me crazy about it, but if that’s the worst we have to handle, I guess we should just sit back and thank our lucky stars. It’s our time. You’re going to be all mine for a year.
What if you hate me? What if it’s just the two of us on the open road and you decide that I was definitely not worth all the fuss for all these years? Now, I know what you’re thinking in that pretty little head of yours, my lovely Lucy, but it’s not true. I could never feel that way about you. You were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I knew it from the moment we met that the stars had just aligned and sent me my own personal angel. I will never be done with you. Never stop loving you and wanting you by my side…
A jolt of hot, electric pain shot through my head before I could finish reading. I dropped the second page to the letter, and it fluttered out of my reach before I could even think to lean forward and catch it. Instead, I clawed tightly to the other page, the one I had still been reading, as I leaned back and waited for the pain to subside. The light from the bulb in the desktop lamp beside me felt like it was a million watts as I sat there, praying that the good Lord would just do me a solid and end this pain.
Damn, but I hated the fact that sometimes the Lord answered those prayers in ways we never really thought about. My only regret was not getting to finish CJ’s letter.
Chapter 19
Unthinkable
Double-D
I knew the other men were headed to the clubhouse to regroup and brief everyone else on what we’d found, and more importantly, what we hadn’t found. I was fucking beat. The ride home had been a long and hard haul with a stopover in West Virginia and Georgia. Yeah, it was out of the way, but we wanted to make contact with the other chapters of the club as we rode so that we could stress how important it was to keep looking for Deck. Ghost was on board, but I could tell some of the younger men assumed he was dead by now.
I didn’t have the luxury of assuming that. I promised my baby girl I would bring her man home, and I couldn’t let her down. I’d already done enough of that in her lifetime. Merc and Trunk both assured me that they would pass along the information we had and the whole lot of nothing we’d discovered while gone out on the road searching for clues again. It had been months since our last lead panned out with any information at all. I knew our own men were beginning to give up hope too. Hell, I saw it in Merc’s eyes as I left him at the clubhouse. He didn’t believe we’d be bringing home a live man, if we got to bring him home at all.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for me to get back to the house. Then again, I had Lucy on my mind the whole way. I missed her so damn much when I was out on these runs trying to track down any fucking leads about where Deck might be. It made me miss the time we were able to spend together alone on our cross-country RV trip we took roughly five years earlier. I had been begging Lucy to go on another with me, and just when I was sure she would relent, Ever had told us the news about the new baby on the way. She and Deck had been trying to expand their little family since not too long after the twins were born and it just wasn’t happening, so there was no way we could go away when I knew Luce would want to be a part of that with our daughter. Hell, I wanted to be a part of it too. I had still been very much on the outside of things with Ever back when the girls were first born. Plus, we had to split the celebration between her and Anna who had their children weeks apart.
I only allowed my mind to drift to the past so often. Living in the past had cost me a great deal in life and I refused to do it. Instead, I had to think about how the hell we were going to