by Sophia Gray
“Ooh, that’s always the best. All that passion builds up and finally explodes.”
“I guess you could say that’s what happened. We definitely exploded.”
Carly claps her hands wildly. “I’m so excited for you!”
I can’t help giggling, all pretense of playing it cool over. “It wasn’t just the sex either. I really like him. He’s got a good heart. He just tries to hide it. Like he’s some hard ass, you know?”
“Ooh, like a bad boy?” She giggles, and I nod. That’s the closest description I can think of.
“Do you see this going anywhere? Will you see him again?”
“I hope so. I want to. I was wondering earlier, before I left him, whether…whether I was starting to have feelings for him.”
“Ohhh…” Carly sighs, hands over her heart. “This is probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard! Like something out of a movie. A dashing bad boy saves your life, then steals your heart!” She closes her eyes, sighing again.
“Wow, now that you put it that way…” I laugh, and she joins me. She’s right. It sounds too good to be true. But I remember Christopher’s smile, his touch, the way it feels when he’s inside me. He’s the real deal.
“Do you think he feels the same way?”
This is the sticking point for me. I bite my lip, thinking it over. “I’m not sure. Like I said, he tries to hold back. Hide his heart, know what I mean? I know it’s in there, I know he’s a sweet person. He was so thoughtful, in so many little ways. Something happened to him, something bad. He mentioned his late wife. I wonder if there’s not still a lot of pain there, you know? Maybe he’s wary of getting involved.”
“Sounds like a touchy situation.”
“A little bit.” I sigh, shrugging. “All I can do is try. He sure seemed happy enough to spend the morning in bed today. We even played board games in the afternoon, just like you said. It felt nice. Natural. I just hope he recognized it, too.”
“I hope so. Ack, I’m so excited you found a good guy! And, um, I’m assuming he’s seriously hot?”
I can’t help laughing again, my face burning. “Super seriously. Gorgeous. Built like a brick house. The whole package.”
We high-five over the table, giggling together.
“What’s his name?”
“Christopher.”
I see a look pass over her face. A millisecond of uncertainty that she tries too late to hide. “Christopher? Do you mean…Christopher Barton?”
I feel the smile slipping from my face. She doesn’t sound happy about this.
“Yeah. His last name is Barton. How did you know? Do you know him?”
She sits back, hard, against her chair. As though the wind got knocked out of her. Her mouth is open again, but not in surprise.
In shock.
“Oh, Amanda. You don’t know who he is, do you?”
“Carly, don’t. Don’t screw with me right now.” I laugh nervously.
She doesn’t. “I’m not. Amanda…he’s one of those guys from The Wicked Angels. Remember when they rode through a while back, and everybody was talking about them? He’s one of the members.”
It feels like a hand is squeezing my heart. My chest literally hurts like I’ve been hit. “What does that mean, though? Okay, he’s in a motorcycle club. He’s also a landscaper. He reads a lot. There are plenty of things to him.” I’m desperate, searching for excuses.
“Amanda, I’m sorry, but there’s more to it than that.” Carly leans over the table, taking my hands in her own. “Christopher did have a wife, and she did die. Just like you mentioned. Only, she died suspiciously. And…” her head slumps forward on her neck, her eyes focused on the table, “…and most people think he was the one who killed her.”
Chapter 18
I’m driving home in a daze. It can’t be true. How can it be true? Thank God I don’t live far from the shop, or else I’m not sure I could make it. I’m just that devastated.
How can this be? I look back on everything I can remember from the last few days. How did I miss this? He never once mentioned a club. Never. I didn’t even see a motorcycle anywhere.
It would have been in the garage, stupid. But…wouldn’t there have been a clue? Something, somewhere?
Oh, God. Of course there was. The tattoo. The angel in the flames. The Wicked Angels.
I can’t be blamed for missing that. I don’t know anything about the club, only hearing about them that one time at the shop when they rode through. By the time we closed up for the day, I had dismissed them from my mind completely. They meant nothing to me.
At least, they hadn’t at the time.
###
I manage to keep from crying until I pull into the driveway of my little house. Then I sit for a while, arms crossed on the wheel, my forehead resting against them as I sob. How long has it taken me to find a man to care about the way I care about Christopher? And what sort of man is he? The sort I’m clearly attracted to whether I want to be or not.
There has to be something wrong with me. What else can the explanation be? First Lucas, now Christopher. I should become a nun. Shut myself away in a cave somewhere. Anything to avoid this shit.
Lucas. His hand flashing out toward my face. The way it felt like an explosion went off when he made contact. Bam! Seeing stars, hitting the floor before I knew I’d been knocked off my feet. Crawling away from him on my butt, hands and feet scrambling until I hit a corner and had nowhere else to go. The way he looked down at me. Like he hated me.
