by Radclyffe
“No problem,” Wes said. “What’s up? Are you going to take a later flight?”
“No,” Cam said, putting money on the table. “I’m going to change my destination.”
*
The late-morning sun finally burned off the gray clouds, and a trickle of warmth struck Sky’s face as they walked out of the Rooster. She blinked in the thin sunlight. She’d been inside the windowless bar for twelve hours. Twelve hours that felt like twelve years, surrounded by clouds of smoke, testosterone, and barely concealed suspicion. She took a deep breath and hoped the cold, clean air would purge the smoke from her lungs and the taste of violence from the back of her throat. “God, I almost feel like climbing on the back of your bike just to blow the grime off me.”
“We don’t have that far to go,” Loren said. She still had her arm around Sky’s waist and steered toward her Harley in the line outside the bar. “I’m up for it.”
“Not exactly dressed for it,” Sky said, indicating her short jacket and skimpy top. “If I lean over on the back of that bike, my ass is going to freeze.”
Loren laughed, but her voice held an edge. “Can’t have that, although the way you risk it, I’m surprised you’re that worried about it.”
“Come on.” Sky grabbed Loren’s hand and dragged her past the bikes toward her car. They were alone, but anyone could walk out of the bar, and she didn’t want to have this conversation outside. Besides, the look in Loren’s eyes said she was pissed, and since they were supposed to be one step from jumping into bed, she didn’t want to spoil the illusion. She yanked open the car door and climbed behind the wheel. Loren cut around the front and dropped into the seat beside her. Sky started the engine and said, “What are you talking about?”
The car was small and Loren seemed very close as she leaned toward Sky. “What the hell were you trying to prove in there? Pushing Ramsey about the audit, then getting chummy with Trish.”
“Ramsey would have expected me to say something,” Sky pointed out.
“And Trish? You do know she could chew you up and spit you out if she gets a wild hair. And, trust me, she gets a wild hair frequently.”
“Listen, McElroy,” Sky said, backing toward the road, “I came here to get inside, and that’s what I’m going to do. Tricia is the perfect avenue.”
“Tricia is smart and tough and more than a little crazy.” Loren was so close, her breath streamed like a hot caress across Sky’s cheek.
A ripple of sensation, shockingly swift and sweet, ran down her body and exploded in her center. Loren’s heat overpowered the pathetic wheeze coming from the vents, or maybe it was just her own temperature spiking. Sky shivered. “If I wanted to be anything more than a faceless pair of tits you diddled for a night, I needed to be seen. Really seen. Being noticed by Tricia helps my cover.”
“Well, now she’s seen you. For better or worse. And you’ve managed to wrangle yourself an invitation to the New Year’s run.”
Sky cut Loren a look. Her eyes still flashed with temper. “Well, only if you offer me the bitch seat.”
Loren grunted. “Do I have a choice?”
“Plenty, I’m sure.” Sky imagined Loren had no trouble finding women to keep her company on the back of her bike whenever she wanted it. The idea left a sour note in her stomach. “Look, I might be able to get a look at things you can’t. And women talk to other women the way they won’t to you—not when you’re a member first, a woman second.”
“Is that how you see me?” Loren asked. “Or do you only see an operative you intend to handle?”
Sky watched the road, and for the first time in her memory, didn’t know how to form her answer. She couldn’t read Loren the way she could other people, couldn’t discern what answer would produce the outcome she wanted. She didn’t know what she wanted. Her feelings, or whatever it was Loren caused to swirl around inside her, throwing her off, confusing her, were getting in her way. “Can we agree to focus on the job?”
“Sure.” Loren pulled back and the heat dissipated, leaving Sky cold even though the interior had warmed up.
“We’re on the same side, Loren,” she said softly.
“You’ll get plenty of opportunity for a firsthand look on the run to Reno—all the chapters will be there, and so will the national officers,” Loren went on as if they hadn’t nearly crossed some unspoken line between the personal and the professional. “But I suggest you go through the books as quickly as possible and give them a clean bill of health. You don’t want Ramsey getting nervous about what you might find, and you don’t want him watching you any more than he already is.”
