“Hey, where’s Zocco?” she asked, looking around. “I need to talk to him.”
“He went to play pool.”
“Okay.” She slid from Ryan’s lap and the drag of her ass across him made his dick stiffen. She lifted a brow as she looked at him. Hell, she must have felt that. “I’ll go find him.”
He let her go, even though he wanted to follow her. He knew she was going to tell Zocco she wanted more angel sugar, this time even more. He hoped like hell she wasn’t going too fast with this. Zocco wasn’t that bright, but he was definitely paranoid about some things. And was she going to try to talk to him about the murder? Hell.
When Sera returned, a faint frown creased her forehead but she smiled at him. When she slid onto his lap again, he pressed his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “What?”
She shook her head, pressed her lips together and he got the message—later. Fine.
“Going to the ladies’ room,” she said, once again doing a cock-teasing shimmy off his lap. He held back a groan. “Carly, wanna come?”
The two women disappeared through the crowd. Manny and Vince were talking about guns and Ryan forced himself to listen and join in, knowing Manny was counting on getting this on tape and hoping for more incriminating details.
After a while, Sera still hadn’t returned. He looked around for her then rolled his eyes at his obsession with her. Christ. Then Carly came back and sat down without her.
“Where’s Sara?” he asked her, frowning.
“She stopped to talk to some guy,” Carly said. “That guy that asked her to dance earlier…?” Then she glanced at him and her smile faded, her voice trailing off into her usual question, and Ryan pushed back his chair, scraping it along the wood floor, and stood. She’d mistaken his concern for jealousy. Which it wasn’t. Whatever.
His height let him survey the room as he strolled casually to the back of the bar. He spotted her, the satiny top she wore gleaming in the light shining down from above her. A man stood close to her, too close, crowding her against the bar. She was talking to him, and had put out a hand, as if trying to push him back from her.
“Hey.” Vince’s voice spoke from behind him. Ryan glanced at him. “That guy’s puttin’ the moves on your woman, Tommy.”
“I see that.” Ryan scowled.
“You gotta stop him,” Vince continued. “Let’s go teach that asshole a lesson.”
Oh shit. Drug-and-alcohol-fueled bar fight in the making. Vince had already started toward Sera and the man, and Ryan hastened after him, knowing he had to stop Vince from beating the crap out of the guy.
And yet—if he let the guy get away with moving on his woman, the other guys would all think he was a complete wuss. He’d lose all respect. Again, shit.
Vince had grabbed the guy’s shirt from behind and yanked hard. Sera’s eyes flew wide. Vince spun the man around and fisted the front of his shirt, giving him a shake. “Hey, buddy. This chick’s off limits.”
“Uh…” The whites of the guy’s eyes gleamed. “Says who?”
Ryan rolled his eyes, and stepped up. “Says me. She’s mine.”
Vince drew back a fist, and Ryan grabbed it and stopped him. “What the hell?” Vince turned to him. “You gonna let him do that? He deserves to hurt.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ryan was thinking fast, trying to ignore Sera standing there wide-eyed, hand to her chest. She could probably take the guy herself and thank Christ she hadn’t or they’d really be in deep shit. “I’m gonna take him outside and kick his ass,” he said.
But a crash beside him made him jump and he turned to see Zocco standing there with a smashed beer bottle in his hand, brandishing it like a weapon.
He swallowed a sigh. Goddammit. The guys thought they were coming to his defense, and really, he had to admire their loyalty and friendship, but fuck, they were making his life difficult.
“Put down the bottle, Zocco,” he said. “I’ll handle it.” He grabbed the guy roughly and yanked him away from Sera. But Zocco was drunk and stoned—what else was new?—and lunged forward with the bottle. Without thinking, Ryan put up an arm to deflect the blow, and tried to get the guy out of there. He’d take him outside, give him a little punch on the chin and tell him to get the hell lost.
He dragged the guy through the bar. Luckily Ryan had a few pounds on him and was able to avoid the guy’s fists as he tried to defend himself. Out on the street, around the corner where nobody would see them, he gave the guy a hard shove. “Get the fuck out of here,” he snarled. “And be thankful I’m not kicking the shit out of you.”
The guy started to speak, took a step toward him, and Ryan drew in a deep breath. Christ, the guy wasn’t going to try to fight him for real, was he? But then the man’s mouth dropped open. He gulped, and said, “Man, you’re…bleeding.” And then he turned and ran.
Ryan looked down at himself, and to his horror saw that his shirt and pants were soaked with blood. His arm had a huge deep gash across the forearm, dangerously close to the veins in his wrist. He stood there gaping at it. Wow. He hadn’t felt a thing. What the fuck? Zocco must have nailed him with the bottle. Jesus Christ.
Suddenly he began to feel a tad lightheaded. He was bleeding like crazy. He leaned against the wall of the building and put his hand over the wound in a futile attempt to stop the flow of blood.
“Ryan?” Sera appeared around the corner. Her eyes flew wide and she rushed toward him through the dark. “Ryan, what happened? Oh Jesus, look at you.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Zocco sliced me with that bottle. Gotta stop the bleeding…”
“Your shirt.” She dropped her purse to the pavement. She started at the buttons, then lost patience and ripped at the fabric. Buttons popped off in every direction. In a fog, Ryan vaguely remembered how strong she was. That was good. Very good.
