“So,” she said as she paused next to the couch. “Tonight didn’t exactly go as planned.”
“You shoulda gone to the hospital,” I chastised. “Still no dizziness?”
“What can I say to convince you that I’m fine?” she asked, sliding her arms around my waist. “My head hurts, and I’m shaken up, but I promise I feel okay otherwise. I wanted to spend tonight with you like we planned. You had a fucked-up day and—”
“Are you shittin’ me?” I asked incredulously. “You didn’t go to the hospital because I had a bad day?”
“Well, no,” she hedged. “I didn’t go because I fucking hate hospitals, and Aunt Molly could do the same things they would’ve done. But, yeah, I wanted to stay with you tonight because you had a bad day.”
I hadn’t even thought about Bernice and the house and all the other shit since the moment I’d seen Leo’s truck sideways next to the road.
“Baby, you could’ve stayed home with your parents. I’m fine.”
“I’d like to point out thatI’vetoldyouthat I was fine like ten times and you didn’t believe it,” she said dryly. “I wanted to stay with you tonight, okay? You had a bad day, I had a bad day, it was a bad day all around.”
“You wanna go crawl into bed?” I asked, brushing her hair away from her face. There were still crunchy areas where the blood hadn’t been cleaned out.
“Can I shower first?” she asked. “I would’ve at my parents’ house, but I was worried you’d take off.”
I scoffed. “I wouldn’t have left.”
Taking her hand, I led her upstairs to the bathroom. As soon as I’d gotten her situated with a towel and the shower was running, I left her to it and jogged back downstairs. I checked both of the locks twice and made sure that the windows were closed and locked, dowels pressed firmly in the bases. Then I perched glasses on the windowsills so if someone attempted to move the blinds, they’d crash to the floor.
When I was done, I headed back upstairs to find Harper sitting on the end of my bed, her hair wrapped in a towel.
“I was full of ambition,” she said tiredly. “But I honestly don’t know if I’m down for sex tonight. My head is killing me.”
Sex hadn’t even been on my radar.
“You wanna just get in bed?” I asked, sliding my fingers under the towel as I pressed my thumbs to her temples and rubbed them softly. “Sleep would probably help.”
“Not yet.” She closed her eyes and let out a small sigh. “Can we watch the last movie?”
“Sure.” Leaning down, I slid one arm under her legs and the other around her back.
It said something about how crappy she felt when Harper didn’t make a joke or sarcastic remark as I carried her back downstairs. She just relaxed into me, her arms wrapped around my neck.
We curled up on the couch with her head on my chest, and not even fifteen minutes into the movie, she was fast asleep. Gently pulling her glasses off, I let myself relax. I’d been wound so tight since the moment I’d woken up that morning that every muscle in my body was sore.
Knowing that Bernice had left me the house had really fucked with my head, but finding the rooms unchanged after all these years was a new level of hell. Why the hell had she kept them like that for so long? Had she thought we were coming back after everything that happened? It didn’t make any sense. She should’ve burned our shit in the backyard. Thrown it in the trash. Anything but keep it as some kind of shrine for boys that hadn’t deserved a single thing they’d been given.
I’d spent a lot of years making up for the shit in my past, and most days I thought maybe I’d gotten there, but today had thrown me right back to the feeling of complete worthlessness that I’d been drowning in the first time I’d walked into the Aces clubhouse.
I would need to go through the house and decide if there was anything I wanted to keep, get rid of everything else, and put the place on the market. Keeping it wasn’t an option. I’d never sleep under that roof again.
First, though, we needed to figure out who the hell was after Harper. That was priority number one. After I knew she was safe, I could deal with the rest of it.
Kissing the top of her head, I thought about the look on her face when she’d found Bernice’s letter to me. Of course, the woman had left it out on the counter like that, no envelope or anything. She’d known that I wouldn’t open it, so she’d forced me to see it.
I should’ve expected something like that.
Harper inhaled sharply and then let the air out slowly. Shifting, she lifted her hand toward her face and didn’t wake when I gently caught it before she could touch the wound.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hurt Harper. It made absolutely no sense. If sunshine were a person, that would be her. She didn’t talk shit, she was polite to strangers. Hell, I’d even seen her talk guys down from a bar fight once. The place had been so crowded that it had taken us five minutes to reach her, and by then the guys had wandered off to be pissed at someone else. She was quiet, unassuming. And sure, I’d noticed that when we were alone she came out of that shell a bit and was as obstinate as the rest of her family—but that wasn’t the face she presented to the world.
It gave me a little satisfaction to know that whoever had been trying to hurt her was on borrowed time. Gray had contacts everywhere, and where he didn’t, Casper did. Between the two of them, I wasn’t sure how the person had gotten away with it so far. Maybe they’d been looking in the wrong direction, thinking that it must have something to do with the club instead of Harper herself. Now that they knew what kind of truck to look for in the security footage they had of the car Harper had been driving, I figured it would be a matter of days before we found out who’d been following her.
Turning off the TV, I carefully slid out from under Harp and then lifted her against my chest. I left all the lights on downstairs in case we had any midnight visitors, but didn’t bother turning any on upstairs. The light filtered upward enough that I could see just fine as I walked her over and laid her in bed.
