by Mandy Baxter
“A little over four years.” A busboy stopped at their table and filled two sawed-off wine bottles that had been repurposed as glasses, with water. Tabitha waited for him to move on to the next table, and continued. “I started working there the summer before my freshman year of college. They worked with my schedule and I could do homework at the front desk when it got slow.”
“After you graduate, you’ll be quitting?”
Tabitha averted her gaze, triggering Damien’s protective instinct yet again. Fear flickered across her features for the briefest moment before she answered. “That’s the plan. BSU has a great program, and since I’m finishing up my clinicals at St. Luke’s, it’s likely they’ll hire me right out of school.”
He noted the quaver in her voice, the lie inherent in her tone. She might want to quit the hotel, but Damien sensed that if Joey had anything to say about it, she’d be staying put. Why? “Not enough blood and guts working the front desk, huh?” If he pressed too hard, she’d shut down. Damien needed her to trust him, and that was something he couldn’t force.
“You’ve obviously never had to manage a swimming pool full of ten-year-old boys in town for a soccer tournament,” she joked. “I actually liked working at the hotel. I get along with my boss and everyone who works there. The money is decent considering how hard it is to find a good job around here. It could be worse.”
“Liked?” He didn’t miss the slip. She’d enjoyed her job at one time, but not anymore.
“Huh?”
Her perplexed expression coaxed a reluctant smile. “You said you liked working at the hotel. As in, you don’t like it anymore.”
A hint of crimson tinted her cheeks. Not embarrassment. Rather, guilt that she’d been caught in an admission she hadn’t meant to make. “It’s not that.” Tabitha averted her gaze and traced the lip of her water glass with the pad of her index finger. “I just—”
“Have you guys had a chance to look over the menu?”
Damien’s lip curled at the interruption, though it’s not like his annoyance was justified. “I’ll take the Urban Burger and a Square Mile Cider.”
“Great. You’re going to be happy with the burger. It’s fantastic.” The waitress turned her attention to Tabitha. “And for you?”
“I’ll have the same.” She gave Damien a sheepish grin as she handed her menu over to the waitress.
“I’ll get these burgers started for you.”
When the waitress was clear of earshot, Damien turned his full attention back on Tabitha. “If you weren’t ready to order, you should have said something. I could have waited.”
It didn’t take much to embarrass her, it seemed. The expression that crossed her features suggested that the people in her life didn’t make her feel as though her opinion mattered. An offense that prompted fantasies of breaking the skulls of anyone who’d managed to belittle her.
“It’s fine. I’ve wanted to try the burgers here for a while. A lot of the guests who stay at the hotel eat here, and they rave about the food.”
“Why haven’t you eaten here before? It’s just a couple of blocks down the road. I’d be mowing down everything on the menu if I were you.”
“It’s sort of out of my price range. This is more of a special occasion place, you know?”
Was there nothing in Tabitha Martin’s life that she’d ever felt was worth celebration? “I’m glad your first time here was with me, then.”
Her answering smile squeezed his heart. “I’m glad, too.”
As they waited for their lunch, Damien tried to keep the conversation light without being too heavy-handed in his questions. It violated his don’t-show-your-curiosity protocol, but Tabitha was a tough nut to crack. She didn’t have the ego most of the criminals he dealt with sported, which kept her from bragging or divulging too much. And she seemed reluctant to offer up anything about herself unless he specifically asked.
“So, let’s say you breeze through clinicals and walk away with a spiffy degree. What then? Will you bounce and take the job at the hospital?”
This was the question Damien was burning to know the answer to. Was she staying at the hotel to help Cavello? Or was she working under duress like he assumed—too afraid to cut him loose and walk away.
“I want to leave. But sometimes what a person wants and what they get are two completely different things.”
Damien leaned forward in his seat, ready to pressure her for an in-depth answer, when their food arrived. He swore the damned waitress was plotting against him. Her interruptions couldn’t be more perfectly timed to fuck up his day.
