Bad Boy Criminal: The Novel Read online

  Dom picked up on the goddamn seventh ring. I’d been on the verge of hanging up and forgetting about it.

  “Who is this?” Dom snapped into the phone. I cracked a slight smile. It was good to hear his bitchy voice again.

  “Who do you think?” I snapped back, still smiling.

  “Jesus Christ, man, I hope somebody cut off your fucking fingers.” Dom sighed, his threat lacking any real vigor. “It’s the only excuse for why a decent brother can’t dial a fucking phone.”

  “I dialed Jade, she doesn’t give me so much shit; these little bastards only have, like, 300 minutes on ‘em to begin with,” I quipped. “But, hey, let’s not focus on the negatives, we’ll be here all day. I’m calling you now. I’m in…fuck, I don’t know—somewhere right off the border to New Mexico.”

  “Jade said you were in Moab,” Dom answered.

  “Yeah, Moab, that’s it!” I agreed emphatically. “Sorry, man, the past—I don’t know—however many minutes—they’ve been a blur—”

  “She called me about an hour ago,” Dom said. “We got the word out to Juan to watch your back while we find some way around the feds. I’m with Xander now. We think you should lay low until we’ve got some answers for you.”

  “Fuck, man, I don’t know how comfortable I feel staying here,” I countered, glaring out at the town of Moab. “I mean, think about it, all right? The only person who knew where I was, was Jade. Then, she tells you guys, right, and you tell Juan, and suddenly, the Valiant know where I am, and they’re hunting me and my girl in the streets.”

  “The Valiant?” Dom and a distant Xander chorused. “How the fuck did the Valiant come into this?”

  “You’re telling me,” I replied hotly. “They came out of nowhere, blocked the entire road, and Alex mother-fucking Cantrell pulled a gun on Isabelle.”

  “Who the fuck is Isabelle?” Dom interjected.

  “For all intents and purposes, she’s my hostage,” I said, rolling my eyes. It was easier than explaining the reality of the situation.

  “Must be a pretty friendly hostage, for Alex to use her as leverage,” Dom deduced.

  “She’s a peach,” I said shortly. “Anyway, he wanted me to turn myself in, and that’s when Juan and his boys roared up, and the Valiant cleared off, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Dom muttered. Like any self-respecting Hell’s Ransom member, he hated them down to the thread work on their jackets. “Well, as long as Juan can keep those fucks off your back, you should try to lay low in Moab. It’ll be easier to hide out if you’re not a loner, and anyway, the feds will give up and follow the next tip they get, if you can resist any more fucking ATM withdrawals, little bro.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Always with the judgment. “You just tell me when you find the mole, because like I said, I can’t really relax in Utah if Hell’s Ransom guys here ain’t trustworthy. Then even Juan can’t help me, can he, and the Valiant will just show up again and again, if not the fucking feds themselves, because who knows who will give up the next big tip.”

  “You sure it’s not coming from your…‘hostage’?” Dom wondered.

  “No, and you’ll shut your fucking mouth,” I commanded, unusually tense at the suggestion. “If Isabelle Turner is a fucking Valiant whore, I might as well turn myself in right now, because the outside makes less sense than the fucking Colorado state prison system did.”

  “All right, all right,” Dom muttered, losing the will to wrestle with me on the topic of a woman he’d never even met. “Just think about it. Anyway, bro, stay low, stay quiet, stay put. Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” I replied, hanging up the phone abruptly. Before reentering Tiny’s, I scanned the silhouettes of fellow Hell’s Ransom brothers lined within, all merrily drinking, surrounding innocent Izzy. Which of them might have been the one? Who had Alex’s number?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Isabelle

  I was nursing my third Tom Collins when Ash came swaggering back into the bar. I’d guzzled the second and was just starting to feel real damn relaxed—finally. Sure, a little woozy, but I hadn’t forgotten Ash’s evasion of my question: what did I mean to him? Why had he let me come at all—just to sleep with me? That seemed like an awfully dramatic gesture just to get a woman into bed: letting her jeopardize your sentencing by toting her across the border as your hostage.

