by Julie Kriss
I picked up Cavan’s phone and redialed McMurphy’s number, which was the last call. He picked up right away.
And the first words he said made me even angrier. “You finished with her already, Wilder?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted.
McMurphy was silent for a second. “Dani,” he said.
“Yes, it’s Dani, you asshole. The woman who left you. The woman who hates you so much she’s driving away from you as fast as she can.”
“You lying bitch,” McMurphy shouted. “You never bothered to tell me that you’re Robert Preston’s daughter? You think I wouldn’t find out? Robert Preston’s fucking daughter!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m Robert Preston’s daughter.” In the driver’s seat beside me, I saw Cavan jump. He knew the name, all right. “And you think you’re so smart, but you didn’t find out until after I left.”
There was a moment of silence. We all knew who Robert Preston was—me, and McMurphy, and Cavan. We all knew he was the founder and president of the Lake of Fire, the Black Dog’s biggest rival MC. It was out in the open, finally. And I knew McMurphy—I knew the way his mind worked. So what he said next didn’t surprise me.
“Was it a setup?” he said, and I could hear the paranoia creeping into his voice. “Did he put you up to it? Did he tell you to be my woman so he could get secrets from the club?”
“It wasn’t a setup!” I shouted, furious. Cavan just drove without flinching or shushing me. He probably knew better. “I don’t even know him, all right? He knocked my mother up, and then he left to go found the Lake of Fire MC, and now he’s in prison! He didn’t raise me!”
“I don’t give a fuck who raised you,” McMurphy growled. “If I’d known you were the daughter of the Lake of Fire president, I’d never have fucking touched you.”
He was lying. To me, to himself—I didn’t care. I knew McMurphy now, better than I had when I had stupidly hooked up with him. The Lake of Fire was the club that was the biggest rival of the Black Dog. If McMurphy had known I was a rival club president’s daughter, he wouldn’t have left me alone; he would have done more to me. And worse. He’d have done still worse to me if he’d found out while I was with him. That was one of the reasons I ran.
That, and because he was hurting me, and I hated him. And Cavan Wilder had appeared on the horizon like an opportunity from God.
That opportunity from God was sitting next to me right now, calmly driving. I could only hope that when I got off the phone, he wouldn’t pull over and leave me at the side of the road.
“Look,” I told McMurphy, “what’s done is done. I’m Robert Preston’s daughter, and I didn’t tell you. We’re over anyway.”
“We’re not over,” he promised in my ear. I knew that tone, knew his mood when his voice got low like that. It meant he was furious, and my fear tried to kick into overdrive. “My woman doesn’t leave me, Dani. It doesn’t happen. My woman doesn’t disrespect me and make me look like a fool.”
“If you look like a fool, that’s your problem, not mine,” I shot back, fighting the fear. “And yes, I did leave you. I’m not a belonging, and I’m not yours.”
“You think you’re not a biker girl?” He laughed. “Sweetheart, you pretended to be some innocent girl, but the MC is in your blood. You were practically in heat when I met you at that first party. You wanted the life. And now you talk down to me like you’re so superior, but you’re driving with the club’s ink man. You aren’t going far. Turns out you haven’t worked through your daddy issues, little girl. You’ll be back in the club before long.”
The shitty thing about McMurphy was that, despite his brutal attitude and his crude toilet vocabulary, he was sometimes painfully right. His insight—as vicious as it was—was what kept him on top as the president of the club. McMurphy might not be a scholar, but he had enough rough intelligence to stay on top of the other Black Dogs.
He was also swift with punishment, which was why he was going so hard after us. To just let me go would make him look weak in front of the brothers, and that couldn’t happen. And he was even more enraged by Cavan than he was by me.
But still, there was a grain of truth in what he was saying. I had wanted in to the club life, even after my mother warned me about it. Maybe because my mother had warned me about it. And I’d never talked about my father because I’d felt shame and horror and fascination about him at the same time, combined with a little girl’s wish that her father would acknowledge her and be pleased.
In short, daddy issues.
Shit.
But who you were—who you had been—that didn’t have to be who you were for the rest of your life. I believed that. You could change, learn from your mistakes, be someone better. I was about to try and prove that. Maybe I would fail. But I saw the road vanishing beneath the hood of the car, and I felt my new, lighter hair, and I still didn’t think so.
“I’m never coming back,” I told McMurphy. Brave words, and I forced them out. “You’re never touching me again.” I hung up and threw down the phone. I was breathing hard, sweating down my back even in the air conditioning, and my hands were slick.
Cavan, wisely, was quiet for a long time while I calmed down. “You okay?” he finally asked.
I wasn’t. I was still angry—furious—and on top of that, I was horrified. Horrified at the bad decision I’d made seven months ago, at the fact that I’d even spent twenty minutes in that man’s company. I’d been so blind in my need to rebel, and so stupid. So terribly, terribly stupid.
I wasn’t going to be stupid anymore.
I turned and looked squarely at Cavan, watching his profile as he watched the road. “I didn’t tell you, who I am,” I said. “I get it. You’re probably mad.”
