“Your friend?” She shook her head. “I told them that she’d been threatened and there was a chance her ex-boyfriend would bother her. Thank you for sending someone to watch over her.”
“You’re welcome. Don’t worry, though. Most of the time, these men aren’t looking for specific women. The only incident we’ve had where a woman was specifically targeted was when one of the enforcers became obsessed with a local girl and took her.”
“The one that was brought to the hospital after the raid on that house earlier this year?”
“Yes,” he said. “She gave us what information she could. But her being taken was the result of the dead man’s very specific obsession. Not them looking for a specific type. As far as we can tell, if the woman is young and attractive, the type doesn’t matter very much.”
“Thank you, sir.” Worry for Mandi was like a spider gnawing on the back of her skull, and his words helped unclamp the jaws a little bit.
“You’re welcome. Can I get you a cab?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Not tonight,” he said, already unlocking his cell. “Go home and get some rest. It’s late and you’ve been through a lot. It’ll just take a few minutes.”
CHAPTER 14
After he left Ladies Night, Tom slammed his bike into gear and roared down the almost silent street.
There are parts of Detroit that people don’t drive through after dark—and if they have to, they ignore street lights, keep the windows rolled up and the doors locked tight. He flew through them tonight, trying to burn off the rage, willing someone to attack him. His fists were singing their desire to smash into an unwary face—or to draw his gun and end the life of someone who tried to end his.
He’d never been a violent man before he found out what Butch had done to his father, but in the last year the dark craving for violence had spilled into his veins. Tonight it was deeper than ever—because the woman was the only thing that had ever alleviated it, and everything about her was a lie.
He didn’t even know her name.
He pushed the bike harder, daring fate to put him over a patch of early ice, at each turn going deeper into it. The engine purred no matter how fast he went, but it wasn’t enough to soothe the burn racing through his chest. That woman had lied to him. He couldn’t even think of her name now—Dakota—what bullshit.
Part of him wondered if he’d—he cut that thought off, but the echo of it was still there. She’d meant more than she should, with her shy smile and confident stride. A study in contradictions. More addictive than the cocaine he’d tried a few times in his late teens before his father found out and knocked the shit out of him. Even now he was jonsing for her, desperate to know where she’d gone and what she’d done.
Who she was.
He slowed down and pulled onto a more heavily-trafficked road, unsure of where to go next. The rage was cooling now, and in its place was a hard icy lump of fury that grew until it threatened to swallow him whole. Then it hit him and he pulled a U-turn in the middle of the street.
He didn’t know her name.
But he knew where she lived.
_____
Grace took the elevator up and tried not to think of Tom and his rough hands as the floors dinged by. When she stepped out onto her floor and padded over the thick carpet to her apartment door, the scent of his cologne still seemed to linger, though he hadn’t been over for two days. The key slid into the lock, turned easily and she pushed the door open with a sigh, throwing her backpack and jacket on the back of the chair before locking the door behind her.
She felt grimy after the night she’d had, and crossed directly to the bathroom. Pulling off her clothes while the shower warmed up, she breathed in the thick steam. Already she could smell the rose scent of the soap she’d impulsively purchased the week before rolling in the mist that filled the bathroom.
The hot spray of the shower was a miracle on her skin. Pressing her hands against the slick tile, she leaned into it and let it drench her hair. While she shampooed, Grace dug her fingers into her scalp and massaged away some of the tension that had built. She’d sleep, she decided, as soon as she got out, she’d collapse in bed and sleep until she woke up. Thank god she didn’t have a shift tomorrow.
After she’d rinsed away the conditioner and soap, she turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, wrapping her hair in a white towel and using another to swathe her body. Stepping through the door that led to her bedroom, she saw him, stumbled back and barely bit off the scream that rose up through her throat.
“What are you doing here?”
“I needed to talk to you, Grace.” Tom said, looking so out of place on her white, lacy bedspread. Everything about him was masculine and rough-edged, so wrong in her delicate, feminine room, but she couldn’t ignore the twinge of hunger that bubbled to life and shimmied down through her thighs.
“How did you get in?”
His mouth quirked in a grin that both warmed and infuriated her. “It’s illegal to break into someone’s home, you know?” She tried to keep her face stern, but the sight of him ignited hope in her chest.
“Are you going to use your handcuffs on me?” There was no humor in his voice. Nothing warm or welcoming. So she moved closer to her closet and reached for her robe, wrapping it on over her towel and securing it tight, double-knotting it while he looked at her with a mocking grin.
“If I have to,” she said. Her eyes wandered to the papers and albums spread over her bed. “You’re going through my things.”
“I was honest with you about who I am,” he said, picking up a closed album and starting to thumb through it. “Figured tit for tat is fair, Grace.” His voice twisted, mocking her as he said her name.
“You chose to tell me what you did.”
