by Evelyn Glass
“I’m not denying it.”
“So doesn’t great sex earn me a favor or two?”
Dirk smirked. He shook his head in amazement. “You’re incredible. Do you really think I’ll let you go just because we shared an orgasm?”
Camilla clenched her jaw. She could feel anger stirring in the pit of her stomach. “You have no right to keep me here.”
“It’s my club’s territory,” Dirk replied. “I can do whatever I want.”
Her green eyes flashed with rage. “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you people so arrogant that you genuinely believe this land is yours?”
“I’m not being arrogant. I’m stating a fact.”
And by God, he really looked like he was doing just that. It infuriated Camilla even more. “You can’t keep me here!” she said again, her voice rising.
Dirk looked at her curiously. “Calm down.” He studied her for a moment, and then he asked, “Is that why you just had sex with me? You thought you could buy your way out of here?”
Camilla opened her mouth. And then she closed it. She was about to tell him that yes, that was exactly why, but it wasn’t true, and they both knew it. She didn’t want him to know that she had wanted him so badly, but what was the point in denying it? Dirk had been in that warehouse with her; he had felt just how deep her desire was. There was no lying about that.
“No,” she finally admitted. “I would much prefer it if that were the case, but no. I had sex with you because I wanted to.”
Dirk continued to look at her, all but impaling her with his implacable blue eyes. Eventually, he nodded once. And then he lapsed into silence.
Camilla waited. She waited for him to add anything else, and when a good ten minutes passed without him saying anything, she took it upon herself to speak. “Will you ever let me go?” she asked.
It was a question that had been running through her head ever since she had been brought into his shed. She did her best not to let herself think about it, and most of the time she succeeded, but there were moments when she just couldn’t help herself. It was a question that stirred an overwhelming sense of mounting panic within her, but she tried not to let that show.
Dirk wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and let the crust of the slice of pizza he had devoured fall back into the box.
“We will,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “Just as soon as Stephan has had a word with you. I can’t imagine he will want to keep you.”
“Then why don’t you just release me now?”
“You know why,” he said. “I need to go through him first. Besides, I, too, would like to know a little bit more about this investigation of yours.”
Camilla frowned. “Do you honestly think you’ll get Tar Mongols intelligence out of me? I’m pretty sure I know nothing that you don’t already.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “We’ll see.”
Camilla shook her head, speechless.
“Also,” Dirk continued after a few moments, “do you really think Herman Ruiz will just let you fly back to New York, just like that?”
She stared at him. The thought of what the president of the Tar Mongols might do to her had not crossed her mind. She had just assumed Tobias going missing would keep the MC occupied long enough for her to get back to the East Coast, and once she was out of their territory, the Tar Mongols would leave her alone.
She shared such thoughts with Dirk, and he looked at her as though she had just sprouted an extra head.
“Are you serious?” he said.
Camilla swallowed. She suddenly felt very uncomfortable. “Uh…yes,” she said, with far less confidence than usual.
Dirk shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that, princess.”
“Well then, how does it work?” she snapped, exasperated.
Dirk stared at her. There was a new intensity in his blue eyes that scared her. Camilla did her best not to recoil from his gaze. “They’re going to hunt you down.”
Camilla stared back at him, as her brain processed the words. “What?” she finally said. Try as she might, she found herself unable to wrap her mind around this new piece of information.
“They’re going to hunt you down,” Dirk repeated. “Ruiz is not letting you go, Camilla. You’re an investigative reporter who tried to meddle in his club’s business. Ain’t no fucking way he’s letting you walk away.”
Camilla swallowed. Her throat suddenly felt very dry. She reached for her beer and took a long swig, and she wished it were whiskey instead.
“I’ll drop the piece,” she said.
Dirk smiled a bitter smile. “Will you, really?”
“Yes.”
“Will you? Really?” He emphasized every word.
Camilla looked down. He knew her. Somehow, he had her figured out in just three days. Dirk Coleman might not be an investigative reporter, but still, he was disconcertingly, annoyingly perceptive.
“No,” she said quietly. She took a deep breath and looked up at him again. “I won’t.”
“I figured you wouldn’t,” he said. “You don’t strike me as a quitter.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
Dirk yawned. He stood and stretched languidly. “Tell you what,” he said. “Right now, you’re supposed to go to sleep. We got a long ride ahead of us tomorrow.”
Camilla snorted in disgust. How could she think of sleep, right after he had basically told her she was a dead woman?
“Stephan will figure it out,” Dirk said.
Camilla frowned. “Why would Stephan Walker help me?”
Dirk shrugged. “Why not?”
Camilla tried to think of something to say to that, but she couldn’t find anything.
