by A Parker
My heart hammered wildly in my chest.
One more thing? On top of murdering Tex?
“What is it?” I whispered.
Bates straightened. “Never set foot in Reno again.”
My head spun.
Caroline grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the study door while Bates turned away and looked out the window.
“Wait,” I said, pulling free of Caroline. Bates looked over his shoulder at me. “If I kill Tex, how am I supposed to convince the others to trust me?”
“You’re a smart woman,” Bates said. “I trust you’ll figure it out.”
Caroline pulled me back toward the door.
“Oh, and Miss Hart?” Bates grinned and ran his tongue over his teeth. “If you fail, I’ll save a bullet for you.”
Caroline clicked her tongue and dragged me back out into the hall. I stumbled across the marble floors as her much longer legs covered more ground than mine. “I wish I could be there to see the look on that dumb bastard’s face when you stab him in the back.” She grinned. “He’s never going to see it coming.”
Chapter 19
Jameson
I was about to head back home, hoping I’d find Carrie there with a hand on her hip as she asked me where the hell I’d gone off to.
But as I turned a corner, I spotted her.
Relief flooded through me even though I could tell as I took the speed off my bike and approached her that something was wrong.
She sat on the curb across the street from the police station. She had her knees drawn up and her elbows resting on them while she buried her face in her hands and her fingers in her hair. Her hair was a mess actually. It looked as though she’d been running her hands through it for hours. One foot tapped anxiously on the pavement, and she looked up from her hands when she heard my bike coming.
I pulled over in front of the Chevelle, which she’d parked at the curb about eight feet from where she sat.
I got off the motorcycle and hung my helmet on the handlebars.
Carrie hid her face from me as I walked over and sat down beside her.
“You okay?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
Either she didn’t hear me or she chose not to hear me because she acted as though I hadn’t spoken. She looked back up and gazed longingly across the street at the police department. I saw heartbreak in her blue eyes and I knew the weight of her burden. Like me, she’d made decisions that compromised her career as a Ranger. Like me, she very well might have to walk away from her job at the end of this.
It was obvious how much it was eating her up inside.
“I fucked up,” Carrie whispered. “I… I think I fucked up really bad, Jameson.”
I couldn’t recall a time where she’d called me by my first name.
Tears glistened in her eyes and she shook her head as if to dispel them. Her hands balled into fists and she pressed her knuckles into her thighs, punishing herself with pain. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought… ugh. I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“What are you talking about?”
Carrie finally looked at me, and as soon as our eyes met, she fell to pieces and started sobbing. Her tears glistened on her cheeks, and I noticed for the first time that her right cheek was bruised. Someone had hit her.
Shit.
What did she need? Should I wrap an arm around her? Console her? Tell her it would all be okay? Did she need tough love—someone to grab her chin and tell her to pull it together and tell the truth? I felt entirely out of my depth as I tried to process how to be there for her without crossing any lines, all the while simultaneously wondering what she could have done that could possibly be this bad.
I glanced at the police station.
Had she turned us in?
I had too many questions and decided she was in no shape to answer them all right now, so I got to my feet and offered her my hand while she sniffled and wiped at her tears.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “Can you drive?”
She nodded.
I told her to follow me back to the apartment, and I drove slowly. She trailed along behind me, the lights of the Chevelle glinting off my mirrors on straight roads. It wasn’t too long of a drive back to my place and by the time we got there she’d stopped crying. Her eyes were still puffy and her nose was pink, and I resisted the urge to tell her she looked adorable.
In my experience, crying women never liked to be told they looked cute when they were crying. It was almost as dangerous as telling them they were cute when they were angry.
Almost.
Carrie followed me down the humid hallway of the warehouse to my unit. It was cool and dim. The sun had just come up to the east and shone through the single window above the kitchen fridge. The light painted everything in an orange haze, and Carrie’s shadow flickered across the far wall as she walked to the sofa and fell into it like a defeated woman.
I grabbed her a glass of water before joining her.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
Tell me what you did that was so bad.
Carrie sipped her water. “I thought I was helping. I need you to know. I really thought I was helping.”
“I believe you.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Okay… well… as you know I tracked down Caroline the other day. I’ve been waiting around for her or her father to reach out to me and I started to worry that they weren’t going to. I couldn’t let them forget about me. I couldn’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers. So I went out looking for her again, and I found her.”
“At the bar,” I said.
She nodded and didn’t ask how I knew she’d been there. Instead, she continued. “She took me out the back door and jumped me.”
That explained the bruised cheek.
Carrie touched her face gingerly and surprised me by laughing bitterly as she remembered her fight with Bates’s daughter. “Sneaky bitch. I should have seen it coming. But it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have the upper hand for long. I was her equal, and when she knew neither of us were going to gain any ground, she stopped. And then she took me to see her father.”
