Deep Trouble: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) (7 page)

“Don’t worry. This will only take a minute,” Devon said, and the gruff reassurance sent a prickle of heat over her cheeks.

“That obvious, huh?”

His lifted shoulder was answer enough. “You did fine in the store. Chances are, snagging a room will be even easier.”

“I don’t suppose I can talk you into letting me stay in the car while you run inside.” It was a long shot, Kylie knew. But for some reason, the car felt safe. Secure.

Devon’s eyes flashed, amber-brown and full of
no
. “It’s my job to protect you. That means you go where I go. No exceptions.”

He skimmed a glance through the windshield to take in the small roadside motel, and even though she had no idea what she was looking for, Kylie did the same. The place looked like a direct relation to the El Monaco, right down to the hourly rates and the mismatched letters on the VACANCY sign. While that might squick her out under normal circumstances, right now, staying at a place without cameras rolling or questions asked did seem pretty smart.

Kylie stuffed her hair back under the baseball hat and followed Devon out of the car. A fresh hit of adrenaline tightened her chest like a steel band, threatening to swallow her right there on the pavement.

But then he turned to look at her, his expression steady and sure. “Just a walk in the park. I promise,” he said.

You’ve got this, girl. Devon’s got this
.

They walked the dozen or so steps to the motel’s front entrance, Kylie’s nerves growing looser with each step. Devon brushed a hand over the small of her back as he ushered her over the threshold, and even though the motel’s lobby was as dated and dingy as she’d expected, she managed to squeak in a semi-deep breath.

“Help you?” asked the man behind the counter, although he’d barely looked up from the poorly concealed
Hustler
propped open over the desk.

“We need a room.”

Devon’s voice carried enough gravel to grab the man’s attention, his bleary eyes going wide at the sight of Devon’s imposing stance less than two feet away.

“Oh! Uh, right. So I just need your ID and a credit card,” the man said, the stink of stale cigarettes and fresh gin punching her in the nose from across the counter as he stood.

“I’ll pay cash.”

“I’m not supposed to…” The man trailed off, his gaze narrowing first on Devon, then on Kylie, lingering on her skimpy T-shirt for two seconds too long. “Oh, I get it.” His greasy grin grew into a leer. “Don’t want the wife to catch you, huh?”

A muscle flexed in Devon’s jaw. “Something like that,” he said through his teeth.

“Whatever you say, boss. I don’t judge. But for that kind of upgrade, there are service fees.”

Kylie put a stranglehold on her urge to knock the guy’s block off, mostly because she and Devon got what they wanted. Devon slipped the manager some extra incentive to work both quickly and quietly to turn over the key to a room on the ground floor, and ten minutes later, they shut (and locked and chained) the door behind them.

Devon closed the drapes, doing a quick sweep of the dated but surprisingly clean room before slinging his duffel bag over the bed closest to the window. “Go ahead and lie down if you want to,” he said, shouldering out of first his jacket, then his holster. “I’m sure you’re beat.”

“I’m fine,” came her auto-reply, but the words were as close to a lie as they’d ever been. Kylie blinked, the surreal memory of the last day and the steady presence of his gun making her pulse beat harder in her veins. “Actually, I’m going to take a shower. I kind of really want to get out of these clothes.”

“Oh.” His throat worked over a swallow, his gaze dropping to his duffel bag. “Right. I have an extra pair of sweats if you want them while we crash. Not ideal, but—”

“Sounds great. Thank you.”

Her voice hitched even though she fought to keep it steady, the ensuing silence making her weakness sound that much more obvious in her ears. Mashing down on the mix of emotions suddenly churning through her belly, she grabbed the sweatpants Devon had pulled from his duffel and the two plastic bags from the drugstore, hightailing it into the bathroom before he could ask if she was okay.

Right now, she was a lot of things. Shaky. Mad. Scared. Amped up.

But at the moment, “okay” was definitely not on the list.

She upended the bag with the toiletries into the bathroom sink, forcing herself to get everything in order. The task calmed her, and she started the shower, turning back to open the oblong box she’d chosen from the hair care aisle. Kylie pulled off the horrible skimpy bar T-shirt she never wanted to see again, then her boots and jeans, every movement methodical, each motion a tiny success.

