“I don’t pretend. Ever. And as for barely knowing each other, we are the freest we will ever be together. You don’t have to choose to see me again. You don’t have to think about the mistakes we’ve made together. You don’t have to do anything, including answering my question.” And yet I ask again, “Why not tonight?”
She exhales a shaky breath, her fingers twisting in my lap, her gaze shifting forward to the window drizzled with rain. The storm has slowed now, at least the one unleashed by the sky, but I have this sense that there is one inside her, as there is one inside me, and neither are even close to calm. “My mom died last month,” she says. “My dad is deploying to Iraq next week.” She glances over at me, pain in those beautiful green eyes. “If that’s not enough, I live in a house I inherited from my dead grandmother who I loved very much.”
I want to scoop her up. I want to kiss her. Hell, I want to get her naked and make her and me forget all the shit going on in our lives. I want to be lost in Candace. But before I choose what comes next, I need to know one thing. “Do you have a boyfriend, Candace?”
“No. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t serious. He was military and a little too busy trying to impress my father for me to feel like anything was about me. What about you?”
“No one,” I say with no hesitation.
No one.
The words linger in the air and I’m aware of the heaviness they hold. She studies me with interest, and I’m aware, even before she asks the question, that she wants to pluck them from the air, hold them, and understand them. “Why are you here alone, Rick Savage?”
I fix her in a deep stare, and I say exactly what I feel. “To meet you,” I say softly with a rough, affected quality to my voice I barely understand. But I don’t fight it. “I just didn’t know it yet.”
The storm erupts again, an explosion of rain, wind, and hail a curtain over the windows, a crack of thunder following. Intense. We don’t speak, but there is a pulse between us, and I say fuck it. I need to kiss her. I move toward her, and instead of backing away, she moves into me. We’re in the middle of the seat when my fingers tangle into the soft strands of her hair and my mouth lowers to hers. “I’m going to kiss you now, unless you object,” I say “because I have an absolute need for this to be what you want, too.”
“Kiss me already, Savage,” she whispers.
“Rick,” I say. “Call me Rick.” And then my mouth collides with her mouth, licking into her mouth, the taste of her sweet honey on my tongue.
She lets out a tiny moan and then her arms slide around my back, her soft, curvy body pressing against my body, and it’s all I can do to keep my hands in her hair. And I have no idea why that feels so important with Candace, but it does. At least at this very moment. I pull back and she stares down at me. “Do you want to get out of here? Together?”
Her fingers curl on my T-shirt but she doesn’t move away. In fact, she seems to melt into me. “I don’t do things like this,” she whispers. “Ever.”
I like that answer, I think. I like that I’m the one that made her kiss a stranger in the middle of a storm. I kiss her again and when she’s breathless, I say. “Then make me the first.”
I blink back to the present, my eyes on the road ahead of me, but my mind is still with Candace. I was never immune to her or her to me, and I don’t regret falling for her, or her for me. I regret following her father to my first kill. Because I can never know she’s safe. Ever. I will always have an enemy. And she will always share those enemies.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Savage
Estes Park is a small little mountain town with a population of six thousand, give or take a few hundred. The path to get there is a climb through the mountain, by way of narrow winding roads with no railings and steep drops. The higher we get, the thinner the air, sure to slow down the enemy. Just not us. We’re bad-asses.
“I was here once, a year ago,” Asher informs us. “I stayed at the Stanley Hotel. It’s supposed to be haunted as fuck.”
“And?” Adam prods. “Because I know there’s more.”
“Oh hell yeah there’s more,” Asher confirms. “I was in bed and felt like I was being watched. I lifted my head and there was a cowboy standing at the end of my bed. No lie. I swear to God.”
“Hell to the no on that,” I say, downing a sip of Dr. Pepper. “I like enemies that can die and then I make them dead.”
Adam eyes Asher in the rearview. “What did you do?”
“The only thing I could do,” Asher replies. “I went back to sleep.”
If only I could go the fuck back to sleep and this Max thing had never happened. “Anything I need to know about?” I ask, glancing at Asher who now, as always it seems, has his MacBook opened.
“If you're asking if I’ve connected Max or anything of this to you, no. Neither has Blake. There’s no chatter on the web, not even the dark web, about you.”
“And Max?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“In other words, no chatter about me means nothing.” My mind goes back to yet another moment with Max.
I shift in my damn seat, cramped as hell, and at this point, we’re high as fuck. We have to be close to Max’s place. “How much further?”
“Five miles,” Asher says. “And between here and there we need a place to hide the rental that isn’t off the side of a cliff.”
“Not to be a Negative Nelly,” I say, “but I’m back to hell to the no on that. We’re driving up to the door.”
“And hell to the no on that shit,” Asher snaps. “He won’t return your calls. He’s dirty or dead. We’re not going to walk up to the door.”
“He likes booby traps,” I say. “And he’s good at them. Unless you want a fishhook in your eye, captain, we go in straight and to the door.”
Adam gives me a side-eye, grimaces, and keeps driving.
Ten minutes later, we turn down a narrow road, drop-offs on either side of us. “If you come at him from this road, you want him dead,” I murmur.
“Let’s not get dead with him,” Adam says, and that’s all he has to say. When he halts the car, we all prepare, locking and loading, ready for action. Sixty seconds later, I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy about this reunion with Max with a gun in each hand, as we keep on rolling, straight to yet another hillbilly delight cabin. We park right in front. A perfect location to see an immediate problem.
The cabin door is open.
“That doesn’t look good,” Adam murmurs.
“Now who’s a Negative Nelly?” I reply. “Maybe he has cameras and he saw us coming, and wanted to invite us in.” I open my door, stand up, and I remain bullet-free as I expect. An enemy wouldn’t be this obvious. Either Max is inviting us in or he’s dead.
Adam and Asher are on my heels as I head up the steps and ease inside the cabin, to find furniture overturned, a window broken, and no signs of life. I hold a hand up to the others to stay in their positions and call out, “Max!”