4. Chapter 4
BLUE
I was starved, so I ordered French toast.
It was indulgent, something I never would have ordered when I dated Otto because he would have shamed me about my body. I drowned the powder-sugared mountain of carbs in a lake of maple syrup and shoved a stacked mouthful between my lips, eating with angry relish. It wasn’t enough that Otto had made me feel shitty when we dated and that he’d stolen my mother’s ring, but now he’d actually had the audacity to hold up Evergreen Gas Station? The one place he knew meant everything to me because it had been my soft place to land when I ran away from my old life.
Fuck. Him.
What was it about men wreaking havoc on my life like it meant nothing to them?
Like I meant nothing to them.
I sat there in the diner's bright white light, staring at my reflection in the dark window overlooking the street, wondering if it was the angle of my jaw or the plumpness in my cheeks that they took umbrage with. If it was the fact that I liked makeup, skincare, and clothes more than dude stuff or if it was my penchant to smother every real thing in humour until true emotion suffocated and died.
Whatever it was, life had taught me that I couldn’t rely on anyone to look out for me but me .
Except there was Aaron last-name-unknown.
Really, everything about him was a mystery besides what I could see with my eyes: his beauty, his crooked smile, and his silly sense of humour. The fact that he put himself at risk to help a random girl when she needed it. That he kissed like the devil luring innocents to sin.
Yeah, so I didn’t know much, but what I knew was heady.
Because it painted a picture of a man who should have been all the things I’d vowed to stay away from but who was actually proving to be the kind of man I’d assumed only existed in my fantasies.
I was musing over this as I dragged my last piece of French toast through the sticky remnants of syrup, bobbing my head to the strains of Hamish Anderson’s “Trouble”, when I noticed the increasing roar of noise in the distance.
Immediately, my fork dropped to the plate with a clatter as I leaned over the table for a better angle to look out the window down the street.
Sure enough, seconds later, five bright, circular lights like flashing moons crested the hill and descended the street toward the diner.
“Holy shit,” I whispered as they drew closer.
Because I recognized the man on the first bike, sitting astride the giant hog awkwardly like he was hanging on to the powerful beast for dear life. His dark, shaved head gleamed under the yellow lamplight. Without the jacket currently in the back of the van we’d parked across the street, he wore only the long black tee he’d been in at Evergreen Gas.
I should have recognized him even beneath the nylon sock back then, but it wasn’t like I expected Otto, idiot though he was, to hold me at gunpoint for some cash in the till.
Now, though, I recognized him right away.
I lurched to my feet, the chair screeching loudly across the chipped, checkered linoleum. The diner was mostly empty, but the trucker in the corner and the female server both looked over at me in concern.
I ignored them.
My gaze was pinned on Otto and the group of thugs trailing him.
How the hell had they found us?
Unless…
The duffel bags filled with money and jewels.
If those assholes were smarter than they seemed, they might have put a tracker in the bags. It irritated me that I knew enough about the criminal mind to make such a guess, but it was also helpful.
If I was right, they were looking for Aaron, and he had no idea.
They’d picked up another man who’d probably been the one to deliver the motorcycles in lieu of the van we’d stolen, and I didn’t like the odds of five against Aaron’s one even though he’d proven himself an incredible brawler.
I tossed a handful of bills on the counter, downed my now-cold coffee, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and walked toward the back of the restaurant.
“Is there a back exit?”
The server pursed her painted bubble gum-pink lips at me, then nodded curtly. “Past the bathrooms on the right. You okay, girl?”
“I will be,” I promised opaquely as I turned down the hall.
I ducked into the break room to grab a black ball cap and hoodie off the employee hooks and then jogged out the back, exploding into the muggy night with my heart racing.
The little parking lot behind the diner was occupied by an old Honda and a fairly nice Audi. I made a beeline for the Honda because it was a model without modern security. There was a rock by the fender that would do nicely, and after wrapping my hand in my Evergreen Gas vest, I used it to knock out the back seat window on the driver’s side. Carefully avoiding the jagged edges, I reached inside to undo the lock and slipped into the front seat.
