Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Thunder
Every second of my life the club taught me to stand still and take it, and I've been standing still and taking it since the second Phantom came around that corner.
You don't fight your president.
You don't raise a hand to the man who gave you your patch, not when he's in the right, and he's in the right, because I did what he's accusing me of.
I put my hands on his daughter and I kept it from him for a whole season, and by every law I've lived by for fifteen years, whatever he wants to do to me for that, I've got coming.
So, I took the shove.
Took the fist in my cut and the wall against my back and the worst words a brother can say to a brother.
I kept my hands open and my mouth shut, because that's the price and I'll pay it.
Something in me that's been holding still since the spring just quits holding.
Because I'll take a beating.
I'll take his fury and his fists and lose my seat at his table.
I will not stand here and watch her take it for me.
"No." It comes out of me low and hard.
Both of them turn, because I haven't said more than five words this whole time and now I'm stepping up out of the spot I've been rooted in. "That's not how this goes."
Moving up beside her, close, my shoulder to hers, I look my president dead in the eye for the first time since he caught us.
"She's not payin’ the price for this, Prez.
Not one ounce of it. You want somebody to be furious at, you're lookin' at him.
I'm the one with years on her. I'm the officer who sat at your table and broke faith with you.
Any promise got made, I'm the one who should've known better than to make it. You put every bit of it on me."
"Thunder, don't—" Presley grabs my arm. "I'm not lettin' you take this."
I don't look away from Phantom when I say it. "Not this. Not for me."
And Phantom, who a minute ago couldn't look at either one of us, looks at me now, really looks, and the fury finds a new channel.
"You want it all on you." His voice has dropped, gone quiet and dangerous. "Fine. Let's put it on you. Let's talk about what you did."
"Harlan—"
"You marked her." The words land flat and terrible in the space between us, and beside me Presley goes rigid. "I saw it."
His jaw is working. "On her back. Your name.
Property of Thunder, inked into my daughter's skin like she's a bike or a bar stool, permanent, forever, and you did it behind my back and never said a word.
" His voice cracks down the middle. "That's not a man sneakin' around with a girl, Thunder.
A man sneakin' around, that I could understand, God help me, I was young once.
But you claimed her. In ink. The most permanent thing our world's got.
You put the club's own language on her body and you didn't have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me first."
And there it is, the wound under all the rest of it.
Not that I touched her.
That I claimed her like a brother claims an old lady, made it permanent and real and forever, and cut him out of the one moment a father's supposed to get.
"You're right," I tell him, because he is."About all of it. I'd have wanted to be told too."
"Don't you dare agree with me right now?—"
"But you're wrong about one thing." I hold his eyes.
"You keep sayin' I claimed her. Like she's somethin' that got done to, somethin' with no say in it.
Harlan, that woman standin' next to me walked into a tattoo shop with her chin up and told the man what she wanted and where.
I tried to talk her out of the Property of.
I did. I told her it was too much, too permanent, that you'd take it as a declaration of war. "
I let that sit. "She got it anyway. Because she wanted it. Your daughter has more spine than the whole clubhouse put together, and you're standin' here talkin' like she's a girl I stole. She's not. She's the strongest person either of us knows, and she made a choice, and the choice was me."
Phantom's eyes cut to her.
And Presley, God love her, lifts her chin and proves every word of it.
"He's telling the truth," she says, and her voice isn't shaking anymore. "I chose it. All of it. The tattoo, the secret, him. And you want to stand here and be furious about a secret, Pops? You? You want to talk to me about keeping something from the people you love?"
"Presley." Low. A warning.
"No. You had your turn, now I'm having mine.
" She steps forward, and there's something coming up in her now that I've never seen.
All that grief and fury she swallowed a minute ago rising back up with nowhere left to go.
"Your secret was a body, Pops. Mine is that I fell in love.
You want to compare? Let's compare. You buried a woman.
You let my sisters grieve a mother who abandoned them for two years, when you knew the whole time she was in the ground.
You let Shiver blame himself. You let Dakota lose her mind hiring investigators. And me?—"
Her voice breaks and climbs right through the break.
"Your secret cost me my whole family. It cost me my sisters looking at me like I killed their mother. I was a stranger who didn’t even go to supper because I was avoiding everything.
I was talking to Mitch's ashes because there wasn't a living soul who'd have me.
Your secret did that. And you've got the nerve to stand in this yard and be destroyed because I didn't tell you I'm happy? "
Something happens to a man when he watches the woman he loves finally put down a weight she's been hauling for far too long.
I've seen Presley strong before.
I've seen her run a whole breeding program on no sleep, how she was with her laboring sister to the hospital encouraging her, take a needle to the ribs without a sound.
But I've never seen this, never seen her stand toe to toe with the most feared man in three counties and hand him back every ounce of what he laid on her.
I have to plant my boots to keep from pulling her into my side right there, because God, she's magnificent, and she's mine, and her father is finally, finally hearing her.
