It takes us a little longer to get going than I thought. Besides Meg—Maggie and me crossing a line that I never thought we’d cross, it took me a while to locate a safe location for us to crash.

It’s nearly sunset by the time I say fuck it and we hit the road, knowing that I need to get us out of the area so no one loyal to Dominick or Sal reports seeing us. I still haven’t located a safe place for the medium term, but there are plenty of no-tell motels along the highways heading west.

The hardest part is that I don’t know how Dominick will react to our running. Or if we show back up. He might understand us laying low until the smoke clears. Or we could be kidnapped and taken to him or Sal. Or worst case scenario, shot on sight. I’m sure that if Dom’s innocent of the hit, he’d let Maggie go. Well, mostly sure.

I’m just not one-hundred percent, and that’s the problem. As desperate as the situation is, or might be, I don’t want to freak Maggie out too much.

Maggie. It makes me shake my head a little as we roll along the highway, the dim light hiding my movements.

I can’t believe she lied about her name. Well, I can. I just can’t believe I couldn’t tell.

One thing I know without a doubt is that I can read people, but she somehow slipped right under my radar. In more ways than one. Without raising a single flag, she’s slipped past all of my defenses.

That both irritates and intrigues me, making me want to know more, even if only so that she couldn’t possibly hide anything else because I already know it all.

Know her inside and out. My cock jerks at that thought, but I talk it down, wanting to use the road time for a better purpose. I look over at Maggie, her feet in the seat, her knees pulled up to her chest. Yesterday, I thought that position was a sign of her shock, her curling into herself, but I’m starting to realize it’s just her.

It’s as if she’s trying to be small, non-intrusive, or even overlooked. It’s as good a place as any to start with the things I want to know.

“Why do you sit like that?”

Maggie startles a little before looking at me, confusion on her face. “Like what?”

I gesture at her feet, appreciating the way it folds her up and the curve it gives her pert little ass before refocusing on the road. “All curled up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sit down with your feet on the floor.”

Maggie grins, shrugging dismissively. “I don’t know, just always have.” She pauses, her eyes flicking up and to the left as though she’s remembering something. “Even when I was a kid, my mom would tell me to ‘sit like a lady’ and try to get me to sit up straight and cross my legs. It never worked, mostly because at my house, all the chairs were so short compared to the tables. I had to sit on my knees or something just to be able to eat dinner for a long time. Later, in school, kids were sometimes cruel.”

My hands tighten on the steering wheel, even though I know what she’s talking about was years ago. “Kids can be motherfuckers.”

“Making myself invisible helped to keep their sights off me. Eventually, I guess it just became habit, along with being invisible. It lets me watch from the sidelines, learn things about people because they don’t perceive me as a threat even if they notice me.”

It’s a deeper answer than I expected, and that she shared makes me happier than it should. “Angel, nothing about you is invisible, and if you ever thought you were, you were fucking mistaken. I saw you the moment you walked into Petals and have been mesmerized by you every fucking day since.”

She blushes, seeming pleased, but laughs lightly. “I don’t think for a second that you were watching me sling beer when there are nearly-naked women swinging on poles right in front of your face.”

I laugh and glance over. “Day one—a pink backpack with a daisy hanging on it. You wore your hair down, curled, and had too much makeup. We shook hands, and I remember that you had hands that were baby smooth.”

“You notice and remember a lot,” Maggie says quietly. “What else?”

I smile, remembering. “You wobbled on your high heels, and the first night you were nervous, never looking at the stage once but doing a surprisingly decent job waiting tables. By the end of the first weekend, you learned to pull your hair up. It shows off your neck and makes me want to bite it, but I’m guessing it’s more to do with how hard you work. You lightened up on the makeup, playing up your big eyes and assuming a young bubblegum airhead persona that is complete bullshit. The customers didn’t know, but we all knew you were a smart girl. Innocent, sure, but smart as a fucking whip. And you learned how to strut in your heels perfectly, your ass swishing this way and that. Yeah, I’ve been watching you every damn day, Angel.”

