Dare To Run (The Sons of Steel Row #1)

by Jen McLaughlin

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and a key slipped into the doorknob. I grabbed a knife from the carving block—just in case—and stared at the door as it opened. When I saw Lucas walk in, I let out a sigh of relief and started talking before he took another step. “Are you okay? Did the cops see you? Are they coming up here? What should we do? What should I do? I don’t—”

  “The Boys didn’t see me. I was already policing my brass before they were a block away.” Lucas lifted a hand to his head and rubbed his wrist over his temple. He looked exhausted. And pale. And . . . and . . . “They’re not coming up here. Relax.”

  “You’re bloody. Are you bleeding?” I took a step toward him, paused, and took another uneven step. Blood soaked through his left sleeve, and his hand hung limply at his side. “Lucas . . . why are you bleeding?”

  “Huh?” He glanced down at his arm, his brow furrowed. “Oh. Look at that. I got shot.”

  “Look at—” I closed my eyes and counted to three. He said that in the same fashion that a normal person would say “I went to the movies” or “I have a cold” or something inane like that. As if it didn’t even hurt. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

  “Hell no.”

  I stomped my foot. “Yes. You’re shot, Lucas. Freaking shot.”

  “Yeah. I know.” He leaned against the door and slid his gun into its holster. “And if I go to a hospital, they’ll have to report it.”

  “But—damn it.” He was right. Gunshot wounds always involved cops. “What do we do? Do you know someone? Is there someone on the payroll that can fix you up?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t go in. I can’t trust him anymore. Scotty could’ve gotten to him.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my mouth before saying, “Sit down. You look pale.” I led him to the couch, and for once, he didn’t argue. “God, what do we do now?”

  Once sitting, he pulled his phone out. He glanced up at me. “Are you good with a needle?”

  “Oh my—” I pressed a hand to my stomach. “No. No way. I’d puke all over you.”

  He winced. “That wouldn’t really help me at all.”

  “Yeah. I know.” A small laugh escaped me, despite the stress of the moment. “But I can’t help it. It’s true. The idea of pushing a needle through your flesh—” I covered my mouth and swallowed back the bile trying to escape my stomach.

  He blinked at me. “Okay, okay. Stop thinking about it, sweetheart.”

  I nodded frantically, because if I didn’t, I’d hurl.

  Lifting the phone with his good arm, he waited. After a few seconds, he spoke. “I need you to sew me up. Some Bitter Hill guys got me in the arm.” He glanced down at the rapidly growing stain. “Yeah, it’s nothing bad. Just a flesh wound, but it’s on my arm, so I can’t do it myself.” He chuckled. Actually chuckled. “No. She’s apparently not on board with needles and flesh.” Another pause. “Thanks—I’ll leave the door unlocked. Be careful. The Boys might actually be doing their jobs and investigating the shots. I heard the sirens.”

  He hung up and tossed his phone aside. When he looked up at me, he looked as calm as ever, and that famous smirk of his was firmly in place. “Chris is coming.”

  I nodded. “Let me help you get your shirt off.”

  He glanced down. “Damn it. This was my favorite dress shirt.”

  “You can get another shirt,” I snapped, unable to believe how extraordinarily calm he was being about this. “You can’t get another arm.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” he drawled.

  I walked up to him and undid the first button. My attention fell to his shirt, and the red blood spread way too fast for comfort. “Did you find them? Did they come out onto the street?”

  He flexed his jaw. “I got two, but the sniper got away.”

  I undid another button. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. I wish I’d gotten them all, damn it.” He shifted his weight and winced. “I’ll get them eventually, though. No one takes a shot at you and lives to tell.”

  “I don’t think they were shooting at me,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t give a shit.” He gripped the arm of the couch. “They still coulda hurt you.”

  My heart twisted. He’d been shot at and almost killed, and all he cared about was that I was almost collateral damage. What even was that? “We need to stop the bleeding.”

