Black Dog Security- Complete 5-Part Series

by Camilla Blake

  I frowned and looked back and forth between the two men. I couldn’t tell if Tucker was bullshitting or not. Well, I knew the truth. No way had Gerald given me any time off. He didn’t believe in it.

  “Fine. Fuck it. I’ve got better things to do anyway.”

  Tucker took me by the arm and pulled me out of the studio and back into the house. He pushed me towards a kitchen stool and cracked his knuckles. “All right. Breakfast. What do you want?”

  I just stared at him. “You’re serious?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. Unless you want something from somewhere else. We could go get donuts or something. What do you want, Charlie?”

  A wave of desire washed through me and left my hands shaking as I stared at him. “What do I want?”

  He nodded. “That’s the million-dollar question. Come on, Charlie. Tell me what you want. You want to stay here? Or do you want to get out and go have breakfast somewhere else, like a normal person?”

  I sat down heavily on a stool. “I’m supposed to be working.”

  “Yep. Charlotte Crier-Banks never misses a day. Even when the shit hits the fan and blows up in her pretty face, she’s just right back at work, letting Gerald crack the proverbial whip at her back.” He leaned casually against the counter like he wasn’t threatening the entire system I’d so delicately accepted over the years. “Do you want to be Charlotte?”

  I blinked a few times and then stood up. “I’ll get my purse.”

  “Grab a hat, too. This day is all about Charlie. We wouldn’t want anyone recognizing Charlotte.”

  “The whole day?”

  “The whole fucking day.”

  “I’ll be right back.” I ran up the stairs and into my room, forgetting all about the pig ordeal. I searched through my closet for a hat and finally pulled a baseball cap out from the back. I grabbed my purse from where I’d dropped it the night before and then hurried back downstairs.

  Tucker was waiting at the door for me. He smiled when I got closer and took the hat from me. “Let me help.”

  I froze while he pulled my hair off my neck and gathered it into a ponytail. He slipped the hat on and moved the ponytail through the hole at the back of it. When he was finished, he slowly trailed his hands down my neck and rested them on my shoulders.

  “You ready?”

  Ready for so many things, I wanted to scream at him. He was touching me so much and encouraging me to break the rules. It was an intoxicating elixir that he was feeding me. “Uh-huh.”

  He took my hand and pulled me out the front with him. For the first time in longer than I could remember, we just walked out and got in a truck. There was no fanfare or theatrics, no cars, no fuss. One of the guards we’d had before would walk out with his gun raised and look around like he was James Bond. Tucker just helped me into the taller-than-average truck and got in on his side.

  His eyes moved around, checking everything out, so I knew he was still watching out for me. It just felt so damn normal that I felt like crying suddenly.

  “You all right?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I’m just a little bit unhinged for the moment.”

  He pulled out of my driveway and pushed a few buttons on the radio. An old country song came on and he turned it down so it was barely audible. “Why?”

  I laughed again, feeling slightly hysterical. “Look at us. We’re just going out! That’s crazy.”

  He sent me a look that said everything.

  “I… I’m not a prisoner. I’ve gone out before. Obviously. It just feels different.” I blew out a steadying breath. “We’re not going to a work thing. We’re just… going out.”

  “Do you want to go to a work thing?”

  “No!” I made a face. “Sorry. No, though. I don’t want to go to a work thing. I want to do… this. Whatever this is. Going for breakfast on a random morning. No plans.”

  “No plans.” He pulled onto the highway and rolled the windows down. “Except for food. I’m hungry.”

  The wind whipped my ponytail and stung my face, but as I stared over at him through eyes watering from the cold breeze, I felt famished. “I’m starving.”

  He grinned. “Got somewhere in mind?”

  “Somewhere with greasy hash browns and black coffee, where they don’t give a shit about me.”

  “I think I know the place.”

  I shook my head, not quite able to believe what was happening. “Am I really blowing off the whole day?”

