Bad Boy Heroes Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  But she was. The lurking memories of the night that had sent her running in the first place now flooded back, triggered by the sound of gunfire and the terror she’d felt both times. A thick trembling rocked her body, uncontrollable.

  Zeke stopped the bike and got off, gathering her into a sturdy embrace. “You’ll be all right, honey.” He rubbed her arms, her back, firmly. “Take a few deep breaths and get a drink from the stream. I don’t want to hang around long.”

  She nodded and he let her go, taking a canteen from a hook under the seat. He knelt at the edge of the stream to fill it and Mattie stared at him, still uncomprehending. “How—”

  “Come on, Miss Mary,” he said. “Don’t fall apart on me now.”

  She gave herself a mental shake, shoving away the gruesome memories and the terror. Kneeling by the stream, she splashed her face and took a long, calming drink. “I’m ready.”

  He gave her a nod and fired up the bike.

  *

  IT NEVER OCCURRED to Mattie to ask where they were going. Away. That was what mattered. They were going away from Brian.

  Shock cocooned Mattie. The stark, harshly beautiful landscape of the northern Arizona plateau and the constant sound of the bike’s engine numbed her. She gave herself up to the hypnotic sound of the wind, the gritty feel of it on her skin. Vaguely, she was aware of the heat of the sun on her arms, of Zeke in front of her, piloting her escape, of the curious faces of children as they passed.

  In the early afternoon, they stopped at a roadside café in the mountains of New Mexico. Mattie stared at the menu without comprehension. Apparently sensing her confusion, he ordered burritos and coffee for both of them. Mattie ate hers dutifully. She couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t lead back to the horrifying image of bullets flying around them, so she didn’t talk. Zeke didn’t seem to mind. They got back on the road quickly.

  At sunset, they pulled into a small mountain town in Colorado. Pagosa Springs, the sign said.

  The air cooled sharply, and the sudden drop in temperature roused Mattie from her stupor. Zeke drove slowly through the small town, and roused, Mattie looked around curiously. Children played hide-and-seek in some bushes. Through screen doors, supper light fell to porches, welcoming and soft. A dog ran behind a boy on a bike.

  Zeke pulled into a hamburger stand, not a chain, but a mom-and-pop joint with broad windows all around. Old-fashioned. On the door, a fading sign in the colors of the old drive-in movie snack announcements advertised double-chocolate malts and curly fries. Two teenagers occupied a booth by the window, and a young mother with three little children had another. As Mattie watched, a burly man in a sheriff’s uniform paused beside the woman’s table to chat.

  Zeke swore mildly. “I was going to suggest we go in and eat, but maybe it would be better if you stay out of sight.”

  “Why?”

  He gracefully slid from the bike and yanked the helmet from his head. Hair fell down around his shoulders, mussed and yet gloriously sexy. A fist hit her belly at the pure animal beauty of him. “It’s a long story, but if I recognized you, someone else who’s a little bit faster on the uptake might recognize you, too. Just sit tight. I’ll get us something to eat.”

  In his voice was the same careful tone he’d used with her all day. This time, Mattie found it annoying. “I’m not going to break, Zeke.”

  His grin was swift and dazzling. Mattie blinked.

  “I knew you’d snap out of it,” he said. Setting the helmet on the seat in front of her, he asked, “They make great hamburgers here. You want one?”

  “Sure. With cheese.” She pursed her lips and pointed toward the faded sign on the door. “And one of those super-duper chocolate malts, too.”

  He continued grinning at her as if she’d done something extraordinary. “No problem. I’ll be right back. Keep your helmet on.”

  She watched him, moving with loose-limbed grace on long legs, and thought of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Strider. It would be a good nickname for him.

  The thought made her grin. Strider had been quite a hero, after all. She doubted Zeke thought he’d done anything heroic today, but he had.

  He’d saved her life.

