by Laura Day
She could feel Jack watching her, and she worked to keep her expression neutral. He had not expressed any disapproval of her relationship with Mason, just some surprise that the relationship was continuing after the initial heady rush of the amazing sex. Missy had been less circumspect.
She made her opinions on the whole thing well-known, from pointing out that her association with Mason had led to her being violently assaulted in her own home, to suggesting that good sex could be had in other ways. That last one usually was mentioned when her top was off. And she watched Caroline’s reactions very closely whenever Mason was at the house, which was often.
Mason, for his part, tended to shrug off their disapproval. “Do you like me?” he’d ask. When Caroline nodded, he’d say, “Then the rest of it doesn’t matter.”
“And no,” she said now, realizing she hadn’t finished her sentence. “He’ll understand.”
Jack held out for another moment, and then sighed, which triggered a coughing fit. He rested his head on his desk for a minute, and she could see his shoulders rising and falling as he focused on breathing deeply enough to catch his breath without kicking off another fit. “All right. Fine. I’m going.”
She watched him sway just a little as he stood up. “Are you really okay? I could call you a cab and then drive your car home later.”
He considered it for a minute, and then shook his head. “No, I’m good. I’m okay to drive home.”
She nodded, and he seemed to gain some momentum. It would have been good to help him, but if she got in his way, she worried that he’d stop and never get going again.
***
It was a Friday afternoon on a sunny day in September, probably one of the last really nice days they’d have before fall came in with a vengeance and moved quickly to winter. Such was the curse of New England; once the leaves turned, the cold freeze was close on its heels.
Sometimes there was snow, sometimes there wasn’t, but the bitter cold always came. No one wanted to think about their 401ks, their payroll dramas, or their mutual funds. They were probably out hiking with families, or out on the lake, or shopping.
If Caroline was the sort to put her feet up on the desk and take a nap, she probably could have. Instead, she thought she would indulge herself with a little Gloria visit. Emily—the vet who had taken care of Gloria after Declan threw her into a wall and Caroline had fled the town—had a kennel and run for dogs she was boarding, and she kept a webcam feed where owners could check on their pets. It wasn’t the same as scratching her ears, but it was still better than nothing.
Gloria had, thank the powers that be, fully recovered from the assault. She seemed to get along well with Emily, and enjoyed having other dogs to play with. She indulged her Border Collie instincts and played herd-master as much as her doggie pals would let her. But Caroline hadn’t ever felt right bringing her back to the house—hell, she could scarcely walk in the front door without crying—and Emily had offered to take care of her until Caroline could figure out her next step.
It was a wonderful offer, but at the same time, she couldn’t stay with Jack and Missy indefinitely. It felt wrong to sell the house because of what had happened, but at the same time… what else could she possibly do?
The bell over the door tinkled, utterly surprising her. She glanced up, and the man in the doorway smiled as he entered. She smiled back, but it was mostly to hide the way her skin crawled as the stranger’s gaze traveled over her. He was dressed well for Vermont, and for her usual clients: slacks and a jacket, shirt, tie. But his eyes, as he took off his sunglasses, were cold and flat. His features were handsome, and he appeared fit based on how his suit caressed his frame, but those lizard eyes made her flinch and look away.
“Hi,” he said, walking across to her desk and extending his hand. “Mike Randall. You’re Caroline Lewis?”
She stood to take his hand and forced herself to look directly into his eyes, no matter how they made her shiver. “Just like the nametag says,” she said, and managed a small smile. “I haven’t seen you here before, Mr. Randall. Are you here for personal finance, or business?”
“Oh, a little of everything,” he said, sitting down in the chair across from her desk. He reached into his pocket, and her whole body tightened; when he pulled out his badge, her heart almost stopped. “And, I should have said. Detective Mike Randall. I have a few questions I’d like to ask you about a missing person.”
She tried to keep breathing. She was sure she could do it if she tried.
“Do you know who I’m here to ask about, Ms. Lewis?”
Her heart was absolutely throbbing. She shuffled papers around on her desk, realized she was fidgeting, and made herself stop. “I don’t—my social circle isn’t very wide, Detective, and everyone I know is where they should be.”
“Go ahead and think hard,” he said, and his intense eyes were gleaming with anticipation.
She wasn’t sure what snapped in her, but it went with a rubber-band pop. “I’m sorry, but I’m really bad at guessing games. If you have questions—about finances, or about whatever you came here about, please ask them. Otherwise, I have work to do.” Her voice didn’t quaver, and she didn’t flinch away from his eyes.
A small expression bent his lips, but she wouldn’t have called it a smile. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. He opened it up, and she saw a color copy of one of the pages from the logbooks that Mason had brought her back when this mess began. A name was circled, again and again, on the page.
She hadn’t circled it. She’d known that Mason was going to need to have these books back, untouched, like they’d never left the garage, so she’d kept separate notes. But looking at the books brought back all the memories.
