CRAVE - BAD BOY ROMANCE (16 page)

Somehow,
I resisted the urge to sprint to him. I had so many questions bubbling up
through me but it probably wasn't a good idea to call attention to myself, not
if we were still on the run. So I walked with an even, measured pace over to
the booth he'd chosen in the corner.

“Glad you could make it,” he rumbled,
the dark vibrations of his voice reminding me of the Harley's engine. “Care to
join me?”

I sat down, glad of the seat beneath
me since it felt like my legs were about to collapse from the combination of
the morning stress, the fight with Thrace, and the escape I'd had to go through
to get away from him. “What the hell are you doing here?” I blurted. “Do you
have any idea what I've just gone through?”

Cade frowned. “No, I don’t. Just as
you don’t know how hard it was to get the local cops to take off my cuffs and
see reason. Bribery. Promises. All of that bullshit and more, not to mention
having to drop one of them on the way out since he didn't want to play ball
with the others.” Cade made a point of rubbing his bruised and bloody knuckles
with the palm of his other hand as his gaze flicked up to mine. “Are you safe?”

“I am now, I think,” I said,
wondering if that was really the truth. If I was being honest with myself, it
was probably far too early to tell. “I had a little visitor to the house when
you were gone.” I leaned forward and lowered my voice, uncertain as to whether
the bartender was on our side or not and not willing to take the chance that he
wasn't.

Cade's jaw tightened. “Thrace?”

I nodded. “Did you know my Grandma
owned a whole bunch of property?”

“I did,” he told me. “She had a lot
of clients, once upon a time. Lots of them were old, and she'd help them so
much in life that they saw fit to transfer their houses to her when they died.
Why?”

“Yeah, well, guess what? It wasn't
just houses they transferred. Apparently, your old motorcycle gang has set up
shop in a warehouse that I technically own. You were right about Grandma and
the way she died. Thrace admitted to killing her. He was looking for the deed
when he did it, and when she wouldn't tell him where it was he thought the best
way to get his hands on it was to wait until I arrived and try again with me.”

Cade didn’t look surprised.

“What a second,” I breathed.
 
It all made sense. “It was you, wasn’t it?
You gave her the deed to the warehouse, as a final fuck you to your old club!”

Cade shook his head. “It wasn’t like
that. I thought it would be safe in Marie’s hands, so I paid her back for her
help in the same way everyone else had done, over the years.”

I pursed my lips.

“How did you get away from him?” Cade
asked.

I told him about finding the little
wooden box with the keys in the deeds inside, and re-burying it beneath the
broken stairs.

“Of course,” Cade said, snapping his
fingers. “No wonder she'd never let me fix those damn things. I kept telling
her they were death trap, but she made me put off the repairs time after time.
Every time I asked, she'd come up with a different chore for me to do instead.
Clean the gutters. Mow the lawn. Fix the damn back door which wouldn't stop
making that squeal, no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, I just stopped
asking.”

“Which was exactly what she wanted,”
I said.

“So it would seem. She's been
collecting deeds for almost 20 years, so I guess she needed access to her
hiding place all of the time. No better place to hide them, I guess. They'd be
in danger of the house burned down if they were stored inside, but under the
dirt they'd survive that sort of thing just fine. She moved like a cat too, so
there was no way I would've heard her when she added another deed to the box.”

“We better go back and get them then,
if it is so important, I said.

“You mean you don't have them with
you?”

“No! I was fighting for my life, Cade.
Thrace and I struggled over your stupid gun and I got him to chase me out the
back door and trip on those fucking stairs. I heard him fall. Something broke,
I'm sure of it but it wasn't his head or his neck or his back because he was up
and after me pretty soon after.”

Cade nodded slowly, though I didn't
like the look on his face. He was assessing our options and not finding a whole
lot that he liked.

“Do you think he has them?” I asked.

“Only one way to be sure,” Cade said.
“You should wait here and I'll go back and find out. Shouldn't take me more
than a couple minutes. Thrace isn’t patient enough to have staked out your
place, so I'll know if he's still there. If he is, I'll come back. If he's not,
I'll put my head over the fence and see what the ground beneath your back
stairs looks like. Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll have missed them.”

I hoped Cade was right.

He got up and headed for the door,
and I stood up before I fully realized my intentions. I couldn't just watch him
go, not so soon after he’d been taken away from me last time. “Wait,” I said
after him.

Cade turned back around. “What now?

“Call it intuition. Maybe this Voodoo
shit is real and maybe it isn't, but I know deep down that things go badly for
both of us if you leave me behind right now.”

I expected fight, but that's not what
I got. “Whatever you say, Rachel,” Cade told me after a second. “You're the
boss.”

“Really?”

He nodded and tossed me a grin. “After
all, who am I to argue with the new voodoo Queen?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“So
where to?” Cade asked me.

I cocked my eyebrow at him. At first
I thought he was joking, or worse being patronizing by pretending to let me
call the shots. He caught my glance and shrugged. “You’re the boss, like I
said.”

“What, you're finally ready to take
orders from me?”

Cade sighed. Look, can we do our best
not to make a big thing out of this? I might have some military training and
have progressed down the path of thuggery since I got out, but I don't know
anything about voodoo.”

“Neither do I,” I told him
forcefully. “At least, I don't think I don't. Anyway, that doesn't really
matter. The next thing we need to do is pretty obvious. When I escaped from
Thrace I pretty much guaranteed that he would put his foot, quite literally, on
the box he's been searching for. We need to find a way to get back to the house
and see if he really discovered it.”

