by Julie Kriss
Cavan’s gray eyes calculated swiftly. “You have anything irreplaceable on this phone?” he asked.
I almost laughed. The irreplaceable things most people had on their phones—photos, the numbers of people they loved—I had none of that. For a second I saw my mother’s face, the last time I’d seen her, when I left home. I’d gotten a new number and I hadn’t contacted her since.
I wondered if I was brave enough yet to change that. Then I put the idea out of my head.
“There’s nothing important on there,” I told Cavan.
Without another word, he walked to the bathroom, threw the phone in the toilet, and walked out again. “We’re running out of time,” he said, picking up our bags. “Let’s go.” His gaze traveled down to my feet. “You’re wearing high heels.”
“They’re the only shoes I packed,” I explained, looking down at where my feet were pinched into the heels below the hem of my jeans. “I was in a hurry and I forgot.”
“We’ll get you shoes,” he said.
The heat outside was harsh, the sun blinding, but we got on the baked pavement of the highway and Cavan hit the gas. He turned the radio on while I rummaged through the groceries he’d bought, pulling out protein bars and water for us. His car had air conditioning, at least. It seemed we weren’t going to talk about what had happened between us on that bed.
I can make it so good for you, baby. Just this, right here, my fingers in your pussy. It’s perfect. Let it come.
I didn’t know what it had been for him—maybe nothing. But for me, it had changed things. I found my sunglasses in my purse and put them on, then sipped water and watched him drive.
Finally, I got up the courage and just did it. I turned down the country music on the radio and said, “McMurphy was my first.”
Cavan flinched, just a quick tightening of his jaw and the skin around his eyes. His knuckles went tighter on the wheel, then relaxed again.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tired of keeping things in, tired of lying, so I’m just going to tell the truth. He was my first, and…” I looked out my window, summoning up the words. “And it wasn’t very good.”
Cavan shook his head, and then he said in a tight voice, “All right.”
“He didn’t rape me,” I said, making him flinch again. I took another swig of water, letting the words come. “I never said no. It was just… always about him. Never about me, not once. It’s hard to put it into words. I thought I was frigid for a while, or crazy. But if I didn’t like it, it made him mad, so I had to pretend. And the more I pretended, the less I liked it.”
He said nothing.
So I continued. “It took me a long time to realize there was something wrong, and that it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t enjoying it. That it was his fault. It was hard to figure that out. I had to, um, take care of myself when he wasn’t around.”
“Jesus,” Cavan said.
Now that the words out, I belatedly felt my cheeks get hot. You feel it? You feel good? Let it come. I could still hear him say it, still feel him touching me. No one had ever said that to me before, touched me like that before. It was like someone had cracked me open with the knowledge it was possible. Which was embarrassing, because McMurphy had liked frequent sex. “I guess it sounds pathetic,” I said.
“It isn’t pathetic,” he replied. “I saw your bruise. He kicked you.”
I rubbed my thumb hard over my lower lip as the fear swirled around me, trying to come back. I kept my eyes fixed on the road and thought: Escaping, I’m escaping, it’s over. “He didn’t like that I didn’t like it,” I said. “It made him mad. He thought I was faking, and then he thought I was fucking someone else who was actually making me come. It was this crazy spiral in his head. I told you, he was going to kill me.”
“Not anymore,” Cavan said with grim focus. “Not any fucking more. But we have some planning to do.” He pointed to the sign by the highway that said we were headed for Yuma, and then on to San Diego. “For starters, we need to figure out where the hell we’re going.”
He was right. I’d been so caught up in escaping, and then those first hours on the road, that I hadn’t had time to think about it clearly. “We should go to your brother in San Francisco,” I said.
But Cavan shook his head. “We’re not going to Devon.”
“Because he’s looking for you?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “I read all the articles, Cavan. Do you think I asked you to help me on an impulse? I read everything I could find about you for days beforehand. It was the articles that gave me the idea. I saw something online by mistake, about Devon, and I read it because he had your face and your last name.”