  “Hence the needle,” he said dryly. “Chris will be here soon. I’ll be fine. It’s a through-and-through, and it only skimmed my arm, really. A couple of stitches and I’ll be back on my feet. Probably could do without, but I don’t want to risk infection.”

  I choked back the bile rising in my throat and continued unbuttoning his shirt. It was taking longer than it should have, as my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “How do you know all this?”

  “Because this isn’t the first time I’ve been shot, darlin’.” He dropped his head back on the couch and closed his eyes. “And it won’t be the last.”

  “That’s just—” Lovely. I bit my tongue and undid the last button. “Sit up. Let’s get this off you.”

  He sat up. I slowly lowered his shirt off his good arm and carefully peeled it back over his injured one. He hissed through his teeth when it stuck to his skin. “Son of a fucking bitch.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I murmured, finally getting it off him. There wasn’t a whole lot of new blood, because it had clotted up a bit. “Did you get hit when you threw me against the wall?”

  “No. I think it was after.” He glanced at me, his gaze shadowed. “When I found them.”

  I rolled the shirt up in a ball. “And you think Scotty sent these guys after you?”

  “Yep, no doubt.” He smirked. “So much for that lunch date with him, I guess. Good thing I filled up on eggs.”

  “Lucas.”

  “What?” he asked, blinking. “I just complimented your cooking.”

  I threw the shirt aside. Anger pumped through my veins, but it wasn’t alone. It mingled with fear. So much fear. Knowing I’d almost lost him . . . Yeah, that scared me more than anything else could have. He could have died, and he was cracking jokes and acting as if it didn’t matter at all. It did.

  He mattered, damn it.

  “Stop acting like you’re not upset by this by making jokes. Your brother just tried to have you killed.” I knelt next to him on the couch and cupped his face, swallowing back the furious words trying to escape. He didn’t look at me. “I know that has to hurt. I know you’re upset. And that’s okay.”

  He growled under his breath. “And what will being upset accomplish? How will that keep us alive?”

  “It won’t.” I climbed onto his lap, straddling him. He didn’t move, but the jaw in his muscle flexed. “And that’s okay, too.”

  He let out a harsh laugh. “Everything is okay, according to you.”

  “That’s because it is.” I ran my thumb over his lower lip. “That’s because it can be.”

  He finally looked at me, and what I saw in his eyes . . . I would never forget it. Not in a million years. The cold, hard reality of what had happened, and what he would soon have to do, was all there for me to see. “Heidi.”

  “Shh. I know.”

  Leaning in, I pressed my lips to his, keeping the kiss gentle. It wasn’t meant to initiate sex. It was an act of comfort—the only act I knew that would show him without words that I cared. He needed to know that I didn’t regret last night, or us, at all. I didn’t know why he’d jumped to that conclusion earlier, but he had. And it had obviously upset him.

  If he ever doubted anything, it shouldn’t be my feelings for him. I loved him, and nothing he did or said would change that. I loved how selflessly he took care of those he considered under his protection. I loved the undying hope he had that his brother was a good man, even though I feared it might get him killed. I didn’t love him despite his flaws—I loved him with them. Who he was. Who I was. We just worked.

  And he needed to know that much, at least.


  Pulling back, I framed his face with my hands again and smiled down at him even though it hurt to smile at him when he looked so lost. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “No. It’s not.” Something inside of him seemed to break. I saw it. Felt it. “It’s really fucking not.”

  But it could be. I was starting to come around to his line of thinking. Except he’d wanted me to run, to be safe. I wanted him to run. To stick to the original plan. I wouldn’t go with him, because there was only one passport, and he needed to get the heck out of this country. If he stopped worrying about me, he could run. He could live. “I want you to—”

  The door opened. “Okay, where’s the—?” Chris paused midstep, a brow raised. He took in our positions, me on top of Lucas, holding his face, and didn’t look too happy. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No,” Lucas said, the emotion I’d seen earlier gone in an instant. “Heidi here was just being a doll and taking care of me.”