I don't say a word.
This part's hers.
All I do is move a half step closer so she can feel me at her shoulder, so she knows without looking that whatever she throws down, I'm standing on it with her, and her chin comes up that last defiant inch when she feels me there.
Nobody says anything.
The whole ranch has gone dead quiet around us, that thick summer silence with nothing in it but a windmill turning somewhere off past the barns, and Presley's words go into her father one by one like nails.
Because she's right. She's dead right, and every man standing in this gap knows it.
It finally sinks in for him.
I've spent almost fifteen years learning to read Harlan Lyle, the small tells under the hard face, and this one hits him somewhere he can't armor.
His jaw unclenches.
Something goes loose and stricken around his eyes.
For just a second the fury drops clean off him and what's left underneath is a tired man in his fifties who did a terrible thing for what he told himself were good reasons, hearing his youngest daughter lay out the bill.
He opens his mouth.
Nothing comes.
Because there's no answer to it.
There's no version of I did it to protect the family that holds up when his daughter's standing in front of him listing everything the protection cost.
He taught his kids that secrets keep the people you love safe, and every one of them learned the opposite the hard way, and now here we all are.
"Presley," he finally says, and his voice is wrecked. "You don't understand what I was tryin' to?—"
"I understand better than anybody." She's crying now, but her voice stays level.
"That's the whole issue. I understand exactly why you did it, because I just spent half a year doing the same thing.
That's what you gave me, Pops. That's my inheritance.
I learned to lie to the people I love to keep them safe, and I learned it from you. "
That does it.
Not the anger.
The truth.
Phantom takes a step back like she shoved him, and for one raw second his face just crumples, and I think, there it is, that's the road back, he heard her?—
And then the armor slams down.
Because Harlan Lyle doesn't fall apart in a ranch yard in front of his sergeant at arms, not even now, not even wrecked.
He pulls it all back in behind that hard face and squares his shoulders and I know we've lost him for today, that whatever just cracked open is going to scab over before he lets any of us see it work.
"I can't do this right now." His voice comes out flat and scraped raw. "I can't stand here and look at the both of you and think straight.
I need—" He shakes his head. "I need to not be here."
He turns to go.
Gets a few steps away and stops.
He doesn't turn all the way around.
Just his head, just enough to throw it over his shoulder, and it's aimed at me. "Almost fifteen years, Thunder."
Quiet. No heat left in it, which is somehow worse than the yelling.
"You've been my sword for those years. There's not a man alive I trusted more."
"I know it," I say.
"I'd have told you. I wanted to tell you a hundred times. I hated every day I didn't."
"Then why?"
"Because she asked me not to, and she'd already lost everything. I wasn't gonna be one more person who let her down."
His stare doesn't waver and neither does mine.
"You'd have done the same for a woman you loved.
You did do the same. That's the whole damn problem in this family, Harlan.
We're all willin' to burn ourselves down to protect our women, and not one of us knows how to just tell the truth and trust the people we love to survive it. "
Something moves behind his eyes.
It's not forgiveness. It's a long way from forgiveness.
But it's not the door slamming either, and after years of reading this man I know the difference.
"We're not done, you and me," he says.
"No, sir. I don't reckon we are."
"But not today." And then, lower, almost too quiet to catch: "Take care of her. Since I'm apparently the last to know she's yours to take care of."
And he walks off across the yard toward the clubhouse, and doesn't look back again.
He leaves me standing in the gap between the barns with the woman we both love coming apart beside me.
She holds it together until his truck starts up somewhere past the shop.
Then she breaks.
It comes out of her all at once, the whole day, every held breath since the spring, and she folds in on herself right there in the dirt with both hands over her face and her shoulders heaving.
The sound she makes goes straight through the middle of me.
I don't say a word. Words are no good for this.
All I can do is get my arms around her and pull her in against my chest and hold on.
She grabs two fistfuls of my shirt and cries into it like something's tearing loose, and I stand there in the open where anybody could see and I don't care, not anymore, because the secret's out and the worst has happened and there's not one thing left to hide.
"I've got you," I tell her into her hair. "I've got you. Come on. Not here."
She lets me walk her to my truck.
I drive her to her cabin because it's closer and because right now she needs walls around her and my body between her and the whole rest of the world.
She cries the whole way there with her hand fisted in mine over the console, and I hold it the entire drive and don't let go once, not to shift, not for anything.
I get her inside.
The door shuts behind us, the two of us finally alone with no yard and no father and no club.
She turns around in the middle of her own living room and looks up at me with her face wrecked, her eyes wet and something else coming up underneath the grief now.
Something with heat in it, something that's been building all through the worst afternoon of both our lives.
"Thunder." My name, raw, half a plea.
"I'm here." Both my hands come up to take her face. "I'm right here, rattlesnake. I'm not goin' anywhere."
And she comes up onto her toes and kisses me like she's drowning.