Steal The CEO's Daughter - A Carny Bad Boy Romance

by Layla Valentine

  “Like I said, I’m exhausted,” she said, softening her voice a little, “Two of them are caffeine pills, the other’s a painkiller.”

  Hardy looked at the pills a moment longer before nodding his acceptance.

  Cassandra darted into the kitchen and opened the fridge. She grabbed the first bottle of water she could find and tossed the pills into her mouth before she cracked the seal on the bottle. Swallowing again and again, she drank down about a third of the bottle and got the pills down.

  “We need to get going,” Hardy said.

  Cassandra turned to look at him and saw that Hardy was watching the door and windows in steady, constant surveillance. If nothing else, this will make a hell of a story, she thought grimly. She gathered up her bag and found her keys. When she turned to tell Hardy that she was ready, he was right at her side, only inches away from her.

  “Come on,” she said, not quite looking up into his face. She led the way through her door, closing and locking it behind her. “Not that it seems to matter if I lock it or not,” she muttered to herself. Pitching her voice just loud for him to hear, she added, “If we take the stairs, there’s less risk of someone seeing us.”

  Hardy nodded and followed her down the hall.

  Cassandra hurried down the steps as quickly as her tired feet would allow her, wishing that the caffeine would kick in already—she wasn’t sure when she would next get a chance to sleep. That’s assuming Hardy isn’t just using this story as an excuse to get you somewhere isolated enough to kill you and get rid of your body, she thought.

  Down in the garage, Cassandra spotted her car in its usual spot. The topcoat of the dusty old Nissan sedan was starting to peel and erode away, leaving the powdery black paint underneath exposed in patches.

  Cassandra unlocked the driver’s side door and the rest of the locks flipped up in the same moment. She turned around to see Hardy standing only about a foot behind her.

  “How are we going to do this?” she asked.

  “I’ll get in the back; the windows are dark enough that they shouldn’t be able to see me.”

  No need for Cassandra to ask who ‘they’ were. She climbed wearily into the driver’s seat and heard the shift and groan of the car as Hardy slipped into the back, closing the door quietly behind him. Glancing in her rearview mirror, she saw him slide down, making himself as small as possible in the seat.

  Shaking her head in disbelief at the bizarre turn her evening had taken, Cassandra turned the key in the ignition. The car came to life with a roaring purr of the engine, and the stereo turned on. The middle-aged women talking about dogs had apparently finished for the night, replaced by two presenters talking about current affairs.

  “You listen to talk radio?”

  “There’s not much on at this time of night.”

  “Put in a CD or something, would you?” Hardy said, his voice testy.

  Cassandra rolled her eyes; she would have protested, but she knew all too well what Hardy was capable of. She slipped her phone out of her purse—wondering again why she wasn’t using it to call the police—and plugged it in.

  “Just to be clear, you may be hijacking my car, but I’m going to pick the music,” Cassandra said, in what she hoped was a firm tone.

  “I don’t care,” Hardy said, shifting in the back seat again. “Just put something on that isn’t the fucking news.”

  Cassandra’s hands shook slightly and she wasn’t sure if it was lingering adrenaline or the start of the caffeine entering her system. She scrolled quickly through her music library, knowing that Hardy wouldn’t appreciate her taking the time to find something appropriate for their errand, and tapped play on Elliott Smith’s Roman Candle album. As the intricate, soft-toned guitar began to fill her ears, Cassandra put the car in reverse, pulling out of the parking spot she had pulled into less than thirty minutes before.

  She took a breath and began to navigate the parking garage, smiling with recognition as Elliott Smith sang that he was hallucinating, hallucinating. No matter how much she might want him to be, though, Cassandra knew that Hardy was definitely no illusion. The convicted felon really was sitting in the back seat of her car, and Cassandra was fairly certain that he was capable of doing her real harm if she pressed him too much, or asked too many questions.

  “Where are we going?”

  She glanced at the shape of him in her rearview mirror as she came to the exit gate, saw Hardy’s face in a brief flash of the fluorescent security lights.

  “Turn right out of the building,” he told her firmly, shifting onto his side on the seat.

  Cassandra briefly entertained the idea that if she applied the brakes just sharply enough, she could throw him against the backs of the seats, knocking him out for just long enough to allow her to call the police. But there were too many risks in that plan.

  Even more importantly, there’s a story on the line, she thought, smiling slightly at her own hubris. Just think: if he’s telling the truth and you can prove it, you’ll have the story of a lifetime. And if he was lying? She would worry about that later. For the moment, she had a mission—and the possibilities opening up in front of her were as intriguing as they were terrifying. Cassandra drove towards the gate until it opened, turned right, as Hardy had commanded, and pulled onto the quiet, near-deserted street.

  Chapter Four

  Cassandra took another drink of water from the bottle she had brought with her and came to a stop at the first light after her building.

  “Do I keep going?” she asked.

  “Condor Ave” came on, and her lips twitched into a smirk of recognition. “She took the Oldsmobile out past Condor Avenue…” Cassandra wasn’t, to the best of her knowledge, going anywhere near Condor Avenue, but the theme of the song was still oddly appropriate.