“That you’re the daughter of the president of the Lake of Fire MC?” He glanced at me with those gray eyes, and even through my anger and my confusion, part of me melted. “It complicates things,” he admitted, looking at the road again. “But I’m not mad. You don’t owe me that shit.”
This man. I wanted to kiss him and I wanted to pry him open, find what made him so damned reserved. “You’re not going to pull over and make me get out?”
He frowned. “Are you fucking serious? No, I’m not.”
I licked my dry lips. He was such a contrast to McMurphy, so starkly different. I hadn’t known there were men like Cavan until I met him. “You know, you’re nicer to me than he ever was,” I said.
“Why? Because I don’t drop you to fend for yourself at the side of the highway? Or because I bought you some K-Mart shoes and a sandwich?”
“Because you left your life to help me get away.”
“I did that for me,” he said, “not for you. Is your last name Preston?”
“No,” I said, realizing with surprise that he wouldn’t know. The Black Dog didn’t use full names very often. “He and my mother were never married, and I never had his name. My last name is Farraday—my mother’s name.”
“You ever meet your father?”
“Only twice. Once when I was five, and again when I was thirteen. Right before he went away.”
“So he knows you exist. He knows who you are.”
“Yes. Mom spent years trying to get child support out of him. Sometimes he sent it, and sometimes he didn’t. Most of the time he didn’t.” Mom had worked in a supermarket while I was growing up, eventually being promoted to manager. She’d been overworked, tired, and stressed all my life. It was only now that I was an adult that I was realizing what she must have gone through, a single mother raising a kid on a supermarket salary.
Cavan Wilder wasn’t the only one who had hurt people in his life.
“He have a good relationship with your mother?” Cavan asked.
It was a lot of questions, but I supposed he deserved some answers. “As far as I know, he has no relationship with my mother at all.” I had no idea what had happened between them when I was conceived, but aside from support payments, my mother had s
teered clear of Robert Preston. Mostly because he’d been into a lot of awful illegal shit, first on his own and then as the president of the Lake of Fire. It had culminated in a series of drug smuggling charges, followed by extortion charges, followed at last by a second-degree murder conviction when a border patrol officer had been shot during a border run. Dear old Dad had been in prison for seven years so far, and unless he got parole—which was unlikely—he’d be in for fifteen more.
That was me. The daughter of a convicted felon and murderer. Maybe there was a reason I’d lost my way, a reason I’d drifted into doing stupid, risky shit. Mom had no money for counselors or therapists or any of that stuff. My therapist, it turned out, had been seven long months under McMurphy’s hard thumb. Free of charge.
I stared at the scrubby landscape going by. I felt like broken glass—fragile, smashed to pieces, but sharp at the edges. Dangerous. I felt like screaming. I felt like dancing. I felt like having hard, dirty sex with someone—anyone.
No, that wasn’t true. I wanted sex with only one man. The hard, dirty man in the driver’s seat next to me.
The sun was setting, its rays slanting hotly into the car as we drove west. An exit sign loomed ahead of us, and Cavan signaled, switching from one highway to another. We were going north now. Curving away from L.A. Heading into the desert.
“Where are we going?” I asked Cavan.
“You don’t already know?” he said.
I licked my lips. I did know. We were going to Nevada. The territory of the Lake of Fire MC. We were leaving McMurphy’s territory and heading into my father’s territory instead.
If we stayed on this road, we’d get to Vegas. We’d also pass near the maximum security Nevada prison where my father was waiting out his sentence.
I glanced at Cavan’s gorgeous, flawless profile. The tousled hair brushed back from his forehead, the scruff on his sexy jaw. We didn’t even have to exchange words in that moment, like we hadn’t had to exchange words while I was in his tattoo chair. I just got him, and he got me.
Instead of leading the Black Dog to my mother, we were going to lead him to my father—if McMurphy had the guts to follow. It should have been my plan from the first.
I hadn’t had the courage to do it when I first packed my bags in McMurphy’s apartment, but I thought maybe I had the courage now. I had to have the courage, because I had no choice. It was where we were going.
The saying was wrong, then.
You really can go home again.
Twelve
Cavan
I’d heard plenty about the Lake of Fire MC during my ten years with the Black Dog. They were based in Nevada, bumped up against the Black Dog territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California. The two clubs had clear lines drawn, and they stayed out of each other’s business and left each other alone. The Lake of Fire was into some of the same businesses as the Black Dog—drugs, guns—but they had different suppliers and supply routes. The two clubs were rivals, but as long as no one crossed into each other’s territory, they didn’t go to war.
I wondered if that would change.
I had the daughter of the Lake’s founder and first president in my passenger seat. I should be freaked out about that, but I found that I wasn’t. I still planned to save her life. I’d have still saved it if I’d known who she was when she was in my chair.
Dani, in the end, was Dani. It didn’t fucking matter.
We took I-95 until it slipped over the border into California, and I kept driving north as night fell, trying to get as much distance between us and McMurphy as possible. Dani offered to take a shift driving, but I turned her down. We stopped only briefly to eat and fuel up, and another hour down the road we stopped for the night.
