Haven sat at the kitchen table with a small plate of cookies in front of her—the product of another restless night. Her sleeplessness had been less caused by anxiety than by excitement over the shopping spree for baking ingredients that Bunny had taken her on after they’d left the mall the day before. Haven had never been given such free rein in her life. And though a part of her felt guilty for spending money that wasn’t hers, at least it was being used for the benefit of the club. She just got to have some fun along the way.
Peeking through the swinging door into the mess hall, Cora nibbled on a cookie. “They’re a huge hit with the guys. Not that I ever doubted it,” she said. “The trays are wiped clean. Annnd it’s entirely possible Phoenix just picked up a crumb off the table and ate it. The ridiculously hot idiot.”
“Wow,” Haven said, a warm satisfaction curling through her belly. “That was almost ten dozen cookies.” Not counting the ones they’d kept in the kitchen for themselves.
“Well, there were a lot of guys here tonight,” Cora said. “Not as many anymore though. It’s starting to clear out.” She ate another cookie and brushed her hands off. “I’ll go grab the trays.”
“I’ll help,” Haven said, butterflies doing a loop-the-loop inside her.
Cora smiled, but refrained from making a comment that probably would’ve had Haven second-guessing herself. They headed into the mess hall.
About a half dozen guys stood in a circle with Bunny, who gave Haven and Cora a wave and a smile. “You girls don’t have to worry about that,” she said.
“We got it, Bunny,” Haven said.
Dare looked over his shoulder, then did a double take. His eyes went wide and his gaze ran a long, slow up-and-down over Haven’s body, nearly pinning her in place. Heat filled her face. More than that, she felt hot everywhere. Part of her regretted wearing the new clothes—a second pair of jeans Bunny insisted they buy and a fitted pale-blue T-shirt—and part of her thrilled at the hungry look that suddenly came over Dare’s face. That hunger scared her, too, so she turned on her heels and rushed into the kitchen with one of the trays.
“Did you see how Dare looked at you?” Cora whispered loudly.
“Sshh! Oh, my God, shut up,” Haven whispered back. The tray clanged against the counter, sending both of them into a fit of giggles.
“You have to go back out there and get the others,” Cora said, her expression full of challenge. “It’s a roomful of people. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Heart racing, Haven planted her hands on her hips. “You think I won’t.”
Cora’s eyebrows rose and she looked at her nails and sighed, a smile playing around her lips.
Haven turned around and went back into the mess hall. It was possible that there wasn’t any oxygen in that room, though, because the minute she saw Dare again she got a little light-headed. What the heck was wrong with her? A single look should not throw a person into a complete freak-out. Then again, Haven wasn’t normal. Or, at least, she hadn’t been in a long time.
“You know you’re not expected to”—Dare gestured at the table—“work around here, right? There’s no quid pro quo.”
She slid one tray on top of the other. “Okay,” she said. “Keeping busy is good, though.”
He gave a nod, and Haven felt his gaze running over her face as if he’d touched her with his fingers. Unsure what else to say, she ducked her head and made her way back to the kitchen again. She used her back to push the door open and found Dare still watching her, those intense brown eyes following her every move.
Why was he looking at her like that? Or maybe it was just her imagination?
The swinging door cut off Haven’s view of him, and she turned and set the trays on the counter by the sink.
“Suddenly, you’re the lion after they visited the wizard!” Cora said, a big grin on her face.
“Hardly,” Haven said, filling the sink with water. Although it did feel good to do something all her instincts were warning her against doing, even if it was something totally small and unimpressive. At least, to other people it would seem that way. For Haven, being in a roomful of strangers was nearly the equivalent of going skydiving or bungee jumping. Actually, she’d probably be fine doing those things. It was people who scared her more than anything, because it was people who could do you the most harm.
In fact, now that she thought about it, she’d love to try skydiving someday. Imagine the thrill of the jump, the rush of the air, the once-in-a-lifetime view of the world, and the incredible pride you’d feel at having taken that chance when it was all done. So, yeah, a big kitchen of her own and skydiving. Look at her making plans, however crazy they might be.
Bunny came in just as they were drying the last of the trays. “Another hit, Haven.” She helped them put away the last of the dishes. “You know, they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. You realize you’re about to make forty bikers fall madly in love with you, right?”
It was a joke, of course, but the comment still whipped a shiver of nervousness across Haven’s skin. “Nope,” she said. “They’ll all be in love with you.”
