Asking For Trouble (The Fallen Men #7.5)

1. Chapter 1

BLUE

Lots of stuff happens in convenience stores and at gas stations.

Most of it bad.

Especially on the Sea to Sky Highway, miles away from civilization, where drug running and human trafficking were known occurrences.

A young, decently attractive woman working the night shift was asking for trouble, but I was the kinda girl born and raised in chaos, who walked the razor’s edge of risk like it was my daily commute to work.

I could handle myself.

Once, when a tweaked-out meth head wandered into the store, knocking over a rack of potato chips on the way to the till, he took out his junk to pee on the glass partition separating us, and I’d handled it. A calm call to the cops dispatched of the pervert without much fuss or fanfare. Cleaning the piss off the glass was another thing entirely, but bleach worked wonders.

Another time, when two drunks had started a fight in the back next to the fridges, I’d called the cops, grabbed my baseball bat, and kicked one asshole in the knee when he didn’t heed my warnings. The snap of a tendon in his leg was grimly satisfying.

I’d been taking care of myself long before I’d left my family home, and I refused to take anyone’s shit since that day.

Few people took tiny me seriously. It was a little hard to blame them when I was five foot two with cobalt blue and black hair and massive blue eyes that lent me an expression of eternal innocence.

It’s funny how biology can tell lies much more eloquently than our mouths.

I looked sweet and younger than my twenty-five years.

The truth was, I’d lived on my own since I was seventeen, including a stint on the streets for a year or so. I was intimately acquainted with all seven of the deadly sins. They were my dear friends, like Snow White and her merry band of dwarves.

Some drunk idiots, strung-out addicts, high school wannabe rebels, and rich jerks with too much money and zero manners couldn’t put me off working at Evergreen Gas Station. Not when it was putting me through cosmetology school.

Besides, Grouch Pedersen was the kindest man I’d ever known.

When I was eighteen and he caught me stealing from the station, again and again, he didn’t turn me in.

He gave me a job and paid for my room at the Purgatory Motel for a month.

Truthfully, I was set to graduate from my beauty program in three weeks, but I was anxious about quitting Evergreen Gas. The retro-looking gas station and convenience store had become my home more than anywhere else. Maybe it was sad that rows of junk food and the whirr of a Slurpee machine were as familiar to me as most people’s backyards and living rooms, but it was the first place where I’d felt in control of my life in too many years to count. Even the dangers of working the graveyard shift at a highway gas station were oddly comforting, familiar from my childhood.

I was reminiscing about exactly that when the bells over the door jingled in greeting. My gaze immediately lifted to the newcomer, an instinct born of self-preservation after years of working there.

My breath caught in my throat like a stuck lozenge threatening to choke me.

He was beautiful.

Like something out of the magazines I studied for inspiration.

Like someone who was paid to look that way.

Only he was too rough for that. The bright tattoos on his neck under the shadow of a days-old beard as black as spilled ink across his jaw. The worn-in leather jacket opened over a white tee with a small Hephaestus Auto Garage logo stitched onto the breast. The tee was too tight, his muscles almost obscene beneath the thin fabric.

I choked a little, trying to cough without making a fool of myself.

Of course, it was just my luck that he noticed me then, as I was coughing quietly, desperate for air behind a shaky hand covering my flushed face.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

This guy was perfection.

The swoop of thick black hair falling over a tanned forehead into eyes the colour of whiskey held over a flame. The wavy locks tangled in his long lashes, and when he reached up to brush them away, I noticed the bright tattoos on the back of his hand, the letters on the base of each knuckle, and what looked like an owl with its wings spread over the sides of his throat. There were thick silver rings on his fingers and a heavy silver chain around his throat. I wasn’t a girl who usually went for jewelry on men, but something about the glint of metal against his warm olive skin made my throat dry and my thighs tingle.

He was the hottest man I’d ever seen in my life, and of course , he was seeing me like this, flushed from the effort to breathe without coughing up a lung, anything but cute in my black and blue Evergreen Gas polyester vest.

“You gonna survive, beautiful, or do you need a hand?” he asked, amusement rich in his tone as he swaggered up to the counter on a slow, unbalanced stride that should have been ridiculous but somehow seemed right.

I held up a shaky hand and gave in to the impulse to cough loudly into the crook of my other elbow. When I could finally breathe again, I flipped my thick blue hair over my shoulder and leveled him with a cool look.

“Can I help you with something?”

His full mouth twitched at the corners as he unabashedly checked me out. “Not a question you should ask a man like me without addin’ some caveats.”

“Does a man like you know what ‘caveats’ even means?” I retorted sweetly, batting my lashes.

He laughed and damn him because it was a gorgeous sound, rolling and low. When he finished, he wiped at his mouth as if he could erase his smile. “You aren’t wearin’ a name tag.”

I blinked at him because he hadn’t asked a question.

Another laugh, this one just a rumble through his throat. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?”