I wasn’t sure how to feel. Furious that Caroline had struck her or in awe that Carrie had held her ground and struck back.
I said nothing and waited for the fierce woman on my couch to continue.
She took a shaky breath. “I went to his estate. He was there waiting for me, and he said he was willing to hear this plan of mine. I proposed I give him the Devil’s Luck on a silver platter, and in exchange, he grant me safe exit out of Reno and back to Austin.”
As I listened, I considered the fact that she might very well be lying to me. There was no way for me to truly know if what she was saying was true or whose side she was really on. For all I knew, she’d gone to Bates and they’d struck a bargain to do just as she said—deliver Jackson and the rest of us to Bates.
Still, I wanted to believe her.
“I thought it would be easy,” she whispered. “I knew I had him right where I wanted him. I knew I was offering him exactly what he wanted and that he’s too damn narrow minded and greedy to say no. But I should have seen it coming. I should have known he’d want to make sure he had power over me. That he’d want to twist the knife.”
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes slid to me and once more filled with tears. “He agreed to my terms, but he had a condition. In order to prove my loyalty to him, I have to murder you, Jameson. I have to murder you and I have to prove it to him.” She pulled a small flip phone out of her jean pocket and tossed it to me. “He gave me this to stay in contact with him.”
My chest tightened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make things worse. And if he hadn’t brought you into this, everything would have gone according to plan. But now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. He’s going to call me
in the next few days, before Friday obviously, and he’s going to tell me to end your life, and if I don’t do it, well, he’ll kill me too.”
I stared at the phone in my hand.
Carrie knit her fingers together and her knuckles turned white. “Please say something.”
“You were reckless.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve been killed.”
“I know,” she said again.
“But,” I said slowly, “I think you succeeded in creating the window of opportunity we’ve been trying to get but have failed to achieve at every corner. You got us a promised location with Bates and all his men, and it’s away from town so there won’t be any collateral damage. I don’t think this is what you want to hear, but I’m going to say it. I’m impressed.”
Carrie blinked rapidly.
I grinned. “This could be the finale we’ve all been working toward. This could be justice for William.”
Carrie snatched the phone out of my hand. “Did you not hear me? I have to kill you in order for the deal to go down!”
“Oh, I heard you.”
Carrie shook her head incredulously. “Really? It sure as hell doesn’t look like you heard me. Why are you smiling?”
I chuckled and got to my feet. “You underestimated Bates, and you’re underestimating us, too. Come on. We have to go.”
“Where?” She eyed my hand suspiciously as I held it out to her.
“To talk to Jackson,” I said simply.
Chapter 20
Carrie
I tossed and turned in Tex’s bed and missed the warmth of his body next to mine. I’d convinced him to let me get some rest before we talked to Jackson. It had been a long night.
It was half past eight in the morning. I’d been lying here, sweating in my yellow sheets despite the comfortable temperature of the bedroom, wondering who the hell I thought I was running after Bates like I did tonight. Back in Austin, this kind of behavior would have gotten me written up or worse, suspended.
I rolled onto my back and draped my forearm over my eyes to block out the sunlight. “And I’d deserve it.”
Tex had been all too gracious about this whole thing. For a biker and a hellion, he had a lot of patience, and I wondered if I’d misjudged him and every other man like him for my entire life. Yes, he was a criminal. And yes, he’d crossed a lot of lines where the law was concerned. But if I’d learned anything since becoming a Ranger, it was that nothing was black and white in this life.
Tex was still a good man, and I believed the others were too.
Even Jackson.
I sighed.
I get why he hates me now.
The bikers on Harleys with chips on their shoulders and hell in their hearts weren’t the loose cannon here. I was.
With a disgruntled mumble, I rolled back onto my side and drew my knees up. Minutes ticked by. A bird chirped outside the window and a neighbor took the trash out. I heard garbage bags rustling before the lid of the bin fell closed and the stranger muttered something about the garbage smelling foul.
“Fuck,” I hissed, sitting upright and rubbing at my eyes. My body felt so tired and lethargic, but my mind wouldn’t slow down enough for me to drift off to sleep.
Trying to sleep was truly pointless.
So I got out of bed, threw on a pair of sweats and a loose tank top, and padded out into the apartment, where I found Tex predictably smoking in the pit. He had the metal door propped open with a wastebasket from under the kitchen sink, and he was peeling an apple and tossing the skin into the bin while he held his cigarette between his lips.
He looked up from his apple peeling when I filled the doorway and wrapped my arms around myself.
“Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head.
He cut me off an apple wedge and handed it to me on the knife. I pulled it free, the juices making it stick to the blade, and took a bite. It was fresh and crisp, more sour than sweet. My cheeks puckered.
He smiled and the cigarette dangled dangerously. “Well, if you can’t sleep, we might as well head to Grant’s.”
My stomach threatened to fall out of my body, and I pressed my hands to my gut instinctively. “I can’t face them,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to do it alone.”