Was Christopher that kind of man? He had to be violent if he was a member of the club. The way Carly made it sound, they were little more than a gang. Just because they rode bikes and wore leather jackets didn’t mean they were any different from run-of-the-mill thugs. That meant violence, vandalism, and all sorts of criminal activity I didn’t want to imagine.
And murder. He might have murdered his wife.
I have to find out more about this. Once the tears slow and I can breathe calmly again, I get out of the car. I take my bags into the house, leaving them just inside the front door. I don’t care about them right now. I need to find out more about Christopher.
My laptop is open in an instant, my fingers flying over the keys. My first keyword search is “Barton murder.” I need to pull the bandage off all at once, get the worst out of the way first. My curiosity is too great.
There she is. Christopher’s wife. Michelle Barton. She was twenty-five when she died. A tiny thing, bleach blonde. She had a big smile, a twinkle in her eye. She was only twenty-five. I can’t stop thinking about that.
She was found dead in the woods one day, a gunshot wound to her chest. I unconsciously raise my hand to my own chest, feeling my heart beating wildly under my skin.
There were never any charges filed. They never even found the gun used in the crime. Still, the court of public opinion had its say. Many people in Michelle’s life, her friends and family, reported that she and Christopher had been on the outs before her death. In fact, she may or may not have been on the verge of leaving him.
It didn’t look good for Christopher. I can see why people assumed he was the one who did it. How many times have I seen stories like this on the news and assumed the husband did it? If I’d seen this story on my six o’clock newscast — the pretty young wife murdered on the eve of leaving her criminal husband — wouldn’t I have leapt to that conclusion before moving on with my life?
I can’t help leaping to that conclusion now. Even though I know him. I don’t really know him, though, do I? I spent nearly three days with him. I’ve slept with him. He’s shown me what he’s wanted me to see. Any idea of a connection between us, an understanding, is what I want to believe. It’s not the truth. I’ve let myself be fooled again.
While I’m online, I do a little research of The Wicked Angels. Boy, they’re an attractive bunch. Rough-looking guys, long-haired, inked, normally with black eyes or busted lips in their mugshots—probably from whatever dust-up they got into
before getting arrested. I remind myself never to judge a book by its cover, but the fact is these are legitimately bad guys. They just happen to look bad, too.
It looks as though they’re always causing trouble. News item upon news item, going back years, report on the fights they’ve caused. Outside of bars, inside of bars. At community events. In stores. One clerk refused to serve them and got a broken jaw. One group beating they participated in allegedly started when a stranger slapped his girlfriend in public while three members of the club happened to be nearby. They put him in the hospital, in critical condition.
Was Christopher one of those men? I have no idea. No witnesses agreed to identify any of the club members. Nobody saw anything, evidently. They only knew the men wore leather jackets with the club name and logo—an angel in flames—on the back.
Various members of the club have been arrested for destruction of property, too. One rival’s car had been destroyed while the rival sat in it at a red light. A few businesses in the area were busted up. There was even a mention of arson at one point, which sent two club members to prison for years.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more. I don’t even want to know. My heart can’t take any more of this. I’m hurting badly enough.
Who is Christopher? Is he the man I met, or a man like those I’ve been reading about? Maybe a mix of the two? I can’t afford to let myself get involved with a man like this. Even if those days are behind him—and I pray they are—organizations such as this don’t just let their members walk away, no questions asked. Even if he got away from them, that wouldn’t change anything he’d done. He would still be a violent criminal, end of story.
Leave it to me to fall for a guy like this.
This is what he was trying to tell me earlier. Oh, my God. It was right there. He didn’t want to come out and speak the plain truth, so he spoke in half-veiled hints. Making bad choices because he was young. Wanting more than anything to feel like he was part of something after his lonely, neglected childhood. Regretting the choices he made when he was running away.
He wanted me to know how much he regretted being part of the club. Or he wanted to make me to think he regrets it, to spare me from losing my mind after finding out the truth. I’m not the kind of girl who would sleep with a motorcycle gang member and not care either way about it. He figured that out at least. He wanted to soften the blow, because of course I’d find out. How many times did he try to tell me how the town has rejected him? I thought he was exaggerating. Now I see he was understating the severity.
I close my eyes, exhaling a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I remember the look on his face, the intensity with which he stared at me. He couldn’t have been pretending. Could he?
A bigger question now looms. Was he only talking about the club…or about Michelle’s death? Does he regret the choice he made in killing her? Was it something he just had to do, something he got caught up in, thanks to his association with the club? I don’t know anything about the real lives of guys like Christopher, but I know weak links don’t last long.
Was Michelle a weak link? Or maybe Christopher was, and he had to be brought into line?
How would I know? I’m sure as hell not going to go back to his house to ask him. Even if I did, would I get the full truth?
