The Devil and Ms. Moody (11 page)

“How about some breakfast?” she said, coming up behind him.

He turned and stared hard at her curly blond hair, sweet face, and lithe figure. Why the hell had he ever told her to cut those jeans so short? And that top? She was half
naked,
for chrissake. “That’s your job, woman,” he said brusquely. “Get cooking. Make me some bacon and eggs.”

“Yes,
sir.
” Edwina felt a crackle of anger, and at the same time a flush of something hot and forbidden. For one crazy second she wanted to walk straight over to the arrogant SOB, unsnap his pants, and arouse him in all the ways a woman can arouse a man. She wanted to make him tremble and lose control the way she had ...

The flush spread like wildfire, stinging her throat. She couldn’t believe the things she was thinking! She had sex on the brain, even when she was angry. She had to get herself under control.
Had
to. It was a matter of survival.

Something told her that if she ever succumbed and made love with him, she would simply melt to his will from that day forward. She would lose every shred of autonomy and dissolve into a puddle of desire whenever he crooked his finger. Edwina Jean Moody couldn’t imagine herself a slave to anything ... except him.

“Got a stock tip for me?” Edwina spoke to the back pockets of Killer’s jeans. He was bent over his motorcycle, a wrench clutched in his greasy hand, and he looked every inch a grungy gung ho biker. So much so that she wondered if she had imagined him with the
Wall Street Journal
yesterday.

“That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?” she said. “Playing the stock market?”

Killer craned his neck around and frowned at her. “Nope. I’m wrenching on my scooter.”

“Oh, of course.” Edwina shrugged carelessly. “I didn’t mean now. I meant in general. You do play the market?”

He rose and tipped his L.A. Raiders hat back on his forehead. “I don’t play the market—I murder it,” he said, squinting into the sun. “That’s why they call me Killer.”

“Murder the market?” She laughed appreciatively. “Did you learn that in college?”

Killer threw her a funny look and went back to wrenching. “What makes you think I went to college?”

“No reason.” Edwina suspected she’d hit a nerve, and it made her even more determined to get some answers. She was going to take a risk, she decided, studying him, a calculated risk. She didn’t have the rubber snake with her, but if she could surprise Killer with the picture of Holt and get a reaction out of him, she just might hit the jackpot.

She glanced around, checking out the near-deserted campsite. Most of the gang had headed into town for supplies, including Diablo. They’d been gone a couple of hours, and they could show up at any time.

She dug the picture from her pocket and frowned. It was much the worse for having been in the river with her and Diablo last night. “Got a minute?” she asked Killer’s back.

He craned around again and squinted at her, then glanced at the picture as she held it out.

“Anybody you know?” she asked.

“You yanking my chain?”

He looked so incredulous that Edwina’s heart began to pound. “Why?
Do
you know him?”

“Hard to tell,” he said with a disdainful snick of laughter. “Is this before or after?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

He straightened up, looked Edwina over suspiciously, then took the photograph out of her hand and gave it another quick hard glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. I never saw this kid before.”

The roar of approaching motorcycles warned Edwina that her time had run out. She whisked the picture from Killer’s hand and jammed it into her pocket, turning in time to see Squire roll in, Carmen seated behind him.

Diablo trailed at the back of the pack, wearing mirrored sunglasses and the red bandanna around his head. He gunned his bike and roared up beside Edwina, the dust flying. “What are you doing?” he said, his glare flicking from her to Killer.

“Having a conversation.” She flagged the dust away with her hand. “Is that against the rules?”

“Get your butt on the bike, woman.”

The undisguised hostility in his voice made Edwina bridle. Somehow she managed to keep her mouth shut under the penetrating stares of the Warlords, but her heart burned with outrage. Silent, furious, she climbed on the bike and crossed her arms, refusing to touch him as he sped off toward their camp.

The second he pulled into their campsite, she slid off and glowered at him. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she said. “I don’t care what our deal is. I don’t care how the Warlords treat their women. If you ever humiliate me like that again, I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” He swung off the machine, hit the kickstand, and loomed over her.

“I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp with your own bike chain.”

A smile flickered. “That tough, huh?”

The threat had been a bit more graphic than Edwina intended, but she stood by it. “That tough.”