“Okay, that makes sense. I’ll go back this afternoon and make quick work of it.” Sky ought to have been happy they were back on neutral professional ground, but instead a nagging emptiness spread through her. “If I close out the books, you and I will have to be seen together to maintain my cover. Frequently.”
“I’ve got my own agenda—I can’t spend all my time feeling you up for the benefit of the club members who might be watching.”
“Darn, and I was so hoping you would.”
Loren laughed and some of the weight lifted from Sky’s chest. “Okay, it’s not a hardship, true. But I may be out of town for a while, probably tomorrow.”
“Doing what?” Sky asked.
Loren was silent.
“I thought we were past this, McElroy.” Sky took the turn toward Loren’s shop. “There’s no reason for me to be here except the ones I gave you. If I’d come here to expose you, I’ve already got enough on you to do that.”
“We’d still both be better off if you handled things from a distance.”
“So what—you can take on this gun exchange with the militia with no backup of any kind?” Sky shook her head. “That’s not happening. You get me, or you get the county sheriffs dogging your steps.”
Loren snorted. “Well, that’s guaranteed to get me dead. They’ve got more leaks than a faucet. Plus, I know two of them who work on the Renegades’ payroll.”
“Yeah, I know. We’ve been looking at them. So I’m as good as you get.”
Loren blew out a breath. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to keep feeling you up for the benefit of the boys, then.”
“I’ll try not to make it too much of a chore,” Sky said dryly.
“The problem,” Loren murmured, “is that it isn’t.”
Sky knew exactly what she should say. She should have put Loren off, put distance between them—safe, comfortable, anonymous distance. Her silence was as telling as a confession.
Chapter Seventeen
Sky parked in the long lot behind Loren’s garage. The fog and clouds had blown away on a rising wind, and the rambling, one-story automotive shop Loren also called home seemed desolate in the too-bright daylight. The nearest house was a quarter mile away around a bend in the snow-covered highway, and the mountain rose directly behind the narrow strip of uneven gravel where they’d parked, towering over them, dwarfing them in its shadow. Sky hesitated before cutting the engine, a sensation of foreboding urging her to back out onto the road and keep going. Irrational and completely not her. Irritated at feeling so out of her element, Sky turned off the car and got out.
Loren unlocked several deadbolts and stepped into the rectangle of blackness that appeared when she opened a blank-faced gray metal door. Sky followed Loren and the door swung shut behind her. The air inside was cool and smelled faintly of motor oil. She paused with the door at her back, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the semidarkness after the bright sunshine outside. A shadow moved across the room, and a small table lamp came on next to a single bed. An army-green footlocker stood at the foot of the bed, and if Sky hadn’t known where she was, she’d have thought she’d walked into a military barracks. The plain wool blanket was stretched taut across the mattress, its corners folded with military precision. A plain boxlike nightstand next to the bed was the only other furniture, with the exception of a utilitarian plank bookcase overflowing with ha
rdbound and paperback books. A braided rug lay on the concrete floor next to the bed. A partition at the opposite end of the room probably led to a bathroom. The plywood walls were painted a uniform tan. Overall, the space was neat, clean, and impersonal.
“Where do you do your cooking?” Sky asked. She knew from her first visit that the garage and workshop were directly through the curtained doorway on the opposite wall.
Loren pulled off her jacket, hung it on one of a row of hooks on the wall, and leaned against the curtained doorway ten feet away from Sky. “Hot plate in the shop. You’d be surprised what you can cook on a hot plate. After you spend a few months in the desert, you learn how to do a lot of things with a little.”
