Chapter Seven
Juniper
I slid on jeans and a thermal shirt. My hair went into a tight bun and I wore no makeup.
Nobody was going to see me at four in the morning except flour, yeast, and the man who’d called me at two a.m. to, apparently, lay down the law.
OK, so that’s not exactly what he’d done, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wondered exactly what he’d been doing.
So, I admit, everything he told me about Brett combined with the way Brett had grabbed me so hard I’d bruised, had me spooked on so many levels I didn’t even know where to begin.
First, I might have a stalker. Second, I wasn’t exactly sure which man was stalking me.
Third, I might just a tiny bit like the fact one of them cared enough to stalk me.
And fourth, the fact that I might like the idea of Inferno stalking me didn’t terrify me told me all I needed to know about my current mental state.
Which was totally fucking stupid. That was my mental state. Totally. Fucking. Stupid.
When I stepped outside at three-fifteen, Inferno sat at the curb on his bike waiting. Just like he’d promised. He nodded when he saw me. I got in my car. The low rumble of his motorcycle followed me all the way to the bakery, always at a respectable distance.
Once inside, I flipped on the lights, turned on the ovens, and got to work. Inferno parked around back and came in behind me.
“Flour’s in the storage closet,” I said. “Would you mind getting me three of the fifty-pound bags, please?”
He nodded. When I opened my mouth to tell him where, he’d already turned and started down the hall to my walk-in pantry storage without comment. He’d been in here once, for ten minutes, and he already had the layout. That should have bothered me. It didn’t.
He hauled the sacks two at a time, one over each shoulder, and gently set them by the mixer. Bastard wasn’t even breathing hard as he went back for the last sack.
“Thanks,” I said, unable to meet his gaze.
He leaned against the counter and watched me while I worked. When the sun came up, pale and thin through the front windows, Inferno straightened.
“I should head out,” he said. “Shop opens at seven?”
I wiped my hands on a towel. “Yes. Late for a bakery, but one day a week I give myself a break. It was my one rebellion against my grandmother’s strict guidance.” I smiled to myself at the memory. “Thanks for the help.”
He looked like he wanted to say something but thought better of it. Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him. The morning continued like any other. Customers came and went, and I worked decorating cakes in between rushes.
At ten, I’d brought out a fresh batch of blueberry muffins while Georgia, my temp, rang one up for a regular.
I glanced out the front window. A motorcycle was parked down the block, chrome catching the sun.
Nashville had motorcycles everywhere, so it shouldn’t stand out.
I was probably hyper aware now that I’d actually ridden on one.
I shrugged it off and finished the transaction, going back to the kitchen.
At noon, I took the trash out to the dumpsters in the alley. The bag split on the way, dropping wet coffee grounds and paper towels at my feet. I swore under my breath before getting a dustpan from just inside the door, scooping up the mess and tossing it into the dumpster.
I noticed a truck parked behind the dumpsters. Normally I wouldn’t have even noticed, but I recognized the truck. I was pretty sure I’d seen it at the Kiss of Death clubhouse. I was half-certain I’d seen the same truck yesterday, now that I thought about it.
When I came back inside, I checked the front window. The motorcycle was still there. Was it the same one? I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected I knew what was happening. Inferno’s interference didn’t really scare me, exactly, but this wasn’t what I wanted.
At two, I told Georgia I was going out for lunch.
I walked a block down the sidewalk to my favorite sandwich shop.
In the parking lot across the street from the shop, I noticed another motorcycle.
A guy sat under a tree, eating a sandwich while he leaned against the seat of his bike with his legs crossed in front of him.
He didn’t look my way, but there was no chance all of this together was a coincidence.
I crossed the street. He saw me coming but pretended not to until I was too close for him to pretend any more.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re the bartender at the Kiss of Death place. Right?”
“I’m Zero.” He gave me a friendly smile and held out a bag of crinkle-cut fries he’d been eating with his burger, totally not answering my question. “Fry?”
“No, thank you.” I tried to look stern, but it was really hard. “How long have you been following me?”
Expecting a lie, I formulated what I intended to say to him. Instead, the guy shrugged. “Since yesterday morning.”