“Get outta here and go to bed, princess,” he said, not unkindly. “I need my sleep.”
She nodded numbly. She stood and walked to the bathroom, and she closed the door behind her without asking him if he would need to get in there before she did. She walked up to the shower and ran the water until it was scalding hot, and then she stripped and got under the scorching spray.
Camilla didn’t feel the heat. Her head was a jumble of thoughts, and her stomach was a knotty mess. She had known the situation she had gotten herself into was bad, but she had not quite realized just how bad until now—when Dirk had spelled it out for her. Her mind was working a mile a minute, trying to find a way out of this and to imagine scenarios that did not end with her receiving a bullet to her skull. She did not know Stephan Walker, and she wasn’t sure she shouldn’t be as afraid of him as she should be of Herman Ruiz.
And yet, as terrified as she was, she couldn’t stop thinking of what had gone down in the warehouse. She couldn’t stop thinking of Dirk’s cock inside of her. She couldn’t stop thinking of his lips on hers, of his warm tongue inside her mouth. She couldn’t stop thinking about just how bad he had wanted her, and how bad she had wanted him.
Fuck. Am I getting a case of Stockholm syndrome?
The thing was, now that he had made the danger she was in so inescapably clear, Camilla couldn’t decide if Dirk Coleman was her jailer or her protector.
Chapter 7
“Will you just tell me where we’re headed?”
“Nope. Can’t.”
“Damn it, Dirk—”
“Camilla, I really need you to shut up now.”
Camilla did. She shut her mouth and clung to him a little tighter as he sped up. They had been riding for what felt like days but was in fact “only” a little over seven hours. Her butt felt numb, and she had eaten so much red dirt as they raced through the desert that she would be surprised if she didn’t cough it up for the next month or so. No one was telling her anything, and it was starting to seriously piss her off. She would have loved to know at least the name of the town they were headed for, or even just the general direction (north? south? east? west?)—but Dirk wasn’t even giving her that.
“How much further?” she asked again after a few minutes, unable to help herself.
&nb
sp; “Camilla, so help me God…”
“You gotta give me something, Dirk,” she all but pleaded. “I’m going crazy here.”
“If I give you anything, they’ll skin me alive. Is that what you want?”
Camilla clamped her mouth shut once more. She wanted to tell him that she knew he was feeding her bullshit, that she could tell he was enjoying her misery and the fact that she was completely at his mercy—again—but she refrained from saying anything else.
The miles went on and on, and finally they stopped in a motel in a godforsaken town in the middle of California. She wondered just how far the Minutemen’s clubhouse really was for them to actually have to spend the night on the road.
However, despite all of her protests, she was glad for the chance to have some more time to think of what she would say to Stephan Walker when she finally met him. Her stomach had been in knots since they had left the desert camp that morning. She had no idea what to expect; so far, the Minutemen had been one surprise after another. She wondered if any of what she had heard about the man was actually true…and then she realized that, instead of wondering, she could just ask the very reliable source she had at her disposal.
When she emerged from her shower, her body a tangle of knotted muscles and aches that the hot water had done little to soothe, she found Dirk lying on one of the two beds in their shared room. Once again, he wasn’t going to let her get out of his sight, even though he must have known she was too exhausted to even consider running away. He was reading a worn copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Camilla paused momentarily to run an appreciative glance over the considerable length of his sprawled-out body, but then she shook her head and forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. It really was no time to indulge in her fatal attraction for this man.
“Dirk?” she called, as she walked to her own bed and sat down on the somewhat lumpy mattress.
“Hm?” He hardly looked up from the pages.
Camilla rolled her eyes. She hated being ignored. “Will you at least tell me one thing?”
Dirk heaved a long-suffering sigh. He stuck a finger between the pages to bookmark the part he had gotten to and looked up at her. “What?” he asked gruffly.
“What kind of man is Stephan Walker?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, as a person. What kind of man is he?”
Dirk hesitated. “What do you care?”
Camilla stared at him in disbelief. “Well, apparently he’s going to be the one to decide whether I live or die, so I care a whole hell of a lot.”
The ghost of a smirk appeared on Dirk’s oh-so-kissable lips, as it always did whenever Camilla’s spunk came out—which was most of the time.
“I doubt he’ll kill you,” he said.
Camilla arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me if I don’t feel very reassured.”
Dirk stifled a yawn and shifted on the mattress. “Look, I told you. All you need to do is tell him the truth. He’ll figure something out.”
“What does that even mean, ‘He’ll figure something out’?”
“It means he’ll think the situation over and decide what to do with you.”
