Road Warriors (Motorcycle Club Romance Collection) (Bad Boy Collections Book 4)

by Faye, Amy

  "You hungry?"

  It always came down to food with him. "I could eat," she answered, like she usually did. And like she usually did, she was lying. Her stomach felt, as always, like it had been turned inside out and wrung out, but today at least she had other things that she was worried about than food, so it wasn't a total lie, not really.

  They drove in silence for a while, as he seemed to mull over where he was headed, going a little below the speed limit and off on the far right side of the road where anyone who cared to could scoot right on by.

  "What happened last night?"

  "I told you what happened. I went to talk to this Coogan guy, and we had a good, productive conversation."

  "But like, what did you guys talk about?"

  "Nothing really," he said, shrugging.

  "But guys like that, they're in it for something, right? They're not in it for their own health, or whatever." She let out a little laugh at her own joke, and hoped that he'd pick up on the idea that she wasn't trying to put him in a corner. If he did, then maybe he would let something slip. The easiest way to put someone in a corner, she thought, was to make them feel like they were going there without any risk, of their own volition.

  "Not usually, no. Particularly in the gangland profession, it seems like health is one of the last things on their mind."

  "I would imagine that's probably a good thing because I feel like they'd have trouble staying healthy when the people they're pissing off on a daily basis are, you know, other gangsters and stuff."

  He shrugged. "Basically."

  "So you must have said something to convince him to back off. If he was coming around, he was doing it for a reason, and if he stopped, that would be for a reason, too. Right?"

  He looked over at her as he pulled off the highway and frowned. "You're smart, you know that?"

  "Thank you," she answered. She hoped that she didn't look as pleased with the compliment as she felt. She couldn't stand the idea that he could just string a few pretty words together and she'd be wrapped around his finger like all the other women were. That didn't change the reality, though, which was that she was just like them. As long as he didn't know about it, it might as well not have been true.

  "It wasn't really a compliment," he said. His voice was flat and it was almost as if he didn't realize that he'd just put her down again. He looked past her as he turned right, And then she realized that he was looking at her, too. "Someone too smart, when you get involved with people like these guys, they run into trouble. You'd be better off being dumb, like me."

  "That sounds awfully smart to me," Caroline teased. He started straightening out the car as the hints of a smile formed at the corners of his mouth.

  "I suppose it might," he answered. "But then again, I've never been too good at taking my own advice. I'm not sure whether I'm too dumb to listen to such great advice, or too smart to listen to such a dummy."

  They pulled into a spot and Caroline didn't fail to notice that through all that, he had very studiously not answered her question. He'd offered something. There was a reason that Coogan was going to back off, if he did. And Shannen had been unwilling to tell her what it was.

  12

  Caroline stayed up later than she should have, but at least the next day was going to be a day off. She could at least hope to get some rest, she could sleep in as much as she wanted, and ultimately it didn't much matter whether she stayed up or not. That was good, because the more that she thought about it, the more worried she got about whatever Shannen had decided to do to fix her father's 'problem.'

  She woke up with her muscles all hurting from a sleeping position that was about as uncomfortable as she could possibly imagine. But in the end, she was satisfied that she'd gotten some of it done, at least.

  Her eyes still stung with sleep, and though the tiredness should have faded away from sleep, it seemed to have settled into her body. The phone beeping at her that it was nearly ten in the morning, on the other hand, was all the motivation that she needed to force herself to roll out of bed.

  Whether Shannen would tell her anything about what he'd done with or to Coogan and his boys, she wasn't going to keep trying to pretend that she wasn't worried about it. Whatever he had done, however he'd gotten himself involved, she wasn't stupid enough to think that there was nothing to worry about. There was obviously quite a bit that she should have been worried about, or he would have just told her everything. Right?

  That, or he was telling the truth, but his little 'don't be smart, be dumb' speech hadn't missed its mark, either. He was telling her, in no uncertain terms, that she should back off, and she wasn't sure that she was prepared to question him on it.

  Whatever his day job was, she didn't doubt for a moment that he knew plenty about the mob, and about what sort of risks they posed. If he was worried then it was for a reason, and she didn't know what that reason was but she frankly didn't want to know.

  "It doesn't even matter," she told herself, out loud. Nobody would be around to hear it, anyways, she knew. He was at the gym, like he was every day at ten. She should have been up an hour ago but thankfully it didn't matter.

  She checked the phone, plugged in and resting on the kitchen counter. A missed call was unusual. Hell, answering her phone was almost as unusual. Nobody had any reason to call her in the first place. But it wasn't hard to figure out who had been calling, at least. For one thing, they had left a message, one that she clicked the button to play as she continued going about her day. For another thing, she knew the hospital's number by heart either way.

  She wasn't going in to work, no matter what they said. She was a hundred times too exhausted to go in, and this was one of her rare truly free break days. She wasn't going to give it up so that she could get puked on by nobody.

