BAD INFLUENCE: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Callie Pierce

  The laughter of kids interrupted her thoughts. It wasn’t the normal cheerful laughter of teenagers who were out late and breaking curfew. There was something… uncomfortable about it. Donna glanced to the entrance of the lot and spotted a few teenagers she hadn’t noticed before. Among them was a bright-haired blonde she recognized. Wasn’t that Becky? The girl that her brother was hung up on? Maybe.

  “Hello, pretty lady.”

  The words were lackluster, the tone disquieting. Her hand tightened on her bag, and she took a second long look. There were seven of them, most of them male. They all, save for one, looked to be teenagers, but no one younger than fifteen. Each of them was dressed in the same midnight blue hoodie that her brother usually wore, in various states of cleanliness. They were all smirking and looking at her. It was like looking into the eyes of a hyena pack. The hairs on the back of Donna’s neck stood up.

  “Hey,” the girl that Donna thought was Becky said. “You’re Kyle’s big sister, aren’t you?”

  “Is she?” This was from the boy who didn’t fit in. Boy might have been the wrong word. He was older than the rest, old enough that his chin sported a dark patch of hair that was in contrast to his nearly white head of hair. She was guessing the hair was bleached. His eyes sparkled as he looked her over. “God damn, I didn’t know you were going to be that hot.”

  She crossed her arms, purposely putting her hand closer to the pay-as-you-go cell phone currently tucked in her pocket. “Thanks. Kyle’s not here right now.”

  “Really?” the white-haired guy asked. He shoved his long fingers into his loose pockets and shook his head back and forth. His steps had a strange sort of rhythm to them, as if he was walking along a hopscotch path that only he could see. “Well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?”

  Donna resisted an urge to step back. Her skin was crawling with the sensation that something was absolutely wrong. The paper crumpled beneath her hand as she clutched it tighter. She desperately wished she had her purse. “Do you know Kyle?”

  “Oh yes, we are very, very good friends.”

  There was a titter of derisive amusement from the crowd of near-children behind him. Donna took a step back. If she made a mad dash for it now, she’d make it back to the relative safety of the taco place. She turned on her heel and started to move, her hand digging into her pocket for her phone. She had just wrapped her fingers around the hard plastic when she felt an arm wrap around her neck. It tightened and she stumbled. The arm hauled her backward against the slender unrelenting line of an unfamiliar body. The scent of him was sour, as if he hadn’t bothered to wash in a couple of days. She struggled as a second hand came around her.

  “Get off me!” she cried out, pitching her voice as loud as she could manage. It wasn’t that late. There were still lights on. Someone might hear her.

  His hand slapped over her mouth. She was all right with that. It freed up her arm. Suddenly all those little tidbits of information from her self-defense classes came rushing up from the depths of her memories. She clenched her fist tight and yanked her elbow back, simultaneously stepping on his foot and slamming her head back. She felt the sick crunch of his nose breaking against the back of her head. He released her as suddenly as he had snatched her up. She didn’t think about it—she just ran.

  She had gotten all of two steps when a hand fisted itself in her hair, yanking her back again.

  “You stupid… bitch.”

  He whirled her in a move she didn’t entirely follow. The next thing she knew her body was pressed against his as if they were lovers, but there was nothing loving in that gaze. The bloody ruin of his busted nose was bright against the paleness of his face.

  “Get the hell off me.” She shoved as hard as she could. He barely budged.

  “Oh no. I was going to do this the easy way… but not anymore.”

  She didn’t feel the knife at first. All she felt was a pinch in her side, no worse than bumping into a particularly stubborn counter. But it didn’t dissipate the way a bump did. It blossomed into a bright burning that threatened to blind her. She looked down. Her shirt was red. It hadn’t been red before, not that color. It stuck to her body in a way that fabric on its own shouldn’t.

  “What the hell did you do!” a girl’s voice cried out. Donna was pretty sure it was Becky’s.

  His hand was close to her body, a handle in his grip. It took her too long to realize that it was a knife, a knife was stuck in her flesh. Pain radiated from the wound as his wrist twitched. The slow flow of blood became faster, and a drop accumulated at the hem of her top and then dripped unto the ground. She was watching another form, unable to think of anything else when she heard a very masculine shout from somewhere behind her. Maybe someone had heard her.

  A shock of pain swam through her body as her attacker ripped the blade out. She collapsed forward, barely aware of the concrete against her knees. A man voice continued to shout, barely discernible over the rev of a motorcycle.

  “Cody?” she gasped, feeling a man’s arms come around her.

  “Sorry, dollface.”

