by Joan Swan
She tortured herself for at least another twenty minutes with similar ideas before the truck slowed and turned. Alyssa lifted her head, and listened. The engine cut out and the driver’s side door slammed. Her heart pounded harder in her chest. Her muscles tightened.
A loud click sounded at the back door, then the metal rolled up with an ear-ripping screech. Creek stood silhouetted at the opening.
“Get out.” His voice was a low, flat void, as dark as the landscape at his back.
Los Banos had been a metropolis compared to this place. She couldn’t even call it a town. A handful of lights shone in the distance, broken by miles and miles of dark as far as she could see, the night air thick with the pungent odor of fertile farmland.
Cautiously, Alyssa scooted toward the door on her butt and paused at the end of the truck bed with her legs hanging over the edge. They’d stopped in some kind of parking lot. Dim lights dotted the small space and across the asphalt, a flashing neon light signaled: VACANCY.
Another motel.
“Where are we?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Creek reached for her hands, stuck the key in the lock and popped the metal open. This time she didn’t feel any sense of hope, only fear for what would come next.
Without looking her in the eye, he wiped blood off her arm with the bottom of his T-shirt. And his hands were shaking.
His fingers slid around her upper arm and bit into muscle as he walked her toward a small room at the front of the motel labeled OFFICE. At least his body temperature had returned to something closer to human. “You’re going to get a room. One room, Hannah. Do you understand me?”
No, she didn’t understand him. She didn’t want to understand him. She also didn’t want to get a room. “Why are we here?”
“Because I can’t stand this blood on me another fucking minute.” He pulled her alongside the office door, where warm light poured through the glass, and shoved cash into her hand. With his eyes directly on hers he said, “I’ll be watching. If that desk clerk picks up a phone or looks the least bit confused or shocked by something you say to him, I’ll walk in and shoot him in the face, right in front of your eyes. Got it?”
She considered arguing with him, but there was something in his eyes, something determined and desperate and dangerous. Alyssa turned and put her hand on the doorknob.
“Hannah,” he said from the shadows. “Don’t fuck this up.”
She took a deep breath, pulled open the door and stepped inside. A bell tinkled over her head. The front desk stood empty, but a television played somewhere in an adjacent room.
“Yeah, yeah. Just a minute.” The grouchy voice emerged from the same direction as the television monologue.
A woman came through the doorway of what appeared to be a break room. She looked about as well cared for as this shack of a motel. And about as old, too. Alyssa had to fight the urge to look over her shoulder to see if Creek was really watching. The thought of taking a chance terrified her, yet her instincts screamed to ask for a phone.
She was trying to think of a way to do that when a young boy wandered out of the other room. Straight, dark hair, big, dark eyes, round little face. About eight years old.
I’ll walk in and shoot him in the face, right in front of your eyes.
Thoughts of crossing Creek evaporated, along with the remaining sliver of Alyssa’s hope.
“Can I get a room for the night?” Alyssa’s voice didn’t sound like her own. Deep and rusty and flat. “Two beds please.”
“Grandma.” The little boy tugged on the woman’s arm. “I’m hungry.”
“Two beds? Who the hell ever wants two beds?” The woman reached for a key on a hook by the register. “All the rooms got one bed. Take it or leave it.”
She’d like to leave it, but one more look at the little boy and she realized that wasn’t an option. The idea of taking two rooms separately was completely out of the question. Creek would never let her out of his sight.
“Do you have roll-a-ways?” Alyssa asked.
“What does this look like? A Motel Six? Make up your mind, lady. I got a hungry kid here.”
“Fine. How much?”
“Sixty-two including tax. Pay now.”
Alyssa paid and took the key. As soon as she stepped out of the office door, Creek skulked out of the shadows and grabbed her arm. One cuff clicked on, then the other. He took the key from her hands and led her toward a row of rooms.
“Wait,” she said, “let me get the Gatorade from the truck. I’m dying of thirst.”
“I’ll get it. You’re not in any condition to carry anything.”
A black number three stared at Alyssa as Creek unlocked the door. He pushed it open and shoved her inside, then dragged her toward the bed and yanked on her arm.
“Sit,” he instructed.
“You treat me like a dog.”
“A five-year-old or a dog? Which is it?”
“Both.” Alyssa perched herself on the edge of the bed and peered around the sparse, dingy room. Creek uncuffed one of her hands and closed the free metal around a lamp base secured to the nightstand. “Don’t make a sound. Anyone who comes in here to help you will end up just like Taz. I’ll be back in sixty seconds.”
Creek’s footsteps crunched on the asphalt, then slowly faded. Obviously screaming was out of the question. She couldn’t risk him following through on his threat. But whatever she did, she had to do fast. Fifteen of her sixty seconds were gone.
Alyssa’s gaze honed in on a phone sitting atop a dresser ten feet away. She held her breath against the pain and stretched the distance allowed by the cuffs, reaching for it, but came up four feet short. Neither the nightstand nor the lamp budged. She braced her feet on the floor for leverage, brought her other arm around, curled her fingers through the cuff and pulled.