Sky tried to imagine what it would be like, sleeping in that bed night after night and waking up to this barren space. Spending her days with men who would kill her if they knew who she was, risking her life, forfeiting her life in so many ways, in pursuit of a goal she might never attain. She needed to understand these things if she wanted to understand Loren. And she did. For the job, of course. But for more than that. For the woman who had held her while she’d slept, asking nothing and offering everything that mattered in that moment—safety and trust. “God, Loren, you don’t have to live like you’re still on the front line.”
“Don’t I?” Loren shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “It works for me, and it suits the cover.”
“Right. Okay.” Sky took off her jacket and let the subject drop. Loren was right—and how she lived was no concern of Sky’s. It just…bothered her. Bothered her to feel the loneliness of the place. Maybe that was just her projecting her own weird sense of being out of place—she must be more tired than she’d realized. Maybe Loren didn’t feel the emptiness like a weight pressing down on her. Maybe she was past loneliness. Maybe she had to be.
Sky turned to the bookcase and perused the titles. Mysteries, thrillers, an odd Western too old to be currently popular. The subjects seemed to be in keeping with who Loren professed to be, perhaps with who she had always been. Sky didn’t know, and the frustration returned. McElroy was a cipher, and Sky needed to solve the mystery of her for both their sakes. She pulled out one of the hardbound books with a plain spine, faded lettering, and a cover that was frayed at the corners. She opened it. A yellowed title page. Zane Grey. Riders of the Purple Sage—arguably the most popular Western ever written. The book had to be eighty years old, at least. “This looks like an original.”
Loren smiled quickly. “Picked it up at a yard sale for fifty cents. It’s easy to pick up old books if you’re looking for them.”
“Hobby?” Sky turned the book over in her hands. She could see Loren as a cowboy—riding free, living beyond the reach of law and convention.
“Not intentionally. They just follow me home.” Loren’s faintly crooked grin made her look devastatingly handsome.
Sky didn’t want to think about how damn good-looking Loren was, or remember the feel of Loren’s hands on her body when they’d been pretending—hell, she wasn’t about to start lying to herself now, they hadn’t been pretending, they’d been touching, and kissing, and doing what she’d wanted to do then and what she wanted to do again. She forced her mind away from the lingering images, ignored the tremor in her belly. “What else do you do, when you’re not working on the bikes or riding with the Renegades?”
“I don’t have a lot of time for anything else. A movie now and then. I keep busy.”
“Yes. I imagine.” Sky turned and put the book back in exactly the place she’d found it, noting without surprise that the titles were all alphabetized. Loren was careful, particular, with the things she cared about. Sky wondered if she’d be that way with a woman. If there was a woman. When she turned back, Loren was still watching her. “You said you had things to do the next few days—with the militia. Tell me what that’s about.”
Loren slid her hands into her pockets. The leather tightened across her thighs. “Everyone back at the Rooster thinks we’re here fucking.”
“Well, we’ll let them think that, won’t we.”
“It’s always best to keep your cover as close to the truth as possible.”
Sky laughed, grateful for the humor that cut the sexual tension slowly closing her throat. “That has to be the most unromantic offer I’ve ever had.”
Loren laughed too. “When I offer, you’ll know it.” The humor in her face faded and the outlaw returned, eyes deadly and hard. “A woman contacted Ramsey early this morning. Said she was in charge of their end of the weapons deal. Actually, she said in command. She wants a rundown of the op and a personal review of the rendezvous site. Maybe the warehouse too.”
Sky looked around for a chair and didn’t see one.
“You can sit on the bed.” Loren tilted her chin toward the garage. “Or we can go out there and you can straddle the Indian again. You looked good on it.”
“I’ll take the bed.” Sky refused to let Loren’s compliment affect her, even if her pulse did jump a little bit at Loren’s admission. She sat in the center of the bed. “Is that usual? A request like that?”
“It’s not totally out of the ordinary—bikers tend to be paranoid, militia too, apparently. Always expecting a double or triple cross. With good reason, oftentimes, especially with a deal this big. But we’ve already met with the militia leader, so this seems to be overkill.”
“Why are you going?”