He still didn’t talk, so I kept going. “I read all about how Devon came out of prison for robbery, and found out he had a grandfather he never knew who left him everything. About how he shares the inheritance with his brother Cavan, who he hasn’t seen in ten years. There was even an article about how he donated to a battered women’s shelter, because your mother—”
“We’re not talking about my mother,” he said.
I watched him carefully. He was tight, his forearms tense as he gripped the wheel, but he wasn’t dangerous. At least, not to me. “Is that why you left ten years ago?” I asked. “Because she… died?”
Died wasn’t the right word, and we both knew it. Devon and Cavan’s mother had been murdered ten years ago, choked and stabbed by her boyfriend, who was now on Death Row in California. Devon Wilder had made a statement about it, after donating three million dollars to the women’s shelter. It only makes sense to me to pay it forward and maybe help another woman and her kids, he had said. I just wish someone had been able to help my mother before it was too late. It must have been awful, having your mother murdered when you were a teenager. “Is that why you hooked up with the Black Dog?” I asked, even though he wasn’t talking. “Because you were trying to get away from what happened?”
Cavan ran a hand over his forehead and through his hair. “None of that matters,” he said. “What matters is that we’re not going to Devon.”
“He could help us,” I pointed out.
“Or we could bring the Black Dog to his doorstep. That would be a pretty nice fucking reunion, wouldn’t it? I’ve already done him enough damage.”
“Fine,” I said, reading the set of his jaw. “Where are we going, then?”
“You got parents?” he asked.
Now it was my turn to flinch. “Just my mother. I haven’t seen her since I left.”
“Where is she?”
“I can’t go home to her, Cavan,” I said. “You don’t want to bring the Black Dog to Devon? Well, I don’t want to bring them to my mother’s door.”
Cavan shook his head. “McMurphy can find your mother anytime, Dani. He’d be happy to use her as a pawn to get you back. So please tell me she lives in Fiji or Tiimbuktu.”
He was right. I hadn’t thought of that, not exactly. “She’s in L.A.,” I finally said. “Or at least she was when I left. She might have moved and I wouldn’t know.”
He was silent for a long minute, wrestling with something in his mind. Something terrible. I wished I knew what it was, but I’d finally found my limit. I didn’t ask him.
“L.A.,” he said at last. “Okay. We should find her. But first, we have to get you some shoes.”
Ten
Cavan
L.A. Fucking L.A. The city I’d come from, the city I never wanted to see again as long as I lived. The city where I’d had my shitty childhood with Devon, culminating in the day when my mother was killed like an unwanted dog on our apartment floor.
I’d left. I’d vowed never to go back. And then I’d decided to be a white knight, and save Dani. And there was only one city we needed to fucking go.
This was just my goddamn luck.
We stopped in a small town called Preston, off the beaten track again. It had a K-Mart, and I got Dani’s shoe size and went in and bought her shoes, because this was still Black Dog territory
and she was extra conspicuous in those high heels. She was already tall, slender, and gorgeous, with that silky black hair. Add jeans, a t-shirt, and heels, and she was a knockout no one would forget.
I bought her flip-flops, some kind of sandal made of cheap leather, and white canvas sneakers. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke and a bag of chips, because she shouldn’t just live on protein bars. My eight hundred dollars dwindled further and further.
I was going to have to do something about money. Which was crazy, considering I was partly a billionaire.
We ate our sandwiches in the K-Mart parking lot, sitting in the car, because apparently I know how to show a woman a good time.
“One more thing,” she said when she finished, licking chip grease from her fingers. She pointed to a little shop in the strip plaza next to the K-Mart. “I’m going in there.”
“A haircut?” I asked, looking at the sign. Two things crossed my mind at once: One, that it was practical and probably a good idea; and two, complete fucking horror that she was going to cut that gorgeous hair.
“I have to,” she said, and then, as if reading my mind: “It’s just hair. It’ll grow back, right?”