In a town called Rio Verde, we found a strip of steak houses, bars, and hotels, for the tourists spilling east from Joshua Tree National Park and south from Vegas and the Mojave. I found a motel called the Rancher, which at least looked clean and decent, and got us a room.
One room this time. I didn’t bother with two. Dani, who checked in with me this time, said nothing. I had no idea what the hell my plans were. I just knew we weren’t going to sleep in separate rooms tonight. She wasn’t leaving my sight.
I paid in cash, and as we walked to our room I mentally counted the money I had left. It wasn’t much. In fact, I couldn’t get us to another town, another hotel, or fill another tank of gas with what I had. If I was going to get us both out of this, I was going to have to face my status as a billionaire. I was going to have to find Max Reilly, even though I hadn’t seen him in ten years and he maybe didn’t want to talk to me. Max, I could face. I wasn’t ready for Devon yet.
While Dani took a shower, I pulled out my old laptop, logged in to the motel’s wifi, and Googled Max Reilly Los Angeles. What I saw knocked the wind out of me.
I’d missed everything in ten years. Fucking everything.
There wasn’t much about him, but there was enough. He was a veteran—he’d done four years in Afghanistan. He came home with PTSD and part of a leg missing. And he’d started a charity called Real Heroes, that connected vets who needed it with free psychological help. There was an article in a small San Francisco magazine about it, with a picture of Max and his fiancée—his fiancée—standing in front of an office building, surrounded by their small staff of four.
Max looked different than he had ten years ago. When I left he’d been a young man, clean-cut and good-looking. He was the steadiest of the three of us, the calmest, the most responsible, despite being raised by an alcoholic father and an overworked mother who eventually left. It was Max that Devon and I went to when we were in trouble, when we needed to figure out how to get out of a problem. And it was Max who always had the answers. He was less dark then Devon and me, the guy we relied on for at least a little optimism and light.
But after what he’d been through, he’d changed. He had dark hair and a beard, worn thick but trim, and a big body, muscled and hard. He was wearing jeans and a black sweater, and his broad shoulders were clearly visible, as were his big arms. His dark eyes held calm, serious depths to them, and though his face was relaxed, he didn’t smile for the camera. I got the impression that post-war Max Reilly was a man who didn’t smile much.
Standing next to him was a blonde knockout, a woman who could probably be on a magazine cover. She wore a classy gray sheath dress and very little makeup, but none of that could suppress her natural beauty. She was leaning close to Max, her shoulder touching his, her arm through his, her hand on his wrist. That hand, the way it curled around him naturally and possessively, supporting him with a touch, told me everything I needed to know about Max and his future wife. Unlike him, Gwen—that was her name, according to the caption—was smiling widely, her happiness obvious.
So Max had been through hell, and—it looked like—come out the other side. The article said he’d started the charity with his own money, and I immediately knew what that meant. Devon had given Max some of his money, probably—if I knew Max at all—under protest. And because Max was a good guy, even after what he’d lived through, he’d used the money to help other guys instead of keeping it.
All of this hit me as I stared at the faces in the picture. And fuck, I missed them—Max, Devon, both of them. They’d been my brothers, though only Devon was blood. We’d been so fucking close. And then the shit had gone down, and we’d blown apart like a bomb had hit us. Especially me.
I wondered if Max hated me now. It was time to find out.
It wasn’t hard to get his number with a little online digging—he obviously hadn’t taken many precautions to hide it, because until now he’d been no one instead of a rich man running a charity. I picked up my burner phone and dialed.
“Hello?” came a gruff voice, thick with sleep. I was so screwed up, I had no idea what time it was.
“Max?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
There was a second when I knew he knew. He
fucking knew.
“Cavan?”
“Yeah. It’s me.”
He was awake now. “Cavan. Where the hell are you calling from?”
In the bathroom, the shower turned off. “I’m in Arizona,” I lied. “I’m not sure exactly where. It’s a truck stop on the highway.”
That was me, good old Cavan. I’ll call you in the middle of the night after a decade, then lie about where I am so you won’t look for me. I’m a real fucking prince.
And still, Max gave a fuck. “Are you all right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine. Things are just weird right now. I read some crazy thing about an inheritance.”
“Yeah,” Max said, calm as could fucking be. “It’s true. You should call Devon about it.”
“I’m not calling Devon,” I said, the words immediate out of my mouth the way they always were when his name came up. “Not now.”
“Why not? He wants to hear from you.”
I didn’t want to find out if that was true. “I’m not. I’m calling you, Max. You’re saying the money is for real?”
“Yes, it’s for real,” Max said. He sounded like himself now, though his voice was a little rougher, and it made me feel so fucking sad for ten lost years. “But you have to claim it.”
The article about the inheritance hadn’t said anything about claiming the money. “You mean come to California.”
“Yeah, I mean come to California. You should come here anyway, man. Your brother wants to see you.”
“I really doubt that,” I said. But I needed the money. “Shit. This might be complicated. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Why is it complicated?” Max asked me, and I knew what was behind those words. Where are you? What is your life like? Tell me.
“There’s a woman,” I said before I could stop myself from telling the truth. “She’s in trouble. I’m trying to help.”