  “If you want to.”

  I screamed suddenly, making Tucker swerve. I laughed like I’d lost my mind and turned to face him. “Sorry! Sorry. I’m just excited. This is crazy. Gerald is going to bitch me out for weeks, but I need a break. I… need to get away.”

  “I’m excited for you, too, but keep the screaming to a minimum, huh?”

  I bit my lip and kept myself restrained while Tucker drove us to a little hole-in-the-wall diner that looked like it was days from being closed down. The inside was marginally cleaner than the outside, but not one of the patrons inside even looked up at us when we walked in.

  It could’ve been the fact that the bell was broken and didn’t ring, or that they were all focused on their meals. The food smelled amazing and my stomach started growling as soon as I caught a whiff.

  Tucker led us to a table and flagged the only waitress down. She stared at him with boredom clear on her face. “Two black coffees and the Tom Petty for me.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “The Tom Petty?”

  The waitress grunted. “Two drudges and two TPs. It’ll be a few minutes.”

  I watched as she left and then turned back to Tucker. Unable to hold back an incredulous laugh, I covered my mouth and widened my eyes at him.

  He wagged his eyebrows at me and nodded. “I can promise you that she doesn’t give a shit about you.”

  I laughed out loud, drawing a few annoyed stares our way. It’d been so long since someone was blatantly rude to me in public that I wasn’t sure how to handle it, besides laughing about it. “That was… amazing.”

  Tucker grinned and in the matter of a few greasy plates of food and coffee that tasted like death, all the tension slipped from my body and I felt like a new person. Or an old person—the old me maybe. By the time the angry waitress had slapped a bill down on the table, I wasn’t sure how I’d ever go back to living as Charlotte. Sitting across from Tucker, living a normal life, even for that short amount of time, felt like heaven. It was crazy how amazing it felt.

  When we got back in the truck, I felt drunk on laughter and so different from my usual self that I couldn’t hold my tongue. Before I even realized what I was doing, I was spilling my guts like a fucking girl scout.

  “It’s all bullshit, Tucker.” I turned to face him and held his steady stare. “None of it’s real. I’m not Charlotte. The marriage, the image, the bullshit Mary goddamn Poppins act, it’s all fake. That’s not me. I don’t wear pantyhose and I don’t like having my makeup done. This isn’t even my eye color!”

  He put the truck back in park and frowned. “What?”

  “It’s all an act. Gerald and the management team have me in a contract that would ruin me if I broke it. I’m trapped playing Charlotte Crier-Banks until they’re tired of me. None of it’s me.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I looked around and sighed. I didn’t know how to make him understand. My brain was working too fast for me to explain it enough to make him understand. I’d have to show him. “Go East on 141.”

  He cocked his head to the side in a cute way that reminded me of a dog I’d had while growing up. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  I nodded. “East on 141. Towards Layle. I’ll tell you when to get off.”

  He smirked. “That’s the first promising thing you’ve said all day.”

  I ignored the blush that burned my cheeks and faced the road. “Go on. I want to show you something.”

  Chapter 18

  Tucker

  I was half convince
d I’d broken Charlie. She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. I mean, I got the overall idea of what she was saying, but she’d been laughing a lot and I wasn’t sure if she’d cracked. She obviously didn’t get out much and the fresh air must’ve been going straight to her head. Nonetheless, I drove East on 141 towards Layle and didn’t stop until she told me to take an exit marked Fullerton. From Fullerton, we drove another twenty miles into the middle of nowhere and finally got to a little town with a dilapidated sign that read “aker’s Town.”

  “Baker’s Town? Maker’s?” Either way, the population below it read 124.

  “Raker’s Town. Population 122, now.” Charlie sat forward in her seat, her seatbelt released as soon as we hit a dirt road. I wanted to tell her to put it back on, but she was somewhere else.

  “Two people upped and left?”

