Craving Redemption (5 page)

Fuck, I have absolutely no problem with Mexicans. I don’t. I’ve met a lot of different Hispanic people that I liked a fuck of a lot. My half-brother is even a part of the Jimenez gang, which is part of the reason Slider sent me down there in the first place. Dear old Dad spent some time in California about twenty years ago, and when he came back he left a pretty little Mexican girl brokenhearted and knocked up. He took care of her until he died, and he took me down to see my brother Deke whenever he had the chance. We didn’t grow up close, but he was my brother—it was as simple as that. I had his back and he had mine.

So when we started having some payment issues with the Jimenez gang, Slider thought it would ease some minds if I went down to collect the payment. It wouldn’t look like we were trying to strong-arm them, even if that
was
our intention. It was a friendly reminder from the brother of one of their members; a warning to get us what we wanted.

Everything had gone down relatively well if I didn’t count the president of the gang beating his chest and trying to exert his dominance whenever I was in the room. The man was like five-seven and had to weigh less than a buck-sixty. I could’ve snapped him in two, but instead, I was fucking diplomatic and did my job. I wasn’t going to get pulled into some bullshit fight when my entire club was a good eighteen-hour ride away.

I had Tommy Gun and Dragon with me as back up, but Dragon was a fucking prospect and I’d known Tommy since birth and he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. I trusted them to have my back, but I wasn’t about to put them in a situation where they would need to—it was the first meet I was in charge of, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.

I thought I was free and clear. I’d been stoked to be headed home with money in my saddle bags, and I was looking forward to the long ride with nothing to worry about but piss breaks and truck stop food.

When El Presidente asked me to stop by and handle some business with Jose, saying he had a quarter of the money they owed in his house safe, I was irritated as hell, but I went anyway. Apparently, Jose had been dealing for the gang, and he’d just come into a shitload of cash, but he hadn’t yet paid up. It was supposed to be just a quick stop on our way out of town, but when we pulled up to the house I
knew
shit was going to go down.

The dude had a fucking house full of people when I knew he’d been told we were coming. I didn’t know if he was feeling squirrely, or if he just didn’t care who knew he was doing business, but I wasn’t pleased with either scenario. It was business, and I was getting tired as hell of these fucking dicks acting like they were hot shit and not giving us the respect we deserved.

We parked our bikes by the road, and my brother Deke pulled in behind us in his little rice-grinder car. I wasn’t sure why Deke felt the need to follow us, but the hair stood up on the back of my neck when he told me he was coming along for the ride. I never ignored that feeling, so I just slapped him on the back before I climbed on my bike. I met Dragon’s eyes before we took off and I knew he was feeling it, too. Something was off.

The house was as full as it appeared from the outside, with people everywhere when we walked inside. I kept my guard up, but lucky for me, the dick I was looking for was standing in the entryway when we showed up. He had his arm around a woman who seemed to be having a hard time standing up, but I just barely registered her as I took everything in.

I didn’t see her as a threat, but I should have.

I glanced around the house and looked back at Jose just as the woman dropped her head back against his shoulder and I got a good look at her face. She was gorgeous. Nice tits, tan skin, and light blue eyes; a weird mix that seemed to work on her. But those weren’t the things about her that were the most apparent. She wasn’t a woman; she was a girl. Her cheeks were still a little chubby, and when her mouth went slack I could see braces in her mouth with little purple rubber bands. It made my stomach clench that Jose, who was at least ten years older than me, was groping the girl, but it wasn’t my problem, so I deliberately looked away from her face even though it fucking killed me to do it.

There was something about her. I’d been around a lot of bitches in my life, whores and good girls, but this girl was different. She didn’t fit the situation. She was like a colored puzzle piece mixed in with a black and grey puzzle. It bugged the shit out of me—but I couldn’t let it break my focus. Whatever she was doing there had nothing to do with me.

I started talking to Jose, telling him we had business to discuss, when four of his boys showed up from somewhere in the back of the house. As soon as they were close, Jose dropped the chick he was holding and I knew shit was going to get bad.
Really bad.
Three of his boys were packing, and what had seemed like an easy pick-up suddenly turned into something I hadn’t seen coming. I was trying to assess the situation, wondering why Jose was being an idiot instead of just handing over the money, when the girl he’d been holding crawled across the floor and grabbed a hold of my leg.

