by Carmen Faye
She frowned.
“What do you mean?”
I took a deep breath and wondered how I was going to explain to her what my life was like. I’d done a lot of running and hiding in my time. Maybe she was the one thing that I didn’t have to do that with. She was the kind of person I could talk to, tell the truth.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I know that’s supposed to be a euphemism for saying you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m asking you to talk about it.”
I nodded. It was true, that was what it meant.
“Remember how I said I used to be a cat burglar?” I asked. Her eyes were wide and drowning deep. I shook my head mentally and tried to focus.
“Well, I didn’t do it alone. I had a partner. Emmett and I were the best team you’ve ever seen, and together we pulled more jobs than anyone I know of. But he wasn’t your standard criminal type, you know? He was innocent, and everyone who knew him loved him. He could charm the pants off of you and steal your wallet, all at the same time.”
The thought of Emmett made my chest constrict. I hadn’t spoken about him since I’d lost him.
“What happened?” she asked, and now that I’d started I couldn’t stop.
“We were caught. The Intel we got was wrong and we ended up in some sort of stake out with the cops waiting for us. There was no way we were going to get out of there, and we ended up in jail. I didn’t have Emmett as a cellmate, but it didn’t matter because we were in the same block. I don’t know how that kid did it, but he made friends with some of the most difficult to reach guys in there. He made being in jail a party. It wasn’t that bad for anyone after he ended up there.”
She nodded and kept quiet, letting me talk. If was just as well. If she interrupted, I might have changed my mind about how much to reveal.
“We worked for the Stone Cold Club then, and they were working to get us out. After all, we were pulling the most cash for them. They needed us. They paid my bail, and I got out, but they didn’t pay for Emmett. He wasn’t worth it, they said. I don’t know why, but they left him behind.”
Alex lifted her hand, slowly as if she was scared I would cower away if she moved too fast, and touched my face. Her eyes and her touch said so much more than what the two words—“I’m sorry”—could say. I closed my eyes.
I was out of jail, but Emmett was still in there, and doing jobs just didn’t work without him. That boy was my right-hand man, and I couldn’t even think straight without him at my side.
I was pissed to high hell about the fact that the Stone Cold Club hadn’t gotten him out. We were a team, they knew that. And then they’d gone and slapped me with the fact that I owed them all the money for bail. Like I was going to pay that back when they’d done nothing to get my other half free? No. Fucking. Way.
Every time I didn’t do a job, it got worse. Every time I refused to get something, or failed at what I was doing, they added that to my bill. I ended up owing them so much I was choking in my own debt. I didn’t know that getting out of jail could be so expensive, and I didn’t have a mind to sort it out because Emmett was still in there.
I started gambling. It was the best way to get money quick. The club may not have wanted Emmett, but I wanted him, and I was going to play and play until I had enough money to get him out of there. I needed him out. He was like my little brother, as good as my blood.
I worked for a year. That was how long it took me, gambling my nights away at the casinos, raising enough money to get him out, and finally I had it. I made my way over to that damn jailhouse with the fancy ass lawyers and self-righteous police officers and I told them I had what it took to get Emmett out.
Except it was too late. He’d committed suicide. Things just hadn’t been the same after I’d left. Some guys hadn’t taken to him the way everyone else had, and they’d done things to him. Terrible things. Things that pushed him to killing himself.
When I heard that he’d done it two weeks before I’d gotten the money I almost killed myself, too. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go on knowing that I hadn’t been there to look after him, to save him. And I couldn’t go out and get the club money when they were responsible for his death. Emmett had been the last thing I’d cared for, and I wasn’t going to give them a dime of what I owed them.
The only thing they deserved was to die.
I didn’t realize I was crying until Alex reached forward and wiped my cheek with a finger.
“My heart breaks for you,” she said, and there was so much emotion in that sentence that I believed her. I sniveled and wiped my cheeks.
“Look at me, looking like a pussy,” I said and turned my face into the pillow so the cotton could do the mopping up for me.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
I nodded.
“How much do you owe them?”
I turned onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. The quarter rounds had floral designs carved into them, as if the house was built years and years ago. It was a really nice house, echoing with love and affection, the kind I could hold onto.
I turned my face to her. “Too much for me to be able to stay in one spot too long. Too much for me to stop gambling. Too much for me to ever be able to relax.”
Alex frowned.
“If this Stone Cold Club ends up finding you, what will they do?”
I shook my head. What was I going to tell her? The truth? She’d see me as an absolute criminal. If she didn’t already. But I couldn’t exactly lie either.
