Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Read online

  SUSAN FANETTI

  THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  Wait © 2019 Susan Fanetti

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Susan Fanetti

  Images licensed from Shutterstock and DepositPhotos and © 2019 Susan Fanetti

  Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

  The Brazen Bulls MC:

  (Complete Series)

  Crash, Book 1

  Twist, Book 2

  Slam, Book 3

  Blaze, Book 4

  Honor, Book 5

  Fight, Book 6

  Stand, Book 7

  Light, Book 7.5

  Lead, Book 8

  THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA:

  The Signal Bend Series:

  (The First Series)

  Move the Sun, Book 1

  Behold the Stars, Book 2

  Into the Storm, Book 3

  Alone on Earth, Book 4

  In Dark Woods, Book 4.5

  All the Sky, Book 5

  Show the Fire, Book 6

  Leave a Trail, Book 7

  The Night Horde SoCal:

  (The Second Series)

  Strength & Courage, Book 1

  Shadow & Soul, Book 2

  Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5

  Fire & Dark, Book 3

  Dream & Dare, Book 3.5

  Knife & Flesh, Book 4

  Rest & Trust, Book 5

  Calm & Storm, Book 6

  Nolan: Return to Signal Bend

  Love & Friendship

  The Pagano Family:

  (Complete Series)

  Footsteps, Book 1

  Touch, Book 2

  Rooted, Book 3

  Deep, Book 4

  Prayer, Book 5

  Miracle, Book 6

  The Pagano Family: The Complete Series

  The Pagano Brothers:

  Simple Faith, Book 1

  Hidden Worthiness, Book 2

  Accidental Evils, Book 3

  Sawtooth Mountains Stories:

  Somewhere

  Someday

  Anywhere

  The Northwomen Sagas:

  (Complete Series)

  God’s Eye

  Heart’s Ease

  Soul’s Fire

  Father’s Sun

  Historical Standalones:

  Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven

  Carry the World

  As S.E. Fanetti:

  Aurora Terminus

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title

  Copyright

  Also by Susan Fanetti

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  For the survivors.

  My eternal thanks to TeriLyn, Amy, and Kim, for all they do in support and friendship.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Wait is both a prequel and a standalone. If you’ve read The Brazen Bulls MC series, then you already know Brian Delaney as the first president of that MC, and Mo as his old lady. In the BBMC books, they are in their fifties and sixties, a couple long established and the patriarch and matriarch of that rambunctious found family. This is the origin story of their relationship, set decades earlier.

  Wait is not, strictly speaking, a biker book—or, perhaps it’s better to say it’s not an MC book. Brian began riding a Harley as a young man, and he rides through much of this story, but he doesn’t found the Brazen Bulls MC until the very last chapters. This story is not about how the club was founded; it’s about the people who did.

  Wait is a story about a soldier struggling with the wages of war and the woman strong enough to stand with him while she overcomes struggles of her own. Aside from a prologue and epilogue set in the 2000s, this story takes place in 1968-1976, during and immediately following the Vietnam War era. Brian has a long and complicated service in that war, and that is the ground in which his love with Mo is seeded and grows.

  You need not have ever heard of the Brazen Bulls MC to enjoy the love story of Maureen Quinn and Brian Delaney. However, the prologue and epilogue, set in 2003 and 2004, respectively—well after the main story here, and at the end of the Brazen Bulls series timeline as well—includes a few spoilers for that series.

  If you do know the Bulls, you will recognize in this story some characters and events, and some questions will be answered.

  I hope you enjoy the ride.

  cheers,

  s—

  I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you

  and become yours forever.

  ~Robert Browning, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  PROLOGUE

  2003

  Brian Delaney watched his old lady scoop up her little dust mop of a dog and climb alone into the RV. It was late enough that the night was dark and most of the creatures had gone to sleep, but spring in southern Louisiana was a half-baked sauna under both sun and moon, and the RV’s air conditioner hummed testily. The choices were sit and stew in the sopping air, or climb into the refrigerated tin can. Considering that the company was as chilly in there as the air, Brian leaned back in his camp chair and took another swig of beer.

  He patted his pockets aimlessly. Mo had spent most of their marriage trying to get him to stop smoking, and he’d tried several times and failed, but he was determined to make this last go work. Since he’d retired from … well, everything, and they’d gone off on this big, year-long road trip, he and Mo spent virtually every moment together, which limited his opportunities for a smoke, no matter how badly he needed to. By the time they pulled this barge back home, he should be clean of the habit.

