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  “Nassir is like a wild animal that escaped from the zoo. He’s amazing to look at, fascinating to watch, but I would prefer that bars and glass separated us. There is nothing soft about that man.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t like him having control of the club?”

  She blinked obscenely long lashes at me and her perfectly bowed mouth crooked up in a half grin. Only Honor could look that good with a split open lip.

  “Ernie was a slob and easy to manipulate. He liked to pretend he was in charge, but we really ran the show. Back in the day this was a fun job that the girls could do hungover and with zero effort. Flash some tit and the tentpole rises. Nassir is all business, and now the dancers have to work for every dollar. There is no playing around, and with Novak gone, every Tom, Dick, and Harry is grappling to prove they’re the next badass. Things are more dangerous, more desperate. Everyone is trying to carve out their own piece of the city, and it shows.” She gestured at her battered face. “Case in point.”

  I hated what she said, but it was true. “Why don’t you quit? Go find something less in the line of fire to do?”

  She reached out a hand and tapped my cheek lightly. “You always were too pretty and too smart for your own good, Race.” She flipped her hair out to the side. “What do you think I’m qualified to do? I’ve taken my clothes off for a living since I was seventeen. I didn’t finish high school. I don’t have rich parents waiting in the wings. Where else can I make a grand a night and the only risk is an overly zealous soccer dad? This is what I know.”

  I was a firm believer in the principle that knowledge was something that continued to grow, continued to develop, as long as you had the desire to chase after it. For me there was always more to know, but I couldn’t fault her for doing what she felt like she had to do in order to survive. I bent down so I could kiss her bruised cheek.

  “Take care of yourself.”

  She returned the kiss on my dimple. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re back. I just hope you know what you’re doing getting into business with a shark like Nassir.”

  “Me too, but it usually only takes one mistake for me to learn my lesson.”

  She gave me a sad little smile. “One mistake is too many in this world, Race. This isn’t the Hill. Remember that.”

  I watched her disappear into the office where I had left Nassir. I wished everyone would stop bringing up where I was from. I knew that Spanky’s wasn’t the Hill. Nothing here even looked the same as there, including me. I guess only time would tell if I had what it took to make the rest of the city see that.

  I walked to the Mustang and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I called Brysen to see when she was going to get off work. Her laptop was a paperweight. There was no salvaging it. I pulled as much limited data as I could off the burned-up hard drive and transferred it to a new MacBook I bought for her. I knew she wasn’t going to want to take it, but I didn’t plan on giving her a choice in the matter. She needed it for school and Dovie mentioned she couldn’t afford a new one, so she was leaving with the Mac whether she liked it or not. Plus, I managed to dig most of her Math Theory junk out of the wasteland, so I was hoping that would smooth the way into getting her to accept it.

  She answered in a rush and told me she would be off a little after midnight. That was only half an hour away, so I told her I would just wait for her in the parking lot. It would’ve been easier to go inside and have the showdown with her in front of witnesses, but I wanted to see if she had actually listened to me and was going to get an escort out of the restaurant to her car. I didn’t like the idea of her alone in this part of town after dark. Sure, my sister walked the same path, had even taken the bus to and from work, but Dovie had street smarts and could pick out a threat from a mile away. Brysen looked like an ice princess from a fairy tale. I didn’t think she was stupid, but I also didn’t think she had any kind of clue what really lurked in the shadows and the dark.

  The front door of the restaurant opened and Brysen’s superblond hair glinted off the glass doors. She had on a tight T-shirt and a short skirt, and obviously hadn’t bothered to change after her shift. A tall Latin guy was walking next to her. She was laughing at something he said and tossed her head back. She really was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. There was just something so easy about her, so effortless, that it made my heart thud heavy in my ears. She put her hand on her escort’s arm and pointed to where the Mustang was sitting. The guy nodded at her, bent down to kiss her on the cheek, and turned around to walk back inside.