  Dollface? She blinked in confusion, tilting her head back until her vision was taken up by a man as beautiful as he was sinister. She was dead, she was almost sure of it. There was no other reason she could think of that Slade McGee would be looking down at her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cody

  The ever-present hum of hospital lighting sounded louder and louder with each passing minute. Cody Bannik knew that it wasn’t loud, not really. It just seemed that way because there weren’t many other sounds. Medical dramas always had a lot of beeping going on, and voices, but that’s not how a hospital sounded at night. It was nothing but lighting, the soft scuff of nurse’s shoes, and the occasional chime of a patient pressing the call button for a nurse. It was too quiet, and he didn’t like it.

  “Come on, Donna,” he whispered to the woman sleeping in the long hospital bed, layers of white knit sheets piled over her legs. “You gotta wake up sometime.”

  “She will.”

  Cody didn’t need to look up. He knew who was there. Slade had come by every few hours to check in on things. Cody had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, he was mad about the boss’s treatment of Donna. On the other, it had been him, not Cody, who had saved her.

  “She will,” Slade repeated. “Donna isn’t one to just give up.”

  Cody silently agreed. Even so, she looked so pale lying there against the sheets, her face slack with the deep sleep of the healing. Everything about her had a gray cast, her lips, her cheeks. Her eyelids were so pale that he could see the lines of her veins running through them. Even her hair, usually so bright and vivacious, hung limp and dark around her face. Her hand wasn’t quite warm against his. A large bag of blood was hanging up, flowing down a tube and into her.

  “Thanks,” Cody said finally, “for being there.”

  Slade shrugged. “It was the least I could do. I owed her that much.”

  “Will you tell me what happened?” Cody suddenly asked. So far, he hadn’t asked. What had happened didn’t matter, not until he knew that Donna was going to be okay.

  Slade slumped around the side of the hospital room and plopped himself into the remaining chair. He wasn’t wearing his jacket. Cody couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the boss without his president’s patch firmly on display. His tattooed hands were stretched over his denim-clad knees.

  “You called me and I put a few things together. I figured that it was Kyle you caught selling. I got mad about it, so I went over to have a talk with Donna.” Slade pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and popped a piece into his mouth. The scent of mint filled the too-clean air.

  Cody snorted. Slade offered Cody the pack, but he shook his head. He didn’t want gum. “What exactly where you going to say?”

  Slade shrugged. “Hadn’t quite worked that one out. I was good and angry and wasn’t thinking everything through right then. I just needed to do somethi
ng.”

  Cody knew that feeling well enough. He’d felt it a couple times these past few weeks, and plenty of times before that now that he was thinking about it. “Sure. I get that. What happened?”

  Slade lifted one brow at Cody’s sharp tone, but nothing else. “I was coming up the road, and I saw her there. Hard to miss all that red hair, right?” When Cody didn’t answer, Slade continued. “I saw her standing there, had a bag in one hand and nothing else. It didn’t seem right. There was a guy with his arm around her. It didn’t seem right to me. I couldn’t put my hand on it. I mean, Donna’s hot enough to get hit on, but this wasn’t that.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was intimidation. A bunch of these teenagers gathered around while this one dude hulked over her.”

  “What dude?”

  “Tall kid, skinny but not scrawny. Loves his peroxide too much. He’s the one that stabbed her.”

  Cody jerked his head in Slade’s direction. “Why didn’t you get him?”

  Slade snorted. “How? I didn’t have a gun on me. Even if I did, she was taking up a lot more space than the guy was and I don’t have a great shot while riding on a bike. And when they scattered, they moved quick, left her behind. I could have gone after them, but there Donna was… bleeding on the ground.”

  Cody felt a sick feeling in his belly. He could picture it. Easy enough since he’d seen the puddle of blood she’d left behind after they’d taken her away. He couldn’t blame Slade’s choice. “I shouldn’t have left her.”

  “You were going after Kyle,” Slade said. “Where is the little brat?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet. I tried looking for him. I found Donna’s car, but not him.”

  Slade made a sound of frustration. “I’ll go look for him.”

  “Why?” Cody dropped Donna’s hand and stood up as Slade swung to his feet. “Why are you doing this? You came into my shop and railed on me about helping people who weren’t part of the club. You made a big deal about it, but here you are.”

  Slade eyed Cody. “You questioning me?”

  Cody moved until he was standing toe to toe with Slade. He wasn’t sure why he was so angry at the man. Slade had been his friend for many years. Not as close as Twitch or Hulk, but still a friend. Anger welled up inside him like a bomb just waiting to explode. “Yeah, I guess I just did.”

  “Why don’t you ask me what’s really bugging you.”

  The words were spilling out of Cody’s mouth before he realized what they were going to be. “Do you still love her? Do you love my Donna?”

  A long silence spilled between the two men. This was too much; it had been too much since the moment that redhead had stepped into his life. He’d never been jealous before, and he didn’t want to be jealous now. Maybe he wouldn’t be if it had been him there to rescue her.

  Slade took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Cody smelled the mint of the gum that the other man was chewing. “Only in the way that you always love the first one. I already told you that I screwed up where she was concerned. I want to make amends.”