  Chapter 6

  *

  CARRYING BAGS OF food into a little motel on top of a hill, Mattie and Zeke sprawled on the two double beds in the room. “Your malt, madame ,” Zeke said. “Your cheeseburger. Fries.” He reached deeper into the bag. “Ketchup, pickles, salt.”

  Mattie grinned. “What a guy. But that would be mademoiselle, not madame.”

  “Give it back, then.”

  “You’d have to kill me first,” she said. “I’m about to starve.” She bit into the thick, greasy burger. Heaven.

  “Me, too. Riding in the open air will definitely give you an appetite.”

  Her head, after wearing the helmet all day, felt extraordinarily light. “My head feels like it did after I cut my hair.”

  Zeke looked up, raising an eyebrow. “That was why I couldn’t figure out who you were—your hair. On TV, they showed a picture of you with it long. Real long.”

  “TV?”

  “Yep. You were a featured story on that mysteries program a week or two ago.” He dipped fries in ketchup, lovingly. “That’s what was driving me so crazy. I knew I’d seen your face and that it was important. It was on television.”

  Her heart squeezed. “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was. That’s why you have to keep yourself scarce. The police in Kansas City have a reward out for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of some guy in Kansas City. You’re wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of three men in a trucking warehouse.”

  Mattie felt faint. The reward was no doubt for Brian. “I wonder how they knew to look for me.” An image of the night that had sent her running tried to surface, but Mattie wasn’t ready for it yet. “How much is the reward?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars.” Zeke squeezed another ketchup packet onto the hamburger wrapper he was using as a plate. “He’s a big-time bad boy.”

  Mattie closed her eyes. “He’ll kill me if I go back there.”

  “Who is he, Mattie?” Zeke waited, hamburger in hand, for her answer. “He described your hair, too.”

  “It was the only thing that stood out about me.” A tinge of bitterness ached in her. Now Brian would know her hair was gone. Cutting it had all been for nothing. Putting her hamburger aside, she wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and opened her heavy leather purse. At the bottom, coiled like a silky snake, was her braid. She pulled it out.

  It unfurled from her hand to swing between them, a golden brown rope nearly three feet long. “It might be kind of sick to keep it,” she said, “but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.”

  Without speaking, Zeke touched it with one long finger. An odd expression crossed his face. He looked up. “You must have been really scared, to cut off that much hair.”

  “I was. I am.” She coiled the braid around her wrist, remembering the feel of it swishing over her back, brushing her hips. Cloaking her. “But I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You’re a brave little mouse, Miss Mary,” he said, and there was a rumbling, almost painfully seductive note to his voice. “You seem so vulnerable, but you’ve done what you had to do. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a woman quite like you.”

  She touched the quivering leap in her belly, but couldn’t tear her gaze from the green waters of his eyes. Something flickered there, warm and approving. She felt herself flush and hurriedly lowered her head. “Not too many women carry around a braid, that’s for sure.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “I know.” She picked up her hamburger. “Who was with him this morning?”

  “I guess the redhead is the one you’re running from?”

  “Brian Murphy. And I’d guess it was Vincent Paglio with him. A dark man with a pockmarked face?”

  “That’s the one.” He narrow
ed his eyes. “Who are they?”

  “What did they say on TV?” she countered, unwilling to say more than she had to.

  “I don’t remember,” he said with a hard edge.

  Mattie glanced up in surprise. His mouth was set in sharp lines, and his eyes had gone very, very cold. Suddenly, she wondered if she’d gone from the frying pan into the fire. “I didn’t ask for your help,” she said, wounded by his icy expression.

  “That’s true,” he said. “I guess you’d rather be a Jane Doe at the county coroner’s office right now, huh?”

  The terror of that bullet-riddled ride down the highway flooded back. “No,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Well, then, why don’t we get this story out of the way? No tricks, honey. I’ve been burned before and I wouldn’t take kindly to having it happen again.”

  Carefully, she set aside her food and tucked her feet under her legs. She took a deep breath and opened the locked box in her mind. “Brian Murphy was my fiancé,” she said at last. “He used me as an alibi so he could kill three men. Or rather, he tried to use me as an alibi.”

