Welcome to Sugartown (20 page)

“
What the
hell makes you think she’d be okay after something like
that?”

“
She told
you?”

“
Yeah,
dumb-arse, she told me. She tells me everything. Including the fact
that she was about to cash in her V-card tonight for your sorry
arse.”

He sighs and
squats down on the driveway, lacing his hands behind his head. “I
gotta see her. You gotta let me talk to her.”

“
No. You’re
lucky I’m not calling Bob, you shithead.” She sighs and grasps the
collar of his jacket, yanking his face back to hers. “You have to
go home and let her deal with everything she’s seen tonight. If she
wants to talk to you after she’s had time to absorb it all, then
Ana will come to you. Until then, you back the fuck off and leave
her the hell alone.”

“
Yeah, okay,”
he mutters, but I wonder whether he’s really absorbing anything she
just said. He runs a hand over his face, hangs his head and stares
at the pebbled drive. He looks so lost standing there, like a
little boy. I lean forward in the darkness and, for a minute, I
swear he sees me because he stiffens and then lets his head fall
back with a shaky exhalation.

“
Holly,” he
says as she’s walking away, “how’s her head?”

“
Her head is
fine, Elijah. It’s probably feeling clearer than it has in weeks.”
She backs up towards the house and says, “It’s her heart that’s
been broken into itty bitty little pieces.”

Chapter
Seventeen

Elijah

For an entire
week Ana has avoided me. She’s disappeared every time I set foot
inside the diner, so every time I’d be left with her very scary,
tiny best friend breathing down my neck until I walked right back
out that door. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts, though
I’ve been blowing up her phone for days. I’m convinced she isn’t
going to talk to me, ever again.

When I’d set
foot inside the garage Monday after the accident, Bob had bailed me
up against the wall and hit me square in the face for driving like
a fool. Apparently, Ana had given him the same version of the story
as I’d given the nurses at the hospital. I don’t know why she was
protecting me but I knew if Bob ever found out what had really
happened on that back road, I’d be a dead man.

Bob had lived
the life; he’d escaped with his balls and his family intact. Unlike
Ana, he’d known about my affiliation when I first came to work for
him. He knew why I’d been sent to prison, he knew about the events
that led to my release, and he also knew I was running as fast and
as far away from that life as possible. If he knew I’d let that
shit come within a foot of his daughter, of his family, he’d waste
no time handing me over to the Angels, and I wouldn’t blame
him.

After it
became apparent Ana wouldn’t see me, Bob had pulled me aside to
pump me for more info regarding our wild Saturday night. I’d fed
him some bullshit about being a stupid insensitive male and he’d
laughed it off, and said if I didn’t try to pull his daughter out
of the bitch-fit mood she’d been in since she dumped my sorry arse
he’d dock my pay. I’m not fucking kidding. The bastard would do it,
too.

That’s how I
wound up here at ten am on a Saturday, watching Sammy’s Little
Rugby League team dominate their competition. I would have been
barracking from the sidelines but his sister doesn’t know I’m here
yet, and I don’t want to frighten her off before I get the chance
to speak to her.

When I sidle
up beside her I cup my hands over my mouth and shout out to my
little mate anyway. “GO SAMMY!”

Several
parents give me dirty looks and I feel like flipping them off, but
I know that won’t help my case with Ana so I ignore them and wave
at the awkward six-year-old who’s waving madly at me from the
middle of the field.

“
You
shouldn’t have done that,” Ana mutters. “He’ll be distracted now
that you’re here.”

“
Can I talk
to you?”

“
I don’t
think that’s a good idea.”

“
Come on,
baby girl, you gonna shut me out forever?”

“
Maybe.” She
looks at me with so much hatred that my heart hurts. Then she drops
her voice to a whisper, “It depends how long it takes me to get rid
of the image of you slaughtering a man inches from my
face.”

I glance
around. No one was close enough to hear that, they’re all focused
on the game, but I’m not taking any more chances out here in the
open. I grab her elbow and cart her off to the brick building
housing the public toilets. Even from the outside they smell like
shit, and there’s graffiti everywhere and a couple of condom
wrappers littering the ground. I press her against the wall. “What
the fuck is going on with you, Ana?”

“
What’s going
on with me? I had a gun held to my head last week. I had a guy
trying to rape me because I was caught in the wrong place with the
wrong person, and you wanna know what the fuck is wrong with
me
? What the fuck is
wrong with
you
,
Elijah? Or should I say Ethan?”

I feel myself
frown at the mention of the name. I hate the sound of it on her
tongue, like it belongs to another man. In a very real way, it
does.

“
Oh, you
didn’t think I heard that part, did you?”

“
Ethan Carr
is my birth name, I changed it when I got out to help me disappear.
It’s awfully fucking hard to pretend you don’t exist when you’re
still carting around ID with your family name on it.”

“
I don’t
understand why you’d have to disappear in the first place? Why were
you sent to prison? And why did those men think you were a
rat?”

“
You wanna
know what got me sent away?”

“
Yeah, I
wouldn’t mind knowing the reason why I was almost killed last
week.”

“
Before Kick
and I could patch in we had to make it through our initiation. Some
DA had information that the club needed. We had to go and rough her
up for the info—”

She narrows
her eyes. “Rough her up?”

“
Assault,
Ana.”

“
You beat a
woman because your
club
told you to?”

“
We were
supposed to. None of it sat right with me, or Kick, but we had
people waiting outside to make sure we’d go through with it. Once
we entered the house we were supposed to tie her up and make her
talk, then the boys would come in and take care of the rest. But we
tripped some kind of alarm. She was sleeping with a cop who drew on
us. I bought Kick some time to get away.”

