by Jessie Cooke
“Hey, Angel said that you cleaned the room I stayed in last night and you found a note?”
Her lips suddenly looked pouty. “Yeah, I gave it to Angel.”
“Where did you find it, exactly?”
“It was on the floor, by the nightstand.”
Shit. If Kat got up on the other side of the bed, she probably didn’t even see it. “Katrina was already gone when you cleaned the room?”
She made a distasteful face and said, “Yes.”
Shit. “Thanks. Have you seen Dax around?”
“I think he’s in the office. Hey, we’re having a little get-together over at the house tonight…”
“Thanks, but I’m busy. Have a good day, Naomi.” David didn’t wait to see the pout. He turned and went over to Dax’s office and knocked.
“Come in.” David pushed open the door. Dax was behind his desk with his phone to his ear. He motioned at David to close the door and come in and then he said, “What do you mean it’s all locked up?” Dax frowned as whoever he was talking to answered the question. “The van is there?” Another pause. “Okay, let me call her and see what’s going on. Hang tight and I’ll call you back.” He ended the call with a sigh and then looked at David and asked, “You haven’t spoken to Kat this afternoon, have you?”
Worry began to coil in David’s core. “No. I was coming to ask you for her number. Why? What’s wrong?”
“I sent Gunner over there with a payment for her and he says the place is locked up tight. Handsome had Monte follow her home this morning and he said she got there fine…”
“Did he go inside with her? Maybe there was someone waiting…”
“I don’t think so,” Dax said, thoughtfully. “Street Chaos was pretty busy last night. I’m sure they weren’t sending guys out to torment Kat. She’s not on their hit list anyways.”
“They were busy doing what?” David asked. The look on Dax’s face made him say, “Never mind, I don’t want to know. I just need to find Kat. Will you call her, please?”
Dax was already pressing in her number. The worry had begun to worm its way through the rest of David’s body. If anything happened to her…he didn’t know what he’d do. He had kept tabs on her in California, just to make sure she was doing okay. He knew she’d be pissed if she found out he was using his job to track her movements, but as long as she was safe, he didn’t care. Dax ended the call and said, “She’s not answering.” David was already on his way back to the door when Dax said, “Hang on, I want to try something else.” He pressed in a number and David waited, impatiently, until he heard him say, “Hello, I was wondering if you could ring the room of Dillon Brown for me. I’m not sure where they moved him…Okay, sure, I’ll wait. Thank you.”
“You think Dillon got sick?” David asked.
“It’s a possibility we need to check out before we go tearing things up looking for her.” A few seconds later Dax said, “Yes, I’m here. Thank you.” Another few seconds that felt like an hour later to David he said, “Kat?” David breathed a sigh of relief. “What’s going on with Dillon?” Dax listened and it was all David could do to keep from tearing the phone out of his hand. At last he said, “Okay, darlin’, I’ll be by as soon as I can. In the meantime, you call if you need anything at all and I’ll make sure you get it. Hang on a minute, David’s here…” The look on Dax’s face told David that she’d hung up before Dax did.
“What room is he in?” David asked.
“I don’t think she needs any extra stress right now.”
“I’m going to tell you the same thing I just told my sister—it’s not up to you. I’ll find her myself.” He was almost to the door when Dax said:
“ICU nine, but don’t upset her, David.” David didn’t turn around. Regardless of what any of them thought, Kat needed him, but he knew her well enough to know that she’d die before she’d ask him for anything. He was going to be there, to make sure she didn’t have to ask.
Kat hung up the phone and sat back down next to Dillon’s bed. Right before Dax called, the internist had come by and talked to her. He explained what was going on inside Dillon’s body, and none of it was good. He told her that Dillon had been in excruciating pain…for a long time. He was supposed to be taking pain meds, but Kat had seen the bottles in the bathroom of their apartment and they were full. He was self-medicating, with alcohol most likely, and that thought gave her a pain in her chest for each time she’d called him a worthless drunk.