  “Get onto the Interstate,” Hardy told her from the back.

  “Northbound or southbound?”

  “Northbound,” he replied.

  Cassandra mouthed the lyrics to the song as the light turned green and she drove through the intersection. She was shocked at how readily she had accepted the situation; she hadn’t fought Hardy on the issue of clearing his name, hadn’t tried to convince him that what he was doing was insane, and she hadn’t done anything to try and get herself out of participating in the bizarre errand.

  Whose names had those been on his hip? Cassandra shuddered as she visualized the ink she’d seen—and the body it had been indelibly printed onto. It wasn’t her imagination, Hardy was definitely more muscular than he had been at sentencing three months before.

  One song melted into another and Cassandra merged onto the on-ramp lane for the Interstate.

  “Where are we going, exactly?”

  She glanced at Hardy in the rearview mirror, her hands trembling slightly on the steering wheel. It was definitely the caffeine that was causing her reaction.

  “I’ll tell you where to go,” Hardy said from the back seat. “Just do what I tell you to do.”

  Cassandra sighed. “It’s just if it’s going to be far away, I’m going to need to get gas at some point,” she told him, glancing at her gauge. It displayed just under half a tank remaining, and Cassandra hoped against hope that it wouldn’t take all that she had in the tank to complete their mission.

  “Let me know when you need to stop and we’ll figure it out.”

  Cassandra pressed her lips together and turned onto the on ramp, glancing at the northbound traffic; it was sparse, which was normal for the predawn hour. If they had to stay on it for hours to come, however, she knew she’d have to deal with rush hour traffic. All she could hope was that she managed to get through the encounter unscathed and with a good story at the end of it; she had money in the bank to cover gas and the other expenses that would come up.

  To keep herself occupied, and keep her spirits up, Cassandra began singing along quietly with the stereo. She merged onto the highway, speeding up to the limit, and then five miles per hour faster—enough to make good ti
me but not so much that she would attract the notice of a wandering Highway Patrolman.

  “For a change, she got out / before he hurt her bad…” the lyric sent a shiver down Cassandra’s spine as she remembered the report on Laura Granger’s murder. “The car was cold and it smelled like old cigarettes and pine…”

  Cassandra took one hand off of the wheel and reached into her purse.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Only if you give me one,” Hardy told her.

  Cassandra snorted and rooted around in her bag until her fingers closed around the pack of cigarettes. She slipped it out then spent the next minute searching by touch until she found her lighter.

  Reducing her speed slightly, Cassandra shook a cigarette free and brought it to her lips, changing the hand that she used to grip the steering wheel long enough to roll down the window enough to let the smoke out.

  She carefully lit the end and took a long drag. Normally she didn’t smoke much—only occasionally, when she was struggling with an article—but Cassandra wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up going through the entire pack and then some, given her current predicament. She tossed the pack and the lighter over the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Thanks,” Hardy said from the back.

  She heard the flick-flick-hiss of the lighter, felt the pop in her ears as Hardy rolled down his own window before tossing the pack and the lighter back up onto the passenger seat.

  The album ended and Cassandra let her phone continue on random as she took another silent drag of her cigarette, From a Basement on The Hill started up, filling the car with a symphonic loop that transitioned into a raucous guitar and drum intro.

  “Can you turn it down a little bit? It’s loud back here and you won’t hear me.”

  “I can hear you right now,” Cassandra said, though not loudly enough to be heard over the speakers.

  She reached out and turned the volume down slightly. No reason to push him, at least until you know where you’re going and what you’re doing, she told herself.

  The music swirled around her and Cassandra realized that her headache had finally started to break up. It wasn’t yet daylight, but she felt strangely positive. There had always been something in her that appreciated a grand adventure, and while she hadn’t exactly planned on a road trip with a convicted felon in her back seat, Cassandra couldn’t quite deny that she was interested in Hardy’s case.

  “This music isn’t half bad,” Hardy said from the back. “Who is it?”

  Cassandra glanced at the shape of him sprawled in her back seat through her rearview mirror.

  “It’s Elliott Smith. Don’t tell me you don’t know who Elliott Smith is?”

  “Never heard of him,” Hardy said.

  “He was amazing,” Cassandra said quietly. She licked her lips and flicked the butt of her cigarette out of the crack in the window, shifting into the left lane. “His story is pretty damned sad, though.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” Hardy pointed out from the back seat.

  “He was brilliant—well, I mean, you can tell that just listening to this.”

  Cassandra smiled slightly to herself as a new song—“Pretty (Ugly Before)”—started.

  “Except for this song and I think maybe one or two others on the album, he played all the instruments on all the songs.”

  “Impressive,” Hardy said, and Cassandra thought she heard the faintest tinge of sincerity in his voice.

  “Anyway,” she said, sighing, “he didn’t actually finish the album. He’d done the recording, but not the mixing. He died—and how he died sort of…” she shrugged. “It’s one of those situations where there’s an official story and an unofficial theory.”

