Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(85)

“It’s a true way. You think what’s happenin’ now—that’s a crisis?”

Asking that question, with the feeling that prompted him to do so, was Rad’s first inkling of an opinion on the matter before them. It didn’t seem like a crisis to him. A potential game-changer, certainly. But not a crisis. Dahlia’s announcement—that had been a crisis. He still remembered that awful dread, the way his brain had conjured up a dismal future for that child. And for its parents.

He hadn’t felt that dread today. Confusion, worry, shock, but not dread.

“Isn’t it?” Willa asked, deflecting the question back to him.

“Not to me. As long as I’ve got you, nothin’s a crisis. We’ll work it out together, and that’s all I need. For us to be on the same page. What page are you on? Do you know?”

“You said you don’t want kids.”

“No, I said I never did before. I said I didn’t have a need to have kids. Those’re both different.”

“How?”

“Because you’re different. What we have is different. You bein’ pregnant doesn’t scare me. I can’t say I’d be a good dad, but I know you’d be a good mom.” He could feel his mind making itself up, easing toward one side of the dilemma.

“You’d be a good dad.” She said it quietly, brushing her hand over his.

“I don’t know. My dad was shit. Ice-cold and quick with the belt or anything else to hand. After my mom died and my brother came home from Vietnam in a box, he forgot all about me, and that was the best thing he did as my father. Soon’s I could, I left home and never went back. He was dead almost two years before I even knew it. Not sure I know what a good father’s supposed to do.”

He’d told her a little about his family over their time together, but not in that way. He didn’t like to talk about the way his father had treated him. He didn’t feel sorry for himself, and it sounded so damn pitiful—my daddy didn’t love me, boohoo—so he usually just said his father had been a bastard and left it at that.

Now, Willa scooted onto his lap and looped her arms around his neck. Combing her fingers through his hair as if she meant to comfort him, she said, “You’d be a good dad because you know how your dad hurt you. You know what you needed and didn’t get. And you’d be a good dad because you’re a good man. You know how to love.”

“I know how to love you, that’s for damn sure.” He brought her mouth to his for a light kiss. “I just don’t want to f*ck a kid up. And this life…it’s calm most of the time, but when it’s not, it’s chaos.”

“Dane and Joanna’s girls seem pretty normal.”

He laughed. “Yeah, that’s true. As normal as teenage girls can be, I guess.” Cecily and Clara had Dane firmly where they wanted him and always had. Rad saw the way the VP looked at his girls—no one, not even his old lady, got a look full of such wide-open adoration as his girls did.

A little girl with Willa’s blonde hair. Or a boy with her hazel eyes. His heart gave a kick at the thought.

“What do you want, Wills?” he asked, his throat thick and his voice hoarse.

“I think I want to have your baby,” she whispered shakily.

“I think I want you to,” he murmured back.



oOo



The next day was hot and humid, the kind of humidity that gave the air weight, so it sat on the skin like spit. Rad could feel sweat trickling through his beard, and he wiped his face with a frustrated swipe. They were still a week shy of the official beginning of summer. This kind of heat so soon boded poorly for the rest of the season.

They were a six-hour ride north of Tulsa, outside a little Nebraska town just southwest of Lincoln, standing in a barn that had been recently fitted as a stash point for a wide assortment of Russian steel.

In a sweltering, muggy barn that smelled of rotten hay stood six Bulls, four Russians, including Kirill Volkov, and six members of the Great Plains Riders, a small MC out of Lincoln.

The Riders were going outlaw for the first time with this gig, and it was no starter job. This was like a benchwarmer on a single-A ball team getting called up to The Show.

Rad and Eight Ball had a lot riding on this personally, because it had been their recon, and their recommendation, that had the Riders, this little club, collecting the guns from the Bulls, storing them until called to move, and then getting them into Canada.

They’d landed on this club because of what was going on with the Night Horde. Delaney had convinced Kirill to bring that little club on board by pointing out that using a small club without an outlaw rep had some major advantages—their low profile being topmost. They weren’t on anybody’s radar. When Rad and Eight had sat down with this club during their recon run, both men had been impressed.

The Riders had two additional advantages: their VP was Canadian-born and had excellent contacts there, and three of their members had done time, so they were primed for outlaw work, even though they’d been riding recreationally for the past several years.

Conventional wisdom said they should be working only with players familiar with stakes this high. But all those players had attention from all kinds of law enforcement. The Volkovs brought plenty of attention themselves, and any opportunity to diffuse it worked in their favor.