  Cody swallowed his anger. It wasn’t real. It was lack of sleep and stress. “You think finding Kyle will do that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Cody dragged a hand down his face. His head was swirling with emotions that he didn’t want and that he couldn’t name. “Yeah, I do. All right.”

  “The club voted. If you want out… you can go. All you gotta do is bleed a little.”

  Cody nodded. “I hear you. Go find the kid. Let me know what happens.”

  Slade snorted. “Just because you’re out doesn’t mean you can boss me around.”

  A moment later Slade was gone and Cody was alone with his own thoughts once more. He wished that Donna was awake. She was easy to talk to. Her ability to pick things apart and lay it all down made short work of understanding things.

  “I’m pissed off, Donna.” He plopped himself back down in the seat, surrounded by the almost silence of the hospital. Maybe the fact that she was out cold didn’t really matter. He just started talking, and it all came spilling out. “I’m pissed off at me, I’m pissed off at Slade. Hell, I’m even pissed off at Kyle. I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you. So what if you didn’t want people seeing dirty pictures of us. That’s no big deal. I should be mad at Kyle for taking them, for using them.”

  He sighed and leaned forward until his forehead was pillowed on the bit of medical mattress between her hip and the edge of the bed.

  “I know I’ve said it before, Donna, but I want to be with you, no matter what it takes. I’ll be your secret lover. You can keep me tied up in a basement if it means I get to be with you.”

  It was stupid, but he meant it. He’d almost lost her, and that simply wasn’t going to happen again. Whatever it took to be with her, he meant it.

  “Cody?”

  Her voice was so weak he almost thought he imagined it. It was a crackle of old paper heard from the distance of a breezy night. Cody looked up, and her eyes were opening. Slowly, as if they had been stuck together, the too-pale lids opened just enough that he could see the misty shade of her eyes.

  “Hey you,” he said. “Hey.”

  “Where am I?”

  She tried to sit up, and he put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re at the hospital. You were stabbed.”

  Her eyes flicked back and forth, opening a little wider. “The hospital? Stabbed?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  She lifted one arm, pausing when she saw the tubes coming from it. She made a sound of disgust and let her arm fall back down. The heart rate on the monitor dangling behind the bed gave a blip. “I think so. I… I was getting tacos.” Slowly she cobbled together a story similar to what Slade had told him. Teenagers, a guy with fake pale hair, and the stabbing. When she got to the end of it, she asked, “Where is Kyle?”

  “We don’t know. We have your car. It’s parked back at the apartment, but Kyle wasn’t in it, and he hasn’t come home.”

  She sat up, her hand going to the wrapped wound at her side. “Something’s not right. They were looking for Kyle, I think… Cody, I think he was the one who was supposed to get stabbed.”

  “What?”

  “The guy, the tall one? He was looking for Kyle. He said he wanted the money… or something. I can’t remember it all clearly, but he didn’t come to the apartment looking for me. Becky was there—Rebecca, that girl that Kyle likes. She… she didn’t like what happened. I could tell.”

  “Why?” Cody stood up, running a hand over the arm that wasn’t stuck with a great big needle. Her skin was warmer now than it had been. Maybe pumping her full of blood had been helping, or maybe she was just mad. Chances were it was both. “Why would she care?”

  “I don’t know, Cody. I don’t know much, but I think that Kyle’s in trouble.”

  She started to swing her legs over the side of the bed. He put his hand on her shoulder and held it as tight as he dared. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m going to find a nurse, and I’m going to get myself checked out of here.”

  “Are you serious? Woman, you were stabbed.”

  “How long have I been here?” she demanded.

  Cody hesitated to answer. When she turned her eyes on him, they were cold and serious. “You’ve been out for two days.”

  “Good enough.” Her legs were almost steady when she stood up. “I’m not going to just lie here, Cody. Something is wrong and I don’t like it. I’ve got to do something. You can help or you can get out of my way.”

  He kissed her. She made a small sound of surprise, but she didn’t pull away. Her lips moved under his. Hands, firm but feminine, clutched at his back. His body sprang to life, and it was all he could do not to push her back against the mattress and remind them both that she was still alive.

  “I love it when you get all commanding,” he teased.

  Her lips spread into a grin, and she gave him a short playful shove. “Shut up.”
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  He laughed and hugged her close. “I love you, Donna Mason.”

  For a moment, her face went completely and totally blank. Her eyes were flat and emotionless. He found himself wondering if what he’d said was wrong, or if he shouldn’t have said it at all. Then she leaned forward and put her cool cheek to his chest. “I love you too, Cody Bannik. Now help me find my brother.”

  He stood there with his arms around her. He wanted to argue with her, to tell her that she needed more rest, that she was injured and he could go out and look for Kyle now that he knew she was going to be okay. Hell, now that he knew she loved him too, he was sure that he could do just about anything.

  “Tell me again, tell me about the kids, this blond-haired guy.”