Cavan

Jesus, what a night. I’d almost blown it a dozen times, so many I’d lost count. I’d spent the entire party with the urge to look at her, to stare, to walk up and talk to her, hear her voice, hear that she was okay. It had taken everything I had to keep my cool.

Now Dani was in the passenger seat next to me, still in her short skirt, unbuttoned blouse, and high heels. The dark makeup around her eyes was smudged, and her lipstick was gone. She rubbed her palms on her slim, bare knees almost rhythmically, as if trying to calm herself down.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She bit her lip and nodded.

“You’re not going to cry, are you?” I said. “I’m really not good with crying.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to cry.”

It was good to hear her voice. I could read her then, read that she was scared and freaked out but still in control. That she wasn’t going to give out on me.

“First things first,” I said as the signs for the highway came out of the darkness. I pointed at our options. “East or west?”

A monumental decision, but she made it in a heartbeat. “West.”

“As it happens, I agree.”

She sat up straighter as I headed for the exit west, and ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “You say things like that, I’ve noticed,” she said.

“Like what?”

“As it happens.”

I laughed. I actually felt pretty good—something to do with the Black Dog MC receding into the distance behind me, probably, getting smaller in my rearview every second. “Don’t be too impressed,” I told her. “I’m hardly a Harvard grad. Just because I talk better than a Dog doesn’t make me quality.”

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Where was I when?”

“After two thirty, you disappeared.”

I’d had no idea she’d been watching me; I’d never seen it. She had serious powers of deception, young as she was. No one developed powers like that unless they had been through the fire. Unless they lived in the fire every day.

I took too long to answer, so she said, “Were you with a woman?”

I laughed again. “Sure,” I said. “I went and fucked some stranger, and then I left her to go get you. This is the kind of guy you picked to leave town with?”

She lifted her hands to her cheeks and rubbed them, glancing at me. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I was looking for you. It helped for me to see you. And then you were just gone.”

“McMurphy left,” I said, and I couldn’t help it—I watched her reaction.

There was nothing but numbness. “I know.”

“That bother you?” I prodded.

“I keep hoping he’ll like one of his other girls better than me,” was her answer. “It never happens.”

She knew better, of course. Once McMurphy had her as his possession, he’d never let her go. It had to do with him, not her. But she’d hoped anyway. “He left with one of them,” I said. “I decided to go keep an eye on him, make sure I knew where he was.”

She was watching me now, from her dark-lined eyes. I found myself wishing she’d wash off the makeup, because she looked infinitely more beautiful without it. Not that her beauty was any of my business. “Did he go to his room in the club?”

“Yes.”

“And he stayed there?”

“Unless he had some crazy impulse to climb out the window, yes. He didn’t come out the door.” I’d started up a conversation with one of the brothers, and we’d drifted inside, where I’d pretended to be interested in his drunken ramblings while quietly keeping an eye and an ear on McMurphy’s bedroom door.

Not my favorite task, keeping tabs on McMurphy’s sex life. But not one I’d ever have to do again.

“How’s your tattoo?” I asked her.

She blinked, and she actually brightened a little, some of the stress falling from her face. “It’s good,” she replied.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little. Nothing out of line.”

“Keep it clean,” I reminded her. “It’ll heal in a few days at most. It looked good—I think you’re going to be happy when it’s all healed over.”

“Maybe you should look at it,” she said.

I shook my head. “Dani, I’ve seen more of you than I need to see. More than I should ever have seen.”

Her voice was soft, honest, and a little hoarse. “You can see any of me you want to, now,” she said.

Those words went straight into my bloodstream and arrowed right down below my belt. It was the sincerity of them, the lack of pretense—she wasn’t trying to seduce me. She was just offering herself. My brain fuzzed over as we flew down the empty highway. What was going on with her? She was scared, tired, and vulnerable. So vulnerable I could nearly see through her skin. So I ignored the slow throbbing in my balls and said, “You know that’s not a good idea.”

She didn’t flinch, but she looked at me for a long time. She was almost uncanny in the fluorescent lights that blew by on the near-empty highway, as if she was slowly putting a spell on me. “It isn’t because you don’t want to,” she said at last.

I had nothing but honesty. “No, it isn’t,” I answered her. “But you’ve just gotten away from a man who, by my best guess, has been fucking with both your brain and your body for months. You need to get yourself right. The last thing you need right now is another man, especially me.”

She latched on to the last part of my little speech. “Why not you?”

“I hurt people,” I said. “I always have.”

She shook her head, frowning. “You don’t have a woman. You’re not in the club. You don’t have a family. Who are you hurting?”

“Everyone who comes near me,” I said. “So don’t.”

She looked away. She probably didn’t understand that I kept myself quarantined, like a leper, for the good of the rest of the population. Emotional leprosy, that was what I had. I was capable of faking it with the club and having a few dirty orgasms with the women who drifted through my life, and that was all. That was all I’d ever be.

“You should get some sleep,” I told her. “We’re going to be driving for a while.”

She looked out the window. “I’m not going to sleep.”

I knew how she felt.

Neither was I.