Greatest Height (New Adult Biker Gang Romance) (Night Horses MC Book 6) Read Free Page A

resting on her shoulder, and sobbed. All of the frustration, the abandonment, the loneliness and fear I’d felt came pouring out in a great onrush of grief.
     
    She cried, too.
     
    Like I’d never seen her before.
     
    Not when her father died, or when our neighbor ran over Bear and we were rushing him to the vet, Dad driving, me and her in the backseat, holding him close, his blood all over us.
     
    I don’t know what happened to make me lose her, or to make me lose control.
     
    I was still angry, though.
     
    When the first storm of my tears past, I pulled away and sat down on the staircase in the hall.
     
    She shut the front door and sat beside me.
     
    I pulled away.
     
    The sight of her flinch sent a hollow chord of unhappiness through me, but I didn’t scoot any closer.
     
    “My baby girl,” she murmured.
     
    It was the first thing that one of us had said to each other.
     
    It was the straw.
     
    The last straw.
     
    “What the fuck?” I asked her. Shouting. Bear fled back down the hall. “If I’m your baby girl, why did you send me away?”
     
    “We didn’t send you anywhere, sweetheart,” she said. She looked totally stricken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
     
    “I know I was out overnight and it was shitty, but I came home and… and… all my stuff was in the yard. How the fuck is that not sending me away? You threw all my clothes in a pile like trash,” I said.
     
    My voice was hard and bitter. I needed to calm down, but I didn’t know how to at that point.
     
    My mother’s hand flew to her face. She was staring at me, shaking her head slightly. I don’t know if I’d ever seen anyone more baffled.
     
    “Honey,” she said, her voice soft and slow, “We got home from work about the same time, and you were gone. Your father and I looked everywhere. I showed up and the front door was open, he was shouting your name. Your bedroom was bare.”
     
    I stared at her.
     
    “That’s not right,” I said. “All my stuff was in the yard, and I saw someone move a curtain in the house. I yelled and knocked at the door, but no one… no one answered.”
     
    She stared at me.
     
    It was as if neither of us could possibly take in what the other was saying. It was too strange. Too completely alien.
     
    I ran away.
     
    I got kicked out.
     
    One of us had to be wrong.
     
    Was I crazy? I suppose it was possible, but… wouldn’t someone have said something? I saw the doubt in my mother’s eyes, the worry, the fear. Did she think I was mixed up in drugs, mixed up so badly I didn’t know what was going on?
     
    I had never taken drugs.
     
    No, wait.
     
    I’d been drugged. El Jefe had drugged me. Multiple times. I still didn’t know what with.
     
    It wasn’t too long after that that I got kicked out - that I ran away - that I moved into the apartment.
     
    Was I still suffering from the after-effects that night? Was I so confused, and out of it, that I’d somehow run away by accident?
     
    Was Merle taking advantage of me?
     
    I saw the worry and anger in my mother’s eyes and knew that that was what she thought.
     
    She thought Merle was the worst kind of man.
     
    I thought he was the best.
     
    One of us had to be wrong.
     
    “I’ve been going to school,” I whispered. “You could have found me there. Why didn’t you look?”
     
    She looked stricken.
     
    “You said in your note that you were eighteen and there was nothing we could do to stop you and if we showed up at your school you’d get a restraining order and have us arrested for stalking you,” she said.
     
    I shook my head on reflex.
     
    “Note?” I asked. “I definitely didn’t leave a note.”
     
    “It was on your bed,” she said. She stood up, more heavily than I’d ever seen her. Did my mother get old while I wasn’t looking?
     
    I followed her up the stairs.
     
    “I didn’t… I didn’t change anything,” she said. “I just clean it.”
     
    I stopped on the