“You aren’t going to drop it, are you?” she asked, smiling slightly.
She was like jelly in my arms. Peering up at me, she sighed before falling closer against me.
“My father was in a great deal of debt,” she said, biting her bottom lip. “He’s addicted to gambling, has been for years. But it’s only been since, oh, four years ago or so that he was diagnosed with a heart condition. The medical bills piled up, and despite not having such great luck on the tables before, he tried to pay his bills with yet more gambling.” She rolled her eyes.
“When he told me he’d gotten a loan from some asshole on the outskirts of town—and that that asshole was now threatening him with violence if he didn’t return the twenty thousand…” She trailed off, digging deeper into the sheets. “I mean, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“Of course it does,” I said, sliding my hand down to the small of her back. I was eager to slip back inside her, to rail her against the headboard and make all the noise in the world until the owner actually did wake up and kick us down the road to Mexico.
“When I saw you there with all that money—boy! I was happy to get that Kraemer creep off his back once and for all,” she said.
Immediately, my stomach dropped. “What name did you just say?”
“My father’s? It’s Jim.”
“No, no. The other one. Did you say Kraemer? Wes Kraemer? The loan shark of—”
“Yeah. What’s wrong?” Luna had sensed the change in the air around us. Sitting up, she wrapped the blanket around her chest and glared at me, demanding answers.
Our worlds had crashed together, two cells in the universe, colliding and exploding.
“Jesus. Of all the fucking people on the planet I could have run into,” I whispered. I brought my legs over the side of the bed and leaned over them, putting my face in my hands. My mind raced.
I’d taken money from the loan shark, and that money had passed directly from me to the daughter of someone who owed him a shit-ton of money.
The money would be going directly back into Wes Kraemer’s safe. It had probably even gotten there earlier that morning. And that meant that we needed to get out of town immediately. Luna’s father would link himself to the robbery, and he’d endanger all of our lives.
“We need to get out of here as soon as possible,” I hissed, jumping off the mattress and grabbing my backpack before I began to toss clothing on. I felt jittery, as I always did when I was about to bolt back on the road.
But this time, whoever was chasing after me wasn’t states behind. He was just down the highway, waiting to kill me—which sounded more like the sad end of a shitty country song than anything else.
And that wouldn’t be the way I, Colt Anderson, would go down.
Chapter Ten
Luna
Colt was staggering around the room, dressing himself like a madman. I continued to stare at him from the bed, the maroon comforter tucked around my breasts, still only half-awake after our lovemaking session. I wasn’t quite sure if anything around me was real.
I giggled slightly, wondering if he was making a joke. “What are you getting so riled up about?” I asked him. “Come back to bed. I think we have till at least noon, as I told you. And Mexico will still be there, even if we don’t get there for the next five years.”
“You know I don’t have that kind of time,” Colt said, tossing the rest of his things into the backpack and looking, wild-eyed, toward the door.
“Actually, I don’t know,” I said, growing insistent. “I told you the reasons why I needed the money, but you’ve been leaving me in the dark ever since this all began. I think it’s about time you started to give me answers in return, Colt.”
In that moment, a knock sounded on the door. I leaped from the bed, wavering slightly with nerves, as Colt turned toward the far window.
“Don’t answer it, Luna,” he warned in a low voice.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, still certain that everything was fine. I donned my dress from the night before and put my hand on my hip, gesturing with the other toward the door. “You should get it. Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”
The knocking continued, putting a chill in my heart. Forcing myself to be brave, I turned toward the spyhole and peered out, giving a relieved, loud laugh as I saw who it was.
Unlocking the door, I gave a large grin to Marge, the woman married to the owner of the motel and the one who often had to go around waking everyone up when her husband was on one of his benders. She looked grim, her mouth in a thin line across her face.
“Hi there,” I said, leaning against the door casually, trying to show off to Colt. Of course nothing is wrong! I wanted to tell him. Stop being so paranoid.