Hot-wiring the car was easy. Anyone could do it after watching a few videos. I’d been taught by the best on the streets of Calgary, so the Honda Civic was a piece of cake. The engine groaned to life like a sleepy beast and protested with a sputtering exhale when I peeled into reverse and out of the lot.
At that point, the motorcycles had already progressed down the street, but I could still see them up ahead. They were driving slowly, in case, I figured, they ran into Aaron or me.
I followed them.
I’d promised myself I would stay out of trouble after Otto left me, but the truth was, I’d been drawn to trouble my whole damn life. I was born into it. So how was I supposed to stay impartial when the most handsome man I’d ever met, who had saved me from my own predicament just an hour earlier, was in danger?
When I was younger, I’d known a man named Cedar who had taught me all there was to know about stalking someone without being seen. It wasn’t about melting into the shadows and not making a noise so much as it was about acting like you belonged somewhere and were preoccupied with anything but the person you were tailing.
I hadn’t tailed anyone in years, but it seemed I was still good at it, even in a noisy old car, because the bikers didn’t turn around once on their way out of town and farther up the mountain.
They stopped at the base of a gravel driveway curving out of sight beyond a bend framed with scraggly trees. A couple of them got off their bikes to deliberate.
It was my only chance to get to Aaron before they did.
I parked the car in a random driveway and then got out to slink through the shadows. I curved far into the brush, moving as quietly as I could over the dry, crackling sticks and grass in order to avoid the group of bikers. Only a dim spot of light through the trees served as a kind of North star, leading me to a small, dilapidated trailer set on concrete blocks.
The window to the kitchen was held open by a wooden chopstick. The screen behind it had been warped with time and punctured in a few places. Voices drifted out of the gaps like smoke.
“They’re fuckin’ scary, man,” a weak, warbling voice whined. “I mean it. You guys’ve been good to me, and I know Z’s a shit crazy motherfucker when he wants to be, but these guys…” There was a sharp inhalation of breath and then a little whimper. “Man showed up and made me shit my pants.”
“He threatened to take away your drug stash?” Aaron asked dryly.
His voice deepening to cruel, dark tones shouldn’t have sent a vibration of energy zipping like an electrical current to my sex, but it did. I shivered in the warm spring air and carefully moved closer.
“My b-brother Davey, he’s in Ford Correctional Prison. Roo-Rooster threatened to have him killed. I know the guy from when I lived in Calgary. He ain’t someone you fuck with!”
The air disappeared from my lungs as if they were vacuum sealed. I struggled to drag new oxygen into my chest but choked. Black spots reeled across my vision, and I had to catch myself with a hand on the trailer.
I hadn’t heard that name in years.
A part of me had honestly started to believe I never would again.
“What was that?” the strange voice asked nervously.
A hushing sound from Aaron.
I moved to the door, knocking as I pushed it open and stepped into the rank interior.
A man sat at a small yellow table. His skin hung off his bones like an old T-shirt, and what little hair he had was greased back from his forehead. Blood caked around his misshapen nose and pooled beneath the skin of his left cheek, but it was the red pool of blood on the tabletop dripping over the edge with a faint splat to the floor that was most compelling. In the lake of red, fingernails floated like macabre boats.
And standing beside it all was Aaron with a gun in his bloody hands trained at my chest.
I arched a brow at him. “You’re the second man today to level a gun at me. If you think it’ll turn me on, you’re wrong.”
Only, he wasn’t really.
The sight of him so tall, dark, and dangerous was mouth-watering in the extreme.
But it was impossible to ignore the fact that he’d been pulling off this man’s fingernails.
I winced in sympathy. “What did he ever do to you?”
“He fucked with my family,” Aaron said, more serious than I’d seen him. “You gotta problem with violence, Blue?”
“I was raised in the thick of it,” I quipped. “But this isn’t the time for ghost stories. Otto and his crew are at the base of the hill trying to decide how best to take you out.”
