Ride Wild

  “Oh, sorry,” Cora called, remembering the mountain of bags she’d left in the living room. “I’ll be right there to clean up that mess.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Slider said. The boys laughed, and then there was an excited round of shushing.

  What in the world were they doing? Cora pushed off the couch to investigate when she caught movement from the corner of her eye. A dog—Bosco?

  “What . . . how? Bosco!” she exclaimed.

  Cora sank onto the floor and the height-challenged old man got right into her lap, put his paws on her shoulders, and licked her on the mouth.

  Laughter rang out from the doorway, where Slider and the boys had gathered with the happiest, most triumphant expressions on their faces.

  Cora hugged Bosco, and Haven chuckled as he licked her hand when she petted his head. “What’s happening?” Cora asked, her brain struggling to catch up with this roller coaster of a day.

  “Surprise,” Slider said, unable to hold back a grin.

  “Are you serious? You adopted him?” she asked, so happy she could barely stand it. She hugged and petted and kissed Bosco until he squirmed to get away.

  “Look at the name tag,” Ben said, coming to his knees beside her.

  Cora did, and she couldn’t decide which amazingly sweet thing to react to first. T.L.B. The Lovable Basset. Or Campbell. “Campbell. You adopted him . . . for me?”

  Slider nodded, his expression so soft and intense her heart almost melted. “He’s yours.”

  “And we’ll help!” Ben said, making them all laugh.

  “Wow.” Cora could hardly believe they’d done this, but it just showed that Slider Evans had a wide streak of sweetness inside him that he didn’t let many people see, but she saw it. Oh, man, how she saw it. She looked up at Slider. “Thank you. I can’t believe you did this.”

  Slider held out a hand and helped her up, and then they were standing face to face. “I did it for you.”

  Cora couldn’t hold back. She threw her arms around Slider’s neck, making him laugh. “I love him so much.”

  “I know,” Slider said, his arms coming around her, too.

  She let go of him before she wanted to, because she didn’t know how his talk had gone with the boys.

  Slider wasn’t having it. He grasped her face and pulled her close. “They’re happy,” he whispered. “And so am I.” He kissed her then, just one soft press of lips on lips.

  “Argh, Dad!” Sam said, as Ben wrapped his arms around both of them and yelled, “I want in on this hug!”

  Haven laughed out loud. “Y’all are so sweet you’re making my teeth hurt.”

  Slider slanted her a glance. “Don’t mess up my reputation with that sweet crap.”

  Rising from where she’d been petting Bosco, Haven chuckled. “Too late, Slider Evans. I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever seen you with your boys already knows.”

  He grunted, making Cora laugh. “She’s not wrong.”

  Haven planted her hands on her hips and gave Cora a loaded look. “Now I think it’s time you deal with that other thing.”

  “What other thing?” Slider asked.

  Cora groaned, but Haven was right. She couldn’t put this off. Slider needed to know. “I had a visitor today. Sheriff Davis.”

  Slider’s brow cranked down. He turned to the boys playing with the dog in the doorway. “Hey guys, why don’t you take Bosco out to the kitchen and unpack his new stuff?” The kids couldn’t leave fast enough, both of them excited to show their lovable basset his new toys.

  “Oh, I want to help,” Haven said, very obviously wanting to give her and Slider some privacy.

  When they were gone, Slider turned back to her. “What the hell did Davis want?”

  “Ostensibly, to go over my statement, but the whole thing was so weird. His tone was combative and dismissive, almost accusatory. He kept discounting what I’d seen and heard. And then he left with this warning about how men involved in dogfighting are dangerous, and that I should be careful.”

  Slider released a frustrated breath that was almost a growl. “Davis has been a thorn in the side of the club for as long as I can remember. Him coming here about your statement I could almost buy, but the way he talked to you . . . something doesn’t add up.”

  “I can’t lie. It felt odd to me, too,” she said. It worried Cora all over again as she thought about it. Talking to him had made her want to take a shower afterward. Nothing concrete, just . . . a feeling. A bad feeling.

