Rich Dirty Dangerous

by Julie Kriss

  I let myself look around again, and saw that Cavan Wilder was gone.

  My excitement was replaced by a quick surge of panic. Had he found a woman, too? Was he off having sex with her somewhere, our agreement completely forgotten? That thought hurt, more than the thought of McMurphy had. I was in trouble, already hanging too many feelings on a man I barely knew and probably shouldn’t trust. I had to get a grip.

  When he didn’t reappear after half an hour, I felt exhaustion weighing on me. I drank two more shots, and one of the other women gripped my arm when I almost lost my balance. “Don’t worry, hon,” she said sympathetically. “They all do it, but they always come back. You gotta try and be tougher, or he’ll just do it more.”

  McMurphy. She was talking about McMurphy going to his room in the club with that woman. She thought I was torn up about it. I nearly laughed, but then I remembered it was better if she made the assumption. “It’s just… right in front of my face,” I said, my words slurring, an effect I hadn’t intended but came out just right.

  She nodded. “He isn’t gonna change, honey. But I’ve seen how he looks at you. You’re his old lady, always will be.”

  For another ninety minutes, anyway. God, I was so tired of lying, of pretending.

  Cavan Wilder never reappeared. The party got sloppy at three, like they always did, and at three thirty—McMurphy still hadn’t come back—I excused myself, saying I was going to go home and pass out. The women didn’t question it, since obviously I couldn’t pass out in McMurphy’s room in the club house.

  I took a taxi home. After hours of crushing fear, I was numb now, exhausted, half drunk, on autopilot. I grabbed my suitcase from the closet I’d stashed it in and locked McMurphy’s apartment door behind me one last time. I walked away, and then I remembered that it was a twenty-minute walk at least to the Sav-Mart, and I was still in my high heels. I couldn’t call a taxi, since I wanted no one to be able to trace me, even through a driver. So I hurried around the corner of the building, popped open the suitcase—and realized I’d forgotten to pack shoes.

  Panic made me sick for a minute. It was overwhelming and completely unreasonable. They were just shoes. There were shoes for sale everywhere, ready to buy to replace the ones I’d left. Shoes were hardly a rare item. But for a dizzy second, it felt like a bad omen. The end of the world. I managed to latch the suitcase again and get moving, nearly running as fast as I could in my pinching high heels.

  There was no one on the streets at this hour. Any insomniac, lying in bed and listening to my heels on the sidewalk, would think I was a hooker coming home from a gig. But I didn’t think anyone was listening. As always I was alone in a world of cotton wool, unable to hear or speak or breathe. This was my last chance—I had to get out now, or I would give up, give in, go down forever.

  The parking lot of the boarded-up Sav-Mart was empty. A cool wind blew in from the desert, and I set my suitcase down and hugged myself, trying to keep warm. I smelled old piss and gasoline. In the corner of the lot, used needles littered the pavement. There were no lights, and nothing moved.

  Minutes ticked by. He’d forgotten about me. He didn’t care. That’s not something I do, he’d warned me, and he was right. He was off with some woman, getting his dick sucked right now, my problems the furthest thing from his mind.

  If McMurphy woke up and found out I was gone, there was nowhere I could hide. I had no car and exactly two hundred dollars in my wallet. I had a maxed-out credit card, no job, no skills. I had gambled everything on Cavan Wilder. I had him—or nothing.

  I waited.

  There was the sound of a motor in the distance, and then closer. I tried to keep control, tried not to hope.

  But headlights swept into the parking lot, and a car pulled up next to me, jerking to a stop. I could only see shadows against the powerful lights, but a car door slammed and a figure came toward me, and then a hand took my arm while another hand picked up the suitcase at my feet.

  I knew that hand. Strong, warm, gentle. His grip was firm, but it didn’t hurt.

  I smelled laundry and something spicy, mixed now with the tang of sweat, smoke, and beer.

  He led me to the car, opened the back door, and tossed my suitcase inside. He opened the passenger door and looked down into my face.

  Cavan Wilder. He was here.

  Part of me was shocked. Part of me had been sure he’d abandon me, and now that I realized he wouldn’t, that this was for real, a voice in my head said: You should have told him. He deserves to know who you really are. But it’s too late now.

  So I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t. I was too busy staring at him in disbelief. I could have gotten on my knees on the cold concrete in that second and kissed his fucking feet. But he didn’t ask me to.

  “You ready?” was all he said.

  I nodded.

  “You better be,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

  Six

  Cavan

  Jesus, what a night. I’d almost blown it a dozen times, so many I’d lost count. I’d spent the entire party with the urge to look at her, to stare, to walk up and talk to her, hear her voice, hear that she was okay. It had taken everything I had to keep my cool.

  Now Dani was in the passenger seat next to me, still in her short skirt, unbuttoned blouse, and high heels. The dark makeup around her eyes was smudged, and her lipstick was gone. She rubbed her palms on her slim, bare knees almost rhythmically, as if trying to calm herself down.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “You’re not going to cry, are you?” I said. “I’m really not good with crying.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going to cry.”

