Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Presley
Carelessness never announces itself.
You never feel it happening.
You don't notice the exact day you stop parking your truck around back.
You don't clock the moment you quit checking the yard before you kiss him.
It creeps up an inch at a time, all that happiness making you soft, slow and sure.
Until one ordinary afternoon you're standing in the gap between the horse barn and the equipment shed with Thunder's hands on your face and his mouth on yours in the wide-open daylight.
Not a wall or a door between you and the whole ranch, because you've forgotten to be afraid.
For months I did everything right.
I parked where nobody looked.
I left before dawn.
I checked windows and doorways and the tree line like a woman with a price on her head, because in a way I had one, because us getting caught meant my entire family would come apart for a second time.
And then the family stitched itself back together, and the investigator went away, and my sisters started answering my texts.
Somewhere in all that relief I let my guard down one notch at a time until there wasn't any guard left at all.
Happiness did what fear never could.
It made me stupid.
That's how it gets you.
That's how it gets us.
It starts sweet, is the cruel part.
I've come from the tack room and he's come from the shop.
We meet in the middle the way we do a dozen times a day now, and he catches my wrist and reels me in.
I go, laughing, because Raine's at Mama Lou's and the afternoon's soft and gold, and there's nobody around.
"You've got hay in your hair," he says, and picks it out, and then he doesn't let go.
His hand slides to my jaw, that big warm palm cupping the side of my face the way it does when he's about to kiss me like he means it.
I tip up into him, and he kisses me slow and deep right there in the open, one hand in my hair and the other dropping to my waist, and I melt into him the way I always do.
His hand at my waist rucks my shirt up.
Just an inch.
Just enough that the warm air hits the small of my back, the fresh ink there barely healed.
I don't think anything of it.
I've got my arms up around his neck and my whole self leaned into the man I love and I am, for one more second, completely happy.
And then I hear my father's voice, and the bottom drops out of the world. "What in the hell?"
We spring apart like the ground's gone electric.
My whole body floods cold, then hot, a sick lurch of adrenaline that leaves my hands shaking and my ears ringing and my heart trying to climb up out of my throat.
I yank my shirt down on pure reflex, too late, always too late.
Everything slows down the way it does in a wreck, that awful stretched-out second where you can see exactly what's coming and you can't do one single thing to stop it.
There's a roaring in my ears.
The gold afternoon that felt like a gift thirty seconds ago has turned into a spotlight, and we're standing dead center in it, with no wall, no door, and no dark to duck into.
Nothing between us and the man at the mouth of the gap but twenty feet of open dirt.
Pops’ standing there, and I don't know how long he's been there.
It doesn't matter, because his eyes aren't on my face.
They're on my back.
On the strip of skin my rucked-up shirt left bare, on the black script he'd have caught before I could yank the hem down.
Property of Thunder.
He read it.
I watch him read it, watch the words hit my father's face and change everything behind his eyes.
"Pops—" My hand's already out, reaching, my heart slamming so hard I taste it. "Pops, wait?—"
But he's not looking at me anymore.
He's looking at Thunder.
And I've seen my father angry.
I've seen him cold, seen him deadly, heard the stories about what Phantom Lyle is capable of when somebody crosses the club.
But I have never once seen what's on his face right now, this white-lipped, wild-eyed, betrayed-to-the-bone fury, and it's not aimed at me.
Every ounce of it is aimed at his Sergeant at Arms.
"Harlan." Thunder's voice is low, steady, both hands coming up open and easy, the voice he uses to gentle a spooked animal. "Let's you and me walk somewhere and talk."
"Talk." Pops says it like the word tastes foul. He crosses the distance between them slowly, and there's nothing slow about what's underneath it. "You want to talk to me now. That's rich, Thunder. That's real rich, comin' from you."
"Pops, this is on me too, it's not just—" I try to step between them and my father's arm comes up, not touching me, just barring me back, his eyes never leaving Thunder's face.
"Stay out of this a second, baby. I'll get to you.
" Quiet. Almost gentle to me, even now. Then, to Thunder, every bit of gentleness gone.
"My sergeant at arms. My sword. The man I trust with—" His jaw works, and he drops his voice low and lethal, because even furious he doesn't say the buried things out loud in the open.
"You know exactly what I trust you with. Better than any man breathin'. And you've been puttin' your hands on my daughter behind my back."
"Yes." Thunder doesn't flinch. Doesn't dodge. Takes it standing. "I have."
"How long?"
"Since the spring."
The number hits my father like a fist and I see him absorb it, the months of it, all the Sunday suppers and church meetings and shared cups of coffee, every one of them with this secret sitting underneath.
"The spring." Pops’ chest is heaving now. "Months. Months of sittin' at my table, breakin' bread at my house, lookin' me in the eye in church, and the whole time you're—" He can't even finish it.
He scrubs a hand down his face and when it comes away his eyes are bright and terrible. "You looked me in the eye, Thunder. Every week. And you lied. Not once. Over and over, for months, you chose the lie."
"I did." Thunder's voice doesn't waver but I can see how it’s affecting him, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands stay open at his sides. "And I'll answer for it however you need me to. But you point that at me, Harlan. Not at her. This was my call as much as?—"
"Don't."
Phantom's on him then, fast for a big man, one hand fisting in the front of Thunder's cut, shoving him back into the equipment shed wall hard enough to rattle the tin.
"Don't you tell me where to point."
"Pops, stop—" I grab his arm and he doesn't even feel me.
Thunder could put him down.
That's what guts me, watching it.
Thunder is bigger, and even hurt he's the most dangerous man on this ranch.
He could break my father's hold and drop him in the dirt without half trying.
He doesn't.
He takes it.
