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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Zach sat up againstthe headboard of Lyra’s canopy bed and watched her sleep. She was curled against him, her head tucked against his side, her top leg resting across his thighs. Her hands were curled up together beneath her chin, and her hair trailed back across the pillows like a flag.
They hadn’t talked last night, just gone into the house and up the stairs to this bed, where they’d fucked quietly and then gone to sleep.
It had felt right, last night, to simply be close and feel nothing but this fire between them, this thing that felt so good and right. Soimportant.
But now, in the pale light of a dawning morning, Zach was worried again.
Trouble had shot up between them out of nowhere. Last night, shocked and confused, all he could think was to go after her and make her talk, but then she hadn’t been home. While he’d sat there, for more than an hour, he’d tried to figure out what had happened, to understand his own feelings as well as hers, but he hadn’t been able to unpack it all.
Then she’d finally come home and run up to him, apologizing like a chant, and all that had mattered was reclaiming the good.
He realized he’d been thinking of her as someone who knew what an MC life meant. Someone like him, who’d been raised in that life. But she hadn’t been. Her father was a biker, had been an outlaw, but not during her lifetime—and he was clearly protective of his only daughter’s innocence.
She knew some things, though. She’d known enough, at least, to have an idea what his Righteous Fist flash meant.
It was possible he’d overreacted when she’d asked if he’d killed. But he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to take a question like that, especially when asked by the woman he wanted to be with, and in the middle of her tantrum over the club. The whole thing had sort of exploded in his head like a bomb.
Maybe something similar had happened in Lyra’s head, too—a bunch of realizations, each minor on its own, all landing at once and making a major mess. So the timeline of their ... fight? ... was: she was grossed out by the house. Fair enough; Gargoyle and Cooper were both legendary slobs who could turn a perfectly clean room into a landfill in under an hour. Then she’d been sent from the room—by her father, but Cooper or Caleb would have done the same, with possibly a bit more subtlety. Caleb, at least, would have probably been more subtle than justgo somewhere else.
Then, while Coop and Caleb laid out the details from their call to Tulsa—nothing earthshattering, but talk of money and specific terms, which was private shit—Lyra had been storming around in the kitchen, slamming doors and generally making it very clear she was pissed. Clear enough that Zach had started getting ‘control your woman’ looks from Coop. ThenReedhad given him a similar look, and Zach had realized two things: first, that everybody in that room, including her family, already saw her as his, and second, that that meant he was responsible for her.
He hadn’t considered that element of being in a serious relationship—that, in the eyes of the Bulls, what Lyra did would reflect on him.
One of the reasons he wanted to come to Laughlin was to getawayfrom those kinds of expectations—the expectation to measure up to his father, to keep his brother on the road. To keep his woman out of the club’s way.
That understanding hadn’t really landed in his head until she’d gotten in his face about club secrets and getting shunted aside. So yeah, there’d been some kind of explosion inside him right then, and yeah, maybe he’d overreacted.
But when she’d walked away, when she’dleft, he’d felt like somebody had opened up his chest and emptied him out. He couldnotlet what had been growing between them since July just die off like that.
He’d left the kitchen like one minute after her, just in time to see the front door close. Then he’d stood there and stared at it for a while like an idiot. When he’d turned to Ben, the old cuss shook his head and said,I told you, I’m not talkin’ to you about my girl.
Reed had said,Michelle is working tonight, and there’s nobody else she’d talk to right now, so she’ll go home.So Zach had gone to the Haddon house.
And waited. And tried to get his head to think clearly. He hadn’t had much success at that last night, and when she’d shown up and run to him, he honestly hadn’t given a fuck about anything else.
But for the past two hours or so since he’d come awake, he’d been doing nothing else but think it all out.
Where he’d landed: it was up to Lyra. He was a Bull. Body, mind, and soul. Blood and bone. Through and through. He’d been a Bull before he’d worn a patch. From the day he was born.
She had to be one-hundred-percent okay with what that meant, what the club demanded of Zach, and what it would demand of her. One. Hundred. Percent. If she was all in, it would be no burden to be responsible for her. She wasn’t like Jay, expecting him to fix everything, and she couldn’t be like his dad, leaving a massive print he was expected to fill. But if she had any reservations at all, they couldn’t possibly work. Reservations about the Bulls were reservations about Zach himself.
If she had even one, he’d walk away. Right now, because every day they stayed together without a future would make it all hurt more when the inevitable end came.
As that thought settled across his brainstem, Zach finally comprehended what it really meant: he was thinking of a future with Lyra. Hewanteda future with Lyra. If they had one, he was staying in Laughlin. He was making that decisiontoday, when she woke up, and they talked.
