Watching the two of them drive off, Jack entertained the thought of following them. He could hang back far enough that they wouldn’t see, and he could make sure she got home safe. But it would just add fuel to the fire of him doing—well, whatever it was she was saying he was doing. Being controlling, overprotective, whatever. She was right. But he also wasn’t going to stop. She was pregnant with his child, she’d said as much. They were going to need to talk about what her accepting his help meant. He didn’t want to be controlling, but he also wanted to make sure that his child had the best possible care and start and all of those things he hadn’t had when he was a kid. So, he’d let her cool down, say he was sorry, and then they’d talk more.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling in the pit of his stomach that he was doing something very wrong.
Chapter Ten Mindy rested her head against the window and tried to think. As soon as she’d gotten into the car, Cook had asked her what she needed, and the cold truth was that she didn’t know.
“Do you want to stay in town?” His voice had been so gentle and kind.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” She closed her eyes tight and tried to will everything away. There was no more pretending now. She wrapped her arms around her belly and silently swore to Bean that everything would be alright; she would take care of everything and make sure that it was all fine. Stomping away from Jack had felt like the rightest right thing she’d ever done, but as soon as she was in Cook’s car and driving away, she realized how very much she’d wanted him to stop her. For him to rush over, grab her hand and yank her to him, demanding that she go with him to wherever he told her she could go. She’d wanted him to stop her from acting like an idiot by being an idiot. Mindy, girl, that’s never going to work out in your favor.
She’d told Jack the truth, and he’d behaved very well. She’d heard about guys who didn’t handle it half that well finding out that their girlfriend was barely knocked up, never mind halfway to birth. And he’d gotten protective, but what did she expect from a guy who wore leather and rode a bike and was the president of a group of thugs and highwaymen who deliberately chose to be outlaws? Wasn’t that half of what turned her on about bikers and that type of guy? Wasn’t that what she’d always said before? That they were fiercely protective of what was theirs but didn’t hold hard feelings once you were done being theirs?
And yet she’d run the moment Jack gave her that kind of protection. Was it because she had finally found a place where she could maybe rest? Was she going to be one of those sorts of troubled women who demanded that everyone love them even as they refused to be loved? Was she going to be just like her mother, and was she going to pass that kind of horseshit along to the Bean in turn? She wanted so much better than that. Not for herself, she knew better than to wish for good things for herself, but for the Bean. For the baby, and the child, and the adult that the Bean would eventually turn into.
She thought about telling Cook to turn around, but what were the odds the famous Jackdaw, the one the waitresses all called Mr. Big, would still be there? He wasn’t one to wait around, and hell, maybe she wasn’t even the first woman he’d knocked up. He could have children spread across a dozen states, not one of whom knew their daddy. She didn’t know a thing about the man, and here she was thinking about having a life with him, about him protecting her. It was nonsense, and she knew it was nonsense, and it was time to smarten up. So, she let Cook keep driving.
“Let me take you to a motel,” he said. “I can pay for the room if that’s a problem. Let you get your head together somewhere he doesn’t know where you are. So you can be calm, happy, rested, and figure out what you need to do next. Does that make sense? Sound right?”
She didn’t know what to do or what to say. She let her head loll against the window and closed her eyes. It was just easier. Easier, right now, to be passive. To let someone else take care of things. She wished she’d let Jack take care of things. That would have been nice. To just rest with him and let him be the one who figured things out. Yeah, she didn’t know much about him, but she was having his baby, so surely it would be good to get to know him. Just in case he really was some kind of dirtbag jerk who should never be allowed near a child. Because she’d already made the call not to run away, so surely—positively—it made sense to do it this way?
Yeah. Yeah, she’d let Cook take her wherever he wanted to take her, and she wouldn’t fight because it was going to be easier this way. And then she’d call Jack on her phone, tell him where she was, and tell him she’d made a mistake rushing off with Cook. That she should have listened to him and talked to him instead of disappearing. He would understand, and they’d work things out.
But right now, she was so tired. She’d swear the Bean sapped all of her energy. It was better than the first trimester when she’d been so constantly sick, but her energy hadn’t ever recovered, and she could trust Cook, she could rest here. That was good. That was okay.
Chapter Eleven It was a voice that pulled her out of sleep. She couldn’t quite make out the words, they were so quietly spoken, but she heard them. She thought it was Cook talking, but she wasn’t sure. Something about on his way, something about a girl. Maybe she was dreaming, maybe he was listening to the radio. By the time she pulled herself together enough to open her eyes, sit up, and wipe the drool from her lip, Cook was silent in his seat, both hands on the wheel, focused on the distance. It had gotten dark while she had been asleep, and the headlights didn’t do much to illuminate the darkness, outside of showing the winding twists of the old road.
They weren’t on the highway. Why weren’t they on the highway or one of the main routes around town? Nothing was on these old back roads.
