.
But John’s hands were steady as he positioned her carefully on the seat just in front of where he’d sit, making sure she was centered and secure before he swung his leg over behind her.
Then his arms came around her, caging her in completely.
Protective. Possessive. Claiming her as his in the most primal way imaginable.
My throat tightened when Tatum twisted around just enough to look back at him, her whole face glowing with trust and happiness.
“Ready?” John asked.
“Ready!” Tatum said.
John looked up at me.
Our eyes met, and whatever he saw in my face must have been enough, because he gave the smallest nod before starting the engine. The rumble rolled through the yard again, and Tatum let out a delighted little laugh that carried all the way to the porch.
“Hold on tight, baby girl,” John said.
And then they were moving. Slowly at first, just like I had demanded. The bike rolled down the gravel driveway with the engine purring low and controlled, sunlight flashing off chrome, Tatum’s laughter carrying back on the breeze like music.
I stood there frozen, one hand still resting on the truck door, and watched them go.
Watched my daughter ride away with her father.
Watched John close his body around her like a shield.
Watched something that had been missing from both of them begin, right in front of me, to take shape. Beside me, Dad started laughing softly.
“What?” I asked, my voice too tight.
“Nothing,” Dad said, still chuckling. “Just... you picked a good one, Lina.”
I didn’t answer. I just watched until the bike reached the end of the driveway and turned out onto the road, the red glow of the taillight flashing once in the morning sun before they disappeared from sight.
I stood there for a long moment after they were gone, heart pounding, hands trembling just enough to make me curl them into fists.
This was real. John was Tatum’s father. He was here. And everything in me was starting—however reluctantly, however painfully—to believe he wasn’t going anywhere this time.
“Come on,” Dad said, pulling me back to myself. “Let’s go before they eat all the food.”
I nodded and climbed into the driver’s seat. But as I started the engine and pulled out of the driveway, I couldn’t stop replaying the way John had looked at Tatum.
The way he had held her. The way his entire body had curved around hers without thought, like protecting her was already instinct. The way he had promised to keep her safe. And for the first time in seven years, I let myself believe him.