  It was good to hear her voice. I could read her then, read that she was scared and freaked out but still in control. That she wasn’t going to give out on me.

  “First things first,” I said as the signs for the highway came out of the darkness. I pointed at our options. “East or west?”

  A monumental decision, but she made it in a heartbeat. “West.”

  “As it happens, I agree.”

  She sat up straighter as I headed for the exit west, and ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “You say things like that, I’ve noticed,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “As it happens.”

  I laughed. I actually felt pretty good—something to do with the Black Dog MC receding into the distance behind me, probably, getting smaller in my rearview every second. “Don’t be too impressed,” I told her. “I’m hardly a Harvard grad. Just because I talk better than a Dog doesn’t make me quality.”

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Where was I when?”

  “After two thirty, you disappeared.”

  I’d had no idea she’d been watching me; I’d never seen it. She had serious powers of deception, young as she was. No one developed powers like that unless they had been through the fire. Unless they lived in the fire every day.

  I took too long to answer, so she said, “Were you with a woman?”

  I laughed again. “Sure,” I said. “I went and fucked some stranger, and then I left her to go get you. This is the kind of guy you picked to leave town with?”

  She lifted her hands to her cheeks and rubbed them, glancing at me. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I was looking for you. It helped for me to see you. And then you were just gone.”

  “McMurphy left,” I said, and I couldn’t help it—I watched her reaction.

  There was nothing but numbness. “I know.”

  “That bother you?” I prodded.

  “I keep hoping he’ll like one of his other girls better than me,” was her answer. “It never happens.”

  She knew better, of course. Once McMurphy had her as his possession, he’d never let her go. It had to do with him, not her. But she’d hoped anyway. “He left with one of them,” I said. “I decided to go keep an eye on him, make sure I knew where he was.”

/>   She was watching me now, from her dark-lined eyes. I found myself wishing she’d wash off the makeup, because she looked infinitely more beautiful without it. Not that her beauty was any of my business. “Did he go to his room in the club?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he stayed there?”

  “Unless he had some crazy impulse to climb out the window, yes. He didn’t come out the door.” I’d started up a conversation with one of the brothers, and we’d drifted inside, where I’d pretended to be interested in his drunken ramblings while quietly keeping an eye and an ear on McMurphy’s bedroom door.

  Not my favorite task, keeping tabs on McMurphy’s sex life. But not one I’d ever have to do again.

  “How’s your tattoo?” I asked her.

  She blinked, and she actually brightened a little, some of the stress falling from her face. “It’s good,” she replied.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A little. Nothing out of line.”

  “Keep it clean,” I reminded her. “It’ll heal in a few days at most. It looked good—I think you’re going to be happy when it’s all healed over.”

  “Maybe you should look at it,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Dani, I’ve seen more of you than I need to see. More than I should ever have seen.”

  Her voice was soft, honest, and a little hoarse. “You can see any of me you want to, now,” she said.

  Those words went straight into my bloodstream and arrowed right down below my belt. It was the sincerity of them, the lack of pretense—she wasn’t trying to seduce me. She was just offering herself. My brain fuzzed over as we flew down the empty highway. What was going on with her? She was scared, tired, and vulnerable. So vulnerable I could nearly see through her skin. So I ignored the slow throbbing in my balls and said, “You know that’s not a good idea.”

  She didn’t flinch, but she looked at me for a long time. She was almost uncanny in the fluorescent lights that blew by on the near-empty highway, as if she was slowly putting a spell on me. “It isn’t because you don’t want to,” she said at last.

  I had nothing but honesty. “No, it isn’t,” I answered her. “But you’ve just gotten away from a man who, by my best guess, has been fucking with both your brain and your body for months. You need to get yourself right. The last thing you need right now is another man, especially me.”

  She latched on to the last part of my little speech. “Why not you?”

  “I hurt people,” I said. “I always have.”

  She shook her head, frowning. “You don’t have a woman. You’re not in the club. You don’t have a family. Who are you hurting?”

  “Everyone who comes near me,” I said. “So don’t.”

  She looked away. She probably didn’t understand that I kept myself quarantined, like a leper, for the good of the rest of the population. Emotional leprosy, that was what I had. I was capable of faking it with the club and having a few dirty orgasms with the women who drifted through my life, and that was all. That was all I’d ever be.

  “You should get some sleep,” I told her. “We’re going to be driving for a while.”

  She looked out the window. “I’m not going to sleep.”

  I knew how she felt.

  Neither was I.

  Seven

  Dani

  We passed the outskirts of Tuscon, then headed west, avoiding Phoenix. The sun started to come up, making the Sonoran Desert look rose-colored. I had passed through exhausted—and partly drunk—into wired, my brain buzzing, my stomach queasy. McMurphy wasn’t an early riser, especially after a night of partying and screwing, but you never knew. The rising sun could wake him up, or wake one of the other brothers up. Maybe he was kicking what’s-her-name out of his room right now, stumbling home to his apartment.

  It was only a matter of time before he opened that apartment door and found me gone.