“Oh.” Her voice is softly high-pitched, surprise written clearly on her face as her eyebrows raise high on her forehead. “I had no idea. I mean, I noticed you too, hard not to with your whole . . . you going on,” she says as she moves her hands about, encompassing my whole body, “But I knew the rules and figured if you were going to break them, it wouldn’t be for someone like me.”

I reach across the console, grabbing a handful of her thigh and squeeze gently. “If I’m gonna break the rules, it’s only gonna be for someone like you.”

She bites her lip, like she’s not sure what to do with that answer, the glimpse of white making me want her teeth on me, marking my chest and neck. “So, what’s your story?” she finally asks, trying to get her balance back. “You usually go around playing hero? I know you don’t have any tights on underneath those jeans, and there’s no S on your chest.”

There’s interest in her lightly playful tone, but also a bit of worry, and I know she’s thinking about our situation. Happy to distract her, I try to give her an edited version of my life, one that won’t cause us more problems.

“Well, I guess I do have some hero tendencies, but not usually to this extreme, admittedly. My dad was a real hero. He went to Vietnam right before the US pulled out, and when he got back, he became a cop in the small town I was born in.”

“Vietnam?” Maggie asks. “What, are you the youngest of the kids or something?”

“No, it took him awhile after he got back to feel he was ready to have kids. He was older than Mom too. He was almost forty and she was only twenty-six when they got married. Still, he was a good role model, taught me right from wrong, and I grew up always wanting to make him proud.”

She lays her hand on mine where it rests on her thigh, holding it tenderly. “I’m sure he would be. You’re definitely my hero. Maybe after all this is over, you can tell him how you saved me from a mob hit and the resulting war?” She says it jokingly, like she’s trying to make the monster less scary by laughing at how ridiculous it sounds, but the underlying fear is obvious. “I’m sure he would love this story, on the run but not sure yet exactly who we’re running from.”

I sigh wistfully, shaking my head. “He died about five years ago. He would have liked the story, and I know he would have liked you. I tell myself he’s my guardian angel now.”

Without thinking, I salute the way I always do, lifting my hand from her leg to bring two fingers to my lips and then raising them toward the sky. “Thanks, Pop.”

My hand goes right back to Maggie’s thigh and hers goes right back on top of mine. It’s comfortable, and I ponder just how strange it feels that a gesture that’s only been in my life for about three or four minutes feels like I couldn’t go the rest of my life without it.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says softly, with genuine regret that she won’t get to meet him. “He sounds like a great dad. What about your mom?”

I smile, keeping my eyes on the road. “She’s great too. After Pop died, she didn’t let it get her down. They talked about that, and they agreed that she should do what makes her happy. So she sold the house and bought a little condo in a nice building. She works as a secretary at an elementary school. She says the kids keep her young, even though she’s not all that old, really. I’m one of the lucky ones.” Feeling like the storyline of my history might be getting into dangerous territory, like how the son of a war vet police officer ended up working door security in a mob-owned strip club, I turn the questions back to Maggie. “What about you? What’s your family like?”

Maggie’s lips screw up a bit, and she hums quietly before answering. “Well, not as picturesque as yours, but they’re good. My parents divorced when I was little, so I bounced back and forth between their houses, but it was an amicable divorce at least, not some made-for-TV drama deal. I see them both regularly, talk to my mom almost every Sunday on the phone.”

“How’d you end up waitressing at Petals?”

I can feel her retreat, like a physical removal of her warmth even though she hasn’t moved. “Oh, I’ve done a lot of moving around, this job and that. Waitressing is something I did when I was younger, so it seemed like a good way to make some money.”

She’s lying. I can tell this time, but I can’t put my finger on how I know. Her tone doesn’t change, her face is neutral, her body relaxed. And that worries me. This girl, innocent as she may seem, is lying, and she’s good at it. Really fucking good at it.

