Chapter 12

Kelli

 

I was still half-asleep when my alarm went off for me to get up for work.

I blindly reached out for it, but when I didn’t immediately feel it, I cracked open an eye, searching the nightstand.

It was gone from where I had put it that morning when I had gotten out of the shower, yet it was still going off. I grabbed my phone, knowing exactly who had moved my alarm.

With only one eye open, I pulled the phone close to my face. Without my contacts in, I couldn’t read anything past the end of my nose.

Pulling up Colt’s name, I was ready to blast him for daring to move my shit. However, seeing that I already had a message from him, my fingers froze over the keys as I read it.

Leaving for a run. Don’t know when I’ll be back. Be good. Watch out for Quinn for me.

There was no cutesy heart or anything else that would suggest he was doing anything more than letting me know he was going out of town. Yet, oddly enough, just getting a message at all from him was more than I would have expected from any other guy. He knew I would be just fine without him. Still, he had let me know he was going away.

The fact that he wanted me to watch over Quinn in his absence was even more telling. Quinn was his person, the one person he would take a bullet for, outside his blood family. That he was trusting me to watch out for her kind of warmed my cold, only half-alive heart.

The alarm was still going off, but I refrained from sending Colt a mean message for screwing around with my things. That he knew me well enough to know I would have just hit snooze a half a dozen times before rushing to get up and out the door for work was a telltale sign of its own. That he had moved the clock, knowing I would have to get out of bed and therefore would be awake enough not to easily fall back to sleep, told me he had spent more time than I realized he had sharing my bed.

Tossing back the covers, I jerked to my feet and crossed the room to the dresser where he had put it before leaving for wherever it was he had to be that morning. My fingers hovered over the alarm clock as guilt and dread churned in my stomach at all the caring things Colt did for me.

I wasn’t used to having people do things for me, had fought it at the very beginning, but I wasn’t sure how I would feel if it all suddenly stopped. I didn’t want them to stop.

But they will.

Clenching my jaw, I finally hit the off button and returned to my bed. Instead of flopping back down and burrowing under the covers, I sat on the edge, putting my elbows on my knees and burying my face in my hands.

Every day I fought my feelings for the biker, and every day I found myself falling a little more. I ached to love him, ached in a way I had never let myself feel for anyone, other than my mother. It was emotional suicide, though. If Colt ever found out what I was doing—who I was related to—he would be long gone.

So would Quinn, who was loyal to a fault to him.

Pressing my fingers into my eyeballs, I fought the tears that threatened to fill them. I wasn’t sure how long I sat there like that, but by the time I lifted my head, I had to scramble to get ready.

I jumped into the shower, not bothering to wash my hair since it was going to be pulled into a knot later so I could put on the wig I wore at work. My hair was long, thick, and dark. The wig I wore was more dramatic with long, flaming red waves that fell to the middle of my back. With the weight of it added to the weight of my natural hair, my neck would be killing me by the end of the night, but I got a shitload more tips as a redhead than as a brunette.

Once I was dressed in a pair of yoga pants and a tank top, I tossed all my things that I would need for work into my gym bag: makeup, a few different outfits I could change into throughout the night, and my curling iron. Grabbing it, I walked through the small house to the kitchen and grabbed a water out of the fridge before heading out the back door.

It wasn’t unusual for Quinn to not be home when I left for work. She had told me she was picking up extra hours at the diner, so I figured she wouldn’t be home until after midnight. The girl worked way too hard, but it was only one of a hundred different things I liked about her. She was sweet, but feisty. She loved with her whole heart, and frankly, I had learned a lot from her about my own heart.

The drive to Paradise City was uneventful. It was after eight, so it wasn’t like it was prime rush hour or anything. I wasn’t surprised to see that the parking lot was starting to get crowded. Most of the cars were from regulars, but there were over a dozen that I figured belonged to college kids.

I hated the college brats. It was the biggest source of revenue for the city, and considering how prestigious the college claimed to be, I was surprised the place wasn’t glitzier. Then again, maybe the MC had something to do with that. They had more or less been running Creswell Springs long before the mayor had gotten the backing he had needed to bring the college to his neck of the woods. With them hanging around, causing so much trouble for the mayor and DA, the big money backers weren’t likely to start footing the bill to put up designer boutiques and imported car dealerships.

I grinned to myself as I headed for the back door. Not much amused me when it came to the old man who had supplied half my DNA, but knowing that the MC had the power to irritate him almost every minute of the day sure did.

“Evening, Kelli.”

My grin faded as I nodded in greeting to Van, the bouncer who kept the riffraff from sneaking in through the back door, and the girls from sneaking out with customers to blow them in the parking lot between their sets.

Van’s name suited him, considering he was bigger than any mom van I had ever seen. He wasn’t fat by anyone’s standards, but the guy had muscle upon muscle that seemed to vibrate with every breath he took.

With the big muscles came a below average sized brain, however. I felt kind of sorry for the big guy. He was a gentle giant ninety-five present of the time. But if one of us was in trouble, he could flip the switch and become a beast who destroyed anyone in his path. Spider had hired him right after I had run into a little trouble not long after I had started working at Paradise City.

My half-brother had come in one night with his frat friends and had recognized me almost at once. Seeing me in the same town where he had been exiled to for the current semester, he had known immediately what our father was up to and had let me know really quickly what he thought of Calvin’s plan.