She was tough. She could do this.

She could survive.

Lather, rinse, repeat had never been so ironic. Kylie stuck to the tasks in her head—
scrub your hair, shave your legs, rinse your skin
—until finally, she stepped out of the shower. One last unopened package gleamed up at her from the sink, but even though her chest ached at the sight of it, she took a deep breath and looked at her reflection in the steam-misted mirror.

“Fuck it.”

Chapter Six

Devon set up his weapons just as he did in every motel room he stayed in, with his SIG within arm’s reach and his KABAR in the nightstand, and a variety of other mean-and-nasties strategically placed throughout the small space. His phone had been silent since he’d activated it a handful of hours ago, and he reached out to palm the thing, tapping in Kellan’s number from memory.

“Tell me you two are holed up someplace safe,” his buddy said, and oooookay, so much for pleasantries.

Which was cool, because Devon wasn’t exactly a tea and crumpets kind of guy. “Copy. You got anything on this douche bag yet?”

Kellan’s pause spoke of nothing even remotely good. “Xavier Fagan, also known as the X Man, is on no less than a dozen wanted lists from Montana to Mississippi. Priors for possession with the intent to distribute, weapons, and he’s been ID’ed as the main player in a heroin ring the size of Yankee Stadium.”

“And he’s still on the street how?” No way a guy who was in it that deep wasn’t at the top of the FBI’s dance card.

“Because he’s not blowing smoke about being well connected,” Kellan said. “Fagan seems to have a gift for sniffing out bad police, the higher up the food chain, the better, and he’s old school. Does all his business face to face, and all his dirty work himself. Word on the street is that he even murdered his own brother because he thought the guy was ratting him out to the cops.”

Devon sank into the timeworn chair across from the foot of his bed. “So the Feds who aren’t in his pocket want him, they just can’t make anything stick because their witnesses always end up in body bags.” Fucking fantastic. “You turn up anything by way of assistance from your contact at the NCPD?”

“The rundown I just gave you is courtesy of her,” Kellan said, his voice shifting slightly enough that if Devon didn’t have noticing every last detail branded into his DNA, he’d have missed it.

Interesting
. Devon filed that little nugget away to pursue when his personal safety wasn’t twisting in the wind. “She have any higher-ups you can trust? I can keep Kylie safe for a while, Walker, but the longer we play cat and mouse, the harder it’s gonna get. We need an end game here.”

“Detective Moreno works in intelligence, and she’s a good cop. But getting jurisdiction is easier said than done. She’s on it, though. Hard.”

Devon had no doubt that Kellan would be a four-foot thorn in the woman’s side until she came up with a solution. “Copy. For now, I’ll keep moving toward your location.”

“Thanks,” Kellan said, pulling in an audible breath over the phone line. “I really owe you, Dev.”

“You owe me nothing, Walker. I’ll check back in at twenty-one-hundred your time. Call me if you get anything from Moreno.”

Devon disconnected the call, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. Although he knew Kellan would have both hands full getting the X’s and O’s into place to get Fagan snatched up, Devon wasn’t concerned about whether or not his buddy would make that happen.

What
did
worry him was that Kylie had now been in the bathroom for forty-five minutes, and despite the fact that there were no windows in the tiny room and he could hear her moving around, Devon had a bone-deep feeling she was far from all systems go.

He pushed himself out of the creaky bedside chair. While he wasn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality, or even a nice guy for that matter, she’d been through a shit-slide of emotions in the last day. A quick hey-how-are-ya couldn’t hurt.

But before Devon could make it halfway across the carpet, the bathroom door pushed open, and Kylie stepped silently over the threshold.

“Hey. I was just coming to—”

Devon’s words tripped to a halt in his throat. Kylie stood barely three steps away, wearing a thin white tank top and his borrowed sweatpants that she’d had to roll over her hips twice to even get them close to staying up. But her unconventional apparel wasn’t what had frozen him into place from lips to legs.

“You cut your hair,” he finally managed, and Christ, nobody would ever accuse him of being suave. But come on. She’d gone into the bathroom with a long, hot pink and black ponytail and now she was sporting a head full of chin-length, caramel colored hair that looked just tousled enough to be hot as fuck.

