Rome (Marked Men, #3)(40)

“What are you doing here?”

He sighed and asked Darcy for a cup of coffee. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

“That’s all you have to say to me after ignoring me and your mother for a year?”

“How did you know where to find me?” I lifted an eyebrow and then answered my own question. “Shaw. That little girl can’t stop trying to pull this family together.”

“Rome.” He sighed so heavily I felt it weigh across my own shoulders. I had always wanted to make my folks proud of me. They had never really been excited about my choice to enlist when I was younger, but as time went on they grew to understand my motivation, my drive to help others, be active in making the world a safer place for my brothers and for them. It bothered me to see the disappointment in his eyes and marked on his face.

“This has to stop at some point. I fought to bring Rule back into the fold, told your mother it was this family or I was done. I’m not going to let another one of my boys go, not without one hell of a fight. I let you stew, let you and Rule act like it was a personal affront we never talked about Remy as a family, but the time for that is done. We need to figure out how to move forward from this point on. End of story.”

I felt like a little kid getting scolded for getting his clothes dirty while out playing. I rubbed a hard hand across the back of my neck and looked down at the bar I still needed to strip and refinish.

“It’s more than just Remy and the secrets. It’s the way Mom treated Rule, it’s the way everyone just let Remy use Shaw. It’s the fact I don’t feel at all like the same guy I was when I left last time. I don’t know how to fit into this family anymore. I don’t know what role I’m supposed to be filling.”

I didn’t have the nerve or the right words to try to explain to him that I didn’t know how I would make it through having him and Mom look at me like they didn’t know who I was anymore. Disappointment I could handle, dismissal I could not, so instead I was hiding and avoiding it altogether.

He swore softly and reached out to clap me on the shoulder. “There is no fitting in. You’re our son, no matter what; that role is yours until the end of time. That’s what I finally had to get across to your mother about Rule and what we should have let Remy know before it was too late. We take you any way you come, Rome, even if it isn’t the same way you always were. The life you lived, son, that changes a man. I understand that and so does your mother.”

He cleared his throat and pushed the bar stool back so that he was standing next to me.

“Come to brunch on Sunday. Shaw said you’re seeing one of her girlfriends, bring her along. I work very hard every week to make sure your brother and that girl of his know how much I love them. We all owe Shaw more than we can ever repay as a family. She’s done more for both those boys than we can probably imagine. Come spend time with your family, Rome.”

He didn’t give me a chance to say “we’ll see” or “no thanks”; he just turned around and went back the way he came. Being an Archer was never exactly easy, but it was like a badge of honor to be one and survive it. I really wished I could just slide behind that bar and mix a drink, but I was doing a pretty solid job of staying sober and just beating back all the crazy stuff going on in my head with force of will alone. I didn’t want to mess that up just because I was being a sissy and couldn’t handle getting told off by my dad. It was hard to keep my head buried in the sand when he had single-handedly just annihilated all my misplaced fears about going home and facing them.

I asked Darcy for that sandwich finally and went to finish getting the pool table leveled. Brite was back by the time I was done and headed out. I told him about the guys from the Sons of Sorrow and he just snorted and told me the kid that attacked me was nothing but a young prick. He told me that I better watch my back, because getting a rocker stripped from a biker’s cut was apparently a really big deal and the scrawny guy was likely to be pissed as all hell that it was happening. It meant there was no way in hell he was ever going to be a member of any motorcycle club, at least not here in Denver, and likely anywhere else. I blew the warning off, figuring it was all said and done, and besides, I was used to watching my six anyway.

What wasn’t as easy to blow off was the conversation that he leveled at me after Darcy ratted me out about the awkward conversation she had witnessed between me and my dad. I was on my way out the door to get my little punk-rock pixie, but he followed me out to where the Harley was parked. I threw a leg over the bike and looked up at him.

“What’s up?”

He ran a hand down the length of his beard, a gesture I was getting used to. It typically meant he was going to say something to me that he really wanted me to hear.

“Your old man came by looking for you today?”

I nodded. “He found me.”

He crossed his thick arms over his burly chest and tilted his chin down at me.

“You know that Darce and I have a girl?”

I shook my head in the negative. Neither had ever mentioned a daughter to me.

“She’s younger than you. Just turned twenty and is a handful and a half. She didn’t take it well when her mom and I split. I can barely get her to spend five minutes alone in the same room with me before she’s at my throat about this or that.”

I picked the bike up off the stand and balanced the heavy weight between my legs.