Bunny grabbed her purse from a cabinet near the back door. “Ah, the old case of mistaken identity. How tragic for them.” She gave Haven a wink. “Rodeo and I are heading out for the night. Call me if you need anything. Or just ask Dare. The man never leaves.” She waved over her shoulder and disappeared back the way she came.
“You know what?” Haven said, feeling better, lighter, more hopeful than she had in a long, long while.
“What?” Cora asked, grabbing a couple of bottles of water from the fridge.
“Today . . . today was a good day.” Not that anything big had really happened, but Haven’s threshold for good days was sadly low.
Cora handed Haven a bottle and slung her arm around her neck. “I can’t even tell you how ecstatic it makes me to see you happy. Or, at least, happier.”
“How about you?” Haven asked. “Are you happy? I know all this was way more than we ever—”
“I’m happy, too, Haven. Really,” Cora said. “I’m with my best friend, who for the first time in years I don’t have to worry about being mistreated by her father and his goons. Leaving Georgia was no sacrifice for me, you know this. I left a waitressing job at the truck stop and a drunk-ass father who—” She bit back the words and shook her head. “You know what? I’m not even dwelling on the past, because what makes me happy is that for the first time, we have a shot at a good, safe future. Together. Whatever it is has to be better than what we left, right?”
Haven nodded, Cora’s words echoing some of Haven’s own thoughts. But that didn’t keep her mind from sticking on whatever it was Cora had been about to say about her father.
“So I propose a toast,” Cora said, tilting out her water bottle. “To the future.”
“To the future,” Haven said with a smile. They tapped their water bottles. “Though I guess toasting with water is pretty lame.”
Laughing, Cora shrugged. “One big adventure at a time. Ha! You know what you should do? You should make a list.”
Haven sipped her water. “For what?”
“Of all the things you want to do and experience. All the adventures you want to have. Now that you’re finally free to have them.” Cora looked at her like she’d just invented sliced bread.
“And toasting with something more than water should be on this list?” Haven asked. How sad was it that she’d led such a sheltered life that something so boring would be new to her?
Then again, she’d seen and overheard and experienced things in her father’s house that she hoped the average person never did even once. She’d seen men stabbed, shot, drugged. She’d walked in on more sex acts than she wanted to recall—not all of them consensual. She’d overheard plans to commit crimes and seek revenge and bribe officials. All of this was done in front of her like she was furniture, or like they believed she was such a doormat that she was incapable of posing a threat. But she’d also fought off unwanted advances, which the men usually got in trouble for, since she “belonged” to her father, but inevitably he would also punish her—for tempting them, for flirting with them, for causing trouble.
“You gotta start somewhere, Haven.” Cora’s words pulled her from the bad memories.
They knocked bottles again, Cora’s idea becoming less and less harebrained the more Haven thought about it. She’d already mentally started a list anyway, hadn’t she? Having her own kitchen, a place someday where she could bake to her heart’s content? Skydiving, because what would feel more free than that? So, what could it hurt?
Haven linked arms with Cora as they made for the door. “You know what? Maybe I will.”
“HAVE YOU SEEN Haven and Cora?” Dare asked Bunny as he and a few other guys helped her clear the breakfast table the next morning. Despite the generally macho culture of the club, they weren’t too good to clean up after themselves. Besides, Bunny had made it clear long ago that there’d be no home-cooked meals around there unless there was help cleaning up after the fact. Bunny might’ve been Dare’s great-aunt, but they all pretty much did what Bunny said rather than face her wrath, or her stubborn streak, which was legendary.
“Not sure where Cora went, but Haven’s out on the back porch, I think,” Bunny said as he followed her into the kitchen with an armful of dirties.
“Why doesn’t Haven eat with everyone?” he asked. Even when Cora did, Haven usually didn’t. Dare wasn’t sure why he noticed that, or why it bothered him.
Turning on the faucet, Bunny shrugged. “She’s a shy one. I expect she has good reason to be. She’ll come out of her shell, though.”
Dare nodded, his mind replaying his brief encounter with Haven from the evening before—her comment about wanting to keep busy was part of what convinced him he should talk to her today. Time to start figuring out how to help her and Cora. Though that hadn’t been the only thing that stood out to him about last night—because Haven in clothes that actually fit her was a total stunner. “Were you responsible for the new clothes?”
“Uh-huh,” Bunny said, rinsing off a plate. “All charged to the client fund per usual.” Clients being a nice way of referring to the domestic abuse victims who made up the bulk of the clientele for their protective services. Bunny’s first marriage had been an abusive shit show of epic proportions, so she had all kinds of firsthand experience with what was likely to make those they worked with feel most comfortable. Together, Dare’s and Bunny’s experiences with domestic violence had been big motivators behind the club’s mission.
