He was lying.
“You’ve got some balls stealing off those bikers,” I said, flicking the end of my cigarette with my thumb nail.
He puffed his chest out. “I can handle myself. I might not match them in size and brawn, but I can certainly outsmart them. Dumb fuckers.”
Again, I nodded. “Right.”
The glass door leading outside opened and Bull appeared in the doorway. My companion took one look at him and turned white. “Fuck.”
“Oh yeah, fuck is about right,” I murmured.
The orderly crushed his cigarette with his boot and whispered, “You know, I was only kidding about the whole marijuana thing, right? I didn’t really break in.”
“Oh, I know.”
He wouldn’t be standing in front of me if he did.
“So, no point mentioning it…”
“I wasn’t going to.”
His cheeks went red and he couldn’t get out of the area fast enough.
“Thanks for the cigarette,” I called after him. But he didn’t reply and disappeared into the shadows.
My uncle walked up to me. “Since when do you smoke?”
I glared at him.
“Since my boyfriend took three bullets to the chest.” I took another drag. “If you’ve come out here to yell at me—”
“I’m not going to yell at you.”
“Good, because I’m not sure how many more of these I can stand,” I said, holding up the half-smoked cigarette.
Bull took it from me and drew back on it. His anger stood between us like a wall and it made me want to cry, knowing how angry he was after everything that had happened. But it wasn’t just his anger standing between us, I was angry, too.
I sat down at a barbecue table and he sat across from me. We were silent for a moment, both of us weighing the gravity of the situation before Bull finally said something.
“You know, in the whole time I knew him, I only ever saw your father cry once.”
Taken by surprise at the random subject choice, I frowned and looked at him. “What?”
“It was the day you were born. After your mama gave birth to you, he came out and just stood there with this look on his face, like he’d just seen God. He shook his head as he looked at me with tears rolling down his face and he told me how perfect you were. ‘The most perfect baby girl that ever there was’, he said.” He took a drag on the cigarette and looked nostalgic before blowing out a funnel of smoke. “Then he walked right on over to me and took me by the shoulders and he said, ‘You promise me now that if anything ever happens to me, you’ll be the father she needs. You tell me, she will always have someone strong watching over her’. And I made him that promise, Chastity. I swore to your daddy that if he couldn’t be there for you, I would be. And I’ve tried to be. For twenty-two years, I’ve watched over you like you were my own.” He paused and his brows drew together. “Wendy and I used to love babysitting you when your daddy and mama went out. She’d always say how she couldn’t wait to have a daughter just like you.” Bull’s voice wavered and he cleared his throat to hide it. “You know, she was pregnant when she died.”
My eyes darted to his. “Aunt Wendy was pregnant?”
He looked infinitely sad. “Fifteen weeks.”
I gasped and my hand shot to my mouth. “Did you know?”
He nodded. “She told me the day we got married. She didn’t want to tell anyone until she was well and truly out of the first trimester.”
I sat stunned. “I didn’t know.”
“The night she died… she was buying wine to celebrate finding out the sex of the baby. She was going to tell me over dinner, she said. Then I forgot to buy the damn wine and—” His emotion was raw on his face. “Following her death, I asked her doctor if it was a boy or a girl. I don’t know if it was to torture myself, or if it was all part of the grieving process, but he did and he was able to confirm it was a girl.”
Another piece of Bull’s protective puzzle fell into place.
His daughter died with his wife.
“The only person I shared that with was Ruger.” He sighed and I could see the pain etched in his face. “The amount of times I’ve thought about Wendy and how she’d still be alive if she never got involved with me.”
“But she died in an accident.”
“She died driving to get wine. Wine I was supposed to pick up for our dinner but I was too busy with club business to do it. If I had just put her before club business… but we don’t always do that, you see, and it’s our queens who pay, Chastity. It’s our queens who have to bear the weight of their men being in the club. Can’t you see, I don’t want that for you.”