“Just wanted to let y’all know that we have checkout at noon. That’s in fifteen minutes’ time. And if you’re a straggler, we’ll have to ask ya to pay the fee. It’s twenty bucks.”
“Thank you, Marge,” I said, giving her a bright smile. “And how is your husband these days?”
“Haven’t spoken two words to him since he left me. Had an affair in this very motel, if you can believe it. Had to wake him up myself. He didn’t have twenty bucks to pay the fee; that was for sure,” Marge muttered.
I nearly burst out laughing at the irony, although I sensed Marge did not share my humor. As I began to express my condolences, my eyes glanced past her, noting a dark green car creeping along the edge of the parking lot. Marge turned around, heading back to her daily route and the next group of motel rooms, but I kept the door cracked open.
The green car rumbled across the gravel and parked near the far side of the parking lot, directly across from Colt’s Mustang. The man inside wasn’t familiar to me—certainly not anyone I’d seen recently at the diner—yet he had a creepy air about him. Beneath his black baseball cap, he was completely bald, with a large, square nose and snake-like eyes.
“Colt, come here a minute,” I whispered, beckoning him toward me.
He came over, sneaking behind the door and peering out. As he watched, his Adam’s apple bounced up and down, showing his immediate panic.
“Jesus Christ, Colt, who is following you?” I demanded, my voice a hiss. “And how are we going to get out of here without him noticing?”
Colt shut the door slowly, not wanting to attract attention. Without another word, he bolted the lock and grasped my hand, leading me to the window in the bathroom. Gripping both my shoulders, he peered into my eyes, his once-bright blue irises now darker, more ominous.
“I need you to trust me,” he said, his voice echoing against the tiles. “Otherwise, we aren’t going to make it out of this alive.”
Without giving me a moment to answer, Colt shoved open the window, removed the screen, and pushed one leg, then the other, out through it. He was standing on a slight brick edge that pushed out from the building, and then he made the leap onto the grass below. He landed, pumped his knees, jumped upright again, and shook it out.
“Are you okay?” I whispered down to him, my heart pounding in my throat.
“Just come on. I’ll catch you,” he whispered back, his voice harsh. “We don’t have time to talk.”
If this guy was only after Colt, I considered allowing him to go on alone. After all, this would solve my problem of having to abandon Colt later on down the road, when I would inevitably fall for him even more.
“I promise, if you don’t come with me now, you’ll be in over your head,” he said.
Still unsure if I should believe him, I brought one slender leg through the opening of the window, and then the other. Clinging to the edge, I peered back into the hotel room—almost saying good-bye to any kind of normality, as I was leaving it behind for good. With a final deep breath, I leaped from the second floor, falling directly into Colt’s strong arms below.
Bouncing slightly as he adjusted to my weight, I clung onto his neck, shivering with anxiety from the leap.
With a final shake of my head, I told him, in no
uncertain terms, “Never make me do anything like that again.”
Then he set me down and we began to run.
Chapter Eleven
Colt
The car out front—one of Wes’s goons, surely—really squelched my plans. Certain, then, that I needed to tell Luna everything—that her father had now given Wes Kraemer’s stolen money right back to him—I resolved to do just that.
But, now, we were zipping across the back end of the motel yard, crunching over gravel and fallen leaves, wide-eyed and panicked. Me, for reasons I understood. Her? Probably just because I’d suddenly asked her to jump out of a second-story window.
I was pretty surprised that she’d done it, to be frank. The girl had guts.
“My car’s at the diner,” Luna said between huffs as she kept up with me. “I have my keys with me.”
“God, you’re a lifesaver,” I breathed. After sneaking a glance behind us, I darted across the road, toward the 24-hour sign glinting in the distance. Luna followed close behind, gasping for air.
