Mystery Man

  I closed my eyes. Then I sighed. I did the sigh thing loudly and I was good at that since my sister made me sigh a lot and I had practice. Then I opened my eyes.

  “I take it you two aren’t together anymore,” I surmised.

  “No, babe, we are not,” Dog confirmed.

  Damn.

  “What’d she do now?” I asked.

  “You don’t wanna know,” Dog answered.

  “Are the police after her?”

  “Probably.”

  I studied him. Then I asked, “But that’s not why she’s in trouble?”

  “Ginger’s got all kinds ‘a trouble, babe. But if the cops are after her, that’s the least of her worries.”

  “Oh boy,” I whispered.

  “That’s about right,” Dog remarked then his eyes shifted over my shoulder.

  I was turning to see what he was looking at when I heard a deep, gravelly voice ask, “Who’s this?”

  Then I saw him. I wasn’t into biker dudes but I could seriously make a turn to the Harley side for this guy. He was tall-ish. He was broad and ripped and there was no “ish” about either of those. He had a lot of tattoos up his arms and neck that I instantly wanted to examine, up close, to the point of cataloguing them and maybe writing books about them. He had salt and pepper hair, mainly pepper, black pepper and it was long with a bit of wave but not too long or too wavy. Ditto with the pepper in his salt and pepper goatee that hung a bit long at his chin in a biker way that was mammoth cool. His cheeks were a couple days passed needing a shave which looked good on him too. He had spikes of pale radiating in the tan skin around his blue eyes. There were only two words to describe all that was him: Biker Yummy.

  “Hey,” I whispered and his eyes went from over my shoulder, looking at Dog, to me and my whole body did a shiver.

  Then his blue eyes did a body scan and it shivered again.

  They locked on mine and his gravelly voice growled, “Hey.”

  Another shiver.

  Yowza!

  “Tack, she’s cool. She’s with me,” Dog stated, my body did a lurch and I turned to him to see he was around the counter and heading my way.

  “I am?” I asked and Dog’s gaze pinned me to the spot and said without words, “Shut the fuck up!”

  I shut the fuck up and turned back to Biker Hottie.

  “Sheila know about her?” Biker Hottie asked.

  I turned to look at Dog who was standing next to me. “Sheila?”

  “How many bitches you need?” Biker Hottie went on.

  “She’s not my woman, brother, she’s a friend. She’s cool,” Dog answered.

  “All right. So who is she?” Biker Hottie, otherwise known as Tack, pushed.

  “Her name’s Gwen,” Dog answered, Tack looked at me and I froze.

  Then I watched his lips move to form my name softly.

  “Gwen.”

  Another shiver.

  I’d always kind of liked my name. I always thought it was pretty. Tack saying it made me freaking love it.

  “So who are you, Gwen?” he asked me directly.

  “I’m, um… a friend of Dog’s,” I told him.

  “We established that, darlin’,” he informed me. “How do you know my boy here?”

  “She’s Ginger’s sister,” Dog said quickly and Tack’s entire, powerfully built frame went wired instantly and it was so damned scary, I forgot how to breathe.

  “Tell me she’s here to drop the money, brother,” Tack whispered in a voice that was equally as scary as the way he was holding his body, if not more.

  “She and Ginger aren’t tight,” Dog explained. “Like I said, she’s cool. She’s good people.”

  “She’s blood of the enemy, Dog,” Tack whispered.

  Uh-oh-uh-oh-uh-oh.

  I didn’t want to be blood of the enemy, not anyone’s enemy but especially not this guy’s enemy. He was hot but he was also freaking scary.

  Time to sort things out, pronto.

  I pulled my purse off my shoulder and tugged it open, muttering, “Ginger. A pain in my ass. A pain in my ass since the day she cut off all the hair on my Barbies. She was three. I was too old for Barbies but they were mine. She couldn’t leave them alone? What’s with cutting their hair?” I looked up at Dog and said, “I think that’s what psychos do. We should have known then. She’s three, wielding scissors and causing mayhem and heartbreak.” I kept blabbing as I dug in my purse, found my checkbook and then kept scrounging for a pen declaring, “She was always, always a bad seed.”