“
Why?”

“
Because
that’s what the brothers do for one another. He had three priors, I
had one. He was my best friend. Stupidly, at the time, I thought it
made more sense to protect him than to protect myself. So I got
three years in a cell for breaking and entering and battering a
police officer and Kick walked free.

“
While I was
on the inside, the club came to see me. They said once I got out,
I’d be patched in. They asked me to do things to some of the other
prisoners, small acts of retaliation. I never got caught, was never
even suspected, then one day a riot broke out because I made the
wrong hit.”

“
The wrong
hit?”

“
I attacked
the wrong guy. During the riot I was trying to save my own arse and
managed to save a prison guard in the process. My time inside was
almost up and I would have headed straight back into the waiting
arms of the club, but the judge who’d sentenced me somehow caught
wind of my heroic feat—” I make air quotes with my hands to let her
know how ridiculous that is, because the truth of what happened
with that prison guard was so much uglier than that. “—and he set
my release six months early for good behaviour, no affiliation with
the club and I had to disappear off the grid, change my name and
remain in regular scheduled contact with my parole
officer.

“
The club had
several deals go south. Their other contact on the inside had to be
the rat, but with the timing of my release and my disappearance,
the weight of the club’s deals blowing up in their face fell on me.
I knew better than to rat on the club. You rat, you die. My dad had
instilled that in me from birth.”

“
So we were
almost killed because of a misunderstanding?” A line forms between
her brows. She’s so fucking cute when she’s mad, and I laugh a
little at the stupidity of that thought because Ana brings new
meaning to the words hell hath no fury. “Oh, you find this funny,
do you?”

She shoves at
my chest with her arms and I gently catch her cast in my hand
before it can do me serious damage.

“
No. I don’t
find any of this shit funny. Nothing about being away from you is
funny.” I trace my fingers over the plaster cast and then down over
her hand. “How’s the arm?”

“
It’s in a
cast, Elijah, how do you think it is?” We hear the whistle sounding
the end of the game, and Ana yanks her arm free and begins the walk
back to the oval.

“
I’m sorry,
baby girl. I fucked up.”

“
Yeah, you
did.”

“
So that’s
it? No second chances? You’re just gonna walk away from this
clean?”

She
backtracks and doesn’t stop until she’s right up in my face, or as
in my face as she can be, given how short she is. “You think I’m
walking away clean? I’m a fucking mess, Elijah! I can’t close my
eyes without seeing that arsehole’s face, without feeling his hands
on my body, inside me. He held a gun to my head and you
watched—”

“
And I killed
the motherfucker, didn’t I? I blew his face apart until he was no
longer recognisable, Ana! Jesus. Fucking. H. Christ! What more do
you want from me?”

Fuck. Every
time I try to speak calmly to her lately I lose my shit and
frighten her to death. She just makes me so fucking crazy
sometimes. Crazier than any woman has ever made me.

She’s crying
again when she says, “Nothing. I don’t want a goddamn thing from
you, Elijah.”

Ana
disappears around the corner of the brick building and I have to
fight the urge to follow her. She’s been through enough shit with
the people in this town and doesn’t need me making a spectacle of
her at her kid brother’s footy match so instead, in the privacy
provided by the toilet block, I pound my fist into the brick until
my knuckles are bloody and the pain settles in, bone deep. I’m not
letting her walk away from this. I can’t.

Chapter Eighteen

Ana

In the three
weeks since my run in with Elijah at Little League Rugby, Holly has
been glued to my side. Not that I’m not grateful. I am. I’m also
indebted. If it weren’t for her helping me out on a Sunday with the
baking, the pie shop would have sunk with this stupid cast on my
arm.

She’s done
more than that, though. Elijah still insists on coming in every day
for lunch and, every day at the same time, I take my lunch over to
the house to avoid him.

If Holly’s
beside me he won’t even try speaking to me, he knows it’s a lost
cause. But it’s when she’s not around, when I’m at my lowest, that
he chooses to spark up a conversation with me. Every time I see him
it’s like a blow to the gut and I don’t know whether it’s the same
for him but the more he attacks at my defences, the more I feel
them coming down. And I hate us both for it.

That’s why I
agreed to come out with Holly tonight. She’s been so good to me for
so long that I thought it was time to be a good friend back. Only,
as we enter the pub and the noise of the band and the crowd
assaults us, and the realisation sinks in that I’m wearing a red
dress that’s way too short and way too tight across my boobs and I
probably look like a complete arsehole with too much make-up on and
my hand still in this god dammed cast, I want to turn and run
straight back out that door. And when my eyes slide across the room
and fix on the pair of chocolate ones staring intently back at me
and then onto Nicole White practically straddling the pool cue
beside Elijah, I feel it like I’ve been punched in the face. Which
is why, when Scott and his idiotic friends come strutting over to
us like they own the place, I decide to do something I promised I
never would again. I talk to him and make out like every word that
comes from his mouth doesn’t make me want to throw up.

Nicole
chooses this moment to play up the fact that she’s yet again
sinking her claws into my sloppy seconds by laughing like a
complete whore and running her fingers down the side of Elijah’s
face.

“
Looks like
our exes are getting friendly,” Scott mumbles, sounding about as
happy as I am about it.

“
Buy me a
drink, Scott,” I say, as I grab his collar and lead him towards the
bar. “It’s the least you can do after the crap you pulled in high
school.”

“
You got it,
Blondie.”