Countdown: Grayson

by Boniface, Allie

  Dorrie wasn’t just a lay. She was someone he’d liked, and someone he’d really screwed over, now that he thought about it. Now that he was sober. He’d just stopped coming to The Last Call. He couldn’t even remember if he’d texted Dorrie to tell her he was trying to get sober or just let her figure it out on her own. Now he wondered if he should grant her some dignity and let her go. If Jade was their child together, maybe he should give Dorrie the privacy to tell him on her own terms.

  She’s yours.

  Except maybe Dorrie had told him. Maybe that note was all she could muster.

  “Grayson?” Kara tugged at his arm, and that finally dislodged his paralysis. “Don’t you want to know if Jade is hers? We have to ask her.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “She looked so... lost. And scared.”

  “She is.” She had been, anyway, all those times he’d taken her home and made her a meal and let her sleep in his sheets long after the sun came up. Dorrie had always reminded him of a lost puppy, and while she wasn’t bad in bed, he felt more pity than desire for her. He’d worn a condom every time, but that didn’t guarantee anything and he knew it.

  She might be Jade’s mother. Kara was right. He had to know. He had to ask. “She doesn’t live far. Just up the mountain.”

  Kara beat him to the truck and had climbed up without assistance by the time he got around to the driver side. He’d been to Dorrie’s place only once, but he remembered where it was, around a sharp curve at the top of Kiskadero Ridge. Kiskadero had once been nothing but a public campsite, a few acres of dirt squares where people could pitch their tents or pull in their RVs. A couple of decades ago, the county stopped funding it, and some businessman from Richmond bought up the land. He’d put up a handful of double-wide trailers, sold them for twice their worth, and then vanished. Now Kiskadero Ridge was like a lot of the valley: rundown, with no money for the makeover it desperately needed.

  “Why would she do that?” Kara asked, chewing her bottom lip. “Just leave Jade with you and then go to work like nothing mattered?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. Maybe because she didn’t have a choice if she wanted to pay rent? Or maybe because she wasn’t Jade’s mother? But those eyes. Pale blue eyes, like the sky seen through a filter of clouds. They were exactly the same color as Jade’s.

  They came to an intersection where a right turn would take them back toward town and a left would take them through two mobile home parks to the highway. If they didn’t turn at all, straight ahead lay Kiskadero Ridge.

  He hesitated and glanced at Kara. He wondered what she thought—of the bar, of Cronk, of the dishwasher he’d slept with. Let me see your face. Let me read your thoughts. But she looked down the road and into the dark, her face expressionless, her profile regal and still.

  She’d never have me. Kara Garrison was so far out of his league, he couldn’t believe she was sitting shotgun in his truck.

  He pressed the gas and flew up the mountain. At the top of the ridge, he made the turn onto Dorrie’s road and was about to beeline it to her driveway when he was forced to screech to a stop. A wide farm gate had been put up since the last time he was there. It sat padlocked shut with a “Private” sign hanging in the center.

  Grayson scratched his head. What the hell?

  “A gated community?” Kara quipped. “I had no idea.”

  “Neither did I.” He put the truck into Park and thought for a minute. Maybe they’d had trouble with trespassers or squatters. Gates like these were a dime a dozen around the valley—not like they kept people out, but they did a decent job of slowing people down. But Dorrie hadn’t come this way. He could see that at once. She’d never have been able to open the gate, drive inside, and then close it again before they got there. “She’s not here.” Whether that meant she’d moved somewhere else, or just ditched them for the night, he couldn’t guess.

  He went to put the truck into Reverse, but sudden lights blinded him. From the other side of the gate, a truck appeared. The driver didn’t bother to dim his headlights. Instead a figure, tall and broad-shouldered, climbed from the cab of the truck and unlocked the gate. It swung open, and he returned to his truck and pulled through. Grayson managed to get his own truck in gear and out of the way only seconds before the other vehicle broadsided him. He laid on the horn, pissed.

  The truck stopped, the driver climbed out again, locked up the gate, then approached Grayson’s window. He’s got some balls, Grayson thought. He doesn’t know who’s sitting in here. I could be a serial killer. Or a drunk or an off-duty cop. Should be a little more careful whose truck he walks up to.

  Grayson cracked his knuckles and put down his window.

  Then he saw the revolver in the man’s hand, its barrel glinting like diamonds in the moonlight, and he realized whoever held it probably didn’t need to worry about facing down serial killers or drunks or cops.

  Or a retired prize fighter who hadn’t thrown a real punch in years.

  Midnight

  It was instinct rather than intention, terror rather than any rational thought, that had Kara’s hand on the door and her knees drawn up against her chest before she realized it.

  Be quiet and maybe he won’t see you.

  The words were a mantra inside her head, words she’d said a thousand times to herself in another place and time.

  Be quiet. Don’t breathe. Don’t speak. Don’t look at him.

  She knew the man standing outside the truck, maybe not his face or his name, but she knew his type. Big. Cocky. Territorial above all else and willing to mark that territory in whatever way necessary. She hadn’t seen his face, but she didn’t need to. She knew from the way he strutted to the truck, the way he lifted the gun just high enough so they could all see it, his eyeball to the barrel as if he was inspecting it.

