‘I don’t care about his jokes and Rosie will come with me, if I have to pick her up and carry her then she’ll fucking come with me.’
‘If you let me come with you then I can deal with Rosie while you keep Trystan at bay. We do make a good team, you know.’
‘You’re forgetting about this stupid bounty. I don’t want you out there because I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘Word won’t be out here yet,’ she said, stroking her fingertips up and down his sternum. ‘It will be quicker if you let me come. You will draw attention to yourself if you take Rosie against her will. We can be in and out by tonight if we work together.’
‘You’re so sure that Rosie will come with you?’ Dax asked.
‘You can get us a room so that we have a key-card. If we take a car and park in the hotel parking lot, then we can take an elevator straight to their floor. Who will we come across in a hotel corridor? More than that, who would know to look for me there? No one in Vegas will have heard about the bounty yet. You said yourself that word takes time to get around.’
They were dealing with this drama caused by her sister and Trystan Stark, then they would have to go back to LA to deal with the bounty and with Maurice Stark. Ivy wondered when she’d have the time to talk to Dax about what Carina had told her. She would have to, but now didn’t seem like the time to bring up his mother and her history.
‘Fine. I’ll keep calling the hotel, and as soon as we know they’re there I’ll set up a meeting with Trystan.’
‘If they know that we’re coming, won’t they run away?’
Dax exhaled and raised his arm to put it over her head and around her shoulders, bringing her body onto his. ‘You’re missing the point. Trystan only went after Rosie because she was easy pickings and because he knew it would rile us. He’ll agree to a meeting. He’ll want to see us running after him and begging him for a favour. This is the kind of thing that Trystan does to amuse himself.’
‘He still hasn’t gotten over his grudge, has he?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Dax said. ‘But don’t worry, we won’t have to deal with him ever again after this. I can talk to Mauri, he might send Trystan on a forced vacation of his own.’
Resting her head on his chest, Ivy enjoyed this moment that they had together; they were few and far between these days. She didn’t think that Mauri would be sending Trystan anywhere, not while he was sick and could go at any time. But she had to admit that the idea of Trystan taking a long walk certainly sounded like a good idea to her.
Ivy came out of the bedroom and closed the door. She had come to Saul’s place and brought Carina with her, yet she’d spent all afternoon in bed with her husband, and that wasn’t exactly polite of her. Making the effort to be social, she entered the living room and saw Carina was reading while Saul was seated on a second couch watching sports on TV. When Ivy came in, both of them stopped to make her their focus.
‘Where’s Dax?’ Carina asked, slipping a bookmark into her book.
‘Asleep,’ Ivy said. ‘I’ll wake him up soon.’
‘Glad everyone’s so comfortable,’ Saul muttered and switched off the TV.
‘Where’s Brittany? Do you want me to explain that—‘
‘That what?’ he asked. ‘That my ex-girlfriend showed up to track down her sister with her mother-in-law in tow? That my ex-girlfriend’s husband came to protect her against the bounty hunters but they ended up screwing in my second bedroom instead?’
Wincing against the obvious annoyance in Saul’s voice, she crossed to sit on the couch with him. ‘In his defence, Dax was still protecting me while we were having sex.’
‘And I can’t say a goddamn word that might upset you or scare you away ‘cause there’s a good chance your husband will kill me in my sleep if I do,’ Saul hissed.
‘Dax wouldn’t kill you while you slept, that’s like shooting a man in the back, it’s not sportsmanlike.’
‘I’m reassured,’ he said.
‘We appreciate this,’ Ivy said, reaching over to take one of his hands onto her knee. ‘And look on the bright side, you’re making a new friend. Having a guy like the Ravager on your side could prove to be advantageous.’
‘The Ravager?’ Carina asked, drawing their attention.
‘It’s the name Dax fights under,’ Ivy said.
‘He’s a pro on the underground fighting circuit. My ex-girlfriend married a man who knows a hundred ways to kill a man without making a sound.’
