She’d landed in the E.R. and that was how she’d entered Mac’s life. He’d been her consulting neurologist, and she still stood out in his mind as one of the worst cases that he’d ever seen in his long career.
Christ, she’d just been so damaged… but she’d fought like hell, and she’d recovered, and she’d been with him. For a little while, anyway. Until the goddamned Fallen Angels had threatened Mac’s life if she carried on seeing him. Without a second thought, Mirrie had walked away from him to keep him alive, and Mac had never known what had happened – not until just recently.
So, yeah. Mac had a fuck-ton of reasons to hate those assholes, and Mirrie had double that number. She hated her Dad and brother for beating her almost to death, hated everything they stood for and loved and were loyal to, but emotions were complicated things. It was possible to hate someone, and still love them, too… Mac knew that all too well.
He gazed down at her now, wondering how she’d react to the news that Sands or Joker had finally just shuffled on off this mortal coil in a hail of bullets. Considering their lifestyles – and as hardcore members of the Fallen Angels MC, they were nothing less than full-on dangerous and brutal criminals – it was more than a strong possibility. It was a damn-near guarantee.
“How’d King know all of this?” Mac asked, changing the subject. He had strong suspicions, naturally, but he wondered how much King had chosen to share.
Mirrie raised her eyebrows. “He didn’t say… but we know that he and King’s Men were there in the thick of it, don’t we?”
Mac nodded, now worried about King. “Did he say how he was? How his team was?”
“Nope. I asked, but…” She shrugged. “He just said that everyone was whole.”
Mac digested that. “That sounds a bit ominous.”
“Yeah, I thought so too. I started to press him, but he told me he was at the police station and he had to go make a statement. Couldn’t get off the phone fast enough, really.”
“Christ.” He felt the sudden and overwhelming urge to call his friend. “I don’t like any of that.”
“What’s to like?” Mirrie said. “It seems that twice a week now, King’s on the phone to me, giving me insider information about some major news item involving the Fallen Angels and Kirk Jensen. He knows what happened before it hits the news stations, and he knows details that aren’t general knowledge. It’s crystal clear that the man is in deep, Shane.”
“Yeah.”
Mirrie wrestled with herself, asked the next question. “Is he in too deep?”
“I don’t know, babe. He’s been even more closed-mouthed than usual these past few weeks, and he’s been showing up at Curves beaten to shit.”
“Yeah, you said. He’s been getting up-close and personal with some very bad people, huh?”
“You know it.” Mac hesitated. “Has Naomi said anything?”
Mirrie shook her head. “A bit, but you know I can’t tell you.”
Mac did know. Mirrie was Naomi’s AA sponsor, and as such, she fiercely guarded Naomi’s anonymity and her secrets.
“Well, I’m sure that King’s OK.” Mac heard the doubt in his own voice. “He’s the toughest bastard that I know, so if anybody can handle the heat, it’s him.”
“Well, sure,” Mirrie said. “But even tough bastards have a breaking point, Shane. I just hope that King isn’t right at the edge of his.”
**
Matt ‘King’ Kingston unlocked his front door as quietly as possible. It was just past seven a.m. now, and it had been one hell of a long night.
He shut it with barely a click and turned. Despite his hopes that she’d still be sleeping, he wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to see Naomi Abbott sitting on the sofa. She had an empty coffee cup in front of her, and her short blonde hair was damp. The TV was on, though the sound was off. Clearly, she’d been up for a while – maybe even a long while.
He examined her closely in the early-winter sunrise, and guilt surged up his chest at the strain around her beautiful brown eyes. Yeah, she’d been up for hours… if she had gone to bed at all.
“Hey, baby.” King struggled to sound normal. “Why are you up so early?”
She regarded him steadily, silently. She took in the horrific bruising all along the left side of his face, watched him limp over to the sofa and sit with a grimace. When he reached for her, she looked down at his hand and saw the bloody, bruised knuckles.
