by Burke, Dez
I place my hand over hers. “I’m driving with a special gal in the car, so no more for me. And I would hate for you to have a raging headache tomorrow. Dance with me, beautiful.”
“You’re right,” she agrees. “We’ve had enough tequila for one night.”
She allows me to take her hand and lead her to the dance floor in front of the band.
“I’m not a good dancer,” she says with an embarrassed laugh when I pull her closer.
“That’s okay, I’m not either. So it’s a good thing this isn’t dancing.” I lift her arms and place them behind my neck. “This is hugging on a dance floor.”
She leans closer into me and runs her fingers along the back of my neck. “I can do that,” she says and sways slightly off balance. “Whoops! I’m a little tipsy. Maybe I shouldn’t have knocked back that last shot.”
I slide my arms around her back and place a kiss behind her ear. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold you up.” Now I’m wishing I’d tried to stop her after the second shot of tequila.
She runs a hand up my arm and traces one of the skull tattoos on my bicep. “I like your tattoos. Do they all mean something special?”
“I’m sure at the time I thought they meant something special. And some of them do. Except for the skulls. They’re just there to make me look badass.”
“What about the others? What do they mean?”
“It’s a long story that I’ll save for another time. You might be bored to death. Are you having a good time tonight?”
She leans her head against my chest, and I smooth a hand down the back of her hair. I notice she doesn’t use any gel or hairspray, so her hair is silky and soft in my fingers.
“I’m having a great time,” she whispers against my shirt. “I could dance with you like this for hours.”
I pull her closer and we slowly sway together all the way through the band’s set. When the band stops to take a break, she looks up at me without removing her arms from my neck.
“Are you ready to go home?” I ask. “Or do you want to sit down and wait for the band to come back?”
“How about we dance at my place?”
“That will definitely work too. Let’s get out of here.”
She’s a little wobbly and unsteady on her feet as we make our way out of the building. When we reach the car, I lean her up against the side while I unlock the door.
“Are we going to make out in the car?” she asks with an uncharacteristic giggle. “I always wanted to make out in a Camaro.”
I wish.
“Not this time, darling. Ask me again sometime and I’ll take you up on it.”
I turn on the radio for the drive back to her house and Lila starts singing along loudly to the song.
“Your personality changes quite a bit when you’re tipsy,” I say.
She laughs and keeps singing.
When we arrive at her house, I walk her up to the front door and lean down to give her a light goodnight kiss. No way am I screwing things up by touching her while she’s drunk. She might be all up for it now, but tomorrow she’ll want to slap the shit out of me.
There’s no need to rush things. We have time.
“Aren’t you coming inside?” she asks. “You can stay for a minute, can’t you?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You need to go to bed and get some sleep.”
Pulling my head down to hers, she reaches up and kisses me slowly.
“Five minutes?” she says.
“Five minutes, and then I need to go.”
“Are you going to the clubhouse?” she asks. “To hang out with the Sweet Butts?”
The thought of leaving Lila to be with one of the Sweet Butts is not appealing in the least.
“No, I’ll go straight home. Alone.”
I help her inside the house and turn on the lights.
“I need to change my clothes,” she says while walking toward the bedroom.
When she doesn’t return in a few minutes, I go to check on her. She’s lying on the bed still wearing her dress. I walk over and nudge her
“You can’t sleep in your dress. What do you normally sleep in? A gown? T-shirt?”
“Nothing,” she mumbles.
“You don’t wear anything to bed?”
“No.”
Shit.
Not what I need to hear when I’m trying to be a decent man.
“That makes two of us then.”
I walk over to her dresser and pull out a drawer. All of her panties, bras, shorts, and shirts are organized into nice, tidy piles. I avoid touching the lacy lingerie since resisting her is hard enough as it is. Grabbing a soft shirt, I walk back to the bed. She sits up and looks at me groggily.
“Take off your dress and put this on.”
I start to offer to help her and decide against it. I’m a man and I’m only human. Only someone with superpowers would be able to resist her with her clothes off, and that’s not me. I know my limits and I’m reaching them very fast.
“I’m going to get you a couple of aspirin. They’re in the kitchen cabinet, right?”
I vaguely remember seeing her reach for them the other night when I was wasted. The thought crosses my mind that we both should stop drinking if this relationship ever has a chance of moving forward.
New rule. No more alcohol.
She starts tugging up her dress, and I hurry out of the room before it gets to the point where I can’t walk away.
In the kitchen, I open and close several of the cabinets until I find the one with her medical supplies. Lila is obviously a health nut. One shelf is loaded with several different kinds of vitamins and supplements along with Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, aspirin, and a round pink container of birth control pills.
Out of curiosity, I pick up the packet of birth control pills and open it. The pill for today is still there, which means she forgot to take it. Or she takes them at night before she goes to bed.
A crazy and desperate plan forms in my mind.
When this is all over, Lila isn’t going to be able to walk away from me without a backwards glance if I can help it.
