Dani

We got dressed and packed in silence. Cavan was already dressed, because he’d just given me an orgasm that changed my life without taking off a stitch of clothing. And he didn’t even seem smug about it.

I should have felt awkward, embarrassed maybe, but I didn’t. I felt good. Good. I had never come like that—not by myself, and definitely not with someone else. And he’d just given it to me without expecting anything in return.

My body was humming like someone had hooked up live wires to it, and the fear and clingy exhaustion had dropped away. Even McMurphy’s phone call couldn’t ruin this. It was crazy, but all I wanted was to get in a car with Cavan Wilder and get the hell out of Arizona.

When I had dug through my suitcase and put on jeans and a t-shirt, then repacked, I turned to find Cavan standing next to the door, holding my phone in his hand, looking down at it and frowning in thought, that sexy furrow deepening between his eyebrows. “What?” I asked him.

“Something McMurphy said,” he replied. “Something about a cheap hotel room.”

I knew the exact words, though Cavan didn’t say them: cheap slut in a cheap hotel room. The words didn’t hurt me—I’d been called a slut before. Maybe I was one; I didn’t care. McMurphy, as Cavan said, could go fuck himself.

But it hit me, what Cavan was getting at. Cheap hotel room. “You think he knows where we are?”

Cavan’s eyes met mine. “We’ve been careful, and I paid for the rooms in cash. So I have to wonder, how the fuck does he know?” He held up my phone.

My good mood fell away. The panic tried to come back, but I beat it down, tried to think. “He can’t track me through my phone. Can he?” McMurphy was just a forty-year-old MC president who liked beer and women, not an IT genius. The Black Dog didn’t have an IT genius. Except—

“Has he ever had your phone when you weren’t there?” Cavan asked.

My mind was blank. He could have. Of course he could have. I’d been with McMurphy for seven months. “I can’t remember. But when I was sleeping, or in the bathroom, or forgot it at home, then sure.” God—he could have tracked me for months. I wouldn’t put it past him. I met Cavan’s gaze. “Did I fuck everything up for us?”

That seemed to surprise him. “You haven’t fucked anything up,” he said. “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

“McMurphy’s brother, Evan,” I said. “He got divorced. He used some app on his wife’s phone to track her. I remember it came up in the divorce hearings. Something to do with invasion of her privacy.” The divorce had been bitter, and Evan hadn’t come out of it very well. He and McMurphy shared opinions on women. “McMurphy wouldn’t know how to do it himself, but Evan would.”

Cavan’s gray eyes calculated swiftly. “You have anything irreplaceable on this phone?” he asked.

I almost laughed. The irreplaceable things most people had on their phones—photos, the numbers of people they loved—I had none of that. For a second I saw my mother’s face, the last time I’d seen her, when I left home. I’d gotten a new number and I hadn’t contacted her since.

I wondered if I was brave enough yet to change that. Then I put the idea out of my head.

“There’s nothing important on there,” I told Cavan.

Without another word, he walked to the bathroom, threw the phone in the toilet, and walked out again. “We’re running out of time,” he said, picking up our bags. “Let’s go.” His gaze traveled down to my feet. “You’re wearing high heels.”

“They’re the only shoes I packed,” I explained, looking down at where my feet were pinched into the heels below the hem of my jeans. “I was in a hurry and I forgot.”

“We’ll get you shoes,” he said.

The heat outside was harsh, the sun blinding, but we got on the baked pavement of the highway and Cavan hit the gas. He turned the radio on while I rummaged through the groceries he’d bought, pulling out protein bars and water for us. His car had air conditioning, at least. It seemed we weren’t going to talk about what had happened between us on that bed.

I can make it so good for you, baby. Just this, right here, my fingers in your pussy. It’s perfect. Let it come.

I didn’t know what it had been for him—maybe nothing. But for me, it had changed things. I found my sunglasses in my purse and put them on, then sipped water and watched him drive.

Finally, I got up the courage and just did it. I turned down the country music on the radio and said, “McMurphy was my first.”

Cavan flinched, just a quick tightening of his jaw and the skin around his eyes. His knuckles went tighter on the wheel, then relaxed again.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tired of keeping things in, tired of lying, so I’m just going to tell the truth. He was my first, and…” I looked out my window, summoning up the words. “And it wasn’t very good.”

Cavan shook his head, and then he said in a tight voice, “All right.”