  Brysen started walking toward me, so I kicked open the car door and rose to my feet. I don’t know where the headlights came from, don’t know how I missed another car idling in the parking lot, but the next thing I knew, there was a squeal of tires, the smell of rubber burning, and a sedan barreling right at her. I saw her go still as I broke into a run. There was too much space between where she was and where I was and the car was headed right toward her. I saw her throw her hands up as the engine revved up even higher. She didn’t scream, didn’t make any kind of noise, so I called her name. Her head snapped around to look at me and I hollered, “Move!” at the top of my lungs.

  Right before the impact, right before I had to watch her end up splattered all over the windshield, the guy who had walked her out suddenly hit her from the side in a flying tackle that had both of them careening hard to the asphalt. I heard her shriek when she hit and turned to try and grab the license plate off of the fleeing sedan. I frowned as I reached the huddled pair on the ground because the plates on the car were missing, making this feel very deliberate and not like an accident at all. I nudged the Spanish guy on the shoulder and he looked up at me.

  “Move.”

  He huffed at me and rolled off of Brysen. She peeked up at me from between the fingers she had clamped over her eyes like that was somehow going to prevent her from getting run over by a speeding car. I reached down to pull her to her feet and felt my back teeth click together when I saw the bloody mess her arm and legs were from where she had hit the ground.

  “Oh my God, Ramon!” She broke away from me and threw herself at the other guy. He wrapped her up in a hug and shook his head.

  “That was crazy. A drunk driver maybe?”

  Ramon muttered the words while he looked right at me as I just stared at him. I wanted him to let Brysen go—like yesterday.

  She took a step away from him and cradled her injured arm to her chest with her other hand. “Thank you so much. You just saved my life.”

  “Weird things are in your orbit, chica. You need to keep your head up.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and looked at me pointedly. “Find someone to watch your back.”

  We watched him walk away in silence, and she finally turned and looked at me. I frowned down at her and she lifted up her pale eyebrows to almost her hairline.

  “Why are you looking at me like I did something wrong? It’s not my fault that guy was wasted and out of control.” She sounded huffy, but under it her voice was shaking. She was scared out of her mind.

  I inclined my chin and let out the breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

  “That wasn’t a drunk driver. The car had no plates, didn’t have any lights on until you came out of the building, and it was aiming right for you. If your buddy hadn’t taken you to the ground it would have run you over very purposefully. What in the hell is going on with you?”

  She blinked up at me and bit down hard on her bottom lip. I wanted to replace her teeth with my own.

  “My arm really hurts.” It should. She had a pretty nasty case of road rash and it was bleeding steadily, and half the parking lot was embedded in it.

  “Want me to follow you home so you can clean up?”

  She shook her head vehemently “no” and asked in a whisper, “Can you just take me somewhere so I can wash it out? I don’t want my sister or my mom to see me like this.”

  One of these days I was going to have to get the entire story of what was go
ing on with this girl. I liked a challenge, but she had passed “challenging” a month ago. Right now she was hovering pretty close to “impossible.”

  “I can run you by my place.”

  She nodded vigorously then looked at her little BMW. “I can’t leave the car. It won’t be here by the time we get back.”

  She made a valid point. I sighed and gave her a once-over. She was a mess and there was no way she could drive a stick shift with one working arm. I put a hand on her uninjured arm and guided her to the Mustang. I opened the door for her and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I waited until the nervous voice on the other end answered before telling Brysen to give me her keys.

  “Aldo?”

  “Yeah?”

  I was probably the last person he wanted to hear from. “You want a break on the two Gs you still owe me on the Alabama game from last weekend?”

  There was a long silence and I saw Brysen look up at me curiously. I just shut the door on her and walked around to the other side of the car. I tried not to be too sad about the fact she was probably bleeding all over my vintage interior.

  “What do I gotta do?” Aldo asked. It was a fair question. No good deed was without a return favor in this world.