Carina didn’t exactly smile, but her eyes lit in amusement. Poor Saul was flabbergasted, but he could only accept his fate as it stood, because they needed him. ‘We’ll only be here a little while longer. Now that Dax is here, he’ll keep Trystan occupied while I talk to Rosie. I promise, we’ll be gone by tonight. Brittany will appreciate a man who treats women right, she wouldn’t like it much if you just tossed us out onto the street.’
‘I think she’d have liked that just fine,’ Saul said.
‘You didn’t even know her name this morning, it’s not as if I upset your great love.’
‘Maybe, we’ll never know now, will we?’ he asked then yawned, but it disappeared from his face when Dax walked in and made eye contact with her.
‘Time to go,’ Dax said.
‘Already?’ Ivy asked, leaping up off the couch and throwing Saul’s hand back to his lap. ‘How do you know that—‘
‘Trystan called, he wants to meet.’
‘You were right,’ Ivy sighed.
‘Right about what?’ Carina asked.
Dax didn’t acknowledge her, he wandered off in the direction of the kitchen, so Ivy answered. ‘Dax said that Trystan would want to show off, that he would want to invite us to the suite just to try and rile us.’
‘Brad is such a pleasant man,’ Carina said. ‘I can’t understand how Trystan turned out to be so obnoxious.’
‘He’s had a lot of practise,’ Ivy said, and Dax came back to the group.
‘Come on.’
‘What shall we do with Carina?’ Ivy asked, causing him to halt in the doorway.
‘She can stay here,’ Dax said as though Carina wasn’t in the room.
‘But if we’re taking Rosie home, we’re not going to come back here, are we?’
‘Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you brought her here where she doesn’t belong,’ Dax said.
‘It wasn’t like I had a lot of time to consider my options. I had to move fast.’
‘She’s taken care of herself for years, she’ll figure out how to get home.’
He disappeared from the room and the front door closed, signalling that he’d left the building.
‘What a sweetheart, no wonder you fell in love with him,’ Saul said, but Ivy ignored him.
‘Carina, you stay here. I’ll talk to Dax and—‘
‘He won’t let me in, will he?’ Carina asked.
‘Now isn’t the time to talk about this,’ Ivy said. ‘I need… time.’
She didn’t like to be rude to anyone, but this wasn’t the time to worry about Dax and Carina’s relationship. If she was honest with herself, Ivy still hadn’t figured out how she felt about Carina. She wasn’t yet sure if she wanted to use her influence over Dax to encourage him into a relationship that he didn’t want when Carina might be bad news.
Sure, she came across as quite sweet and innocent, but the woman had walked away from her child when he was still an infant in need of a mother. Carina hadn’t come back or followed up to see how Dax was. Anything could have happened to her son and what did happen to him wasn’t at all pleasant.
Realising that she hadn’t yet forgiven Carina for what she had done to Dax, Ivy left Saul’s house alone. Going into the thick heat of the desert, she crossed the drive to reach the car she’d driven here.
Dax was in a different vehicle parked behind hers. Though he was wearing his shades, he still managed to glower at her, and she glowered right back. Opening the trunk of her car, she unzipped the s
uitcase and pulled some bills from the wad of cash still nestled in her clothes. Ivy was heading back into the house when she heard Dax exit his car.
‘Give me the keys,’ he said, and she turned to toss him the car keys though she didn’t know why he needed them.
Pushing open the front door, she took the cash into the living room where she had left Saul and Carina. She gave each of them a thousand dollars.
‘You, for your trouble,’ Ivy said to Saul, then turned to Carina. ‘That should get you home, to wherever that is.’
‘It’s over?’ Carina asked. ‘But I didn’t get a chance to—‘
‘The truth is there’s too much going on for Dax to deal with this right now,’ Ivy said. ‘If you want to give me a phone number, I can talk to Dax, and if he decides he wants to get in touch, then I’ll tell him to call you.’
‘A phone call,’ Carina said.