“You OK?” she asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Is there any point whatsoever for me to ask you what happened?”
King tensed up. “You know I can’t talk about it, Naomi. I’m sorry.”
“Uh-huh.”
Naomi switched her attention to the TV now, and King followed her gaze, already sure that he knew what she was looking at. Sure enough, she was watching the news, and yep, the lead story was the drugs bust in the mountains. King and his team had beat it the hell out of there long before the cameras had shown up, and he was interested to see that the cabin was still ablaze. He also saw that a few bodies were still scattered around, though they were covered by sheets.
“You know anything about any of that, Matt?” she asked him softly.
“Naomi…”
“No, don’t bother.” She stood up. “I can smell the smoke on your clothes. I know you were there, and that you and your team killed those seven people. Hell, for all I know, you offed every one of those men all by yourself, maybe beat them to death with your bare hands. Please don’t insult me by coming up with some evasive answer or bullshit story of your whereabouts. I know where you were, and –” She nodded at the TV, “– I have a pretty good idea what you were doing.”
“Hey.” King grabbed her around the waist and hauled her in to his lap, wincing a bit as she made contact with the bruising along his ribs. He wasn’t about to let her go, though. “I’m sorry.”
She was stiff in his arms, and he didn’t like that at all. It reminded him of Naomi when they first met, back when she was so defensive and abrasive around him.
Back then, she’d still been in the first year of her recovery from alcoholism, and she’d fought hard against his attentions. She’d been so damn determined to push him away, to keep him at arm’s length, and King had finally understood why when Naomi had told him about her struggle with alcohol.
Since then, she’d been so open with him, so trusting, soft, and warm. But the woman he held right here and now was hurting and afraid, and when Naomi felt that way, she withdrew emotionally. She just slammed the doors shut, closed up inside herself, huddled up in the corner and went silent.
“Naomi…” King smoothed her hair back off her forehead, needing to see her eyes. “Don’t do that, OK? Don’t pull away from me.”
“Don’t pull away from you?” she said, disbelieving. “You’re the one who won’t talk to me, Matt.”
“Come on, now,” he protested. “That’s not true. I’m here, baby, I’m right here. I can’t talk about the shit I’m involved in, but I’m with you.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why am I up so early?”
He faltered, suddenly feeling like he’d missed something big. He was sure that whatever he said was going to be wrong, but he gave it a shot anyway.
“You were worried when I didn’t come home last night?” he said. “You were waiting for me?”
“You’re half-right.”
“OK.” King grinned up at her, relieved that he hadn’t messed up completely. “What’s the other half?”
She shook her head, jerked away from his embrace. “I have a flight to Miami in three hours.”
King froze. Fuck, fuck, fuck. That’s today?
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” he said. OK, that was fucking lame, and he knew it. “Yeah, I remember.”
“No, you didn’t.” Her voi
ce was soft, but he heard the hurt below the words. “You forgot, Matt. If you’d come home an hour later, I’d have been at the airport, and you wouldn’t have had a goddamn clue that’s where I was.”
“Honey…”
“No.” She stood up now. “I have to go and get ready.”
“I’ll drive you to the airport,” King said, desperate to make this right. “I’ll take you, yeah?”
“I booked a taxi,” Naomi said. “So don’t worry about it.”
She walked across the living room, and he watched her go. She paused, turned, glanced at the TV again.
“I love you for going out there night after night and taking down the bad guys, babe,” she said slowly. “I love you for saving people trapped in horrible situations, for getting kidnapped kids home, for protecting the defenseless. I love knowing that every time you come back from whatever you were doing, and wherever you were, the world is a safer place.”
King heard the ‘but’ coming a mile away.
“But ever since you struck that deal with Ace Cuddy and he started feeding you intel, you’re coming home badly hurt, and you won’t tell me what happened. You’re quiet, and you look angry all the time. You don’t pay attention when I talk, you don’t remember things that I say.”