“They’re going to hate me even more than they already do.”
“None of them hate you. Except Jackson. But Jackson takes longer to warm up to people than the rest of us. He’s got baggage. Just try not to provoke him this time and you’ll be fine.”
“Try not to provoke him? He’ll be provoked as soon as he hears what I did last night.”
“It doesn’t have to come from you.” Tex pulled the last slice of apple from the edge of his blade with his teeth. He tossed the apple core in the wastebasket and the cigarette returned once more to his lips. He took three more drags before putting it out. “I’ll do the talking. You just keep your head down for once. Think you can handle that?”
I licked my lips. “Maybe.”
Tex wrapped an arm behind my waist and pulled me up against him. It surprised me, and I let out a little gasp before he put a hand under my chin and forced me to look up at him.
“I mean it, Carrie. Head down. I’ll do the talking. Even if Jackson tries to get a rise out of you, don’t respond. It will only add heat to the fire and we need this conversation to go in our favor.”
“Is that an order?”
“An order, a request. It’s whatever you need it to be in order for you to listen.”
Despite the tightness in my chest and my stomach still trying to vacate its host, I smiled. “I’ll behave.”
I scratched at my upper arms as we walked up Grant’s driveway and Tex paused to unlatch the metal gate into the backyard.
He frowned at me. “You’re scratching yourself raw.”
“It’s a nervous habit. Leave me alone.”
He drew the gate open and latched it behind us. I hovered around him like a six-year-old, desperate for his reassurance and protection as I continued scratching at my arms despite the way my skin burned. Tex grabbed me by the shoulders before taking both of my hands in his and holding them firmly between his palms. His grip was warm and steady as he looked into my eyes.
“Enough of this,” he said. “You’re a Ranger, Carrie Hart. Even if you want to run away and hide, right now is the time to put your big girl fucking pants on and pretend you know what the fuck you’re doing. You hear me?”
I blinked.
He released my hands. “You can scratch yourself until you have hives on the drive home. But right now, pull it together. Don’t show a weakness. You can do this.”
Yes, I can.
I didn’t start scratching again. I followed him across the gravel to the shop. The bay doors were open, and all of the men, as well as Suzie, were tinkering away on bikes or other projects. Unable to help myself, I immediately sought out Jackson. He stood at the back of the shop with his back to me. He spoke to Mason, who stood beside him. Mason laughed at something Jackson said, but his eyes were on Suzie as she wrestled with a bolt on a bike.
Mason tapped Jackson’s shoulder when he saw Tex and me coming.
I reminded myself of what Tex had just said. I’m a Ranger. I can do this.
“Hey look, it’s the dynamic duo.” Abel flashed us a white smile and hooked his thumbs in his jeans. His pants were covered in grime and oil, and he had a dark smear across his nose, most likely from scratching an itch with a grease-covered finger.
Tex met Abel with a clasping of hands and a shoulder bump. When they broke apart, Tex looked around at them all. “Boys, we need to talk.”
Suzie stood and wiped her hands on her coveralls. “Does that mean I have to leave?”
I wanted her to stay. There was something comforting about another woman’s presence in the testosterone-filled shop.
Jackson shrugged. “You can stay, Suzie. What’s this about, Tex?”
Tex and I shared
a look before he cleared his throat. “Maybe we should move up onto the deck and sit down. We’ve got a lot to tell you.”
The next half hour was a special kind of torture for me. I wasn’t good at sitting quiet and still like a good girl while a group of men shot me mistrusting glances and muttered behind their hands about the quality of my character. Jackson didn’t bother hiding his irritation with me. He shook his head at me often, massaged his brow with two fingertips, and rolled his eyes half a dozen times before Tex wrapped up the story shortly after telling them Bates demanded Tex’s death in order to secure the deal on Friday night.
“It’s Tuesday,” Suzie said. “All of this is supposed to go down in the next three days?”
“Pretty much,” Tex said.
Suzie surprised me by shooting me a scornful look. “Have you learned your lesson yet? You’re fucking with our lives, Carrie. Do you get that?”
I looked at my hands in my lap and nodded. Yes, I get it.
“We’re not going through with this,” Jackson said almost dismissively. He waved a hand in his sister’s direction, dismissing her concern with nonchalance. “It’s too messy. And what, we’re supposed to sacrifice one of our own to get our hands around Bates’s throat? No. I don’t think so. We need a new plan.”
“We’re not going to get a better opportunity, Jackson.” Tex turned to Brody, who sat on his other side. “Chips, how long can a person’s heart be stopped for?”
“No,” I blurted out. Shit. I was supposed to keep quiet. But hell no. “Nobody is stopping anyone’s heart. That’s batshit.”
Brody nodded. “What she said.”
“Indulge me,” Tex said.
Brody ran a hand over his head with a sigh. “Four to six minutes, tops.”