The doctor also told her that the bag attached to his catheter looked like it was filled with dark beer because of the bilirubin built up in his system. That also caused the yellowing of his skin and eyes. His arms had big, ugly, red rashes on them and his skin would only continue to get worse as the bilirubin continued to back up. His brain was having trouble functioning because of the toxins and the doctors thought that was why he wasn’t waking up. The worst part was that the doctor told her once end-stage liver patients slip into a coma, 80% of them die. She looked at Dillon now and promised herself and him too that he was going to be one of the 20%, no matter what she had to do. She’d had to grow up without a mother; she wasn’t about to just sit back and let her father go too. She took out her phone, which she had turned off, and turned it back on. She had a ton of missed calls from Gunner and Dax. She ignored those and pulled up her text messages. There was nothing yet from Gavin. She had talked to the doctor a little bit about getting a work-up to see if she was a match for Dillon. She, at least, had medical insurance still. She’d just have to borrow enough to pay for Dillon’s end of it. The doctor told her they would start with blood and tissue typing and go from there. He seemed skeptical about the whole thing, but he did give her some paperwork to fill out with regard to her own health. She already had those ready to go, and she was ready to take the next step, but she was waiting on the hospital. Patience was not her strong suit, and watching Dillon die as she waited only made it all that much worse.
“Miss Brown?” She looked up at the nurse who came into the room. They all looked at her with pity in their eyes. Kat hated that too.
“Yes?”
“You have a visitor. He asked to come back here, but your father is only allowed one visitor at a time.”
“Who is it?”
“He said he was a family friend. I can go back and ask for his name…”
“No, it’s okay,” Kat thought it was probably Gunner; she was sure Dax would send him by to see if she needed anything. “I could stand to stretch my legs. I’ll go see him.” Kat got up and walked down the hall with floors so shiny that you could almost see yourself in them and a strong odor of antiseptic in the air. She pushed open the double doors and then turned right into the waiting room. Her heart kicked up a few notches at the sight of David before she remembered he’d walked out on her…again. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see if you were okay. Do you need anything?”
“Yeah, to be left alone to take care of my father.” She turned her back on him.
“Kat, please, hear me out, okay?”
“Like you were willing to do for me five years ago, David?”
“I’m not sure that was the same thing…”
Softly, she said, “Fuck you. You’re not sure, because you didn’t listen…not to me, anyways. You listened to your sister and your brother and everyone else in this town that had something shitty to say about me. You don’t get to walk out on me twice, David. Please just leave. I don’t need this right now.”
“I didn’t come here to upset you. I’m sorry that you feel like I didn’t listen to you…”
“I don’t ‘feel’ like that, it’s what happened. I spent five years in my own personal hell because you turned your back on me when I needed you the most. Last night was a terrible mistake and it won’t happen again. Now go, and leave me be.” She pushed through the doors and stepped out into the hallway. Before they closed behind her, she saw David sit down. A switch flipped in her head and she barreled back into t
he room and stopped inches from him. “I said to get the fuck out!”
“Shh, you’re in a hospital.”
“Fuck that! Fuck you!”
“I’m not leaving. You might not think you need me, but…” A young Asian man and woman walked into the room and David lowered his voice. “I’ll be here, just in case.”
“Sure, until your sister or brother find out and tell you what a fool you are for being here.” Kat didn’t lower her voice, and the man and woman looked at her nervously as they took the furthest seat away from her. Kat was used to that and most of the time she didn’t even give a shit. Still focused on David she said, “I want you to go.”
David settled back further in his chair and said, “Call security.”
“Fuck you!” When he didn’t respond, she was afraid she was going to sock him. Instead, she turned and walked away. She called that maturity…it was fucked up.
24
“No more lockdown?” Angel had just gotten Susie to sleep and she found Dax sitting on the couch drinking a beer. She had heard him on the phone a short time before, letting the front gate know they could ease up on the security, at least on who was leaving the ranch. He looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot and a deep line creased his forehead. As far as Angel knew, he hadn’t slept at all the night before. She wasn’t sure what he had done, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.
