Sinful Suspense Box Set (3 page)

My shoes slid along the mossy ground, kicking up the musty green smell that was uniquely moss. The boulder stood taller than me, and it was at least fifteen feet wide. In fact, to call it a boulder was silly. It was more an extension of the rocky mountain slopes, an outcropping that had somehow skipped the usual ravages of wind and erosion.

I stood and closed my eyes as an evergreen scented breeze pushed against me. Without warning, a jolt of panic shot through me. Suddenly, the breaths I’d been pulling in at a natural pace and depth weren’t enough, and I couldn’t seem to take in enough oxygen. My fingers and face tingled with numbness, and an overwhelming sense of terror froze me to the spot. The donut fell from my fingers and landed icing down on the dirt. I had no explanation for my reaction. A clammy sweat covered my skin. I leaned my hand against the rock to steady myself. The tingling in my fingers moved to my hands and arms and I worried I might pass out.

It was a laugh behind me, a deep, treacherous sounding laugh that shocked me out of the panic attack. I sucked in a long, steadying breath and turned around. Panic turned to fear, and it dawned on me just how alone I was. Only I wasn’t completely alone. The man, the motorcycle rider, was tromping down the slippery, steep trail in his black motorcycle boots and black leather jacket as easily as one might cross a flat, solid floor. His dark hair was shaved close to his head and a mosaic of black tattoos that looked like nothing more than a blur of ink from where I stood covered his neck. The one thing that was clear to me—my beloved guitar, my prized possession, was dangling precariously from his big hand.

He waved the instrument around like a flag above his head. “I wasn’t seeing things.” His unhinged laughter bounced off the surrounding granite cliffs. He stopped a few feet away. I backed up.

My bottom hit the rock. The unexplained panic attack had subsided sharply. Now fear made adrenaline surge through my bloodstream. My gaze flicked in every direction, looking for my escape route, as if I’d been cornered by a hungry mountain lion.

He had dark eyes that were looking at me but seemed to be looking straight through me too, as if there was a conflicting bunch of thoughts going through his head. One thing was sure, he looked dangerous.

His eyes dropped to my legs and back to my face. “Aren’t you something,” he said. “Looks like you just popped out of a magic genie bottle or something.” He licked his bottom lip and grinned wickedly at me. “And I already know what my three wishes will be.” He took another step.

My eyes shot to my guitar. He hung it from his long fingers as if it was a piece of trash to be tossed aside. He was more focused than I would have given him credit for as he seemed to notice where my attention had landed.

He looked at the guitar with surprise, almost as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. He lifted it up and strummed it roughly. The discordant sound sent several critters from the nearby trees and I startled. He laughed again.

“Give her the damn guitar,” an angry voice called from above. Another pair of black motorcycle boots lumbered with preternatural ease down the rough terrain. This man was just as tall but with dark blond hair and facial hair. There was much more emotion in his face. In fact, he had a face that was hard to look away from. He reached the spot where the first man was standing and wrenched the guitar from his hand without a struggle. They were both over six feet tall with imposing, almost threatening physiques that would make any sane man think twice before crossing them.

The second man stepped closer, and instinctively, I took a step back which, from the tiny tilt of his mouth, seemed to amuse him. He had a black plug in each ear and a deep scar lined one side of his perfectly squared jaw, the kind of jaw that made a man undeniably handsome. A ham handed doctor or possibly even a friend or the man himself had done a poor job stitching the gash, yet it didn’t detract from his face.

He stretched his arm out to hand me the guitar. As I reached to take it, our fingers accidentally brushed together and the oddest feeling, a feeling akin to déjà vu, a weird familiarity, pushed the breath from me. His eyes, brown but with flashes of feral gold, met mine for a brief second. It almost seemed as if he’d felt the same thing, but I brushed off the idea as my runaway imagination, a result of the earlier panic attack.

“Don’t you fucking dare turn on that charm, bro,” the first man barked. “I spotted her first.”

The man who had returned the guitar looked back. “She’s not prey, and she’s not for you. Now get your ass back up on your bike.” The first man, the one who seemed to be a few pancakes short of a stack, as my Aunt Carly liked to say, took the time to look me up and down before turning and heading back up to the road.

I was left standing with the second man, a man who looked like trouble just as much as he looked like heartache, deep, unshakeable heartache.

He stared at me for a long, hard moment. His Adam’s apple moved along his throat with a deep swallow. “Christ, you are a goddamned heartbreaker,” he said quietly as if he was just talking to himself. He seemed to shake off another thought. All sense told me I should be afraid to be standing in a deserted ravine with this man, a man whose gaze was now riveted to me, but the earlier fear I’d felt at seeing his friend hike toward me had vanished.

He lifted his hand toward my guitar. I pulled it out of his reach, thinking he’d decided to keep it.