She set two large, square wooden planks on the table, each decked out with a fat, juicy burger and all the fixings. Beside the planks she doled out two conical metal baskets overflowing with Parmesan fries. Damien’s mouth watered as he realized that he hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. Hell, he could easily inhale two burgers and three times the amount of fries. Maybe if he turned his attention to his lunch, it would give Tabitha a moment or two of introspection. Reluctant witnesses often opened up after they had a few minutes to process what an investigator asked them.
At the very least, he could enjoy the view while he ate. Goddamn, there wasn’t a more beautiful woman in existence.
Tabitha dug into her burger with gusto she didn’t feel a damned bit embarrassed about. She hadn’t eaten in almost twelve hours and she needed something in her stomach so it would quit churning with the nervous acid that kicked up every time she laid eyes on Damien’s tattooed and muscled body. It should’ve been illegal for a man to look so perfectly made for sin.
Her conscience tickled at the back of her brain, a germ of thought that infected what was sizing up to be a nice afternoon. Damien Evans might be gorgeous. He definitely had the body of an MMA superstar and charm in excess. But he was still a criminal, a hard, unflinching, unconscionable drug dealer who probably had a history of violence that would make Joey’s petty squabbles seem like a child’s temper tantrum in comparison.
Was it strange that, given all of that, she felt safer with Damien than with any other man in her entire life?
“Can I ask you a question?” So far, they’d talked only about her. Tabitha appreciated that Damien was curious and a good listener, but it was time to turn the tables.
He washed down the gargantuan bite of his burger with a long pull from the bottle of hard cider. “Shoot.”
“That first week you stayed at the hotel, were you working for Joey then? Did you come to Boise to work for him?”
“That’s two questions,” he said without humor.
Tabitha’s stomach twisted. She might feel safe with him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a dangerous man. “True. But I’d like you to answer.”
He studied her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. “No,” he finally replied. “I wasn’t working for him the first week and I didn’t come here to work for him.”
“So . . . you just stumbled into it?”
Tabitha wondered if he’d noticed the note of hope that leaked into her voice. Was it too much to wish that he—like her—had ended up an unwitting accomplice to Joey’s less than legal activities? Would that somehow absolve her of the guilt she felt for lusting after him?
“I met him in a bar. Liquid. I needed money, he needed a guy. That’s all.”
Tabitha wasn’t unaccustomed to the need for extra cash. She lived every day of her life needing only a little more than what she had to make ends meet. Surely selling drugs was easy money for some. Her parents had found the money easy enough to make. It was obvious by the way he carried himself that Damien could handle most any situation that came his way. Maybe for someone as fearless and strong as he was, the consequences of his illegal acts meant very little at the end of the day.
“There are safer ways to make money, you know.” Her voice dropped with her gaze and she fiddled with a fry, twirling it between her fingers before she popped it into her mouth.
“There are,” he agreed. Tabitha dra
gged her gaze up to his and her breath caught at the intensity of his golden-brown eyes. “But I’ll endure the danger factor—and that idiot Joey Cavello—if it means I get to see more of you.”
“You want to see more of me?” God, she sounded like a fool, all shaky voice and fluttering nerves.
His gaze heated, warming Tabitha from the inside out. “I do. And wearing a hell of a lot less than you have on right now.”
Tabitha was pretty sure that the entire restaurant could hear the sound of her brain sizzling as it short-circuited. Maybe the cider had gone to her head and she was drunker than she thought, imagining the words spoken in a husky rasp that made her skin tingle. One hard cider on an empty stomach was surely enough to give her a buzz. And enough of a buzz to make her feel brazen at that.
“Shouldn’t that be my line? You’ve definitely seen more of me than I have of you.”
A wicked smile curved his lips and it was all Tabitha could do not to jump across the table and tackle him. “I’ll show you whatever you want to see. All you have to do is ask.”
Sin. Incarnate.
