by Naomi West
"Here." Archer passed me a handful of fairly clean bandages and a bottle of off-the-shelf antiseptic.
I took the rudimentary medical supplies, and he took off his jacket. He poked his fingers through the hole left by the knife, shook his head, and muttered something to himself.
"I think," My words came out through a dry mouth, "It might be easier if you took your shirt off, too." Not strictly true, but it was worth a try.
Archer looked at me for a long time, his face like granite. Finally, he stripped off the T-shirt, revealing a muscular torso that made me catch my breath and gulp like an ostrich trying to swallow a beach ball.
"How does it look?" asked Archer.
"Fantastic," I breathed.
Archer frowned, and I realized what he was talking about.
"Doesn't look too bad. It's a clean cut. Not ragged, I mean." I took a first aid course when I went to college, so I knew I was saying all the right words, even if I wasn't one hundred percent sure what they all meant.
"Does it need stitches? I've got a needle someplace."
"No!" Just the thought of stitching up human flesh made my stomach turn. I was not cut out to be a nurse. "Just a cleaning and a bandage."
Archer sat down on the bed. "Get on with it, then."
I sat next to him, hyper-aware of his half-naked body next to mine, and idly wishing it was the other half. I tore off a piece of bandage, soaked it in antiseptic, and dabbed at the long laceration. Archer didn't even wince. His features might have tightened a bit, along with the rock hard muscles of his torso, but no more than that.
"Doesn't it sting?" I felt I had to talk to take my mind off what I was doing. Maybe that would stop my hands from shaking.
Archer just shrugged.
"Do you mind me asking ...?” I began.
"Almost certainly, yes."
"What was going on out there?"
Archer looked at me for a long moment. At times like this, he seemed to be assessing me, deciding if I could be trusted or not.
"My friends and I help out local businesses getting heat from unsavory characters."
"Unsavory?"
"You know what it's like. Any time a business does all right, some bastard with a load of cash is looking to move in and take over. And, if the business owner doesn't want to sell, then the bastards hire men like the ones you saw tonight to persuade them. I stand up for the business owners."
He made it sound pretty noble.
"You're with Battle Pride."
"You've heard of Battle Pride?"
"My dad mentioned the name."
Archer snorted. "I bet he didn't have much good to say."
"What were you doing at my house tonight?"
"Focus on what you're doing."
I began to wrap a bandage around Archer's arm. My fingers brushed against his skin and, to my surprise, I heard him catch his breath this time.
"You've got cold hands," he muttered, trying to explain away his reaction.
"You've got strong ones."
As I tied off the bandage, he turned to look at me, and our eyes met. The heat between us was almost palpable. You could have fried an egg where our gazes met.
I thought back to what I had said about going home to Dad's. But things had changed now. Something was happening, and that promise no longer mattered. Something crackled between Archer and me, and if I didn't do something about it, then I was going to explode. I placed a trembling hand on Archer's thigh, feeling the muscles tense beneath my touch and hearing his breath become suddenly more audible.
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
What a ridiculous thing to say. It made me sound like a little girl, not the wild child rebel I wanted to appear. It would have surprised my dad, and probably Riley, too, to learn it, but I wasn't really that girl. I had played the part well, but I never drank as much as I pretended, I never smoked or took drugs, and 'Do you think I'm pretty?' was probably my best chat-up line.
I liked painting—it wasn’t just an easy course for college drop-outs to me. It was a real career. I preferred spending an evening curled up with a book than getting wasted at a party. But, for whatever reason, I didn’t want people to know that. Maybe I wanted to be the wild child that everybody thought I was. Maybe I needed it. I never had a chance to get to know my mom. I learned about her mostly through the distorted prism of my father's memories. The less I got along with Dad, the less I seemed to take after him, compared to Riley, and the more I assumed I must take after my mom. Maybe the more I wanted to take after her. I wanted to be the bad girl that she was—the rebel, the hard drinker who hooked up with men for sport. I wanted to be that, but the truth was that I was no more like her than I was like my dad.
So, my heart fluttered all the more quickly in my chest as I slid a cautious hand up Archer's thigh, because this sort of situation wasn't as common to me as my family might have thought. As my hand travelled toward the point of no return, I leaned toward Archer to kiss him.
But he pulled back. And a split second before my questing hand entered the danger-zone, I felt his strong grip on my wrist, stopping me.
"You promised you'd go home without a fuss. You promised you'd do as I tell you."
"I will," I nodded, trying to keep the nervousness out of my voice. "I'll do anything you tell me. So, what are you going to tell me to do?"
"To get on my bike, and keep that mouth of yours shut while I drive you home."
"There are a lot more fun things you could tell me to do."
