She nodded. “Yes, she was here.”
“I know how tight you girls are, there’s no
way you’d let her leave like that, without knowing shit about her plans. She had to have told you where she was going.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry, she didn’t.”
“Bullshit.” He took a step toward her, but Cole brought him up short. He slammed a hand into Wolf’s chest, grabbing a fistful of his shirt and shoving him back.
“Back off, Brother. She told you she doesn’t know.”
Wolf’s jaw tightened as he stared down his VP. Then his eyes moved back to Angel, and he shook his head. “I can’t believe you just let her go.”
With that, Cole tightened his fist in Wolf’s shirt and shook him, growling in his face, “Don’t you dare put this on Angel. It’s your fucking fault she’s gone. You’re the one that never made her your ol’ lady. You’re the one that strung her along all this fucking time, so don’t think you can come here and put the guilt on Angel or anyone else. It’s nobody’s fault but yours.”
“She didn’t talk to you before she left?” Angel asked quietly, and there was something in the way she said it that had a bad feeling snaking down his spine. Was there something he was missing? He searched Cole’s face. Did his VP know something he wasn’t saying? Brothers didn’t lie to one another. Not if he straight up asked. “Cole?”
He shook his head. “I got shit to tell you, Wolf.”
His eyes moved to Angel for one final appeal. “Please, Angel. She didn’t even say goodbye. I can’t just let her go like this.”
“But you did let her go in every other sense of the word, didn’t you?” she asked him, slicing another piece of him.
Fuck, he hated to be confronted with the truth. With his own inadequacies.
Expectations. Fucking expectations. They’d been the bane of his existence. Why? He didn’t fucking know, but he was sure it had to do with a father that never thought he was good enough, no matter what he did. So, instead of continuing to beat his head against the wall in a futile attempt to convince a man who would never be convinced, instead of continuing to try to prove himself, what did he do? He joined an MC and became exactly what his father always expected of him. A big nothing in his father’s eyes. The disappointment he’d always told him he was.
No, Wolf didn’t do well with living up to other’s expectations.
So he supposed he’d never tried with Crystal. Ran like hell from anything resembling a commitment. And where had that gotten him?
He met Angel’s eyes, seeing the contempt in them, but also a tiny bit of sympathy. He wished he could explain. “You don’t understand.”
“I think she does,” Cole corrected him, then twisted to say over his shoulder, “Go back inside, Angel.”
Like any good ol’ lady, she didn’t hesitate or question. The sliding door slid shut.
“Sit down,” Cole ordered, pushing him down into a chair next to a patio table on the deck.
Wolf collapsed back onto it and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His VP sat in the chair next to him and leaned forward as well. Wolf looked over at him. “Tell me the truth. Did Mack run her off?”
Cole shook his head. “No, Wolf, he didn’t. I was here when she came by. Her leaving? That was her choice.”
Wolf looked at his hands, shaking his head.
“She sold her ‘vette two days ago.”
Wolf looked up at him startled. “What?”
“Some guy gave her eighteen for it.”
“Shit.”
“So if you’re worried about her, that’ll tide her over, help her start a new life.”
Wolf cradled his face in his hands wondering what in the hell he’d done. He could feel Cole’s eyes on him, watching his reaction.
“You could have made her your ol’ lady anytime you wanted, but you didn’t. And I get that.” Cole glanced back at the house. “Relationships are hard work under the best of circumstances. The life we lead? Takes a special kind of woman to put up with it. Shit, Wolf, the burdens I walk through that door with some nights, I can’t even tell you how Angel deals with me. But she does. And I thank God every day she does.”