Cherise nodded. “But what about you?”
“I’m gonna jump on my bike, try to lead them in the wrong direction,” he explained. “Don’t stop driving until you reach Green River, okay? It’s about forty miles to the west. Don’t stay in North Fork, don’t even slow down until you get at least twenty miles out of town.”
“But what about you?” Cherise asked as they slowly backed toward the door.
“I’ll find you,” Lynx promised.
“How?” Cherise whispered.
“I don’t know,” Lynx admitted. They were at the door. Lynx held the gun steady with one hand and reached for the doorknob with his other free hand. “But I’ve done a pretty good job of it so far, haven’t I? I promise I’ll find you, Cherise. Now…run!”
Cherise sprinted across the parking lot, dashing toward her tiny little rental car. She fumbled at the driver side door, wrenched it open and flung herself inside.
Across the parking lot, Lynx’s motorcycle roared to life and rubber squealed as he sped away from the Olde Glory Inn. Cherise aimed her car in the opposite direction, heading toward the interstate and, hopefully, safety.
In her rearview mirror, she saw a mass of bodies pour out of the bar, leap onto their own motorcycles, and zoom off in the direction Lynx had gone.
Cherise’s hands were shaking badly as she found her way onto the highway and pointed her rental in the direction of Green River.
Please let him find me, she prayed as she sped west, leaving North Fork behind her forever. Please let him find me and please let him be safe.
***
Every time a pair of headlights swept by her window, illuminating her room for the briefest of seconds, Cherise jumped out of her skin. She knew it wasn’t Lynx, it couldn’t be Lynx. Not that Cherise doubted that he’d be able to ditch the biker gang—he’d already proven that when he’d rescued her—but she didn’t truly believe that he would find her.
Lynx didn’t have her number and she didn’t have his. Hell, she didn’t even know if he had a phone, let alone a phone number. And Green River was a much larger city than North Fork. It had dozens if not hundreds of hotels within its sprawling city limits. There was no way that Lynx would be able to track her down to this particular La Quinta Inn, just one of many off the interstate.
A knock sounded at the door and Cherise, without giving her doubts a second thought, flew across the room and flung the door wide open. There, standing on the doorstep of her hotel room, was Lynx. He looked tired, he looked windswept, but he was there and he was whole.
Cherise flung herself at him, wrapping him in the fiercest bear hug her small arms could muster. She was laughing and crying with joy as Lynx peppered the top of her head with soft kisses.
Finally, she was able to tear herself away from him. “Oh my god, I thought I would never see you again,” she sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “How did you know where I went?”
Lynx stepped inside the room, shutting the door behind him and locking the bolt. He looked at her, a smirk hiding in the corner of his mouth. “I may have taken a page out of your book,” he admitted.
“You…what?” Cherise frowned.
Lynx held up his phone—He does have a phone, Cherise thought wildly—and showed her a blinking blue dot on the map on the screen. “You were talking about apps and I realized that I, uh, I could track you.”
“You tracked me?” Cherise didn’t know if she should be angry, confused or very flattered.
“To be fair, I tracked your rental car,” he admitted. “I slipped a little tracker thing under your bumper before I went into the Olde Glory. Then, once I got away from those assholes, I opened up the app and…here you are.”
Cherise wanted to kiss him, she wanted to kill him, but she settled for dropping to her knees in front of him and working his fly open.
“What are you doing, Cherise?” he whispered, as she tugged his pants over his hips and letting them pool around his ankles.
Cherise shushed him. “You’re my hero, Lynx. And heroes generally get rewards. Now sit back and enjoy yours.”
Lynx obeyed orders instantly, sagging back against the door and letting the wood support the weight of his huge body. Cherise smiled up at him, her brown eyes twinkling, and he smiled back, shaky.
Ever so gently, Cherise eased the leaking head of his cock between her full lips, gently sucking him in and teasing until he was in as far as he could go, his tip pressing against the back of her throat.