He lets Pops slam him into the wall and fist his cut, getting right up in his face.
He keeps his hands open and down and his eyes level, because this is his president, and by every law of the world they both live in, Thunder's the one in the wrong.
And I can't stand it, watching the man I love hold still and let another man rattle him against a wall.
Every muscle in me wants to throw myself between them.
I've got my hands on my father's arm and I might as well be pulling on a fence post for all the good it does.
Thunder catches my eye over Pops’ shoulder, one flick, and there's a warning in it, a plea, a don't, and I understand what he's telling me even as it kills me.
He needs me to let this happen.
He needs to give Pops this, the shove and the fury and the right to it, because it's the only apology the club's world lets a man make with his body.
So, I let go of my father's arm.
I stand there with my fists clenched so hard my nails bite my palms and I let them have it out, and it's the hardest thing I've done since the day I learned what my mother did.
"You're an officer at my table," Phantom says, low and shaking, their faces inches apart. "You took an oath. You of all of 'em. And you decided my own daughter was somethin' you could just take and not tell me. Like I don't matter. Like twenty years of brotherhood buys me nothin'."
"It was never that."
"Then what was it!" It rips out of him, and for a second under the rage there's something that looks horribly like hurt. "What was it, if not you deciding I couldn't be trusted with the truth about my own girl?"
"Because I told him not to." My voice cracks out of me before I can think, and finally, finally, my father's head turns, his hand still fisted in Thunder's cut. "It was me, Pops."
I'm shaking everywhere, but I get it out.
"I'm the one who wanted it secret. I begged him to keep it quiet.
I was scared, and my family had just blown apart, and I couldn't—I couldn't take one more thing detonating, so I made him promise.
If you're gonna be furious at somebody for the secret, then be furious at me, because the secret was mine before it was ever his. "
It works, at least halfway.
His hand loosens on Thunder's cut.
He steps back, breathing hard, and turns to face me full on, and now I'm the one getting the whole weight of that stare, and God, it's so much worse aimed at me.
"You," he says, and his voice has changed, gone rough and wounded in a way that scares me more than the yelling.
"You kept this from me too."
"I—yes. Yes, I did."
"After everything." He shakes his head slowly.
"After what secrets did to this family. After what my secret did to your sisters, to Shiver, to you—you watched all of it, you lived it, you know better than anybody in this world what a secret costs when it finally comes up.
And you looked me in the eye at Sunday supper and kept one of your own. "
And there it is.
What's actually breaking him.
Not the club, not Thunder's hands on me, not even the ink.
That I did to him the exact thing he did to us.
I look at my father.
Really look at him for the first time since he came around that corner, and under the fury I finally see the rest of it.
The lines around his eyes are deeper than they were in the spring.
His hands aren't quite steady where they hang at his sides.
This isn't a man protecting his daughter's honor or defending his club's chain of command.
This is a man who spent two years watching one buried secret rot his family from the inside, who finally got most of his kids back in the same room, who thought the worst was behind him.
And here I am, the daughter he took in late and tried the hardest to make room for, showing him the rot got into me too.
That I learned the family trade after all.
Keeping things in the dark.
Looking him in the eye and letting him believe a lie because it was easier than the truth.
I want to tell him it wasn't like that.
I want to tell him a hundred things.
And the sheer helpless need to make him understand shoves the first words up out of me before I've thought them through.
"That's not fair." My voice is climbing now, wet and unsteady. "Pops, that's not—the situations aren't the same, you can't?—"
"Aren't they?"
"No! God, no, they're not, and if you'd just let me?—"
"You stood in my kitchen." He's not shouting now. Somehow the quiet is worse. "Not two months ago. And you let me go on thinkin' I knew what was happenin' in my own family, on my own ranch, with my own daughter, and the whole time you and my sergeant at arms were?—"
"Because I knew you'd do this!" I throw a hand at the two of them, at Thunder pinned a second ago against the shed, at all of it. "This exact thing, Pops, this is why, because the second you found out you'd?—"
"I'd what, Presley." His eyes are blazing. "Say it. What was I gonna do that was so terrible it was worth lyin' to my face for half a year?"
And I open my mouth to tell him.
To finally say all of it, everything that's been building in me for months, every ounce of the anger and the grief and the terrible unfairness of being the one who lost the most and got blamed the worst.
But he doesn't let me.
"No," he says, cutting clean through whatever I was about to become.
"No. I don't want to hear it right now, because right now I'm lookin' at my youngest, the one who came to this family late and got hurt worst of all, and I'm realizin' she looked me dead in the eye and decided I was just one more person she couldn't trust. That's what I've got.
That's what the both of you left me holdin'. "
His voice breaks on the last word, actually breaks, and my father, my hard, deadly, unshakeable father, turns away from me so I won't see his face.
And every word I had lined up dies in my throat.
The heat drains out of me all at once and leaves something hollow and awful behind.
My eyes are burning, spilling over before I can stop them, and there's a pressure building behind my ribs so hard I can barely pull a breath around it.
I came into this braced to fight him, and instead I'm watching the strongest man I know stand in the dirt with his back to me like I put a knife in him.
"Pops." It comes out of me wrecked, barely a sound. "Pops, please, let me just?—"
"Not now." He doesn't turn around. "I can't look at either one of you right now."
"But you're not being—if you'd only listen for one second, you'd?—"
"I said not now, Presley." And it hits so heavy, so final, that whatever I was building toward collapses in my chest before I can get it out.
My throat closes.
My hands won't stop shaking.
Every argument I've been stacking up for months, every true and furious thing I've been dying to say to him, jams in behind my teeth and won't come, because he won't turn around, and he won't listen, and I'm crying too hard now to force it.