She wrapped the shirt around his arm tightly. Christ she was trying to cut off his circulation. No, that was a good thing right now. Riiiight.
“Take me home,” he said, clenching his teeth.
“Yes. Come on.” She grabbed her purse and led him to where he’d parked the truck. She dug in his front pocket for the keys and he laughed.
She frowned at him. “What are you laughing about?”
“That feels good, but this isn’t a good time for fooling around.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she muttered, unlocking the passenger door and shoving him in.
She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned to him. She looked so cute all worried about him. “I should take you to the hospital. You need stitches.”
He sighed. “Ah hell. I can’t go to the hospital.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it. I either go there as myself and use my government health insurance. In which case I’ve blown my cover. Or I go as Tommy Briscoe, and sit there for hours—probably all night—because I’ve got no insurance, waiting to get stitched up. You know how they’re gonna treat a biker gang member.”
“Ryan. You’re bleeding. You need stitches.”
“Take me home. We’ll look at it there and see.”
She inhaled a long breath in through her nose as though he was trying her patience, and turned the key in the ignition. With a spray of gravel she pulled out of the parking lot then raced through the dark streets of Clover City to their house, breaking the speed limit all the way.
“Careful,” he cautioned her, feeling strangely light-hearted and amused. “We don’t want any more run-ins with the law. Remember last time?” He laughed.
She pressed her lips together but didn’t slow down until she pulled into the driveway. She helped him into the dark house, led him to the bathroom where she began unwrapping the shirt tied on his arm.
She sucked in a breath when she saw the open flesh. Ryan looked down at his arm. Fuck, it was starting to hurt like a bitch. The room wavered and the floor shifted beneath him.
“Ryan!” She caught him as the floor came up to smack him, and again he appreciated how stron
g she was, although his weight almost took her down too. He wanted to laugh, but his ears were roaring and the room was going black.
She shoved his head down between his knees and held it there, and he was happy to stay like that while the noise stopped and the darkness cleared. Christ, what a pansy he was. He’d never fainted in his life.
“You have to go to the hospital, Ryan,” she said again, her tone urgent.
“Don’t want to go there. Can’t go there. I’ll be fine.”
She crouched on the floor beside him, a towel now wrapped around his arm. He hadn’t even noticed her do that. “Fine,” she gritted out between clenched teeth. She stood and left the bathroom. He frowned. Where the hell did she go? She wouldn’t leave him like this…and then she returned with something in her hands. His frown deepened and he shook his head, trying to focus.
She pulled out a needle and thread—fuck! Was she going to stitch him up herself?
She threaded the needle with black thread, then tugged one end of the towel, unwrapped it and dropped the bloody cloth into the bathtub. She pulled his arm across her lap then poured rubbing alcohol all over everything including his arm and the needle and thread. Fire consumed his arm, flames licking over his entire body, and he gasped. The fumes and searing pain made his head twirl even more.
“Sera…”
“Don’t worry.” She looked up at him, a cute little crease between her eyebrows. “Do you want something? A bullet to bite on? A shot of tequila?”
“Uh…”
She shrugged, bent her head and stabbed the needle into his flesh. He thunked his head back against the tile wall and closed his eyes, gritting his teeth until his jaw ached. He might have passed out, or maybe he just managed to blank out the pain stabbing at him with every poke of the needle through his flesh. When she stopped, he opened his eyes. She sat with her head bent, her hair a curtain obscuring her face from him. She prodded gently at his skin with her index finger as if testing it, pursed her lips, then shrugged.
“There,” she said.
“Sera.” He reached with his other hand to push her hair aside. Was he dreaming? Had she really just stitched him up? Maybe she’d taken him to the hospital and they’d given him some really good drugs, and he didn’t remember. That’s what this was. A psychotropic hallucination.
She unrolled a length of gauze and started wrapping it around his arm tightly. Now that the bleeding had stopped, he chanced a look. Huh. Didn’t look too bad, considering. Well, the black thread was really ugly, but her stitches were neat.
He reached out and lifted Sera’s chin and stared into her eyes. “Thank you, Sera.”
Sera sat on the edge of the bathtub, her knees wobbly. A dull throbbing had started at the base of her skull and she knew it was only going to get worse.
“You’re welcome,” she muttered. She put a hand over her eyes, the glare of the bathroom light like knives into her eyeballs.
“You sewed me up.” His words came out in a low, barely audible tone.
“Yes.” She put her other hand out to the edge of the sink to steady herself as she rose. “I have to go lie down.”
Ryan lumbered to his feet also, his body huge in the small space of the bathroom. He circled an arm around her waist and led her out the door. His strength supported her, his warmth reassured her. The pounding in her head intensified until her skull felt as if it were splitting in two.
Then the floor fell away from her feet and the ceiling tilted, and Ryan had her in his arms. “Don’t!” she tried to protest. “You’ll make your arm bleed again.” He ignored her, strode across the hall into the bedroom and gently deposited her on the bed.