“Yeah, I…” Kylie broke off, taking a steady breath that outlined the press of her breasts against her tank top. “You were right. The pink was really obvious. I knew hiding it wasn’t going to work in the long run, and anyway, it’s just hair. So I cut it.”

“It looks…”
Do not say wildly sexy, do not say wildly sexy, do not say
… “You know. Pretty.”

Kylie’s laugh rode out on a soft puff of humorless breath, and man, she was a fighter. “I don’t know about all that, but I guess it’s not terrible. There were a few pieces in the back I couldn’t reach, though.”

She extended the scissors in her hand just far enough to hammer home her request, and Devon’s chin snapped up in shock.

“You want me to cut the rest of your hair?”

“Well, yeah. It’ll be pretty obvious if I leave it like this, won’t it?” she asked, gesturing to the handful of thick strands still cascading down her back.

Damn, she had a point. Still… “Cutting your hair is a little outside my wheelhouse, is all.”

Okay, so the words were a massive fucking understatement. Devon could dismantle an AR-15 with one hand chained to a radiator, but cutting Kylie’s hair?

Unless she handed over a pair of clippers and asked for a standard issue crew cut, he didn’t have clue one what to do.

But Kylie just served him with a no-nonsense stare. “This whole thing is outside my wheelhouse, Devon. But I trust you with my life. My hair is kind of the least of our worries, don’t you think?”

“You trust me with your life.” The words echoed in Devon’s ears as he repeated them, and her brows tugged downward.

“Of course. I mean, I’m here with you right now, hiding from Fagan.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” He took the scissors from her, suddenly needing something to focus on other than her wide-open honesty. Of course Devon had known she trusted him to a point. Her brother had sent him to keep her safe, and she damn well needed protecting—both truths that Kylie clearly couldn’t ignore. But trusting him because she was in over her head was a whole lot different than trusting him instinctively, and he only needed a glimpse at her bright blue stare to know that she meant what she’d said in spades.

Kylie trusted him without question. Just as her brother had in Afghanistan.

When he shouldn’t have.

Hot, dust-choked air…sweat running down his back beneath his gear…turning to give Kellan the all clear…

If you move, I will kill your friend.

Devon cleared his throat, although the gesture did nothing to ease the tightness log-jamming his vocal cords. Sliding his thumb and forefinger through the scissor loops, he waited for Kylie to turn around before threading his opposite hand through her hair. She smelled sweet and clean, like flowers and fresh bedsheets, and even though he didn’t need to, Devon ran his fingers all the way to the ends of her hair twice, because that’s the sort of bastard he was.

To his total surprise, Kylie melted into his touch.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice notched down to a throaty whisper that made his dick stir behind the fly of his jeans.

Christ, he needed to concentrate. He angled the scissors over a strand of her hair, opening and closing them in a precise cut. “For what?”

“For coming to the motel when Kellan called you. For keeping me from getting killed. For staying so calm when I’m not. Take your pick.”

Devon was tempted to tell her all of that was part of the job, that he owed her brother a thousand favors that would get him shot at and chased across the country. That he wasn’t calm so much as he simply hadn’t allowed himself to feel anything for the last four years.

But instead, he stuck with a gruff “You’re welcome,” making another cut with the scissors, then a few more still before adding, “You know, not staying calm in situations like these doesn’t mean you’re not tough. In fact, all that emotion is a good sign you’re normal.”

Kylie’s shoulders tightened slightly, although her chin stayed on the level. “Yeah. I’m sure the pure-terror panic is really helpful in keeping me safe.”

“It’s normal,” Devon reiterated. “Plus, you’re doing just fine. I’ve seen guys twice your size cry for their mommies at the slightest whiff of danger.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He moved around to Kylie’s side, reaching for the last long lock of uncut hair. His fingers accidentally brushed the bare skin on her shoulder, just above the strap of her tank top, and damn, how could she be so soft when he was so loaded with rough edges?

She turned her chin, looking up at him from over her shoulder. “Are all the emotions normal? Even the ones caused by the adrenaline, like you said?”

The glint in her eyes did nothing to make his cock stand down, and Devon swallowed hard. Kylie was off-limits. Forbidden. Way too good for a guy like him.