by Julie Kriss
“What is it?” I finally asked him, sometime in the late afternoon. We were on the sofa, and I pulled the papers out of his hand and sat up, straddling his hips.
He looked up at me. He was wearing jeans and a dark gray t-shirt, his arms marvels of muscle and ink. He was relaxed, but I could feel the knot of tension in his spine, his shoulders. Still, he blinked at me lazily. “What?”
“Whatever is bothering you,” I said. I was wearing a pair of women’s boxer shorts and a snug cotton top, and I watched his gaze travel down over my breasts at leisure. The sated lion thinking about another meal.
As always, he didn’t try to fob me off, just gave it to me straight. “Someone has pissed me off, put me in a bad position. I’m going to take care of it,” he said.
“So you admit it’s a problem.”
“A problem I’m going to solve.”
“How?”
He smiled lazily at me. “I’ll think of something.”
I slid my butt strategically over the crotch of his jeans, settling in just so. “I can get it out of you,” I warned.
That made him smile wider. “I want to see you try.”
I leaned forward, pressing my palms into his hard, warm chest, brushing my lips along his stubbled jaw. “Talk, prisoner.”
“No way.”
“If it’s important, you can tell me, you know.”
“It’s just a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “Someone is messing with me. I’m going to make it stop.”
I thought about that. If someone was messing with Devon and irritating him, it was probably someone from his former life. His illegal life. “Someone wants money?”
There was only the tiniest pause, the tiniest flinch, in the man beneath me. “Everyone wants money,” he said.
He hadn’t answered the question. But his body had. Someone wanted money, maybe. But they also wanted more than that. They wanted something he didn’t want to give, something that made him uneasy. “Don’t do it,” I said into his neck.
There was a beat of surprise. “Don’t do what?”
“Whatever it is this person is asking. Don’t do it.”
He was quiet for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. I kept my face pressed lightly to his neck, feeling the heat from his skin, taking in his scent. I felt a flutter of panic, as if all of this was just for the moment—as if I could lose it. As if he could make a wrong move and be gone again, just like last time. Leaving me alone.
“You’re freaking psychic, you know that?” he said at last. “You see everything. It’s weird.”
“I don’t see anything,” I countered, pushing down on his chest so I could rise up again. “Because you don’t tell me.”
“And I’m not going to,” he said. He lifted a hand and brushed my cheek. “But I’m not going to do it. That much, I can say.”
My phone rang, and I blew out a breath, frustrated. I climbed off him and picked up the phone, which was sitting on a side table. “Hey, Gwen,” I said, answering it.
“Are you with Hot Dark and Handsome?” she asked.
Damn. I flinched and hoped Devon hadn’t heard that. “Yes. Why?”
“You might want to warn him that it’s hit the news.”
“What has?”
“Him. Devon Wilder. I’m looking at a local news website right now. ‘Ex-con goes from convicted felon to mega-heir overnight.’ That’s the headline.”
I blinked, surprised. I hadn’t thought the news would be interested in Devon. I hadn’t thought they’d have a reason. “Jesus.” I turned around and found that Devon had sat up on the sofa and was watching me. “Is there a picture?”
Gwen sighed. “Just his mug shot. And a shot of his house in Diablo. Jeez, Liv. It looks hella nice.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “Thanks for the warning.”
“You’re welcome. I hope you’re ready for some publicity. Because it looks like you’re about to get some.”
We decided, in light of the news story, that Devon should take me home instead of my staying the night. There were no signs of reporters in Diablo yet, but Devon didn’t want to take the chance. “They can try talking to me if they want,” he said, shrugging. “But I don’t want anyone bothering you.”
He’d taken the appearance of the story in stride, but the line of his shoulders got more tense, and his eyes grew as hard as chips of ice. Something about this bothered him, and it wasn’t just the invasion of privacy. “It’ll blow over, right?” I said as I tossed my overnight bag into the back of his car. “We just ignore it, and they move on. Right?”
He said nothing for a minute as he watched me get into the passenger seat, and then he started the car. “If they dig, they’ll find things,” he said.
“Things?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He just drove.
My chest felt tight. He was so freaking hard to unravel, this man. He was locked down so tight. Every time I peeled back a layer, I found there were more I hadn’t known existed. I looked out the window at the passing scenery and realized I didn’t want to let him off the hook. “Bad things?” I asked.
“It depends how you look at it.”
I blew out a frustrated breath and tried again. “Are you secretly married?”
“No.”
“You have an illegitimate kid somewhere?”
“Jesus. No.”
“You killed someone?”
Now he was the one who blew out a frustrated breath. “No.”
“Then tell me, Devon, or I’m going to keep guessing.”
“It’s public record. It’s just shit I don’t want dragged up and printed, that’s all.”
Which still wasn’t an answer. “Tell me.”
He was quiet. This time, watching him, I could tell it wasn’t because he was shutting me out. It was because he was trying to find the words.
I waited. The silence stretched so long that I knew that whatever it was was bad. Maybe the worst.
“I lied to you about something,” he said finally.
