Daddy's Angel

June Beck grew up on Blackened Vines property in a trailer with a number on the door. She knows the rules. If you marry a patch, you belong to a patch. If you don't, you clean up after one. When her mother dies, June finds a box of paperwork that says her father isn't the man she's been told. It says her father is Cyrus Lamb — the founder, the dying man, the reason the club exists. Ruth Lamb has been running the women of the Blackened Vines for forty years. She doesn't get angry when June comes to her. She gets practical. She offers June a husband, a trailer, and silence. June says no. The next morning, there's a missing wallet and her name on the rumor mill, and the entire club stops looking at her. The only man who doesn't is a fifty-one-year-old prospect with a tool bag and no illusions about anything. One chair. One church meeting. One daughter who wasn't supposed to exist.