  “One died and you’re looking at the other one.” She pointed to an overgrown drive up ahead and frowned. “Turn there. You’re going to go back about a mile and there will be a house there.”

  I followed her directions and had to avoid dips and rivets in the road that would’ve ripped the bottom off of a normal-sized vehicle. At the end of the road, there stood a shanty of a house. It leaned to one side and painted a desolate picture. One that I recognized from my own childhood.

  “Whose house?”

  She tossed me a look that I couldn’t read while climbing out of the truck. I watched her for a second, the sadness on her face at contrast with the happiness that had been there before. She looked heartbroken, and for a second I found myself wondering if the one dead person was a lover. I hated the streak of jealousy I felt that had no business anywhere near me, so I climbed out and ignored it.

  Charlie looked back at me and offered me a sad smile. “I didn’t think it’d be so bad. I haven’t been back in ten years.”

  I had plenty questions but she looked like she was getting around to telling me what she’d been trying to earlier.

  “It’s my house. It was my grandma’s, but she died the year I turned nineteen. I grew up here.” She turned back to the house and walked closer. “It looked a little better then. Maybe not much, but the lean is new.”

  I wanted to pull her away from the house. It looked like a breeze would knock it over and I didn’t want her finding herself buried under it.

  “I was raised dirt poor. Grandma tried, but when I came to live with her, she was already living on social security and it wasn’t much.”

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “They died in a house fire when I was seven. A neighbor came in and saved me, but he couldn’t get to my parents.” She looked back at me. “Grandma took me in and we lived here, making things out of nothing. She taught me everything. I learned how to cook and clean and use things in cool ways that other people would consider trash.”

  I had a hard time seeing her in that house. Even with her simple T-shirt and baseball hat, she looked like a star. Her skin was too smooth, her body just a little too fragile to be real, much less from a place like the one we were standing in front of. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “It was a long time ago. I have more memories of things I’ve done without them than I ever had of things I did with them.” Her eyes glossed over for a second but she blinked it away. “Anyway. This is where I’m from. The poorest family in a poor town. Just a girl named Charlie who had a goth phase and who used to spend hours at the local library because it was better than spending another minute in this house that was suddenly so empty without my grandma.

  “When Gerald and his team found me, I was a teenager who had no one and had just started blowing up because of some dumb videos on the Internet. I dyed my hair black constantly and had a tongue ring. I just got lucky somehow because of a video I posted about turning an old fork into a necklace.”

  I just stood there, captured by the idea of the sad little girl who’d lost everyone and had nothing.

  “Gerald offered me money. All I had to do was sign a contract with his management group and he’d give me everything I could ever want. All the money and fame I could dream of. It’d take some time and some work, but it’d happen. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought that it meant I’d have a family. Fast-forward all these years, though, and I’m still just as alone as I was then. They have me locked in a contract I signed when I was nineteen and if I break it in any way, they get everything.”

  I blinked. “What does everything mean?”

  She laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. “Everything. The house, the cars, the money, the name. Everything. I would be left with literally nothing. Not even the clothes on my back, if they wanted to be cruel. And, as I’ve learned, they do like to be cruel. Breaking character from Charlotte, the woman they created, means that I lose everything. I wouldn’t even have this house to come back to.”

  Rage coursed through me. “Surely a contract you signed at nineteen isn’t still valid. There have to be loopholes. I know a few good lawyers, Charlie. I can help.”

  She walked over to me and put her hand on my chest. “You can’t. I’m stuck. I’ve tried everything. They fucked me over. I can’t do anything about it, though. Telling you is the first time I’ve been able to say anything about it to anyone. Something as simple as a day like this, going out to a diner and then coming here… it’s amazing. I wish I could have this.”

  My chest ached for the woman in front of me. I’d known that things were weird in that house, but she was a prisoner. “You can have it.”

