The Handler (Noir et Bleu Motorcycle Club #2) (12 page)

I closed my eyes and felt her move to the side. I stepped in the same direction. Her body moved away from me. I stepped closer, then her body moved toward me, and I stepped away. It actually wasn’t that hard. I opened my eyes and smiled.

“See. It’s nice, right?”

“It’s all right.”

The band transitioned into a slow song, and the couples who were dancing all hugged each other tightly. Lincoln stepped forward and pressed her cheek against my chest. I moved my arms and wrapped them around her body. She sighed as we swayed back and forth. If I had known it felt so good to dance with a girl, I would have agreed to dance with Liv one of the hundreds of times she’d asked me to. My heart sped up, and Lincoln probably felt it.

Once the song ended, she didn’t step back. “The food’s here,” I whispered and waited for her to lift her face off my chest. She looked in my eyes for a brief second before she sat back down at the table.

We didn’t talk as we ate. It didn’t feel awkward, but it did feel like there was an intense, unspoken conversation happening between us that neither one of us wanted to acknowledge. We kept the silence going as we left the restaurant and strolled in the dark to the Eiffel Tower. We crammed into the crowded elevator and I had to hug her closely to make room for the bodies. Her eyes met mine, and she didn’t blink for what felt like minutes as we rode up. I finally looked away, but could feel her still staring at me. Once we were at the top, it seemed like everyone else stopped talking, too. It was perfectly silent. We wandered out onto the platform and looked over the edge at the millions of sparkling lights.

“It’s so romantic,” she whispered.

I inhaled and stared at the sky. It started to snow, and I couldn’t help thinking that she was right. A few minutes later, she started to cry.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head and took her glove off to wipe her cheek. “It’s just so beautiful, and it makes me sad to know that you would rather be here with someone else.”

I glanced at her. “I’m glad I’m here with you.”

“But it would be different if you were here with Liv.”

Part of me wanted to be honest and tell her that Liv and I were done, but I worried she would hope our relationship could be more than professional. I didn’t want her to get hurt, so I didn’t say anything.

She glanced at me and wiped her cheeks again. “Sorry. It’s just that I always had this dream that my first kiss would be on top of the Eiffel Tower.”

“That’s cliché. Where was your first kiss?”

“I haven’t had it yet.”

“Oh please!” I nearly yelled and then lowered my voice. “I saw you grinding up on that video shoot. There is no way in hell you haven’t at least kissed a guy.”

“I haven’t.”

I shoved her shoulder playfully. “You are such a liar.”

“Shut up. I am not. I learned the raunchy stuff from watching other videos and movies. I’m an actress, remember?”

“You’ve got to be shitting me. You’re almost eighteen years old, you’re beautiful, you’re famous, and you’re trying to tell me that you’ve never been kissed. I don’t believe you.”

She shrugged. “It’s true.” She took her knit hat off and leaned her head close to the edge. Her hair cascaded forward. “What would you do if this fencing was loose and I squeezed out to jump?”

“Watch you splat. Then call Hal.”

She leaned back and frowned. “You wouldn’t try to catch me?”

“Not if you jumped. I’d try to catch you if you fell.”

“Oh.” She held onto the railing and rocked back and forth. “Do you think it’s weird that a girl who’s almost eighteen hasn’t kissed a boy?”

“Yes. When’s your birthday?”

“In eight days.” She sighed, and her body deflated as if her best day ever just took a nose dive. “I guess we should probably head back before Hal calls the police.”

When she turned, I grabbed the collar of her coat, pulled her in to my chest, and kissed her. She seemed stunned at first, and it took a second before she opened her mouth and kissed me back. Once she did, blood rushed through my veins. She grabbed my neck, and I pushed her against the railing to kiss her harder. She slid her hands to hold my jaw, and I could feel the tremble in her fingers.

Eventually, I leaned back and checked her expression. She appeared to be in shock—her eyes were stuck in a wide open stare, and her mouth locked in the same position it had been in while we kissed. I glanced around at the other people on the platform, then back at Lincoln. She blinked slowly as if her brain was trying to process what just happened. Her expression made me laugh. “There is no way you’ve never kissed a guy before.”

“I swear to God I haven’t,” she whispered.

“Well, then you’re pretty good at it.”

“Really?”

I smiled, glad that her best day ever was saved, and grabbed her hand to lead her back to the elevator. “Let’s go.”

She had a grin plastered across her face for the entire taxi ride back to where the buses were parked. She was still smiling like an idiot when we walked up and found Hal standing in front of our bus talking to the driver. “Oh, thank God. Where have you two been? I called you both like a thousand times.”

“Sorry, Hal,” she said in a dreamy voice and boarded the bus.

“Is she drunk?” he asked me.

I laughed. “No. She just had a really good time.”

