“Alright,” I said as I got in the driver’s seat, taking a deep breath, trying to keep myself positive about the whole thing. “Let’s go on another adventure, girls,” I said, then I was off.
I blamed the music for it.
I couldn’t drive in silence.
The thoughts tried to creep in too much since driving was done so much on autopilot, leaving your brain free to drift to other things.
So the music was bumping, distracting me, until about twenty minutes into the drive, something made the satellite cut out, banking the car in complete silence.
Save for a… chewing sound coming from the backseat.
I mean, yeah, the dogs chewed at their feet sometimes, but that was an annoying mashing sound that made me feel twitchy. This was a munching and scraping sound.
Like they were chewing on bones.
Which I never would have given them on a long car ride where I couldn’t keep an eye on them.
My gaze shot to the rearview.
Then there he was.
Perched over the backseat, sitting in the trunk.
Shock gripped my system, making my arms move of their own volition, turning the wheel, sending the car into a spin that had my stomach plummeting and my heart skipping into overdrive.
The dogs let out startled grumbles.
And before the car even pulled to a stop when I slammed on the brake, one of my hands was shooting out toward the center console, flipping it open, and reaching inside.
“Looking for this, babe?” Sway asked, tone calm as could be as he waved around my heavily modified gun. “What does this do, anyway? Shoot laser holes in people?”
SUV safely parked at the side of the road with no one passing by at the moment, I yanked off my seatbelt, threw open the door, and climbed out.
Suddenly, I wasn’t completely debilitated by the idea of a confrontation.
This man had broken into my car.
He’d bribed my highly trained dogs into submission.
He’d stolen from me.
Oh, no.
For the first time in my entire life, I wanted a confrontation.
I stormed around the back of the car, pressing the button for the trunk door release, then threw it upward.
“Get the fuck out of my car,” I hissed.
And when he didn’t immediately move to do so, I reached inside, grabbing him by the lapels of that well-worn leather jacket of his, and yanking him out over the mounds of crap in the trunk myself.
I wasn’t delusional.
He was much bigger than I was.
He let me pull him out.
He didn’t resist until he was at the edge of the trunk, dropping down on his ass at the edge, looking up at me with his head tilted to the side.
Looking.
Seeing.
Somehow, I felt, seeing too much.
My arms wrapped around my front, a defensive gesture from my childhood that I could never shake.
It was a gesture teachers had called ‘standoffish,’ and my peers had said was ‘bitchy.’
It was just protection.
A layer of defense.
Sway seemed to see this too, his light eyes going soft.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his voice as soft as that look he was giving me.
I didn’t trust softness from hard men, either, though. It was too easy to use gentleness as a form of manipulation. And I was just not good enough at reading people to trust anything at its surface. I was always looking for ulterior motives hidden underneath.
“Men with good intentions don’t stow away in women’s trunks after stealing their weapons.”
“I had a feeling you were going to ghost,” he told me. “I couldn’t let you get away.”
“This isn’t even your deal,” I reminded him. “It’s not even your club’s deal.”
“No, but a deal going south for one club reflects badly on all of them. So the word from above is to get you to make the guns.”
“By what? Force?” I asked, tone tight.
“I think that was mentioned as a last resort,” he said, confirming my growing fears.
I wasn’t clueless about how these sort of operations ran. Biker clubs had lots of members, had other chapters. Their reach was long.
If they wanted to, they could strong-arm me into doing what they wanted.
More men taking advantage.
The rage that simmered in me felt both new and age-old. Like generations of women before me who’d been forced to do things against their wills were springing up within me, making my anger hotter, brighter, more dangerous.
“Hey, look,” Sway said, pressing my gun back into the trunk, showing me the palms of his hand. “Can’t we just… make this work?” he asked. “I get the guns. You get the rest of the money. Then I can leave you alone, like you clearly want,” he added. This time, when he smiled, it wasn’t that warm, playboy smile, it was one tinged with sadness around the edges.
“I don’t have what I need to make the guns even if I wanted to right now,” I said, shaking my head.
“Where is the stuff you need?”
“Back home,” I said. “But I can’t go there right now.”
Unlike me, Sway seemed good at reading between the lines, with hearing the things that weren’t being said.
“Not even with protection?” he pressed.
That was a good question.
I didn’t have a ready answer.
Yes, the reason I ran at the first sign of trouble was because I was all I had, because there was no one to rely on, no one to help me fight against the odds.
I was all I had.
It had been that way for a really long time.
Because trusting someone was risky. Especially when life had proven time and time again that I wasn’t great with making the right decisions about people, about their motivations, about how willing they were to hurt me to get what they wanted from me.
That said, I understood that this guy was going to hunt me to the ends of the Earth to get what he wanted out of me.
“Just you?” I asked. “As back up,” I clarified.
“Just me, unless you think Coach is necessary too. Or more of the guys, too. We will work with you on this.”
“Just you,” I heard myself say, but hadn’t been aware of even thinking it until it was out of my mouth. “For now,” I added as I tried to rationalize it to myself.
One guy would be easier to overpower if I needed to.
One guy would have a harder time fooling me.
It had absolutely nothing to do with his soft eyes.
With his gorgeous face.
“Okay. Just me,” he agreed, nodding. “Can I ride up front now?” he asked. “I almost got knocked out by a can of corn when you took a turn. You drive like a maniac.”
“I do not,” I said, stiffening, more offended than I probably should have been.
“The dogs agree with me,” he said. “They had giant eyes the entire ride so far. I’m pretty sure the black one even whimpered a little and clutched her sister for support.”
“Miranda is the all-black one,” I told him. “Samantha is the sable one. And just so you know, you can’t give dogs bones in the car. It’s not safe.”
“Noted,” he agreed, hopping fully out of the trunk, then slamming the door shut. “The bones fell to the floor when you spun around like a crazy person,” he told me, all lightness and teasing.