“Under false pretenses.” He rose from the bed and started to walk toward her, a slow, leonine stalk that made her stomach flutter. “So tell me what you wanted to know so badly that you were willing to come close to whoring yourself to get it.”
“I didn’t whore myself.”
“Really? Because I think another couple of dates and I’d have had your panties around your ankles.” The mental image didn’t help the heat gathering in her body. “As it was, I made your hot little pussy come until you screamed, and I don’t think that was all an act.”
“I doubt they’d have been around my ankles,” she said, though she didn’t. Despite her best efforts to resist him as long as he didn’t know the truth about her, she knew it was only a matter of time before she gave him everything. She’d wanted to—desperately.
“So what did you want to know, Dakota?” Again with the mocking. “Did you go there hoping to meet me, or would any Storm Runner do?”
“How can you possibly think that? Do you think I just chose a random strip club and hoped someone from your club with enough information to pump would walk in? Do you think that’s how police officers work?” Frustration almost choked her, but his jacket was unzipped and she could see the muscles of his chest under the t-shirt he wore. Some of the heat was desire too.
“I don’t know, Grace.” His gaze lowered to the neckline of her robe. The towel had slid down and was only loosely around her hips and his gaze heated as he took in the peek of flesh he could see between the white sides of the thick terry robe. “I don’t know how you work. It might surprise you to hear this, but we’re not exactly fans of the corrupt fucking police in this town.”
“Not every officer is corrupt.”
“Maybe not, but you didn’t seem to have a problem getting close to me for information.”
“I wasn’t after you for information.”
“I don’t believe you.” He turned and she saw him ball his fists tight. Tom had the right to be mad, she told herself, but if it came to violence, she’d knock him out of the apartment without a second thought. But he took a deep breath and turned back around. Some of the sickness that had her shaking in a fucked up combination of lust and fear eased when sh
e saw that his eyes had cleared.
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t in your place. But have you ever considered that just maybe you shouldn’t be doing things that would make the police take an interest in you?”
“I’m not.”
“But you still think that I somehow implanted myself in that particular club to meet you.”
“It wasn’t a secret that I’ve been going around to strip clubs, looking…”
“Looking for what?”
“Nothing,” he said, looking away. “It’s not a secret that I would have been there eventually.”
“And I tried so hard to get your attention.”
“You know what you look like,” he said. “There was no question that I’d be attracted to you. So you just played me and made interested in some fake woman instead of whoever you really are. You played me. How did you think we could be together if you weren’t honest? It was all a bunch of bullshit.”
_____
Tom’s anger shrank a little more when he saw tears gather in her eyes at his words. Women’s tears had never made him weak before, but something about Grace made everything different. Just the sight of her welling eyes almost had him on his knees, ready to beg forgiveness. Here, washed clean of makeup and artifice, she was more beautiful than she’d ever been before.
Grace, he thought, was an excellent name for her.
“I didn’t play you,” she said, the words small and timid. She looked down at her feet, then took a step forward. The towel gave up its valiant grip on her waist and fell softly to the floor to puddle at her feet when she stepped forward. Now the robe was the only thing between him and the woman he still craved.
“You lied to me.” That was the crux of his rage. Not that she was a police officer. Not even that she might have been after information on the Storm Runners had infuriated him as much as her lying to him. Not when he’d been feeling something for her that burned away all the cold he’d been living with.
Looking around her room, he gathered more information about her. So many things made sense now that he knew who she was. Her sense of order and the spare, but female decorations screamed someone disciplined. Before she’d walked in, he’d rifled through her drawers and found another gun, several knives and many pairs of workout leggings and t-shirts. She was a woman who took care of her body for utility, not nearly for looks, he’d concluded.
Either way, it worked for him.
On the wall were pictures of friends and family, grouped together tidily but not in a severe, tight-edged pattern. He’d studied each one to see the people who mattered to her—and the happiness in her eyes. Most of the time he that sparkle, but Tom wanted to. The desire to see a laugh rise in her eyes like the picture where she was on a ski lift, grinning at whoever pointed the camera at her, ate at him.
I don’t love her. He’d repeated it more than once to himself as he systematically went through her apartment, looking for any sign that she’d been after him and the Storm Runners. Before she even walked in, he was almost certain Grace was at the Ladies Night for another purpose.
But he couldn’t let it go. He had to be sure—even if it killed him to see the flare in her eyes every time he accused her of lying to him.
Of course she’d had to lie to him. No matter how much it pissed him off. He wasn’t an idiot.
“I had to.”
“No, you didn’t. Unless you were investigating me, you didn’t have to lie to me. You could have told me why you were there.”
“That’s not how being undercover works,” she said, her eyes snapping up to meet his. “You think any person there knew who I was? Do you think I talked to clients and said, ‘just to let you know, I’m a cop’? Of course not. That’s not how you get the information you need. That’s how you get fucking shot.”
“Why were you there?”
He could see her weighing the answer in her mind, the cogs working behind her eyes. Just when he thought she’d dismiss him and say nothing, she sank down into the soft chair across from her bed.