  “Black BMW in the parking lot on the corner of Paradise and Loft. I want it at the garage within the next twenty minutes. I’m leaving the keys in it, so if it gets stolen in the next five minutes, I’m adding the car to the total of what you already owe me.” Nothing like a little motivation to get the ball rolling in the direction I wanted it to roll.

  “I’m across town, dude.”

  “I suggest you get unacross town in a big hurry.”

  I hung up on him and walked over to her little car and stashed the keys under the floor mat. It was a risky move, but I knew Aldo didn’t have the cash on hand to pay his debt, so he would make it happen one way or another just to be clear of the debt and my wrath.

  I got back in the Mustang and looked at my passenger in the dark. Her eyes were wide and the pupils were huge in the center. I wondered if I needed to worry about her having a concussion.

  “You okay?”

  She rolled her head from side to side on the leather seat. “No. Nothing’s been okay for a long time.”

  I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. The rumble of the engine was oddly comforting and I saw her shift a little as the blood on her legs started to drip toward the floor mat. I wanted to tell her not to worry about it, but her words were buzzing around in my head like a bunch of angry bees.

  “Why did someone try to run you over in the parking lot tonight?”

  She shot me a sideways look and pushed her hair out of her face to tuck it behind her ear.

  “I don’t know. I also don’t know why I’m getting strange text messages, or getting shot at during parties, or why I’m failing a class that should be a piece of cake, or why I keep making excuses for my parents. I don’t have any clue how it became my responsibility to make sure my sister makes it to adulthood as minimally affected by the nonsense at home as possible. None of it makes sense to me, but it just keeps happening and happening and I don’t have any kind of control of my own life anymore.”

  She sighed and I saw her eyes gleam with shiny, unshed tears. It was probably the most personal, most open, she had ever been in my presence, and I wanted to react, but all I could focus on was the fact she had gotten weird text messages and that she thought the gunshots at the party were somehow related to her. That didn’t line up in any kind of okay direction for me at all.

  “You have someone threatening you, Brysen?”

  Her teeth dug harder into her lip. “I don’t know. I got a weird text after the party from a number I didn’t know, and then Ramon, the bartender who just saved my life, said there was some guy lurking around the restaurant during my shift. I mean I have been known to rub a guy the wrong way when I’ve turned down a date or two, but generally only when they don’t get the hint. It could all be coincidental, but after tonight, I just don’t know what to think.”

  We got to the garage and I used the keypad to get the gates to swing open. As soon as the big metal barriers clanged shut behind us, she finally relaxed. I pulled the car into the bay and shut the door. It was insulating, like being in the heart of a big iron-and-steel box, and when I walked around the car to help her to her feet, I had to make a seriously concentrated effort to keep all the anger and confusion her words had churned up in me in check. I didn’t like women being threatened or feeling fear in general, but considering it was her, and something about her was firmly entrenched under my skin, all of it made me see red.

  She gave me her good hand and I pulled her to her feet. We were chest to chest, her eyes glimmered so enticingly, and it was all I could do not to bend down and pull that gnawed-on lower lip into my own mouth. She was hurt, she was scared, and she was pretending really hard that she didn’t like me at all. None of that stopped my dick from going hard and my nostrils from flaring at her alluring scent.

  “Let’s go get the rocks out of your knee and arm before they cause you more problems than you already have.”

  She nodded jerkily and took my hand so I could guide her up to the loft. I could feel her palm quiver against my own.

  “By the way, did you save my laptop?”

  With all the drama of almost watching her get run over, I had forgotten all about the reason I was waiting for her in the parking lot in the first place.

  “No. It was DOA, but I did get most of your Math Theory shit onto a new hard drive. You’re right; it’s an easy class and you shouldn’t be failing it.”

  She made a light noise behind me and I didn’t bother trying to give her a tour of the place since everything was really in one room and she could see everything I owned in one glance. I took her right to the tiny bathroom and pushed open the door.

  “Great. And the good news keeps on coming.” She sounded so sad, so defeated, it twisted something hard at the center of my chest.