“I’ll get the Tylenol,” he said before he disappeared.
“Get some for yourself too!” She closed her eyes and sank into the blissful softness of the mattress and pillow, the hammering in her head a steady rhythm. She put her hands to her head and held it. Shit.
She’d known this was going to happen. Every time she saw blood, this happened. Why did she do this to herself?
Most of the time she had no choice. And tonight, well, what was she supposed to do—let Ryan bleed to death?
Possibly she was strong enough to have dragged him into the ER, if she’d driven there instead of home. But dammit, he’d been right. They’d sit there all night waiting for attention without insurance. She knew how the hospital staff would look at them. As if they were bikers. Criminals. They’d both experienced it, in restaurants, shops, with the cops. Or they blew his cover and ended the op.
No choice.
The words echoed in her head to the cadence of the throbbing. Then she sensed Ryan’s presence. He pressed two tablets into her hand. “Here.” He helped her sit up long enough to swallow some icy water and the pills, then laid her carefully back down. She felt him removing her boots then her jeans, and she knew she was in sad shape when she didn’t even get turned on a little by him taking her clothes off. She let out a long sigh.
He tucked her into the covers and she tried to relax through the pain, breathed through her nose, eyes closed. Moments passed and she heard faint rustling noises and she waited for Ryan to leave, but to her surprise the bed dipped beneath her as he climbed in with her, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her up against his naked body.
She snuggled into him, and the hand that cupped her head felt comfortingly strong and steady.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, drifting on a haze of pain.
“Christ, Sera. Don’t apologize. Please, don’t apologize.”
“How’s your head?”
Waking up in bed together was extremely pleasant. Ryan pulled Sera against him and wrapped her up in his arms.
“It’s fine now. How’s your arm?”
“Hurts like a sonofabitch. But I’ll live.” He rested his cheek on top of her head. “It’s blood, isn’t it?”
She said nothing.
“It’s okay, Sera.” He waited but she still didn’t speak. “What did you find out from Zocco last night?”
“Oh. I told him I want to meet Casas. Because I want to sell more sugar, and I need to make sure he can deliver. He’s going to talk to him about it.”
“That’s good. But you didn’t look happy.”
“Yeah.” She sighed against his chest. “I tried to talk about that murder, but I didn’t get anywhere.”
“Neither did we.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
They lay together for a while. Then Ryan said, “Thanks.”
“For…?”
“For last night. For…uh…fixing me up.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.”
This woman was amazing him, in more ways than one.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Did you talk to Dominick?” Sera spoke to Zocco in a low voice. They were at the house a few days later, a bunch of guys watching WWE on television again. She’d dragged him away from the television into the kitchen.
“Yeah.” He shoved more chips in his mouth.
“Is he going to meet with me?”
Zocco scowled. “Yeah. He said he’s coming to Clover City next week. He’ll talk to you then.”
“You know Tommy’s been helping me sell the sugar,” she said to him, leaning against the counter in what she hoped was a casual posture.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got a couple of really big customers lined up,” she said. “The Coyotes in L.A. want to sell the stuff for us.”
Zocco frowned. “Huh.”
She studied him. “We want to meet with Dominick ourselves about this. Make sure he can actually supply that much sugar.”
“He can.”
“Well, I know he can,” she replied and shot Ryan a glance as he walked into the kitchen. “But Tommy’s a little more uh…cautious. He wants to make sure before we start making promises to people.”
“We do that and we don’t deliver…” Ryan spoke up. “Sara trusts you guys.”
“But you don’t?
” Zocco seemed completely unoffended by that.
Ryan grinned. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I value my life. Some of these people aren’t very nice, and you know yourself what can happen when a deal goes bad.”
“Yeah.” Zocco nodded understandingly. “I get it.” He thought a moment. “You’re still not going to sell the stuff here though?”
Sera shook her head. “No. This is your territory. We had a deal, and I’m sticking to it.”
Zocco nodded again.
“I want to know where he gets the stuff,” Ryan said in a hard, cold voice. “I’m getting the cash, and I’ll front the money. I’ll take that risk. But I want to know he’s going to be able to keep up the supply before Sara starts telling people.”
“This is big, Zocco,” Sera said with a meaningful look at him.
“How big?”
She glanced at Ryan and he gave a nod. “A thousand hits. One gram each.”
Zocco’s eyes bulged. “Holy shit! That’s a hundred grand! Where you gonna get that kind of dough?”
“I have my connections,” Ryan said. He took another step into the room, hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Sara wants to do this and I think it’s a good deal. So I’m arranging to get the money.”
Zocco looked from one to the other. She could see the thoughts processing in his mind. He wasn’t brain surgeon material, but he was canny and street smart. He was figuring out how much money was in it for him personally. She wanted to offer him a calculator, but instead just leaned against the counter and waited. Breathed. In. Out.
“Okay,” he finally said. Greed won out. “I’ll tell Dominick.”
“Great.”
“Hey, man.”
Vince and Ryan sat at the bar at The Patch. It was only four in the afternoon, but Vince had called him and wanted to meet for a beer. Ryan had put him off on the pretext that he had one more delivery to do, long enough to get hold of Josh and get surveillance in place.
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