“Beat you up?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“They would kill me,” I answered.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
I lay in bed next to Rip and tried to orientate myself after the bomb he’d just dropped on me. I hadn’t realized he was in so much trouble. When he turned his head to look at me, his eyes were serious and there were no traces of the joke I was looking for.
The room was dark, but I could see enough of his face to be able to tell that he was dead serious. Dead. Serious. I shivered and pulled the covers over me, covering my nakedness. I had no issues with him seeing my body, but it seemed wrong to discuss life and death and mistakes with no clothes on.
If his former club found him, they really were going to kill him.
“Is that why you’re here?” I asked. “Is that why you wanted to make a plan to work with me? To get more money?”
He shrugged in a way that made me think the answer to that was yes.
“I don’t know… I guess it was a combination. Sure, I needed the money. I still do. But I saw you, and I didn’t really want to walk away without knowing you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. It sounded an awful lot like he cared for me more than just as business partners with benefits at this point. It felt like maybe he was talking about falling for me.
“But that was all it was, right? Business?”
He hesitated before he nodded. The hesitation made me think that it wasn’t exactly true, but I wasn’t going to go into it. I was going to take what he was saying at face value because I couldn’t afford to get tangled up in a situation where he actually cared about me.
I couldn’t do another relationship if it was just going to end in disaster. And knowing who I was, what I did for a living, and how people felt about it, there was no question that it was going to happen again.
“Rip… you do know that we can’t do this all the time, right?” He kept quiet so I continued to make myself clear. I needed him to know this. “This whole sleeping together thing. We can’t do this on a regular basis.”
He turned his face away from me so that he was staring at the ceiling. “That wasn’t what I thought we were doing,” he said. “I thought it was the kind of thing that happened when it happened.”
“That’s fine, then.” Impromptu sex I could deal with. Planned relationships weren’t part of the picture. He looked at me, and his eyes seemed deep and dark, the ocean at night, when he nodded. He turned
on his side with his back to me and promptly fell asleep.
I sighed and cuddled deeper into the covers. I thought for a moment if I needed to get dressed, but Rip hadn’t, and it wasn’t as if we were spooning. He could have been in a different state with how distant he felt.
I’ve never had a problem falling asleep when I was upset. Sleep was an escape to me. Sleep and gambling. Hell of a combo. No wonder I just didn’t get lonely. Falling asleep after Rip had turned his back on me wasn’t hard, and in no time I opened my eyes again and it was morning.
Rip was still asleep. The last time he’d stayed over he’d woke up before me and offered to cook breakfast. Somehow I doubted his courtesies would extend that far this time, but maybe I was just in a bad mood because he’d dropped a bomb on me—knowing that someone was effectively hunted the way he was just didn’t come softly—and then turned his back on me like this wasn’t my house and he didn’t have to respect me as a hostess if nothing else.
I walked to the kitchen and put on the kettle. I could do with a proper cup of coffee, but seeing that I didn’t have a machine and I didn’t feel like getting dressed to go out to the coffee shop, I was going to have to make do with instant.
I made toast, too, and it might have been the smell that pulled Rip out of bed. I sat at the table with a cup of milky coffee and two slices of buttered toast when Rip stumbled into the room. He winced and held his stomach.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Whatever his problem was, it wasn’t my fault. We’d had a good night but rough sex wasn’t my thing and I wasn’t known to leave injuries.
“I had a run-in with some thugs last night before I came to see you,” he said.
“You didn’t look hurt when you arrived,” I said, frowning. Rip was just wearing a pair of boxers, and if I wasn’t annoyed with him, I would have admitted that he looked damn attractive standing in my kitchen wearing so little I could trace the lines of his manhood.
As if he knew I was looking, his body responded to me and he started getting hard.
“Sorry,” he said and sat down so that I didn’t see his hard-on straining against his boxers. Good. I wasn’t interested in sex, no matter how much my body disagreed.
“Who was it?” I asked. “Did the brothers get ahold of you?”
Rip shook his head.
“They’re okay with me. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Rip shrugged.
I took a sip of my coffee, took a bite of my toast, and crossed my arms over my chest while I chewed. When I swallowed, I tried again. “Sort of?”
“There’s this one guy, Big Don?” He waited until I nodded before he carried on. “He doesn’t seem to think that I’m trustworthy. He thinks I’m lying.”
He pointed to the kettle. “Can I have some?”
“Help yourself,” I said. “And Big Don wouldn’t be very far off, considering that you are actually lying.”