“Oh, Cherise,” Lynx breathed. “Yes, that’s it. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
Cherise did not stop. Instead, she wrapped her hand around his shaft and began to jerk him as she guided the end of his cock between her full, wet lips. He was hard now, so hard, and Cherise shuddered in anticipation of what was to come next.
As much as she enjoyed sucking him off, pulling the length of him into her wet, waiting mouth, she needed him to fuck her again. After having him in her the night before, she was desperate to repeat the experience.
Lynx whimpered when she pulled her mouth off his cock with a wet pop, but she gently shushed him. “Don’t worry, baby, you’re going to be back inside of me in just a sec.” Lynx nodded, his eyes closed with pleasure. “Now come here.”
Cherise got off her knees and grabbed Lynx by the hand, tugging him toward her bed, this one much nicer than the shabby motel back in North Fork. She shed her clothing and pulled Lynx down on top of her, enjoying the way his massive bulk pressed her into the mattress.
He was hard and naked on top of her and Cherise could feel the wet patch between her legs dampening with desire. Lynx grasped his cock with one large, strong hand and guided it toward her entrance.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Cherise nodded. She was ready, she felt like she’d been ready forever. With one quick thrust, Lynx filled her, spreading her open beneath him with his girthy cock. She threw her head back with a cry and Lynx correctly took that as an encouragement, thrusting into her more enthusiastically. The thickness of him filled her beautifully, and she moaned with pleasure every time he thrust into her again, and again, and again.
Lynx was moaning now, low grunts every time he filled Cherise, and soft cries each time he pulled out. He was getting hungrier now, more desperate.
“Don’t stop, baby,” Cherise encouraged. “Don’t stop, please. Please don’t stop fucking me, Lynx.”
Lynx did not stop fucking her. He drove into her with wild abandon, his pace increasing as his orgasm drew near. “Cherise!” he cried out, his voice wild with need. “Cherise! Cherise! Cher—”
He came with a cry, filling Cherise with the heat of his release. Her own orgasm followed on the heels of his, her release exploding into white light behind her eyelids as she came, crying out his name as the waves of satisfaction swept over her body.
They were both trembling. Cherise didn’t know where she ended and Lynx began. This was so perfect, so divine. She didn’t think that anything could be better than the previous night, but she was wrong. She was so very wrong.
Cherise wondered if every time with Lynx would take them to new heights of pleasure and satisfaction. She didn’t know if her body and mind could take it. She desperately wanted to find out.
Lynx and Cherise held each other through the night, falling asleep in each other’s arms, tangled up in one another.
It wasn’t until the next morning, with sunlight streaming into the room that Cherise turned to Lynx, smiled sadly, and said, “We need to talk.”
***
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Lynx said, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, refusing to look at Cherise. “Can we please talk about this later, after we’ve had a shower, at least”—
“No, we need to talk about this now, Lynx,” Cherise insisted. “We need to talk about this now, so we can have a later.”
Lynx just shook his head, eyes still locked on the ceiling. “Don’t you see, Cherise? We won’t have a later, we can’t.”
“What do you mean—?”
“The thing we need to talk about? Whatever it is you’ve discovered about me, whatever information made you go back to that bar looking for me? It’s all connected. We can never be together, Cherise.”
“You’re a felon,” she said.
“I am,” he admitted without hesitation. “But it isn’t what you think, Cherise.”
Cherise made them two cups of coffee from the flimsy hotel coffeemaker as Lynx explained his side of the story.
He was a felon, all right, and the app’s report on him was correct: he was guilty of aggravated assault and battery.
“Why would you—?” Cherise began, but Lynx held up one hand to silence her.
“I didn’t want to, Cherise, I had to.”
Lynx had a sister, a little sister named Lily. “The sweetest, kindest girl you’d ever meet, Cherise, but she had terrible, and I mean terrible taste in men.”