“Called Boner by my friends,” he said, so straight-faced I wondered if he could actually be serious about it. “But pretty girls call me Aaron until they learn why I earned that nickname for themselves.”

Despite myself, I chuckled. “You’re not serious, are you? This shtick doesn’t actually work on women.”

He shrugged one shoulder, leather jacket creaking. “Whaddya think?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, enjoying his outrageousness and the perfect symmetry of his face more than I should.

I didn’t have time for boys or trouble.

And this guy was the prettiest boy I’d ever met, so of course, he was trouble with a capital T.

“Tell me your name,” he pressed, knocking his knuckles against the plastic countertop on his side of the partition. “Wanna know what to call you when I ask for your number.”

“You’re pushy.”

Another one-shoulder shrug. “You see somethin’ you like, why wouldn’t you make an effort to make it yours?”

“‘Make it’ implies a lack of consent,” I warned him, half serious and half flirting because I couldn’t help it. He was too damn charming.

“Oh, trust me, you’ll be askin’ me to kiss you minutes into our first date. Beggin’ me to make you come after an hour. Never taken anyone against their will in my life, never had to, and certainly never fuckin’ would.”

“Arrogance isn’t attractive,” I informed him, but really, it was a lie.

He didn’t take himself too seriously despite his obvious confidence. His smile was more goofy than smug, his tone full of humour implied he was laughing at himself as much as he was enjoying our interlude.

“Let me prove you wrong,” he suggested, leaning forward until he was so close to the slightly blurred plexiglass that I could see a faint scar cutting through the inky stubble on his chin. “The only thing I ‘make’ is trouble.” He winked outrageously, a self-mocking smile curving one side of his mouth. “What’s your name?”

I opened my mouth to tell him my name, my number, maybe even to demand he take me out on that first date at the end of my shift because I was curious about him, too curious, when his phone rang. The ringtone was AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”.

Aaron cursed under his breath, excused himself reluctantly, and answered the call as he walked to the back of the shop. I couldn’t see him beyond the shelves, but I listened to the low murmur of his voice and hated myself for finding even that attractive.

To remind myself that I didn’t need the hassle of a man in my life, I hit a button on my phone to light up the home screen. The photo of a man appeared, heavily doctored by the edits I’d made with an app on my phone so that his eyes were crossed out and devil horns sprouted from his head.

Otto Granger, my ex-boyfriend, the man who stole all my savings six months ago.

We’d been dating for two years, living together in his basement suite in Whistler, on the track to spending the rest of our lives as a team.

And then one morning, I’d gone home to find the space cleared out, nothing but the dented metal lockbox I’d kept my savings in broke open on the kitchen counter. I didn’t care about the money as much as I ached for the disappearance of my mother’s sapphire ring. It was the only thing I had left of her, and I’d gone to dangerous lengths to take it with me when I’d fled home. To have my scumbag boyfriend steal it to pawn it off still made me prickly with rage.

After that, I promised myself that I wouldn’t let anyone or anything else distract me from becoming a certified cosmetologist. It was the only thing I’d ever wanted for myself, to take part in making someone feel beautiful and special.

I wasn’t built like the models all over social media, my curves softer and more exaggerated, but I knew how to work with what I had, and I fucking owned it. Over my years of sparse living, I'd learned that even a coat of nail polish could give a woman a reason to smile throughout the day. It might have seemed insignificant or trivial, but joy was joy in whatever amount or iteration it presented itself in.

So my dreams came first.

And this Aaron character, as beautiful as he was, as warm as I felt under the light of his regard, was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

If Otto had taught me anything, it was not to trust chemistry. I’d grown up with bad men all around me, and despite leaving that life behind a long time ago, it seemed I was still inexorably drawn to dangerous men.

I was uncharacteristically zoned out, so I didn’t look up when the bells over the door chimed even though it was gone midnight and into the hours when I had to be hypervigilant.

“Hey, pretty girl,” a rough voice rumbled, alerting me to the presence of a large man just to the left of the till.

Instantly, I took a step back from the partition between us, hand reaching for the panic button installed under the lip of the counter.

He grinned beneath the lady’s stocking pulled down over his face, the shape of his smile obviously sinister even though the black nylon obscured it.

“Not so fast,” he warned, whipping his arm from behind his back to lay a massive sawed-off shotgun on the counter. The barrel angled up into the window box designed in the partition, where customers and I could exchange coins and lottery tickets, cigarettes and receipts. It had to be opened on my side for the gun to get through, but even though the plastic barricade was thick, it wasn’t bulletproof. Gun laws were strict in Canada, and there usually wasn’t a need for it.

My throat went dry as fear thundered through me like a herd of stampeding bulls.

“I’m thinkin’ you know what to do,” he encouraged in that gravelly voice. It was artificially deepened in an attempt to obscure his true tone, but something about it seemed familiar. “Put the cash in a bag and slot it on through.”

They’d hit at one in the morning, so there was a decent amount of money in the till.

I hesitated, my fingers so close to the button that would raise the alarm.