I punch out today’s pill and drop it down the sink’s garbage disposal. This time I’m one step ahead of her. I always wear condoms, so I still have time to think this over carefully before I risk anything. It’s probably a stupid and ridiculous idea. For some reason, it makes me feel more in control of the situation to know I have a backup plan if things go bad.
After shaking out two aspirin, I place them on the counter and pour her a glass of water. When I walk back into the bedroom, she's already in her shirt and under the sheets.
“Here’s your aspirin,” I say, handing them to her along with the water. “We need to stop doing this. No more heavy drinking. Okay?”
She nods in agreement. After swallowing the aspirin, she puts her head back on the pillow. “You’re not staying?” she asks.
I swallow hard and don’t let myself consider it, even for a split second. If I do, I’ll be crawling into the bed beside her before she can blink.
“No, because you’ll be mad at me tomorrow if I do. I’ll call you in the morning.”
I can’t trust myself to kiss her goodnight without things going further. I turn to walk away and she grabs my arm.
“Goodnight, Sam,” she says in a perfectly clear voice.
Her green eyes suddenly look as bright and alert as they always do. Then it hits me. She’s not drunk. She was testing me tonight.
I pull the sheet up to her shoulders and kiss her on the forehead.
“Goodnight, darling.”
Chapter Thirteen
Lila
I’m still working on my first cup of coffee when Sam calls.
“Are you doing okay this morning?” he asks. “I’m calling to check on you.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thank you for tucking me into bed.”
Sam passed my pretend drunk test with flying colors. I was suitably impressed. If things had gone the oth
er way, I could have put the brakes on at any time by pretending to throw up in the bathroom. Works like a charm every time to cool off a man’s passion.
“No need to thank me,” he says. “I’ll do turn down service for you any night of the week.”
His deep Southern twang is a nice thing to hear first thing in the morning.
“So...I was wondering how you would feel about coming over to my house tomorrow for a party,” he continues. “All of the Steel Infidels will be there, and I would like for you to meet them.”
He’s inviting me to his house?
“Sure. I would love to meet everyone.”
“It’s a casual affair, so no need to dress up. I can’t wait for you to meet my brothers, Jesse and Flint.”
The Steel Infidels President and VP.
“Me either. Are you picking me up?”
“Of course. I’ll be there around five. The fun starts early and the party goes on most of the night.”
“Sounds like fun. I can’t wait.”
“See you tomorrow then,” he says before hanging up.
I’m not sure how I feel about going to Sam’s house, the second location where I’m supposed to place another surveillance bug. This investigation is beginning to make me feel uneasy.
Surely the ATF has other criminals they could be investigating instead of the Steel Infidels? Like genuinely bad people with no redeeming qualities? The fact that I aggressively pushed for this investigation isn’t helping me to feel any better.
After finishing a second cup of coffee, I set up my equipment on the kitchen table. I’ve been putting off the task of going through the surveillance tapes taken before I arrived in town. Sam will be at the shop all day, so this will give me a good chance to sit down and work on it uninterrupted.
I’m barely into the first tape when Sam commits his first crime on camera. A customer walks down the alley and knocks on the back door of the tattoo shop. Sam steps out and money is exchanged. He ducks into the building and then hands him two bottles of alcohol that he doesn’t even take the time to disguise in bags. Ten minutes later, another exchange happens and then another.
The tape date is a Friday night, and he’s doing more business than most big-city package stores. A truck backs up to the door and Sam helps a man load several boxes into the bed. By the time I finish a week’s worth of tapes, my hands are shaking.
I honestly don’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I was hoping he wasn’t really doing anything illegal. There’s enough on the tapes to put him away. And that’s without bringing the gun running into the equation.
Things are looking very bad for Sam.
***
I’m unusually nervous about meeting Sam’s family and the rest of the Steel Infidels. I don’t know why. It’s not like this is my first undercover operation. I’ve worked plenty of them over the past few years. After the first couple of times, it became easy to put on a mask and be someone else.
This feels different.
When we pull up into the driveway of Sam’s house, I see a group of men standing outside the house. I immediately recognize Jesse and Flint standing side by side. Both men are solidly built, with muscles like granite beneath their close-fitting shirts. Jesse is much bigger than I expected, with large muscular arms and a broad chest. He towers over Flint by several inches. They’re both deeply tanned with dark hair. I wonder how Sam ended up with his blondish hair and blue eyes.
They look up and smile when they see us walking down the hill to the house.
“You actually brought a date to this shindig?” one of the other men jokes.
I recognize him as Toby, a high school classmate of Sam’s and a Marine back at home after years in Afghanistan. He’s wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap turned backwards. Another blue-eyed, dark-haired, handsome hunk of a man.
Does an ugly Steel Infidel even exist?
If so, I haven’t seen him yet.
Sam pulls me over closer to meet Jesse. I take one look at Jesse’s eyes and immediately want to step behind Sam to put him between us. If there is one person here who wouldn’t think twice about hurting me, it would be Jesse. He is the very definition of silent and deadly.