“Good, thanks, Bunny,” he said, walking around the counter to the door. “And, uh, wouldn’t be upset at all if there were more peanut butter cookies today.” He winked.
Bunny gave him a funny look, but just laughed.
Outside, Dare found Haven sitting in a lounge chair in the sun, her knees drawn up to provide support for something she was writing in a small notebook. Damn, she was a pretty thing.
“Haven, you got a minute?” he asked.
She slapped the notebook closed, her eyes going wide. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, of course.” She swung her feet to the floor, sitting up straight to face him as he sat on the edge of the chair beside her.
Dare eyeballed the way she was clutching onto the pad of paper, but he didn’t want to make her any more uncomfortable than she already seemed around him by asking about it. She wore jeans and a white V-neck shirt, and she looked like summer personified with her sun-kissed skin and all that long, wavy blond hair. His appreciation of her bothered him—Dare didn’t get involved with their clients, partly because most of them were in the middle of or trying to escape bad relationships and partly because that wasn’t why they were under Ravens’ protection. But he couldn’t seem to stop noticing Haven Randall.
“I need to talk to you about what happened to land you here,” he said. The question wasn’t based in idle curiosity—he needed to know to help her and to assess what kind of danger she might still be in. Because she and Cora had been rescued in the middle of the crisis with the Hard Ink team, Dare hadn’t had a chance to speak with them before this.
“Where should I start?” she asked, her gaze part weary and wary.
He braced his elbows on his knees and nailed her with a stare. “At the beginning of whatever story will tell me what kind of trouble you’re in and how to keep you safe going forward.”
She dropped her chin, her gaze going somewhere in between them. “Right.” For a long moment, she fidgeted with the notebook and pen in her lap. “Well, the short version is that, with Cora’s help, I ran away from my father, who’s a really bad man, and when we got to Baltimore our truck broke down. The tow truck driver apparently wasn’t who we thought he was, because instead of taking us to a repair shop, he took us to a storage facility and forced us at gunpoint to go in.” Her gaze flickered to Dare’s, but she wouldn’t really look him in the eye. “He was part of a gang, I guess, and they put us in a cell in the basement. And then those soldier guys rescued us and Ike brought us here, and along the way we lost everything we had.”
Dare kept his expression neutral, but her story set off all kinds of alarm bells in his head. The bad father. The discomfort with eye contact. The involvement with the Church Gang—despite being torn apart on an organizational level, there could still be some guys around who could identify Haven and Cora, and therefore might be able to offer someone a lead that would point at the Ravens. “I think I better have the long version,” he said, his brain racing through all the possible complications. “Starting with who your father is.”
She shifted on the chair, her hand spinning the pen round and round. Dare observed all the little movements and already knew there was something that she thought was important that she wasn’t telling him. Why, was the real question. “He’s involved in all kinds of things, and probably some things I don’t even know. Selling drugs, stealing and stripping cars, stealing various kinds of cargo and selling it off, intimidating business owners into paying him protection money . . .” She shrugged. “I’m pretty sure he pays off the local sheriffs so they’re in on it with him.”
As concern settled into Dare’s gut, he heard what she hadn’t said as loudly as what she had. “His name, Haven.”
She licked her lips and quickly glanced at him and away again. “Randall, like me.”
He tried to rein in the impatience that wanted to claw up his spine—because as long as she was there, a threat against her was a threat against everyone there, but he didn’t want to make her clam up by coming on too strong. “Haven.”
When she finally met his gaze, her eyes were filled with such fear that it kicked Dare in the stomach.
“You don’t have to be scared, that’s why I’m asking these questions. My people can’t protect you if they don’t know from which direction the threats might come.”
Just when he was sure she wasn’t gonna spill, she said, “His name’s Rhett Randall, from Hall County, Georgia.” Even after the words were out of her mouth, she wore a conflicted expression, like she wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing in sharing the information with him.
The name didn’t ring any immediate bells for Dare, but Georgia was far enough away that they had no regular business there. Which was one positive in all this. “Okay, and why did you have to run away?” he asked, not liking any of the reasons he could imagine.
She hugged herself. “My father was very controlling. He looked at me as his property, property that only he could decide what to do with. When that didn’t end when I turned eighteen, I worried it might never end. The more time that passed, that seemed more and more likely.”
“Wait, just how old are you?” he asked.
“I turn twenty-three in July,” she said, finally looking him in the eye.