My stomach dropped for a sickening minute. “What?”
“I told you that my prison stretch was the worst thing that ever happened to me.” His knuckles were white on the wheel. “It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.”
“Okay,” I said.
He was quiet for another minute, finding the words again as the traffic flashed by. The lights of the city were on our left, beautiful under the night sky. “I told you that Cavan split after our mother died,” he finally said.
“Yes,” I said softly.
“What I didn’t tell you was that she was murdered. Our mother. She was killed by her boyfriend. He choked her unconscious, then stabbed her in the chest with scissors. He’s on death row. I was sixteen.”
The air was sucked out of the car; it was just gone. I felt unmoored, as if we were in a capsule gliding through space instead of on a California highway. “Devon,” I managed.
“Cavan was eighteen. Our dad left when we were little kids, and Mom was on her own. She had boyfriends. Some of them were good, some bad. We knew the last one was a bad one, but there was nothing we could do. She wouldn’t listen to us. She’d only been dating him two months when he killed her.” He kept his hands on the wheel, his gaze straight ahead. “Cavan was an adult, but I wasn’t. He left town. I went underground to avoid the foster system. I bunked with friends, mostly Max.”
He’d been homeless at sixteen? “Oh, my God,” I said.
But he held up a hand, briefly and sharply, cutting me off. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t get worked up. My parents hated each other, and after Dad left Mom barely took care of us as it was. I was already basically on my own, even before she died. I was used to it. And even as a kid, I was a tough little shit. I’m not a victim. I took care of myself. You understand?”
I shook my head. My life, growing up with my sister and my has-been mother in Hollywood, seemed ridiculously soft. “But what did you do?”
“I learned to fix cars,” he said. “I sl
ept in Max’s basement. Max’s dad was a drunk, and he barely knew what was going on. And LA is an easy place to stay lost in. I worked at a mechanic’s for pay under the table, and I tried to study the same as if I was in school. And I learned to drive.”
No wonder he was so closed off, so alone. That had been Devon Wilder’s life, one I couldn’t picture. But all of that was past, and he didn’t want my sympathy, my pity. “So,” I made myself say, “you think the media will dig this up.”
“My mother’s murder case is public record,” he said. We were pulling in to Shady Oaks now, the building lit by its dim corridor lights in the darkness. “Anyone who does a basic search will find it. I don’t particularly want that shit dredged up, but there’s nothing I can do. It happened. He went away for it. It’s fact. The only good thing about the press might be if Cavan happens to read the article. Maybe then he’ll find me.”
He stopped the car and put it in park. I stared out the windshield, feeling helpless. I said the only thing I could think of. “I just wish I could do something. That I could help.”
He leaned over, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed me. It was a good kiss, a powerful kiss, one he used to say all the things he didn’t know how to. It was sex—it was definitely sex—but it was more than that. It was him and me. What we’d been from the first time we’d passed each other in the corridors of Shady Oaks, the first time our eyes had met. He was telling me it mattered. I mattered.
He broke it off. “You do plenty,” he said, his voice low.
I curled my hands over his shoulders. “Okay,” I said. It would have to be good enough. “Call me tomorrow.”
He waited while I went through the front gates, while I climbed the steps to the second floor. His car was still there when I put my key in my door and opened it. I turned and gave him a wave, and he drove off while I watched. Then I turned to go inside.
“Hey there,” said a voice.
I turned. A man was coming toward me, his footsteps hard on the wet floor of the corridor. I didn’t recognize him. He wore a bulky jacket and a baseball cap.
It took me a split second, but it was a split second too long. I tried to duck into the open doorway of my apartment, but his hands were already on me. I opened my mouth to scream, but his palm was already there. He pushed me down the corridor to the stairs, open to the rain, their surface slick as they descended to the courtyard.
“Tell Devon Wilder this is a warning,” he said, and he pushed me. And everything went black.
Twenty-One
Devon
My cell phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. I jerked out of sleep, wondering at first what the hell Craig Bastien wanted with me in the middle of the night. But then I recognized the ring tone. It was the phone from my present life, not the phone from my past.
I’d given the number to almost no one, but still I didn’t recognize the number that came up on the screen. I answered it, my voice growly from sleep. “Yeah?”
“Devon?”
It was Olivia, and something was wrong. In an instant I was fully awake. “Olivia. What is it?”
There was a pause. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I woke you up. It’s late. I just… I need a ride.”
I was already out of bed, searching the floor for my jeans. “Where are you?” I said. “What happened?”
She sighed. She sounded tired, so tired. “I’m at UCSF.”
The hospital? “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. But I fell down the stairs at Shady Oaks, and I passed out, and I guess an ambulance came. I don’t remember.” Her words were tumbling out of her, as if she couldn’t quite control them. “They checked me out, and my wrist is sprained, but otherwise I’m fine. They discharged me. And I suppose I could take a cab home, but the battery’s dead on my phone and I can’t charge it, and it’s so late and I just—” Her voice cracked a little. “I called you instead.”