  “I see that,” Chris said dryly. “Don’t expect me to straddle you like that. You’re not my type.”

  “The hell I’m not,” Lucas said, smirking.

  I rolled my eyes and climbed off him. “I’ll get you some whiskey.”

  “Thanks, doll,” Chris said.

  “It’s not for you,” I snapped. “It’s for him.”

  He held a hand to his chest. “Ouch. That almost hurt.”

  “And don’t call me doll.”

  “I’m winning you over,” Chris said, grinning. “I can feel it.”

  I ignored him.

  Lucas laughed. “Shit, man. She doesn’t like you.”

  “She’ll come around,” Chris answered distractedly. His gaze was on Lucas’s arm instead. “This is barely a bullet wound at all. You called me over here for this shit?”

  “I’m high maintenance like that,” Lucas said, grinning.

  “No shit,” Chris said, walking past him and into the bathroom.

  I came out of the kitchen, a full tumbler in my hand. “Drink this.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.” Lucas lifted it to his lips and downed it all. I cringed because he had the cheap stuff that tasted awful. Prison food must have destroyed his palate. When the glass was empty, he handed it back to me. “You might want to leave the room.”

  Shaking my head, I dumped the glass onto the coffee table, sitting beside him to hold his hand. “I’m staying right here.”

  “Heidi, you nearly puked just thinking about the stitches. Now you’re gonna watch? I don’t think so, sweetheart.” He locked stares with me. “Go into the bedroom and listen to your music or something. The stuff you were dancing to earlier.”

  Taylor Swift. I couldn’t rock out to that when he was getting stitches and bleeding all over the couch. I just couldn’t. “But—”

  “Look at it.” He turned to me fully, and I forced my eyes on it. Just seeing the blood and flesh torn apart—oh my God. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. You look seconds from puking, and that won’t help Chris focus on the stitches. Go in my room.”

  He was right. Swallowing back the bile, I nodded once. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.” He rested his head against the couch. “Go.”

  Standing, I dropped a kiss on his forehead. It was coated in a thin sheen of sweat. “Okay.”

  His good hand gently cupped the back of my head before letting me go, his fingers trailing through my hair, and he nodded once. “Thanks. And, darlin’?”

  I stopped halfway to the bedroom. “Yeah?”

  “Turn it up really loud, and dance for me. I like it when you dance.”

  I wouldn’t be able to dance to music right now if someone held a gun to my head and told me my very life depended on it. “Yeah. That’s not going to happen.”

  As I walked to the bedroom, I stopped at the bathroom doorway. I peeked back at Lucas, but he didn’t appear to be watching me. Chris straightened, a bunch of medical supplies in his hands. When he saw me standing in the doorway, watching him, he froze. “You hiding in the bedroom?”

  “We agreed that it might be best.”

  “I heard.” Chris studied me, his dark brown eyes seeing way too much. Despite my knee-jerk dislike of him, he really was very handsome, if you liked brown hair and brown eyes. Turned out, I preferred reddish brown hair and moss green eyes. “I’ll let you know when it’s over.”

  Running my gaze over the supplies, I noticed something was missing. “You’ll give him something for the pain, right?”

  Chris shifted his weight, focusing on something past me. Lucas, more than likely. “Haven’t before, but maybe the third time’s the charm.”

  Lucas had been shot twice before? Somehow in my examination of his body last night, I’d missed the scars. It was something to put on my to-do list. Chris began to move, like he was going to try to squeeze past me, and I took a step to block his way. I glanced at Lucas again. He’d lifted his head and was watching me.

  Turning back to Chris, I took a deep breath, Lucas’s stare burning into my back. “Look, I’m not good with the blood-and-gore type of stuff, but if something happens . . . if you need an extra set of hands, yell for me. I’ll deal.”

  To be honest, I half expected Chris to laugh in my face. You’d think a street rat like me could handle a little blood, but nooo. Yet, instead, he eyed me with respect and nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll take good care of him, though. I swear it.”