  Zeke waited.

  Mattie went on, her words emotionless as she tried to keep her memories from overwhelming her. “He’d taken me out to dinner and we stopped at a party afterward. Something happened there, something that made him really angry. He made a couple of phone calls—one of them to Vince.”

  She closed her eyes. “I should have stayed at the party.”

  Silently, Zeke handed her the milk shake. She took a sip and gave him a brief history of the trucking firm and Brian’s successful bid to bring it back from the brink of ruin. “I know now that he was transporting something illegal—but I didn’t know that then.”

  “Drugs and guns,” Zeke said. “The guns are the big problem. The police found a truckload of AK47s in the warehouse.”

  Guns. Mattie thought of the strife tearing cities—including Kansas City—to pieces. “He used to talk about the gun problem like he really cared,” she said, and felt betrayed and stupid all over again.

  “Makes a nice smoke screen, right?”

  Mattie nodded cynically. “Anyway, that night he drove us over to the warehouse, said he just needed to check something and we’d go to my house. We went in and he made a couple more phone calls. I could tell he was just furious about some kind of shipment that had been waylaid.”

  She had begun to feel uneasy by then. The warehouse was dark and shadowy and felt somehow threatening. Dressed in a taffeta gown and high heels, Mattie didn’t want to sit down anywhere, so she paced the small office as Brian made his phone calls.

  “It started to bother me, that he wouldn’t say what was going on and that he was so angry. It was almost like he was afraid.”

  Three other men had shown up at the warehouse, men Mattie didn’t like. “Brian told me to drive his car to my house and he’d have someone give him a ride there in the morning to pick it up. I was tired and a little annoyed, so I did.”

  “You would have been his alibi,” Zeke said.

  “Exactly.” A hundred times, a thousand, she’d wondered what would have happened if she’d made it home. “I got almost all the way to my apartment before I realized I’d forgotten my purse, which had all my keys in it. I had to go back.”

  Her mouth dried and she crossed her arms over her chest. “I could hear an argument when I got to the door, so I slipped to one side, behind a truck. I was just going to be inconspicuous, get my purse and get out of there.”

  She started to tremble and hugged herself closer. “I got to the office, grabbed my purse and was on my way out when Brian—um—” Her voice shook. She pressed her lips together and took a breath. “When he started shooting. I heard it before I saw it—there was so much noise—it echoed all through the room. It was huge, there were so many bullets…”

  Blood everywhere. One of the men slammed against the truck she was hiding behind and he fell, his life spilling out on the floor all around. “I was frozen, kind of. I couldn’t think what to do. He fell right by my foot and blood got on my shoe.”

  She stared at the floor, seeing in memory the traumatic moment. She gestured toward the mess she could see. “It was just everywhere. I’d never seen anyone shot except in the movies. I couldn’t believe how much one person could bleed.”

  “Mattie.”

  She ignored him. “I looked up and Brain was standing there with this enormous gun and there was this look on his face—I knew he was going to kill me, too. So I ran.”

  Zeke moved abruptly, came to sit next to her. He took her hand. “You don’t have to tell me any more. I’m sorry—”

  “I slipped,” she said in the same dull voice. The shivering in her limbs grew nearly uncontrollable. Distantly, she felt Zeke’s strong arms encircle her, warm and steady, but she couldn’t stop the unreeling filmstrip. “I fell,” she said. “Right in that man’s blood. It got all over me. My knee. My hand. But I couldn’t stop. I ran out and stole Brian’s car. I just started driving.”

  “I’m sorry, Mattie,” Zeke said again, and tucked her head into his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “I don’t know how he found me,” she said. “I don’t know how the police knew I was there.”

  “You probably left prints at the scene.”

  “My hands—” she held them up “—got bloody.”

  He caught her hands in his own. “I’m sorry, Mattie.”

