Boxed Set: Steel: Blacthorne MC Romance (20 page)

W
e stepped
out of the shower, and Nick handed me a towel. As I dried myself off, I couldn’t help thinking about Nick’s future. I wanted more than anything to ask him to leave all of this behind.

He’d already been shot once, it was only a matter of time before he got badly hurt again… or worse.

But I hesitated. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to take over his life.

“How often do things like this happen?” I asked.

“Huh? What do you mean?” Nick asked as he rubbed his hair with a towel.

“Things went wrong today. Chad had blood all over him. A couple of weeks ago you got shot… Don’t you ever think about getting away from this life?”

Nick’s jaw clenched, and shutters seemed to come down over his eyes as he blanked me.

He turned away, giving me a fantastic view of his shoulders, narrow waist and tight ass.

I licked my lips, but then took a deep breath. What I wanted to say was important. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by his perfect body.

“You could leave with me.”

There. I’d said it. I’d admitted I wanted him to be with me properly. And why shouldn’t he? We could start over in New York. It was a big city and no one would bother us there. We could have a
normal
relationship.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could see from the tension in his shoulders and the way he held himself that my words had generated some kind of reaction.

I just didn’t know whether it was a good reaction or a bad one.

“We could go back to New York, and we could live in my tiny little apartment for a while … just until we got sorted,” I said. “You could find a job, and then we could get a bigger place…” I was aware that I was babbling, so I clamped my lips together.

It was hard waiting for his reaction… waiting for him to reject me.

When Nick turned around, his face was devoid of expression. I couldn’t tell if he was happy, sad, pissed or bored.

He shook his head.

Crap. I was rushing things.

We’d only known each other for a couple of weeks and here I was telling him we should move in together. No wonder I had freaked him out.

“I mean, we don’t have to move in together, obviously. And if things don’t work out between us, that’s okay. But you could have a fresh start, Nick. You could get away from all this.”

Nick wrapped a towel around his waist, drawing my eyes downwards towards his washboard abs.

He sighed. “When are you going to realize, Ella, that I’m not fucking around? You have some idealized version of a man you’re daydreaming about. It’s not me. I’m not cut out for a life like that.”

I stepped forward. “I know it’s a big decision. I’m aware you’ve done some bad things in the past, but Nick, I know deep down you’re not bad. Please, come with me. I think I’m falling in —”

“Stop!” Nick held up his hands and shook his head.

My heart was pounding in my chest as I realized I’d been about to tell him I loved him.

Crap. Where had that come from?

His expression was conflicted as he shook his head again and looked down at the ground.

He wouldn’t look in my eyes as he said, “I don’t want to go with you.”

I clutched my towel against my chest and took a step back. His words stung as if he’d slapped me.

“I thought…”

“That’s the problem, Ella,” he said. “You think you know me, but you don’t. If you did, you’d know that I could never leave.”

Nick pushed past me, leaving the bathroom. I stood there shellshocked.

Maybe I had been a little naive, but did he have to be so cruel?

I felt tears well up in my eyes. I blinked them away angrily. I didn’t need this crap in my life.

I’m not sure how long I stood motionless in the bathroom, reeling from what Nick had said, but when I finally went out to the bedroom to get my clothes, Nick was already dressed and sitting on the bed.

He looked up at me with a mixture of emotions in his eyes, but I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, Ella. The last thing I want to do is hurt you.”

“Well, you
have,
” I said, my voice brittle. I glared at him as I reached down to pick my jeans up off the floor.

“You’re an asshole,” I said, struggling not to cry.

Nick bowed his head. Then he looked at me and sighed. “I think you’re finally getting to know me.”

N
ick left
to go and get something to eat, but I had no appetite.

Truthfully, I thought a little time apart would do us good. I didn’t understand how I could have been so wrong about him. I’d always been a good judge of character in the past.

But maybe he was right. This whole situation had been an emotional roller coaster, and because he’d been kind to me, I’d clung onto him, perhaps giving him character qualities he didn’t have.

I paced the bedroom, feeling trapped and miserable. I didn’t feel like I could think straight. The room felt so claustrophobic.

I longed to walk amongst crowds on the New York streets. I wanted to go shopping, meet friends for a drink. I wanted to be free. I hated this.

I was still pacing the bedroom, fruitlessly trying to rack my brains as to how I’d completely misread Nick’s feelings when there was a knock at the door.

My first thought was that it was Nick coming back to try to apologize again.

I opened the door and saw the waitress from last night. She looked just as slender as she had the other day. She wore a pair of skinny jeans, which were baggy around her knees and ankles, completely swamping her.

She looked over her shoulder and down the corridor as if she was afraid we were being watched.

“Can I come in?” she asked urgently.

I stepped back to let her inside the room, wondering what she could want.

She pulled the cell phone from her pocket.

“Oh, that’s kind of you.” I said, thinking that she’d come to lend me her phone again. That simple act of kindness touched me.

But instead of handing me the phone, she gripped my hand.

“I tried to find you earlier,” she said. “But I couldn’t find any of you. I was scared you’d already left.”

I shook my head, feeling confused. “We just went into town for a few hours.”

The girl nodded and then nervously licked her lips. “There was a phone call for you.”

“For me?” I looked at her puzzled.

She nodded eagerly. “They must have gotten the number when you called using my phone.” She waggled her cell phone in front of me. “Anyway, they said they would call back at three o’clock, which is in five minutes.” She checked her watch and then pressed the phone into my hand. “So I’ll leave it with you and come back for it in about half an hour. Is that okay?”

I stared down in disbelief at the cell phone “Are you sure it was a call for me?”

She nodded. “Definitely. They asked for Ella. That’s you, right?”