  He sure as hell hoped. For now, he patted his pockets forlornly and took another swig of beer. That swig killed the bottle, so he reached into the little cooler on the ground and got another. No rush to go inside. Mo was having trouble being away from home, and when they settled in for a night and there was nothing to do, she dug into her head found things to fret abo
ut. He hoped she was in there writing in her journal; she did better when she put her shit down in ink.

  They’d left home about three weeks ago. Brian had known perfectly well right out of the gate that Mo didn’t want this trip. She’d never said so, and he hadn’t asked. He’d told her he wanted it, that he needed it, and she’d agreed. But he understood what he’d expected—not asked, simply expected—her to sacrifice so he could have this. They’d left their family behind. Her best friends. Her grandbabies. Becker and Sage were expecting twins any day now, and he’d pulled his wife from all of that so he could chase a thing he couldn’t even describe.

  But fuck, how he’d needed this. Even now, with Mo only half present, trying to give him what he needed while homesickness tore her apart, Brian could feel something that had shriveled to a stony kernel in his chest begin to soften and open again.

  When he was young, just coming into his manhood after a tumultuous childhood, feeling lost and at loose ends, he’d taken a trip much like this one, riding the roads for more than a year, getting to know the world that was America. Then, young and vigorous, he’d gone off on a Harley-Davidson, with nothing put a knapsack and a bedroll, a copy of On the Road in his pocket. He’d worked odd jobs when he’d needed money along the way, slept off the side of the highway, under the stars, more nights than he could count, met all kinds of people and seen all kinds of things, and—the reason he’d gone, though he hadn’t known it at the time—he’d figured out some things about himself.

  He’d come home from that trip and joined the Army. Just a couple years before the conflict in Vietnam had blown up. He’d been one of the first pairs of combat boots on the ground in that war, and one of the last as well. He’d taken a twisty and turbulent path to four tours in all.

  That war had fucked him up. Maybe it was still fucking him up. He still dreamed of it sometimes, woke with it fresh in his mind, got caught sidelong sometimes when a memory got triggered and blasted to full, fresh life.

  Not one day since the first day he’d seen combat had he not felt war in his blood. He’d fought and survived wars on every front of his life. He was fucking exhausted.

  The man he was now, more than forty years after he’d first tied a bedroll down on the back of his chopper and ridden away from his sister’s house, was not the same man. But when his life had stopped making sense, he’d needed the same thing. He was too old to sleep where he dropped anymore, well-off enough to afford some comfort as he went, and no longer alone, so this trip looked different, reflected the life he’d lived in the meanwhile. But it was the same at its heart.

  There was still a Harley, but it spent a lot of its time on its trailer, hitched to the big RV. And there was Mo, hitched to him, dragged along where he had to go.

  He needed to ride to understand himself. He needed to leave home to find it again. It was just the way he was built.

  Mo was not the same. His lady had always known herself, and she’d always known her home. She settled in place, and she made what she needed out of what she had. She nested. When they’d lived in a ratty three-room house barely more than a shack, she’d made it their first home, warm and full of life. When they’d bought a rundown ranch house, she’d turned it over the years into a palace.

  When she’d been unable to have the family of her dreams, she’d built a family that dreams were made of.

  She centered him, because she was the center of everything. She understood that he needed this, so he felt able to take it, even knowing how homesick she was. Throughout their long life together, she’d given him what he needed, and trusted him to do the same for her. And most times, he got it right.

  Which was why he shouldn’t be sitting out here in the dark, letting her feel lonely on her own inside.

  He finished his beer, closed up the cooler, and went into the RV.

  It was dark, and Mo was already in bed, asleep. Toro was curled into a white puffball near her feet.

  Brian stripped down and slid under the covers. When he settled behind her and folded her into his arms, she sighed and reached back to brush her fingertips over his beard.

  “I love you, Irish,” he whispered and kissed her shoulder.

  “Always,” she answered on a sleepy breath.

  Thirty-five years ago, Brian had been reeling from the ravages of war. Then he’d met Maureen Quinn. She’d been the center of his life ever since. She tethered him, soothed him, loved him. She kept him human. She’d redeemed him.

  She loved him.