  “Hey, man, what’s with the gun?”

  If Kara didn’t know Grayson better, she might’ve thought he sounded casual. Nonthreatening. Maybe even a little nervous. But there was an edge beneath his words, mirrored in the tight squaring of his shoulders and the set of his chin that had nothing casual inside it.

  “Can I help you?” the man said.

  “Just taking a drive. Looking for an old friend.” Grayson cleared his throat. “Didn’t know that was a crime up here.”

  “Awful late to be making a social call. This here’s a private road.”

  “Didn’t used to be.”

  “It is now.”

  Kara wanted to touch Grayson’s arm and signal they should leave; after all, there was no reason to be up here since Dorrie wasn’t. But he didn’t move.

  “Might not want to be waving that around.”

  The man laughed, and in the moonlight, Kara could see his teeth, wide and even, his jaw solid and his hair pulled back into a ridiculous, disheveled man bun. He looked thirty, maybe a little younger. She didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean anything. He could be new in town, just passing through, a squatter, a relative of someone on the ridge, anyone at all.

  “A man’s gotta defend himself,” he said. “You know how it is around here. Bears gettin’ into the trash, thieves breakin’ in when you’re not home, nuisance critters like that.” His glance cut to Kara. She unfolded her knees from her chest and slid her feet back to the floor.

  Grayson gave a short nod. “I do know something about that.” The edge was back, razor-thin and sharper than before. Kara wondered if he’d pull the guy through the window and put a fist in his face a few times. But he only tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “You know Dorrie Slocum?”

  The man finally lowered his gun. “I damn sure do. Been lookin’ for her all day. You seen her?”

  “Think I’d be asking you if I had?”

  The guy chuckled, and suddenly it was as though they were old friends, commiserating over a woman. “Guess not. Naw, man, I ain’t seen her.” He offered his free hand through the open window. “Name’s Travis.”

  “You been in town long?”
/>
  “Couple-a months. I work construction over in Greenway. Met Dorrie at The Last Call and she gave me a place to crash, said I didn’t have to pay for it.” He chuckled again. “I mean, I pay, but not in cash.” He winked, then waggled his tongue. Kara’s stomach turned.

  “Well, if you see her, tell her Grayson’s lookin’ for her, will ya?”

  “Sure thing. Electric’s out again, so I’m guessin’ she didn’t pay last month’s bill. If you see her before I do, tell her that, ’kay? Can’t fuckin’ microwave dinner or watch the game if the power’s out.”

  “Will do.”

  Travis lifted the gun again and gave a little wave with it. “Be careful, man. Lotta people don’t like strangers driving around after dark.”

  “I’ve lived here a while,” Grayson said. “Don’t have to tell me.” He put the truck in Reverse and eased away. Travis stood there, arms folded, and watched them go.

  “That guy’s creepy as hell,” Kara said.

  Grayson glanced over. “No kidding. You okay? Looked a little shook up.”

  “When a stranger comes walking out of the dark holding a gun? Tends to do that to me.”

  He looked as though he might say something else, as if he could see through her lie to the long-dormant fear behind her breastbone, but he didn’t.

  “He’s Dorrie’s boyfriend, you think?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. Boyfriend would imply he cares about her an ounce or two.”

  “Think he was lying about knowing where she is?”

  He shook his head. “I think he’s looking for her same as we are.”

  “I hope we find her first.” Kara loosened her fingers from their death grip on the door handle. She thought of the bruise on Dorrie’s arm.

  “I hope so too.” Grayson stopped at the bottom of the mountain. “But I don’t know where else to look.”

  BACK AT THE LAST CALL, Grayson scratched his cell number on a cocktail napkin and handed it to Cronk, who still looked pissed.

  “Didn’t find her?”

  Grayson shook his head.

  Cronk gave him a long look. “What happened with you an’ her, anyway?”

  Wish I knew how to answer that.

  “One day everything’s fine around here, the next day you’re gone. Then the day after that she’s gone, then she comes back, but she’s moping around like someone kicked her dog. I wouldn’t-a taken her back at all, ’cept I needed someone in the kitchen and no one knows the place like she does. Only the last few months she’s been back to normal—if ya can call Dorrie normal, know what I mean? Then you walk in and she bolts like a fuckin’ deer in headlights.”

  Grayson waited for the tirade to stop. “Listen, just text me if she shows up, okay?” He was beyond exhausted. His head ached, his back ached, and his goddamn ego ached too, when he got right down to it. He couldn’t remember a shittier, more confusing day than this one.

  Cronk waved them away. “I’ll be closin’ up in another hour, but if she shows....” He muttered something under his breath and disappeared into the kitchen. The only other guy at the bar nodded into his chest, snoring softly.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Kara didn’t say anything, but she followed him to the truck.

  “Sorry for the wild-goose chase,” he said as they headed back to Yawketuck.

  “I wouldn’t say it was entirely a wild-goose chase.”

  They left Main Street and bumped up the mountain, through darkness so thick you could cut it. The moon and stars had disappeared, so only the truck’s headlights sliced through the night.