  But, if there was something else between us, why had he ignored me for the first several hours of the trip? Did he regret letting me come? Was he trying to invent a way out of this situation? He could have easily just gone…but he’d asked Jade to make false identification for both of us, hadn’t he?

  As my imperiled Casanova swooped down onto the stool next to mine, the first words out of his mouth were, “I’ve got to get the hell out of here, Izz.”

  Well, that answers that, I thought glumly. “I already knew that,” I countered acidly.

  He wasn’t just going to abandon me after everything I’d sacrificed for him. I’d stolen Bill’s truck for him. I’d abandoned the dairy for him. I’d had a handgun aimed at my forehead and I’d broken my sobriety just a handful of weeks shy of two years running. And now, now, he was trying to bail?

  “Can’t get to Juarez without leaving Utah,” I mumbled.

  But Ash grimaced. “Not exactly what I mean,” he said. “Look…when I say that I’ve got to get…I mean, I’ve got to get alone. You’ve been great; you’ve been my face while I couldn’t have a face, and you kept me sane, and I’m not gonna lie, Izz, you’ve got the kind of body that could cheer up a man in any circumstance. But I’m in too much trouble with too many enemies. You almost got lead in your brain because of me once already, and how long have I known you? Not a week.”

  “I didn’t almost get anything, actually,” I corrected him, surveying his body carefully with my eyes.

  The memory of that downtown intersection splashed up to the front of my thoughts, and with it came a surge of arousal: Ash extending his flat palms vertically, signaling his surrender, and his voice, placating, edged in despair: “All right, all right. No reason to bring the girl into this.” He could talk all he wanted, but that moment had been illuminating: he’d agreed to sacrifice himself to the FBI for my sake.

  Suddenly and sharply, I needed him inside me, and I stood from the stool with a slight sway, leaning into his space with low eyelashes and a knowing smirk. “You may have lied to me when we first met; I get that. And yeah, maybe you’ve broken some laws.”

  “Maybe?” Ash prodded, but I ignored him, swinging one leg up to straddle his thigh and lean as deeply into him as I could.

  “And you made an ATM withdrawal while there was a man-hunt—just to get a freaking motorcycle,” I concluded, curling my fingers around the neck of his shirt and pulling him closer to me.

  “How much gin did you drink?” he wondered, his eyes not on mine, but on my lips, then trailing down my neck to the subtle crevasse of cleavage at the scoop of my blouse.

  I pushed a hand under his chin, forcing his eyes back up to mine. They were like the eyes from a fucking mascara commercial. “But there’s no way I’m letting you leave without me,” I concluded, running my thumb gently over his bottom lip. “Promise me.”

  Right about now, I suspected that Ashton Carter would promise me anything.

  “Promise you what?” he asked breathlessly. I could feel his member, hard as a rock and faintly throbbing, against the inside of my thigh.

  “Promise me we see this through together, or not at all. Promise me we see this through—until the end.”

  My roving thumb pulled his jaw down and opened his mouth; I crashed against his lips with a hunger, pinning my hands to his hips and discreetly thrusting against his turgid manhood. He moaned softly into my mouth and clutched my ass, forcing me down harder into his lap. When we parted, his eyes were glazed with desire, his cheeks spotted with blush, and his breath came in ragged bursts.

  “All right, babe,” Ash whispered. His eyes were locked
onto me now; no wandering.

  “All right what?” I pressed.

  “All right, I promise.”

  I kissed him one more time, and again we ground together as if we could satisfy our animal urges here and now—knowing that we couldn’t.

  This time, when we parted, adrenaline sang so hard in my veins, it made me neigh sober again. “All right, then,” I breathed. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Ashton

  By the time Isabelle was done with me, I would’ve proposed if it would’ve meant finally getting off together. I’d never in my adult life waited this long to savor a woman who wanted me back; it felt like being thirteen years old again.

  “Let me hunt down Juan,” I said to her. “I’ve got to thank everybody for coming out like this for me. I mean—we all could’ve ended up in jail.”