The bells jingled again, such an innocuous sound heralding three more alarming, gun-toting men with stockings over their heads. Two joined the original thief, but the other turned down the rows with a murmured, “No one needs a Good Samaritan fuckin’ things up.”

The man in front of me laughed harshly. The sound scored down my spine like sharp nails.

“Do what I tell ya, bitch, and maybe I won’t shoot ya.”

My heart lodged itself in my throat, making it hard to breathe as I opened the till and slowly collected the money for these thugs. Self-preservation and personal terror collided with fear for Aaron as I watched the thickset man with a gun wander down one row and up the next.

Where was he?

Had he left out the back when he heard the men enter?

It was hard to believe a man like him would cower in the face of these assholes, but anything was possible, and it wasn’t like I knew Aaron from Adam.

I just thought he was beautiful.

I just thought something at the backs of those large, thick-lashed eyes spoke of goodness despite his obvious counter-culture appearance.

“You’re takin’ too long,” the man growled, cocking his shotgun with a click-schtick that chased chills down my spine. “Hurry the fuck up.”

“All clea––” the man wandering the rows started to say.

But his words were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a gasp and then a clatter as he fell to the ground in the far aisle to the left, dislodging a stand of beef jerky as he landed.

“The fuck?” their ringleader demanded. “What the fuck’re you doin’?”

There was a slight pause that seemed to throb with tension, then a low masculine groan.

“Fuck,” came a voice I recognized even in that single syllable, even though he’d only spoken a handful of words to me. “Tripped over a damn magazine.”

The ringleader standing in front of me seemed to quiver with pent-up adrenaline. His head was cocked back toward the aisle, and I felt sure he would know his thief-in-arms had been taken out and replaced with Aaron. There was no air in my lungs and no hope in my heart.

Aaron was fucked.

While the ringleader was distracted, I pressed the panic button and prayed the cops would arrive before the handsome stranger ate a bullet.

“Fucking hell, asshole,” he finally barked. “Stay on your goddamn feet. We clear back there?”

A man rose from behind the aisle, his head obscured by that nylon sock. He was wearing the original man’s grey zip-up sweatshirt, the hood pulled up over his masked face. But I knew it was Aaron.

What kind of man took out an assailant with a gun and swapped places with him as easily as you please?

A shiver of dangerous arousal bit sharp teeth into the base of my back.

“Clear,” Aaron said, raising the long-barreled shotgun as he adjusted it. I had to wonder if he did it for my benefit, to show me he had a weapon now too.

The ringleader turned back to me as his two other cronies pilfered packages of chips and peanuts from the store. “Hurry the fuck up, you fat bitch.”

Heat rose at the back of my neck, the words igniting age-old embarrassment in me like a match to a strike strip. My ex and some of my old friends I’d met through him had always called me chubby or fat as if I didn’t know I wasn’t a size zero. It wasn’t that I cared about my weight. I was happier with myself now as a woman than I had been as an underfed, terrified girl, but my ex liked to harp on me about the few extra pounds I wore well on my hips, thighs, and tummy. Even though I’d grown around the wounds from my past, it was hard to remain unmoved when someone really wanted to humiliate you, and the name-calling triggered old memories.

I could feel his leer as he watched me put the stacks of money––over three grand––in an Evergreen Gas Station paper bag.

“Nice tits, though,” one of the other men murmured as if he was reluctantly impressed.

Immediately, my right hand flew to my neckline even though I was conservatively covered in a long-sleeved navy-blue tee beneath my polyester uniform vest. I never wore anything remotely revealing when I was working. When I looked up into his expression, it was feral with entitled, savage interest.

“Pretty thing stuck in a glass cage,” the ringleader murmured as the other guys joined him in front of the counter. “Maybe I should break you out and take you with us, along with the cash. A little bonus for my crew.”

“I’m locked in,” I said, surprised by the levelness of my voice when inside, I felt seconds away from a panic attack. My chest was so tight, I couldn’t force air into my compressed lungs.

“Good thing we know a thing or two about breaking in,” he retorted, and I could see the faint impression of a smile beneath the dark nylon.

Fear clutched my heart with talon-tipped hands. I was suddenly a teenager again, stuck with men who wanted to break and bend me to their will, with no hope of escape. The edges of my visions crackled with static, the present colliding with the past in a way that short-circuited my brain and made me forget the difference between who I’d been and who I was.

“Not worth it,” Aaron grunted. It was obvious he was trying to modulate his voice. “Let’s get the cash and get out before the pigs come.” There was a jingle as he fished through the pockets of the hoodie he’d taken from the thug he’d knocked out and produced a set of keys. “I’ll start the car so we can get the fuck outta here.”

The entire store seemed filled with static energy as the others waited for their leader to give the final verdict.

“No,” he said slowly as if the word had flavour, and he relished it on his tongue. “Let’s take the girl. I think I know someone who’d be happy to take her off our hands when we’re done with her.”