Lily had started dating a biker, a young guy who ran with the gang from the Olde Glory Inn, and everything seemed okay at first. The guy, Rusty, had treated Lily well in the beginning, and had quickly befriended Lynx.
“I liked the bastard,” Lynx admitted. “I liked him a lot. He seemed like he was treating my sister good and he was fun to hang around with. We used to ride together, fix up our hogs, shoot the shit at the bar with the other guys there. Everything was cool.”
Until Lily got pregnant, that was. Lynx claimed that Lily told the family that Rusty was cool with it, that he was happy even, that they were going to get married. Lynx believed that lie—and ignored small bruises and marks on his baby sister—until Lily, seven months pregnant and as big as a house, phoned him from the emergency room, sobbing that he needed to come get her.
When Lynx arrived at the emergency room, Lily’s sweet face was covered in bruises and Rusty was nowhere to be seen. After much duress, Lily finally admitted that Rusty had beat her up—that he’d been doing it regularly for months now—and thrown her down the stairs. She’d lost the baby.
Lynx looked at Cherise, his eyes shining with tears. “So I went and found him,” he said simply. “I found him in the bar at the Olde Glory, and I beat the living shit out of him with a tire iron.”
Cherise shuddered, whether from the story or the cold tone in Lynx’s voice, she wasn’t sure.
Lynx continued. “I would have killed him, I would have fucking killed him, if the cops hadn’t show up. They arrested me for assault and he got time for domestic abuse and manslaughter.”
Cherise gasped.
“I got out in two years, with good behavior,” Lynx said. “Guess how long that bastard served?”
Cherise shook her head. She had no idea how much jail time was associated with Rusty’s sentence. She hoped that it was a good, long time. “I don’t know? 20 years?”
Lynx laughed, a harsh, rough sound. “Try six months. That asshole only served six months for beating my sister and killing my unborn nephew.”
“That’s awful.”
“I know,” Lynx agreed, nodding. “It’s horrifying, Cherise. The law didn’t punish him for what he did, so it’s up to me.”
“You can’t—”
“I have to! That’s why I was at the Glory. I’m trying to get back in those guys’ good graces and see if I can find out where Rusty’s hiding out. Once I figure out where that little rat is holed up, I’m going in there and I’m going to finish what I started.”
Cherise shook her head. “No, Lynx.”
“Yes, Cherise.”
“There has to be something else you can do—”
“The law already failed me, Cherise. It failed my sister, it failed my baby nephew,” Lynx said. “The only person who can end this is me.”
Cherise’s head was spinning. Only thirty minutes ago, she’d been happily nestled up with a man with whom she was slowly falling in love and now, now, she was trying to dissuade that same man from committing a vigilante revenge murder.
“Come to San Francisco with me!” she blurted out. “We can get you set up with a new life, get you a job—”
“Felons on parole can’t really get jobs, Cherise,” Lynx argued.
“Then don’t work! I make enough money, I can keep us both comfortable—”
Lynx just shook his head again. “Cherise, no. I can’t come to San Francisco with you, girl.”
“Why not?” Cherise demanded. “Give me one good reason why not, Lynx!”
Lynx closed his eyes for a long time, and when he reopened them, they were clear with purpose. “I’m on parole, Cherise. Parolees can’t leave the state. I can’t come to San Francisco with you. Hell, I can’t leave Nebraska.”
***
San Francisco seemed dull. Cherise used to delight in the busy traffic, the steep hills, the streets teeming with people of all creeds and colors. The city used to be her happy place and now. Now it seemed dull and lifeless, a dull mass of humanity that teemed around her every time she stepped outside.
“We just need to find you a boyfriend!” her friend Meredith crowed, pouring more white wine into Cherise’s still-full glass.
Cherise rolled her eyes and tried to take a sip of the wine. It tasted bitter, like it had gone bad. “Does your wine taste okay?” she asked her friend and Meredith enthusiastically nodded.
“All right, it just must be me then.” Cherise hadn’t had a taste for alcohol since getting home from Nebraska over a month ago. Maybe getting into two barroom brawls had something to do with that.
