Chapter 1 #3
I got an up-close view of him now. I had thought that the shadows surrounding him had made him seem so giant—but no, he really was that size, as big as Damian’s largest bodyguard, Matheus.
Mat was tall and wide but hard as a rock, and it seemed like this guy was the same.
He wore a T-shirt with no sleeves, so I could see the muscles in his arms. There were a lot of those and I could feel the strength of his thigh beneath my leg as it rested there.
A big, dark beard covered the bottom half of his face.
A baseball hat concealed the top half of it and he bent over my cut, so I couldn’t really tell what the rest of him looked like.
“Hell.” Callum frowned at my foot. “This is deep in there. Ready? One, two—”
He yanked it out on two and I jumped. “Ok?” he asked.
He had looked up and I saw that his eyes were a warm brown.
I nodded, so he poured water over where the wound was now bleeding harder.
He used one of his cloths to staunch that and then wrapped a bandage around and around, turning my foot into a giant burrito-shaped object.
“It should heal,” he said. He didn’t sound certain. His deep voice had gone up slightly at the end of his sentence. “Yeah, you’re good to go.” That had sounded definite. He moved my leg off his, and stood.
“Thank you,” I told him. I used the wooden handrail to pull myself up and he stepped out of the way, squeezing between two of the ATVs so I could get past him.
I walked to the door, avoiding the puddle of oil this time.
It was still so dark and somewhere, there was that dog.
I bet it hadn’t gone very far. But somewhere out there was better stuff, too, like the hotel where we’d stayed with clothes strewn around our rooms. Somewhere out there was my purse, and I wondered who had it. I really had liked that lipstick.
“Where are you headed?” Callum asked.
“The hotel,” I answered. I opened the door. “I’ll go to the hotel. Bye.”
I walked to the driveway, slowly so that I could listen for the dog, but mostly because my foot hurt. I glanced around the street, wondering where my shoes had gone, but it was too dark to see. I couldn’t have fit them over the bandage anyway.
I had made it to the curb when he came back out to his car. “Still here?” he called.
“I’m leaving,” I promised. I turned toward the tall buildings again and started walking. Limping.
I heard his motor start but it didn’t sound anything like Damian’s car. That was more like purring, but really loud. Callum’s rasped like metal scraping across a rock but it ran a lot quieter after that. The headlights flashed over me and showed the empty street ahead, so he was coming my way.
You couldn’t talk in Damian’s car because of the engine noise and his music, but I heard Callum perfectly fine when he pulled up next to me and stopped. “Where exactly are you going?” he wanted to know.
I pointed at the faraway lights. “There,” I told him. “I think that’s the downtown and that’s where I’m staying.”
“In a hotel.”
I nodded.
“Which one?” he asked but I had nothing to say, and we looked at each other as he waited a beat. “You don’t have a phone. Do you have a wallet? Money?”
I’d had money in my purse, a wad of bills that Damian had given me. Millie had peeled a few off my stack and put them in her own bag, saying that it was for safekeeping. I had an ID back at the hotel, where I also had clothes, makeup, and shoes. “I’m good,” I said.
I had taken another step, a hop, when he spoke again. “You should get in.”
This time, I didn’t hesitate to follow his suggestion. I opened the car door and slid into the seat, very glad to get off my feet. He looked over at them and then he drove us away.
“I’m going to the gym first,” he warned me. “Then we can look for your hotel. Will you recognize it?”
“Yes,” I said. But Millie had called me a liar and she was right about that. I put my hand on the vent but there was no heat coming out, even though Callum wore only a T-shirt.
“Do you usually work the downtown?”
I looked over at him, confused for a moment by his question, before I understood. “I’m not a sex worker,” I told him. I wasn’t the kind that he meant, who got picked up on a corner or who had dates with travelers in their hotel rooms.
“What are you doing in Indianapolis?”
Oh! Indianapolis, that was the name of this place.
We had flown here from Chicago but almost as soon as we’d taken off, we were landing again.
Damian had been furious because we had been on a plane with no first-class section, and he’d had another fit when the front desk at the hotel wouldn’t let us check in early.
Millie had slid over a short stack of bills and then they gave her the key cards.
“I’m on vacation,” I said.
“Were you at 20 Grand?”
That might have been the name of the club where we’d gone, so I nodded. “The one in the warehouse area,” I ventured, and he didn’t say no. “My friends left me there.”
“Alone? And barefoot?”
“I had shoes but I dropped them when I ran from the dog. Why are you going to the gym so early?”
“I have to get it in before work,” he answered.
“What do you do?”
“Right now, I’m in the lumber department at a home improvement store. But I’m also a football player.”
Oh, ok. I knew lots of guys like this. They were music promotors—but they were also personal trainers, just for the time being.
They were producers—but they were currently moonlighting as waiters, only temporarily.
I’d never heard any of them claim to play football, but Callum was large enough to make that sound believable.
“I don’t know much about sports,” I mentioned. I believed in giving men opportunities to talk so that I didn’t have to, but he didn’t say much else. He only mentioned that he had stopped playing for a while but he was trying to get back into it.
“What do you do?” he asked me.