Devil May Care: Boxed Set (40 page)

Finally, when I felt like everything was picked up and ready to go, I forced myself to eat another slice of pizza for fortification; I wasn’t running on an empty stomach. When I was done I brushed my teeth again and then packed that up, too. Finally, when I’d done everything I could think of, I took a seat on the edge of the bed. Perched lightly, energy and anger thrumming through me, I waited. My eyes fixed steely on the door, waiting for it to open, for Rome to walk in and realize that I wasn’t just some stupid girl. That I wasn’t someone he could control or manipulate.

Damnit, I would be my own person if it
killed
me.

Rome

The taste of her made my lips tingle as I pulled out of the driveway of the hotel. The impression of her body was like a wall of heat molded to my own, like a second skin. It pressed against me, curled around me, and beckoned me back to her. It called out to me, desperate and needy and reminding me of my own need.

God, I wanted her.

I shouldn’t have kissed her like that before leaving. It had left me with a difficult and uncomfortable hard-on in my jeans, not to mention a sizable distraction. Not exactly how I wanted to go to get my answers, but I’d have to deal with it just the same.

Adjusting myself in my seat, I pulled out into traffic and focused on dealing with the idiot drivers on the road. It helped take my mind off of Olivia a little bit, allowing me to focus on the things that were to come. Things that needed a lot more attention than I’d been giving them.

Sometimes it was hard to remember that I was here to
do
something when Olivia was around. She had a way of taking up so much space in my mind that I forgot what I was here for. Now that Olivia was tucked safely away from harm in a decent little hotel far enough away from me, I could finally focus on what was going on.

It hadn’t taken much for me to consider that the reason people were pointing fingers was because Axel had been set up. The top tier of the Renegades had probably been working covertly to reduce a long list of names as to who was responsible for that little fuck up. I wasn’t sure how
my
name ended up at the top of the list, but I was willing to bet it had more to do with a popularity contest than it did with any sort of evidence.

Jacob was picky and a prick when it came to who he did and didn’t like and some thing or another got me on his shit list. Unfortunately, Jacob was also in good with Axel. Up until a few days ago, I’d thought the same thing of myself, but it was becoming abundantly clear that things were shifting. Somehow I’d landed myself in hot water without even realizing it was happening.

I never would have imagined Axel would be convinced that I was a traitor.

Now, I had to figure out how to clear my good name before the Renegades decided that it was better to get rid of a potential rat than to find the real one. I had a couple of options, though none of them were great or likely to guarantee success, but at least they gave me a shot.

If I could get my hands on the list of names that Jacob and his goonies had collected, there was a chance that maybe I could see something they didn’t. Maybe I’d find a name that seemed out of place or a guy who had been acting suspicious lately. There was a chance that Jacob and the others had been doing the same thing, but I doubted it. Like I said, it was about popularity for them, not reason. I could have been an upstanding, polo wearing, model citizen and they still would have pointed the finger at me if they decided they didn’t like me.

In fact, if I’d been something along those lines, I probably would have been the
only
one on their list.

Unfortunately, there was no way to get access to that list. Chances were they didn’t even have the names written down, just clustered in their little brains as they struggled to make connections that didn’t exist. Getting a hold of that list would involve getting one of Jacob’s guys to spill their guts about it. And I didn’t think I could make that happen right now. Not because I had any qualms with torturing those bastards, especially after they tried to rape Olivia and kill us both. Didn’t really inspire a lot of comradery on my part. But I couldn’t do that while Olivia was here. I felt as though we were really making progress, heading towards something that might be more than a one-night stand or a desperate run for our lives, but if she started to think that I was the kind of guy who would torture someone to get what he wanted…well, I didn’t think we’d last long after that.

No, I definitely needed to tread lightly if I wanted to keep Olivia in my life. And I found that I did. When I first met Olivia, only a few short days ago, I had thought it was pure lust driving me forward—as it usually was. I was sure that all I had to do was quench that thirst to have her body, just fuck her good and hard once and be done with it, but I found that it hadn’t helped at all. If anything, I felt as though it made me want her more. I thought about her constantly, her body driving me to madness, but it was more than that. I craved her like a drug, but I also felt something I didn’t admit to lightly: connection. There was something about her that almost felt like it just fit naturally with me. Some sort of piece of her that really belonged to me, and the only way to get it back was to have her at my side.

It sounded ridiculous even to me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling just the same. She’d come to mean so much to me in such a short amount of time and I was so possessive of her that I worried slightly what it would be like a week from now, a month, a year. And I never thought that far ahead, mostly because I never considered any woman being in my life that long.

But Olivia was different. And not just because our first few encounters were filled with her saying no to me, though that certainly upped the ante.

Forcefully shoving thoughts of Olivia from my mind yet again, which was a hell of a lot harder than it should have been, I made a right turn and pulled onto an old street that looked so unused it could have been some back alley somewhere. I hadn’t been out this way before, but I had the address memorized, just in case.

The houses along this block were grimy and run down, not necessarily condemned but close enough to it that the current residents were likely just waiting on a notice. They were mostly squatters from the looks of it, but that didn’t much matter to me. I’d grown up in neighborhoods just as bad if not worse, and a piece of shit house didn’t mean much one way or the other in my book. Something could look like crap from the outside and be a palace inside, but even palaces on the outside could be crumbling if you weren’t paying attention. Or worse, if you were only paying attention to the superficial stuff.