Wanting to tease out what she’s lying about, I pick at her answer, keeping it casual and teasing her a little. “This and that? Tell me, what has an Angel like you done before becoming a strip club waitress?”

She smiles, but it’s her fake one, too much teeth and not enough eyes. It’s a dazzling smile still, but I guess when you’ve made a woman come and then made her deep-throat you, you get to see a lot of what her eyes can reveal. “Well, I’ve been a barista, a secretary, a copy girl, a waitress, a nanny, and a personal assistant. It’s not quite the Village People, but finding a construction job is really difficult at my size.”

Her list sounds real and honest, and I wonder where the lie was in her previous response, thinking maybe it was something else she was lying about. Maybe it was the moving? Or the money? A lie of omission, maybe?

Before I can ask more follow-ups, she redirects us to the current problem at hand. “What do you think is going on back at the club?”

I know pressing her more isn’t going to get any results, so I decide to go with the flow. “I don’t know. I’ve got a guy looking into it for us. I’ll check in with him in the morning, see what he’s heard.”

“You’ve ‘got a guy’?” Maggie asks, lifting an eyebrow. “Seriously? That even sounds like we’ve jumped into the middle of a mob movie. How in the heck did we end up here? I mean, how’d you get in touch with this guy?”

“Burner phone in my bag,” I admit. “The phone’s off for now, just in case. But I’ll check in, and we’ll see what he’s hearing back home.”

She looks at me with calculating eyes, and I’m reminded once again just how smart she is and how careful I need to be with her. “So, on a moment’s notice, you snatched me up, switched vehicles to a nondescript sedan that you knew would be waiting in that lot, have a duffle bag packed with at least one day’s worth of clothes, cash, and a burner phone, took us to a no-tell motel, and now we’re headed to another safe location, and you ‘have a guy’? That about sum it up?”

Fuck. She’s putting a bunch of shit together pretty damn fast, and it does sound like a fucking action movie script. Scrambling, I try to stay calm and put her on the defensive, a tactic that usually works on most folks. I laugh heartily, not taking my eyes off the road as if I’m not concerned. “Well, when you put it all together like that . . . you’re welcome, Angel. You planning to say thank you on your knees too? Because that was a damn fine apology this morning.”

She doesn’t take the bait, sidestepping the crude, and honestly rude, comment. “Who are you, Shane? You said you’re not one of Dominick’s guys, not in the mob. But it sounds like . . . are you tied up in all of this?”

I grit my teeth, growling as I clench the steering wheel a little tighter and hoping it’ll scare her into backing the fuck off. “All you need to know is that you’re safe.”

As we’ve talked, her curled knees had fallen loosely to her left, toward me, but at my harsh words, she pulls away. Her knees are once again clenched tight to her chest in a protective posture. She half turns away, her back mostly to me as she faces the window, her eyes unfocused as the scenery flies by.

It hurts, honestly. I was enjoying talking to her, but I need to keep her from probing in areas that she shouldn’t. I realize I likely hurt her feelings, and that despite her brains and sass, she’s got a vulnerable side too. Unable to reach her thigh, I rest my hand on the back of her neck, squeezing lightly, comforting and not threatening, I hope. “Maggie, you’re safe, and I promise to keep you that way. That’s all you need to know right now.”

She doesn’t answer, doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken. I turn my attention back to the road, knowing I should give her space. Hell, I should give myself some space to figure out how to handle this, handle her. Fuck, that doesn’t even sound right. Maggie’s a grown ass woman with her own mind. She shouldn’t be ‘handled’. She should be respected, but the situation makes my caveman instincts come out and all I want to do is protect her.

As my thoughts swirl, I leave my hand where it is, drawing small lines up and down her neck with my thumb, soothing her anger, her fear, even if some of it is my fault.

If I’m honest with myself, having her satin skin under my palm calms me too, and that’s a fucking problem.