  “You think she’s Jade’s mom, don’t you?”

  “Why else would she have run away the minute she saw me?” The dull nausea that had roiled his stomach all day returned. He had a kid he barely knew. With a woman he barely knew. What would Dorrie want from him from that moment forward? Money? A place to live? Full custody of Jade, since she’d as much as said so by leaving the baby on his doorstep? In how many different ways would his life change after that night?

  He turned onto Fourth Road. A family of deer, a doe and twin fawns, walked down the middle of the road. Grayson laid on the horn and they bounded into the forest. He didn’t usually act like an asshole to wildlife, but he was angry, disappointed, restless, fatigued, and about a million other things he didn’t have words for.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Kara said as he pulled into her driveway. “If we can talk to her before tomorrow morning, maybe we can get some answers.”

  “And if not, Jade goes to Social Services?”

  “Probably.”

  He cut the engine and turned to look at her. “That kills me. She’s just a kid. A baby. Goin’ to a foster home?” He shook his head. It was such a fucked-up way to start a life. Of course, he could man up and adopt her himself. Maybe. Or maybe Social Services would take one look at him and forbid it. A nice family with two married parents and a picket fence would be a much better place for Jade, even if Grayson was her biological father. But that just made him feel worse.

  A lone light remained on in Kara’s living room. “Your friend’s been here a while.” He reached for his wallet. “How much do babysitters get these days?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t paid one in forever.”

  He sat back and unbuckled his seat belt. She did the same, but neither one got out or reached for the door. Like a switch had flipped, all the attraction from earlier in the day, the heavy sense of anticipation between them, the want, the remembered taste of her on his tongue, overtook him.

  It made no sense. His head was spinning, his thoughts ricocheting between Jade and Dorrie and Kara and his own father, his own upbringing. A baby waited inside. Tomorrow, everything in his life would change forever.

  But that was tomorrow. He wanted tonight.

  Grayson stretched his arm across the seat, across the infinite space of black leather, and folded Kara’s hand inside his own.

  Her chest hitched, an unsteady breath he probably wasn’t supposed to see, but it set him on fire. He pulled her closer and put his lips to her throat. Warm. Perfumed. A faint pulse that sped up the longer he teased her, until his dick couldn’t stand the teasing and he took Kara McGarrity in his arms and kissed her.

  She fit perfectly, like she’d been made for him, one leg slung over his and her hands on his face, in his hair, tugging him close. Her tongue met his, strong and certain and hell if he could remember kissing a woman this way in his adult life. Their breath steamed up the windows in a matter of seconds.

  She laughed against his mouth, and he pulled away.

  “What is it? What’s funny?”

  “It’s like we’re teenagers making out before curfew.”

  He traced the shape of her cheekbone, the tiny lines under one eye. “You are most definitely not a teenager who has to worry about curfew.”

  A shadow crossed her face, and he pressed his finger to where it etched a frown in her brow. “What is that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You have these...moments where you go away. Where you look sad or scared or....” He tucked her back into his embrace. “Darkness from a long time ago?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  And that was okay too. He kissed one temple, then the other, then her nose and each eyelid. He took his time getting back to her mouth while his hands explored the rest of her, the ridges and planes of her body, the space between her ribs and her breasts, the soft crease in her thigh—the rich landscape he found himself wanting to get to know more with each passing moment. Damn, he wanted her, all of her, calling his name, begging for his touch, coming in waves as he slipped inside her and made believe for one incredible night that he was man enough to make her feel the same way too.

  1:00 a.m.

  Somehow they made it into the house without giving too much away. Harmony looked at them with an arched brow, but Kara stayed on one side of the
kitchen and Grayson on the other, at least until he gave Harmony fifty dollars, which she said was too much but pocketed all the same.

  “Have any problems with her?” Kara asked. She bent over Jade, who was sleeping soundly in her carrier on the kitchen table. Her cheeks were pink, her eyelashes a dusky shadow against her tiny face. Her fingers curled into her palms like miniature seashells, and she smelled like that infinitely wonderful baby scent of fresh powder and purity.

  “Not at all. She slept most of the time.” Harmony pulled out her phone, typed something, and then stuck it back into her pocket. “Okay, well, guess I’ll get going.”

  Harmony closed the door behind her, and Kara counted to ten before breathing. She ran her fingers over Jade’s tiny, perfect forehead. The woman in the bar had bleached-blonde hair. Grayson had light brown hair. She wondered what Jade’s natural color would end up being.

  Grayson closed one hand over hers before she realized he’d crossed the room.

  “She’s okay?”

  Kara nodded. “Sleeping like a baby.” She smiled at her own joke, but butterflies were creating pandemonium inside her, and if they stood here for much longer, she could make no promises about what might happen.

  She wanted him.

  With every inch, fiber, cell, and naughty big and little part of her body, she wanted Grayson Hollister. Naked. In her bed. Or in his, or on the sofa, or the floor, or hell, even the kitchen counter. Doing things she’d only seen in the occasional porn movie or imagined in her fantasies late at night.