  The trembling eased a little as she absorbed his strength and warmth. “But how did Brian find out I was in Kismet?” she said, lifting her head. “I’d never been there before. Never even heard of it before I got on the bus.”

  “It isn’t as hard as you might think to track someone. You must have dumped the car, right?”

  She nodded, feeling calm enough to pull away from him before she made a fool of herself.

  “He started there, I can tell you.” He let her go. “It’s the police looking for you, Mattie, not him. They said on that program that they’ve been trying to put him away for years, but hadn’t had anything solid to go on.” He cleared his throat. “The men he killed were undercover detectives. They almost had him.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t remember the program.”

  “I wanted to hear your side.”

  “Wanted to make sure I told the truth.”

  He was unapologetic. “Yeah.”

  Mattie nodded.

  “Why don’t you just turn yourself in? It would be the easiest way—and you’d be doing a good deed.”

  “No.” The word was flat and harsh. “He might not be able to kill me himself, but he’d find someone to do it.”

  “If his house of cards is collapsing—and it sounds like it is—he won’t have the power to do that.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  She sighed, suddenly exhausted by the whole day. “I will.”

  “How did you get mixed up with someone like that?”

  “I didn’t know he was like that until that night. I met him at Mass. He used to bring his mother.”

  “Mass?”

  “Yes. He seemed like a good Irish Catholic guy. He had a big family, a successful business. I really thought…” She trailed off.

  “Thought what?”

  “That I was finally going to have a family of my own,” she said quietly. “Losing that dream was almost worse than anything else.”

  “I understand that,” Zeke said. “More than you know.”

  She looked at him intently, curious at the sound of old pain in his words. His expression was so bitter, she decided not to breach it. She shifted and groaned at the pull of muscles in her body. All over her body. “I had no idea riding a motorcycle was so much work,” she said ruefully.

  “You’re likely to be pretty sore in the morning. Why don’t you go take a hot shower?”

  Mattie nodded. She was so tired, she could sleep sitting up, right there on the edge of the bed. Withou
t another word, she grabbed her tote bag and headed for the bathroom.

  *

  ZEKE LET OUT a breath as the shower kicked on in the other room. Maybe he could pull himself together before she came out.

  Again he told himself good girls just weren’t his speed. Especially good girls who went to Mass on Sunday mornings. No, he corrected himself, not a girl. A woman who went to Mass. A woman with quiet allure instead of flashy charms. He liked fast women because he was a fast, blunt man.

  But his body didn’t seem to be getting the message. He’d spent the day with her soft breasts pressed gently against his back, with her thighs cradling his hips, her arms wrapped around his waist.

  Even now, the memory had his unrepentant parts jumping in anticipation. He shifted irritably.

  He was the one who needed a shower. A nice, sharp, cold one.

  The situation was not improved when she emerged, her hair combed wet around her gamine face. Her skin held a dewy, scrubbed freshness, and she wore the baggy tank top and dowdy shorts he’d seen the morning at the canyon.

  Except now, she wore no bra, and her breasts swayed seductively as she moved, bumping the cloth over them subtly. Subtle. Everything about her was subtle, hidden to those who didn’t take the time to look: her sable-colored hair and soft brown eyes, that fragile collarbone and long, graceful neck.

  “You’re too little for all that hair,” he said suddenly. “Nobody would see you at all.”

  She touched her neck and Zeke wanted to touch it, too, with his hands and lips and tongue. Wanted to taste her throat and those plump, perfect lips. A tic jumped in his eye.

  “It was my only real beauty,” she said, smiling ruefully. “One of my foster mothers used to tell me that a lot. That my hair was my glory.”

  That foster mother needed her head examined, he thought, and touched with his gaze the crook of neck and shoulder that seemed to beg for a kiss.

  Damn. How was he going to get from the bed to the shower without showing off all his own charms at full alert? He’d been grateful for the two beds, but hadn’t anticipated this part…being with her in a close, quiet room, having to smell her scent of soap and freshness.