“Cook,” she said, hearing the gravel in her voice. “Where are we?”
He was startled by the sound of her voice, glancing over at her with a nervous expression she didn’t remember seeing him wear before.
“Hey,” he said, his voice just a little higher pitched than she was used to. “I thought you’d sleep longer.” He winced, and she didn’t know quite why. “You just looked so tired.”
She remembered her thoughts from before she went to sleep, how very tired she had been, and how she’d longed for someone else to make a call for her. How passive she’d gone. Looking at Cook now, she was entirely sure she’d made absolutely the wrong choice.
“What’s going on?” She tried to make her voice firm and calm at the same time, but the fear that was swelling in her stomach was making that extremely difficult. She tasted acid on her tongue and tried to steady her breathing.
He shook his head hard; he seemed even more upset than she was. “You need help, Mindy. I know you don’t want me, and that’s just fine, but you and your baby need help. That man is a monster, he’s done terrible things, and all of the Wardens know it. I don’t know why the Chain Gang still follows him. He’s a monster. Your baby will belong to a monster if you’re not careful.”
He spoke with a conviction that she might have admired in a different circumstance. At this moment, however, the fear in her stomach solidified into something that was dragging her down, fast and hard.
“Cook, answer me. Where are we, and where are you taking me?”
“I’m taking you to a motel. Just like I said.” His jaw set, hard and fast, and she stared at him, trying to read between the lines.
“Who’s meeting us there?”
He winced again, and she got it, all of a sudden.
“One of the Wardens. Because they want to get me and get the baby, to use against Jackdaw.”
“It’s not like that,” Cook snapped back. “It’s not like that at all. They’re good men, they’re just trying to survive in a bullshit situation, and he doesn’t understand. He won’t admit what he did to them, and that makes it harder for them to do their work. They want to clean up this town, and remove the unsavory element.”
Objectively, she noted that she was fighting back as if she was somehow involv
ed in the Chain Gang. But then, maybe she was. Maybe she already was. Maybe that was going to be a thing she was going to need to admit and deal with before she could move forward.
“Cook, how are you involved with these people?”
“I didn’t want to be,” he said, shaking his head again. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I wanted the diner to be neutral territory. Neutral. I just wanted to make food and keep my head down. No more gambling, no more ladies, no more things that I shouldn’t be doing. I was going to get my shit together and then I was going to go back and win big. Pay off the diner, and then I’d have enough money for the rest of my life. It only takes that one big score, you know? That one big win, and then you can retire. You can be done with it. But Wester knew about it, I don’t know how, but he did, and he said—horrible things, if I didn’t do what he said, horrible, terrible things. And he’s right about Jack Dawson, Mindy, you have to believe me. Wester showed me the evidence that Dawson killed Grim Teller. There’s no other possibility. No one else could have done it. And it was after that, things started going wrong in the diner. They were fighting and arguing. Wester said he’d make it all stop. And all I had to do was help him take down Jack.”
His eyes were so shifty and nervous that Mindy almost didn’t recognize Cook as the man she’d worked for these past few months. There was an urgent desire to scream and yell, but it wouldn’t have done any good. It wouldn’t have changed anything. She couldn’t jump out of the car on a dark road in the middle of nowhere, so she was just going to have to go as far as Cook planned on taking her, and then see what would happen next. She was going to have to be brave. She was going to have to take care of herself, and trust that doing so would help her take care of the Bean. But the good news? Mindy was pretty damn good at taking care of herself after all these years.
“Okay,” she said, completely comfortable in the lie. “I think you might be right. I trust you.”
She saw Cook relax a little. “I’m so glad you think so,” he said. “I just think this will be the best thing for you. For you and the baby. Babies need good fathers, you know? Fathers who are present in their lives.” He stopped short of saying that he could give that to her and the baby, but she got the sense that it took him serious effort.
She nodded, though. “I know. I grew up in a broken home, too.” It was a gamble, but it got her a furious nod, so she went with it. “Kids need their parents. They need people who are present and who love them.”
He breathed what she could only take as a sigh of relief. “I’m just so glad you agree.” His hands relaxed on the steering wheel, and she breathed a quiet sigh of relief. That was one step down. If Cook trusted her, she would be more likely to find an opportunity to get away from him and call someone for help.
Chapter Twelve They had driven for maybe another ten minutes before she saw on the horizon the lights of an old cowboy and biker bar that looked like it had been lifted directly from a movie set. There had to be two dozen bikes parked outside, with a bunch of pickup trucks lining the parking lot itself. Men milled around the front of the building, long neck bottles in their hands and a certain rowdiness to every step they took. But not all of them. There were two men standing in front of the bikes, backlit by the lights of the roadhouse, and they stood at a kind of attention that made her nervous. She didn’t think there’d be any talking them down or convincing them that she was harmless. No, they had something much more sinister in their postures.
