Price of Angels (Dartmoor Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  Pathetic.

  “Okay.” He reached her, and the bag went on the ground again. He spread a black-stained kitchen towel on the soft bed of grass, and then the guns came out. “We’ll start with this” – a small revolver with a long blue barrel that glimmered in the sun – “and move on to these” – another revolver, larger, heavier, with a shorter barrel, and two matte semiautos that had the hair on the back of her neck standing up.

  He tipped his head back, so he was looking up at her as he crouched on the ground. As if he could read her thoughts, he said, “Don’t be intimidated. They won’t jump up and shoot you all by themselves. They only do what you make them do.”

  She took a deep breath. “I know.”

  “What’s scarier: these? Or the fact that you felt scared enough to try and hire a hit man?”

  She frowned at him. “Not a very good hit man.”

  Undeterred, he stood, the small revolver in one hand. “Pay attention now. This is a .22 magnum…”

  She had small hands, but he said that didn’t matter. With a touch like feathers brushing across her skin, he cupped a hand beneath hers, showed her where to rest the grip of the gun, positioned her fingers where they needed to be. He touched her arms, elevated them to the proper angle, so they were straight out in front of her. He stood behind her, and tipped her head so she could align the sights properly, with one eye closed. When he stood behind her, she could feel his radiant body heat; she could smell the cigarette smoke, the shampoo, the cologne. He’d put cologne on, to come shooting with her. Her heart danced. What would it be like, she wondered, if he closed his arms around her, pulled her back into his chest? What would if feel like to be embraced, rather than subdued?

  Michael wasn’t capable of such softness, she reasoned, as he stepped clear of her. Best not to wish for things that would never happen. Wishing had never gotten her anywhere in the past anyway.

  “Target on the left,” Michael instructed. “Aim for the bullseye. Line up your sights – there, like that – and remember what I said. Deep breath in, half out, hold it, relax, aim and slowly pull the trigger back.”

  “Got it,” she said, and took her deep breath, closed her right eye, stared down the barrel of the .22 toward the green and black paper bullseye affixed to the plywood downrange. She let half of the breath out, finger caressing the trigger. Then held it, pulled back slowly –

  The gun went off with a ripping crack of sound. The barrel kicked upward, toward the sky, grip tugging at her hands.

  “Jesus!” She fumbled the weapon, managed not to drop it. “Oh my God.” Her heart was hammering against her breastbone, thumping in the pads of her fingers where they touched the gun. Michael had been right – the recoil hadn’t been strong at all – but she still hadn’t been expecting such movement, even after watching Michael shoot a few rounds. The gun had looked so controlled in his hands. She felt small and weak and incapable, and it made her throat tight with stress.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing from the unblemished target to Michael, who watched her from behind his Ray-Bans with something almost like real interest. “I figured I wouldn’t be any good.”

  He gave the tiniest smile, wider than the usual twitching. It warmed her immediately, helped with the sense of inadequacy. “Honey, nobody hits the target on their first shot.”

  Honey. She could float away on that word. She wondered if he knew he’d said it, or if it had slipped out without his consent.

  “Not even you?” she asked.

  “Well…I did. But that’s different.”

  “Oh, right.” She snorted, rolled her eyes. “How could I not have known? You probably gave the bullet the evil eye, and it jumped out of the gun and flew right into the bullseye so you wouldn’t get angry with it, right?”

  Another little smile. “Something like that. Here.” He grew serious again, stepped up beside her, adjusted her grip. “Try again. This time, I want you to keep your hands real tight on the gun, but keep your arms loose. Can you do that? You’ve gotta separate the muscle groups in your head.”

  “Okay.” She shook her hair back, waited for him to back off from the firing line – one of many terms he’d inundated her with – and refocused, thinking about loose arms and tight hands.

