Roderick

by Gadziala, Jessica

  She liked flirting with danger a little too much.

  And, sure, many criminals acted that way. But people who did it as a career learned really quickly that danger was something you really tried to avoid at all possible costs. You didn't paw at it like a cat playing with a mouse.

  Those were experience lessons, though, ones we tried not to make her learn the hard way, knowing just how steep the consequences could often be.

  So we made sure she was trained.

  We let her tag along, pitch in with some extra muscle when it was necessary.

  But mostly, we had her on the grunt work.

  She was the one who clocked the most time on the dark web chasing down leads, finding new contacts that seemed trustworthy. And then Camden and I were the ones to meet up with them, to take the risks.

  So, really, if she was willing to put in all the legwork here on tracking down these pain in the ass guns again, why not let her? Why not keep ourselves from acquiring another enemy?

  And she was right, too.

  When it came to dealing with an MC, I would always much rather deal with one of their younger bloods than the older, more established members of the club. The presidents were the kind of men you didn't want to fuck around with. So if we could avoid that, avoid being put on their shit list, then that was likely the smart path to take.

  As for the latter part of her argument, yeah, no. That was not happening.

  It wasn't that he wasn't good looking.

  I'd seen him up close two days in a row.

  I was a red-blooded straight woman.

  So I was affected.

  Tall, well-built, with that perfect caramel skin, brown eyes, easy smile with perfect white teeth that somehow made this badass biker have goddamn dimples? Yes, it was all working for me.

  But that didn't mean I had any plans of ending my drought with the likes of an outlaw biker.

  It wasn't the outlaw thing, though. I had no issues with criminals. What little bit of dating or sleeping around I had ever done, it had pretty much exclusively been with those who skirted the edges of the law.

  It made more sense.

  I didn't have to pretend to be someone I wasn't around them.

  That being said, you don't fuck where you work. So anyone in my line of crime was off-limits. So that meant all arms dealers, traders, collectors, black market sellers... they were for business only, not pleasure.

  I had mouths to feed.

  I didn't need to snatch food out of them simply because I was hard up for an orgasm.

  So no matter how attractive I found the man's dimples, I was not planning on sleeping with him.

  I mean, I wasn't even that hard up, was I?

  It had been...

  "Ugh," I grumbled, dropping down across from Cam, reaching for another old-fashioned donut, never having been big on sweets, instead being known to go into the fridge and bite into a block of cheddar cheese like it was a burrito when I was stressed, not reaching for a bar of chocolate. Cam was the one with a sweet tooth in our little house. Jelly donuts especially. But he also had a thing for coffee rolls or the occasional marble frosted.

  "Just realized you haven't been laid since the Fourth of July, huh?" Astrid called, knowing me way too well.

  "Shut up," I demanded, sighing.

  "And Camden, if you have lost track, the last time you got lucky was around Easter," she reminded him, voice grave.

  My gaze slid to his, seeing the same look of shock and disgust on his face.

  We'd been busy.

  Sometimes things like that fell to the wayside.

  Especially since - as a whole - we didn't do the relationship thing. So having to actively go out looking for sex was just a chore.

  It was bad enough for me. And, let's face it, most women could just about walk into any bar and find someone willing to warm her bed for a night.

  Cam, yeah, I wasn't sure how he managed to land chicks when he did. Sure, he was stupidly good looking, but not even being able to offer a pick up line seemed to greatly hinder the chances of taking someone home.

  He did manage though.

  Not often, per se.

  Not as often as a man like him could if he were able to communicate, but more often than you would imagine when he couldn't even say hello to the women.

  "After this job," I mumbled so that only he could hear. "Then we can pity our sexlessness. But now, we need to work." Cam's pointer finger and middle tapped the tabletop hard twice to get my attention, making me turn to him, seeing him take those same two fingers and wave them around my body, making me look down to realize I might as well have been naked for as little modesty as the kimono was giving me. "Right. First, I get changed. Then we work."

  I moved down the hall with the bathroom to shrink into my room, closing the door, taking a deep breath.

  I should have known this job would come back to haunt me. There was no way they would let us get away with stealing from them. Especially guns that were so hard to replace. If we'd jacked some AKs or pistols or something, they probably would have chalked it up to part of the job and moved on. But when it came to collector's items like these, ones that were hard to get, ones that influential clients wanted their paws on, yeah, of course they would track us down.

  I guess I had maybe been imagining they'd want money. With interest. Or possibly beat the crap out of us as a message to others who might think of crossing them.

  Honestly, as much as it would hurt our bottom line to do it, I think I'd have preferred the money.

  And as much as I ached enough in random areas from harsh beatings already, I would have probably taken a beating too.

  This was going to be a pain in the ass. Require endless hours online hunting things down. Then likely some travel as well. And when you were dealing in illegal guns, you couldn't exactly make life easier by hopping on a plane real quick to pick it up.

  So, no.

  There would be cars.

  Or, worse yet, boats.

  Even just at the thought of it, my stomach lurched, sloshed around.

  Boats and I, we never got along.