  I yanked out my checkbook, flipped it open, clicked my pen smartly, put the point to the check and looked at Tack.

  “All right, how much does she owe you?” I asked irately, not happy to be bailing Ginger out again, especially when money and angry bikers were involved.

  It was at this point I noted that Tack was staring down at me and he wasn’t being scary anymore. He was looking like he wanted to laugh. It was a good look.

  I didn’t want to see his good looks, not his expressions or the rest of it all over his face (and hair and tats and body). I wanted to go home, whip up a batch of cookie dough and eat it. All.

  “Well?” I snapped.

  “Two million, three hundred and fifty-seven thousand, one hundred and seven dollars,” Tack answered, I felt my jaw go slack, his white flash of a smile surrounded by his dark goatee dazedly hit some recess of my brain and he finished, “and twelve cents.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  Tack was still smiling when he dipped his head to my checkbook. “Think you can get that on one line, peaches?”

  “Oh my God,” I repeated.

  “You need mouth to mouth?” Tack asked, leaning in and I took a step back, clamped my mouth shut and shook my head. “Shame,” he muttered, leaning back.

  “My sister owes you over two million dollars?” I whispered.

  “Yep,” Tack replied.

  “Over two million dollars?” I repeated, just to confirm.

  “Yep,” Tack confirmed.

  “You haven’t made an accountancy error?” I asked hopefully.

  Tack’s smile got wider and whiter. Then he crossed his big, tattooed arms on his wide, ripped chest and shook his head.

  “Perhaps this is foreign currency and you forgot. Pesos, maybe?” I suggested.

  “Nope,” Tack returned.

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” I told him something I was guessing he already knew.

  “Sweet jacket, peaches, but I was guessin’ that,” he replied.

  Well, the good news was, the tufts of fur didn’t turn him off. The bad news was, my sister owed him over two million dollars.

  “I think it’ll take me awhile to raise that kind of cash,” I explained then finished, “maybe eternity.”

  “Don’t got eternity to wait, darlin’,” he responded, still grinning so huge, if he burst out laughing it would not surprise me.

  “I figured,” I muttered, clicked my pen, snapped shut my checkbook, shoved both in my purse and lost my mind.

  I mean, I had reason to lose my mind and that reason had a name.

  Ginger Penelope Kidd.

  I looked up at Dog and demanded to know, “Why me? Why? Just innocently being born and seven years later, zap! God curses me with the sister from hell. Is it too much to ask for a sister who giggles with you and trades makeup secrets? Is it too much to ask for a sister who finds a great sale, calls you immediately but peruses the racks to stash great deals she knows would look hot on you so you’ll get a shot at them before anyone nabs them? Is it too much to ask for a sister who’ll come over and watch the modern Hawaii Five-O with you so you can both perv on Steve McGarrett and wish you had a Camaro? Is it? Is it?” I ended on a shout.

  “Gwen, babe, think you should calm down,” Dog muttered and I could swear I could read on his face that he was wondering if he should knock me out for my own good.

  “Calm?” I yelled. “Calm?” I yelled again. “She owes you guys over tw
o million dollars. She cut the hair off my Barbies. She stole the lavalier my grandmother gave me on her deathbed and pawned it to buy pot. She got drunk and stuck her hand down my boyfriend’s pants at Thanksgiving dinner. He was straight-laced, went to church and, after Ginger’s antics – and the hand down the pants was only the culmination, he caught her snorting coke in the bathroom too – he thought my family was insane, possibly criminally insane, and he broke up with me a week later. He might have been straight-laced and, looking back, probably boring but at the time I liked him!” Now I was shrieking. “He was my boyfriend!”

  “Peaches,” Tack called and my body swung to him to see he’d moved into my space.

  I tipped my head back and snapped on a shout, “What?”