“Trayvon Lee, the leader of Street Chaos, agreed to a truce. We’ll ease out of the lockdown to be sure, but things should get back to normal around here soon.”
She sat down next to him and said, “Do I want to know how you managed that?”
Dax grinned. “Not likely.” Angel shook her head, but she smiled too. The smile fell when she thought about her talk with David earlier in the day.
“What?”
“I was just thinking about something David said earlier, and I guess…wondering if I’ve been too hard on Kat.”
Dax raised an eyebrow and said, “If David got you to believe that, he and I are going to have to get together. I need some tips…” She socked him in the arm.
“I’m not that hard to deal with.”
Dax laughed. “Not at all, baby. But…when it comes to your family…”
“I know. He just made me remember how hard everyone was on me when I fell in love with you.”
“Well, of course that was different. There was no way you could be expected to resist me.”
She laughed. “You think so, huh?”
Dax slid his arm around her shoulders and settled back into the couch. Angel curled into his side. He sighed and Angel wanted to ask him what was wrong…but again, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. She felt his lips brush against her forehead, and she closed her eyes and for a few seconds the rest of the world disappeared. Dax had the ability to do that, and that was one of the reasons she loved him the most. “We might be off lockdown, baby, but we have a bigger problem.”
Damn it! She was afraid of that. “Okay, lay it on me.”
“We dealt with Chaos with as little bloodshed as possible. We didn’t lose any guys and nobody ended up on Doc’s table. Their guys are mostly in one piece…”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t, but when I was laying out the details of our ‘truce,’ Trayvon Lee, their shot-caller, pulled out an ace he had in the hole. He agreed to a cease-fire, but he won’t agree to move out of our territory and if I force the issue…”
“You’re scaring me, babe.” Angel sat up and looked at Dax. It wasn’t like him to hesitate or beat around the bush. “What’s this…ace in the hole?”
“They found something in one of the cars they jacked. It’s what made them so bold. Trayvon said that the car belonged to a private investigator, and he had a locked box in the trunk. It was full of photographs, some of them over a decade old.”
“What are the photos of?”
“Me, doing things that could send me away, and for a long time, according to him. He only showed me one, but he said there are dozens just like it.”
“You?” Angel thought back to her days as a cop…the days when she was one of the people that wanted so badly to bring Dax and the Skulls down. She would have paid good money for compromising photos of him back then, and now, she’d kill the man that would use them against him. It’s funny how things change.
“What does he want in exchange?” She was afraid of that answer, but she had to know.
“He wants to continue operating in our territory…but not just the cars. He wants his drug territory back and he wants us to stay out of his business with his prostitutes…” Dax and the Skulls had cleaned up the Southside. Once Dax got rid of the competition and stopped the wars over territory, they’d been good for the stressed blue-collar community. Angel wouldn’t have thought that possible if anyone had told it was Dax’s goal when she was a cop, but she knew him now and she knew that although he didn’t always do things on the up and up, his heart was always in the right place. He’d stopped the distribution of hard drugs in the neighborhood and he’d sent the pimps packing. If the women wanted to go with them, he didn’t stop them, but if they wanted to stay and needed a place to go, Dax had offered them a safe place at the ranch. Everything he did these days was in the best interest of his family, his club, and his community, in that order. She honestly believed he was paying for the sins of his past by helping so many people in the present, and there was no way he deserved to go to prison.
“Then let him,” she said, hardly believing she was saying that herself.
“Baby, you don’t mean that. You don’t want Susie or any of the other kids here growing up in the place I grew up. The Southside used to have the highest crime rate in the state, along with being the murder capital of Massachusetts. You know that. It’s how we met. You came all the way home from Boston to take on an assignment to clean it up. You and Kyle and your dad…that task force is as responsible for cleaning it up as this club is. I’d be letting everyone down if I agreed to that in order to save my own ass.”