Hal patted me on the back in a congratulatory way before walking to his bus. I boarded, and we started rolling as soon as the door closed. Lincoln smiled at me before she went into the bathroom. I stood outside the bathroom door and shouted, “You know that was a one-time thing, right?”

“You kissed me. Tell yourself it was a one-time thing.”

“I just didn’t want your best day ever to end on a sad note.”

“Mmm hmm.” The door swung open, and she poked her head out. “Are you sure you weren’t just a little curious to know what it felt like to kiss me?”

I smiled because I had been more than a little curious, but I covered the grin by swiping the back of my hand across my mouth. “You wanted your first kiss to be on top of the Eiffel Tower, and you only get your first kiss once. I didn’t want you to have to wait until you’re twenty or something to get kissed.”

She smiled in the self-assured way that I’d only ever seen her do on stage in front of an adoring crowd. “Well,” she poked my chest, “just make sure you remember it was a one-time thing, James.” She closed the door, and a minute later, she was singing in the shower. It sounded beautiful.

It felt good to know I made her happy, but that was exactly why I shouldn’t have kissed her. I had no idea how I was going to un-complicate the relationship, and worse, I honestly wasn’t sure I wanted to. I stretched out on my bed to come up with an argument to convince her that keeping the relationship professional was better for both of us. Instead of coming up with a game plan, I fell asleep thinking about the kiss and listening to her voice.

The next thing I remembered was flying through the air. I slammed against the ceiling of the bus. Then I dropped, and my shoulder was driven into the floor. The room tumbled again as if I were in a dryer. I hit my head on the corner of the bed frame. Finally, after another roll, I ended up rammed against the window with debris piled on top of me. There was dead silence.

Chapter Twelve

Blood poured out of a gash above my eye, and I couldn’t move my left arm properly because the pain in my ribs felt like it was stopping my heart. I used my right arm to push the mattress and the lamp off me. “Lincoln,” I called as I looked up at the door—it was where the ceiling should have been. I cupped my hands against the window that was underneath me. All I could see through the glass was what looked like snow and dirt.

I flipped the mattress and stood on it so I could reach high enough to unlatch the door. It took three punches before it gained enough momentum to swing up and open. Lifting myself out of the room and onto the wall of the hallway hurt so badly I had to buckle over to fight off the wave of light headedness and nausea.

“Lincoln!” I crawled along the wall and opened the door to her room. Snow fell in from one of the broken windows. Everything was piled up on the one side, and there was shattered glass sprinkled everywhere like glitter.

I frantically pulled debris off the pile and dug down until I found her. She was contorted and jammed between an end table and the closet. When I picked her up, her body seemed lifeless. Something exploded and knocked me off my feet. Lincoln’s body landed on me. The smoke from the fire entered my nostrils before I felt the heat. It smelled like the night my parents got torched, and I started to gag. It took all my strength, but I rolled over and lifted Lincoln onto my shoulder. The back window was partly smashed, so I kicked at it to make a hole big enough to duck out.

The pavement was icy and I fought not to slip as I crossed to the opposite side of the street. I put Lincoln down on a snow bank and then ran toward the front of the mangled bus to see if the driver had gotten out. He hung from the seatbelt, unconscious. I climbed in through the broken front window and pulled him out. He was close to two hundred pounds, so I had to drag him by the armpits with his heels dragging. I dropped him next to Lincoln and hunched over with my hands resting on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

The bus was flipped backwards and wedged on its side in a ditch. Flames had engulfed the back half of it already. The other buses weren’t anywhere to be seen. “Shit,” I mumbled, then sat in the snow to rest Lincoln’s body on top of mine. She had a faint pulse. I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Hey, you’re okay. Hold on. They’ll be here soon. They should be here soon. Just hold on.” I stared up at the stars, but after what seemed like only a few seconds, they faded as if someone had turned the dimmer switch down.

“Cain.” I heard my name and opened my eyes. “Cain, can you hear me?” The entire back side of my body felt numb. I focused my eyes on the face of the person who was saying my name. It was Hal. “Hey, he’s coming to. Get him into the helicopter.”

Two men lifted me off the cold and strapped me onto a board. There was a restraint across my forehead, and I couldn’t turn my head. I stared up at the sky trying to remember where I was. Snow fell into my eyes, the flakes melted, and the liquid ran down my temples. They slid me into a helicopter and climbed in with me. The lights above were too bright, so I closed my eyes. That’s when I remembered what happened.

Panicked, I tried to sit up, but my head was trapped. A hand pushed my chest to keep me from trying to sit up. “Where’s Lincoln?” I asked and attempted to turn my head.

“You guys were in an accident, and we’re flying you to the hospital.”

“I want to talk to her.” A needle poked into my arm and someone wrapped a blanket over me.