The ATF has placed him at the scene of several mysterious rival motorcycle gang deaths. Not enough to charge him with anything, but enough for me to keep a close eye on him. He makes me uncomfortable. To underestimate him would be a big mistake.
“Who is your girl?” he asks. When he smiles, his face softens and I relax a little.
“This is Lila,” Sam says. “She’s from Atlanta.” He waves a hand at the group of men. “Lila, meet the Steel Infidels. My two big brothers, Jesse and Flint.” He points them out and I pretend like I don’t know exactly who they are already. “The big guy with the dorky baseball cap is Toby. Don’t pay attention to anything he says about me because he’s a big fat liar.”
Toby laughs and takes a sip of the beer he’s holding. Sam goes on to introduce me to the rest of the Steel Infidels one by one. They all nod politely and smile. If I didn’t know better, I would think they were a nice group of Southern boys.
But I do know better.
Appearances in this case can be very deceiving.
“Where are Trish and Kendra?” Sam asks.
Flint nods toward the house. “They’re in the kitchen with the kids.”
“I can’t wait for you to meet them,” Sam says. “And my niece and nephew. Missy is only a couple of months old and Josh is a toddler.”
He takes me inside the house where his brothers' wives are busy putting out platters of food for the guests. An adorable toddler with dark curly hair is hanging on to a woman’s legs. Sam scoops him up off the floor and tosses him into the air. The toddler squeals with laughter and Sam tosses him again.
“Don’t come crying to me if he pukes all over your face, Sam,” the woman says with a laugh. “I’ve warned you about that before.”
“You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, Josh?” he says to the child, who giggles.
“I’m Kendra,” the woman says. “And that’s my son Josh being thrown around. I’m married to Sam’s brother, Flint.”
So this is Kendra, the town veterinarian.
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
Another pretty young woman walks into the kitchen with a baby on her hip. “And I’m the other brother’s wife,” she says. “We’re Trish and Missy.” She holds out the baby’s fist to wave at me.
“Missy is a lovely name,” I say.
“Jesse and I named her Melissa after his mom,” Trish says. “Then Sam kept calling her Little Missy, so the name stuck. It suits her better anyway.”
“Sam, why don’t you run along outside and play with the boys while Trish and I get to know this gal,” Kendra says. “We can use an extra set of hands in the kitchen.” She turns to me. “We don’t want to let the Steel Infidels get too hungry. If we wait too long to put out snacks, they turn into a bunch of grouchy grizzly bears.”
“I know when I’m not wanted,” Sam says. “But I’m taking Josh with me.” He turns to me. “Will you be alright here for a few minutes?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not taking Josh outside to hang around all of you dirty-talking guys,” Kendra scolds. “Put him back down right this minute.”
Sam sighs and hands Josh back over before walking out.
Trish and Kendra seem nice. It makes me wonder how they ever got involved with men like Flint and Jesse in the first place. Especially Kendra, a highly educated woman with a good reputation in a small town.
I guess the saying about ‘love is blind’ must be true.
***
I’m still hanging out in the kitchen making small talk with Trish and Kendra when the music outside the house suddenly changes from a slow Willie Nelson tune to loud heavy metal.
Trish sighs and places the baby up against her shoulder to burp.
“Sounds like the boys are starting up again,” she says. “Come on,
Lila. You don’t want to miss this.”
Everyone in the house starts making their way toward the doors. I can’t help wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to be outside in the unbearable heat when it’s air-conditioned inside.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “What’s happening? Where’s everyone going?”
“The men call it basketball,” Kendra says with a grin. “We call it foreplay.” She laughs and glances over at Trish. “Isn’t that right?”
Trish nods. “Oh, yes. You’ll see what we mean. Let’s go.”
When the two women move toward the door, I realize now might be my best chance to place the surveillance bug in the house. Another two minutes and the house will be empty.
“I need to use your restroom,” I say. “I’ll be right out in a sec.”
“We’ll save you a spot,” Trish says. “Hurry though. You don’t want to miss the best part.”
I walk to the bathroom and wait until the house is quiet before going back into the kitchen. Slipping the bug out of my purse, I head toward the table. I bend down to attach it when suddenly, through the kitchen window, I hear Sam’s laughter ring out loud and clear.
I hesitate and then drop the bug back into the purse.
Damn it.
I can’t do it today.
Instead, I hurry outside to join Trish and Kendra at the side yard where a basketball goal is set up on a small concrete court. A few scantily-clad Sweet Butts are placing lounge chairs around the edges of the court while the men toss a basketball back and forth.
“They’re going to play a basketball game?” I ask, still confused as to what’s happening. “In blue jeans and boots? That’s weird and something I’ve never seen before.”
“You’ll never catch one of these men in a pair of shorts or without their boots,” Trish says. “Grab a lounge chair. We shouldn’t sit too close to the court. The guys can get rough, and I don’t want them crashing into the baby or little Josh.”
I drag a couple of lounge chairs from the stack and set one up in the shade for Trish and the baby. Kendra plops down on the other side of me with Josh hanging onto her legs for support. He starts to fall, and I instinctively reach over to grab his chubby little hand.