“So? When are you going to let me set you up with my brother’s friend?” Meredith prattled as Cherise did her best to listen and not let her mind wander back to Nebraska, back to Lynx. Her head pounded, partially from her friend’s perky diatribe, but perhaps also from lack of sleep. She hadn’t been able to sleep well back in San Francisco. Her empty bed seemed like too much to bear.
Meredith was still yammering. “And he’s so nice! He works in HR at my brother’s firm and is part of their intramural kickball league! How fun is that?”
Cherise stood up suddenly, slamming her wine class down onto the coffee table with far more force than she intended.
Meredith’s eyes widened. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. My head is pounding and I just need to grab some aspirin real fast. Excuse me for a sec, Mer…”
Cherise pushed past her little friend and stumbled down the hall to her bathroom. Her medicine cabinet was a disaster. The aspirin was nowhere in sight, so she moved some other items out of the way as she searched. An old toothbrush, eye ointment for a condition that had long since cleared up, a full box of tampons…
Cerise did a double take at the tampon box. She vaguely remembered buying those at CVS, reminding herself to get them before she went to Nebraska. Nebraska was over a month ago, Cherise thought wildly. I should have used those tampons by now…
Her eyes widened and she had to grip the edge of the sink to keep from toppling over.
“Meredith!” Cherise cried out. “We need to go to the drugstore. Now!”
An hour later, Cherise and Meredith were huddled together on the couch, intently watching the little red cross appear at the end of the little pee-stick.
“Oh my god,” Cherise muttered.
“Oh my god!” Meredith crowed. “You’re going to have a baby!”
Cherise buried her head in her hands and sobbed.
She couldn’t do this, she really couldn’t. How was she supposed to do this on her own? Raise a child without a father?”
“Who’s the father?!” Meredith shrieked. “I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend, Cherise!”
Cherise shook her head and told her friend the whole story. By the end, Meredith’s eyes were wide.
“But you have to tell him, Cherise!” Meredith said.
“I can’t, Mer,” Cherise argued. “Even if he could leave Nebraska, which he can’t because he’s on freaking parole, that still wouldn’t change the fact that he’s a convicted felon on a revenge mis
sion. What kind of father would that be for this kid, huh?”
Meredith just shrugged. “I still think you should tell him, Cherise. It’s his kid, he has the right to know.”
Cherise shook her head defiantly. “I can do this on my own, Mer. He doesn’t need to know. He never needs to know.”
Despite objections from her friends and family, Cherise kept her word. She pushed through the first trimester of her pregnancy just fine, taking herself to her doctor’s appointments and planning her own upcoming baby shower.
She didn’t need help, she didn’t need a boyfriend or husband to help her raise this kid. She could do this.
One afternoon, Cherise was returning to her apartment, arms full of new maternity clothing. She’d only recently begun to show—nothing much, just a small swell of her tummy—and was anticipating a need for some new, stretchy clothing sometime in the near future. The day was hot, even for San Francisco, and she was dripping with sweat by the time she made it home and parked her new little SUV inside her tiny urban garage.
As she climbed the steps to her front door, she froze in her tracks. There, seated on her porch swing, was a very familiar, very large figure.
***
“What are you doing here?” Cherise asked, in lieu of a proper greeting.
Lynx just looked at her, his posture defeated and his eyes remorseful. “I came to find you, Cherise.”
“Are you insane, Lynx?” she hissed, pulling him into her home. “If they catch you breaking your parole, they’ll drag you back to Nebraska to serve more time, they’ll lock you up again, they’ll—”
“No, they won’t,” Lynx said. “They let me off parole early, Cherise.”
“What? Why would they do that?” Cherise was dumbfounded. This was everything she wanted, everything she dreamed, so why wasn’t she happy?
“I helped them find a fugitive,” Lynx said simply. “Rusty broke his own parole and I found him, Cherise.”
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