“Just stay still.”

“Is she okay?”

Nobody answered. The only sound I heard was the whirl of the helicopter blades. My eyelids felt heavy, and each time I blinked, it got more difficult to open them again.

I woke up in a hospital room. Hal was talking on the phone nearby. To my relief, Lincoln was sitting on a chair next to my bed, resting her cheek on the mattress, holding my hand with both of hers. Hal paced back and forth near the window. He hung up and looked over. “Hey, kid.”

Lincoln’s head popped up, and she smiled at me. “Morning.”

“Are you okay?” I asked her. My voice was hoarse and didn’t sound like mine.

She leaned to the side and swung her leg up enthusiastically to show me that her ankle was bandaged. “I gashed my leg, bumped my head, and broke a nail.”

“So, you almost died,” I teased.

“Almost,” she joked back, but then her expression turned serious as she gently touched the side of my face. “Apparently, some guy pulled me out of the burning bus and put his own body between me and the snow so I wouldn’t get hypothermic.”

I reached up and squeezed her hand to reassure her I was all right, although I wasn’t positive I was. “What happened to that guy?”

“He got twelve stitches above his eye, he has a minor burn on his leg, his ribs are bruised, and he was hypothermic.” She stood up and leaned over to kiss my cheek. Then she hovered her lips close to my ear and whispered, “He’s my hero.”

Hal’s expression was serious as he watched us from across the room. It was hard to know if it was because he was upset about how close Lincoln had come to being killed, or if he disapproved of how close she had come to me.

I sat up and purposely broke the intimate distance between us. It was too late for professional, but I hoped to at least restore lighthearted bantering between fiends so Hal wouldn’t fire me on the spot. “Don’t get all mushy. I’m not a hero. I was just saving my own ass and stumbled across your body as I escaped out the back window. I draped your body on top of me to keep myself warm. I saved you for totally selfish reasons.”

“Really? Selfish?” Her eyebrow raised to accept my bantering challenge. “Is that why you went back and saved the bus driver, too?”

I smiled because she had me on that point. “I’m not sure why I did that. Is he okay?”

“He has a broken collarbone and a concussion. He’s fine.”

“Why did we crash? Was it the snow?”

Lincoln shrugged and looked over her shoulder at Hal. “Do they know yet?”

He shook his head in a distracted way. “Not yet. The driver might have fallen asleep. They’re investigating.” He read a text on his phone, then turned to face the window and made a call.

“Where’s your necklace?” I asked Lincoln.

She reached up in a panic, feeling for the unicorn charm. She searched around as if it may have fallen off the bed or on the floor. “No,” she mumbled. “No.”

“Linny, we have to go downstairs,” Hal said, not noticing that she was flustered. “They’re waiting for us to do the press conference. Everyone wants to see that you’re all right.” He walked toward the door.

Tears formed as she looked under the chair. “It’s gone.” She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip.

“I’ll get you a new one,” I offered.

She shook her head sadly and squeezed my hand. “Thanks, but it won’t be the same.” She wiped her palm across her cheek. “I’ll be back soon.” She paused at the door, and her eyes met mine. “Seriously. Thank you for saving me.”

“No problem. Taking care of you is what you pay me for.”

Her posture deflated a little as if that wasn’t the response she had hoped for. “Risking your own life might have been a little above and beyond the call of duty.”

“Well.” I winked. “I didn’t want your best day ever to end in death.”

She smiled at the memory of our day in Paris and made a move to leave.

“Hey,” I called as she leaned her shoulder into the door to swing it open. “You do realize I was off duty when the accident happened, right?”

She paused and turned her head to look at me. “Well, thank you even more then.” Her face glowed with a blush as she waved and ducked out into the hall.

The door clicked shut, and I was feeling pretty good until I moved to get out of the bed. My ribs felt like something was still clamped down and crushing them. It took my breath away, so I had to lean with one hand on the bed and gasped until my lungs filled back up. My left leg was obviously the one that had been burned because, when the blood flowed down into it, the throbbing was excruciating. The plan was to find my clothes and get dressed, but I gave up and reclined back down onto the mattress.

Lincoln returned two hours later, and since the hospital food looked like the plastic pretend play food that Huck played with as a kid, she asked her assistant to bring us some edible food from a café. Lincoln’s phone rang as the doctor arrived to examine me. She moved to lean against the wall and talked.

The doctor shone a penlight in my eyes and listened to my heart. “I want to run a few more tests before we discharge you,” he said. He wrote on a chart and then left.

