“What about today? Listen, Zane said last night that Jasper’s guy confirmed what I thought—whatever they’re looking for is in your bakery. And Jasper’s not going to give up looking for it. He sent one guy. That wasn’t enough. Next time he sends a whole pack of his fuckers over, probably arms them just to be safe, and if you’re anywhere near the joint when they get there, you might catch a bullet. I’m not having that happen, Ash, so you just let me handle it with the guys. We’ll find whatever they’re looking for and we’ll settle the whole thing. Okay?”
“No, not okay. One guy walking into the bakery’s not suspicious. He can get away with that. And I know you said Jasper’s got a couple cops in his pocket, but he’s not going to send his guys downtown in broad daylight to shoot the place up. Right?”
Alex frowned, his brow crumpling. “Probably not. But if anything happens—“
“How many times do I have to tell you how important the bakery is to me? It’s the only thing I’ve got. I bet my future and my daughter’s future on making it a success, and I’m not sitting around here just because you think something might go down. Jasper probably knows someone’s watching out for me. He’s going to be more cautious now. And if you’re right, if he does send some guys over, you, Axle, Zane, and Achilles—“
“Ajax,” he corrected her.
“Close enough,” she muttered. “Anyway, all of you will be there to keep me safe. You’re going to be searching the place anyway, right?”
Alex’s frown deepened into a scowl. “If anything happened to you, I’d never forgive myself—“
“So don’t let anything happen to me,” she cut him off. “You said you’d protect me, right?”
Alex grunted and shook his head. “I said I’d keep you safe. And it’s safer for you to stay here. Zane told me that someone in the Devils heard Jasper’s moving more people in on this after his guy failed.”
Ashleigh’s heart skipped a beat. “He knows already? I thought your guys still had him?”
Alex rolled his eyes at her, as if she’d missed something obvious. “Guys like Jasper operate on a tight timeline with expendable errand boys. He may have underestimated us, but when he didn’t get a courtesy call from his boy, you can bet he sure as shit assumed the worst. He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to sit around on his hands, hoping for the best. Things are only going to get worse from here on out, so the further away from whatever it is Jasper wants, the better.”
“I’m opening my bakery today. If you try to stop me, Alex, I’ll call the police, and you better believe I mean it. So, are you going to stand in my way, or are you going to be smart about this?”
Alex folded both arms over his chest and stared at her.
She didn’t flinch.
“Fuck,” he bit out. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
She just arched her brow at him.
“Fuck it. Fine. But we’re going to do what we need to do, Ash, whether you like it or not. We’re going to get this taken care of.”
“Fine.” Ashleigh dragged her overnight bag over to her from beside the nightstand and began rummaging through it, searching for the outfit she’d packed. “I’ve got to go pick up my daughter. I’ll meet you over there.”
“You’re going to bring her over here?”
Ashleigh glared up at him. “I told you that I wouldn’t. That’s not going to change.”
Alex ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I told you, Jasper’s escalating things. I don’t even want you out in public. Listen, until I get this taken care of, it’s probably a good idea that you don’t take your daughter anywhere. Jasper might not try anything in broad daylight, like you said, but if his guys see you and your girl together, they’ll see an easy target to get leverage over you. If you won’t let me near her, I can’t keep her safe.”
The thought of Penny in some thug’s hands took the breath out of her lungs. “They have no reason to hurt her—“
“Fuck, Ash, they have every reason. They think you know where this shit’s stashed. They think you’re trying to make off with it and sell it. I don’t know why, but that’s what they think, and what they think is all that matters. If you want to keep her safe, you have to stay away from her. Okay?”
She knew he was right. She hated that her daughter could get caught up in this, but hating the facts didn’t change them. She would just have to sit tight and hope that Alex and his guys would find whatever it was Jasper was looking for. It couldn’t take long. Her bakery wasn’t that big.
Besides, Nancy had already offered to let Penny stay. It was just going to be a day more, maybe two. Penny would forgive her.
Ashleigh set her clothes aside and reached for her phone, which was charging on the bedside table. “I’ll see if she can stay with my friend for a few more days,” she muttered, resigned.
Alex heaved a sigh. “I’m going to go make breakfast. How many eggs do you want?”
“I don’t care.”
“Hey.” Alex sidled away from the doorframe and moved toward her, the corners of his mouth creased in concern. He sat beside her on the bed.
Ashleigh held her phone in her two hands, staring despondently at it. She knew she should drive over to see Penny, to explain to her in person. But she didn’t doubt Alex when he told her that things were getting more dangerous. And would it be worth the risk, however small, just to try to make it easier for Penny to understand why she couldn’t pick her up and take her home just yet?