What can I do? Here I was, dreaming of life with him. Stupid, silly me. A happy little life together in his house, away from the rest of the world. I could go to work in town; he could do his landscaping. He has land. I could start a big garden. Maybe raise chickens. I laugh out loud, remembering some of the visions that had danced through my head before Carly stuck a pin in my dreams.
My phone buzzes from inside my purse. Funny—I used to be afraid of seeing Lucas’s name on the ID. Now, there’s a second name I dread.
There it is. Christopher. He texted me. Hey, gorgeous, get home okay?
Who could have imagined how sick I’d feel just seeing those words? Had I come straight home instead of stopping at the shop, this wouldn’t be an issue. I’d have just replied, maybe said something a little naughty. We’d go back and forth. I might even invite him over. At the very least, I’d think about him when I went to bed, as my hands revisited the places he just explored earlier in the day.
Now, though, I couldn’t drop my phone faster if it were on fire. I feel dirty now. The way he touched me, the things he did to me…it all meshes together in my mind with a third image: Christopher holding a gun to his wife’s chest and pulling the trigger.
I run upstairs, pulling my clothes off as I do. I crank the water to scalding, and I jump under the spray, my skin turning deep red on contact. I scrub myself thoroughly, wanting to remove every trace of him from my body. I remember the way we showered together earlier today and scrub even harder, struggling to keep from throwing up in the tub. I can’t possibly be clean enough. I’ll never feel clean again.
Eventually, the water starts to run cold. Another reminder of the way we showered together earlier. Only then I was happy—joyful, even. We used up the hot water because we didn’t want the moment to end. Could that really have been less than twelve hours ago? It feels like a lifetime.
The walls drip with condensation from the steam that’s been billowing up from the tub for endless minutes. My skin hurts from the unforgiving treatment I gave it. It’s nearly bleeding in spots. Still, I feel dirty.
I sit on the floor of the tub, arms around the legs I’ve drawn up to my chest. I’m trembling, not from the now-cool water, but from the complete heartbreak I feel.
I thought I loved him.
How many times have I taken showers like this? Maybe not scalding ones, but ones that ended with me sitting like this? Crying, struggling to hold back the sound so Lucas wouldn’t hear me. I could never let him know how badly he hurt with his words and hands. The shower was my only refuge, the bathroom the only place where I was left completely alone. I’d take three or four showers a day sometimes, just to have the time to myself. To get away from his eyes on me, to have time to recover after he screamed in my face, or hit me, or taunted me. I would sit in the tub, under the shower, and quietly cry. Hoping the sound of the water would drown me out.
Will there ever be a time in my life when I don’t feel this way?
Soon, the water is icy, stinging my raw skin like tiny knives. I can’t stay here any longer. I get up, sore all over, to turn off the shower and climb from the tub. I wrap myself in a fluffy robe, hoping for even a little comfort. All it does it hurt on contact. Maybe the pain is what I’m secretly craving. I’m tearing myself apart from the inside out.
I return to the first floor, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea. Just like I did for him. My hand lingers on the handle of the kettle for a moment when I remember.
The phone buzzes again, still sitting on the coffee table. This time, it keeps buzzing beyond the two that signal a text. He’s calling me now. How long do I imagine I’ll be able to avoid him? I’m sure he can find out where I live if he tries hard enough. Besides, he knows where I work. I can’t stay away forever.
I can’t help but wonder if he’s left other messages while I was upstairs, so I pick up the phone against my better judgment. There are a half dozen texts, each one sexier and more suggestive than the last. He already misses being inside me. His cock hurts when he thinks of me. He needs me again, soon. He wants to pull my hair again, and maybe beat my ass the way he promised just before I left.
Imagine. It had sounded like a good idea at the time.
I drop the phone again before putting my head in my hands and curling up in a ball on the sofa. What am I going to do? Spend the rest of my life being sexted by a murderer?
Chapter 19
I didn’t sleep well last night. Nightmares kept me tossing and turning until I gave up entirely. I decide to go to the shop, rather than wasting time in bed. I’m only going crazy here. My brain won’t leave me alone. I might as well be productive if I can’t sleep. I can get some baking done
before customers start coming in.
There’s something about the perfect silence of the shop in the early hours. Totally dark, empty except for the display case and coffee machines, tables and chairs. It sits quietly, waiting for people to come in and make it bustle again.
The back rooms are even better. This is my church. Back here is where I do much of my thinking, planning, dreaming. While I’m measuring ingredients into the stand mixer, rolling dough on a floured table, pouring batter into muffin tins, I might as well be meditating. Sometimes I’m so deep in thought, I don’t notice Carly trying to get my attention.
That’s why it’s best for me to work at times like this, when there’s no one around to bother me. I preheat the ovens, then take stock of what needs to be baked. Chocolate chip cookies, chocolate muffins, carrot cake muffins, banana bread…I have my work cut out for me.