  “Just for blocking traffic? When someone else had pulled a gun?” she wondered.

  I smirked and glanced back at her as I left behind the bar. “Trust me, nobody here is guilty of just blocking traffic…and we probably all have unregistered guns on us.”

  “Do you?” she demanded, suddenly shrill.

  I shrugged and turned, off into the now crowded and smoky bar to find Juan and give him my best. The truth of the matter was that I had bought an unregistered little piece before I’d even picked up the motorcycle. She should’ve been glad that at least one of those items came from an established retailer, and not from under the table from an old man at a pawn shop who said, “They won’t take this off of me, but I’ve got to get this off of me, you dig?” and agreed to knock the price back a hundred dollars.

  Finding Juan playing darts with some fellow brothers, we shook hands and exchanged well wishes for the future. “Thanks for everything, man,” I told him, slapping him on the shoulder. “If you ever need anything—you can find me through Hell’s Ransom. Just gotta give Tiny his due, and we’re on the road again.”

  Juan winked. “Right on, right on,” he croaked. I could smell the marijuana in the paper cylinder he smoked, rolled so tightly it was almost indistinguishable from a commercial cigarette. “Anytime, brother. Good luck getting out of Dodge. Don’t bother with the tab, man—me and Tiny go way back; the Utah Hell’s Ransom has done him some favors. And hey.” Juan grinned with big yellow teeth. “Tap that ass once for me, okay?”

  “Ha. You got it.”

  We pounded knuckles, and I threaded through Tiny’s again, scanning the bar for Isabelle.

  There she was…reclining with her shapely legs crossed one over the other, her blouse slouched down across one shoulder to allow a peek at her lacy white bra strap. Damn, I wished we had time to get a room…but Dom had already warned me that we’d been hanging at Tiny’s for an hour or so now.

  Though the Valiant had scampered off with their dicks tucked between their legs, the feds were still out there, and I didn’t know if they’d be quite so gun-shy, wearing those Kevlar vests like they always did, having that fire power they had—and it was doubtful that even Hell’s Ransom would come to my aid in a clash with the FBI. Izzy was right: let’s get the hell out of here.

  “All right, babe,” I called out to her, and her limpid hazel eyes swung to drink me in. I tried not to think too much about what I’d rather be doing with her than riding, and gestured for the exit.

  Albuquerque was still hours away…and something told me we’d be needing to take a circuitous route to avoid all our admirers.

  You know the one true test of a biker’s old lady? She rides for hundreds of miles. She doesn’t complain about her ass going numb or her knees getting stiff, although they almost certainly do. She goes inside for the smokes while he pumps the gas. She holds him tight around the midsection and doesn’t make the elementary mistake of trying to talk over the roar of the wind. Now, that is fucking marriage material…although most motorcycle clubs discourage that kind of talk.

  We hit Albuquerque after sunset, but a phone call to Jade verified that Arlo would still be waiting for us, though possibly less sober as time went on, in the back room at another Hell’s Ransom-dominated bar, this one called Three Tequila Floor. We parked with the plates facing the wall, just in case any Valiants were wandering through; I was still trying to keep my head on a swivel, because I hadn’t heard back from Dom about the inexplicable leak somewhere between him and Jade.

  Three Tequila Floor had multi-tonal lamps set ablaze at the front walkway, splashing the sidewalk like a dark rainbow. I tugged Izzy through the front door after me, and she stiffened at the sound of a glass breaking and a table being shoved to one side—followed by a burst of laughter. The Hell’s Ransom brothers responsible set the table back up and continued their game of cards on its top.

  “Come on, he’s in the back,” I whispered, pulling Izzy further into the den of iniquity.

  There was one unmarked doorway, locked, with a peephole set in the wood; I knocked loudly and waited for someone on the other side to inspect me through the warped glass. “Password,” a voice muttered.

  “Scratched,” I hissed. There was a brief hesitation, and the door came ajar for us. I pushed inside, pulled Izz through, slammed the door, and bolted it again behind us.