The parking lot showed it was the lunch rush hour, with several station wagons, mom vans, and dilapidated vehicles all in rows as their drivers sat inside the diner eating greasy burgers. I slowed down briefly, allowing Luna to run in front of me and press her key into a little red Chevrolet. She gestured for me to get into the passenger seat, her eyes shooting back toward the diner.
“I’m supposed to be there right now,” she whispered. “Hurry.”
She didn’t understand that we were in a whole lot more trouble than her missing a shift at a crummy diner.
Speeding out from the parking lot, Luna drove us out onto the highway and headed south, her hands gripping the steering wheel like her life depended on it.
She was anxious. And her anxiety only made mine worse.
“Holy shit,” I said, bringing my hands over my eyes. My heart wouldn’t calm. I found it thudding in my throat, ramming against my tongue. “Jesus Christ.”
“Stop praying over there and turn on the radio or something,” Luna said. “I’m driving as fast as this little car can go.”
I watched as the little dial grew over first 70 mph, then 80, with Luna whipping her head back and emitting a wild, beautiful “Yahoo!”
She looked alive to me, then. It seemed that she’d found her element in the minutes since our escape. Her skin became clear and bright in the sun, her breasts rising with each of her strenuous breaths. In that moment, I could see our entire lives stretched out before us: Mexico, then South America, then—hell—Europe, just to explore the world together.
It felt like it belonged to us.
We drove for maybe half an hour, listening to the ’80s radio station and nodding our heads in time. As we raced along the highway, I could almost see Luna’s brain in motion, cranking gears beneath that bright red hair. She was putting everything together. Her teeth crested from her lips, biting the bottom one in an adorable way—one that made her irresistible.
I had half a mind to tell her to yank the car off the highway and find a spot somewhere in the back woods of Iowa so we could make love into the afternoon.
As if she’d read my mind, Luna did pull off the highway, driving along a country road and bumping against the gravel and the potholes, mumbling something about them “never fixing the road out here.” She glanced past me at a dilapidated building out behind a barn, and then she turned down a small, almost unnoticeable dirt road.
“Where are you going?” I asked her. Even though my cock was trying to think for me, I still felt Kraemer’s men, hot on our heels. If we didn’t push ourselves to get past the state line, we’d be caught. “Maybe we can stop in a few hours…”
But she yanked the gear to park, halting us in front of the building. She pointed at it, her eyes direct, and then burst toward it, leaving the car door wide open. Several napkins fluttered out, flitting across the field.
I followed her at a run, already falling into a pattern with this woman: out of breath, my strides long. Things had been relatively calm before, when I’d assumed that I’d either make it to Mexico or I’d die along the way. Now, I sensed an explosion at every turn.
The abandoned building looked like it had once been a radio station. We burst into the empty hallways, eyeing the signs on the wall, which read back top hit singles from the late ’90s. I traced the once-familiar songs with my fingers, still trying to bring my breath back to being steady. Luna’s eyes were on me, direct and fiery, waiting for me to turn toward her—to take it.
“I know what you did,” she said, inhaling and exhaling in quick bursts. Flipping her hair behind her shoulder, she continued. “The money you gave me was Wes Kraemer’s money, wasn’t it. You stole it. And now I’ve given it back to him by way of my father.”
As I heard the truth of it from her gorgeous lips, I turned and brought my hands to my hips, sighing. “Seems you’ve figured it out,” I said. I gave her a slight smirk, hoping to make her fall into giggles once more.
But she gave me only a grim expression, a flat line across her face. “I can’t believe you’ve helped me put my father in danger.”
“How was I supposed to know your dad was involved with Kraemer?” I protested, raising my hands into the air. “It’s not like you had pure intentions when you asked for the money. Your dad was in way over his head. I thought I was doing you a favor. And I thought you were doing me one in return.”
My voice was low, growing gruffer. Our voices bounced against the walls, making me sound bear-like. My heart pounded in my throat, reminding me that I hadn’t been completely honest with Luna, either. I still had so much under wraps, but since I hadn’t yet voiced my story to anyone on the planet, I wasn’t sure how to form the words. I wasn’t sure how to face their reality.