Alex slid a hand over hers. “It’s going to be alright, Ash. I know things are shit now, but it’s going to be over soon. I’m going to fix this.”
Ashleigh closed her eyes. She wanted to believe him. But it was hard to when it felt like her world was coming down around her. She couldn’t run her bakery, she couldn’t take care of her daughter.
All she could do was hook up with her ex, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Even though she knew it could go nowhere. She didn’t know what the right thing to do now was, but it sure wasn’t this. Maybe there was no right thing, only different degrees of wrong things.
Alex kissed her for the third time that morning, this time pressing his lips to the side of her head. “I’ll call you when the food’s done.”
She felt the mattress lift as he stood and left. She clutched the phone tighter. This was the best thing, she reminded herself. She could always make it up to Penny. But she would never forgive herself if even a hair on Penny’s head was harmed because she wasn’t strong enough to make this hard choice.
She phoned Nancy, who picked up after the second ring.
“Hi, hon. What’s the word? How are things coming?”
“Not too good, Nancy. I hate to do this, I really do, but I’ve got so much work to do today to catch up from the break-in. I don’t want Penny to have to spend her whole Saturday running errands with me or sitting on the floor behind the counter at the bakery. There’s just no good place for her there. Would you mind terribly if she stayed another night? Really, I hate to impose—“
“It’s no problem, none at all. Penny’s a little angel. You just get back on your feet and don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll understand.”
“Thanks, Nancy. You’re a lifesaver. Is she up? Could you put her on the phone?”
“Of course, hon, just a second.”
There was a bit of fumbling, then she heard Penny’s sleepy voice on the other end.
“You’re not coming to pick me up.” Penny stated it flatly, as if it were just a fact.
The words pierced Ashleigh through the heart. “Not today. I’m so sorry, I just have a lot to get done, and it would be no fun for you. You’ll have more fun staying at Katie’s.”
“I’d rather have no fun but be with you, Mommy.”
Ashleigh didn’t know what to say. “I don’t think so, baby girl. Listen, it’s not going to be much longer. I promise I’ll be over as soon as I can. Okay?”
“Sure, Mommy.” Penny didn’t sound convinced
though
Ashleigh hated this. It wasn’t right that she had to hurt her daughter like this. Because she knew she was. Ever since Penny was born, they’d only ever had each other. Ashleigh had told Penny time and time again that it was them against the world—everyone else could leave them, but they’d always have each other. And now, even though she knew it was the best option, even though there was no other way to keep Penny out of harm’s way, it felt like she was breaking that promise.
“I don’t like this either, honey, but this is what’s best. I’ll call you this afternoon and tonight to check in, okay?”
“You’re not even going to come over to see me?”
Ashleigh closed her eyes tight. “I can’t, Penny.”
“Why not?”
Ashleigh sucked in a deep breath, trying to steel herself. God, she wished she could say something to make Penny understand. She wished she didn’t have to lie like this. “I won’t have time. I’ve got a lot to do. But I promise I’ll call, okay?”
Penny didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me? Penny?”
“Yeah. Bye.” There was a click, and then the sound on the other end of the receiver turned to nothing but a low dial tone and dead airspace.
Ashleigh slumped back onto the bed. What if she was wrong? What if she couldn’t fix this? What if Penny hated her now and never believed her again?
No. She couldn’t think like that. She couldn’t beat up on herself for the choices she was forced to make in this situation. She forced herself to sit up and take the first steps toward getting ready.
She would lose herself in her routines today. She would pray that Alex found whatever Jasper was looking for, and quickly. And then she would work on doing damage control.
Chapter 14
Ashleigh
“All right, and three fourteen is your change—“
The sound of something hard colliding with concrete resounded up through the stairs leading to the bakery’s basement. Ashleigh winced.
Her customer, a middle-aged businessman who was likely on his lunch break, stared at her, wide-eyed. “What the hell was that?”
“Renovations,” Ashleigh lied smoothly, doing her best to keep her voice apologetic with a tinge of frustration. “This is an older building, and the storage space downstairs was starting to have some major problems. I’m really sorry for all the noise, but I couldn’t afford to shut down until the job was done.” She handed the man his change and the oatmeal cookie she’d bagged up for him.
The man still stared at her, his surprise colored with a little suspicion. “What are they doing, tearing out the foundation?”
Ashleigh winced again. God, she hoped not, she thought. “There’s a lot of work to do,” she hedged, still smiling saccharinely. “Was there anything else?”
“I’d look into your contractor if I were you,” the man muttered under his breath before leaving the shop.
Ashleigh let loose a pent-up sigh of frustration. This was not going well.
When Alex had told her that he and the guys were going to search the basement, she hadn’t thought that their search would entail so much noise. Or outright destruction.