  Holding his woman, he closed his eyes and eased into sleep.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1968

  Hands snagged at his arms, his chest, his throat. The metal-sharp sheets of fucking endless rain sliced down over him, making the whole fucking world opaque, and he couldn’t see anything but steely wet, couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the water hitting his helmet, his gun, the fucking Bulldog behind him. All he felt was blades of rain and hands everywhere, grabbing him, pulling—

  Somebody yelled, right in front of him, their hands on him, but it was too loud, and there was a baby screaming—

  A baby? Did he hear a baby crying? Oh shit, oh shit, no more babies, not here, not here—

  He squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. Fucking M16 jammed again. Dropping the useless hunk of metal, he grabbed the man who had him, squeezed his throat. He was going to make the motherfucker pop like a zit. Hands flailed now, batting at his shoulders, his face, his chest.

  “BRIAN!”

  Brian? Nobody called him Brian here. That was a name for back home. Where he’d been a brother, a son. In this godforsaken place, where he was a godforsaken soldier, he was Delaney, or even less, reduced to nothing more than a single letter, as if his name had sloughed off in pieces along with his humanity. He was D.

  That baby. Where was that baby? Why was there a baby on this fucking hill?

  A hand slapped him in the face.

  “BRIAN! STOP! WAKE UP, WAKE UP!”

  His eyes opened. The world was dry, and dark. No roar of rain on metal, of artillery fire. No mud, no stench, no death. A baby crying, a woman screaming, a man grunting. All his muscles were banded tight and ached with the fire of a fight.

  He had his hands around a man’s throat, but he wasn’t on the battlefield.

  This was a bedroom.

  This world came back to him with a sudden rush, and he forced his hands to release his brother-in-law’s throat.

  Lenny sagged to his knees at the side of the bed, gasping.

  Faye, D’s—Brian’s—sister, stood in the doorway, holding her squalling infant son.

  “I—” It was all Brian could force from his mouth.

  “Jesus, Brian. You almost killed him,” his sister said in a voice full of shock and fury.

  “I’m alright,” Lenny croaked.

  D—Brian—couldn’t understand anything around him, but he’d done something wrong. “I don’t know what … what’s goin’ on?”

  “You were in here havin’ a nightmare again, yellin’ so loud you woke Jamie. Lenny was just tryin’ to wake you up, and you almost killed him!” Faye bounced her still-crying son on her hip, hushing him with a gentle croon that was the absolute opposite of the bile in the words she’d spoken to Brian.

  Now he understood. The war had receded enough for him to feel his presence in this place where he was Brian. He was in Hiram, a little town just south of Oklahoma City, where Faye and Lenny lived. He was in the spare room of their house, a room that had once been his bedroom but was now fixed up like an office, with a sofa bed for guests. He was a guest in his big sister’s house. Not a paratrooper in Vietnam.

  It was January 1968, not November 1967.

  This was not Dak To.

  This was home.

  He rubbed away the sudden blazing ache in his chest and shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Lenny cleared his throat and took a deep breath. He stood. The top of his striped pajamas sat askew on him, and Brian saw that a button had b
een torn away. He’d done that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Without another word, his sister carried the baby down the hall, toward the kitchen. His cries faded like a siren moving away.

  Lenny stood there, little more than a silhouette, backlit by the hallway light. “I can’t imagine what it was like, Bri.” His voice was still tight with the pressure of Brian’s fingers. “All we see is what they show on the news, and that’s bad enough. But you can’t let the war turn you into a monster.”

  The sound that came up from Brian’s chest was a reflex, not a choice. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob. Or a primal scream choked down to a whimper.

  “It already did.”

  ~oOo~

  Brian was afraid to sleep anymore that night. He didn’t dream every night about the war, some nights he was drunk enough not to dream at all, but the dreams were becoming more vivid as the days passed, not less. And now he’d attacked his brother-in-law. And he’d meant to kill him. In his mind, Lenny had been NVA, the enemy, not the man who’d been a big brother, practically a father, to him since he was fourteen years old.

  He’d been home a month. Twenty-seven months in-country, two tours back to back, including four weeks at Bien Hoa hospital to end his tropical vacation. Put his feet down on American soil on 26 December. Back here in Hiram on 28 December.

  Now it was the end of January, and he was still fighting the goddamn war in his head. Happy Fucking New Year.

  When he heard the morning bustle start up outside the door, Brian yanked on yesterday’s jeans and t-shirt. He stuffed his dog tags under the cotton; Faye didn’t like to see them. He’d tried to take them off—in fact, during those long months under fire in the mud and rain, he’d fantasized about how fucking good it would feel to take the damn tags off and throw them away—but when the time came that he could, he hadn’t been able to get them off. They’d become part of him. A new limb. More than that—a new vital organ.