Aaron blinked at me, then swore viciously, dropping the gun to his side and dragging a tattooed hand through his mess of hair. “A tracker in the bags.”
“That’s what I assumed,” I agreed as if none of this had fazed me. As if I wasn’t reeling from the sound of Rooster’s name and the knowledge that he was involved somehow in British Columbia.
Aaron spun to face the cowering man at the table, who whimpered when Aaron grabbed him by the stained tank. “The next time Rooster makes contact, what do you do?”
“C-C-Call you,” he promised, eyes wide and blown black with fear.
“The second,” Aaron insisted. “You remember, they might threaten your brother, Beaker. But I’ll threaten your entire goddamn family and every person you’ve ever known if you fuck with my family, you hear me?”
Before the man named Beaker could answer, Aaron was twirling around, tagging my hand and the duffels on the ground by his feet, and dragging me to the back of the trailer to the tiny bedroom that smelled like mold. The bed was so stained with mysterious colours that I couldn’t look at it without wanting to gag. There was a window over it facing the back of the mountain that Aaron popped out with one fierce hit from his elbow.
“I don’t think you can fit through that,” I mused as the sound of voices drifted up the mountain to our ears.
“I better,” he said, totally unfazed as he moved me into position and helped push me through.
I was almost out the other side when his hand landed on my ass, and despite myself, I snorted. Only Aaron would cop a feel while we were running from outlaws.
My landing was hard against the packed, cracked earth, but I rolled to absorb the brunt of the impact. The thud of the two duffels sounded in quick succession behind me. By the time I righted myself, Boner was squeezing his big body out the window with surprising grace, landing on booted feet.
At the front of the trailer, there was a crash as someone kicked the door in.
“C’mon,” Aaron murmured, grabbing the bags and my hand again as he ran hunched over to the cover of trees I’d climbed through on the left side of the lot. We raced through the growth, heedless of how much noise we made. Behind us, there were shouts and an errant gunshot that echoed through the hills.
“You think they killed him?” I asked, alarmed that Otto had turned into a violent criminal when he’d only ever been a slightly lazy ne’er do well with me.
Aaron didn’t answer.
We burst through the evergreens, our shoes slapping against the asphalt as we met the sidewalk.
“I got a car,” I panted as a stitch stabbed into my side under my ribs.
Jesus, I needed to do more cardio.
Aaron flashed me a glance over his shoulder but slowed enough for me to lead us to where I’d parked the muted green Honda. He shucked off the duffel bags, unzipped them both to root around until he found square black monitors in each, and then shoved the bags in the back seat. I watched as he tossed the trackers into the bushes before getting into the front seat. After I raced around to the passenger side, he laughed at the evidence of my hot-wiring abilities.
“You’re gonna explain this skill on the way down to Entrance,” he warned as he started the car and executed a half donut that spun us the right way down the road.
I was too preoccupied with catching my breath to answer.
Aaron gave me a few minutes of silence as he expertly navigated through the dark streets of Whistler and back onto the Sea to Sky Highway. Still, he looked at me often, his gaze a tangible caress on my sweat-damp cheek.
“Never met a girl like you,” he finally mused, almost to himself. “And I know a lotta girls.”
I snorted. “Way to make me feel special.”
His grin flashed white in the dark interior. “Got a lotta brothers shacked up with some pretty kick-ass women.”
Ah, okay. Well, that was cute and not misogynistic like I’d assumed.
“How many siblings do you have?”
“You wanna have a heart-to-heart, Blue, you start by tellin’ me how you cottoned on to Otto’s crew findin’ where I was at.”
I looked out the window at the dull metallic sheen of the ocean beside the cliffside road and wondered what to say. It had been so long since I’d explained my history to anyone, and I wasn’t anxious to do so now.
It was better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Only, Rooster wasn’t some far-off threat. He had a connection with the man in that trailer, potentially a connection to the man beside me now.