He smiled, but the sorrow behind it seemed to be permanent, as if he hadn’t been happy in a long while. “Relax, darlin’, I’ve got no use for a guitar. Can’t even sing in the shower without scaring the birds outside. I just thought I’d carry it up for you. You look a little out of it, and it’s a harder hike up than down.”

Reluctantly, I handed him the guitar. His fingers once again brushed mine. I was sure it wasn’t just a coincidence because his hand lingered longer than necessary. The way he looked at me made me feel as if I was standing completely naked in front of him. There was a glimmer of amusement in his light brown eyes as his gaze drifted down over my body.

I shifted slightly on my feet. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at all. The opposite, in fact. Just wondering if you’ve got a peace sign or the words ‘make love not war’ tattooed somewhere on that body of yours.”

“I don’t. Sorry if my clothing style amuses you.”

“Nope, I like it.” He motioned with his head. “Come on, Woodstock, follow my steps, and you should be fine.” He turned back toward the makeshift trail.

I stayed close behind him. His height and impressive shoulder span in his black leather jacket made me feel as if I was following a gothic Goliath up the mountain. I scurried behind trying to keep pace with his long legs and confident steps.

He glanced back over his shoulder. The waning sunlight made his eyes nearly glow gold. “What were you doing down there?”

I didn’t answer.

He stopped and turned around. “You lost someone on the curve.” It wasn’t a question. But, as Everly had said, it was common for people to visit this spot.

“Yes.”

He stared at me for a long, drawn-out moment again before turning back around. Up above, a motorcycle roared to life. I hoped that the other man would be gone before we reached the road. He was unsettling, to say the least.

I followed behind my intimidating but intriguing trail guide. My gaze strayed to the mesmerizing movement of his butt and leg muscles beneath his jeans, and I stepped too far near the edge. I gasped as the trail gave way. A terrifying vision of me falling head over heels down into the ravine flashed through my mind. Strong fingers wrapped around my arm. I slipped no farther than a few inches, but my heart raced as if I’d fallen a hundred feet. It was an odd, uneasy feeling I couldn’t shake even moments after both my feet were back on solid ground. He held my arm until I steadied myself.

“Guess you’ll think twice before hiking down here again.” He stepped up to the ledge of flat ground running behind the highway railing. He turned back to me. A rush of recognition went through me that pushed a lump into my throat. Impossible. He was a complete stranger. This was not a man who would just dash out of your memory after meeting him. There was no way I’d ever seen him before. I pushed all my crazy thoughts off as the product of a long, emotional day and my first whole day away from home.

It took me a second to notice the hand he’d lowered to me. I placed my palm on his. It was strong, warm and callused as he closed his fingers around mine. He held my hand as I climbed back over the railing.

It had been shady down in the ravine, but the light on the highway was fading fast. The dusk sky was filling with the velvet gray of the coming night.

His motorcycle was parked a few feet down along the railing. He looked up and down the highway. “How did you get here?”

“I walked from the last bus stop.” My voice sounded shaky and small standing in the majestic mountain setting and in front of this striking man.

His dark brows creased together. “You walked? What’s your name, darlin’?”

“Tashlyn. And I suppose I should thank you for getting back my guitar and getting me out of that ravine safely.”

“My brother wouldn’t have hurt you. He just likes to act before he thinks.” He looked down at the duffle bag at my feet. “Where are you heading?”

“Blackthorn Ridge.”

His scar twitched as he tightened his jaw. “Why the hell are you heading there?” His tone had hardened.

“I’m looking for something.” I wasn’t about to start telling my story to a complete stranger, especially one who looked as if he could break my heart just as easily as he could reach in and rip it from my chest.

His expression grew grim. “You should get back on the bus and head straight back to wherever the hell you came from.”

I stiffened my shoulders, trying hard not to let his harsh words upset me. “I don’t see how that is your business.”

Again, he stared at me a long moment before speaking. “It’ll be dark soon, and you’ve got two miles ahead of you. Want a ride?”

I looked at the bike and the cold, hard gaze of the man in front of me.

“No, thank you. I prefer to walk.”

He nodded and headed back to his bike.

“Thank you again, Mr.—”

The fading light cast a wild gold glow in his eyes. “Name’s Wolfe. Jem Wolfe.” He threw his long leg over the seat of the motorcycle. It rumbled beneath him as he leaned his massive shoulders forward and sped off.

Chapter 4

Jem

The mouth-watering aroma of grilled onions drifted through the broken window in the kitchen. One of the hazards of living right next door to a busy truck stop diner was the constant trail of hunger-producing smells floating through the house. And, since a home-cooked meal was completely foreign to me, I usually ate half my meals next door. Milly, the owner, was one of the few people who didn’t sneer and look the other way when I walked into her business. She had learned to cook in the marines, and she dealt with ornery truck drivers all day so she had a high level of tolerance for
bad elements
like me.