  “I got you a new one.” I gave her a little nudge so I could reach around her to crank on the water in the shower. “I think you should try and rinse out as much of the gravel as you can in the shower first. The water is either the temperature of the sun or of the Antarctic, so you’ll have to pick whichever one hurts less.”

  I leaned back and paused because she was staring up at me with huge blue eyes the color of the summer sky. I could float away and get lost in them with very little effort.

  “You bought me a new computer?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Yeah, and you’re gonna take it and tell me why someone really might have it in for you, and then I’m going to find whoever it is and make them think twice about their current life decisions.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, or to say thank you, but she didn’t get the chance to do either because I got a text from Aldo saying he was out front and needed a way to get the BMW inside the gates. I also decided he had much more to do for me before his debt was going to be wiped clean.

  “Take a shower, Bry. Clean up, and when I get back I’ll help you get the rest of the grit out, wrap you up, and send you home.”

  I was halfway out the bathroom door when she put a hand on my arm and drew me to a stop. I looked down at her tiny, shaking hand and then into her lovely, sad eyes. I was going to strangle whoever was responsible for putting that look there.

  “Race . . .” She trailed off and all I wanted to do was scoop her up and put her somewhere flat and climb all over her. She was hurt, and it was totally inappropriate, but my libido didn’t care. “Why are you doing this? I’m friends with your sister, not you. I’ve never even been very nice to you. Why are you being so helpful?”

  My motivations seemed to be in question to anyone and everyone. It was starting to get old. I reached out a finger and moved the longer, front part of her hair off of her face so I could hook it around the delicate shell of her ear. The action made her shiver.

  “I take care o
f my own, Brysen. Like it or not, that includes you.”

  I stepped away from her as her pretty mouth fell into a little O of surprise. I was getting to the bottom of what was going on with Brysen Carter, and while I was at it, I was kicking down that stupid wall she had erected between us. Like Nassir had said earlier—there was only one way to do things, and that was my way. Whatever she was dealing with, whatever control she was missing in her life, she was about to have all kinds of the worst sort of help getting it back. I just hoped she was ready to give a little so I didn’t destroy both of us in the process of pounding ruthlessly against those shields she was constantly throwing up.

  Chapter 5

  Brysen

  THE WATER BURNED EVERY place on my body where the skin had ripped off. The runoff swirled pink and dingy with leftover parking-lot goo, blood, and grime as it ran over my feet. Race hadn’t been lying, the shower was inferno hot, but it felt nice because I was ice cold on the inside.

  I had no clue what was going on, why anyone would want to hurt me, but there was no trying to explain away the fact that I had almost been run down tonight. Along the way of giving up my life, of trying to take care of my family, it appeared I had managed to upset someone enough that they wanted to hurt me. I never went anywhere, kept my nose clean, and never wandered out of the basic suburban box my life had always existed in, so it didn’t make any sense. It was scary, and I didn’t even know where to start with trying to figure it out. For right now I was going to let the superhot water wash away as much of the blood and aching in my bones as it could, and try not to jump on Race in all his protective and glowering hotness. No one had claimed me as their own in a very long time. Add in the fact he was even more sexy and alluring when he was being threatening and up in arms on my behalf, and my resolve was flickering out like a low-burning wick on a candle.

  He left me a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants Dovie had left behind when she was staying here with him, but I left both of them sitting on the counter next to the cracked sink and just wrapped myself up in a threadbare towel he had tossed haphazardly on the closed toilet. I still needed his help fishing a nice-size rock out of my elbow, and the outside of my knee looked like someone had attacked it with a cheese grater. Cleaning it was going to hurt like a bitch and I was going to be bummed out if I ended up with a gnarly scar. Right now I didn’t feel like I had very much going for me, and it would suck if the one thing I had always been able to fall back on—my looks—was suddenly compromised as well. I stuck my tongue out at my reflection in the mirror and twisted my hands through my hair to wring out some of the water. I looked like hell, but it fit since I felt like hell.