Loren shrugged. “We could make noise about it, but since they’re asking, it gives me the opportunity to ask for something in return. I want a closer look at what’s going on up there. If I can get some pictures, it’ll help us ID the members and maybe find some connections. They’re getting their money from somewhere. My guess is somewhere big.”
“If you get caught up in those mountains taking pictures, they’ll kill you.”
“Well, I’ll just have to be careful.”
“Who’s going with you?” The tension in Sky’s belly ratcheted up along with her temper. Loren shouldn’t be planning an op like this without discussing it with her first. She was Loren’s handler.
“Quincy and Armeo will back me up, but chances are if I want to get anywhere near the compound, they’ll want me to come alone.”
Sky shook her head. “I don’t like it. It’s too isolated up there. We can’t get aerial surveillance, we can’t get a ground team in place. And all you have for backup is two bikers who won’t save your ass if they get wind of who you are.”
“Look, I’ve been doing this a long time. I know what I’m doing.”
“I know. Even though you’re lousy at reports, I know what you’ve been doing. I know more about you than anyone.” Sky stood up. “And you know you should have run this by me.”
Loren stiffened. Sky was right, and she didn’t like it. Sky did know more about her than anyone, and she didn’t know Sky at all. Loren didn’t like being on an unequal playing field. She didn’t like how much Sky affected her. Wrong. She liked it too much. She liked the way Sky’s skin smelled, the way they fit, the way when they kissed the connection felt immediate, intense, right. She liked the way she felt every time she looked at Sky—like she wanted to touch more of her skin, taste more of her, drown in her. Loren raked a hand through her hair, cursed under her breath.
“What?” Sky asked. “You’re going to have to talk to me.”
Loren paced a few feet away, then whipped around. “You’re a complication.”
Sky’s brows rose and heat prickled along the back of her neck. “Am I? Define complication.”
“You shouldn’t be here. You’ve introduced an unknown element into an operation that’s already in progress. We have to secure your cover right in the middle of the damn Renegades, with Ramsey and everyone else watching everything we do. And now you think I can just drag you up into the Bitterroots to a paramilitary compound with no way to explain who you are or why you’re there. You’re crazy if you think I’m doing that.”
Sky stalked toward her and poked a finger
into the center of Loren’s chest. “Listen, McElroy. You might like being a lone ranger, but there’s more going on here than we originally suspected, and we need intel now. We need to know who’s funding them and what the hell they plan to do with two hundred assault weapons. You can’t be the only person on the ground out here because even though you are very, very good, if something happens to you, we lose two years of effort on this project. So you’re stuck with me.”
Loren grabbed her wrist loosely, but firmly enough to send a message. She moved Sky’s hand away from her body. “It warms my heart to know you want to keep me alive so the operation won’t be a waste.”
Sky’s eyes flashed. “Do you enjoy being a pain in the ass?”
“Immensely,” Loren half snarled.
“Well, so do I,” Sky snapped. She gripped Loren’s shirt, yanked her close, and kissed her hard on the mouth.
For a second, Loren’s body tightened, and then she wrapped an arm around Sky and tethered her in a tight embrace. Sky tasted like her name—cool and bright. Loren drank her like she drank in the morning air after a fresh snowfall. She basked in her heat as she ran her hands over the smooth, firm planes of her back. “You’re beautiful,” she murmured against Sky’s mouth when she paused for a breath.
Sky’s fingers came into her hair, twisted there, trapping her as she had trapped Sky. “Shut up and kiss me.”
Loren laughed, scooped an arm behind her legs, and picked her up. She walked three steps and sat on the bed, Sky still in her arms. Dipped her head, took another taste. Snowflakes melting on her tongue. Sky tasted fresh and clean, something she hadn’t realized how much she’d hungered for. She swung her legs onto the narrow bed and pulled Sky down beside her. Their legs intertwined and she pushed up Sky’s top, pressing her hand to the bare skin of Sky’s lower back. Sky moaned softly, and Loren groaned with the rush of blood into the pit of her stomach.