"I'm sure."
"I'd do them."
"Are you keeping your promise or not?"
"You don't think I'm pretty?"
He stood up sharply, and a little hastily, and I caught a glimpse of a bulge in the front of his tight pants that answered the question for him. "That's neither here nor there."
"Okay." I stood up, demure and subdued. There was a strange mixture of emotions in me. Disappointment, of course, and the sharp frustration of thwarted desire. But relief, too. Perhaps I wasn't ready. Still ... "But you do think I'm pretty, don't you?"
I had come up close behind him, so that when he turned he was flush against me, and I felt his hot breath on my upturned face.
"I'm President of Battle Pride. You're the sheriff’s daughter."
"I don't care."
Archer scoffed. "I know that. You love it. You'd like nothing more than to score one against your old man. And then you'd regret it. And I'm damn sure I would. I'm many things, but I'm not any girl's plaything, and I don’t want to be. Now get your ass on the damn bike."
We rode back to my house in silence, arriving there in the early hours of the morning. I wasn't sure what to think about the events of the evening. Maybe he was right. I didn't want to be with him for any more reason than to irritate my dad and because the idea of being with a bad boy thrilled me. But I had hung out with bad boys before, and I’d never felt anything like this. I wanted Archer like I wanted my next breath, but even I didn't know if I wanted him for an hour, for a week, or forever. My head was too muddled with lust to know more than that.
But he had known. He had read me like a book, and, rather than taking advantage for an enjoyable one-night-stand, he had chosen a higher path. Which somehow made him more desirable still. My friends and family didn't understand me—they all thought I was something I wasn't, something I was trying to be. Truth be told, I didn't really understand myself. But Archer had sized me up in one night. He got me. And, so, I couldn't have him.
We pulled up outside my house.
"Off you go."
I made no move to get off the bike, pushing my luck to the last, unable to help myself and secretly hoping Dad was watching through the curtains. "Don't I get a kiss goodbye?"
Archer kicked out the kickstand, swung himself off the bike and went to take me in his arms. For a moment, I thought he was actually going to do it, that I was going to get my kiss, and my insides melted just at the thought. But instead, he scooped me up off the pillion and dumped
me unceremoniously in the dust in front of the porch.
"Good night."
He rode off, leaving me exactly as he had met me: a virgin.
Chapter Four
Archer
Fran Dixon raised her eyebrows to me disbelievingly. "Nothing?"
I nodded. "That's what I'm telling you; nothing happened."
Fran raised her eyebrows again. "Archer, I've seen you take a lot of women—some younger than the Dupont girl—back to that motorhome and never has nothing happened."
"Well, this time nothing did."
"What happened? You losing your charm?"
We were chatting over dinner at her bar the day after my failed attempt to break into Ben Dupont's. I'd spent the day asleep after a long and somewhat frustrating night.
"I guess that must be it." I wanted to tell her that I could have had Cassidy there and then, and that she had been all over me. But if I told her that then I would have to explain to Fran why I had turned her down, and I couldn't explain that to myself yet.
Fran shook her head. "I saw the look in the little girl's eyes. I've seen that look in a lot of girls’ eyes. Hell, Archer, I've been that girl—and thank you for the memory. No way was she turning you down."
"The little bitch did nothing but get in the way since I met her," I said, trying to get the conversation away from an uncomfortable subject and back to where it belonged.
"So, your Black Book is still in Dupont's house."
"I guess. We checked out the sheriff station, and I'm as sure as I can be that it's not there."
Fran nodded. "If the sheriff's got any sense, he'll carry it around with him."
"We'll have to hope he hasn't got any sense."
Fran shrugged. "Well, he let his youngest daughter ride off with the president of Battle Pride last night, so I'd say there was hope."
Fran was making light of the situation, but I knew that she was worried. I'd known Fran since I joined Battle Pride in my late teens, over ten years ago . We had a bit of a thing back in the day, off and on, heating up, then cooling down. It was mostly just good fun between old friends. Every now and then, we hooked up again for old time sake. She was still the sexiest 'older woman' I'd ever met, but these days it was mostly business. Fran was my best client for selling hooch, and that made her a target for local gangs and big city hustlers, so she also became my best client for protection.
Not that Fran couldn't take care of herself. There was a pool cue behind the bar that was well-used despite never having been anywhere near a pool table. But that wouldn't be of much use if Sheriff Ben Dupont got his way. The Black Book contained my client list and enough evidence to put me and the rest of Battle Pride away for a long time. Fran herself would probably do some time too for receiving stolen goods. More importantly, with Battle Pride gone, she'd be without protection.
"He saw you there last night. He'll be on the look-out now," said Fran.