Multiple reactions warred inside Dare, and most of them turned his blood hot with anger. “Are you saying he held you prisoner in your own home?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” she said in a soft voice. “I mean, I could leave the house sometimes, but never alone. I had a guard at all times.”
The ramifications of her admission stunned him. That likely meant Haven had very little experience out in the world, and the first time she’d gone out on her own she’d ended up in the hands of the Church Gang. Which shined a whole new light on her trust issues, didn’t it?
“For what purpose?” he asked, still trying to get a handle on the father’s motivation.
Haven rose and paced to the railing a few feet away. Notebook still in hand, she leaned against the railing and stared out at the view. Dare followed the direction of her gaze, finding the same solace in the dark green of the Blue Ridge that he always did. He rose and leaned his hip against the railing a few feet away from her, dread snaking through him the longer she didn’t talk.
“At first I really didn’t know,” she finally said, her gaze still distant. “Part of it was just because he wanted to control me, which was a big reason why he pulled me out of school. Once I was eighteen, I thought maybe he just needed someone to cook and clean for him, which had been my job for years. But I think it was also because my mother had run away from him when I was a baby, and he wanted to make sure I didn’t, too.”
Dare didn’t know what to react to first. “He pulled you out of school?” Her father was a real piece of work.
“Yeah. Awesome, huh?” She peered up at him.
“Not even a little, Haven. Why the hell did he think he needed to yank you from school?” Dare asked. This part of her history struck a real nerve with him, since being on the run from his father for his latter teen years meant he hadn’t had a typical education either. It wasn’t until he got settled with his grandfather at the age of seventeen that he buckled down to get his GED, even though by then he already had a fucking PhD in life experience. And, damnit, he suspected Haven did, too.
She dropped her gaze as her cheeks went pink. “I don’t know.”
Her reactions said that wasn’t true, but Dare had a lot more he needed to get from her that was likely more pertinent to her recent circumstances. He shook his head and forced his fisted hand to relax on the railing. “Okay, skip that for now. Why did Cora run with you? What kind of trouble was she in?”
“She wasn’t in trouble,” Haven said. “I mean, her dad sometimes worked for mine, so he wasn’t all on the up and up, but he just did things on the side. She came because she knew I wouldn’t be able to do this on my own.”
Dare nodded and thanked God that they weren’t dealing with two times the threats, at least. And he found himself feeling grateful to Cora, too—he respected the kind of loyalty and friendship the other woman had demonstrated. Without Cora, Dare never might’ve met Haven. Although, why that should matter . . . Dare shook the thought away. “Okay. So if things had been like that for all these years, why did you and Cora decide to run now?” Because no way was it as simple as she’d just woken up one morning and decided she’d had enough.
Her throat bobbed once, twice, as if she was trying to force the words up and out. “He was going to make me marry someone,” she finally said. “Told me he’d been saving me for just the right deal to take his empire to the next level.”
Make her marry . . . ? Aw, what the actual fuck. “So, what, it was to cement some business alliance with another crook?” Dare asked, his hackles all the way up.
She cut her gaze to his. “Yep.”
“Jesus Christ,” Dare bit out, raking a hand through his hair. As bad as that all sounded, Dare knew she was painting the picture of her life using the broadest strokes. The details of her day-to-day would probably make him want to smash things with his bare hands. And given how the father viewed her and his desire to use her that way, he was probably pretty damn motivated to get her back and save face with the would-be groom, whoever the hell that was. “What was the other guy’s name? The one you were supposed to marry?”
“Ray Landry,” she said, her voice thin, her tone sad. “God, I sound even more pathetic when I say all that out loud.”
On instinct, Dare stepped right into her space. He saw a lot of things when he looked at this woman, and none of them were pathetic. “Don’t say that, Haven. You hear me? From what I can tell, you survived, you escaped, and you persevered in a bad situation. That must’ve taken an incredible amount of fortitude and courage, so don’t discount yourself like that. I won’t stand for it,” he said.
Eyes wide, chest rising and falling fast, mouth open in surprise, Haven peered up at him like she was afraid to move. “Okay,” she whispered, her gaze flickering over his face, lingering on his lips.
That little show of interest speared white-hot lust through Dare’s body. He was hard in an instant, his mouth suddenly ravenous for a taste of her. Which meant it was time to get the fuck out of there before he did something they’d both regret. He reared back, nodding. “That’s good for now. I’ll let you know if I have any more questions,” he said, and then he took off without waiting for her to respond.
Anyway, he had much more important things to be doing than sniffing around a woman—a much younger, way-too-innocent-for-him woman. He had two Southern criminals to track down. Before they found Haven first.