It only took a second.

I looked down at her when she grabbed a hold of my thigh, her fingernails scratching across my jeans, and that was enough of an opening for the fuckers. The pulled their pieces, and before I could say a word, started firing.

When people are shooting at you, it isn’t like the fucking O.K. Corral. You don’t stand there and shoot back and hope you don’t get hit. You get the fuck down and
then
you shoot back. So that’s what I did. I dropped hard on top of the girl as I reached for my piece in the back of my waistband.

When all was said and done, there were people all over the house fucking screaming and running, but Jose and his men were dead. My boys may have been new—or in Tommy’s case, completely fucking stupid—but they’d done their job. I climbed to my feet as people rushed out the back of the house and started to step toward the front door, but the look on Dragon’s face stopped me. He was staring at the floor, and that’s when I remembered the girl.

She was completely out of it, sprawled out on the hard wood. She wasn’t wearing revealing clothes, nothing that a normal teenager wouldn’t wear, but the way she was sprawled out on the floor made her short shorts and tank top look fucking obscene. Her legs were spread wide with the legs of her shorts gaping, one of her arms was crossed over her chest and the other was close to her face. With the way her hair covered everything from the neck up, it almost looked like she was sucking her thumb. She looked so goddamn young that I felt like I’d been punched in the throat.

I couldn’t leave her there like that—alone and vulnerable to any dick that came across her.

So I took her with me.

Getting her on a bike wasn’t going to happen, so I stuffed her into the back of my brother’s car before we headed to a motel by the freeway. We’d been staying further south, but after that mess with Jose I wasn’t going to stay where we’d been. The gang had to have known within minutes what had gone down and I wasn’t about to be ambushed for something that wasn’t my doing in the first place. Their boy had decided he felt froggy and was going to stiff me the twenty-five grand he owed us.
Bullshit
. He took the first shot—fucking bad luck for him that he didn’t make the last one.

I wasn’t thinking straight. The adrenaline was flowing, and I was trying to figure out why I hadn’t just left that girl behind, so when we got up to the motel room, I was blindsided by the fact that I actually had a teenage girl in our room and my brother was pacing the floor, mumbling to himself. When the shit hit the fan, I hadn’t thought about what that would mean for Deke—he’d been put in a really bad position.

“Deke, man, follow us up. I can get you a meet with Slider, no worries,” I reassured him, but he wasn’t interested.

I tried to convince him to leave it all behind, but he wasn’t having it. He seemed to be under the impression that he wouldn’t have any problems, and he was a grown-ass man, so I wasn’t going to argue. If he wanted to stay, that was on him. Even though I was older by a little less than a year, I couldn’t tell him what to do. He’d been taking care of himself for a hell of a long time.

We were arguing about what had gone down, and the fact that I had a chick we didn’t know in my bed, when the girl woke up.

Everything after that was like some sort of fucked up version of
The Twilight Zone
that I couldn’t escape. She was as young as I’d thought when I saw her with Jose, but it wasn’t just that. She had to be around seventeen or eighteen in age, but Christ, in experience?  She was a ten-year-old. She had no sense of self preservation and she thought I was some kind of hero for saving her ass from somewhere she shouldn’t have been in the first place. I knew she was young, goddamn, but when she climbed into my lap I felt myself growing hard underneath her.

It’s not like I was much older than she was, I was only twenty, but I’d stopped fucking girls her age when I was fourteen. There was a huge gap in life experience that made anything I wanted from her impossible, which was proven when she told me she had to call her grandmother and spoke to her like she knew she was going to be in trouble. When we introduced ourselves to her, she wrinkled her nose in confusion and I could tell the wheels were turning in her head as she gave us her name. For a split second, I thought she might have given us a fake one, but I could tell by looking at her face that she hadn’t—and she was kicking herself for it.

I made plans to meet the boys about an hour north of San Diego and took Callie to her grandmother’s. There was nothing else I could do. She was fucking jailbait, and even if she wasn’t, there was no way she was staying the night in my motel room. The girl had fucking braces on her teeth. She came from an entirely different world.