Pain stretched through her side. The metal lamp base bent. Just a fraction of an inch. The effort made fresh sweat slick Alyssa’s face. She gritted her teeth, refastened her fingers on the cuffs and pulled again. The metal groaned as it bent a little more.
Alyssa tried for the phone again. Managed to catch the spiraled cord between her fingers. Yanked the receiver off the base. It hit the floor with a kerplunk just as the door to the room swung open again.
“Goddammit.” Creek dropped two armfuls of supplies on the floor and kicked the door closed. “Can’t you hold still or shut up for one minute?”
Alyssa recoiled as Creek picked up the receiver and slammed it back onto the base, then raked his fingers across his head and paced. She watched every step, her emotions toggling between fear, anger, guilt, frustration and empathy.
Without warning, Creek swung around and approached her. In automatic defense, Alyssa’s hand came up. But he didn’t strike. He released the cuff around the lamp and pulled her into the bathroom. Her heart rate spiked again as his angry gaze scoured the small space. With a hand on her shoulder, he pushed her to sit on the closed toilet lid and dragged the free cuff below the sink. The ratchet of metal signaled its closure around an exposed drainpipe.
“What are you doing?” She twisted her wrist against the metal, trying to position her body to alleviate the strain on her side.
Creek stripped off his shirt, balled it up and chucked it into the corner, then pushed the curtain aside on the shower / tub combination and bent to flip on the faucet. The muscles beneath his skin flexed and rolled. That’s when a fresh form of anxiety wedged in. She couldn’t sit here and watch him get naked and shower. She really couldn’t.
“I can’t sit like this,” she complained, hoping to play on the sympathies she’d seen. “It hurts my side.”
Without acknowledging her, he moved his hands to his waist, unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and shucked them so fast Alyssa didn’t have time to look away. And, okay, yeah, maybe she could sit here and watch after all.
He wore burgundy boxer briefs that clung to his muscular ass. He was tan everywhere but for a pale line mid thigh where he’d obviously
worn shorts. She could swear every muscle was outlined in perfect relief. Her gaze traveled over the lines and dips and swells and curves. God, he was beautiful.
A beautiful, racist, murdering, escaped convict.
Alyssa grimaced. Before he took off his underwear and Alyssa lost her last shred of human decency and ogled the beautiful, racist, murdering, escaped convict, she laid her elbow on the edge of the sink and pressed her eyes to her forearm. “Why couldn’t you just leave me in the other room?”
Her only answer came in the swoosh of the plastic slides on the shower curtain rod as he closed the drape.
Alyssa stayed there, resting her head on her arm, for what seemed like endless minutes. Without any immediate threat, her adrenaline flagged. When her butt went numb and her arms tingled from lack of blood supply, she finally raised her head. Steam filled the room, creating ethereal clouds she could barely see through.
Searching for Creek behind the frosted shower curtain, she discovered him sitting on the tub floor, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs, head bent.
She’d seen many a broken man in her line of work—the distraught father, the grieving husband, the heartsick son— and the man behind that curtain had all the signs of a broken man.
Alyssa stared, unable to assimilate this man with the one who had wrapped a chain around her throat. Or the one who’d killed Taz right in front of her. That one was a force to be reckoned with. This man looked overwhelmed. Vulnerable. Defeated. Her compassionate streak—the one that most of her coworkers swore she didn’t have—flared to life, urging her to give him the benefit of the doubt against all common sense and good judgment.
“Cr—” Her voice caught. At some point she needed to tell him she wasn’t the woman he thought she was. Or she needed to do something to make sure he never found out the truth. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Creek? I need to ... um ... talk to you about something.”
His head came up, eyes peering at her over the edge of his arm. “It’s Teague. My name is Teague.” His voice was soft and flat, without animosity. He lowered his head again. “And not now.”
“O-okay, but when you’re done. It’s ... important.”
No response. No movement. With no other options, Alyssa put her head back down and closed her eyes.
She woke to the rake of the plastic curtain rings. Her head jerked up to find Creek staring at her from the tub, a white towel wrapped low around his hips. She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear them. And when she did, the sight that met her nearly made her drool.
This was the first time she’d seen his chest bare in any substantial light, and she wasn’t disappointed. His shoulders were wide, his chest strong, his belly flat. A thin cluster of golden hair formed a vertical line down the center of his abdomen, starting just above his belly button. Oh, yum, was the first, involuntary thought to flit through her mind. Amazing, the second.
Peeking out from beneath the towel, spreading over his right hip and pelvis where his leg met his torso, a deep red streak of skin, much like a healed burn but with more style, more design, tempted her eyes. Curiosity spiked at the extent of the mark, its shape, its origin. Then about his body as a whole. How hard, how often, did a man have to work out to obtain that level of fitness?
She forced her gaze to his face, pleased when she only lingered on his chest and the dusting of dark gold hair over his pecs for ... okay, more than a moment. That’s when it registered. He looked ... different, but she couldn’t figure out exactly how. He looked ... cleaner, more human. More attractive—if that was possible. But there was something else, too. Something in his eyes, a dullness, a veil. Something flat. Distant. Pained.