The feel of her hands, tightly bound against the chair behind her. The whisper of Mason’s voice in her ear, the feeling of his fingers brushing against her hand as he tried to pass her a message, a message that she hadn’t understood at all. The top of her head was too light—she was going to float away, fly away, vanish, disappear. She couldn’t breathe.
And the detective was still watching her with that cold expression, that soft, fake, predatory smile. Breathing was not a thing that she could do. Stars danced in her vision, and she wondered what would happen to her if she fainted, if she passed out right now.
“Tell me,” he said, and his voice came from far away, echoing through the tunnel as she fell. “Who is Anna Bressette?”
“She was my sister.” Mason’s voice was so cold and clear that it felt like a dream, but she grabbed hold of it, used it as a line to pull her back to reality from the nightmare where she was drowning. “Baby, is everything okay here?”
Caroline looked to the office door, where Mason had entered quietly without being noticed until he spoke. “Detective Randall had some questions. About—a missing person, I guess?” Fuck, she’d nearly said Declan’s name. That would have been convenient, wouldn’t it? Fuck.
Mason stood at his full height, broadening his shoulders, crossing his arms, and planting his feet. Moments like this, she knew damn well that he’d been in the military for a long time, and that he wouldn’t ever really be out. “If you have questions, Detective, I suspect that they’re really for me.”
Randall stood, matching Mason’s stance with one just as balanced, just as casually aware of the violence that could break free at any moment. “Mr. Butler, I would love for us to talk. But somehow, for an outlaw, you’re shockingly well-connected within the legal system.”
Mason stayed silent, watching Randall, but Caroline could see his pale knuckles whitening further, and she was sure Randall could as well. She breathed in a prayer that Mason wasn’t stubborn or stupid enough to punch a cop.
Randall watched the other man for a moment, then shrugged, his lizard eyes flashing as he put his sunglasses back on. Caro had a sense that he wasn’t yielding so much as walking away, and she had a definite sense that it wasn’t the end of this. “Thanks for talking with
me, Caroline. I’ll be back later, so we can finish our conversation.” He gestured towards the piece of paper on her desk. “Keep that. Think about what it might mean.”
He walked out, and she at last gave in to the shaking in her knees, putting her head in her hands and trying to breathe. Somewhere far away, she heard Mason turn the lock on the door and flip the sign over to closed. He came close, but he didn’t touch her, not right away.
“Please,” she said. He’d wait there for permission forever if she needed him to, because once he’d moved too fast and she’d screamed like she was being murdered. But now—she needed the grounding, the purifying motion of his hand spinning tiny circles over the muscles in the small of her back.
“Breathe, baby,” he said. “We’re gonna be okay. That dirtbag cop doesn’t know anything. He’s just sniffing around hoping someone left a lead where he can dig it up.”
She looked up at him, tried to find a way to ask how sure he really was, and decided to let it go. Asking would only make things worse. And that was something that she couldn’t afford to do. “Okay,” she said, reminding herself to focus on the now, on her breathing, and on the man she knew loved her.
It was a lot harder than it should have been.
CHAPTER FORTY
Once Caro had put herself back together a little bit she locked up the office, and Mason passed her the leather jacket and helmet he’d bought her a few weeks ago. They still felt like they belonged to someone else who lived a very different life as she straddled the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around Mason’s waist.
She’d called bikers “brain donors in waiting” to his face just a few months ago; she’d never anticipated that she’d be here, the smell of leather in her face, the rumble of the machine setting up fascinating vibrations between her thighs. She always came off the bike ready to climb into his lap for a different sort of ride. Or, really, given some of the presents he’d brought her, less different than she might have thought.
But tonight they were going out, which was a nice change. He’d been so busy with the club, and she’d been so busy trying to forget what had happened, that they’d mostly just stayed in. And it was lovely staying in, amazing and kind and sweet, and he was the most considerate lover she’d ever had—not that there was a long list of competitors in that department.
But since he’d taken over the club, other things came up. He got phone calls sometimes, and he’d get this cold look as he picked up his phone—an expression she only saw when he occasionally spoke about his time overseas.
He didn’t talk much about what went on; the power struggles that she knew were ongoing. Declan was gone, and his VP had disappeared shortly afterwards. He’d told a bunch of people that he was sick of the weather, and was heading out to Vegas; Mason had told her that he was sure they didn’t have to worry about him. But he was trying to disentangle the club from the crap Declan had involved them all in while also getting help for the poor kids that Declan had turned into some kind of disgusting stable. And he was trying to accomplish it without getting the entire club arrested.
She hated even thinking about it. She was glad that Mason was stopping it, that he was returning the club to what he wanted it to be—a family who relied on each other, depended on each other, supported each other.