  His hands landed on her shoulders, and his expression was filled with so much emotion. For her. “Why didn’t you call me right away? I would’ve come home.”

  “I know you would’ve, and I thought about it. I promise. But I wanted you to have time with the boys. And Davis wasn’t even here for fifteen minutes.” Cora put her arms around her man, because she could claim him now, right out in the open for everyone to see. And she adored that. “If I’d have really been upset, I promise I would’ve called.”

  Slider nodded. “I don’t want to be overbearing, Cora, but I care. Some asshole gets up in your face, even an asshole in a uniform, and I want to know.”

  “Okay,” she said, pushing up onto tiptoes to kiss him. “It’s nice getting to do this without worrying about getting caught.”

  “Aw, damn, does that mean no more sex against your car?” he asked with a grin so sexy she wanted to go find her car right now.

  She chuckled. “I sure as hell hope not, Slider.”

  He heaved a deep breath, the smile slipping off his face. “I don’t like this thing with Davis. He comes again, don’t let him in. You aren’t even obligated to answer the door.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good. Because the more I think about it, the more this all feels wrong,” Slider said. “But I promise you, Cora, that I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

  Chapter 20

  After lunch at the clubhouse on Sunday afternoon, Slider and his brothers met up in Dare’s office to talk about Davis. The evening before, Slider had texted everyone what Cora had said about Davis’s visit, and the wrongness of it had been like shrapnel under his skin ever since.

  “I have some news from Marz that’s pertinent to this Davis thing,” Dare said, sitting behind his desk.

  Slider hadn’t been around to get to know the Hard Ink guys, but he sure as hell appreciated their expertise and assistance now. Because thinking about Davis being inside his house hassling Cora was making him crazy. Last night, the only thing that made him feel any better was slipping over to Cora’s room to sleep. Bosco had lifted his head long enough to grunt an acknowledgment, and then gone back to sleep on her floor. Next to the dog bed. Go figure.

  Maverick sighed and dropped into the chair in front of Dare’s desk. “Let’s hear it.”

  Dare opened an e-mail on his desktop computer. “I talked to Marz for a long time yesterday. The guys at Hard Ink are opening a security firm of their own, and they’ve gotten some new toys that he was only too happy to try out on our behalf. He said he’d dig into both of our situations, and then first thing this morning, he sent me this.” He turned the monitor so that they could all get a better look.

  Two pictures, side by side. One of them Slider recognized from Cora’s phone.

  “What’s the other picture?” Slider asked.

  “Traffic camera about two blocks away from the grocery store. Gives us a nice side view of the vehicle,” Dare said. “No good image of the passengers, though.”

  Slider leaned in. His brother was right. The sun glare on the window obscured the interior. “Is that a Datsun? Late eighties, maybe.”

  “Yup,” Dare said, reading a note on his desk. “A 1985 Datsun 720 4x4 Truck King Cab with a white bed cap.”

  “I think Datsun might’ve been practicing some wishful thinking when they used the word king,” Phoenix said, staring at the old truck’s image on the screen.

  “All right, Dare, what else you got?” Caine folded his arms
, a scowl on his face.

  Dare nodded. “It’s an older vehicle. Unique enough to stand out on traffic cameras if you know what to look for. According to Marz, that makes it useful if you have software which can analyze and compare footage from different cameras and aggregate all the times it hits on a particular image. Which their new company now has.”

  “Tell me it picked up this truck,” Mav said.

  “Hell, yeah, it did,” Dare said. One by one, he scrolled through the images that Marz snagged off the camera footage. Most of them were from nighttime.

  “A bunch of those are from the same intersection. Over off of the Golden Mile,” Caine said, referring to the big commercial strip that projected out from the center of town. Slider had noticed that, too, and something about it was bugging him.

  “Driver always seems to have a baseball hat on. I can’t make out his face for shit on any of them,” Phoenix said.

  “No need to guess who it is.” Dare slapped a sheet of paper down in front of them. “When I’ve got the car’s registration.”