  It didn't matter how often I had to be on one, my stomach had violent objections that left me queasy for weeks after even on solid ground.

  But we had to do what we had to do.

  Get this burden off our backs.

  Then we could maybe take a vacation, go somewhere that Astrid could actually drink piña coladas on the beach while being fed pineapples by hot men who told her how beautiful she was.

  Maybe I could too.

  Then take one to bed.

  My eyes moved around my room, taking in the lack of art on the walls, the fact that I hadn't even painted it after we'd moved in. I hadn't put anything down on the cold, hard cement floors either.

  My bed, though, my bed was where it was at.

  For someone like me, someone to whom sleep was not usually an easy thing - either falling or staying - I tried everything I could think of to make my bed a bit of a sanctuary for myself in the hopes it might fight off the insomnia or the bad dreams.

  It was king-sized which was unnecessary for most single women. But I tended to explore in my sleep, ending up not only from one end to the other but also from top to bottom, diagonal to diagonal, or even, on occasion, all my body but my legs on the bed. So room to roam was mandatory for me.

  The sheets were all Egyptian cotton, gray, buttery to the touch. There were two rows of pillows, a giant body pillow, heavy blankets, and then a light blanket for those nights when you're too hot, but you need to sleep with something on you anyway. There was a heating pad, a sleep mask, and a sound machine on my nightstand, blackout curtains on the windows that lined one wall, a fan overhead to move some air.

  It was a sleeper's paradise mostly wasted on someone who struggled to get a good five hours in.

  As I walked past, I tossed the blankets back into place, picking up a Christmas throw that had fallen to the floor to drape off the side.

&nb
sp; Christmas.

  If we were traveling, we might miss it.

  My heart sank a bit at the thought as I went into my closet, dragging out light wash jeans and a long-sleeve hunter green tee, slipping into underthings and those before pulling out my hair, dragging a brush through it as I tried to fight off the stab of guilt I felt at possibly making us work through Christmas.

  I had told Astrid this year that we would get to have a nice, calm holiday. That she would be able to do all the normal stuff. That we would be home to bake and cook and wrap and sing. Instead of like last year when we'd exchanged gifts we'd wrapped in hotel room towels in ninety-degree weather, no one actually in the spirit, simply going through the motions.

  It would suck to break that promise. Even if she was a grown woman who would understand.

  I'd tried every single year to make it perfect, idyllic, the kind of Christmas she had never gotten.

  But many years, something came up.

  I took a minute to dry my hair, not knowing if the day would demand we go out in the cold at all, then finally made my way back out of my room, figuring that if we hustled hard, harder than normal, we might be able to wrap all of this up in time for the holiday.

  Then, too, we would be able to go into the new year without anything hanging over our heads.

  "He brought more coffee," Astrid called, making me stop short, realizing Roderick was back, standing in the kitchen, pulling coffees out of a tray.

  "Figure it is going to be a long day," he told me, holding out a cup, and I found myself really careful not to let our fingers brush. Like there would be a spark or something cheesy and unrealistic as that.

  "How did you know we were going to agree?"

  "Because it's me or having Reign on your ass. And I don't know if you know what kind of year that man has had, but he'd be looking for an outlet for that kind of anger."

  Cam's eyes held mine for a second, knowing. "Yeah, see, Cam agrees... everyone knows Reign doesn't hurt women."

  "Cam looks like a man to me. And he might not do anything, but if you get the girls club stirred up enough, they might decide to step in. Working with me is the smartest bet for all of you. We can get all this handled and have you back off of Reign's radar in a couple weeks."

  "Working with might be pushing it. We will do this. But we don't need you all up in our shit while we do," I told him, taking a sip of the coffee he'd gotten me, tasting cream and caramel. Observant men, in my opinion, were possibly the sexiest of them all. They knew how you liked your coffee, if you changed your hair, if you were trying out a new perfume. Guys who paid attention were hot.

  Maybe that was how Camden got women.

  He was observant too. Almost freakishly so. But he likely needed to be when he couldn't communicate with most people.

  "Sorry, mami, you're going to need to deal with me being here. Going with you when you talk to contacts or go to pick up. I'm not taking any risks here. Not with guns that are impossible to find as it is. If you line them up, then something goes south with the trade, we're all fucked. It's smarter for me to be here."

  "He can stay on the couch," Astrid offered.

  "Astrid," I hissed, never planning on letting him stay at all, even if I did agree to letting him be a part of the process.

  "Or in Liv's bed," she offered, smiling. "She has plenty of room."

  "The couch would be better than the car I've been living in," he said, making me feel a small - very, very small - stab of guilt.

  Really, if it wasn't for us - me, mostly - none of this would have ever happened for him. He never would have been robbed, upset a client, pissed off his boss, lost the respect of his peers, tracked us down, staked us out, lived in a car.

  He'd been putting up with a lot of shit just because I didn't want to lose one of my clients.

  Really, the least I could do was extend the offer of the couch.

  "I'm sure we could scrounge up some pillows," I agreed, feeling an odd little surge of what felt like excitement, like anticipation inside at the idea of him being around.