I made myself give a nod before I could beg her not to. “Be quick. We have to keep moving.”
She nodded and got out of the car, trotting across the parking lot in her canvas sneakers. Which fit pretty good, considering I’d never bought shoes for a woman before. I tried not to watch her walk, the way she moved in her jeans. Tried, and failed.
She’d been in there for ten minutes—I was using the paper map from the glove box to check the route to L.A.—when my phone rang. My actual phone, not the burner phone I’d bought in Datsun for cash. I picked it up. It was McMurphy.
“What do you want?” I said when I answered.
“You fuck her in this room?” McMurphy said.
Shit. He’d found our motel room already. I did a swift calculation. We’d driven for two hours; McMurphy, and whatever brothers he had with him, were only two hours behind us. But if our guess was right that he’d tracked Dani by her phone, then he didn’t know where we were right now.
I had to play this cool. Not show fear. “None of your goddamn business,” I answered him.
“I’m going to kill you,” McMurphy said, his voice like ice. “I’m going to torture you first while the brothers hold you down. And then I am going to kill you.”
“I dumped her phone, McMurphy,” I said. “You’ll have to find us.” I kept my eye on the door of the hairdresser’s, hoping Dani would finish up and get the hell out of there.
“What’d she do to you?” McMurphy said. “I left her alone with you for an hour, ink man. One fucking hour. And now she’s got you by the dick. So what’d she do? She blow you the minute I got out the door?”
I may have made a lot of mistakes, and I may have a lot of doubts, but never for a second would I doubt that I’d done the right thing getting Dani away from this asshole. “She didn’t need to blow me to know she’d like me better than you,” I said. “It was just a natural understanding.”
He laughed, a nasty sound that sent chills up my spine. “She didn’t blow you,” he said. “She doesn’t like to do that. I didn’t go without, though. Sometimes you just have to tell a woman how it’s going to go, you know? Sometimes you have to make it crystal fucking clear.”
My stomach turned. I didn’t like it, Dani had said. It wasn’t good. I thought there was something wrong with me. He really would touch her again over my dead body.
“Are you in our room right now?” I asked McMurphy. “Are you looking at the bed? I know you are. Looks a little rumpled, doesn’t it?”
“You cocksucker,” he said. Because of course he was looking at the bed. I could tell.
I mentally begged Dani’s forgiveness, sucked in a breath, and made myself say the dirtiest things I could think of. “She screamed my name,” I told McMurphy. “I made her come so hard she practically called me God. I fucked her until she couldn’t walk. And I’m going to fuck her again, McMurphy. She’ll let me bend her over anytime I tell her to. She’s insatiable. She loves my dick. She says she can’t get enough.”
It was crude, and disgusting, and I didn’t mean a word of it, and I was grateful that Dani would never hear me say this shit. But there was method in my madness.
McMurphy was paranoid, especially when it came to Dani. If I could convince him she was used goods, maybe he’d leave her alone. And if that failed, and if I could convince him that I was using his woman like a whore, it would be me he’d come after first. Me he’d kill first. Which meant that Dani had a shot at getting away clean. Me, I didn’t care about.
So, yeah, I said that garbage. Because I’m a fucking gentleman.
“Laugh while you can, rich boy,” McMurphy said, his voice frozen in a way that would make most men flinch and cover their balls. “I know all about you now. You and all that money. Hiding that little bit of information, were you? A billion fucking dollars? Keeping that all to yourself? I thought we were a club.”
“I was never part of your club,” I said.
“You know that’s why she picked you, right? It wasn’t your cock or your pretty face. She wants your money, that’s all.”
Was that supposed to bother me? I’d known it from the first. I was a means to an end, and if she got a few real, honest-to-god orgasms out of the deal, it was just a bonus. For both of us. I didn’t deserve her anyway—I didn’t deserve anyone. “That’s funny, because I assume you want my money too, and you aren’t even fucking me, McMurphy. So who do you think is gonna win?”