  His hand came up, fingers curling around my neck, he dipped his face into mine and he whispered, “Baby, calm down.”

  I stared close up into his blue eyes and instantly calmed down.

  “Okey dokey,” I whispered back.

  His eyes smiled.

  My body shivered.

  With his hand at my neck, I knew he felt it and I knew it more when his fingers curled deeper into my flesh and something flashed in his eyes that made me shiver someplace he couldn’t see but I could feel. A lot.

  Time to go.

  “I could probably sell plasma and a kidney but I don’t even think that will work so, um, can I just leave my sister to deal with this?” I asked politely, wanting to move from the strength of his hand but scared to do it.

  “No one takes a blade to you for Ginger,” he said quietly.

  “Okay,” I replied.

  “Or at all,” he kept going.

  “Um…” I mumbled. “Okay.” I said this because I didn’t want anyone to take a blade to me for Ginger or at all either and I didn’t want that in a big way.

  His fingers curved deeper into my neck and he pulled me up a bit so I was almost on my toes and his face was closer. Way closer. Too close. Shiver close.

  “I don’t think you get what I’m sayin’ to you.” He was still talking quietly. “This Ginger shit heats up, you get on radar, you mention my name, yeah?”

  Oh no. This didn’t sound good. This sounded worse than owing a biker gang two million dollars. And I suspected there weren’t a lot of things worse than that but, if there were, Ginger would find them.

  “Um…if you’re asking ‘yeah?’ as in, ‘Yeah, I get you’, then no, I don’t get you,” I told him honestly because I was thinking with Tack honesty was the best policy.

  “All right, peaches, what I’m sayin’ is, you get in a situation, you mention my name. That means protection. Now do you get me?”

  “Um… kind of,” I answered, “but why would I get in a situation?”

  “Your sister has shit where she lived, she’s shit where she didn’t live, she’s shit everywhere. You walked in here and had no clue. Don’t bumble into another situation because others…” he paused, “they might not find you cute like I do.”

  “Okay,” I whispered, liking that he found me cute at the same time regretting my decision not to call my father or, say, get on a plane and fly to France. “If I um… have to use your name… um, what does that mean?”

  “It means you owe me.”

  Oh boy.

  “Owe you what?”

  He grinned but didn’t answer.

  Oh boy!

  “Owe you what?” I repeated.

  “I gotta get on my bike and get you out of a situation, we’ll talk about it then.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I assured him and said a short prayer in hopes of making that true.

  His grin got bigger.

  Then he let me go but slid my purse off my arm and before I could make a peep, he dug into it. I decided to let him have at it. He’d already touched me and I wasn’t certain I wanted that to happen again because I wasn’t certain what my response would be but I was certain that jumping his bones was high up on the list of possibles. I also figured he could best me in a fight for my purse so I was going to let him take what he wanted. My best lip gloss was in that purse but at that point, if he wanted it to give to one of his bitches, I was willing to let it go.

  He came out with my cell, flipped it open, his thumb hit buttons, he flipped it closed, dropped it into my purse, then slid it back on my arm.

  “You got my number, darlin’. You need it, use it. You don’t need it, you still wanna use it, don’t hesitate. Now, do you get that?”

  I hitched my purse further up on my shoulder and nodded. I got that. He thought I was cute.

  I fought back another shiver.

  “Nice t’meet ya, Gwen,” he said softly.

  “Yeah,” I whispered, “later.” Then I turned to see Dog grinning down at me and I said, “Later.”

  “Later, babe,” Dog replied in a way that made it sound like he’d actually see me later which made me have to fight back another shiver.

  I turned to the silent biker boys behind me, saw them all smiling, found this scarier than them being scary, lifted a hand and called, “Later.”

  I got a bunch of chin lifts and one, “Later, darlin’.”

  Then I got the hell out of there.

  Chapter Two

  I Keep Tabs

  I drove home with a lot on my mind.

  First and foremost, my sister and why I didn’t disown her like my father and Meredith. She wasn’t even my full sister. She was my half sister. I’d never found her in my living room giving an unconscious man a blowjob but she’d done worse to me, way worse, so, seriously, I should just give it up and let it go.