“Then kill him.”
“Angel!”
She stood up off the couch. “I’m not letting you go to prison. I’ll kill him myself.”
Dax stood up and put his hands on her arms. “No, baby, we’re not going to kill him. We’ll figure something else out. Besides, I’m sure he’s provided for that possibility…and then there’s the guy who owns the car.”
“And who is that?”
He sighed again. “I don’t know. Trayvon wouldn’t give me that information. It’s probably safe to assume those weren’t the only photos that exist, though.”
Fuck! Angel suddenly felt like danger was lurking everywhere…more so than when they were on lockdown. Her world felt like it was crumbling around her. They couldn’t take Dax from her and Susie. They needed him.
“I still have friends, connections in the department. We can have Lee arrested…”
“And he’ll take me down with him.”
“Fuck! We can at least get a list of cars jacked in that area…” Angel felt the hot tears burn her eyes. He pulled her into his chest and let her cry while he ran his hand through her hair. The wheels in her head were turning so fast that she could hardly keep track of her thoughts. There had to be a way out of this.
“That’s a good idea. It’s a good place to start,” he said, soothingly. “It’s gonna be okay, baby. I’ll make it okay.”
“You better,” she said with a shuddering sob into his chest. “I can’t live without you.”
“You won’t have to. I’ll come up with something, but I’m too tired to think about it tonight.”
She looked up at him. She hated the worry line between his eyebrows. She really would commit murder to make that go away…if she had to. “Okay,” she whispered, “Let’s go to bed.” Dax didn’t move his feet. Instead, he ran his fingertips down the length of her arms, caressing her skin and sending sparks running down her spine. She leaned back into him an
d let him run his fingers down to the hem of her t-shirt and up her sides underneath. She’d already pulled off her bra and put on her nightshirt and shorts, and when his fingers reached the sides of her breasts, she had to suck in a hard, shaky breath. She looked up at his face. Was this what he needed, now? The look of need and lust in his eyes answered her question. He let his hands travel back down until he reached hers and he locked their fingers together. Neither of them spoke and he didn’t break eye contact with her as he walked her slowly, backwards, down the hallway toward their bedroom.
She stepped back over the threshold when they got to the room and he leaned down toward her mouth. Angel reached up and put her hands around his neck, pulling him down until their lips met. Even more than two years together hadn’t dampened the passion that crackled in the air between them when they kissed. His tongue possessed her mouth and hers danced with his like it was part of a perfectly choreographed performance. Angel never believed in soulmates until the first time Dax kissed her. It was a cliché, she knew, but he was the piece of her puzzle that had been missing and as soon as she found him she was finally complete.
Dax kept up the hot tempo of the kiss until they both had to come up for breath, but even as he pulled his mouth off hers, his hands didn’t still. He let them run up under her shirt again, rubbing and massaging her skin and causing her body to convulse with pleasure. She put her own hands on his lower back and pushed up his shirt as she ran her palms over the hard, sinewy muscles there. Once she got the shit up to his armpits, he took a small step back and pulled it over his head; she did the same with hers. His hands went immediately to her breasts and Angel gasped as he began caressing them and letting his palms press into her hard nipples. He had goosebumps racing down both her arms and her spine before taking a nipple between his fingers and twisting it. His mouth lowered down to the other one and he sucked it in between his lips. Angel’s hands were in his long hair, twisting and pulling on it, and she was gasping out his name while he licked and sucked. His hands went to her shorts and he pushed them down roughly without taking his mouth off her, and suddenly his fingers were dipping in the hot moisture that had gathered there and Angel’s legs were shaking so hard that it was like trying to stand up on two wet noodles. Dax felt, or sensed, that she was about to collapse and so he cupped her naked ass in his hands and walked her back to the bed. Once he laid her back, he finished stripping off her shorts and underpants and then he stripped off his own, before lying down next to her.