Tabitha couldn’t remember a time in her entire life that she’d shared a bit of dirty talk over a cheeseburger. She tingled with excitement from head to toe, even though the cautious part of her lust-addled brain reminded her to tread lightly. “Let’s say a girl wanted to do just that. Where would she find you on any given weeknight to pose such questions?”
After a week at the hotel, Damien had checked out, and aside from his weekend there working for Joey, Tabitha had no idea where he was staying. He’d asked her plenty of leading questions over the course of their lunch. It was time for him to answer a few of hers.
“Does it matter where, as long as it’s private? Maybe you could ask me a few questions over at your place.”
“No.” Damien might be the sexiest man she’d ever laid eyes on, but Tabitha had worked hard to make sure that Joey didn’t know where she lived. No matter what depraved acts she wanted to commit on Damien’s body, there was no way she’d risk her or Seth’s tenuous sense of safety by inviting one of Joey’s associates to her apartment.
Her stern response was answered by a dubious brow. “No?”
Tabitha had a feeling that very few people told Damien Evans no. There was a first time for everything, she supposed. “Sorry, but—” How far should she trust him? “—at the end of the day, you still work for Joey. And there are some things, my address being one, that he doesn’t need to know.”
Damien studied her as though he wanted to climb inside her brain and rummage through her thoughts. His bright eyes clouded over and Tabitha sensed that his temper simmered close to the surface. “Did he hurt you?”
Emotionally? Yeah. Mentally? You bet. He’d thrown her self-esteem to the floor, stomped on it, torn her emotional stability to shreds, and that was before he’d used her brother as a tool to blackmail her. “He never hit me.” Though she hadn’t really given Damien the answer she was sure he was hunting for, that was all he was going to get. “But he’s bad news and I don’t need him in my life any more than he is already.”
The cloud didn’t lift from Damien’s mood. In fact, at her words, it seemed to darken even more. “I’m just like him, aren’t I? Bad news is bad news. What are you doing sitting here with me?”
Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “You’re not like him.”
Damien braced one massive forearm on the table as he stood and leaned toward her. He reached out and cupped her face in his palm, his grip firm as he forced her gaze to meet his. Tabitha suppressed a shudder that had nothing to do with fear or anxiety. When he took control this way, he didn’t realize that he was giving her exactly what she wanted. “You sure about that?”
He’d meant to intimidate her. To put a little healthy fear into her. Sorry, buddy. It’s not gonna happen. “I’m not afraid of you, you know.” She met him look for look, her tone no longer meek but full of fire.
“Oh no?” His grip tightened. Not enough to hurt her, but just enough to let her know that he could if he wanted to. As if.
“No.”
His large frame loomed above her as he leaned down for a kiss. Tabitha felt multiple sets of eyes watching them, but Damien seemed not to care. His mouth moved over hers, not roughly as it had earlier in the hotel room, but with a slow, possessive precision that made Tabitha’s toes curl in her shoes.
When he pulled away, she was breathless and eager for more. His brow furrowed as he sat back down. “I’m afraid of me. You should be, too.”
For the first time since they’d met, Tabitha experienced a tiny trickle of what Damien wanted her to feel. “Maybe we’re both a little scary.” Or more to the point, scared. Scared of who they were, what they’d done, and how perfect they were together despite the fact that they barely knew each other. “Life is a little scary, don’t you think?”
His dark gaze swept over her and every nerve ending in Tabitha’s body seemed to respond. He could get to her with a look, enslave her with those golden eyes until she was little more than a mindless minion. “Scary.” The word hung in the air, flat. “You shouldn’t have to be scared, Tabitha. Of anything or anyone. Ever.”
The fierceness of his tone made her think that he’d do anything to reassure her, keep her safe. She believed his earnest expression, the concern etched into every line that marred his forehead. But did protecting her mean that he would also protect her from him? She didn’t think she wanted that. Not anymore. “No one should have to be scared, Damien.” And that included him, whether he believed it or not.