A couple of my foster parents had been like that. They’d dress us up like little dolls in pretty clothes and then forget the little things, like feeding us and making sure we had school supplies. After all,
those
things didn’t reflect back on them. Well, not until someone like a social worker started paying attention. But they were usually so swamped that we fell by the wayside, slipped through the cracks. I knew a lot of kids were saved and helped and turned out all right in the end, but I never seemed to be one of them. I couldn’t say what it was about me that made people just shrug their shoulders and write me off, but it was part of the reason that I’d joined on with the Renegades in the first place.

I was tired of being written off.

Now, the same people I’d learned to trust because they were the family I never had were doing the same thing as all of those foster families and social workers: writing me off.

I wasn’t about to stand for that, not in the slightest. First, I’d try to clear my name and do things right and proper. I wasn’t above forgiving people, sweeping things under the rug or bridge or whatever, but I wasn’t about to take it lying down either. If they wouldn’t get in line with what I thought I deserved, there’d be hell to pay and I’d be the devil they were all afraid of.

Because
that
was why they picked me in the end. Fear. They knew I was as volatile and dangerous as my record claimed and this was the only way any of them would dare cross me. I was about to teach them a lesson they wouldn’t forget.

When I came to the last house on the block just to the right of a dead end street that looked like it might be where people’s lives also dead ended, I pulled the car to a stop along the sidewalk. The house itself was just as old and ratty as the rest, but the lawn was green and there was a scraggly flower bed that was trying to keep its blossoms perky despite the heat and lack of rain. The colors were a mixture of pinks, blues, and purples, though I had no idea what kinds of flowers they were. If I took a closer look at the house, I could see that the shingles were new-ish, or at least redone, the paint wasn’t nearly as flaky as the others, just painted in that off-white, grayish-green color to look like the other decaying houses, and the weeds stopped just short of the little square piece of property. At first glance, I’d thought the house was just like all the others, but now that I was taking in the details I saw the little differences.

Someone cared about this house and took care of it as a result. It looked like they did it with limited means, but the effort spoke volumes to me. I could understand effort. I understood it all the more in a place where you had little to work with.

I waited a long time in the car, thinking things over.

Going after Jacob’s boys for information on who they had on their list and why wasn’t a good idea. At least not with Olivia around, and they made it pretty clear that I couldn’t leave her alone. But this? I wasn’t sure how good of an idea this was either.

With a heavy sigh, I finally popped open my door and slid out. Lately, I’d been leaving my jacket rolled up in the backseat, out of view. Since my own family was after me, I couldn’t risk being seen in their leathers. All someone would have to tell them was that they’d seen some guy with a jacket that matched theirs and bam, caught. But today was different. I
wanted
this guy to know who I was and who I belonged to. It increased my chances of survival about tenfold, so I’d risk it this time.

Shrugging the jacket on, ignoring the blazing California sun, I slammed my car door and began the short trek to the front door. When I got there, I raised my hand to knock, fist clenched, but I didn’t even get the chance to knock once. The door opened wide and in the frame stood a man a good three inches taller than me, his shoulders the width of the frame, his hair a short, buzzed gray color, and his eyes narrowed and startlingly blue. There was a snake tattoo twisting up a medieval-looking sword on his right bicep and he was holding a shotgun aimed directly at my chest.

Hell of a welcome.

“Who the fuck are you and what do you want?” he barked in a deep voice that sounded like it bubbled up from a well somewhere in hell.

I paused for a fraction of a second before I said, “I’m Rome and I need to know what you know.”

The man’s eyes narrowed even farther until they were barely even open at all, yet it was enough for him to examine me it would seem, because for a long, tense moment all he did was stare. Finally, after I had half decided that this burly man was just going to shoot me, the big guy lowered the shotgun. “Get in. I don’t do business on my porch.”

Again, I paused for a fraction of a second. Just long enough to think,
Or you want me inside so you can claim self-defense when you shoot me and call the police.
But whether that was the case or not, I had to risk it, so I stepped across the threshold like I wasn’t nervous.

The inside of the house was startling and more noticeable than the front by a longshot. The walls were a deep wood color that matched the floor, glossy and swirling with the natural grain of the tree. It made the interior darker than it might normally be, but beautiful. There were throw rugs that were old-looking, but intricately woven into ringed geometric patterns that brought a little bit of muted color into the place. There were several pictures framed and hanging on the wall or set on table tops—also a glossy wood colored very similarly to the house, but with a deeper red to them—but they seemed like they were almost generic pictures. Like the kinds of pictures that came with the frames when you bought them, rather than pictures of your own family.

The exception was one lone picture of a large, burly man with buzzed hair and a large arm around a pretty young girl with blazing red hair. She was grinning at the camera, but his eyes were set on her, lost in her.

I looked away from the image. I wasn’t here to delve into this man’s soul, just pick his brain.

“Take a seat,” he told me gruffly, indicating a seat of leather chairs and a matching couch that took up all the space in his small living room. There was a table there, too, more subtle than the rest of the furniture and lighter. It looked like it had a flowing vine covered design burned into the surface and I thought I saw an engraving on it, but couldn’t linger long enough on it to know for sure what it said or who it was by.

I chose to sit off to the side of the couch, letting my arm rest on its side. He took a seat opposite me, across the coffee table in a large stuffed chair.