“I grew up with criminals,” I explained slowly, carving out the easiest words to explain a complicated history.
“They taught you,” he surmised.
My laughter was as hollow as a spent gun casing. “Taught me? Ha! I was a girl, Aaron. A waste of space if no one was allowed to fuck me. No one taught me shit.” Except for Cedar and, briefly, a brother named Axe who’d helped get me on birth control despite Rooster forbidding it. “I learned, though. I was invisible, mostly, so they did a lot of their worst kind of shit in front of me.”
Aaron’s hands squeaked on the wheel, and I realized his knuckles were white with strain. “They hurt you?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Only once. I left a few days later.”
It took me a moment to realize that grinding sound came from Aaron. He was growling .
Something about that warmed my belly like good whiskey. I’d told Grouch my story when he’d caught me that last time stealing from his shop. But that was years ago. Since then, I hadn’t made any good enough friends to confide in or commiserate with me.
To care.
It felt absurd and beautiful that this essential stranger cared enough now to be enraged for me.
“It was a long time ago,” I placated.
“Time’s got nothin’ on the depth of a wound,” he snapped, then rolled his shoulders to release some of the tension. “Didn’t mean to bite your head off. Never reacted well to women gettin’ hurt.”
I didn’t curb the impulse to reach over and squeeze his hard, denim-clad thigh. “Mr. Wise Guy, eh?”
A tiny smirk. “People usually don’t accuse me’a bein’ wise. More like stupid.”
“Was it stupid of you to pry off that guy Beaker’s fingernails?” I asked. “He could press charges.”
A deep, smug chuckle. “Beaker wouldn’t know how to press charges against someone if he was hit in the head with a law book. Besides, he fucked with family, I fuck with him.”
Hearing the vehemence of his loyalty caused something to pang in my chest. What would it be like to have Aaron at my back? Safe, I thought.
And God, I yearned to feel safe.
“You don’t seem real fazed by my show’a violence.” He dropped a hand to cover mine on his thigh and tangled our fingers in a casual way that belied how intimate it felt. His heavy rings were warm from his skin.
“Criminals, remember? I’m not as innocent as I look.”
“You look like a wet dream,” he murmured, bringing our joined hands to his mouth to plant an open-mouthed kiss on the back of my hand.
“Stop.” I tried to tug my hand out of his grip, but he wouldn’t release me. “You don’t need to say things like that to me.”
He shot me an incredulous look. “Does anyone ever hafta say somethin’ nice about anyone? It’s not ’cause I feel you’re owed the words, Blue. It’s ’cause I feel moved to say them.”
His words prompted something to squirm uncomfortably in my belly. I wanted to tell him he was stupid or crazy, that his flattery was false, but how could I when he seemed so sincere?
“Blue,” he said, tone heavy so the word dropped in my lap. “You’re so goddamn gorgeous I’ve been hard since we kissed in the parkin’ lot. You know how difficult it is to run with a fuckin’ boner?”
Laughter exploded from me, rich and warm spilling out of my lips into the car. I was aware of him grinning at me, shooting little glances my way as if he just had to watch me. As if I was beautiful doing it.
And oh God, how did I resist a man like this?
Why would I want to?
When I finished, the smile still wouldn’t leave my face, and our joined hands were back on his thigh, his thumb rubbing back and forth on my palm.
“Well, aren’t you gonna say somethin’ nice about me?” he quipped with a goofy grin.
I rolled my eyes, but there was too much humour in my tone to curb. “I thought you said people should only compliment others if they feel moved to do it.”
“Damn,” he groused, then grinned when I giggled. “Love the sound’a that laugh.”
“What now?” I asked because I felt giddy with lingering adrenaline and warmed through with vivid attraction for this man with the roguish grin and soft, dark eyes.
“We take this loot to a friend’a mine and get it off our fuckin’ hands.”
“You seem to have a lot of friends willing to do a lot of favours for you,” I noticed.
Another smile, this one slow and wide. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. And now, you’re gonna know them too.”