When I got her home, I thought I’d feel relief, but I didn’t. She’d spent the entire ride rubbing up against my back, with her little hands clenching and releasing my chest like a kitten, and her not quite innocent actions had me hard as a rock. I wanted her. Bad.

I’d programmed my number into her cell phone back in the motel room, but I didn’t see any reason why she’d ever need to call me. So when her grandma ordered me in for food, I took her up on her offer. I told myself that I just wanted some home cooked food, that I didn’t want to ride with my jeans strangling my dick, that I wanted to make sure she was okay from whatever she’d been given earlier in the night—but none of those reasons were the truth. I just didn’t want to leave her yet.

She was so sweet—the way she looked at her Gram, the way she served up my plate without even asking what I wanted, and the way she smiled with her mouth closed, trying to hide her braces. I’d never been around sweet like that before—I fucking loved it. She didn’t talk a whole lot, but I figured that might have been because of whatever she still had in her system. Her Gram was watching her with an eagle eye while we sat at the table, but Callie didn’t seem to notice. By the time we were done eating, she’d passed out at the table.

It fucking killed me to leave her there, but I knew that her Gram would take care of her and it really wasn’t any of my business. I had gotten her home safe and sound and I’d look like a jackass if I hung around too long—not to mention the fact that I probably had forty Mexican guys gunning for me.

I needed to get the fuck out of there before I did something stupid and got myself killed.

Chapter 6

Callie

I woke up alone in Gram’s bed to bright afternoon sunlight shining through the lacy white curtains. My head was throbbing, and my mouth tasted like something had crawled in there and died. I tried to roll over, but gave up with a groan when my entire body protested the movement. It only took a few seconds for me to go from wondering why I was so sore, to remembering
exactly
why I felt like shit.

My mind raced over the events of the night before, and I was completely baffled by everything that had happened. Shit like that just didn’t happen to me. I rarely got into trouble, and when I did it was for normal things, like talking back to my parents or staying out past curfew. I couldn’t have imagined the night before if I’d tried.

I was busy sifting through my memories, trying to catch the elusive ones, when Gram came into the bedroom to wake me up.

“Oh, good. You’re up. I’m heading over to Aunt Lily’s and figured I’d drop you off at home on my way. How you feeling?” she asked me as she walked around the room, pulling on a sweater and a pair of tennis shoes.

“Eh. Like I got ran over by a truck. My mouth is dry like the freaking Sahara.”

“Yeah, well getting drugged by some piece of trash will do that,” she told me with a glare, sitting down beside me on the edge of the bed. “I know you were just having fun, Callie, but crap like that has a way of getting out of hand. I took care of things for you last night, but something like this happens again and I’m calling your dad myself. You put me in a hell of a position.”

I felt like shit when she was through talking, but had to hide my smile at her subtle guilt trip.
Sneaky old lady
. I forced my achy body into a sitting position and wrapped my arms around her waist, cuddling up to her as I apologized. “I’m sorry, Gram. I won’t ever do something like that again. I don’t want to get you in trouble with Dad.”

She wrapped her arms around me and rubbed my back for a minute while I relaxed into her, knowing I was forgiven. It was amazing what one simple hug could do to soothe us both. Before I could grow too comfortable or fall back asleep, she pulled back, jarring my throbbing head that was resting on her shoulder.

“Callie, I love you, baby, and we’re fine … but your breath smells like shit. Go brush your teeth,” she grumbled with a wrinkled nose and a smile.

I loved my Gram.

I pulled myself out of bed and went to brush my teeth, sliding by Gram at the kitchen counter and rubbing her back lightly as I went. She was making sure her “billfold” and keys were in her purse, just like she’d done every single time we’d left the house for as long as I could remember. She always checked and re-checked her purse for everything she needed and it had been like a treasure trove of goodies when I was younger. There was always a little notebook and pen if I was bored at the grocery store, a hair tie if she needed to pull back my hair, or a Band-Aid if I scraped my knee. Gram’s purse could solve any problem, no matter where we were.