  I pulled my phone from my purse and stared at it. No calls, no texts. My hand was sweaty, almost trembling. I pressed the power button and turned it off.

  Cavan saw me, but said nothing. He didn’t talk. He was probably as tired as I was, though he didn’t seem as afraid as I was. He just drove, his eyes on the road. From time to time I found myself slipping into the pleasant lull his company had given me in the tattoo shop, the feeling of peace and safety, and then I’d jerk into fear again, my stomach twisting.

  His gray, dark-lashed eyes flicked to the signs passing us on the highway, and then he signaled and exited, the turning of the wheel doing fascinating things to his wrists and forearms. Despite my jangled nerves, I watched.

  He’d turned me down; I wasn’t surprised. It was the small hours of the morning, we were on the run from McMurphy, and we’d both just left our lives behind. Besides, my hair was a mess and my eye makeup was smeared. We both smelled like old booze. Fifty Shades of Grey, it wasn’t.

  It didn’t make me want him any less.

  Sitting in the car with him this long had only confirmed what I’d already suspected: Cavan Wilder’s presence cut through the numbness that had been my companion for nearly seven months. I was awake when I was near him—not just my brain, but my body. Through the exhaustion and the fear, my body felt like it was thawing. I had no idea what I would do if he ever touched me or, God forbid, actually kissed me. A crazy part of me that wasn’t dead yet held out hope that I would find out.

  “Why are we exiting?” I asked, coming out of my lust thoughts to see we had left the highway behind.

  “We need sleep,” he said, “and to clean up. I’m going to find us a place, but we need to be off the main route.”

  “Okay.” I pushed my sluggish thoughts into motion. “Do you need me to use a GPS or something?”

  “Not now,” he said, pointing to a sign. Datsun, 10 Miles. “You ever heard of Datsun?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. Sounds perfect.”

  “It’s a town named after a car,” I observed. I had great powers of thought right now, that was me.

  Cavan glanced at me. “You got a problem with that?”

  “I guess not.” There were weirder towns in America. In Arizona, even.

  “All we need is a motel and some food,” he said. “If Datsun has it, we’re crashing.”

  It was going to be a hot day. The chill of night on the desert was already evaporating under the power of the sun. I was getting woozy now, I was so tired. Datsun seemed to have a gas station, a strip mall, another gas station, a few houses, a few stores, and—thank God—a motel. A one-story place that looked like it had had better days, maybe in the seventies. There were no other cars parked in front of it; no other tourists were in Datsun today. Cavan pulled into one of the spots and stopped the car.

  “Stay here,” he said to me. “I’ll go in.”

  “Why?” I asked, not wanting him to leave me alone.

  “Because this is still Black Dog territory,” he said, “and you’re distinctive. I don’t want word getting back to McMurphy before we’ve even cleared the state.”

  “Why am I distinctive?” I asked. I had no filter right now. I wanted to know if distinctive was good or bad.

  Cavan frowned, looking me up and down impersonally. “The hair,” he said. “The eyes. And you look like you just came from a party.”

  I glanced self-consciously down at my half-unbuttoned blouse. “You look like you just came from a party, too,” I argued.

  “No, I look like a hungover piece of shit, like any of a thousand other hungover pieces of shit,” he said easily. “The manager’s probably going to think I’m just another Dog driving home from a drug deal. I’ll go ahead and let him think it. But if I have you with me, he’s going to remember.”

  I sat back in my seat. “Fine,” I said, reluctantly. The Dogs had a big network, and not just of bikers. They knew a lot of people all the way to the California border, and any one of those people would gladly rat on me. “Go ahead. And you don’t look like shit. You look stupidly good.”

&n
bsp; Cavan laughed, which of course made him look even better. “You’re good for my ego,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He was as good as his word, coming back not ten minutes later with a key, stuffing his wallet into his back pocket. He walked to one of the room doors and opened it, then came to the car and opened the passenger door. “That one’s yours,” he said.

  I swung my cramped legs out and stood, feeling my whole body creak. “What?” I said in alarm as his words sunk in. “Where’s your room?”

  “Next door,” he said, opening the back seat and getting my suitcase.

  “No way,” I said. “I’m staying with you.”

  Cavan sighed and looked at me. We were standing in the parking lot, the sun heating the sky overhead. Behind us, the road was silent, not a car in sight. “You get your own room,” he said.

  “No,” I said again. I was still wearing my heels, because I had no other shoes, and the hot wind lifted my hair. “I’m not staying by myself. No way. I’m staying with you.”

  “Dani.” His voice was soft. “We’ve been over this.”

  My throat was closing. I stared at the open motel room door. This didn’t have to do with sex; it was panic, and nothing else. “I’ll just sleep,” I said. “That’s all. But not without you.”

  “You don’t want some privacy?”

  “No, I don’t want any privacy!” It came out half a shout, my voice laced with fear. I didn’t even know why I was upset; I just knew that I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet, wasn’t ready to just lie there alone. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I can’t. No way.”

  He sighed again and glanced around, probably seeing that I was immovable—and, as he’d said, distinctive—in this parking lot. “Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll share a room. Just move.”