A lot of things can happen in a day.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you who I am. But first, I need to borrow your phone.”
Eleven
Dani
It shouldn’t have taken me so long to get angry. It should have happened a long time ago. Maybe it was the fact that I was finally away from McMurphy and leaving Arizona. Maybe it was the experience of Cavan Wilder’s fingers inside me, making me come. Who knows—maybe it was the damn haircut. But suddenly I was done, so done, with William James McMurphy, president of the Arizona Black Dog MC.
I picked up Cavan’s phone and redialed McMurphy’s number, which was the last call. He picked up right away.
And the first words he said made me even angrier. “You finished with her already, Wilder?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted.
McMurphy was silent for a second. “Dani,” he said.
“Yes, it’s Dani, you asshole. The woman who left you. The woman who hates you so much she’s driving away from you as fast as she can.”
“You lying bitch,” McMurphy shouted. “You never bothered to tell me that you’re Robert Preston’s daughter? You think I wouldn’t find out? Robert Preston’s fucking daughter!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m Robert Preston’s daughter.” In the driver’s seat beside me, I saw Cavan jump. He knew the name, all right. “And you think you’re so smart, but you didn’t find out until after I left.”
There was a moment of silence. We all knew who Robert Preston was—me, and McMurphy, and Cavan. We all knew he was the founder and president of the Lake of Fire, the Black Dog’s biggest rival MC. It was out in the open, finally. And I knew McMurphy—I knew the way his mind worked. So what he said next didn’t surprise me.
“Was it a setup?” he said, and I could hear the paranoia creeping into his voice. “Did he put you up to it? Did he tell you to be my woman so he could get secrets from the club?”
“It wasn’t a setup!” I shouted, furious. Cavan just drove without flinching or shushing me. He probably knew better. “I don’t even know him, all right? He knocked my mother up, and then he left to go found the Lake of Fire MC, and now he’s in prison! He didn’t raise me!”
“I don’t give a fuck who raised you,” McMurphy growled. “If I’d known you were the daughter of the Lake of Fire president, I’d never have fucking touched you.”
He was lying. To me, to himself—I didn’t care. I knew McMurphy now, better than I had when I had stupidly hooked up with him. The Lake of Fire was the club that was the biggest rival of the Black Dog. If McMurphy had known I was a rival club president’s daughter, he wouldn’t have left me alone; he would have done more to me. And worse. He’d have done still worse to me if he’d found out while I was with him. That was one of the reasons I ran.
That, and because he was hurting me, and I hated him. And Cavan Wilder had appeared on the horizon like an opportunity from God.
That opportunity from God was sitting next to me right now, calmly driving. I could only hope that when I got off the phone, he wouldn’t pull over and leave me at the side of the road.
“Look,” I told McMurphy, “what’s done is done. I’m Robert Preston’s daughter, and I didn’t tell you. We’re over anyway.”
“We’re not over,” he promised in my ear. I knew that tone, knew his mood when his voice got low like that. It meant he was furious, and my fear tried to kick into overdrive. “My woman doesn’t leave me, Dani. It doesn’t happen. My woman doesn’t disrespect me and make me look like a fool.”
“If you look like a fool, that’s your problem, not mine,” I shot back, fighting the fear. “And yes, I did leave you. I’m not a belonging, and I’m not yours.”
“You think you’re not a biker girl?” He laughed. “Sweetheart, you pretended to be some innocent girl, but the MC is in your blood. You were practically in heat when I met you at that first party. You wanted the life. And now you talk down to me like you’re so superior, but you’re driving with the club’s ink man. You aren’t going far. Turns out you haven’t worked through your daddy issues, little girl. You’ll be back in the club before long.”
The shitty thing about McMurphy was that, despite his brutal attitude and his crude toilet vocabulary, he was sometimes painfully right. His insight—as vicious as it was—was what kept him on top as the president of the club. McMurphy might not be a scholar, but he had enough rough intelligence to stay on top of the other Black Dogs.
He was also swift with punishment, which was why he was going so hard after us. To just let me go would make him look weak in front of the brothers, and that couldn’t happen. And he was even more enraged by Cavan than he was by me.
But still, there was a grain of truth in what he was saying. I had wanted in to the club life, even after my mother warned me about it. Maybe because my mother had warned me about it. And I’d never talked about my father because I’d felt shame and horror and fascination about him at the same time, combined with a little girl’s wish that her father would acknowledge her and be pleased.
In short, daddy issues.
Shit.
But who you were—who you had been—that didn’t have to be who you were for the rest of your life. I believed that. You could change, learn from your mistakes, be someone better. I was about to try and prove that. Maybe I would fail. But I saw the road vanishing beneath the hood of the car, and I felt my new, lighter hair, and I still didn’t think so.
“I’m never coming back,” I told McMurphy. Brave words, and I forced them out. “You’re never touching me again.” I hung up and threw down the phone. I was breathing hard, sweating down my back even in the air conditioning, and my hands were slick.