Cade nodded. “Leave that part to me.
I'll get us back there without being spotted by anybody who'll get word back to
him.”

“Good. Let's go.”

We went outside and turned the
corner. Cade stopped short when he saw his Harley in the parking lot. He’d
obviously been expecting me to make my getaway in the rental car.

I shrugged. “Couldn't get to the keys
for the car before I had to run for my life,” I told him. “I found yours on the
workbench in your garage and made do.”

I was expecting him to get all
possessive. Hell, what I was really think he was going to be doing in the next
few seconds was a quick walk around of his motorcycle to make sure that I
hadn't done it any damage. Instead, he surprised me by reaching out and squeezing
my shoulder with his big hand. “You rode this beast here yourself? I'm
impressed.”

I felt myself blush. “Well, I'm not
going to lie and say was easy. But I watched you when you did it, and I did my
best to not fall over.”

“Still,” he said, his voice holding
more than a little awe, “this thing is not an easy ride. I mean, it takes some
getting used to. You must be some sort of natural.” He peered at me even closer,
“Unless it's the voodoo giving you skills you shouldn't have…”

I rolled my eyes. “God, can't a girl ride
a Harley without banging up without being accused of being a witch?”

“Yeah, I suppose. Maybe,” he said
begrudgingly. “But that's exactly what I'd expected a witch to say,” he told me
with a grin.

I handed Cade the keys and he took
them happily, getting on the motorcycle and motioning for me to hop on behind
him. Once I had, he started the bike and we were off.

I didn't even have to be very
familiar with the area to know that Cade was taking us along back streets. We
swung so far out of the way as we rode back toward the house that some of the
streets weren't even paved, their gravel surfaces crunching beneath his wide
tires.

In the distance I could hear the
mournful cries of swamp birds, and now and then the wind brought the dark and
moldering smell of rotting vegetation to me.

The Bayou was calling to me. I could
feel its tug as we got nearer to it, and when he turned back toward
civilization to come at Grandmother's house from a little used road that didn't
appear to even have a street name, the pull of the swamp hung on to me.

I don't know if it was real or not,
but it was easy enough to feel like I was losing my balance. I leaned forward
and held on to Cade tighter than ever before, prompting him to let go of the
handlebars with one of his hands and reach back to lay his wide palm on my
thigh.

“Almost there,” he turned his head
and said.

I nodded. He was right. Within a
couple of minutes we were coming at Grandma's house from a side street, and he
pulled the Harley over a block or so away and cut the engine before pushing the
kickstand down with the heel of his boot.

“I'll be right back,” I said.

“No,” he growled, shaking his head
and brooking no argument. “We’re both going.”

“Fine,” he agreed. It was getting
darker now, and I looked to the sky and saw big, black clouds were in to
blanket the world.

Cade followed my gaze with his. “Going
to blow a gale, looks like.”

I nodded. “Going to suck, is what
it's going to do.”

“Yeah?”

“For sure.” I pointed at the house as
we carefully picked our way towards it. “We'd be crazy to stay here, since they
know exactly where we'd be. I doubt it’s safe to go and get the keys to the
rental. Which means, my dear man, that you and I are going to be stuck out in
the storm, cowering under some crappy tree and waiting for the worst of it to
blow over.”

He shrugged. “One thing at a time,
huh?”

We were just outside the fence that
separated Grandmother’s backyard from the street, and Cade bent down a little
and locked his hands together, clearly offering me a boost. “Get up there and see
what you can see, will you?”

I put my shoe into the palms of his
hand and felt him lift me effortlessly until I was head and shoulders above the
wooden fence. Grandma's backyard was private, but nobody built fences high
enough to stop someone looking in like this.

I could tell right away that we were
in trouble. Neither Thrace nor his guys were anywhere to be seen, but I could
clearly make out the ruins of the backstairs and the scattered dirt that showed
Thrace had been digging. I could even see the hollow little depression were the
boxes been.

“Shit,” I said as I stepped down from
the perch he'd made for me. “They've got the deeds.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “Thrace
may be an asshole, but that doesn't make him an idiot. Just because he has the
deed doesn't mean he's won, though. He still needs you to transfer it over to
them.”

“That's not going to happen.”

Cade shrugged. “That's an easy thing to
say, Rachel. But everyone has pressure points, and if there's one thing the Gravedigger
Union has gotten good at since I left, it's finding them.” A look came over his
face that I'd never seen there before, and it took me a second or two to
recognize it for what it was.

He was thinking of giving up.

“Oh no,” I said angrily. “No you
don't. You can’t back out on me now!”

“It may be better off for you if I
did,” he told me quietly. “After all, there's no point in playing the hero.
What would you gain? You're not even from here. Why risk your life?

I saw a red. If we weren’t trying to
be undercover out here, I'd probably have ripped into him right then and there.
As it was, I made do with turning on my heel and heading back to the motorcycle
without another word.

Was he right? Did Cade have a point?
It was true that I wasn't from here, but I'd been wondering over the past day or
two if I was from anywhere… Detroit was home, but only because it was the last
place I'd lived. I'd ended up there, a bit of driftwood coming to rest on a
dirty beach.

No, it didn't make it home. My heart
wasn't there.

It was here!

The thought set me free. Grandma had
carved out a place for me, and given me a way to make a living if I wanted it,
be it through her voodoo clients or the rent I was sure the properties would
yield. She loved me more than anyone else had bothered to in the last few
years, and the only way I had left to thank her was to fight for the things
she'd left me.

And so I would.

Cade was following me, and he got
back on the Harley. “Come on,” he said, looking at the sky again. “It's about
to open up. I know place.”