“I know that, but Tucci trusts me, and I think having the brothers on my side is a good thing to have right now.”
This got me suspicious.
“Why? Who are you running from that they’ll stop?”
I knew that the Crucifix Six wouldn’t get involved with other clubs and their dirty business. If they wanted Rip, the Crucifix Six wouldn’t hand him over, but they wouldn’t protect him either. If he saw the Crucifix Six as an advantage, his problems were much closer to home.
“Who?” I asked again when he didn’t answer me.
“I had a bit of a run-in with Jerrill, and his buddy John took his frustrations out on me.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Are you expecting the Crucifix Six to protect you against one of their own?”
Rip shrugged.
I shook my head. “You’re really digging a hole for yourself, Rip. A hole that they’re going to end up burying you in. If you mess with them, it’s just going to come back at you in a way you’re never going to survive.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Rip said, and then he shrugged in a way that made me think he didn’t know what he was doing at all. He didn’t make eye contact with me at all. Instead, he stared at his food as if it was going to give him the answer to life itself.
“We can run away together,” he said a moment later.
“What?” The question caught me so off guard that the only emotion that flooded me was stunned surprise.
“We could run away together,” Rip said again. “You and me. We can do this thing we’re doing somewhere else. Somewhere no one knows us.”
I leaned back in my chair, hands still on the table so that my arms were extended.
“What are you talking about? Why would I want to leave?”
He shrugged. It was really starting to tick me off. Another shrug and I was going to feed him his own ass.
“I just thought it would be something you’d like to do. To come with me, live the high life, gamble all night and sleep all day.” He popped his eyebrows twice when he said it so that I knew he wasn’t talking about sleeping, but sex. Like I was too stupid to catch it.
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then… whatever we want.”
I took a deep breath and tried to figure out where the hell he was coming from. He’d walked into my life all swagger and arrogance and charmed the pants off me—literally—and now he was talking about running away?
“You owe me money,” I said.
“If we leave together, you’ll know where to find me if I don’t give it back.” He had a cheeky grin in place, but his eyes were saying other things to me. There was nervousness in them. Tightness around the eyes. No, not nervousness; something more like fear.
“You owe me a date,” I added.
He nodded. “You’re right. We can make it our date. Running away together is romantic, isn’t it?”
“Stop it, Rip!” I cried out, slamming my hands on the table so that my plate shifted a fraction and Rip’s smile drained until his face was only the mask of nervousness. “What’s going on here? This isn’t a joke. You’re talking about running away from the life I made for myself. You worked hard to get into the Crucifix Six, and now you just want to leave? After one hustle? After no dates even though you insisted?”
Ripped opened his mouth and his chest rose as he breathed in to speak, but no sound came out, and a moment later, he deflated again. He wasn’t going to answer me.
“Just talk to me, dammit. I feel like I’m missing something. The one moment you’re here all week, then you disappear for a week, and now you want to run away together?”
Rip shrugged again.
“Will you stop acting like nothing’s wrong?” I snapped. “Your shrugging is fucking getting on my nerves.”
Rip stilled in his seat, as if my uncharacteristic swearing was really all he’d been waiting for.
“They’re going to find me here, eventually,” he finally said. His voice was low and steady, but his tongue darted out to touch his lower lip and his eyes shifted from my face to the clock on the wall and back.
The silence in the kitchen was so thick I could almost touch it, the click of the second hand the only thing proving that I hadn’t gone deaf.
“They? Your old club?”
He nodded so small I almost missed it. I thought back to what he’d said before, that if they found him they would kill him.
“Are you being serious? They’re out to kill you and you want to run before that happens?”
I would feel sorry for the guy, really I would. All that talk about his friend dying and how his club had screwed him over was a nightmare of which I was glad I wasn’t a part. But if they were headed here, he was running out of time, and the fear on his face made sense now. Real fear, the kind that would push anyone to run for their lives.
“Why do you want to pull me into this?” I asked.
Rip looked at me as if the thought that he would endanger me only dawned on him now.
“I just didn’t want to leave yo
u behind,” he said. It was a sweet statement. In any other situation I would have felt flattered. Now I felt betrayed.
“Get out of my house,” I said.
Rip frowned. “What?”
“I said, get out of my house. I want no part in this. I’m sorry about everything you’ve been through, but I’m not playing this game with you. I can’t afford to play it.”
And wasn’t that the truth. I was already teetering on the edge of an abyss from where there was no return. I was playing with fire. I knew it. But there was no way I was planning on jumping right into the furnace.