I felt the excitement building in my chest. “Yes, that’s right. Was the person who called female?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

My God. It must be Claire. It had to be
.

“Was it Claire?” I asked, scanning her face for any signs that she might not be telling me the truth.

She gave a shrug. “They didn’t give a name.”

I bit down on my lip, thinking hard. It had to be Claire. Who else could it be?

“Well, I’d better get back to work now. I’ll leave the cell phone with you for now, okay?”

I smiled at her and resisted the urge to hug her. “Thank you so much! You have no idea how much this means to me.”

She returned my smile. “I’m glad I could help.”

I sat on the bed and put the phone on the nightstand after she left the room. The time on the screen of the phone said that it was now fourteen fifty-eight, so just two minutes to go.

My gaze shifted from the phone to the door. I really hoped Nick didn’t return before I got this call.

I wrapped my arms around myself, tapping my foot nervously, waiting for the cell phone to ring.

Fourteen fifty-nine.

Why did time pass so slowly when you were anxious for something? I tried to take a deep, calming breath but it didn’t do much good.

Then, at three o’clock on the dot, the cell phone rang, and I snatched it up with a trembling hand.

“Claire?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a voice I didn’t recognize said, “It’s not Claire. I got this phone from Claire, who asked me to pass on a message to a girl called Ella if she ever rang.”

Disappointment flooded me, and for a moment, I couldn’t think straight.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“Yes, sorry. I’m still here. This is Ella. What message do you have for me?”

“Okay, it’s a little weird, but hopefully it will make sense to you. Basically, she said to let you know she is in Nevada, and she said you can’t tell anyone what you guys saw that night. She also told me to call you
Tinker Bell
… I guess that must mean something to you, right? Unless she was just kidding around.”

My mouth felt so dry I couldn’t speak.

I swallowed. “Is that it? That can’t be all she said. When did Claire give you the phone?”

“Three days ago.”

Three days ago.
That meant that Claire was alive, or at least she had been three days ago.

“The Tinker Bell thing… she was messing with me, right? Or was it some kind of codeword?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Thank you for the message.”

Tinker Bell wasn’t a codeword exactly. It was the pet name my dad used to call me. Hardly anyone knew that, but I had told Claire. She’d used it because she wanted me to know the message was really from her.

After I hung up, my hands were shaking and my heart was still racing.

This was the best news I could have received.
Claire was okay
.

But even though I knew she was alive somewhere in Nevada, it still didn’t explain what she was still doing here.

Then there was the fact she said not to tell anyone what we’d seen…

Did that mean she remembered what happened that night?

It must do. She was there with me, and she saw everything that happened, too.

A
fter my mind
had stopped racing, and I’d managed to get my emotions under control, I shoved the cell phone into the pocket of my jeans and left the bedroom.

I needed to get the phone back to the girl behind the bar before anybody noticed I’d had it, especially Nick or Jackson. She’d promised to come back for it in half an hour, but I couldn’t risk waiting for her.

I didn’t want Nick coming back and finding me with the cell phone.

I saw the girl behind the bar and gave her a thumbs up sign as I slid her cell phone between two trays of drinks.

She winked at me, and I quickly left the bar before Nick or anyone else could see me.

I intended to go back to the room and have some alone time. I needed to think this whole thing through.

But I didn’t get very far.

I’d only taken a couple of steps down the dark corridor back towards the bedroom when I felt a hand clamp down over my mouth.

It was so sudden that I didn’t even react straightaway.

The next thing I felt was some kind of rough material pulled over my head, like a hood. When the material was wrapped around my neck, panic finally kicked in, and I started to struggle.

What the hell was happening?

I felt myself hoisted into the air, and then the thick muscle of a man’s shoulder pressed against my midsection.

Oh, God
.

Someone was carrying me over their shoulder. How could they do that in broad daylight?

I struggled and tried to scream, but my voice was soft and indistinct. When they’d put a hand over my mouth they must have put some kind of tape over it, too.

I heard a voice telling me to calm down and everything would be okay, but it was strangely muffled.

My attempts to wriggle free made me slide a couple of inches off the man’s shoulder, but then I felt a large hand grip my ass and haul me back into position.

And then the thought hit me…
It had to be Nick
.

He’d promised he would get me out of there within a week. Was this his plan?

Surely, his plan didn’t need all of this. If he’d told me what he’d intended to do, I would have gone with him willingly.

But maybe he thought I would still be mad at him.

I felt the heat from the outdoors hit me, and then I heard the crunch of my captor’s feet over the gravel, and I guessed we had to be in the parking lot.

Within a few seconds, I slid from the man’s shoulder and was bundled down onto a soft surface. If I had to guess, I thought I must be on the back seat of a car or truck.

I heard a muffled voice telling me to relax again. But that really wasn’t easy with a freaking hood tied around my head.

My hands were still free though, so I reached up and tried to yank it off, but then I heard a sharp voice telling me to stop.

It had to be Nick. So I obeyed and tried to relax my breathing, as I could only breathe through my nose, and I was in danger of hyperventilating.

I heard the engine start up with a rumble, and the vehicle I was in pulled away.

Jesus. Why would Nick do this? Didn’t he know this would freak me out?

It seemed like we’d been driving for ages when finally the vehicle stopped.

I laid there perfectly still, straining to listen and pick up on any clues.

I felt the vehicle lift as my captor got out of the front seat. I heard the door click open and then felt the warm heat of the Nevada air hit me.

I started to tremble.

It had to be Nick. It had to be.

Two strong hands clasped my shoulders and pulled me upright, into a sitting position.

The tie around my neck was loosened, and the hood was whipped off, I blinked at the brightness.

The sun was so dazzling it took me a moment to register what I was seeing, but then I gasped.

It wasn’t Nick who’d taken me. It was Jackson.