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“Carly is your mom?” Huntsman asked finally, and my heart skipped.
He remembered her name.
“Yes,” I whispered, finally lowering my gun, but refusing to put it down until I heard more of what Huntsman had to say. I could tell he was a hard man. He hadn’t thought twice about putting his hands on me when he thought I might have been lying to him or a threat. Yet, when I looked at him now, I noticed his gaze was glued to the picture he held. His features had softened slightly, which only made my heart race even faster.
“Brew, Orion, go wait outside for me,” Huntsman ordered, much to Brew’s horror.
Orion gave me one last curious look before heading for the door. Brew being smart, he kept his mouth closed and followed, but not before giving me that one final look which was full of dark and painful promises. Almost like he knew I was hiding some secret, and it was just a matter of time before he figured it out.
I wasn’t hiding a secret, but I was pretty sure he was going to find one anyway.
When the door closed, I finally allowed myself to breathe. Taking a seat on my bed, I put the safety back on my gun and slipped it into my bedside drawer. While the state of Arizona wouldn’t let me conceal and carry until I was twenty-one, at eighteen, I was still allowed to own a handgun, and Hadley and Leo had made sure I had one which was perfect for me and that I was confident in using before I left Athens.
I was pretty thankful for that now.
Huntsman was quiet.
He leaned against my window frame, his eyes still stuck on the photo of him and my mother.
“So you do remember her,” I murmured, not wanting to disturb the moment he was having, but impatient and needing to hear what he had to say about the whole thing.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I remember her,” he admitted, his brows growing a little sterner when he looked up at me. “I ain’t the one who left her high and dry, though. We spent… time together. Then the minute I got called away to deal with some club business, she fucking disappeared into thin air.”
The nostalgia had passed, and now he was pissed.
He obviously had a different idea of what happened between them than my mom did, or at least, he didn’t know the whole story. “My grandparents… her parents were killed in a car accident,” I told him, suddenly feeling overwhelmed and upset. It was hard for me to miss people that I’d never met, but the emotions I felt were for the pain I knew my mom and my aunt had gone through. The same pain that I knew Ham had gone through when his parents were killed. One I couldn’t ever imagine I’d ever be able to come back from.
Huntsman tossed the photo on the ground with a flick of his wrist, and my mouth dropped open. “I don’t fucking care if her damn dog died. She walked away without a single word. Then she had my child, and never fucking bothered to tell me? She’s just like every other bitch.”
Flying to my feet, I shoved him in the chest, hard enough to have him move onto his back foot to stabilize himself. There’s no way in hell I was about to let him get away with talking about my mom that way. “Before you start throwing the wordbitcharound, maybe you should listen to the whole story,” I spat, picking up the photo off the floor and slamming it against his chest. “My mom went to the clubhouse to find you, but do you know what she found instead?”
His face had hardened again, his fists clenched by his sides as if he was barely controlling himself, and if I didn’t step lightly, I was probably going to earn myself a black eye.
Yes, I was pretty sure my so-called father wasn’t one of thoseI’ve never hit a womantype of men. My mom was right when she said these men, they weren’t like Uncle Leo and his brothers, they were different. More intense. Less give a fuck. I wasn’t saying they weren’t capable of love because I could hear the hurt in his voice, not just the anger when he spoke about Mom leaving without a word. I just had that feeling if I spoke too far out of turn, I was going know about it, and it was probably going to hurt.
If there was one thing I’d learned spending time with the club, it was that respect went a long way, and right now, I’d thrown all my respect for Huntsman on the floor, and I was treading all over it.
“No guesses?” I threw in sarcastically. “She found your wife.”
He didn’t look even slightly shocked, but I did catch a twitch in his features, one that told me he wasn’t all that happy with this information.
I gave him a chance to speak, to explain, or tell me that he didn’t know. But when he continued to just stare me down, I gave up. I was done.
“You can leave now,” I ordered, folding my arms across my chest, trying to be strong and not let the tears that were welling, fall and have him think that he’d won. “Go back to your wife. I didn’t come looking for you. I didn’t search you out. But what I’ve figured out during this very informative but brief meeting, is that I’ve done perfectly well without you in my life. Learned to drive a car without you. Learned to shoot a gun without you. Learned to respect myself without you.” I stomped toward the door, yanking it open in anger and holding it, hoping he’d just leave me the hell alone so I could break down in peace.
It was a Mexican standoff—neither one of us moving an inch.
The kids who were milling around the hallway, trying to figure out what I was doing in here with the president of one of the scariest motorcycle clubs around, they all scattered in fear.
I was a mask of strength, and I wore it pretty fucking well.
It was just that though—a mask—a part I was playing to try to get out of this situation possibly unscathed.
When he finally moved, the air in the room shifted around him like a tumultuous storm filled with all kinds of different emotions. He stopped at the door, and in a moment of weakness, I looked up finding his eyes staring back down at me. No, not his eyes—my eyes. Eyes that I’d seen in the mirror every morning for the past eighteen years. I’d never doubted once that what my mom had told me might not have been true, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t either.
We both knew he was my father.
It was now just going to be about what he was going to do about it.