Spider had thought I was being molested, but really, all Kevin had done was give me a few bruises and the promise of more if he saw me again. After that, I had kept more of a low profile, even at the club. However, Calvin had still been adamant about keeping an eye on his precious only son.

Van opened the door for me, and I walked into the bright corridor that led to the girls’ changing room. Adjusting the strap of my gym bag, I pulled out my bottle of water and took a sip while a few other girls came in behind me. I didn’t know many of them well, and they didn’t really like me all that much, but I could learn a lot by just sitting back and keeping my ears open.

The changing room was what anyone would expect when they thought of a strip club’s dressing room. Vanity stations were set up everywhere, the bright bulbs baking the thick makeup on the other girls’ faces as they got ready for work.

My station was in the corner, as far away from the bathroom as possible. I wasn’t a fan of listening to some of those bitches puking their guts out periodically throughout the night.

I dropped my bag on the floor beside my chair and slowly sat after making sure there was no gunk of any kind on it. Nasty bitches liked to sit in my chair without any bottoms on, and I kept a can of Lysol and a container of disinfectant wipes on hand just for that purpose. When they left me little surprises like that, I always went off the deep end on every single one of them. After the last time it had happened, and I had gotten some kind of white nastiness on my favorite Juicy sweats, it had stopped, and they all now walked widely around my station.

“So, what do you think?”

It took me a minute to realize someone was talking to me. I lifted my head, examining the chick who had just walked up behind me. She was wearing killer heels that made her legs look like they were a million miles long, yet she was super tiny. The outfit she was wearing, a mixture of dominatrix with a dash of cop in black leather, was so tight it appeared to be spray painted over her perfectly porcelain skin. Her tits looked amazing with whatever pushup she was using, making me instantly jealous of her assets.

I had no idea which of the girls she was, because her face was behind some kind of lacy mask that let her see out, but hid her features. Her hair was glossy black and fell past her waist, but when I looked closer, I realized it was a wig, although a really good one like my own.

Her voice sounded familiar, so I knew it had to be one of the girls who talked to me every now and then …

“You don’t recognize me?” Her voice was full of awe now, and I jerked to my feet as if she had just tased me.

“Quinn?” I half-shrieked, half-whispered when she put her finger to her lips and glanced around as if she expected the FBI to burst through the fucking door and drag her away.

Goddammit, I wish that would happen, but we both knew it would be a billion times worse than that if Colt found out she was even in Paradise City, let alone dressed like she was about to make every man in the building her sensual prisoner. I could picture my boyfriend turning into the caveman he claimed he wasn’t and killing every single man in the county to eradicate the image of his best friend from their minds.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I demanded in a lower voice so the girls now giving me worried looks like I was about to become possessed and butcher them all wouldn’t hear me.

Jesus Christ, maybe I would. It would save me all kinds of trouble with Colt.

“More to the point, why the hell are you dressed like”—I waved my hands up and down at her outfit, even as I mentally checked her out all over again. Fuck, she was hot. I had done plenty of experimenting, but hell, looking at her right then was making me wonder just how much experimenting I could still do with my roommate—“that?”

If I hadn’t already known it was Quinn, I would have when she started twisting her fingers together, something she did when she was nervous.

“I need the money,” she murmured after a few moments of just staring down at her feet, which were covered in the sexiest leather boots I had ever set eyes on.

They went up to her thighs, shaping them in a way that shot my heartrate up a few notches. I could only imagine what she was going to do to the middle-aged guys with heart conditions. And the college brats? They would be jizzing themselves before she even finished her first set.

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hide the fact that my nipples had gone rock-hard at the sight of her in that outfit. It wasn’t that I was a lesbian, or even bisexual, despite my experimental phase. No, Quinn was just that fucking hot, and I was really giving my sexuality a rethought as I watched her inhale sharply, making her tits quiver.

“Why?”

What the hell did she need that would require her to go from working her respectable job at Aggie’s to wanting to bare all her lovely assets to the world in this sleazy place?

The answer to why I still worked there was easy. I liked the excitement of knowing a room full of men wanted me yet couldn’t touch. But Quinn … She was so sweet, so innocent. This place would fuck all that up, would fuck her up, and it hurt to think about that happening to her.

“I’m leaving,” Quinn told me, lifting her chin almost defiantly.

I nodded. “Good idea.” I started to bend to pick up my bag. “Come on; I’ll go with you.”

She swatted at my hand when I would have taken hold of her elbow. “No.” She shook her head, making the silky dark hair of the wig shimmy over her shoulders. Yeah, I was definitely rethinking the whole lesbian angle. Maybe I was bisexual after all.

Maybe I could talk Colt into a threesome with me and his best friend …

Shit. Now I had those images in my head and they wouldn’t go away. Of Colt doing all those naughty things he loved to do to me, while I did a few naughty things of my own to sweet, little Quinn.

“Kelli, I can’t go home. I need this job. I need the money.” She stepped back from me when I would have become more forceful. “What I meant is that I’m leaving Creswell Springs. As soon as I have enough money to do it, I’m getting the hell out of here.”

Something in her voice had all the heat she had been producing in me turning to ice. I couldn’t see a single one of her features, but I knew her well enough to guess she was trying not to cry. What had happened that would make her want to pull up all the roots she had to this place and move away? She had so much going for her there. People loved her, cared about whether she was taken care of or not. She had so much. The goddamn world at her fingertips, for fuck’s sake.

So, why did she want to give all that up?