“Naomi –” He cleared his throat. “I can’t slow down, baby. Not yet. Too much is going on, and we need to make our moves now. The kind of stuff we’re dealing with, it’s time-sensitive. You get me? It’s like… we have to be there to intercept the shipment, or catch the top guy. Things like this can’t be delayed or pushed. This isn’t my time-table and I don’t control it, as much as I wish I did.”
“No, I get it.” She gave him a small smile. “I really get it, Matt, I promise you. What you do is so important and it changes lives, and you need to be flexible and ready to go at any second. I know what you do isn’t safe or clean… I know it’s dangerous and dirty, and I know that you don’t want any of that in my head. You can’t stop doing it, and I know that, and I don’t want that. I’m not saying that I want you to stop.”
“So what are you saying?” he asked, almost afraid of the answer.
She bit her lip, thinking. “I don’t know what I’m saying… and that’s the problem.”
Stunned and worried, he watched her head down the hallway to their bedroom. What he heard next showed him just how bad things were getting – it was a sound that he’d never heard come between them, not since they’d first gotten together. Even when she’d been furious at him a few months earlier, and booted him on to the sofa for a week, she’d never done this.
Fuck. She actually shut the bedroom door.
Chapter Three
That night, Jax Hamill glanced around Dangerous Curves, checking the vibe. It was pretty relaxed for a change, he was relieved to observe. Things had been far too tense far too often lately… but no surprise there. It seemed that every single goddamn time he’d turned around over the past few months, some crisis was sitting there, just hanging out and waiting to explode. And when it did explode, it was nothing less than devastating.
At that thought, his dark-green eyes zeroed in on Gabriela Torres as she headed in to the staff room for her meal break. Jax still couldn’t believe sometimes that Gabi was here, and safe, and whole; normally, a woman marked for death by the Fallen Angels MC would be just that. It had been damn close – way too close, in her boyfriend Aidan Carter’s opinion, and he wasn’t alone in thinking that – but she’d come up and out of the earth alive. Shaken, damaged, traumatized. But breathing.
The Fallen Angels had carried on with their reign of terror when they’d decided to go after Mac and Mirrie. Mac had conspired with King to defuse that whole situation, and Mac had been the one damaged that time.
He’d chosen it, of course, and King and King’s Men had had Mac’s back the whole damn time… but there had been more than a slight chance that the former MC President, Trigger, would simply shoot Mac in the head before King could get in position, and make his decisive move. Trigger had, after all, been given his nickname for his preferred method of killing people, and the man hadn’t been shy about just going for it.
Trigger was dead now, though, dead at King’s hand – or rather, at his former VP Ace Cuddy’s gun – and now Ace was the President of the Fallen Angels. He was also firmly in King’s pocket, and was proving himself to be one hell of an informant on local slime bucket Kirk Jensen’s criminal activities.
So far, and from what Jax was able to piece together by watching the news, and observing King’s comings-and-goings and his injuries, Ace had provided King’s Men with intel on no less than nine major operations that Jensen had going on all over the state. Jax knew – without being told a word – that King’s people had busted open and demolished every single one of them. Jensen was howling, and the ripples and repercussions were huge, and they were being felt right there at Dangerous Curves.
In some cases, Jax’s clientele wasn’t made up of Denver’s most upstanding citizens, and many of them had been directly affected by Jensen’s loss of drug and prostitution chains and distributors. Many times over the past few weeks, Jax and his staff had heard the bar patrons bitching to each other over a few drinks about a formerly-lucrative shady business going bust overnight, and with no warning. Jax was pretty sure he knew who had been behind every one of these surprise stings, even if he wasn’t privy to any of the details.