  In a cruel twist of fate, my father married my mother, who was a wild child then he got married to an angel and they’d created a hell child.

  Mom had left when I was three but she came back occasionally and when she did we had fun. I didn’t remember much but I remembered she was a blast. She wasn’t about rules or discipline; she was about sticky food that made a lot of mess, fun places and good times.

  That was until one visit, while she had me for the weekend, she met a guy she liked and she liked him a lot. She took him back to her hotel, gave me a bunch of candy and sent me outside to sit and wait for her to call me back in.

  The manager of the motel saw me sitting out on a bench, swinging my legs, eating candy, daydreaming and doing it for ages, so he called the police. By the time they came I’d wandered off because I was bored and the police found me. I told the policeman my phone number that Dad made me memorize and they called. Then Dad came to get me, he had a rip roarin’ with Mom at the hotel while her one-day-stand kept shouting at them to keep it down, he was trying to sleep and I never saw Mom again. Ever.

  I missed her for awhile but I didn’t know her very well and anyway, at that time Meredith was already in our lives.

  Meredith was awesome. She was the coolest stepmom ever. She was sweet and funny and she loved my Dad, like, loads. She also kept homemade cookies in the cookie jar all the time and for a kid, a girl who was being raised by a man who was all man, that meant she was practically perfect

  She and Dad got married and I was the flower girl but not like normal flower girls. She walked down the aisle with one hand through the crook of her father’s arm, one hand clutching mine. She made her special day our special day. She was making a public statement that she was walking down the aisle not only to take a man in marriage but to build a family. I was six and I never forgot how special she made me feel, never, not to this day.

  But that was Meredith. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Then she and Dad had Ginger who was my Mom times, about, five million.

  This was the cruel twist of fate. For Dad, Meredith and me.

  The second thing I was thinking about was all things Tack. What he said, the way he looked and how he made me feel.

  I was already regularly sleeping with a man whose name I didn’t know. A man I met at a restaurant just under a year and a half ago, took h
im to my home, slept with him, had the best sex in the history of womanhood and, fortunately or unfortunately depending on when I looked at it, he kept coming back for more, proving again and again that first time wasn’t a fluke but, instead, a sneak preview of better things to come.

  I didn’t even give him a key. How he got in was as much a mystery as his name. But he did. He didn’t come every night, sometimes it was once a week, sometimes twice, sometimes he’d skip a week, once he’d been gone for three which freaked me out and then it freaked me out that it freaked me out.

  But he always came back. Always.

  With Mystery Man in my life I didn’t need the trouble that Tack had written on him. Okay, so he thought I was cute and another bonus was that I knew his name and he knew mine (which, Mystery Man, by the way, did not know). But my sister owed him over two million dollars and he was scary.

  He also said I could get onto “others” radar and get into “situations”. I didn’t want to be on anyone’s radar and I made enough situations for myself, being half my mother’s daughter. I didn’t need Ginger dragging me into her situations.

  And lastly, I was thinking about my Mystery Man. The days after he visited I always did. I always wondered what was with me, I didn’t tell him to go. Now I was wondering, when I had what could possibly be the world’s greatest lover visiting me in the dead of night, how I’d move onto someone else. I’d had three dates and no lovers since I met The Great MM. None of them came close to what little I had with MM and therefore none of them got to the second date or second base (yes, the Great MM was that good of a kisser).

  He was totally screwing up my life.

  No. No, that wasn’t true. I was screwing up my life.

  This was what I was thinking after I parked my car in my drive, walked up to my house studying my boots, slid the key into the lock and opened my door.

  However, even if I’d been paying attention, I wouldn’t have been prepared for what happened next.

  Once I cleared it, the door slammed, hard and loud. Then a hand in my chest slammed me into the door, again hard and loud. Then a man was in my space, his body deep in mine, pressing me into the door and I looked up into a pair of somewhat familiar black eyes.