  The voice on the other end of the line was a doctor, one that she'd met before but never worked with. Dr. Strand was an older man and if he were a politician he would have been a handsome one. Doctors can be a little bit younger, though, and he was much, much too old to be of any interest to her.

  Second, he didn't work on her floor, so she wasn't going to work with him either way. He worked in the cancer ward. The one where her father was.

  "Hello, Miss Rice? It's Dr. Strand calling. It's about your father. There's nothing to worry about, but you might want to come around some time today. Your father's being transferred for surgery and if you'd like to see him beforehand, he's going in at, uh..." She could almost see him looking down to check his notes, even through the speaker.

  'Nothing to worry about' he'd said. But the fact was, surgery was always something to worry about. No matter how minor it was supposed to be, no matter how easy it would be, there was always some risk that things would end up with a complication. The minute that things were complicated was the minute that you had to worry.

  As it turned out, nobody ever performed surgery unless things were already complicated. The risk of getting someone hurt was too much to just perform surgery willy-nilly, so they only did it when they thought that by poking around inside someone they could at least hope to improve something that couldn't be improved without the surgery.

  What did that mean for Dad? If he needed surgery, why hadn't someone told her? It wasn't as if she were hard to reach. She was in the same building more days than she wasn't, and she was speaking to doctors on a near-daily basis. And yet, nobody had decided to tell her, as if it were no big deal.

  She closed her eyes and sucked in a breath, and the Dr's recorded voice picked back up. "Noon, he'll be transferred to surgery. Sorry to spring this on you, it was a little bit of a surprise for us, too. But again, we've got everything in hand. There's nothing to worry about, we're not worried in the least bit. We're just trying to make sure that we don't run into any trouble."

  Doctor-speak is a thing. Not a formal thing, of course. In all of her classes, nobody had sat Caroline down and told her that this was how you were supposed to lie to your patients about how bad somethi
ng is. Nobody said 'just call it a little pressure, and when it feels like they're being kicked by a mule, well, technically it won't have been a lie.'

  But somehow, everyone managed to come up with their own euphemisms, their own white lies, and they stuck with them as well as they could. Nothing to worry about was a phrase, four words long, which meant nothing at all, but it made the patient's family feel better so they said it anyways. Well, that might work with other people, but Caroline knew better, and being treated like a rube was about the last straw.

  She let out a long breath and pulled her hair back. She'd have to take the coffee to go this time. That, or burn the shit out of herself. The shower would wait. But she had two hours to get to the hospital, and that really meant she had forty-five minutes before they started seriously prepping for surgery.

  She could make that, of course. She would have to make it somehow, but she could do it if she tried. All it meant was that she had to leave now, she had to leave in a hurry, and she had to do her best not to worry too much on the way, because with the way the last few days had been going already, she was going to give herself an ulcer if she didn't cool it for a little while.

  The car started, though it let out a high-pitched noise that made her ears hurt and made her shoulders tense up like the worst of her scoliosis patients until it went away a minute later when she shifted the car into Drive.

  The drive to the hospital generally took about fifteen minutes; nothing special was slowing her down, except that her usual trips were before the sun even came up, one of the few cars on the road, and now an army of stay-at-home moms had apparently finally gotten around to going out and running their day's errands. A fifteen minute trip took twenty minutes, but she was still there by eleven.

  Which made her that much angrier when she stepped out of the elevator, walked to Dad's room, and found the room empty save for a nurse changing the sheets of a bed that had been stripped.

  "Oh, hey, Caroline," she said. "They found space in OR-3 for your dad, so he's a little early. Sorry."

  Caroline's eyebrows raised but she wasn't the least bit surprised. "Yeah, figures."

  "Sorry again," the woman said. But there was nothing that she could do, and they both knew it. Caroline tried to keep her frustration off her face. Tried to keep her worry off her face.

  "You know where Dr. Strand is?"

  "He's in his office," the nurse offered. That would make a decent second stop, at least. He could tell her nothing to her face, rather than over a telephone message, and in a few hours when Dad was out of surgery and the painkillers had worn off, she could see him and maybe find out from the horse's mouth precisely what it was that he was making such an effort not to tell her.

  She took a deep breath and forced her body to keep moving. Dr. Strand's office was right at the end of the hall, and as long as she didn't think about anything beyond making it to the door she might be able to get that far.

  13

  Caroline swallowed hard and watched the clock tick by. There was a lot that she needed to wait for. A lot that she needed to do. The majority of it, right or wrong, wasn't something that she was looking forward to.

  At some point, for example, she was going to need to figure out what she was supposed to be doing about her father's surgery. What was she supposed to think, and what was it all supposed to mean?

  'Exploratory surgery' didn't sound like the sort of thing that people who were perfectly healthy got very often. It didn't sound like the sort of thing that doctors did when they had the entire situation in hand. Of course, Caroline already knew that; even in only a few short years of studying medicine, and in a few short weeks of working at the hospital, she'd already developed a wealth of knowledge about the sort of things that people generally ought to worry about.