It hadn’t been bad at first. That morning, when she’d been prepping recipes for the day before opening shop, they’d been pretty quiet downstairs. She’d heard the occasional scuff of a storage rack across the concrete floor, but she’d chalked that up to the emptiness of the bakery and her own hypersensitivity.
But after that, as the hours dragged on with apparently no success, things had grown noticeably louder. When her first few customers had come in to get coffee and muffins, she’d heard the unmistakable sound of something hard and heavy colliding with drywall. When her customers had asked, the lie about her “renovations” was born. It was a convenient excuse that explained away why she’d been closed for a couple of days as well as the strange noises coming out of the basement.
She’d found time in between serving customers to run downstairs and see what was actually going on. She’d found Alex and the three other guys tearing out chunks of drywall and using a small flashlight to search the wall space. The smallest of them—Zane, she remembered—held a hatchet in his hand. All four of them were covered in white dust. It looked as if they only intended to intensify their efforts going by the other tools spread out on the ground—a sledgehammer, crowbars, ice pics, even a power tool that she couldn’t identify, though her best guess was that it was a mini jackhammer. Her first thought was that they intended to completely demolish the basement.
“What the hell are you doing?” she’d snapped at Alex, though she’d been careful to keep her voice down so it wouldn’t carry up the stairs. “You’re wrecking the building! And we can hear you upstairs—“
“Well, that’s just how it’s going to be,” Alex had replied, unconcerned. “We’re not going to pussyfoot around with this. It’s going to be loud, and you bet your ass we’re going to search every crack of this place until we find what we’re looking for. If someone doesn’t like it, you can tell them to get the fuck out.”
That had stoked Ashleigh’s temper. “It doesn’t work that way! Look, just try to keep it down. I told them you’re renovating down here, but if it sounds more like you’re trying to collapse the foundation, it’s going to scare people off.”
Zane snorted at her in disbelief. “Cobra told you to stay home, right? Look, sweetheart, we don’t know where this shit is, and we’ve gone over every inch of this space. Now it’s time to dig deeper. If you want this over quicker, you’ll let us do our work.”
Ashleigh wanted to snap at him that she didn’t need any of them, that she had done nothing to make herself a part of this. But that didn’t change the fact that he was right. The slower they went, the longer it would take. The longer her life would be in danger and the longer she’d be jeopardizing Penny’s life. And the longer she’d have to keep away from her daughter.
She realized then that she would just have to deal with it. So she’d stalked off, still seething, hoping to God that they’d find the stuff behind the next wall they tore down.
They didn’t, of course. And things only grew worse after that. After the businessman left, the loud noises became more frequent. She was sure they’d moved on to breaking into the actual concrete structure behind the drywall, though she had no clue what they thought they’d find there, or why they thought someone would have been able to stash something in a concrete wall in the first place.
Whatever the logic behind it, the constant noise and clamor coming up from the basement was enough to spook off her customers. By noon it was clear to her that her efforts to keep the bakery open were hopeless.
So she closed up. She flipped the sign, stored her unsold merchandise, and cleaned up the front room. Then she headed downstairs to watch the progressive destruction of her business. It was fitting, she thought, that Alex and her guys were tearing it apart physically as she was falling apart financially.
When she reached the bottom of the steps, she sank down, rested her elbows on her knees, and observed. Drywall dust was thick in the air. Part of her knew she should have a mask to protect her lungs, or that she should at least cover her mouth with her shirt to filter out the worst of it.
But in light of everything going on, taking care of herself seemed entirely inconsequential. So she suffered silently as Alex and his guys worked to remove each segment of drywall.
It was a while before they even noticed her sitting there.
Alex left ripping out the current wall to the others, choosing instead to move over to her side. “Aren’t you supposed to be selling cakes or something?” he demanded.
Ashleigh glared bitterly at him. “My customers couldn’t take the noise. It sounded like the whole building was going to collapse from up there. So I closed up. I figure, what’s one more day of lost profits? I’m already pretty fucked over. It can’t get any worse.”
Alex ran a hand through his hair, a telltale sign that he was agita
ted. “Christ, how many times do I have to tell you not to worry about that? If you need any help after all this—“
“I’m not taking anything from you,” she growled. “I’m not going to owe you a dime after this. Just…don’t worry about me. This is my problem. I’ll deal with it.”
Alex glanced back at the guys, who’d all stopped working at tearing out the wall. The three of them were focused on her and Alex, faces split by shit-eating grins. It seemed to her that they treated her fights with Alex as a spectator sport.
“I’ll be back,” Alex told them curtly before grabbing Ashleigh by the arm and escorting her up the stairs.
BAD INFLUENCE: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 38