  A thought struck her. “You know” – she lowered the gun, turned her head to glance at him over her shoulder, voice sounding muffled and strange through the big ear protection muffs he’d put on her – “I saw in a movie once that the instructor stood behind the student and helped her hold the gun. Like, when someone helps someone else swing a baseball bat. Would that help? Just till I get the hang of it.”

  He frowned. “The only reason guys do that is so they can feel a woman up. No, it won’t help. You’ve gotta learn to control the gun yourself.”

  Deflated, Holly nodded and turned back around. The smile had given her false hope; he didn’t want them to be close, didn’t want there to be any confusion about their relationship.

  “Set up your shot,” he said behind her.

  She did. She fixed the target in her sights and thought about this frustrating dynamic between the two of them. She didn’t want to feel this pull toward him, and he didn’t want her to feel it either. But it was there, like a magnet drawing to metal, and she hated him a little for making this all so difficult, when he could have just taken on the contracts, and then she wouldn’t have to worry again, not ever. Could he imagine? What it would be like to go to bed every night with the knowledge that no one was coming for her? There would be no more ropes, no more locked doors, no more bible verses, no more one after the next after the next, a nightmare that wouldn’t end, in the bed where her mother had died.

  No, Michael couldn’t conceive of that, because he was a strong, frightening man, and he had no reason to be afraid of anything.

  She swept the trigger back with her finger and the gunshot didn’t spook her this time. Her hands controlled the kick of the .22. She didn’t jump or yell. And when she peered downrange at the target, she saw the tidy hole just right of center, its edges glowing green where the black ring had been punctured.

  “I hit it,” she said in disbelief.

  Michael’s hand was so warm it seemed to burn her as it landed on her shoulder and squeezed. “Good.”

  When she glanced over at him, there was an unmistakable pleased expression on his harsh face. No one had ever been pleased with her, not since her mother had died. She felt her chest tighten, wanted to cry, wanted to fling her arms around him. Oh, you have no idea, no idea at all how wonderful you are, just for this, just for being proud that I did something right.

  His hand squeezed her shoulder again and then fell away. “Let’s shoot a few more rounds with the .22, till you’re real comfortable with it, and then we’ll move to the .38.”

  There was a member of the Arkansas chapter, Bug, who’d once told Michael that he thought it was “damn stupid” teaching any woman how to shoot. “Then they’ll known what they’re doin’ when they get real pissed off at ya.” He’d then spat an eloquent stream of Copenhagen juice onto the asphalt and declared the afternoon “hot as balls.”

  Michael hadn’t said so – why bother? – but he’d thought that comment was the dumbest in Bug’s history of dumb comments. Women should know how to shoot. Women should be competent and confident with a gun, one that best fit their size and strength. He’d held that sentiment since the night his father beat his mother into a bloody dead pulp, and he believed it still. Women were no physical match for the evil men of the world who wanted to do them harm; they had to level the playing field. God made man, and Samuel Colt made him equal. When he’d come to Knoxville, back to his home state to serve the mother chapter, he’d been glad to see that Ghost Teague had instructed and armed his wife and daughter. That’s what you did when you loved them and wanted them safe: you put the power to defend themselves into their hands.

  Had Camilla McCall been carrying a .45, that night at Uncle Wynn’s farm, it would have
ended very differently. The gaping gunshot wound in John McCall hadn’t been a consolation to nine-year-old Michael. Just another image to haunt him all his days.

  So it was with a weightless, free feeling in his chest that he watched little Holly master the heavy .38 and then reach for the .45 semiauto with excitement gleaming in her eyes.

  My little gunslinger, he thought, and then he wondered where the my had come from, because she wasn’t anything to him but a waitress with a great rack and a bad history trying to catch up to her.

  Right. Keep telling yourself that, asshole.

  “Here, this one’s a little different,” he told her, and when he showed her how to rack the slide and eject the empty magazine, he knew that his hands lingered against hers longer than they needed to. Her skin was soft and white and delicate to the touch, the blue veins visible in her palms and between her small knuckles. Child’s hands. The sleeves of her sweater had been pushed back and he saw again the brown leather cuff bracelets she wore, three fingers wide and too bulky for her arms.