Lincoln cried quietly as she continued to talk on the phone. “No, Mom. I’m fine. Really…it wasn’t them who got to me.” She looked at me and sighed, so I waved for her to come over. She sat on the edge of the mattress and leaned into my hug. “I have plenty of tin foil. Hal ordered extra for the rest of the crew.” She tilted her head to make eye contact with me and smiled. “Cain’s fine. I’ll tell him that you were worried about him, too… I know… I know… Okay, I should probably get going. Don’t forget to take your medications and eat something… The food at the hospital is screened to make sure it’s safe… I hired them myself. Trust me. I love you, Mom… Okay. I’ll see you soon.” She hung up and let out a heavy breath as she sunk against my chest.

“You okay?”

“It’s just so tiring. It’s always the same. Just when I think she’s getting a bit better, she goes back to the same crazy place.” She sighed and handed me her phone. “You’re going to need to call your family. It’s been all over the news that the tour bus crashed. They’ll be worried about you once they find out.”

“My phone was on the bus. Can Hal get me another one?”

“I’ll ask him. You can use this one for now.”

I dialed Huck’s number, but there was no answer, so I left a message telling her I’d call back. “Someone’s going to need to get our passports replaced, too,” I said to Lincoln after I hung up.

“I’ll take care of it.” She lifted her head off my chest and winked. “I’ll be your handler until you’re all better.” She abruptly hopped off the bed and headed toward the door with purpose. “I’ll ask about the passports and be right back.” She returned about twenty minutes later looking proud of herself. She put on a black baseball hat and sunglasses and posed like a tough guy against the wall.

I knew she was mocking me, and it was kind of funny, but I said, “I don’t look like that.”

“Yeah, you do—acting all bad-assed because you hang with bikers.” She crossed her arms and snarled her lip.

“I definitely don’t do that lip thing.”

She laughed and crawled up onto the bed to sit next to my feet. “Well, even without the sneer, I wouldn’t mess with you.”

“If you think I’m bad-assed, you should have met my dad. He could make you piss your pants just by looking at you.”

She reached over and held my hand up to inspect it. “Did he have piano playing fingers like you?”

“No. He could have probably crushed your skull with one hand.”

“Nice.” She released my hand and sat cross-legged. “Were you and Huck afraid of him?”

“I wasn’t exactly afraid of him. I respected him. Huck had no reason to be afraid. He was different around her. He treated her like a baby doll.”

“Is Huck her real name?”

“No, it’s actually Finn. He always called her Huckleberry, so everyone else did, too.”

She handed me the phone. “Do you want to try again to get ahold of her?”

“Um, yeah. Thanks.”

Huck started crying when she heard my voice. “I thought you were dead,” she was eventually able to choke out.

“I’m fine.”

“They said on the news that the bus rolled over two times and burst into flames.”

“It wasn’t that bad. Everybody’s fine.”

“You’re lying. I can hear it in your voice.”

She always could read my tone better than anyone else. It wasn’t exactly a lie, though. I was downplaying the seriousness so she wouldn’t worry. “Huck, I’m fine. I got some stitches on my forehead, and there’s a bandage on my leg. That’s it.” Lincoln winked and squeezed my hand before she leaned over to get an iPad out of her bag.

“Was it scary to flip over inside the bus?” Huck asked.

“I don’t remember.” I spoke with as much nonchalance as I could to calm her down. “I was asleep when it happened.”

“You’re lying.”

“I swear to God I was asleep. I’m fine. How’s school.”

“I hate it. Don’t try to change the subject. By the way, did you and Liv break up?”

“Yeah.”

“You should still call her to tell her that you’re all right.”

Huck had always liked Liv because they did girly things together like spa days and shopping trips. I assumed she’d be upset, but she didn’t sound that surprised. “Maybe you could call her for me.” Lincoln glanced at me, frowned as if she knew I was talking about Liv, then she looked back down and scrolled through something on the iPad.

“Did you have a fight because of what you did in those pictures?” Huck asked.

“What pictures?”

Lincoln winced.

“The ones of you and Lincoln in Paris.” Huck’s voice perked up with excitement. “The pictures where you look like you’re her boyfriend. God, I wish Digger would let me use my real name at school. I can’t even tell anyone that my brother is hooking up with Lincoln Todd.”

“Hooking up? Where’d you learn that term?”

Lincoln’s cheeks turned scarlet, and she avoided eye contact with me.

Huck giggled. “I’m fourteen, Jamie. I hate to break it to you, but kids in my grade hook up.”

“Jesus.” I exhaled and ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah, well, you’d better not be hooking up with anyone. And that’s not what’s going on here, so I don’t want you talking like that.”

She chuckled. “What do you want me to call it? A romantic rendezvous? A passionate love affair? Steamy sex?”

“It’s a job. That’s it.”

Lincoln’s glance shifted in my direction, but she didn’t make eye contact. She tucked her hair behind her ear and then got off the bed.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Huck’s voice was so animated I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Every guy on the planet probably wishes he had your job.”