Jack came closer and stared into her face. She tried to look away, but the evil in his eyes held her captive.
“Thanks. I’ll take a long time to do it. Make it last.” His eyes glistened. “I’ll help her realize the problem with being stubborn, let her see the wisdom of doing wonderful things for me because it will postpone the pain. I’ll tell her things she can do to buy time. Are you sure you don’t want to hang around for it?”
“No. I’ll leave you a phone number. When you finish call it and some associates will come take over to implement my plan.” Terrance took her face in his hands. “These people will be compassionate, Audra. They’ll be really sad that you are in pain—so sad that they’ll want to give you something for it. I imagine you’ll be glad to get it. I don’t know whether it will be heroin or meth, or what have you, but it will help. But then you’ll need more, because that’s how that shit works. You’ll have to please them to get more. When they are sure you understand how it works, they’ll find people willing to pay for you to please them, to do whatever you’re told. Absolutely anything.”
Jack’s eyes shimmered. “Ah, the making of a meth whore.”
“Exactly. It’s a perfect career for you, Audra. I’m told this approach will ensure you are inspired to do whatever you are told—beg men to fuck your ass or to use you however they want. The results are nearly magical.”
Terrance stood and brushed imaginary lint off his suit. He took a cell phone out of his pocket, then reached down and grabbed Audra by the hair, turning her face up so he could take a photo. “This will be my before picture to remember you by. I’ll treasure your memory, especially looking at this along with the pictures Jack sends me of you when he’s finished. It will be a hell of a makeover.”
As Terrance left the room, Jack bent down and slid his scalpel under her gag and jerked his hand up, cutting it. “I do need to hear you scream,” he said. “It isn’t nearly as much fun if I can’t hear you begging for mercy.”
“Fuck you!”
The man actually smiled. “Ah, good. Your husband was wrong. You do have spirit. It won’t last, but while it does…”
Her head was spinning. This had to be a nightmare, something out of a horror movie. But it wasn’t. She really was tied and helpless with some scalpel-wielding psycho looming over her, drooling as he decided how to inflict pain on her.
Dirk couldn’t have any idea where she was and Greg was dead. She was alone with a psycho.
* * * *
Dirk sat on his bike in a shadow made by a broken streetlight. He had a clear view of the house. A car had driven off just as they’d arrived, but it held three men. Unless she was in the trunk. He’d sent Bobby to follow them and report back.
“I’m sure she’s in there,” he told Chris. “I’ll go in alone and you cover my back.”
Chris smiled and nodded to the man sitting in the front seat of the black sedan. “How about the watchdog?”
Dirk thought for a moment. “You can take him out.”
“It’s the guy that shot Wrench, Dirk.”
Dirk knew Chris was asking if he could kill the man. He thought about Greg lying in the hospital. “Show him the error of his ways. I don’t care if he apologizes.”
“My pleasure.”
Dirk watched the man get off his bike and slip across the open ground toward the sedan. The goon in the car was half asleep and smoking a cigarette. Chris was an ex Ranger and the goon didn’t stand a chance.
While Chris moved in, Dirk walked casually toward the door of the house, timing things so that he’d be another distraction for the lookout. As he imagined, the man spotted him approaching and started out of the car, intending to intercept him. He couldn’t see Chris at all now, but as the lookout moved behind his car he suddenly went down. Silently. End of bad guy.
Dirk reached for the door knob. The door was unlocked. He pulled his knife from his boot and slipped inside, steeling himself for what he might find. His big worry was that the car leaving meant it was over, the shit had already taken his revenge on her.
Then he heard a scream of pain that came from a bedroom. It was a man.
“You goddam bitch!”
There was no time to plan, no time to waste. He put his shoulder to the door and burst into the room. There, on the bed, he saw Audra naked, with her panties cut into ribbons. Her body was crisscrossed with cuts, not deep, but bleeding. She was alive and her face was bloody. A man stood over her holding a bloody scalpel.
Hearing Dirk come in, he half turned to face him. Blood streamed down his cheek and he had a bloody hand clamped over his ear. Audra had bit him.
Dirk could feel the hate in the man’s eyes and he moved fast, closing in. His concern was that the man would use her as a hostage. It would be an easy matter to put that scalpel to her throat. Fortunately, the man was a sadist, not a warrior, and he froze, holding his scalpel out toward Dirk, menacing him.
With his own knife at his side Dirk slowed his breathing. “Put it down.”
The man circled him. “Not fucking likely.”
Dirk stepped forward and the man lunged at him. Sidestepping the scalpel, Dirk stepped behind him, grabbing him by the hair, tilting his head back, and drawing his knife calmly across the man’s throat. He released him and heard a muffled cry as he fell to the floor. Blood gushed out across the carpet and Dirk kicked him, rolling him onto his stomach, his blood pooling around him and already soaking into the faded carpet.
Then he turned to Audra, untying her wrists and ankles, his eyes dancing over her, evaluating her injuries, noting they were all superficial. They’d gotten there in time. The man had been starting with small, painful cuts, intending to escalate everything slowly. His pleasure had cost him. “He’s dead,” he told her.