  “I’m familiar with that concept,” Hardy said flatly.

  “The official story is that he stabbed himself twice in the chest,” Cassandra said, feeling her cheeks warm up with a deep blush at the reminder of Hardy’s status as a convict. “That it was a suicide.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe the official story,” Hardy observed.

  Cassandra shrugged, licking her lips as she remembered the details of the case as she’d read them, years and years before.

  “There’s…” her lips twisted into a grimace. “First—how likely do you think it is for someone to stab themselves in the chest twice?”

  “Not fucking likely,” Hardy said, snorting. “It’s hard enough to stab yourself in the chest once.”

  “So there’s that,” Cassandra said. “There’s also the fact that the coroner noticed what looked like defensive wounds on his hands, and the fact that he wasn’t in the apartment by himself—his girlfriend was there with him.”

  “And they didn’t take her in for questioning?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cassandra said, trying to remember. “Nothing more than the standard questions, anyway.”

  “Why were they so keen on the suicide angle?”

  Cassandra rolled her eyes, thinking about the police who had responded to the 911 call and handled the case.

  “He had a history of suicide threats and one or two attempts,” she replied. “So I guess they figured it was just easiest to put it down as that.”

  “They’re all about what’s easiest,” Hardy said, his voice full of bitterness.

  Cassandra thought about the police officers she had met since she had started at the newspaper. She would have to agree with Hardy in the case of more than one or two of the ones she knew; whenever she had to get information for the paper from those particular officers, it was like pulling teeth. They never wanted to even fax her the information, much less get her official copies of reports. Cassandra had, more than once, secretly wagered herself that those particular officers would rather not even write the reports, much less copy them for the press.

  “Not all of them,” Cassandra countered. “But enough of them to make many people’s lives miserable.”

  “So when did that Elliott guy die?”

  Cassandra considered. “Years ago,” she replied. “Over a decade, I think.”

  “And in all this time, no one’s been able to convince the police to re-open the case, to see if there’s some merit to that whole murder possibility?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  Cassandra wanted to argue; she wanted to protest that it didn’t make sense to reopen an investigation without new evidence, but she stopped short of acting on the impulse. He’s the last person who would appreciate a defense of the police right now, she thought, reminding herself that she was not on some road trip, driving in the middle of the night to go to a theme park before the gates opened for the day; she was driving an escaped convict to some place she didn’t even know, ostensibly to help him figure out who had framed him for murder.

  “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s some stinking bullshit. But that’s the way of the world, apparently.”

  “Once they think they know what the story is, you can’t get a single cop to even consider that he might have something wrong, or that he didn’t see it all happen in front of his own two eyes.”

  Cassandra heard the creaking of old leather as Hardy turned over in the back seat.

  “How long are we going to be driving for?”

  “Just keep going north,” Hardy said. “I’m going to take a nap now, but I swear to God: if you try and stop the car or call the cops while I’m asleep, the next time I break out I will kill you.”

  “Go to sleep,” Cassandra said, trying to ignore the adrenaline coursing through her and convince Hardy she wasn’t afraid. “I want it to be noted that I think it’s bullshit that you get to sleep and I don’t.”

  “I’ve been awake for twenty-four already,” Hardy countered. “We’ll talk about fairness when you’ve been up that long.”

  Chapter Five

  Around an hour later, Cassandra heard movement in the back seat.

  “Oh, you’re awake?”

  The caffe
ine was still working in her system, but she could feel the fatigue underneath it.

  “You do realize that taking over the driving would be exactly the worst thing I could do to avoid being caught, right?”

  “So when I’m too exhausted to carry on,” Cassandra said, looking at him in the rearview mirror, “what are we going to do then?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Hardy said. “Maybe if we have some space—and we’re not being chased actively—I’ll find somewhere, a safe house or something. We’ll hide your car and you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”

  “You know,” Cassandra said, licking her lips as she thought. “Listening to the radio would be a good way to find out whether they’re still after you or not.”

  “I know they’re still after me,” Hardy said.

  He shifted in the seat and Cassandra saw his arm snake out around the passenger seat, his hand rooting around until he found the pack of cigarettes, and extracted one.

  “The question is whether they have any idea where I am or where I’m going.”

  “Considering I don’t even know where we’re going, and I’m the one driving…”

  “They could figure it out, if they had someone like me on the case,” Hardy countered.

  Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “Someone like you?”

  “A bounty hunter,” Hardy explained. “Someone who’s knows how to track people, and figure out where they’re likely to try and disappear.”

  “So, if they had someone like you hunting you down,” Cassandra said, checking her mirrors in a sudden burst of paranoia, “where would that person go?”

  “That would depend on if they guessed what I was doing,” Hardy said, and Cassandra heard him open his window a crack before lighting his cigarette. “If someone figured out that I was interested in clearing my name, in figuring out who really did it, they’d go where we’re going right now.”

  “You know, it would be easier if you would just tell me wherever it is we’re going,” Cassandra said. She glanced at Hardy in her rearview mirror. “I’m already on board, obviously.”