“Who’s that?” she asked Cook, but he didn’t reply. He did, however, start to clench the steering wheel again as he drove directly up to the two men.
“Wait here,” was all he said to her as he stepped out of the car. She couldn’t hear what he said, but he walked over to the big man, extending his hand. The bigger man—Wester, she realized suddenly, the shithead who had pulled her down into his lap in the diner that day and started this whole goddamn mess—ignored the extended hand. He said something, jerking his head at the car. Her presumably. Cook nodded and said something back. Wester nodded. He glanced at the man next to him. It was an odd combination of speed and incredible slowness as the other man pulled a gun and shot Cook in the stomach.
Everything inside Mindy convulsed with a toxic combination of fear and rage. She screamed, slapping at the dash so hard her hands hurt. Cook collapsed in slow motion, his mouth frozen in a wide O of shock and fear and something so very much more. She pressed her palms against the glass, an echoing noise through her head that she didn’t even realize was a scream until it stopped.
Wester took the gun from the other man and began wiping it down. The man came to her side of the car. She clung to the door handle, trying with all her might to hold it shut, but he yanked it easily out of her hands. She tried to pull her way out of the passenger’s seat, hoping to climb out the driver’s side, but she got tangled in the seatbelt. He opened the door and held her against the back of the seat, his arm pressing against her throat just enough to make it hard to fight. He unbuckled the belt, leering down her top as he did so. His breath was sweet, like gum. It was the most distressing part of the whole thing, somehow. She wanted a monster of a man to have breath like rotten meat. Sweetness was unanticipated.
He hauled her out of the car by her arm, gripping her bicep far too firmly for her to think that running away would be useful. He hauled her towards Wester, who had wrapped the gun in a cloth and tucked it away somewhere. Her face was wet, but she couldn’t remember when she’d started to cry.
Wester looked her up and down, and she felt dirty everywhere his gaze touched.
“I’m not looking to hurt you,” he said, his tone polite and conversational, even as his gaze lingered on her breasts. Her uniform had torn in her struggle with the other man, and her bra was showing. This bra fits about as well as the rest of her uniforms did, which meant she was just about spilling out of it. He had lots to stare at, the filthy son of a bitch. “But you have something I need.”
“I don’t have anything.” She snarled, yanking against the other man’s grip. It wasn’t going to get her anywhere but bruised, but she couldn’t hold still and let him keep looking at her like that without saying something.
Wester glanced down at the curve of her belly, accentuated by the way the monster at her side was twisting her arm up and around, keeping her up on her tip toes to avoid the incredible pain in her shoulder. “You have exactly what I need. Leverage. But the good news for you is that I’m quite sure it’s the baby he wants, not you, so when you’re done…” He waved a hand in that way men do when they are discussing reproductive things, “… gestating, I’ll be more than happy to let you go.”
She felt another scream roiling through her, and her free arm wrapped around her belly, both trying to protect Bean and trying to keep the scream inside. Screaming wasn’t going to do any good now. She was painfully sure of that.
And then she heard a sound, rising up over the noise of the roadhouse. She told herself she wasn’t sure, that she didn’t know, but she did. She knew, all through her body, that it was Jackdaw, and he was there to rescue her. She couldn’t hold back the grin, but then there was another sharp crack, too close to her, and the scream she’d been holding back was released. The man twisting her arm spasmed next to her, jerking her arm so hard she thought it might break, and then he let go. She spun towards him, ready to use any opening to her advantage, but he was already dropping down into the dust.
Wester broke right, diving for the cover of Cook’s car. Cook was groaning in the dust, his hands over the wound in his belly that was gushing blood. For just a moment, Mindy felt bad for him, worried that he might die there in the dust of this biker bar. But he’d brought her here and been ready to hand her and Bean over to people who were prepared to hurt them, very badly. She felt bad, but not so very bad. She hoped someone would get him some help. She had zero obligation to be the one who tried to help.
Jackdaw spun the bike around, kicking up gravel that bit at her lower legs, but
she pushed that sensation away, making it something she would deal with later. Right now, she needed to get away from all of this before another shot rang out and took her down with it.
“Get on!” Jack shouted, but she was already running, slinging her leg over the back of the bike like she’d done this a thousand times. Jack barely waited for her to get settled before he tore off again, racing into the darkness of the night. She clung to him, and let herself believe that it was the rush of the air that pulled tears from her eyes.
Chapter Thirteen Mindy clung to Jack’s back as he tore through the night. Once they were a good distance from the roadhouse and no one appeared to be following them, he slowed the bike down and road at a more sedate pace. She didn’t try to talk to him; she was still shaking hard, and she was sure her voice would quake. No point in making him think she was even more vulnerable than she actually was.
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