  It listed one Curtis Davis as the owner of a 1985 Datsun pickup.

  “Fuck me,” Slider said, as Maverick raked his hands through his hair and exclaimed, “Holy shit.”

  “Car we’re looking at is blue,” Caine said, leaning in to eyeball the document. “This says the color is rust.”

  “That’s because he covered the color,” Slider said pointing at the screen. “The blue on that truck is primer paint.”

  “So Davis is somehow involved with the 301 Crew, dogfighting, or maybe both,” Caine said, his expression thoughtful—and lethal.

  “Hot damn.” Phoenix said, giving a fist pump. “Let’s get Sheriff Martin up here and share the good news that we can get rid of his asshole colleague once and for all.”

  Jesus, how Slider wanted to do that, too, but he shook his head. “We’re not there yet. This is all circumstantial, which means we need more. Sure as shit explains why Davis was in my fucking house, though. That shit happens again and we’re going to have a problem.” Because it meant that Cora was on Davis’s radar, and if Davis was as potentially dirty as this made him look, that was exactly the wrong place for Cora to be.

  Sonofabitch.

  “Slider’s right,” Dare said.

  Maverick groaned. “Then what’s our next play? Because this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to nailing Davis. And I want him. I want him bad. For being Slater’s bitch, for his part in the dumping, and for arresting Jagger.”

  “We go to the fight,” Caine said. “We go and we place him there. And if not there, we bide our time until we nail him.”

  “Agreed,” Dare said. “And we hope that Marz brings us more good news, because he’s working on the other research we wanted and he’s still running this vehicle image through that program.”

  “In the meantime,” Slider said. “I’m worried about Cora now.” Fuck, and about the boys too. Because they were also there at the store that day.

  Caine nodded. “The only saving grace is that she couldn’t identify the men. That’s probably what Davis was there to learn. Hell, if it was him she saw, he stood right in front of her and she didn’t know.”

  God, the thought churned ice in Slider’s gut. “And she told him that, too. Maybe that makes her safe, but I’m not hanging my fucking helmet on maybe.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Dare said. “Let’s come up with a security detail for your house. Something at a distance so it doesn’t worry the kids.”

  “I’ll get it in place tonight or first thing tomorrow,” Maverick said.

  Dare stood up. “And, Slider, anything else you need, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll have your whole family’s back as long as it takes.”

  Slider appreciated the hell out of the sentiment, but it didn’t make him feel any better. What he needed was Cora and his boys in his sight and in his arms. So he knew for sure that they were safe.

  Cora’s first sign that something was off was when Slider announced he was taking a week’s vacation from work. He shared the news at the dinner table on Sunday night. All his reasons were good—he wanted to do some work around the house, help Phoenix out more at the track, and pitch in with making sure Bosco got settled.

  But that didn’t explain why Slider kept looking out the windows. Checking that he’d locked the doors. And pacing around the house like a caged animal.

  Cora didn’t want to ask in front of the boys, so she waited until they were in their beds and she and Slider were tangled up lying side by side in hers.

  “Ready to tell me what’s going on yet?” Cora asked, her room illuminated only by the small lamp on her nightstand. She’d added a few personal touches over the past few weeks—a jewelry box, a framed print of the ocean at sunrise, a little bowl of sea glass.

  Slider scrubbed at his face, and then he turned toward her. “That truck you saw, there’s a pretty good chance it belongs to Curt Davis.”

  It took a few seconds for the news to sink in, and then Cora’s jaw dropped open. “How do you know?” Slider explained the information that Marz had sent to Dare, and Cora wasn’t sure her jaw could drop any wider. Reaching over, she unplugged her phone from the charging cord and opened the pictures, and then she zoomed in on every one. “God, it could be Davis. I can’t tell.”

  “None of the shots of the truck we managed to grab caught a good image of the driver either,” Slider said. “But think, Cora. Davis was standing in front of you. How did their builds compare? Their height?”