The light in the small fridge was off. Not a good sign. I reached in and my fingers wrapped around a beer. It was piss warm. I shoved it back into the worthless refrigerator. Not drinking wasn’t an option tonight. Especially after the fucked up end to the work day was followed by the unexpected encounter with the impossibly sweet confection standing on the side of the road. Hell, impossibly sweet was a fucking understatement. She hardly belonged on this planet let alone in this shitty, dirt-hole of a town.

I walked out the door and headed across the weed patch to the front house. Almost every piece of property in town had been built with two on a lot, and almost every house was a dilapidated, crumbling pile of stucco and wood. Our place, or the place that my dad had squatted on long enough to take over as his own, was one of the worst.

After I’d come back from my three years on the road looking for a place to belong, any place other than Blackthorn, I’d moved into the back house. There was no fucking way I could stay under the same roof as my dad. Even if his whiskey soaked liver was slowly dragging him to the grave, I still couldn’t stomach the idea of living with him. Dad’s failing health and Dane’s lack of common sense had brought me back to Blackthorn. I knew once the old man kicked, Dane would not survive on his own, or worse, the town might not survive an unsupervised Dane. Not that I gave much of a damn about this town. They’d been judge and jury in my life since the day I was old enough to stand. I’d been born into a family with a tarnished reputation, and that stain had followed me wherever I went and no matter how hard I tried to scrape it off.

Through the shredded screen door, I heard laughter and nearly decided to forget the beer. I stepped inside and ignored Draven and Rocky, Dad’s two sketchy
business
partners, as I walked past the front room to the kitchen. Dad was leaned against the kitchen counter talking quietly into his phone. He looked up as I stepped into the room and quickly walked out speaking so low it was a wonder the person on the other end could hear him at all.

I walked to the fridge, pulled out a cold beer and sat at the kitchen table. A secretive call meant he was about to deal in some shady shit. After all these years, I still had no fucking clue who was holding my dad’s puppet strings, but whoever it was, they had never loosened the hold. I knew Dad and the two clowns leaving their stink on the front room couch dealt in stolen goods, whatever was hot and valuable at the time, but I had never known any more than that. I was thankful he’d kept me out of it. Dane had been more involved when we were younger, running errands and helping move goods, but my dad had soon realized that his loose-lipped son who rarely ever processed any rational thoughts was more of a liability than an asset. I, for one, was glad when he’d pushed Dane out of the business.

Of course, my dad’s fall into the world of black market trade could easily have been blamed on the town. In his teens, he had worked for the lumber mill like everyone else. His dad had left when he was six, but his mom, our grandmother, had been respected in town. After the accidental death of Dad’s high school girlfriend, the town jumped into their usual vigilante mode. They’d decided it was easier to despise him than trust him. No one would hire him. No one would give him the time of day. Any normal person would have taken the hint and left, but even after his mom died of heart failure, my dad, Alcott Wolfe, stuck around town just to spite everyone. Or at least that was what he’d told Dane and me.

Dane’s mom had died of suicide, a drug overdose, when Dane was two and I was still only a flicker of movement in my mom’s belly. My mom had me and then split the town for good, leaving my dad, a man whose parenting skills were right up there with all of his other life skills, in charge of a toddler and a baby.

Even though Dad had been, according to him, a ladies’ man in high school, his tragic track record with women didn’t exactly make him a catch. His despair at having nothing but two boys, including one who wasn’t quite put together in the head and one who found every reason to rebel against him, had grown so great, he’d tried to kill himself.

In the fifth grade, I was sent home early for talking back to the teacher, and I walked in on my dad’s makeshift gallows. He’d climbed up into the rafters in the garage with a rope and jumped off with a noose around his neck. I’d stood there for several seconds wondering if I was just watching some imaginary movie play out in our dusty, cobweb covered garage. His legs were twitching but his face was beet red. He gurgled his last few breaths of air as I raced over to him. Back then, he outweighed me by a good hundred pounds, but I lifted his body up high enough for air to flow back into his pipes. He was out cold for a good hour, and there was no one around to help. I held him up, keeping his windpipe free of rope until my entire body shook with fatigue. The mailman finally passed by with his little cart. He heard my yells. Dad still has the scar from the rope as a reminder. I could never tell if he was mad at me or thankful. I wasn’t completely sure I’d do the same for him now.

