The Biker Who Drove Her Away novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Retraction

The rain drummed on the stage roof, and nobody in the crowd moved.

Boone stood with the microphone in both hands.

He looked at the floodlights, and the hundreds of faces, and the rows of wet jackets with club patches from three counties.

He had planned a speech.

I could see it in his posture, the chin up, the slow breath in.

"Folks, I've made mistakes," he started. "A man gets proud. A man..."

"Just the sentence," I said.

I didn't raise my voice.

The speakers picked it up anyway, and my words went out across the lanes.

A murmur rolled through the crowd.

Boone's face tightened.

He looked down at me, at the Triumph behind me and at Rafe, who had stopped his Harley at the back of the crowd and did not come any closer.

Then he looked at the vice president, who had planted himself at the foot of the stage steps with his arms folded.

Nobody was going to help him.

He lowered the microphone, then raised it again.

"Maggie Gerrity is my daughter," Boone said.

His voice cracked on the second word.

"She's mine. I'm her father."

Nobody spoke.

"I told my club she wasn't. I posted a lie about my wife. I told you all she was carrying another man's child, and it was a lie, and I knew it."

"Keep going," I said.

His eyes closed.

"Fifteen years ago, I called Rafe Lanier in Zanesville and told him Annie had picked me. She hadn't. I told her he had run off with a girl in Dayton. He hadn't."

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