“Thank God,” she moaned and her arms went around his neck. Then she passed out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She moved a bit stiffly but that was a combination of soreness and the fact that the wounds were scabbing over. She’d been lucky. Dirk had gotten there before that maniac had done any real damage. The cuts would heal fine and the doctor hadn’t done much more than put antibiotic cream and band-aids on most of them. Only a couple required stitches.
“You’ve looked better,” Greg said from his hospital bed.
She laughed. “I’ve felt better, but you aren’t one to talk. You look like shit.”
“Bullets will do that to you, so I’m told. But they give me painkillers and a steady diet of hot nurses, so I’m not in a rush to get better.”
“I told you he was a lazy bastard,” Dirk said. “I’m glad he’s getting a chance to show you the real person behind the tough biker facade.”
“What’s this about you biting a guy’s ear off?”
She smiled at Greg. “It was self defense.”
“Probably still tasted like shit.”
“Actually, considering everything, it tasted fine.”
“So tell me, there you were, tied up and this guy is torturing you and you get the bright idea of biting his ear off… how does that work? How would that help you escape?”
She pushed the memory away, back into the dark recesses, along with everything else about Terrance and put on a brave face. “It wasn’t about escaping. He bent down as he was cutting me, wanted to whisper what he intended to do to me next. I figured that if I fought back, if I hurt him, he might lose his cool and accidentally kill me. Once I got his ear in my mouth I was just so furious… I didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t realize that I had torn it off until he started shrieking at me.”
Greg nodded. “Nice going.”
His smiled took away a lot of the sting of remembering. Dirk had told her it would take time before the memories stopped hurting. At the moment it didn’t seem like they would. Maybe after the physical wounds healed.
“You fought him, Audra.” Greg wasn’t smiling either now. “It seemed like there was nothing you could do, and you didn’t just accept it. It might not seem that
way, but that was fucking brave.”
His comment helped. Dirk had helped too. After that… that thing died on the floor, Dirk had taken her in his arms. She’d passed out, but when she woke he still held her. She’d cried then. She’d cried like a damn baby and he hadn’t said a word, just held her. He hadn’t tried to make her stop, or tell her some bullshit about things being all right and she’d known he understood that even though it was over, nothing was all right. You couldn’t be treated like that and then accept that much of anything was all right. Having him just hold her and keep his goddamn mouth shut until the fear subsided had to be the finest thing anyone had ever done for her.
It had subsided but not gone away, that fear. The threat of that or something else still hung over her.
Not that she wasn’t happy to be free. She was deliriously happy, just as she was happy that the Jack creature was stone dead. She was pleased about lots of things, that Greg was alive and recovering well, just as she was sorry the other biker was dead. But how she felt about any of those things didn’t really matter all that much. Dirk rescuing her might have gotten a couple of goons killed, but the world was not a safer place, and now she knew just how scary people like Terrance really were. People thought robbers were scary, but a man like Terrance was evil and he employed people like Jack, who were even more evil.
It made her blood run cold to know they were out there.
“Hey Audra.” It was Greg. “Mind if I speak to this asshole alone for a couple of minutes?”
“No worries.” She kissed his unshaven cheek, relishing the roughness against her lips, the abrasion that was real life. “I’ll go get something to eat in the cafeteria.”
“I’ll meet you there after I hear whatever this is about,” Dirk said. The puzzled look on his face told her that he had no idea what Greg wanted to talk about. Her instincts told her that it was about her. Her heart pounded. Greg had told her he cared about her. If they hadn’t been interrupted by a bullet, she probably would have fucked him. Her two men were friends, and she wondered if she was coming between them. That they both wanted her, at some level was sexy and flattering, but not what she wanted.
The truth was, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. The shock of her kidnapping was still ringing in her head, making it hard to process much of anything else.
* * * *
Dirk waited until the sound of Audra’s steps down the hospital corridor faded. Then he sat in the chair beside the bed and faced Greg. “So is this where you tell me what a jerk I’ve been?”
“Seems like it needs to be pointed out.”
“I sort of noticed myself. That I let them shoot you, kill Johnny, and take Audra right out from under my nose made it clear.”
“That wasn’t the part I was thinking about. If you want to beat yourself up for that shit too, I’ll go along, but the truth is that it wasn’t your fault. They caught us all on the back foot. We all thought we’d be safe after we shook them.”
“We didn’t decide to go for a beer.”
“And I bet you didn’t bring any for us.”
“I got you an ambulance instead.”
Greg grimaced. “Okay, but you owe me a beer.”
“The asshole was good at finding us. Too damn good.”
“Lots of people in his pocket most likely.”
“Highway patrol sort of people.”
“The best money could buy. Doesn’t do much for a man’s faith in the system—in law and order.”
“I didn’t know you had any.”
Greg laughed. “I don’t. So this just makes me feel fucking self-righteous.”
“So it isn’t what you were bitching at me about.”
“No. But you are still being a jerk.” He tipped his head toward the door. “About her. The girl cares about you. I think you care about her, but are too damn stupid to let yourself know, much less her.”