“He didn’t rape me,” I said, making him flinch again. I took another swig of water, letting the words come. “I never said no. It was just… always about him. Never about me, not once. It’s hard to put it into words. I thought I was frigid for a while, or crazy. But if I didn’t like it, it made him mad, so I had to pretend. And the more I pretended, the less I liked it.”

He said nothing.

So I continued. “It took me a long time to realize there was something wrong, and that it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t enjoying it. That it was his fault. It was hard to figure that out. I had to, um, take care of myself when he wasn’t around.”

“Jesus,” Cavan said.

Now that the words out, I belatedly felt my cheeks get hot. You feel it? You feel good? Let it come. I could still hear him say it, still feel him touching me. No one had ever said that to me before, touched me like that before. It was like someone had cracked me open with the knowledge it was possible. Which was embarrassing, because McMurphy had liked frequent sex. “I guess it sounds pathetic,” I said.

“It isn’t pathetic,” he replied. “I saw your bruise. He kicked you.”

I rubbed my thumb hard over my lower lip as the fear swirled around me, trying to come back. I kept my eyes fixed on the road and thought: Escaping, I’m escaping, it’s over. “He didn’t like that I didn’t like it,” I said. “It made him mad. He thought I was faking, and then he thought I was fucking someone else who was actually making me come. It was this crazy spiral in his head. I told you, he was going to kill me.”

“Not anymore,” Cavan said with grim focus. “Not any fucking more. But we have some planning to do.” He pointed to the sign by the highway that said we were headed for Yuma, and then on to San Diego. “For starters, we need to figure out where the hell we’re going.”

He was right. I’d been so caught up in escaping, and then those first hours on the road, that I hadn’t had time to think about it clearly. “We should go to your brother in San Francisco,” I said.

But Cavan shook his head. “We’re not going to Devon.”

“Because he’s looking for you?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “I read all the articles, Cavan. Do you think I asked you to help me on an impulse? I read everything I could find about you for days beforehand. It was the articles that gave me the idea. I saw something online by mistake, about Devon, and I read it because he had your face and your last name.”

He still didn’t talk, so I kept going. “I read all about how Devon came out of prison for robbery, and found out he had a grandfather he never knew who left him everything. About how he shares the inheritance with his brother Cavan, who he hasn’t seen in ten years. There was even an article about how he donated to a battered women’s shelter, because your mother—”

“We’re not talking about my mother,” he said.

I watched him carefully. He was tight, his forearms tense as he gripped the wheel, but he wasn’t dangerous. At least, not to me. “Is that why you left ten years ago?” I asked. “Because she… died?”

Died wasn’t the right word, and we both knew it. Devon and Cavan’s mother had been murdered ten years ago, choked and stabbed by her boyfriend, who was now on Death Row in California. Devon Wilder had made a statement about it, after donating three million dollars to the women’s shelter. It only makes sense to me to pay it forward and maybe help another woman and her kids, he had said. I just wish someone had been able to help my mother before it was too late. It must have been awful, having your mother murdered when you were a teenager. “Is that why you hooked up with the Black Dog?” I asked, even though he wasn’t talking. “Because you were trying to get away from what happened?”

Cavan ran a hand over his forehead and through his hair. “None of that matters,” he said. “What matters is that we’re not going to Devon.”

“He could help us,” I pointed out.

“Or we could bring the Black Dog to his doorstep. That would be a pretty nice fucking reunion, wouldn’t it? I’ve already done him enough damage.”

“Fine,” I said, reading the set of his jaw. “Where are we going, then?”

“You got parents?” he asked.

Now it was my turn to flinch. “Just my mother. I haven’t seen her since I left.”

“Where is she?”

“I can’t go home to her, Cavan,” I said. “You don’t want to bring the Black Dog to Devon? Well, I don’t want to bring them to my mother’s door.”

Cavan shook his head. “McMurphy can find your mother anytime, Dani. He’d be happy to use her as a pawn to get you back. So please tell me she lives in Fiji or Tiimbuktu.”

He was right. I hadn’t thought of that, not exactly. “She’s in L.A.,” I finally said. “Or at least she was when I left. She might have moved and I wouldn’t know.”

He was silent for a long minute, wrestling with something in his mind. Something terrible. I wished I knew what it was, but I’d finally found my limit. I didn’t ask him.

“L.A.,” he said at last. “Okay. We should find her. But first, we have to get you some shoes.”