  Cora ran through her memories. “I can’t say for certain, but I can say that there was nothing about the shorter man I saw with the dog that would make me think he wasn’t the sheriff who stood in your living room yesterday.”

  “Our.”

  “What?”

  “Our living room, sweetheart.” He tossed the phone away and cupped her face in his hand. “I want you to think of this as your home, too.”

  Oh, this man. “No one has ever made me feel as special as you do, Slider.”

  He kissed her then, deep and sweet, but flirting with heat. “I’m going to make it my job to ensure you feel that way every day of your life.”

  Butterflies stirred in her belly as she retrieved a condom from her nightstand and handed it to him. “Then make love to me,” she whispered.

  They came together slowly, softly, taking their time to explore and linger. Slider’s weight pressed her into the mattress as he moved between her thighs, rolling those hips the way he did, filling her so full that all she could do was moan. He worshipped her breasts and she dug her fingers into his ass. They had no reason to rush and nothing to hide from, not anymore.

  And that had Cora thinking . . . thinking about how she’d said the way to move on from the past was to make new memories to replace the old, good memories to replace the bad. Cora wanted to try following her own advice, because she didn’t want to be afraid of anything, and she refused to let the past have any hold over her. Not anymore.

  She pushed at Slider’s chest. “I want you to take me . . .” The way he did. But the words got stuck in her throat as the adrenaline kicked up in her veins. “Flat on my stomach. You on top. All your weight on me.”

  His eyes were a sudden pale storm. “Cora—”

  “You won’t be hurting me. I know you won’t. But I need proof.”

  “Proof of what, sweetheart?” he asked, his voice strained with emotion.

  “Proof that he’s not still there.” The words made no sense, not really, but she couldn’t think of a better way to explain it. “Please?”

  He eased off her, and she couldn’t help but notice how his body had filled out these past weeks. He was still muscular and lean, but the sharpest edges of him were softer now. And it made him appear bigger, broader, even sexier. But what she most noticed was the dark expression on his face.

  Cora reached up and kissed him. “I’m sure about this, okay?”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Fuck, I don’t want to hurt
you or scare you or—”

  “Don’t you see though? You never could. I need you, Slider. Make this new memory with me. Make it good.” She turned onto her stomach and lay flat.

  He shifted above her, his thighs going to the outside of hers, and stroked his hand down her spine from neck to ass. “So fucking beautiful, Cora. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He guided himself between her thighs, and his cock found her center and sank deep. She moaned at the tightness and the goodness of the sensation, his slow thrusts dragging his head against that delicious place inside her.

  But as good as it was, it wasn’t enough. “Please,” she said. “I need you.”

  He came down on her then. Not all at once. His legs around her legs, his stomach against her lower back, his arms curled around hers. “It’s me, Cora. Loving you. So damn much,” he said, and then he lowered his chest against her shoulders, his whole weight pinning her down.

  She couldn’t deny the jolt of adrenaline, the tendrils of fear, the fingers of the past reaching out for her. And he must’ve sensed it, because he guided her face to the side so that they were looking eye to eye.

  And, Jesus, that look chased the past away, leaving only them—and the fact that Slider had used the word love.

  “Say it again,” she said.

  “It’s me.” His eyes flared with understanding. “It’s me, loving you. And, Jesus, Cora. I do. I love you so fucking much.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, emotion knotting in her throat so tightly that it brought tears to her eyes. “I love you, Slider.”

  Their fingers laced, their faces almost touching, Slider fucked her then. Soft and slow at first, harder and faster when neither of them could resist.

  “I’m gonna come, Cora,” he rasped, his cock driving deep. “Fuck, I’m gonna come.”

  “Yes, let yourself go,” she said, already flying from the triumph of being able to take him this way, of putting the memory of his love in the place of one of her pain. It was the greatest gift anyone had ever given her.

  He shouted out his release, his hips plowing into hers on punctuated thrusts that forced her to brace her hands against the headboard. His cock kicked inside her again and again, and his body shuddered above her.