Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70516 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70516 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Boston and I were happily drinking down a coffee from the local coffee shop—definitely not a Starbucks but something way better—when my phone rang.
I was with Nettie, Boston and someone wholly intimidating—the president of the Dixie Wardens MC Sawtooth chapter—Denver.
Denver was a great guy.
I’d only met him this morning when he’d shown up in my hospital room and announced he would be the one taking us all home—to Weaver’s home.
Since I’d gotten the message from Weaver that a telephone pole had fallen and cut off power to the nursing home down the road, and that he’d be sending someone to give us all a ride home, I hadn’t questioned the man from Weaver’s club showing up.
Denver had proven he was a sweetheart by asking us all if we wanted coffee, then he’d taken us out to breakfast after picking up our fatty drinks.
By the time that I was able to be released to work out again, I’d have to be rolled into the gym.
We were halfway through eating when my parents came storming into the diner, looking furious.
My dad saw me, pointed at me, and roared, “How could you do this to me?”
Denver got up and placed his body in front of the booth, physically stopping my father from coming closer.
“Sir, I think you need to leave.” Denver stood his ground, his voice scary soft and icily intimidating.
“Oh, you think?” Dad sneered. “My own daughter is accusing me of something heinous, and you think that I’m going to take it lying down?”
The whispers started, and I felt my face heat.
“What was it that she ‘accused’ you of?” Denver asked, sounding curious.
He damn well knew what it was my dad was being accused of, though.
They—the Dixie Wardens MC—all knew.
They’d all taken it upon themselves to do what they could to help, and would never stop. Not only because it was a sick thing my parents were doing, but because I now belonged to one of their members. I was one of them.
“What is he talking about?” I heard Boston whisper to Nettie.
Nettie replied, but it was too soft for me to hear over my mother who started screaming. “How could you, Edith?”
More whispers.
What a shitshow.
There were better times and places, and they were only making this worse.
“You’ll get what’s coming to you.” My dad stepped back, giving me a clear view of his angry face. “And when it finally catches up to you, you’ll know that you were the reason this all happened.”
My mother and father left just as abruptly as they arrived, leaving the diner in stunned silence.
“Call Black,” Denver said quietly. “Right now.”
I assumed he was talking to me, because there was no one else at the table that could’ve known what he was talking about. But then a man I hadn’t observed at the counter stood up and reached for his phone clipped to his belt. I recognized him as Odin, the town grump and expert glarer. He’d scared the absolute crap out of me ever since he’d started showing up in town with the Dixie Wardens last year.
The first time I’d seen him he’d gotten in a bar fight with one of the workers at Paul Bunyon’s Logging. The man had been the size of a brick shit house, and looked like he could bench press a Buick. Yet, Odin had found offense when the man had tried to force his wife to drink a shot that she didn’t want to drink. After telling the man off, Odin had gone back to his business.
But the abuser had hauled his wife up by her hair and all but shoved the shot down her throat, and Odin had rightly objected to that move also and shown him the error of his ways.
From that moment on, I’d had a wary respect for him.
Now, looking at him, he looked even more scary, which should’ve been impossible. However, I was experiencing it with my own eyes, and the man looked like he could flay the skin off your bones with just a narrow-eyed glare.
“Black,” I heard Odin rumble. “Something’s happened.”
“You okay?”
I looked away from Odin to see Denver looking at me like I would break.
But that’s the thing about my parents. Their opinions of me had stopped mattering the day that I’d emancipated myself and moved out at seventeen.
“Yes,” I lied.
I might not get my feelings hurt as easily, but that didn’t mean that everyone else’s opinion of me didn’t matter.
Especially the two men standing in front of me looking quite ferocious.
They meant something to Weaver, so that meant they meant something to me.
And I liked to make good impressions when it mattered.
“What’s with that look on your face, then?” he asked bluntly.
“I can’t say that I quite like the idea of my business being aired like it has,” I admitted. “But I know that something like this wasn’t ever going to stay secret for long.”