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat. I didn’t cry, and I wasn’t about to start now. “Good. Now go fix him up for me.”

  Chris brushed past me, his gaze never leaving mine until he was out of the bathroom. I watched him cross the room, set down the medical supplies, and lean down at Lucas’s side. Instead of going into the bedroom, I backed into the bathroom and closed the door most of the way, leaving a small crack for me to see through.

  They spoke quietly between themselves, and I strained to hear the words. I couldn’t make out a single one. After Chris finished threading the needle and setting up the supplies, he started wiping the wound with a cotton ball doused in alcohol. Completely unfazed by the blood that was soaking the cotton, Chris said something that made Lucas laugh. At the sight of the crimson-tinged cotton, my stomach roiled.

  I pressed a hand to my mouth. “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  “Heidi? Close the damn door,” Lucas growled.

  Jumping, I slammed the door shut out of reflex. As soon as it closed, I heard a few words, and Lucas laughed again. Clearly, I was the only one thrown by the fact that Chris was doing emergency surgery in the living room. I retreated until I hit the toilet. Dropping the lid, I sat, interlocking my fingers tightly. There was a “Fuck, man, that hurts. Didn’t your Girl Scout troop leader teach you any gentler sewing techniques?” from Lucas, and I could taste bile. Three times he’d been shot. I thought I knew what kind of life he led, but as I listened to the boys compete for the filthiest curse, I realized I had no idea.

  Things got quiet again, but I refused to go peek. With my luck, Lucas would be passed out from the pain and I wouldn’t be able to stay away. Instead, I got up and opened the small window. It was freezing outside, but the cold air was a refreshing wake-up call. Maybe I didn’t know all the details of Lucas’s life, maybe we’d only scratched the surface of our personal lives, but the fact remained that this was a man I wanted to be with, even if it was only for a short period of time. He was the man I loved.

  Gunshots and all.

  CHAPTER 19

  LUCAS

  An hour or so later, I was all stitched up and Chris was ready to leave. I sat down on my bed, rubbed my forehead, and let out a long sigh. Heidi walked Chris to the door, talking to him quietly as she went. After he’d patched me up, he’d questioned me on what my next move would be. Would I tell Tate? Go after those Bitter Hill guys unauthorized? What was I going to do about Scotty? And I didn’t know.

  Truth was, I had no idea what to do.

  That pissed me
the hell off, too.

  I tucked the spare gun Chris had given me under my pillow. The mag wasn’t fully loaded, but it would do in a pinch. One gun in the house wasn’t enough anymore. Not when Scotty seemed bound and determined to put me six feet under.

  Slumping down against the pillows, I ran through everything I knew again. We had a big company dinner Friday night, and I was supposed to be there. According to Chris, it was also the night I’d find out about my promotion.

  Scotty would probably be there, too.

  Unless he decided to avoid it, because of me.

  By now, he had to know that his assassination attempt had failed. He had to know that I wasn’t dead. And that meant he’d be biding his time, waiting to see what I’d do next. Time to show him. Picking up my phone, I texted him. They missed.

  It took a while for him to reply. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who missed what? What happened?

  I gritted my teeth. If he thought he could play innocent after that, then he was more of a fool than I’d ever given him credit for. Don’t fuck with me, kid.

  This time, he replied right away. I’m not. What happened?

  You know what happened. My finger hovered over the send button before deleting the message. If he wanted to pretend that I didn’t know, then maybe it would be to my advantage to let him think I was still clueless. I thought you heard by now. Bitter Hill attacked me outside my place. You know anything about it?

  A few moments, then: No. Why would I? What are you going to do about it?

  You’ll see. Friday night.

  He didn’t answer, so I called to let Tate know I wouldn’t be able to stop by today. He was pissed until I explained the cops were nosing around the neighborhood after my little shootout and he agreed I should lie low. I promised to be there for the party, so he was good when we hung up. I didn’t mention what had prompted the fight in the first place.