Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(13)
That was dumb—she didn’t know anything about Rad, and she hadn’t done anything but politely draw a boundary around what he could know about her. But he’d helped her out, and he’d been offering even more help. Her reticence had obviously hurt his feelings, and she felt bad about that.
The thought that a rough man like him could be that sensitive, though—it made her smile a little. After a few hours in his presence, Willa was getting the impression that there were many facets to Radical the Bull’s self-concept.
She also felt bad that he’d left at all. His company had made her feel calm after an emotionally wrenching night, and, yeah, she’d felt safe with him. For a beat or two, she’d really considered telling him the little ditty about Jesse and Willa, taking the help he’d offered.
But she didn’t spend her life afraid. She had taken measures to protect herself, and she was stronger than she’d been. Leaning on a guy was bad form and never as safe as it seemed. Hiding behind one was worse. If Jesse did find her—and, come on, she knew he would eventually, no sense lying to herself—she could handle it. On her own. She’d made sure.
Ollie whined again and pushed his cold, wet nose at her bare arm.
“Okay, buddy, okay.” Turning the top sheet and chenille cover back, Willa examined her right knee. It was as fat and ugly as it was sore. She bent it slowly, experimentally, and hissed at the fresh pang in the steady ache. But she could move it. A few more flexes, each painful but manageable, and she decided that it was tissue damage only. She just needed a day or two of RICE: rest, ice, compression, and elevation.
Ollie stood and began his Outside Emergency Dance, hopping and wagging and whining.
“I’m coming. Hold your water.”
As she got to her feet and put weight on her knee, she grunted, and Ollie stopped dancing and came over to sniff at her leg.
“I’m okay, Ollie.” She tugged lightly at his ear. “Let’s go.”
oOo
Normally, Willa would send Ollie out on his own for his morning piss-and-sniff while she got busy starting a pot of coffee and hunting up breakfast. He knew where he was allowed to go in the yard and where he wasn’t, and he didn’t need her monitoring him. But on this morning, a beautiful, dewy early April morning promising a bright, warm spring day, Willa stood on her little brick patio with the kitchen door open behind her, and let the good air and the sweet scent of her lilac bushes, freshly blooming, ease her aches and lift her spirits.
She’d bought the house because of those old lilac bushes lining one side of the yard. It was a good house through and through, and she loved every inch of it—God, how she hoped Jesse wouldn’t find her here, or if he did, she hoped she could make him go away—but it was the lilac bushes, so reminiscent of her grandma’s house, that had made the decision for her. She’d created a whole garden of purples to suit those bushes, which had been growing almost as long as her house had been standing.
This was the home she wanted to keep. This was where she wanted to grow roots as deep as those under the lilacs. This was where she’d make her stand, if she had to. She loved her family, but the little town in West Texas where she’d been raised was not her home anymore. This was her home. This was where she’d build her life.
It was time to stop living like she was under siege.
She put her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes, remembering the warmth of Rad’s mouth, the scratch of his beard. The taste of him.
Ollie trotted up with a faded tennis ball in his slobbery mouth—a treasure from the yard. Smiling, Willa leaned down and opened her hand, and he dropped the slimy thing into it. She tossed the ball underhand down the center path, and he bolted away, his powerful muscles turning his body into a missile.
He could play fetch nonstop, possibly until his feet wore clean off, and since they clearly wouldn’t be able to take a run around the neighborhood today, Willa knew she should toss the ball for a good long while, but she had something she needed to do, so she made him drop the ball after about five minutes, then struggled up the steps and into the kitchen to make them both breakfast and get their day going.
She felt better. She’d made a decision.
oOo
Her thought that she’d be up to driving today was a bit ambitious, however. Even the ten minutes it took to get to Brian Delaney Auto Service had taxed her right leg hard. All that city driving, stopping and starting, had made her knee throb.
She should have called. But that seemed too passive a move, too easy to ignore. Anyway, she wanted to see Rad, to look him over in the full light of day, in the calm of a normal situation, to check her read on him and be sure.
The station was on a corner lot in a rough area just off downtown Tulsa. A lot of dilapidated buildings and vacant lots. It was a mixed-use area, with old brick four-family flats sharing blocks with dusty storefronts—a VCR repair, a smoke shop, a laundromat, a furniture store with painted windows advertising mattress and box spring sets from $100!—and other dubious business ventures above them. On the opposite end of the block from the Sinclair station was a storefront church: Glory to the Savior Fellowship, as an inexpertly hand-painted sign over the door declared.
The Bulls seemed to have something of a compound on this block of Third Street: the service station on the corner, then, next door, across a narrow gravel alleyway, a big four-family flat with a sign over the door: a menacing black bull in flames, with the words BRAZEN BULLS arcing above it, and OKLAHOMA arcing below it—a painted replica of the patch the members wore on the backs of their kuttes. A metal sign bolted to the brick next to the door announced that it was Private Property. Authorized Entrance Only.