  The room was filled with unsavory types—obvious and proud criminals, not that I could judge—and Arlo recognized us before we found him. He whistled from his table, where he had been drawing out a thick line of cocaine for a young and skinny thing at his side, blonde dreadlocks and a nose ring. Arlo himself was massive, like a mountain which had stood up and gotten into motorcycles one day. He was chalky white and as bald as a baby, wearing sunglasses on the bridge of his bulbous nose, even though it was already dim in the room.

  “Hey, kids,” he rasped, shunting the coke off toward his date. He passed her a rolled up five dollar bill without looking at her. “About time. I’ve got places to be, you know.”

  I really doubted it, but I let it slide. “Sorry, man,” I said instead. He was, after all, a fellow Hell’s Ransomer. “Got held up by the Valiant in Moab.”

  Arlo grimaced. “A-yup,” he agreed. “Heard about that. Anyway, boy, here’s the deets your girl in Juarez ordered.”

  Reaching under the table, Arlo produced a meaty fistful of documents and pushed them toward us with a kind of negligent boredom. Leathery booklets: passports. I glanced inside and saw our own faces peering back at us. Isabelle Turner had become Adriana Rey, and Ashton Carter had become Louis Carmichael.

  Nice. Generic. Perfect. Two new phones: both burners. Nice. Driver’s licenses. Adriana Rey was twenty-one, and she was from Arkansas. Louis Carmichael was twenty-five, and he was from Michigan. There was also an unmarked white envelope. I opened it to find five hundred dollars inside. Nice.

  “What do I owe you?” I asked.

  At this, Arlo’s lip quirked humorlessly. “I already got it,” he assured me. “Goodnight, kids.”

  Izz didn’t seem to need any more than this to convince her that it was time for us to go. Her hand was in my back pocket, and I felt it give the denim a little tug backwards. I glanced at her, and those big baby hazel eyes blinked up at me pleadingly. It would’ve frankly been embarrassing if it wasn’t that Three Tequila Floor gave me a bad vibe, too. Albuquerque was a tougher city than Moab, I’d give it that.

  “Thanks, brother,” I said, and extended my fist for a bump—but found that Arlo had turned his back to us, and was invested into an entirely different brand of bump at the moment, this from the tip of a skinny spoon. Taking Izzy’s hand out of my pocket, I held it tight and pulled her through the back area, across the main room of Three Tequila Floor, and out to the parking lot where our bike waited. I was bone-tired anyway…and desperate to lay down beside her.

  I straddled the leather seat of the hog and gazed up into the dark New Mexico sky.

  “Where to now, Louis?” Izzy asked with a grin—and, as I gazed back at her, I found exhausted eyes.

  “You know, Addy, I don’t really w
ant to get boxed up under a rooftop tonight,” I confessed. “You ever been camping?”

  “You met me on a dairy farm,” she reminded me, deadpan.

  “Yeah, well…we passed some signs for a state park on the way into here,” I let her know, revving the motorcycle’s engine and gingerly pulling it from the lot. “New Mexico has a wider sky than all the other states; did you know that?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Isabelle

  The Rio Grande Nature Center, a state park outside of Albuquerque, housed a large, circular building for tourists to visit, but we had missed its hours of operation already—and besides, we were no tourists. The expansive Rio Grande sprawled through the middle of the refuge, dark and shimmering beneath the open sky. Ash was right…New Mexico did have a wider sky than all the other states.

  I was beginning to really fall in love with the unfettered nature of the motorcycle. It wasn’t just about the rush of the wind on the road. The lack of bulk enabled us to travel through the park almost as freely as a couple on any other kind of bike. He parked her behind a fringe of bushes and we climbed off to investigate our surroundings.

  The park was entirely empty now, and night had fully fallen. Stars were sprayed in a milky swath overhead, and the moon lit the sandy earth at our feet, turning the park into a land as silvery as the Sea of Tranquility itself.

  I dropped my backpack and opened it, unraveling the thin but soft and plush camping blanket from within and fanning it into the air, letting it drape elegantly in front of a thick forked tree.