He stepped out with a key in his hand and reached for the cuff holding her hand to the sink. The scent of soap drifted to her nose. He no longer smelled of sweat and blood, and as he leaned in to reach the cuff, the warmth of his body floated close. Her eyes lingered on his head. On the swastika covering his scalp, which was noticeably lighter. Confused, she brought her free hand up and ran her fingers over it. His short, soft hair prickled her skin.
Creek jerked away. “What the hell?”
Frowning, she inspected his body again, this time with attention to the other tattoos. The ones on his chest, his arms, his belly, they’d all faded. Instead of that intense black, the images had turned a strange shade of brownish-gray.
When reality dawned, she looked up at him and found his eyes averted. “They aren’t real?”
He reached down to take the other cuff off her wrist, and neither met her eyes nor answered.
“Why would you do that?” She rubbed at her wrists, which had grown raw from the chafe of metal, but her mind was still unraveling this new knot in Creek’s personality. “Why would you pretend to be something you’re not? What’s the point, anyway, if they wash off so easily?”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to scrub my skin raw. Come in here.” He straightened and walked ahead of her into the other room. “I’m going to make a phone call.”
Her mind dropped the confusion over his tattoos and refocused on the immediate problem. “Who are you calling?”
He didn’t answer. When he reached the bed, he dropped his towel without warning and reached for a pair of underwear from the bag on the floor. And the seconds between seeing him naked and seeing him step into those boxer briefs seemed to stand still.
He had the most gorgeous ass she’d ever seen. Muscle definition, shape, size, the way his body was so flawlessly proportioned, he made her mouth go dry. And that scar or birthmark or whatever it was and the way it curved around his hip, the tip of a pointed section touching high on one perfect glut, was way too intriguing.
With heat kicking up in her body, she forced herself to turn away and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Can’t you warn me before you do that?”
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
She dropped her hand and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. He was dead wrong. He was like nothing she’d ever seen before. “Are you done? I want to talk to you.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” he said, his voice muffled behind what Alyssa guessed was a T-shirt coming over his head, “I’m a man. I do ‘talk’ about as well as you follow directions.”
Oh, she’d noticed—the man part, at least. She took a chance and looked at him from her peripheral vision. He was dressed again in fresh jeans and a black tee. She breathed a sigh of relief, then stiffened as he picked up one of the cell phones he’d bought at Walmart.
“Wait.” She held out a hand, anxiety heating her neck and face.
“Be quite, Hannah. This call is as important to you as it is to me.” He gave her a serious look. “If you want to sleep in your own bed tomorrow night, or Luke’s bed, or ... whatever”—he waved the idea away with an irritated fling of his hand—“then keep your mouth shut.”
EIGHT
Teague tried to block Hannah out of his mind as he dialed. He needed total focus. But the woman seemed to inspect every inch of his body with a mix of appreciation and interest, leaving his skin tingling as if she’d touched him. Sure, she was sexy as hell. Sure, he was hornier than sin. Still that didn’t account for this level of extreme and immediate attraction. Especially after all he’d put her through. Sonofabitch, if this didn’t qualify as a clusterfuck, he didn’t know what would.
As he paced the small room, Teague chalked up the heat between them to his warped imagination, and his attraction toward her to the fact that she belonged to Luke. There had to be some subconscious temptation to take something of Luke’s the same way Luke had taken something of Teague’s.
He pushed the weak idea to the back of his mind and focused on what he had to do next. The words had all been worked out. Studied. Rehearsed. Yet now they skittered around his brain like frightened birds, banging into cage walls.
Just get it over with.
Teague dialed Luke’s cell. Hannah eased onto the desk chair, back straight, attention riveted on the
phone, hands clasped between her knees.
On the third ring, his ex-best friend, ex-brother-in-law, ex-partner picked up. “Ransom.”
Teague hadn’t heard Luke’s voice in three years, yet recognized it immediately. A rush of emotion pumped through his chest: hurt, anger, betrayal, loss. He opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out.
“Ransom,” Luke repeated with a familiar irritation edging his bark.
“Luke,” Teague managed.
“You goddamned idiot!” Luke bellowed. “Did your brain turn to jerky in prison? When they catch you, you’ll be in the hole so long, you won’t see Kat until she’s eighteen.”
“If you had your way”—Teague’s voice emerged rusty and torn—“I’d never see her again. Period.”
A beat of silence passed. “Ever heard of a fucking phone? A goddamned letter? Ever think of discussing something before you go and cut your own throat?”
“Don’t insult me. We both know nothing I could have said would have gotten you to bring her to see me.”
“Prison is no place for a little girl.”
“Living without me is no way for her to live.”
Another tense moment of silence passed before Luke said, “Then why’d you call? You can’t think I’m going to let you talk to her.”
“No.” Teague’s resolve solidified with Luke’s rigid defiance. “You’re not going to let me talk to Kat. You’re not going to let me see Kat. You’re going to let me have Kat.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“I’m not asking for a gift, Luke. I know understanding and compassion are completely beyond you. I’m offering a trade.”
“You don’t have anything to trade. And what the hell makes you think I’d trade anything for—?”
“I have Hannah.”