2. Zane
CHAPTER 2
ZANE
My head is fucking killing me.
“Hey, are you awake?”
I’m not sure, but if I have the choice, I’d rather not be. It hurts to even think about opening my eyes.
What the hell kind of punch did that guy land on me? I can take a hit. I’ve taken plenty over the years.
This is it , I think grimly. This is how I go.
“Maybe I should’ve left you in the truck.” There’s that voice again. It’s soft, but full of steel. And a touch of desperation.
Wait, I know that voice. It’s the angel who came for me at the roadhouse brawl. The woman who looks like my future children.
So I guess heaven is a…
I blink my eyes open.
Heaven is a motel room that hasn’t been updated since the 1970s?
That’s probably not right.
“Oh my God, you’re awake ,” the angel says in a relieved gush.
I twist my head and find her perched on the bed beside me, a girl half my age and half my size.
Very human.
No wings, no halo.
I’m alive.
And I’m in an unknown secondary location with a girl half my age. Oh shit.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, pushing to my feet.
She jumps off the bed with more agility than I can even imagine having right now. “What are you doing?”
“Where the hell am I?” I spin around, and the room spins, too. Fuck .
She gets in front of me, all five-and-a-quarter feet of her, and she pushes me back onto the bed.
Maybe she drugged me.
“Don’t touch me,” I manage to blurt out before passing out again.
“Look mister, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to have to call 911, and then I’m going to have to hightail it out of here and you’ll be on your own with the cops and the paramedics and what not. So you better not have any warrants or anything, because the only way to get out of trouble in this town is to be in love.”
I must be dreaming, because that makes no fucking sense.
Sweet, concerned breath brushes my cheek. “I’m not going to let you die on me.”
“Not gonna die,” I groan. “I’ve almost named our children, angel, but you keep waking me up.”
“Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do with people with head injuries.”
“I think that’s old science.” I reach for the nearest warm thing and pull it on top of me.
“Hey!” The warm thing squirms and smacks my chest. “Don’t touch me!”
“Wasn’t that my line?”
She gasps. “You remember?”
Not really. Not much.
And then sleep tugs me under again.
It’s solidly daytime when I wake again, maybe even the afternoon. And this time, I’m alone in the motel room. I have a faint recollection of the girl curled up against my side, huffing something like fine, if you insist, you big weirdo .
My head still hurts, but when I sit up, the room doesn’t spin. It’s still ugly as fuck, though.
Across the room, my flannel shirt is hanging on the back of a chair. I’m still wearing my jeans and a t-shirt, but my wallet and phone are both missing.
Fuck.
I must have imagined the angel worrying about me and threatening to call an ambulance if I didn’t wake up. Turns out, she used my being passed out as an opportunity to rob me.
Some angels are fucking demons.
I pick up the phone, but who the fuck do I call? The cops in who-the-fuck-knows-where-I-am? The thought of waiting for someone to come take my statement sounds exhausting right now. Do I want to lay charges against a manic pixie girl with misguided rescue energy just because she stole a credit card I’m about to have my brother pause for me? A phone that was due for replacement, anyway?
What if she kidnaps people on the regular?
Seems unlikely. She’s got terrible protocols. Who leaves a kidnapping victim alone in a hotel room with a working phone?
She’s probably a down-on-her-luck person who saw an opportunity, that’s all. As long as I can get out of here ASAP, I’ll give her some grace.
I dial the ranch instead, but I get an automated message that it’s a long distance call and I’ll need to put it through the front desk. I’m about to smash the 0 button to do just that when the room door opens.
The demon girl returns.
I drop the phone into its cradle and pivot, all my aching muscles on high alert, because she still looks like an angel, all wide-eyed innocence and concern.
“Oh!” she says breathlessly. “You’re awake.”
Her voice is sweet as wildflower honey in the spring. A trap.
I hold out my hand. “Give me back my phone and wallet.”
Flushing, she fishes my wallet out of her backpack and tosses it to me.
“And my phone?”