  “Tucker, I—”

  “I don’t mean forever. I couldn’t offer you that, even if you weren’t a prisoner in your own life. Just for a few days. Gerald’s gone. There’s nothing saying that we have to follow their fucking rules. Tell me what you want to do and we’ll do it.”

  She suddenly looked reserved and pulled her hand away from my chest. “I can’t ask you to do that, Tucker. You have a lot of stuff happening. I know your friend is still in jail. You could spend this time checking in on him.”

  “I can’t help him right now. Let me do this with you.” I felt desperate to help her do it. I couldn’t explain it, but I wanted to treat her to something different. “Tell me what you want to do.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes wide. “For real?”

  I nodded. “Of course. I’m not telling you to lose everything. That’s something you’d have to get to on your own. I’m just telling you to let loose for a couple of days. Let your hair down. Have a little fun, Charlie.”

  “I want to eat.”

  I laughed. “You want to eat?”

  She nodded. “They starve me. I’m always hungry and I just want to eat everything. I want to sit on the couch and eat chips while watching trashy TV. I want to be so fucking lazy that you have to check to make sure I’m still breathing because I haven’t moved in hours. And I want to have sex!”

  I choked on air and gave her an incredulous look. “What?”

  Her cheeks turned bright red and she laughed an awkward little laugh. “I want to have sex. It’s been eleven years and I only had it twice before then. It wasn’t great, but I’m sure it has to be better now.”

  My dick was an instant rock in my pants. “You want to have sex?”

  As if realizing what she was saying, she sputtered. “It doesn’t have to be with you! I was just saying what I wanted. I wasn’t propositioning you. I mean… I just… Okay, let’s forget that one.”

  My pride and a foreign sense of possessiveness reared their heads. “It doesn’t have to be with me?”

  She grunted. “I just mean that I wasn’t begging you or anything. I was just saying that I—”

  I grabbed her hips and tugged her into me. “If that’s something that you decide you really want to do, I’m right here, baby.”

  She looked up at me with heat in her eyes. “It’s so brave of you to offer yourself up like this. Must be the SEAL in you.”

  I laughed, despite the urgent need coursing through my body.
I leaned down and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “You call the shots. Whatever you want to do, we do. As long as I can keep you safe while we do it, we do it.”

  She shivered in my arms. “Is it too early to go back to bed?”

  “I can get us there in half an hour.” I pulled her back to the truck and helped her into her seat. “Can you wait?”

  She bit her lip and pressed her thighs together. “I waited eleven years. What’s another half an hour?”

  I shook my head and tried to shake off the desperate feelings that were making it hard to focus on anything but Charlie. I got in the truck and carefully navigated us back to the highway, making sure to keep my eyes on the road and off of her.

  On the highway, Charlie turned to face me and took a deep breath, getting up her courage for whatever she was about to say. “I’ve only ever had sex in the missionary position. It was just… It happened and then it was over. I didn’t come either time. Maybe that position doesn’t work for me?”

  I swerved to avoid slamming into the back of a Volvo and stared over at her. “This probably isn’t the best time to discuss it.”

  “You’re right. I just don’t want it to be bad. You know? You’re the first man to make me come and I want it to keep going well. If this is the sex that’s going to hold me over for another eleven years, I want it to be something to remember.” She was bright red, but it didn’t stop her from talking. “I’m not doubting your skills. You’re probably used to this sort of thing. I was just saying that I don’t know about missionary.”

  I got off the highway and turned towards her house. “Charlie. You’re killing me.”

  “Sorry. I’ll stop talking.”

  “It’ll be good. I’ll make sure it’s good.”

  She took off her seatbelt when we were closer to her house and I shook my head. “What?”

  “Put your seatbelt back on.”

  She raised her eyebrow. “We’re less than a hundred feet from my driveway.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She scooted closer to me. “I care about not being restrained. I want to touch you. I’ve wanted to touch you since day one. You’re hot, Tucker. I know you know that, but still. I wanted to say it.”