Ivy shrugged. ‘It’s the best I can offer right now.’
With the bounty and Mauri’s illness, this wasn’t the time for an emotional reunion between mother and son. If Carina pushed Dax right now, then she wouldn’t get the response that she was hoping for. Dax would be abrupt, and he could be cold. His only reaction to Carina so far had been to ignore her, and that didn’t bode well.
Saul got them pen and paper so Carina could write down her phone number and after taking it, Ivy said her goodbyes. She went outside to see Dax back in his car enjoying the air conditioning until he buzzed the window down a couple of inches.
‘Get in.’
Trusting that Dax had switched her things into his car, she did as he asked and got in the passenger seat. ‘Is Trystan going to be a nightmare?’
‘Yes,’ Dax answered. ‘Your sister knows how to pick ‘em.’
He backed out of the driveway and began to head toward The Strip. ‘Ironically,’ she said, fishing in the backseat for her purse, which Dax had flung in there. ‘She always went for the bad boys, and I always tried to avoid them.’
‘Why is that ironic?’
Peeking up from her purse, she smiled at his profile. ‘No reason, my baby-faced angel.’
His scowl made her laugh, and she pulled her sunglasses from her purse. ‘Ok. So, I’m no innocent, but I’m better than Trystan.’
‘Hands down,’ she said. ‘Rosie just likes the attention and a guy like Trystan, with money, he could take care of her. If he was decent that is. I didn’t know that they were flirting until she vanished with him last night. Carina said that they met at Mauri’s party.’
‘Why did you bring her? Why would you—‘
‘Carina came of her own accord. I packed up our things at the beach house and by the time I got downstairs, she was waiting for me. I didn’t have the time to argue.’
‘I don’t want you to make friends with her.’
‘I haven’t. I spent most of the time avoiding her. But we did… we got the chance to talk before Rosie took off. I think you should listen to what she has to say.’
‘So now you know more about where I come from than I do?’ Dax grumbled.
‘If you’d taken the time to listen to her then you would know too,’ Ivy said. ‘Some of what she said was… I was shocked, but… it made sense too.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
Unsure if he was putting up the barriers just to be bull-headed, or because he was affected by his past, Ivy started gently. ‘When she was pregnant, she left to protect you,’ she said, deliberately avoiding Bruno’s name. Though riling Dax now would mean that his patience with Trystan would be non-existent, which was a good thing as far as Ivy was concerned. Dax had shown Trystan plenty of patience over the years, too much in fact.
‘Protect me from what? Getting involved in Mauri’s world?’ Dax asked. ‘That worked out well, didn’t it?’
‘She didn’t know that Mauri had tracked you down and taken you in until years after the fact. She figured that you wouldn’t want to see her. Carina knows Mauri well, knows the people in his world, and if they had closed ranks around you—‘
‘She didn’t try, did she?’ Dax asked.
‘Did you want her to? Can you see yourself welcoming her? Look at how you’re acting towards her now, if she had shown up when you were fifteen or sixteen, would you have fought against Mauri to keep her in your life? Be honest.’
His jaw moved, and Ivy knew he was peeved by the direction of the conversation, but she put her purse back on the backseat and waited for him to respond.
‘Mauri told me that… that he tried to stop me fighting.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Me neither. When he did, I got aggressive, and that’s why he pulled me from school. He let me go back to fighting, and that changed things, calmed me down, least that’s what he said.’
So Dax had been learning things about where he came from. Knowing that sort of made this whole journey worth it. They could have stayed away and refused to return with Brad despite Mauri’s illness. But if they had done that then Dax would never have any answers to his questions.
Time had forced him to face up to where he had come from, Mauri had limited time left, and he was the greatest source of information. Bruno would never offer it if anyone saw him again, and Carina had her own agenda. That being said, Mauri always had an agenda too, except this time they knew exactly what it was – to have Dax take over the reins in line with Brad.