Jax wasn’t sorry to see Jensen’s ass being kicked, of course, and King was even less so. The man was sitting there now, drinking a beer and saying not much. Jax observed his friend, saw the severe damage done to his face. He’d asked, of course – they all had – about what had happened, but King wasn’t talking. They all knew it had to do with an op, and they guessed it had been a rough one, if the TV coverage dominating the airwaves that day was anything to go by. Beyond that, it was a fucking mystery, like so much of what King’s Men did.
Jax caught Mac’s eye now, and the two men exchanged hard looks. Yeah, they were worried about King, for damn sure, but no way he’d stand for that. King was a good guy, a stand-up guy, but he was also a brutal, lethal man who’d made it his life’s mission to handle shit that was even too hot for the cops to touch sometimes.
King would never let anyone feel sorry for him for getting hurt while rescuing kidnapped kids, or saving trafficked girls, or shutting down a meth lab. He’d fucking die first… and Jax’s biggest fear was that that was exactly what was going to happen one day. Maybe even one day soon.
Jax shifted a bit, and thought about that. If he, Mac, and Aidan were good and freaked out about King, then how the hell was Naomi coping? Even though Jax didn’t know her all that well since she never came to Curves, he knew she was a tough, smart, kind woman. She’d see the need for King to follow up on each and every lead given to him by Ace – and she’d have to be a nervous wreck each and every time King walked out their door to follow up on said lead.
As if he could hear Jax’s troubled thoughts, King turned to stare at Jax. His gray eyes were hard, as always, and showed exactly nothing of what the man was thinking. Yeah, King was hardcore and a killer… but he wasn’t fucking invincible. He could get hurt. He could get dead.
King saw the look on Jax’s face, and he almost sighed. It was the same look he’d seen on Naomi’s face that morning, a kind of still, silent watchfulness. Everyone was waiting to see if he’d open his mouth and start to talk… and talking was just about the last thing that he could do.
The truth was that King and his people were taken aback at just how dirty and deep Kirk Jensen’s criminal connections and operations were and went. Like a gigantic, slimy octopus, the man had his revolting tentacles everywhere, and in everything. King had thought he’d been prepared to finally get a full view of the monstrous underbelly that was Jensen’s world – but he hadn’t been. That shook him up. And if it shook him, what the hell would it to do his friends? Or,
dear God, to Naomi?
No. He wasn’t talking about any of it with anyone but King’s Men. His priority was to keep the people he loved and cared about safe, and away from all this ugliness… and that meant shutting the hell up. It also meant putting up with lots of looks like the ones being directed his way right now.
Uneasily, King thought about Naomi’s departure that morning. She’d kissed him, thank Christ, and let him hold her close. Then she’d pulled away and given him one of her searching, sweet looks, one of the looks that he adored and lived for.
“I’m not going to call you, OK?” she’d said quietly.
When he’d started to protest, she’d laid her finger across his lips gently, silencing him.
“I don’t want to interrupt you in the middle of something dangerous, Matt. You can’t be distracted… that kind of thing gets you and your team hurt. Maybe worse. And you’re sleeping such crazy hours now, I don’t feel good about calling during the day anymore. You need your rest so you can focus when things get intense.”
He’d stayed quiet, just watching her beautiful face.
“You call me, when you can. Just remember that my meeting schedule with the art gallery owners is full-on, so I’ll have my cell off a lot. Leave a message or text if I don’t pick up.”
“OK,” he’d said softly. “I’m gonna miss you, baby.”
She’d just walked out the door then, and his heart had jumped out of his chest and stowed away in her luggage. He knew she needed to expand her Art With Heart business, to get her artists’ work in different cities and states – but the timing fucking sucked.
He looked up again, saw that Aidan was now giving him a wary look. King took a swig of beer, decided to deflect everyone’s attention away from him. He turned to Jax and said, “So. How’re the wedding plans going?”
Jax gave him a crooked smile, one tinged with a bit of sadness, one that said that he knew precisely what King was up to. He shook his head but he played along, as King had known that he would.
Secret Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 5) Page 3