“She doesn’t give a shit about you,” McMurphy said. “She doesn’t give a shit about anyone. You want proof? Why don’t you ask her who she really is?”
I went quiet in surprise. I glanced at the door to the hairdresser’s again.
“Didn’t know about that one, huh?” McMurphy sounded pleased. “Yeah, I got my brother to do a little digging online. I know all about you, and all about her. Get her to spill the little piece of information she didn’t tell either of us. Maybe instead of fucking my woman, ask her who she really is.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is,” I said, though in the back of my mind, I wondered. McMurphy didn’t sound like he was lying. “And she isn’t your woman. She was never your woman. And she sure as fuck hasn’t been your woman since the minute she packed her bags, left you, and got in my car with me.”
“You’ll be begging me to take that little bitch back before long,” McMurphy said. “She’s a liar, a shitty fuck, and more trouble than she’s worth. Maybe I’ll take her back, and maybe I won’t. But I’ll make you both pay.”
“She’s so much trouble you’re following her halfway across the state,” I said. “Try again. You can’t find us now, and it’s over. Give up.”
“Ask her,” he said again, and hung up.
Dani chose that minute to come out of the hole-in-the-wall hair salon. She’d really done it—she’d cut off all that long, glossy hair. It was shoulder length now, still damp, shaped nicely around her face, with long bangs swept to the side. It was just a haircut, but it changed everything about her. It made her look older, less girlish, more sophisticated somehow, even though she wore a t-shirt and jeans and no makeup. Jesus, I thought to myself, I’ve been fooling myself. There’s no way to lie low with a woman that beautiful.
She got back in the car, smiling at me. “Done,” she said. “I told her to make it quick because I wanted to surprise my boyfriend, and she totally believed me.” She touched it self-consciously. “Do you like it?”
I looked at her, with McMurphy’s voice in my brain. Why don’t you ask her who she really is?
“What?” Dani said, looking at my expression. “What is it?”
“You have something to tell me?” I asked her.
The change in her expression was immediate, and unmistakable. The tentative pleasure left her face, replaced by blankness. Her skin went pale. It was just a few words I’d
thrown at her, but I recognized that expression. It was fear.
And I’d put it there. I’d put that fear on her face.
Fear was McMurphy’s currency. Not mine.
And in that split second, I made a decision. I decided that no matter who the hell Dani No-Last-Name was, I was still getting her out. I was still taking her somewhere where that expression would leave her face for good.
Maybe it would get me killed. But I already knew I had no problem with that.
I started the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed for the highway. Dani was still silent in the passenger seat. “Forget it,” I said to her. “You don’t have to say anything.” And then, because I was an asshole, I added, “Your hair looks nice.”
“I never lied to you,” she said finally, looking straight ahead out the window. “I just… What happened while I was in there?”
I pointed to my phone, which was in the well between my seat and hers. “McMurphy gave me a call. He told me to ask you who you are.”
She reached into her purse and found her sunglasses, which she’d taken off to get her hair cut. “So ask,” she said, her voice brittle and hard, unlike her usual tone.
“I told you,” I said, “I changed my mind. I don’t care.”
“You should,” Dani said. “It’s bad.”
“This is already bad. For both of us. Degrees of bad are a detail at this point. There’s no turning back, anyway. There never was. There’s only forward.”
She was quiet. She was ruminating on something, turning it over in her mind behind those sunglasses. She was already changed from the woman who’d come into my tattoo parlor. That had been yesterday.
A lot of things can happen in a day.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you who I am. But first, I need to borrow your phone.”
Eleven
Dani
It shouldn’t have taken me so long to get angry. It should have happened a long time ago. Maybe it was the fact that I was finally away from McMurphy and leaving Arizona. Maybe it was the experience of Cavan Wilder’s fingers inside me, making me come. Who knows—maybe it was the damn haircut. But suddenly I was done, so done, with William James McMurphy, president of the Arizona Black Dog MC.