  When she accepted the gun from him, the right cuff shifted, and he caught a fast glimpse of an angry red scar, hidden beneath the leather. So that was why she wore them: to cover up something she’d deemed unseemly to the restaurant patrons.

  He’d lost all fear at this point that she’d shoot wild and hit him with a ricochet. “Go for it,” he told her as he stepped back and secured his ear muffs.

  She fired off four rounds in quick succession, taking out each beer bottle with a shower of amber glass.

  Michael felt a smile threatening as she lowered the gun and turned to him, beaming.

  “Did you see that?” She was thrilled, breathless. “I got all of them!”

  “I saw.”

  “I just…” She struggled for words, her free hand gesturing to the air, her chest lifting in an enticing way under her sweater. “I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel…”

  “Brave?” he suggested. Because he knew that was exactly how she felt, the same way he’d felt the afternoon Uncle Wynn had walked him beyond the goat pens and showed him how to handle the shotgun. Like he had some control over the dark, bad things in life now. Like he had a say so, in the threatening world.

  Holly’s eyes widened, huge and brilliant green in the sunlight. “Oh, no, I’m not brave.”

  “What do you call asking someone to commit murder for you?”

  She blushed and looked away, shame and guilt warring for supremacy across her face. “Well…”

  “It’s a good thing, being brave,” he said, taking a step in closer, not sure why. “It’s a good thing the gun makes you feel that way.”

  She glanced back up at him, uncertain now. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  But her good mood had fractured; he could see that in the shadowing of her face. “Gun or no gun, I’m still only me, and that’s not much to be brave about.”

  “Holly…” he started, not sure where he was going. He didn’t understand why, but he felt like a shithead, suddenly. Like he’d come across a woman on the side of the road with a flat tire, and rather than fix it for her, he’d offered her a jack and a wrench and wished her luck.

  She stared at him, her gaze a blend of contradictions: trusting, yet wary; hopeful, yet despairing. Life had been one long disappointment for this girl. He didn’t know how, but he knew that it had, and he wanted, standing in front of her, to do something about that.

  But before he could continue, she was staring at the .45 in her hands, passing a hand along its matte black finish. “So where do I go to get one of these for myself?”

  “Nowhere,” Michael said, and his voice was rougher than he wanted it to be.

  Her head snatched up, confusion sparking.

  “I mean,” he said, “you can just keep that one. You don’t have to go to all the trouble of buying one that way.”

  Her pretty brows drew together, marking her smooth pale forehead with a single crease. “But it’s yours.”

  “I’ve got plenty. Take it.” He reached into the bag, drew out two spare clips. “Here. Ammo.”

  She stared at him a long moment before she accepted the magazines. Her fingers were cool and smooth against his. “Are you sure?” She was already bundling the clips against her middle, nestled beneath her breasts like a mother clutching a child.

  “I’m sure.” He almost reached toward her, but had nothing else to offer. Nothing physical, anyway. “You’ll have to practice. You can’t let yourself get rusty; don’t wanna shoot holes in walls and cars and shit.”

  Her smile was fleeting. “Right.” Another look his way, questioning this time. “But where would I practice?”

  She couldn’t come up here alone, not when it was locked. And not when the Lean Dogs used this property for such dark-of-night activities.

  “I can take you to practice.”

  “You can? I thought you didn’t want to see me anymore after this.”

  He felt a twinge of regret. He wasn’t a kind man; didn’t know how to be. And he’d been cold to her, maybe even cruel, and she thought he hated her. If only she understood that it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with his place in the club, his inability to put the Dogs at risk because of anything personal.

  “Well, we haven’t worked on knives yet,” he said, lamely. “We can do that another afternoon. Get some more target practice in, too.”