I did the math. Yesterday morning was Sunday. Inferno had called me at one a.m. on Monday. He’d had his club watching me a full day before I ever said yes to anything.
The morning’s good feeling curdled in my stomach like bad milk. I stood there in the parking lot with the sun on my back and the kid on the bike in front of me, and I didn’t say another word. Just turned around and walked back to my car.
I let Georgia off early and closed the shop. I thought the few minutes it would take to do that would cool me off. It didn’t. The drive to the Kiss of Death compound took twenty minutes, and I used every second of it to get good and fucking mad.
I pulled up to the gate and, surprisingly, they parted and a man waved me through. I parked next to a row of bikes in the same building I’d been to before. I didn’t get out for a long moment, caught between being mad enough to spit and scared stupid. What the fuck was I doing?
Finally, I got out of my car, marching toward the big warehouse. Two women waited by the steps. Darby leaned against the railing with her arms crossed, one boot propped on the bottom step. Another woman stood beside her, hands in her jacket pockets, watching my car with patience and stillness.
“Hey, cupcake,” Darby said as I approached. “You look like you’re about to break something expensive.”
“I might.” I stopped a few feet from them. “Did Inferno send you out here to run interference?”
Darby laughed. The sound carried across the empty lot.
“No. Zero did. Called me and Hannah both after you talked to him at that sandwich shop. The rule in the clubhouse is, no woman walks in here angry with a room full of bikers with nobody in her corner. So here we are.” She pushed off the railing.
She hiked her thumb as the other woman. “Hannah is Knuckles’ old lady.
Knuckles is the president of Kiss of Death so, as you can imagine, she carries some weight around here.
” She glanced at Hannah before continuing.
“And for what it’s worth, the way they handled putting a tail on you was bullshit. Straight up.”
“Darby,” Hannah said, her voice low and calm.
“What? It was. The man decided he was your bodyguard before he asked if you wanted a bodyguard.” Darby shrugged. “That’s a dick move, and I’ll say it to his face when he comes down those stairs. But the rule’s the rule. You don’t walk in alone.”
Hannah chuckled and shook her head. “You’ve got a solid friend in your corner with Darby, Juniper. Come on. Inferno’s upstairs. He knows you’re here.”
“Of course he does,” I muttered. “Do I go the same way I did last time?”
“Yeah,” Darby said as she and Hannah walked me through the common room to the lift at the back. They rode up with me until I got off. “Juniper?” I turned to look back at her. “Don’t let him off easy.” She grinned. “He deserves what’s coming.”
Moving down the hall at a brisk clip, I made my way to his door. I found it slightly ajar. Figured. He was expecting me after all.
I pushed it open without knocking. Inferno stood at the window, back to the door, one hand braced against the frame. He didn’t turn when I came in.
“You had a man on me yesterday?” My voice shook with anger and nerves.
My stomach was in knots but I couldn’t say exactly why.
Yes, I was angry. Spitting mad. But it was more than that.
“A full day before I said yes to anything. Before you called me at two in the fucking morning telling me about Brett’s past.”
He turned. His face was carefully blank, like he’d decided he was right and might just be willing to die on that hill. “Yes. I did.”
“I agreed to help at the bakery. That’s what I agreed to.
I did not agree to a man following my car.
I did not agree to be watched.” My hands were shaking.
I shoved them into my pockets. “Do you have any idea what this is like for me? I already suspected there was something not quite right about Brett’s behavior.
After he grabbed me and you found the prior complaints?
Yeah. It scared me. You know what else scared me?
” I might be stretching this a bit, but I wanted to make a point.
“Realizing I’ve had someone following me for a full day, watching me at my home, my job, any time I’m moving about.
I expected it would be Brett. But now, I find out you’ve done this!
Have I got two psychopaths fixated on me now? ”
“One of those psychopaths you chose.” His voice didn’t rise. “The other one you didn’t. I’m trying to protect you from the one you didn’t.”
“You had Knight digging through Brett’s life before you even told me his car was at my shop. You had a whole fucking file on a man who’d just ended things with me, and you and I have known each other less than a week! Doesn’t that sound just a tad bit fixated?”
“That’s not the same thing and you know it, Juniper.” Again, he sounded so reasonable it made me want to claw his eyes out.