"Yeah.”
"Any of your boys up to it?"
I pulled a face. There were too many youngsters in Battle Pride these days. I supposed there always had been, but it never seemed like it when I was one of them.
"What about the girl?"
I frowned. "What girl?"
"The Dupont girl."
"Cassidy?"
"Unless you're banging the other one as well."
"I'm not banging ..."
Fran rolled her eyes. "Yeah, sure. It's all perfectly innocent. You rode up with a twenty-one year old tight ass ..."
"Twenty-three."
"... clinging to you like a limpet. Then you take her back to your place for half an hour and come out looking flushed. But nothing happened. All very innocent."
"Fine, don't believe me."
"I don't," said Fran. "I'm struggling to figure out why you can't talk about this one. What makes her different?"
That was a question worth asking. What did make Cassidy different?
"Look," Fran continued. "The girl likes you, yeah?"
"Maybe."
"Quit playing dumb. She's crazy about you. They always are. I bet she'd do anything you ask. So, ask her to find out where her dad keeps the book and steal it for you."
There was no doubt in my mind that if I asked Cassidy to do that, she would. Partly to please me, but mostly to anger her father. Why should I care if Ben Dupont had a bad relationship with his daughter? The man was, after all, trying to stick me behind bars. But that was his job, and I'd broken the law, and that was the way it went. Dragging family into it was different. You didn't do that. I didn't have the greatest of childhoods. My dad's drinking made him violent, and that drove my mom to drink, and neither of them much wanted me. Battle Pride gave me a family—not a good one, but better than the one I was born into.
From Cassidy's behavior, I could guess that Ben Dupont maybe hadn't been the perfect dad, but I'd have laid odds that he was better than mine. He was a trier, and even if he had failed where Cassidy was concerned, you had to rate a man for trying. I had a scar on my head from where my dad cracked a bottle over it. That was the only thing he gave me that I’d kept. However screwed up Cassidy's relationship with her old man might be, I didn’t want to screw it up further. I knew firsthand how that worked out, and the world didn’t need any more people like me.
"Her dad trusts her about as much as he trusts me," I said to Fran, which wasn't all a lie. "No chance of her getting the book. We need another plan."
"Do you have one?"
I was about to answer when the door to the bar opened and in walked Cassidy Dupont. With one thing happening after another, I hadn't had much of a chance to look at her last night, and I took the opportunity now. She really was a stunning girl, with an attractive tangle of wavy red hair piled up on her head, bright green eyes, pale skin, and a cupid's bow of a mouth. She was wearing a short denim skirt that hugged her tight backside and showed about nine feet of bare, shapely legs, taut, toned, and accentuated by heeled boots. A vest top hung loosely on her frame, with no evidence of a bra to support her high, firm breasts. It occurred to me that I really shouldn't be taking this much interest in the girl I had very much rebuffed last night. It wouldn't end well for either of us. But it was impossible to ignore the thumping desire that was welling up from within. The damn girl looked incredible, and I wanted her so badly I could taste it.
"Something wrong?" asked Fran, who had her back to the door.
"Nothing," I said, as Cassidy spotted me and gave me a cheeky little wave. She might be in her twenties, but with Ben Dupont for a father she was still jailbait to me. I turned my attention back to my dinner companion. If Cassidy wouldn't take no for an answer, then perhaps there was another way. I reached across the table to take Fran's hand.
"Have I told you how good you’re looking since I got back?"
Fran looked at me quizzically. "No, but you very seldom do."
"I should. You're a very beautiful woman, Fran."
Fran looked more bemused than flattered. "Is this just because you didn't nail the girl last night?"
As subtly as possible, I kept an eye on Cassidy and was gratified to see the petulant expression on her face. She stamped towards the bar like a teenager who didn’t get her own way.
"It's been a while since you and I ..." I let the sentence hang.
Fran nodded. "It has. But I'll be damned if I'm going to be a surrogate for the Dupont girl. When you're with me, I expect you to be thinking of me. I'm not that hard-up, Archer. You may not believe it, but there are other men in my life."
"I don't doubt that for a second," I said. But I was now becoming distracted. Cassidy had sidled up to a man at the bar, an irritatingly handsome guy in his mid-twenties, and was flirting coquettishly. As she sat, her skirt rode even further up her thighs, and I thought I caught a glimpse of red underwear before she crossed her legs.
"How about a dance?" I suggested to Fran.
"What is going on with you? We haven't danced in years."
"Then it's past time."
"You're a lousy dancer, Archer," Fran said, shaking her head. "I hate to be the one to tell you, but you've got two left feet."
"It never used to bother you back in the day."
"That's because you were very good at something else, and dancing was kind of the prelude."