Silence settled over them like an early winter snow. Peaceful and calm. Each of them lost in their own thoughts. Tabitha picked at her lunch, dipping one of the Parmesan-coated fries into a little silver bowl of fry sauce. Damien wasn’t the sort of guy you pushed into anything, but Tabitha was going to do her best to urge him to leave the path that Joey had set out for him. He was a good guy. Too good to live his life peddling drugs and whatever else Joey wanted him to do.
“Here.” Tabitha looked up as Damien slid her cell and the canister of pepper spray across the table to her. “You left these in the room last night.”
“Thanks.” She tucked both of them into her purse and gave him a sheepish grin. “I wasn’t too worried about the cell, but replacing a lost canister of pepper spray is such a hassle.”
He flashed her a grin, the sight of his dimples enough to make her heart race. A breeze of fresh air seemed to blow the clouds of melancholy away and just like that, they were back on track.
“How’s it going over here?” their waitress asked as she approached the table. “Is anyone interested in dessert today?”
Their eyes met and Tabitha’s stomach flipped at the brilliance of his smile. God, he was amazing. He didn’t break eye contact with her as he said to the waitress, “We’re definitely interested in dessert.”
Damien Evans scared the crap out of her, but not for the reason he thought. The way she felt with him, as though she might actually be falling for him, was scarier than anything he could throw at her.
Chapter Eleven
“Seth Martin. Twenty-one years old, has a record that goes back to juvie.”
Damien sat back in the swivel chair, his arms planted on the armrests, fingers steepled at his lips. “Can we get our hands on the sealed records?”
“Already done.”
Gates had spent most of the morning digging up everything he could on Tabitha and her brother. Damien’s stomach soured as the deputy marshal listed Seth’s laundry list of offenses, ranging from petty theft to possession with intent to deliver, and a B and E, all before he’d turned fourteen. “Boise PD picked him up at seventeen for delivery of a controlled substance. Let’s face it, the kid isn’t exactly a criminal mastermind. I’d be willing to bet he gets caught doing more than he’s ever gotten away with.”
“What about the sister?” Damien was willing to bet that Tabitha spent most of her time bailing her brother out of jam after
jam. It fit her protective personality to a tee.
“A couple of speeding tickets several years back and one parking ticket last June, but nothing major. If she’s a player, she’s smarter than her brother.”
“What was the brother’s most recent arrest?” There was more to Tabitha’s story than her brother’s arrest records and her involvement with Joey.
“Possession with intent to deliver, about eighteen months ago. He did six months and got thirty-six months of probation. I read the transcript and the judge told him if he stepped a toe out of line again, he’d be going away for the duration.”
“Six months isn’t a long sentence for that type of charge.”
“No,” Ryan agreed. “But when Boise PD picked him up, he only had a few baggies on him, not more than an ounce of weed apiece. They’d been following him for a while, I guess, but according to the arrest record, the narc guys figured he’d unloaded most of the product by the time they got their hands on him.”
If Seth was on probation with a stern warning from the Ada County magistrate hanging over his head, there was a good chance that Tabitha could easily be coerced into giving Joey a hand if he had something on her brother that could get the kid arrested. “I take it Boise PD and Seth Martin are well acquainted?” Then again, Damien could be grasping at straws. Anything to excuse Tabitha’s involvement.
“Oh yeah.” Gates sat back in his chair and nibbled on the cap of his pen. “I talked to John Rader this morning and he said that they’d been investigating Martin for a couple of years. As clueless as the kid is, they were sure someone was using him as an expendable mule.”
“But they never made an arrest?”
Ryan shook his head. “Whoever was supplying Martin with product kept a low profile, and Seth wouldn’t give him up even when they offered him a plea bargain.”
Maybe Seth didn’t give up the supplier because the asshole was dating his sister at the time? “My money’s on Cavello for the supplier.”