  "So are you two going to go talk to Eduardo?" Astrid asked, on a one-woman-mission to push this man and me together, it seemed.

  There was a throat-clearing, drawing our attention over to Cam whose chin was lifted, something I took for No, I'll go with you.

  "But that would leave him with Astrid," I told him in a small voice, quiet enough for just the two of us to hear.

  Torn.

  That was the look Cam had then.

  He was torn.

  Because he loved us both, wanted to protect us both.

  But in the end, he knew I was more capable of handling myself. Because while Astrid had a whole hell of a lot of training that we both insisted on, she hadn't been given many real-life opportunities to put them into practice.

  And, quite frankly, we were okay with that.

  And while I didn't get a danger or creep vibe off this guy, sometimes you never knew. Some people didn't vibe. Sometimes their evil was hidden deep, only surfacing when the situations were ideal for it to do so.

  And we wouldn't risk that with her. Especially because she did her flirt thing on guys, some who maybe didn't like hearing no when she'd been working them for an hour. Until she decided to stop toying with men for her own power play, it was best not to leave her in the loft alone with some man whose impulses we knew nothing about.

  Me, on the other hand, I'd rip his balls clean off his body with one hand if he so much as got too close.

  "Who is Eduardo?" Roderick asked, leaning back against the counter, looking at home already as he sipped his coffee, oblivious to my ball-ripping thoughts.

  "He's someone who keeps his ear to the ground," I supplied, shrugging. "Sometimes he's useless. Other times, he is the only person who knows anything. He's usually worth the quick walk down the street to track him down."

  "Alright. You want to head out now?"

  "Might as well," I agreed, handing Cam my coffee to shrug into my jacket. "But try to let me do the talking. He's jumpy about new people. Once accused me of bringing some random homeless guy with me. Never mind that that guy has lived on that street for years. He's just paranoid like that."

  "Got it," he agreed, falling into step with me as we moved out into the hall, turning to watch the elevator doors close. "Can I ask something that might not be, ah, delicate?"

  "Alright," I agreed, brows drawing together as I watched his profile.

  "Why doesn't Cam speak?"

  "That is a long - and short - story. I, unfortunately, only know the short part. He simply doesn't. I don't know if he can't or just doesn't want to. But he has no interest in learning sign language or writing things down either. He just..."

  "He gets his point across," Roderick finished for me.

  "Exactly."

  "Alright. I was just curious. We have a guy in the club - our road captain - who doesn't speak much. Only ever like five or six words together at any time."

  "It is interesting what trauma can do to a person," I observed as the doors slid open to reveal a couple with three kids from a floor below our loft - people who didn't mind our noise because it often sounded like their children were having contests to see which could scream or slam doors the loudest, effectively cutting off the line of questioning just as his mouth had been opening to likely say something.

  "So, Roderick," I started as the silence on the walk started to get awkward. "How does a nice boy like you end up as a gun-running biker?"

  "Nice boy like me, huh?" he asked, smirking slightly.

  "No. I get it. You flash those dimples around out drinking with buddies, get the skirts to lift, the panties to fall. You make money by putting illegal firearms on the street. You're bad in that way, but I don't know, I get a family vibe from you. You have people out there who care about you. People who have families like that don't usually end up as bikers."

  "I have a mom and sisters," he told me, easy with the information, not something you often found in o
ur line of work. Everyone liked their secrets. They kept themselves - and their loved ones - safer. "We came over from Puerto Rico with nothing but a bag of clothes. My mom worked her fingertips raw when we were younger. I needed to find a way to provide for them."

  "I get that," I agreed, nodding.

  I didn't have a family to speak of, barely even remembered what any of mine had looked like even when they had been around, but despite all that, I did understand.

  "That's what you have going on, right? With Cam and your girl? You take care of them."

  "We take care of each other," I corrected because we did, we all helped one another in different ways, playing to our strengths to pick up the slack on the others' weaknesses.

  "Yeah, but you're the primary. The glue," he insisted. "If you weren't there, that whole thing would fall apart."

  "I don't like the sound of that," I admitted.

  See, I didn't live in a world of certainties. And while none of us did, no one knew when a wayward tractor trailer might veer into our lane on the highway or when a bit of food might get lodged in our throat, or our hearts might give in, it was different for people like me, people who flirted with death for a living. I had no guarantees that I would make it through my next job. And I had always imagined - hoped - that even without me, Cam and Astrid would be there for each other. And, in my heart of hearts, I did believe that. Cam loved Astrid, would never let any harm come to her if it could be avoided. But if I wasn't around to push for normalcy, to decorate for holidays, to make sure we got downtime here and there, that we communicated, yeah, I didn't know how long the two of them would be able to go on the same way we always had.

  And I hated that idea.

  I didn't mind being the glue, but I really hoped there were some staples or nails or goddamned buttons to help hold it all together.

  "Are you the primary?" I asked, wanting to steer the conversation away from myself a bit.

  "Ah, nah. I'd like to say I was. But that is my mother. If she didn't nag us all about getting together, I probably wouldn't find the time to see my sisters half as much as I do now. Not because I don't want to see them, just...