“You can’t say anything to anyone, Tom. I mean that. Not to the people in your club. Not to your best friend. I’ll tell you the truth—maybe you deserve to hear it. But I can’t have anyone else know. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” he said, knowing that he’d probably tell Ace anyway—keeping secrets was a violation of everything the Storm Runners were to each other, especially when it involved an undercover cop. Telling the president was the code he lived by—and maybe he should have admitted that—but he couldn’t not get the truth. It was eating away at him, deep inside.
He trusted Ace, besides. It would put her in danger, he told himself.
“Over a year ago, a woman disappeared. That led one of my coworkers to put together the pieces of a string of other, unrelated disappearances—except they weren’t unrelated. Women were being taken and no bodies were being found. No motives were being teased out in interviews. Just women—largely prostitutes or dancers or undocumented immigrants—being taken and disappearing.”
She kept explaining, but between sentences he flashed to the memories of the night Anna was taken. How they found her and the other women in the house, so close to being sold like cattle. They’d called the police and left—only six months ago.
“How long ago did you get put undercover?”
“It’s been almost half a year,” she said. “There was a huge break in the case. A group of women—including one from Detroit who had disappeared the year before—were found in a house with several dead bodies. Men who were holding them. But it barely made the news because only one of the women was a high interest case—and she wasn’t even in the house when the officers arrived.”
“High interest case?”
“She was a college-educated, middle class white woman in her 20s who hadn’t worked in the sex industry.” He nodded, as if the woman didn’t live on the club property now, when of course Carly did. She’d made him coffee that morning, laughing at cartoons with him when he imitated the voices.
“And she was found.”
“Yes, but her information was mostly about the people found dead in the house. There’s someone higher. Someone running the show. I have some leads on him, but not enough. It’s never enough to get to him.” The weariness in her voice spoke to him on a real level, something more real than all the lies between them. Hunting for a man who couldn’t be found was wearying.
Hunting for the man running the Detroit arm of a human trafficking ring was—exactly what Tom was trying to do.
Every end was a dead end.
Every twist and turn ended up at a wall.
But she had leads and he knew the name of the man she was looking for. He couldn’t tell her that without implicating the club, which he would never do. But he could push her in the right direction. Then she’d find out more and share it with him, if he played his cards right. He could use her information, get to Butch first and end the man’s miserable life.
Which meant he didn’t need to walk out of this apartment for the last time.
Grace used him—maybe not directly, but it couldn’t be denied that his coming into her life made her cover more real, more valid. So now he’d use her. If some long-forgotten guilt tickled his palms, he pushed it aside. Because the woman he’d been falling for had suddenly become his way directly to Butch.
He would have the man’s blood on his hands.
“I don’t know much about what’s happening in the city,” he said. “We aren’t involved in human trafficking.” Except for the contingent that murdered my father, our brothers, and then broke off from the club to rise and control the trafficking in the city. “But this is important and I’m not going to walk away if you need help.”
“Being at the Ladies Night has become…exhausting.” Grace slumped back and for the first time he noticed just how tired she looked. “We aren’t getting anywhere and god, I wish I’d killed that man tonight.”
“Why?�
�
“He victimized people and will victimize more. I—I’m glad I didn’t kill him, I guess. It’s not right. We have a justice system set up to punish people like him. But I hate thinking of him doing what he did to Mandi when I’m not there to stop him.”
“Some people deserve to die,” Tom said, reaching out to touch her knee. He said it was to build rapport, but he couldn’t lie to himself. His hands wanted to feel the silk of her skin.
“But we don’t have the right to kill them,” she said. “That’s why we have police and courts. That’s what it’s all here for. If I killed him because I wanted him dead—not to save a life—then what makes me better than him?”
“You’d have been exterminating evil. That’s never wrong.”
She smiled, but her face looked sad. “We disagree.”
“I can live with that.”
“So are you satisfied? Are you going to leave now?”
“I’m not satisfied,” he said with a laugh. Satisfaction wouldn’t even be on the table until he’d buried himself in her body, felt her buck with pleasure beneath him. Though he’d been furious to discover what she was, seeing her in front of him, knowing her power and her dedication—it made her more attractive than ever.
“Funny guy.”
“I try. And I’m not leaving.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re worth sticking around for.” He could hear his mother, long dead, calling him a bastard. Because Grace was worth it, but he was still going to use her to find Butch. Then, maybe, his father could rest in peace. Maybe he could stop drinking himself to sleep at night.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not quite ready to give up on this yet.” Say the right thing and she’ll fall into your arms. The closer you are to her, the closer you’re getting to Butch.
That’s what he told himself when he reached out and took her hand, wrapping his larger fingers around hers. He couldn’t deny the surge of protective tenderness that welled when her fingers clenched his back. “Come to bed.”
STRIKE: Storm Runners Motorcycle Club 2 (SRMC) Page 10