  She nodded, but she was feeling last night’s hurt, the bruise of his refusal, and the desperation of being alone.

  It killed him, just a little. She was small and brunette and helpless…like his mother had been, all those years ago. It was stirring up long-buried emotions in him.

  “Holly, you’ll be alright,” he told her.

  The look she gave him was faraway, and impossibly sad. “No I won’t,” she said, softly. “But I never expected to be. Thank you for the lesson, and the gun.” She took a step back. “I…I won’t bother you again.” And before he could come up with something else stupid to say, she was striding back toward the car, the winter wind plastering her sweater to the curves of her body, hair snatching over her shoulder, a mahogany banner.

  Michael exhaled, realizing that he was tired, sore and restless thanks to the underlying frustration she inspired in him. Telling himself he was making the right call, he packed away the rest of the guns.

  With this confidence boost, Holly would stop being so frightened, and she’d get over her infatuation, her crush, whatever it was, and she wouldn’t make any more requests that he kill anyone for her.

  That was his hope. Otherwise, he was in danger of doing something regrettable.

  Seven

  They didn’t speak on the drive back to Bell Bar. Holly wasn’t pouting, Michael sensed, but she had drawn deep into herself. It was like she’d forgotten he was in the car with her, as she drove them back into town.

  The parking spot at the curb in front of his bike was taken, so she braked to a halt in the street, turning to look at him for the first time. Her face was a careful mask, twitching at the corners of her mouth, as she struggled to maintain the appearance of calm.

  “Thank you again,” she said. “I appreciate you taking time out of your day for me.”

  There were a dozen things he wanted to say to her. Starting with how pretty she looked in the late afternoon sun that streaked through the windshield. But he nodded. “You’re welcome. We’ll set up a knife lesson.”

  “Sure.” Her voice was thin, unconvinced.

  “So…yeah.” He opened his door and shoved out, before it could get even more awkward. The wind slapped at his face, the slap Holly should have given him instead.

  He stood beside his bike and watched her turn in at the alley, heading for the parking lot in back.

  Only then did he think to check his phone. He had two missed calls and one text from Ghost.

  Church in five. Sent fifteen minutes ago.

  “Shit.”

  Michael had never been late to churc
h. When he turned onto the lot, his heart started to hammer in his chest, audible to him above the roar of the bike. It throbbed in his ears, the pulse of the guilty.

  He parked at the end of the line of Harleys, beside Hound’s Fat Bob, and tore his helmet off, crammed his sunglasses in his pocket. How undignified. Not at all like a sergeant at arms should act.

  He’d left his cut on a peg in the clubhouse entryway, and he yanked it down, shoved his arms through it.

  Ares the German shepherd came to greet him with a curious sniff. He gave the dog an absent pat on the head and kept moving.

  The three prospects were in the common room, playing at the bar with paper footballs they were flicking through uprights made of their fingers. All three glanced up, startled at his entrance, caught goofing off while the adults were in church. Redhead Harry, lanky Littlejohn, and former football stud Carter, whom RJ had taken to calling Jockstrap.

  “Mop something,” Michael instructed, on his way through the room.

  “Yes, sir,” they all said in unison.

  As he moved down the hall, he heard the low din of masculine voices coming from the chapel. A fine sweat misted across his shoulders, gluing his shirt to his skin. Damn, he was late.

  The double doors stood open and through them, Michael watched his president glance out into the hall, see him, acknowledge him with a lifted chin and an expectant expression. He wouldn’t make a scene – that wasn’t his style – but like any kingly father, he had a way of making those beneath him feel shame at their indiscretions.

  Michael stepped into the sacred room – heavy, ornate dining room table, velvet-cushioned chairs, paneling, framed photos and memorabilia, swirl of cigarette smoke – without looking at anyone. He caught brief glimpses of faces and cuts, but only made eye contact with Ghost, bowing his head in silent, brief apology before he closed the doors and took his seat on the president’s right.