They shared a common bond of the bikes, and yeah, they dealt a little bit on the side—workaday things for workaday folks, just looking to get by, Mason liked to say—but whatever her personal feelings on recreational marijuana, the fact remained that it was still illegal in Vermont. Whenever she let herself daydream about a future with him, an image kept intruding of him being dragged away in handcuffs for selling a little bit of pot.
And it had started that way for Declan, hadn’t it? A little bit of pot had spiraled out into a little bit of hash, a little bit of coke, a little bit of—what, smack, meth, X, roofies, whatever you wanted, he’d been the guy who got it for you. Guns, girls, he’d done it all. What would stop Mason from following that same path?
When her fears got out of control, she tried to remember that he would stop himself. He’d let the memory of his half-sister stop him. She almost fancied that he might even think of her, but then she’d stop. Because he didn’t talk about it, but sometimes he stopped, looked at her, and smiled, and she was quite sure that he was imagining a long series of nights together stretching out into the future.
But what did he see between then and now, in that stretch of nights? That was the part she hadn’t been able to figure out yet.
He pulled the bike into the parking lot of the restaurant they’d decided to try. It was an odd place, neither his style nor hers, really. Before her, Mason admitted that he’d spent most of his time in dive bars full of other vets and bikers, guys who understood that some nights a man might be the life of the party, and another night, he might look like he was being chased by ghosts.
On the other hand, Caroline had been more likely to spend the night at home with a glass of wine and a good book—and when she went out, it was to restaurants, places that offered $30 single-person meals paired with a wine the chef had chosen personally.
This place—it was a diner supposedly run by the sister-in-law of the guy who ran the biker bar. She had no idea if that was actually true or not, but Caroline could smell grease on the air, and it smelled stale and old. “Still excited?” Mason asked her, and she nodded. She wished, though, that she’d told him no, that the cop had creeped her out too much, and that she wanted to just go home.
Not that she had a home to go to. Not really. Her house wasn’t “home” anymore, not when it still smelled like Declan’s stale sweat and the gag he’d stuffed in her mouth. Jack’s house wasn’t home, no matter how long she’d stayed there. Where else was there to go? Nowhere. Nowhere at all.
She could sell the house. She should sell the house. But to do that, she’d have to go there, again and again, clean it out, get rid of everything. And it still didn’t solve the problem of where she’d go, or what she’d do once she was there.
At least the house was hers to sell. That was something. Not much, but something.
Mason was watching her, and she’d been silent too long. She had to scroll back through her brain to see what question it was that he expected her to answer. “Yes,” she said. “I’m really excited.”
“Great.” His concern was buried deep down, but she could see it anyway, in the delicate way he folded his fingers around hers and steadied her as she swung her leg over the back of the bike, the way he leaned in and gave her a quick kiss before they walked into the restaurant. It was all over him. And she didn’t quite know why it was setting her teeth on edge, but it did. It absolutely did.
She followed him into the diner. The view was beautiful, looking over the valley down onto the lake, and that calmed her somewhat. The waitress brought menus, and Mason pointed out the strawberry lemonade before she saw it on her own, which was a nice touch, and then when the waitress brought it, there was an actual strawberry cut up and dunked into her lemonade. “I wasn’t excited,” she said, finally. “But now I am.”
He was quiet and still, sipping at a beer in a clear pint glass. “Why weren’t you excited?”
She stared out the window, taking in the view, and found her shoulders shrugging in a quiet, sad gesture. “I miss Gloria. I feel at loose ends. I don’t know how to move forward from where we are.”
He was so still that it was as if he were standing on a pressure plate, as if he was carefully searching the ground for the grenade that was about to blow him to bits. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She leaned her cheek on her hand and shrugged again. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I have to either chill out and move back into my house, or accept that I can’t, sell it, and find somewhere else to live.”
The waitress came back; they both ordered burgers. She disappeared again, and there was a lull of quiet.
“You should bring Gloria back,” Mason said after a while
. “I think you really miss her, and having her back would help you feel stabilized.”
“It probably would,” Caroline said, forcing herself to meet his eyes. So much concern, so much caution. Why was he so nervous right now? “But where in the world would I keep her? I can’t really afford to board her locally. It’s only working out now because Emily’s doing it for me as a favor. I can’t bring her to Jack and Missy’s, and I can barely force myself back into the house for clean underwear.”
“Bring her to me,” he said, and she could feel the shockwave roll off the words, changing everything around them in a second, flipping their fun, sex-based relationship into something deeper, more intense, more—well, serious. “I always had dogs when I was a kid,” he said, tripping over the silence and desperately working to fill it. “I miss it, a lot. I miss—I miss seeing you smile, like you did when she was around.”
“I—” She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly. “I’ve never even seen your place,” she said. “I don’t mean that to sound judgmental, I just—I need her to be safe. You know? I need her to stay safe.”