Thunder (Shotgun Saints MC: Kings of the Road #1)

Prologue

Thunder

A cane is a coward's third leg, and I hate the sight of mine leaning against the fence post while I stand here pretending I don't need it.

A little over three weeks out from the surgery, and I can hold myself up through a wedding if I lock the hip and don't think too hard about the twenty yards of gravel between me and my truck.

The doctors said walk.

They didn't say it wouldn't hurt like hell.

Every step out to this pasture rang up the side of my leg like a struck bell, and now I'm standing in the front row of Rogue's wedding, sweating through my good shirt and gripping a fence rail like an old man.

Meanwhile, the woman I'd give both legs to stand beside is forty feet away, where I'm not allowed to look at her.

So I look at the oak instead.

Phantom's daddy planted it when he was a boy, and it's stood over every important thing this family's ever done since.

Hay bales set in a half-circle underneath it, Marlena's quilts thrown over them so nobody's sitting on bare straw in their Sunday clothes.

Mason jars of black-eyed Susans and those little Mexican hat flowers on every bale, the ones Bex and Hadley pulled off the back acreage yesterday while I sat on a bucket and wasn't allowed to help carry anything.

A white runner down the middle of the grass from the pasture gate to the trunk.

It's a good day for it.

Late light comes gold across the pasture, the heat is backing off, the cicadas are winding down.

Marlena's in a chair at the front because she can't stand for long yet, her hand at her ribs where the bullet went in.

Phantom stands under the oak in a black shirt with his hands folded, looking out at all of us like a man counting his herd and finding it mostly whole.

We came close to burying more than we did five weeks ago, and every soul under this tree knows it.

It hums under a wedding like this one—the gladness has a blade in it.

We're not just happy. We're relieved all the way down to the ground.

Banshee's got his sling off, Bex on his arm.

Blaze holds his hat against his chest.

Spur and Dakota, Shadow with his hand spread wide on Grace's belly where the next Lyle boy's already making himself known.

Holt and Cash rode in from their chapters.

A little woman with Garrett's eyes sits front row in navy—the dead husband's mother, come to give her blessing to the man marrying the widow, and if that's not the bravest thing I've seen all year, I don't know what is.

The fiddle starts up on the porch of the main house.

Diesel comes first down the runner, that tough old shepherd with a leather pouch swinging off his collar and the rings tucked inside it.

Nash walks beside him with one hand flat on the dog's back.

The both of them took worse than I did that night, and here they come down the aisle like it never happened, boy and dog, and the sound that moves through the hay bales is half a laugh and half something wetter.

My own throat goes tight and I let it, because everybody's is.

Then the women come.

Bex. Grace on Shadow's arm. Dakota on Spur's, her hat off because you take your hat off at a wedding.

Then Hadley.

She walks up alone in cream lace that stops at her knee, boots underneath it, her hair down, loose over the scar at her temple she didn't try to hide.

Every man under that oak stands up.

I get myself up off the rail and onto my feet through a white spike of pain that I'd stand through ten times over, because you rise for a woman walking toward a man in front of God, and I'll be damned if my hip's going to be the reason I'm the one sitting when she passes.

She turns at the foot of the tree and the back of her dress shows the ink between her shoulder blades.

Property of Rogue.

Black script on sun-warm skin. Another breath moves through the bales.

I keep my eyes on Hadley.

I keep my eyes on Hadley because Hadley is safe to look at, and the person I want to look at is standing at the far edge of the half-circle in a green dress the same color as the one she wore the night she crossed a bar to say my name.

If I turn my head even a few degrees I'll find her, and if I find her, I don't trust my face to do what a Sergeant at Arms's face is supposed to do.

Rogue takes Hadley's hand.

Phantom starts to speak, low and steady, the voice of a man who's stood under this tree and buried people and married people and blessed babies born to this dirt.

I hear about half of it.

Something about how love isn't the soft thing people sell you, it's the hard one, the choice you make on the days it costs you.