The reality of Aaron’s death, of my impending one. “You’re next,” the note had read. Jesus Christ.
“I have to go back and make sure my father’s all right,” Luna said, her eyes filling with tears. “I can’t just traipse off to Mexico with you while my father gets eaten alive by some asshole loan shark. Jesus, Colt, you really know how to ruin a girl’s life.”
I turned toward the wall and rammed my fist into it, making a big, horrible tear in the large board, right between numbers 16 and 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. I heard Luna’s sharp cry of alarm as she backed up, suddenly fearful of my strength. I didn’t feel the pain of the strike, only sensed a tingling at the edges of my knuckles.
In the silence that followed, Luna crept backward, eyeing me darkly. “I need to go,” she whispered. “Don’t think I won’t leave you here, Colt, because I will if you can’t control your temper.”
My nostrils flared, and I finally caved. It was time to tell her.
“There are bigger things at play here than an Iowa City loan shark, Luna. There are bigger things at play than whatever Wes Kraemer might do to your father. Just trust me on this.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was small.
“I mean what I’m running from in the first place,” I said, my hands beginning to shake. When was the last time I’d had any food? Anxiety seemed to fill every cell of my body. I needed a fresh breath of air; I needed relief. But I continued, sensing Luna’s eyes on me—bright, like moons. “Back in Detroit, I didn’t have much. My granny died when I was young, and I hopped in and out of the foster system for a long while. Lived on the streets for a lot of it. My only friend was a kid named Aaron Lee.”
That was it, the first time I’d said his name out loud since his murder. I hadn’t had the strength to look up whether or not they’d had a proper funeral for him. I hadn’t had the heart to contact his mother, to tell her that Aaron had still been a good person despite the people he’d dealt with. “We aren’t like the rest of them,” we’d always told one another while counting the bills on our bedspreads, plotting our next job. There was always another corner, another neighborhood to hit, another stack of bills to count.
Luna crossed her arms over her chest, wait
ing.
“Aaron and I were basically inseparable, and when he suggested we start selling weed, I thought it was a fine idea. I mean, we were both broke as shit, could hardly pay the bills. I was working as a fry cook and he was driving cabs. It wasn’t a good life, Luna. And I know you struggle, with your waitress job and your dad who can’t keep his hands off the gambling table. I know. But we had nobody else but each other, so when he went off the deep end, I followed him. I became his partner. And that’s around when we started getting involved with a gang called the Detroit Seven.”
“The Detroit Seven,” she echoed back, her eyes glittering. “It sounds like a sports team.”
“It was a bit more fucked up than that. Quite a few more guns,” I said. “And I’m sorry if this knowledge makes me ugly in your eyes, Luna. I’m so sorry for all of it.”
Luna made no move to speak. She seemed filled with urgency, wanting me to continue.
“Aaron started to take a bit too much from the gang for the jobs we did for them. He didn’t think they’d notice, you know? He thought he could cream off a little bit here and there and pay off his debts. He started seeing a girl and taking her on all these fancy dates. Sharon, her name was. I teased her, told her she had an old lady’s name.
“It went on like that for a while, with things slowly getting more and more out of hand. The gang didn’t threaten him. They didn’t warn him. I simply came back to the place where we were crashing at the time, and found him dead.”
Luna’s lips parted in shock.
Needing to make sure she believed me, I reached into my back pocket and drew the note out of my wallet. I’d looked at it countless times, tracing the words and wishing I’d known who’d written it.
I passed the note to Luna, watching as she unfolded it and stared down at it, incredulous. Giving tentative shakes of her head, she seemed dumbfounded, finally realizing that I was a fuckup. Nobody she should be involved with.
Jay's Lucky Baby - A Secret Baby Romance Page 41