  She would develop more, and in years to come, she knew, she'd think of herself now as barely knowing anything at all. But those two words, 'exploratory surgery,' put back to back like that, she already knew those spelled more than just a little bit of trouble.

  Those were practically nuclear-level 'oh shit' situations just waiting to manifest themselves, and that was what Dad was staring down the barrel of. In a few hours more, maybe she'd go in, and see him, and then she'd find out that everything was completely fine. She was worried for no reason, and there was nothing to worry about in the first place. They'd found everything they needed, and it wasn't nearly as bad as they had feared.

  But that didn't seem likely. Instead, she was likely to go in and be told that after all that searching, they'd found some new ideas that would be perfectly interesting to explore, but were the furthest thing from conclusive. That wasn't really good enough, not to be digging around inside someone's organs, but it would have to be.

  Which was why she was sitting in the driveway, staring absently at the garage door, still closed and not moving to open, when Shannen's black-pearl coupe pulled up, purring like a chainsaw until he eased it out of gear and turned the ignition off.

  He looked like a wreck, and there was no way he ought to have been home this early. The entire 'ride home from work' situation worked because Shannen generally left the gym not too long before she got out of work herself. They were both heading to the same place, around the same time, and it wasn't so far out of the way.

  Of course, being convenient for her didn't hurt things, either, but that was only one part of the puzzle, and it all came together to mean that she could get her ride from him in spite of everything.

  But at two in the afternoon, he shouldn't be coming home, and he shouldn't be coming home looking like he was dragging himself across the lawn by the skin of his teeth.

  Furthermore, he didn't notice that she was sitting in the car. If he did, then he wasn't making any sign of it. He just pulled himself into the house, closed the door behind, and whatever he did after that, she couldn't see, beyond what was visible through the gaps in the front window blinds.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to get out of the car, even though her body didn't want to move. There was a whole day ahead of her, and if she hadn't gotten that call then some of it might have been productive. As long as she could keep forcing herself to move, and keep avoiding thinking too hard, she might have a chance of salvaging some of it yet.

  The sound that hit her first was the noise of the shower turning on. Shannen wasn't being particularly quiet about it today. She wasn't sure if he was assuming that she wouldn't be there, in spite of her car in the drive, or if he was trying to give her some sort of warning that he was home, and she was supposed to be in her room, but either way it seemed strange.

  She let herself wonder for a minute before she eased herself onto the couch, flipped open a medical text, and started reading through it with the sort of care that she might have taken on a paperback novel. It wasn't productive work, but it felt like it could be, eventually.

  By the time that she heard the sound of his moving around in the shower, the sound of grabbing shampoo or conditioner or whatever he was on, she was almost convinced that she could start to seriously focus on the book.

  Caroline skimmed, her eyes critically looking out for anything that stood out as distinctly unfamiliar. The first and most important thing that she had to do was figure out what she was going to have trouble with, before the problems ever arose. Her pen absently noted words she didn't recognize on one side of a piece of notebook paper as her eyes scanned.

  A noise caught her attention and pulled it away from the page in her lap. Something moving behind her. Her eyes flicked over to the back hallway before she could reason with herself, that it had to be Shannen doing the moving.

  He wasn't wearing anything at all, again, and he hadn't noticed her, again. She watched him with an interest that she didn't bother to hide this time. She was too tired to play coy, and she knew that it wasn't going to lead to anything. At least, she knew that until he turned and caught her looking, smiled, and turned toward her.

  "You like what you see?"
<
br />   She felt her throat dry up. He was teasing her, she knew, and it wasn't intended to be taken seriously. But she couldn't stop herself, whether she wanted to or not, from hearing an edge of serious flirting in his voice.

  "You should get dressed," she said. Her voice was weak and it lacked conviction even to Caroline's own ears. "Nobody wants to see that."

  "You do," he said. "I saw it in your eyes, that first day. Fucking what's her name. I can see it right now."

  As he spoke he walked forward, and it was only a moment later that she could smell the bath wash on him, the softly masculine, woody smell of whatever product he used.

  "Don't flatter yourself," she said. Her throat was dry and the words croaked out of her, but she managed to say them nonetheless. That was a small victory, but from the expression on his face it wasn't anywhere near enough to convince the fighter.

  "Have you ever been fucked before, Caroline? Have you ever had a man take you?"

  "No," she said. There was more to it, when she'd planned the response in her head, but when her mouth started moving it came out short and didn't have the protest that she'd intended.

  "But you wanted to. You've been wondering what it's like for so long that you don't even remember when you started. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong, and I'll stop."

  He rounded the sofa, his cock starting to grow. Even flaccid, he had a size that was a little bit intimidating, but as he stared at her it grew. He seeming to see right through her defenses and into a private world where she had wondered very much what it would be like to have him take her. It made her shiver.

  "You should go get dressed," she offered. It wasn't a refusal, though, and deep down she knew it.

  "I could do that. But I don't want to disappoint you."

  "Who would be disappointed?"