Dirk turned away. “When she came and wanted our help, I figured that she was a cute rich bitch playing bad girl. Since she was hot, fucking her seemed like a pleasant bonus while taking an otherwise boring ride to Canada.”
“Didn’t turn out boring at all.”
“No. And as I learned her story… I wanted to protect her, but letting her get under my skin was going to make that hard.”
“So the cold shoulder.”
“And then you got all dreamy eyed about her, making me the bad guy. She started falling for you. Well, by then I figured I’d screwed that up, and if the two of you wanted to get it on that was no business of mine.”
“And now?”
Dirk let out a slow breath. “Trying to work that out. She’s kind of amazing. The thing is, she’s headed for Canada.”
“It’s a pretty country with lots of nice open highway.”
Dirk wrinkled his nose. “It’s got ice and snow and fucking elk, Greg. People run into elk on the highway up there. Probably with dog sleds.”
“And she still wants to go there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You might want to ask. Seems like it was just a convenient place to hide. Who knows, maybe she’d rather hide in Mexico if you gave her the choice? Both places have fine cold beer, but there aren’t any damn elk in Mexico.”
“That’s true. I like Mexico.”
“That asshole husband of hers is still out there and he didn’t finish getting his pound of flesh from her.”
“Now he’ll be looking in Canada.”
“Or he’ll give up altogether, or who the hell knows with a guy like that?”
“Right.”
Greg smiled. “She didn’t really hire the club to get her anywhere in particular.”
“And?”
“If that doesn’t give you ideas about what to do, then let me know and I’ll finish the job.”
Dirk smiled. “You do like her.”
“Yeah. A lot.”
“So why push me to do something?”
“Because she really wants you. As stupid as that might seem to those of us with a brain, she prefers you.” He shifted in the bed, wincing. “When I heal up, if you haven’t done something I’ll be forced to kick your skinny ass.”
“Forced?”
“Yep. Now go save that girl from cafeteria food. You owe her that much, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
* * * *
“I’m not good with emotions.”
She smiled at him, wondering if he was teasing. “You’re kidding me.” As the words left her mouth, she regretted the sarcasm. He was trying to talk and she’d slapped him down.
“I mean, I feel things but sometimes I get confused about what I feel or don’t understand what I feel. And when it comes to talking about how I feel… telling someone you care about them or about something makes you vulnerable. You show people your weakness and they exploit it.”
“I understand. I just don’t know where this is going.”
He turned away. “Maybe nowhere.”
She reached over and touched his arm. “Time to find out.”
He glanced at her. “You think so?”
“You aren’t scared in a fight because you know you don’t control the outcome. All you can do is your best, right?”
“More or less.”
“Being scared doesn’t get you anything and can tip the odds against you.”
“Yeah.”
“This is the same. You can say how you feel and hope it works, that the person you are talking to understands. You can’t make them understand. But if you don’t talk about how you feel, then no one will ever know. They’ll think you don’t feel anything. And I know that isn’t true.”
“Do you?”
“A lot of it is how we act. You talk about your feelings with body language and your reactions. It’s just that when you want to make sure someone knows how you feel about them, or about something, they are more likely to get it right if you tell them.” She punched his arm. “And since you are telling them anyway, why are words scary?”
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He laughed. “I suppose you’re right.”
He turned back to her, and held her arms. “I was worried when they grabbed you. Scared shitless. Not only because you might be hurt, which sucked, but I realized I might never see you again and I’m selfish enough to have that piss me off.”
“Because you’d decided I’m a good lay.”
“You are. But it isn’t just that. I don’t know exactly what it is. I haven’t felt like this before, but things are just better when you’re around. When you aren’t pissed off at me, I mean. When you are happy with me, life is sweet.”
She laughed. “I think I get it.”
“I wondered…” he looked away.
“Buck up and tell me, dammit.”
Dirk looked sheepish. “I want you to be my old lady.”
“Your old lady?”
“My woman. Ride with me. Be with me. Share my world.”
The idea rattled her. Dirk’s world was sometimes a rather dark place. “Don’t you have problems enough without adding mine to them?”
He got a faraway look in his eyes. “You and me on my bike, roaring through this crazy world.”
“Getting in fights?”
He laughed. “We’d pick our fights and win most of them.”
“Or die.”
His eyes sparkled. “Can’t win them all.”
As a boyfriend Dirk certainly had his limits, but who didn’t? The thing was that she’d been attracted to him since she met him. He’d pissed her off, been pissed at her, all the things you go through, but he’d been there for her.
She still thought affectionately about Greg, but it wasn’t the same feeling at all. Dirk was leading her somewhere and Greg offered her his support. It was comforting more than exciting.
Dirk, so good with gang stuff and a great leader was an interesting contradiction as a suitor. She’d laughed at the way he’d expressed himself on the subject of their future. He’d held her, kissed her passionately and said: “Fuck going to Canada, Audra. It’s cold and dull up there.”
“You goddamn romantic. And then what? I still have my insane husband out there and he’s probably still hunting me.”
“I don’t think he’ll bother you without that killer of his.”
I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances Page 83