“I don’t have your phone.” She pulls out two cans of cold brew coffee and a six-pack of glazed donuts before she clocks that I don’t fucking believe her. “I swear on my life, I don’t. Maybe it fell out in the truck?”
I check my wallet. She didn’t touch the cash I had in it. “Why’d you take this if you didn’t want the money?”
“Umm.” She swallows hard, not answering the question. “I’m Daisy, by the way. Nice to meet you.”
I grunt.
“And you’re Zane. I got that from your driver’s license. I’m sorry about all this. Seriously.”
“What is this ?”
She pulls a piece of paper from her backpack. “It’s a long story and we really don’t have time just now.” She pauses, a beat that feels important. I’m still not prepared for what she says next. “I need you to pretend that we’re eloping.”
There’s an edge of panic to her voice, and it’s so real sounding my immediate instinct is to protect her from whatever unseen threat has caused it.
Trap trap trap.
The distraction means it takes a second for the meaning of her words to sink in. Eloping? “Pardon?”
“It’s semi-urgent.” There’s a knock at the door and she winces as her voice jumps half an octave, her words jamming together now. “Make that very urgent.”
My pulse thuds hard and heavy in my neck. “Who is on the other side of that door, Daisy?”
“My stepfather.” I can see the whites of her eyes all the way around her pretty irises, and while I’m sure no girl would like to be compared to a spooked horse, that’s the only frame of reference that I have.
And like any ranch hand who finds himself trapped with an out-of-control animal, I do what I need to do in the moment.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, low and slow. “I’m going to answer the door in a minute. You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to.”
“I kinda do, though. It’s his truck I was driving when I found you.”
“When you found me…at the roadhouse?”
“Yes.”
“How did I end up here?” But I remember slices of the night now, enough that I can picture what she fills in.
“I couldn’t leave you there! They were going to kill you!”
“It was a bar fight!” I’ve never been in one that ended in death so far, anyway. I scrub my hands over my face. “You didn’t have permission to drive his truck?”
“Not exactly.”
“So when I open that door, he’s going to think I’m an accessory to a felony.”
She gives me a blank look.
“The car theft, Daisy.”
“Oh.” She worries her bottom lip as the man on the other side of the door bangs his fist again, yelling her name. “You didn’t have anything to do with that. You weren’t even awake.”
“Where are we?”
Now that her panic is settling down, there’s a stubborn little lift to her chin. I won’t go so far as to say I like it when it’s aimed in my direction, but that’s better than freaking out. Her answer, though, doesn’t make me feel any better. “Nevada.”
My voice raises dramatically. “You took me across two state lines?”
“Just barely. Like…boop, and we’re back in Idaho.”
Boop. Jesus Christ. “I was in Wyoming the last I checked!”
“Okay, so? This was our only option. I didn’t know what kind of trouble you were in!”
“ So? You kidnapped me across two state lines and now you’re asking me to be an accessory after the fact to grand theft auto. That’s a pretty big so . And I wasn’t in any trouble before I met you!”
“Didn’t look that way to me. It was two against one and you were already unconscious. But then I remembered a story about the judge here. He’s a sucker for a romantic story. So all of…this…will be a non-issue if we just get married,” she says desperately. The piece of paper shakes in her hand. “Please. I tried to explain it to my mother and that asshole, but they don’t believe me.”
I gape at her. I don’t believe her, either. But her desperation is palpable and real, and she did rescue me from a bar fight I was definitely losing—not that I couldn’t eventually win it, but there were three bear-shaped men and that is a reasonable test of my fighting abilities.
And then the door creaks on its hinges and our time is up.
Taking a big, fortifying breath, I unlock it and let it pop open, revealing a stocky, angry man on the other side.
Behind him is a woman bristling with her own variation of violent rage. She looks like Daisy, albeit with a few decades of bitterness having worn her down.
I immediately don’t trust them.
“Can I help you folks?”
“Who the hell are you?”
Fuck. I sure hope her plan has some substance, because apparently we’re doing this.
“I’m Daisy’s fiancé.” I push to the full extent of my six-foot-five-inches and frown down at them. “Didn’t she tell you?”