“Hold on,” I said. I had pants and shoes on now, and I swiped a shirt from where I’d tossed it on the end of the bed. “I’m coming. Just tell me where you are and hold tight.”
Olivia exhaled a breath. “I’m at a pay phone in the lobby.”
“Is anyone near you? Anyone around?”
“A few people. Doctors, nurses. But it’s pretty quiet.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have called. It’s so far for you to come. I wasn’t thinking. It’ll take you time to get here.”
“Sweetheart,” I said, “it won’t take me any time at all.” Still holding the shirt, I set the alarm, slammed the front door behind me, and got in my car. “Just don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. And don’t talk to anyone.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine.” Her voice trembled, just a little. “Please hurry.”
I hung up and drove like a bat out of hell. I’d never done a getaway job this fast, never driven this fast even when the cops were after us. My wheels ate up the road, which was as empty as any California highway ever gets at three o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t just because Olivia was sitting alone in a hospital lobby, shaken and upset and waiting for me. It was because of what she’d said.
I fell down the stairs at Shady Oaks.
I’d watched her go to her door hours ago. I’d watched her put the key in the lock and open it. I’d watched her turn around and wave. She’d been nowhere near the stairs.
Fell, my ass.
There was an ember of a fire, deep down inside me, in my gut, at the base of my spine, and it started to burn.
Gray Jensen wouldn’t have the guts to push a woman down the stairs. He was finished, anyway. Only one man I knew had the means to have me watched, to find out I was spending my time with Olivia. And only one man I knew had the motivation, and the pure blackness of soul, to have her pushed down the stairs.
I hadn’t answered him about his shipment, and he was sending me a message. You’re in. You may not think you are, but you are. You’re in this.
I pulled up to the emergency entrance of UCSF and got out of the car. Olivia had already spotted me. She came through the glass doors and toward me. She was still wearing the clothes I’d dropped her off in—a pair of loose linen pants, now wrinkled, a tank top, and a thin sweater—and her wrist was bandaged. She looked pale, and when I got close I saw that the side of her face was bruised from the fall. Her face. The fire got hotter, the flames licking up my stomach and my chest.
Still, I tried to keep myself calm. Without a thought to what it looked like to anyone watching, she flung herself at me and buried her face in my neck as I caught her. “I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life,” she said, her voice muffled against my skin.
I held her for a minute, and then I gently pushed her away. I wanted to get the fuck out of here. But first I looked into her bruised face, my thumb gently brushing her temple. For a second the fire was so hot I couldn’t speak. “Baby,” I managed.
“I’m okay.” She shook her head. “The doctors checked me out, I promise.”
“No concussion?”
“No. They did all the tests. X-rays, too. It was just a fall. I need rest. I’ll be fine.”
I held her still for a second and looked at her. “A fall,” I said, not phrasing it as a question.
Her eyes slid away from mine. “Can we get out of here?”
I helped her into the car, and I pulled away from the hospital. She was shaken up, but the fire was burning and I had to have the truth. “Did he hit you?” I asked.
She had been looking straight ahead, but now she turned and looked at me. “Did who hit me?”
“The man who did this to you.” When she was quiet, I added, “You can’t lie to me about this. I already figured it out. Just tell me the truth.”
She had gone stiff and tense in her seat, and I realized she was afraid. “I really don’t—”
“Olivia.”
She flinched, and I felt lower than shit. I was supposed to be the good guy, the nice guy, here. I was supposed to say reassuring th
ings to her, tell her it was going to be okay, make her feel better after her shitty night. Instead I said, “Tell me.”
“He said it was a warning,” she said at last.
“To you?”
“No.” She paused. “To you.”
For a split second the road disappeared and all I saw was red. Oh, Craig Bastien, you thought you were so clever, using my woman to threaten me. You have no fucking idea.
“Devon,” Olivia said. “What is this about? Can you even tell me?”
“Did he hit you?” I asked her again.
She bit her lip. “No. He pushed me down the stairs.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No. I’d never seen him before.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because this has to do with you,” she said, her voice cracking. “And I thought maybe that was what he… whoever this is actually wanted. For the police to start bothering you. For you to get in trouble.”
Some fucker had pushed her down the stairs, and she was still looking out for me. I truly didn’t deserve this woman. Still, I was glad she hadn’t gone to the cops. I would take care of this myself. “Some people from my old life are on my case,” I told her, figuring I owed her at least part of an explanation. “They want me to get involved with their shit again. Illegal stuff.”
She stared at me in shock. “Someone wants you to drive?”
I shook my head. “Not driving. They’ve heard I came into some money. They want me to help them front a deal. A shipment coming into the harbor.”
Olivia put her hand to her stomach, as if it was turning. “Drugs?” she said. “Someone wants to drag you into a drug deal? Devon, you can’t do that. You just got out of prison, out of that life. You just got the opportunity to start new. You can’t.”
She was worried about me. Yet another indication that I didn’t deserve her. “I know,” I agreed. “I can’t do it. I don’t want to. And I’m not going to.”