Camilla stared at him. “Thank you,” she said dryly. “That helps a lot.”
“Look, Camilla, I’m not here to babysit you,” Dirk snapped. “I’m not here to soothe your fears. I’m not your friend. You’re a reporter who trespassed into one of our territories. I’m not going to give you shit.”
Camilla found herself clamping her mouth shut once again, taken aback by his outburst. She glared openly at him, anger stirring so fierce within her that it took all of her restraint not to start screaming at him.
“Now go to sleep,” he all but ordered.
“I’m not tired,” she said after a moment’s pause in which she tried to get as much control over her own voice as she could. She didn’t want him to see just how much his unexpectedly blunt reaction had thrown her.
“I don’t care,” he said. “We leave at dawn tomorrow.”
“We have another day of riding ahead of us? At least you can tell me that,” she added through gritted teeth when his blue eyes flashed in annoyance.
“Fine,” he said after a moment in which he, too, visibly did his best to remain calm. “We’ve only got another four hours to go, but I want to be there as soon as possible.”
Camilla nodded curtly. She climbed under the covers, turned her back on him, and closed her eyes.
***
She woke in the middle of the night. Everything was pitch dark, except for the slate of light she could see coming from underneath the bathroom door once her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. At first, she had no idea what had woken her up. But then she heard Dirk’s voice speaking in hushed tones behind the bathroom door which he had left ajar, and she knew…. It wasn’t the ridiculously low volume of Dirk’s voice that had woken her, of course—it was the use of her name. Dirk had mentioned her name in his conversation, and the sound had somehow sneaked into her subconscious and brought her back to full consciousness.
Camilla strained her ears. If she had not been such an expert at eavesdropping, she probably wouldn’t have heard anything, but it just so happened that eavesdropping was one of her many skills. She closed her eyes and steadied her breathing so that if Dirk was to walk out at any moment, he would think she was still asleep, and she listened.
“Camilla Hernandez,” Dirk said again. “I’ve tried to reach you, Stephan, but as you had anticipated, you were unreachable.”
Camilla made a conscious effort not to let her breath hitch. He is talking to Stephan Walker. It is the middle of the night, and he is talking to the Minutemen’s president. About me. This could not be good, she thought.
“So far I’ve got her under control.”
Camilla bristled silently. Under control, my ass!
“She’s not here for us, or so she claims. Apparently, she was working a story on the Tar Monguls.” A pause. “Yeah, you bet your ass Ruiz knows.”
Camilla swallowed past the sudden wave of fear that threatened to overcome her. Just how screwed am I, exactly?
“We’re not sure. Do you want me to contact them?”
Contact who? Who else could possibly get involved in this mess? Camilla clenched her hands into tense fists under the covers.
“All right, I’ll wait. What do you want to do with her?”
Camilla’s heart was pounding so fiercely in her chest that she almost couldn’t hear Dirk anymore. Had he lied to me? Did he not think that Stephan would help me? Did he not think Stephan would let me go? Was Stephan Walker a real, deadly danger to me after all?
“Right. Of course. Makes sense.”
What makes sense?
Camilla had to bite her tongue in order to keep herself from calling out and asking all the questions that were swirling around in her head out loud.
“We should be there by lunchtime.” Dirk gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, you do that. See you tomorrow.”
The sudden silence let Camilla know that the conversation was over. She did her best to keep her breathing in check, and her body as relaxed as possible, given the circumstances. She heard the bathroom door open all the way, the click of the light being turned off, and Dirk’s footsteps, as he walked back to his bed. There was more silence for a moment, and she knew that he was checking on her, making sure that she really was sleeping. He must have been satisfied with what he saw, because the next sound Camilla heard was the rustling of the covers and the creaking of the springs in the mattress as Dirk settled back in.
She relaxed then, relieved that he had not noticed that she was awake. It wasn’t long before she could hear his breathing even out, and that was when she allowed herself a small sigh of relief that she still made sure remained soundless for good measure.
She would have given pretty much anything to know just what Stephan Walker had said to Dirk during their private conversation. What was the MC’s president going to do with her? Th
e more Camilla thought about it, the more she became convinced that she didn’t want to find out. She knew now that she couldn’t count on this man, and she berated herself once again for her own stupidity.
She had yet no idea of how she could ever pull it off, but she decided right then and there that she would make her escape as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Should that opportunity not come, she would create it for herself.
Chapter 8
As it turned out, the town where the Minutemen had their home base was called Northburg, which was particularly ironic considering that it was situated in sunny California. Camilla expected a MC clubhouse to be a squalid, run-down place, but it was—in fact—quite cozy. It was a large, one-story house that the club had renovated.