‘I can imagine you as an angry teen,’ Ivy said. ‘All the more reason to doubt that you’d let Carina in though.’ Watching the road in front of them, an idea struck her. ‘Wait a minute, is that why…? You think that because when you lost the outlet for your anger back then that… that’s why you thought you might hurt me when you retire from fighting now?’
‘Makes sense,’ he mumbled.
‘To who?’ she sighed. ‘Dax. You’re nothing like him, and you are nothing like the angry, hormonal teenager you were back then. You’ve grown and changed, even just in these months since we’ve been together I’ve seen a change in you. You should be proud of what you’ve become, not fear it.’
‘I don’t fear—‘
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re a big brave man who fears nothing… I’m telling you that I’m proud of you, and I wouldn’t have married you if I feared you. You can always beat the shit out of your bag and run as many miles as you want every time I piss you off. When you give up fighting, we’ll find something else to keep you occupied.’
‘Something else like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she exhaled. ‘You can teach our boys how to defend themselves.’
Taking his eyes from the road, he frowned at her. ‘Our what?’
‘Sure. Now that I know you’re not going to turn them into felons, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have kids.’ This time it was her stomach that was the focus of his scowl. ‘No, I am not pregnant… yet. But it’s something to think about.’
‘If I can keep you alive long enough.’
‘Well yeah, I guess there’s that,’ she smiled. ‘I always worried that you brought more to this partnership than I did, you have skills that you get paid for and I just sort of tag along. But having babies… that’s something we can do together.’
‘Ok, this conversation is too weird to have while we’re on our way to do what we’re going to do.’
‘Off to threaten together again,’ she said, sliding a hand onto his arm. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure that Bri and Blaser will babysit if we have to do this when we get back home.’
Bri and Blaser were their neighbours and employers in North Carolina. That was a friendship they could trust wouldn’t turn into this kind of craziness, and it was a friendship that Ivy wanted to get back to as soon as possible.
Chapter Twenty-One
The GoldSpring hadn’t changed. Ivy had been working here when she met Dax, which wasn’t all that long ago if she put it into real terms. But they’d both changed and been through so much together that it seemed like a lifetime ago.
It was diffi
cult to be in this place again because it was also the place that Trystan had assaulted her. But that was part of the reason that Trystan was happy to keep coming here and spending his father’s money. In this hotel, the staff would let him get away with anything as long as he kept coming back to splurge as he did at frequent intervals throughout the year.
Dax parked in the private parking garage and then took her out of the car and up in the elevator to the floor where Trystan’s suite was located. With gold carpeting and gleaming white walls, the sweet smell of vanilla flowed down the hallway when the elevator doors opened. It was pumped in, Ivy knew that the housekeeping staff had a specific, and large, budget just for the air fresheners alone.
‘You stay quiet,’ Dax said, walking just ahead of her. ‘Stay behind me.’
‘I don’t care what you do to Trystan,’ she whispered. ‘Just don’t let him upset you.’
‘I know how to deal with Trystan.’
The suite had double doors and was right at the end of the corridor. When they got there, Dax handed her the car key. ‘Why are you giving me this?’ she asked, tucking it into the pocket of her dress.
‘Because I want you to get Rosie and get out. Don’t wait for me. Just go.’
‘But how will you—?’
‘I don’t need you to look after me,’ Dax said.
‘We can go back to Saul’s and meet you there after—‘
‘No, go back to the beach house. You’ll be safe there. All of your things are in the car downstairs.’
‘I’m not leaving you here with him,’ Ivy said.
‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Dax said. ‘If it goes smoothly we’ll all be riding back together. But I’ll give you cover if you need to—‘
‘You didn’t bring this up until now, because…?
‘Because now there’s no time to argue about it,’ he said. Turning to face the door, he knocked, then pushed her behind his back again.
The GoldSpring-provided private attendant opened the door. She was blonde and in the same black and white uniform that Ivy had worn when she worked here.
Fighting Back (Harrow #2) Page 22