Something about a woman who lost a good man and a man who spent his whole life waiting to be chosen, and how they found each other on the far side of everything that tried to break them.

That part hits the entire crowd.

It’s important to remember, and I make the mistake I swore I wouldn't make. I turn my head.

She's already looking at me.

Presley.

Across the whole clearing with the gold light in her red hair and her daddy's jaw set against something, looking straight at me the way she hasn't let herself in five weeks of Sunday suppers I've dodged and runs I've volunteered for just to keep from sitting at a table with her and pretending she's nothing to me.

For one second, neither of us looks away.

For one second, it's the two of us and forty feet of other people's happiness.

Her eyes go bright and her jaw works the way her father's does when he's holding something down.

Mine's doing the same, and I think—clear as anything I've ever thought—that should be us and it never will be.

She looks away first.

She has to, or I would’ve, and one of us being strong enough to break it is the only mercy in the whole moment.

Phantom says the words. Rogue says the words back.

He bends and kisses his wife, and the pasture erupts, hats in the air, Dakota's whoop cutting over the top of it.

Diesel’s barking at the noise, and I clap along with my cane hooked over my wrist because a man needs both hands to clap and I need one for the fence rail.

I smile because you smile at a wedding.

Then people start moving toward the barn where the food is, and the crowd swallows the space between me and her, and that's my window.

I take it.

I catch Rogue on the way past—get a hand on his shoulder, lean in over the noise. "Happy for you, brother. Truly."

"You're not stayin'?" He says it flat.

Rogue doesn't miss things. It's what makes him good and what makes him a problem.

"Hip's had enough. Gonna get off it before it quits on me in front of God and the chapters."

He looks at me a half second longer than the lie deserves.

Then he nods, because it's his wedding day and he's got a wife to feed, and he's not going to spend the moment digging at me. "Go easy on it."

"Yeah."

I go.

Sixty yards of gravel back to the trucks, and every one of them hurts.

I'm glad of the hurt because it gives me something to think about that isn't the green dress.

I don't look back to see if she watched me leave.

I already know she didn't.

She's better at this than I am.

She'll walk into that barn and eat cake and laugh with her sisters who aren't speaking to her and hold the whole thing together with that Lyle spine, and nobody will know she's coming apart.

She learned how to do that somewhere along the way and it's the saddest skill a person can have.

I get to the truck. Lean against the door and breathe through the worst of the hip before I trust myself to climb in.

Out past the pasture the fiddle's started up again, faster now, and I can hear the party finding its feet—my whole family, the only one I've ever had, celebrating a good thing under that old tree.

And me out here in the gravel, leaving it, because I can't sit in a room with the woman I want and keep lying about it.

I told her I wasn't done.

I told her she wasn't done with me either, and I meant it, and I've spent every day since doing exactly nothing about it but heal and hurt and going out on runs I volunteered for so I wouldn't have to watch her across a supper table.

I get in the truck. Sit there a second with my hand on the key and my bad leg stretched out stiff into the well.

There's a rattlesnake healing on the side of my neck that she hasn't seen yet.

Got it the week after she walked out my door—sat in a chair in Llano and let a man put her on my skin where I'd feel it every time I turned my head, because I'm a fool for her and I decided I'd rather wear the proof than pretend.

She hasn't laid eyes on it.

She will.

This ranch is too small and I'm too far gone for her not to, and when she does, she's going to know exactly what it means.

I'm not done.

I turn the key and the truck rumbles up under me.

I pull out slowly down the ranch road while my family dances behind me, and I make myself the same promise I've made every gray morning since she left.

I'm going to get her back.

Not today.

Today she gets to grieve what we can't have in a green dress at her friend’s wedding, same as me.

But she's mine, Presley Lyle, even if she doesn't know it yet—and I've never craved a single thing in my life the way I mean to earn the right to stand under that oak with her someday and not give a good goddamn who's watching.