Dad walked back into the kitchen, and his two cronies followed. Draven was a few years younger than Dad. He was a beefy guy who was half muscle and half blubber. He wore a long ponytail even though the crown of his head looked like a plucked chicken’s ass, and he always smelled gross, like a mixture of cigarette butts drowned in stale coffee and the harsh gritty detergent he used for cleaning pots and pans at Milly’s Diner, where he worked. I remembered the soap smell from my summer job at the diner. For the longest time, I thought Draven spoke with an accent, but lately I’d determined that he just had terrible speech. He pronounced the letter
a
long and flat making all his words sound like a splat. When he wasn’t working with my dad, he was washing dishes at Milly’s. Jason Rockfield, the other guy, was from a long family of loggers. In his twenties, he’d nearly lost a leg as a chainsaw kicked back at him. He had a major limp that was so bad it seemed most of the time he was just dragging his second leg behind him. Hal, the mill owner, had given him a job moving logs with a tractor, but he’d still kept his side job of running stolen goods with my dad.

I gulped back the rest of the beer and pushed out my chair to leave.

“Stick around, Jem. I’ve hardly seen you this week.” The whites of Dad’s eyes were stained like the walls of a house filled with smokers. It was obvious from his eyes and the sickly pallor of his skin that his liver would be checking out soon. He’d always been one of the biggest, toughest men in town, but he was withering away to a pale yellow shell of his former self. “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been working.” I lifted the beer. “And when I’m not working I’m drinking, playing poker and—”

“And fucking,” Rockfield said with a laugh.

I pointed my beer toward Rockfield to give him credit. “And fucking.”

Rockfield licked his lips. “How’s that little brunette, Annie? Ooh, if I could just have one night with that hot little piece of ass.”

“That’s right, Rocky, just keep those unreachable dreams flowing.” I finished the beer and smacked the can on the table.

Rocky scowled at me as I stood up. I turned to walk out.

“Heard there was some girl out on Phantom Curve,” Dad said to my back before I could step out of the kitchen.

I turned around. “Yep. Just another family member coming to pay respects.”

Dad stared at me as if he was trying to figure out if there was more to it. He’d always had an unhealthy interest in the deaths out on the curve.

I lifted my hand in question. “What?”

He shook his head. “Fuck, Jem, just brought it up. Dane said she was out there all alone, a real pretty girl with a duffle bag like she was traveling through.”

“Well, Dane had on more of his thinking cap than usual then.”

“So?” Draven sat forward with interest.

I raised a brow at him.

“Was she pretty? How’d she look?” he asked, and I could almost see the drool dripping from his mouth.

I thought about the question. The girl had looked at me with round blue eyes peering out from long blonde bangs, and for a second, the rest of the fucking landscape had disappeared and all I could see was her. “Too damn pretty for this place.” I turned and walked out.

Dane was working on the old jeep he’d bought for three hundred bucks. For a guy who wasn’t always thinking straight, when he focused on something mechanical, he was like a brilliant surgeon with a wrench. He straightened from under the hood. He wiped the back of his greasy hand across his forehead and left behind a black streak.

“What happened with that chick? Damn—” He shook his head. “The only place I’ve ever seen a girl like that was in the center of my magazine.” He ducked back under the hood. “Did you get her number?”

“Now why the fuck would I get her number? She was standing in the ravine, not in the middle of a bar.”

“You disappointment me, bro. Never known you to walk away from a pretty girl without a phone number. No matter where you met her.”

I shook my head and leaned my forearms on the edge of the jeep to look down into the engine. “Yeah, well this wasn’t your every day pretty girl.”

“Yep, she was out of his world.”

“Well said, Dane. So are you about ready to breathe life into this monster, Dr. Frankenstein?”

He laughed. “Almost. Hey, Jem, you ever hear from that girl, Kiki? The one who used to send me naked pictures of herself just to piss you off.” Another laugh.

I straightened and scrubbed my hair with my fingers. “Oh yeah, I forgot about her doing that. Kiki was definitely wild, but no, I haven’t talked to her.” The day Kiki and I’d split up to head our own ways was the last time we spoke. It was over by then, and we both knew it. There wasn’t any reason to stay in touch. I’d been on the road for a long time, and I’d met a lot of people. I’d picked Kiki up hitchhiking on the highway. For six months we’d traveled the country on my bike. Her dad had been a successful pool shark, hustling people out of their pocket money, and he’d taught Kiki all his tricks. She’d fill her pockets with the money of the poor duped souls she played, and I’d win cash laying down poker hands. In between, we found motels and shabby rooms to rent and fucked until the bed springs broke. One day we were filling up the bike at the gas station and Kiki walked inside and bought herself a straw hat to shield her from the sun. I knew she was taking off again. She walked over, kissed me good-bye and headed to the highway without looking back. Neither of us had any idea what love was. We’d walked away from each other as easily as two strangers.

“Are you going to head over to Rotten Apples tonight for some brewskies and poker?” Dane asked.

“Might as well. You want to go?”

“Yep. Think we’ll see her?”

“See who?”

“The girl, the magic genie with the blue eyes and the amazing tits.”

“A girl like that doesn’t belong in a place like Rotten Apples any more than she belongs in this town.” I headed back to my house. “We’ll head out in a couple hours.”