“The rodeo starts day after tomorrow,” he said. “You and I have got forty-eight more hours to get through, and we’re
going
to get through it.”

Edwina returned his stare defiantly, holding her ground, daring him to cross the symbolic line she’d drawn. He snagged her wrist and jerked her toward him, staring down at her until she felt herself weakening. She held her breath as his eyes flared, rich and emerald green. Seconds flew by, quick silent beats that connected them in some frightening way she didn’t fully understand.

“We’re going to do this my way, Princess,” he said, bringing her face up as though he were going to kiss her. And then Edwina realized that he
was
going to kiss her. His eyes had gone black with desire, and she could almost feel the stirring of his breath on her lips.

She rose up, trembling, lifting her mouth to his. Their lips touched, and she’d barely closed her eyes before he caught hold of her arms. A violent curse shook on his breath as he wrenched himself back from her. His voice dropped low, the same hair-raising whisper she remembered from Blackie’s.

“We’re going to do this my way,” he said.
“Or we’re not going to do it at all.”

D
IABLO’S “WAY” TURNED OUT
to be the ultimate test of Edwina’s patience. For the next two days he put an entirely new spin on the word
tension.
He was brusque and remote. He barked out commands like a marine DI, even going so far as to suggest that Edwina wash and wax his bike as the other old ladies did.

“Got some mud on those rims,” he announced late the following afternoon as he pulled a beer from the six-pack he had cooling in the river. He settled back against a bigleaf maple, popped the top, and took a swig. He’d barely lowered his arm and wiped his mouth before he was pointing Edwina toward the mud-spattered bike. “Spokes could use some elbow grease too.”

Edwina drew the line at that. “I don’t
do
spokes,” she told him flatly. “However, I’d be happy to run the bike into the river if you’d like, spokes and all.”

He took a deep pull from the beer can, flashed her a scowl, and then settled his gaze on the river.

A prince, she thought, I’ve finally found my prince. She shot visual daggers at his handsome, sullen profile. The bike first and then you, Mr. Congeniality. And may you both sink to the bottom like cement blocks.

She began busying herself with dinner, a mess of catfish the men had caught that morning. The rodeo started the next day, she reminded herself, striking a match to the logs left over from last night’s fire. She would have another shot at Killer then, and even if Killer wasn’t Holt, the real item was sure to turn up. Earlier that day Carmen had told her the rodeo was the biggest motorcycling event of the summer. Not only were they expecting several thousand “brothers” from all over the country, but it was going to be televised by a national network.

Moments later, as she settled the frying pan on its makeshift grate over the low-burning coals, she glanced at Diablo again. Contemplating his dark surliness, she marveled at the power of the attraction she felt for him, despite everything. Part of it was purely physical, she knew.
Handsome
didn’t begin to do him justice. The cheekbones, the eyelashes—God. She could thank her lucky stars that he was also unbearably nasty. She wouldn’t have been able to keep her hands off him otherwise. She was having trouble as it was.

He tilted his head against the tree, and the flashing light from the river outlined his three-quarter profile in silver. It was a reflective pose, and Edwina found it impossible not to wonder what he was thinking about. Past lives? Lost loves?

She slapped the catfish in the frying pan. If he was thinking about anything at all, she decided, it was probably riding motorcycles and ordering women around.

He had been acting oddly though, she admitted, even beyond his surliness toward her. The camp had been deserted the day before while the Warlords were swimming, and she’d noticed Diablo moving through the empty campsites. At one point she thought she’d seen him going through someone’s saddlebags, but when she asked him about it, he’d claimed he was doing some repair work on the bike. “A favor for a brother,” he’d said, so abruptly, she’d let the matter go. The last thing she’d needed then—or now—was to provoke him any further. She hadn’t bought his story, though, not entirely. Whatever his reasons for joining the gang, she was beginning to suspect they weren’t limited to brotherhood and fast bikes.

Much later that night as she lay in her sleeping bag staring at the stars, Edwina was quite sure she was losing whatever grip she had left on reality. She’d been listening to crickets for hours, until suddenly another sound caught her attention. Soft and plaintive as a songbird’s call, it came from the distance, perhaps even from the vicinity of the main camp. What kind of bird would make that sound? she wondered, trying to follow the melody. It actually sounded a little like “Kumbaya, My Lord,” an African folk song she vaguely recollected from summer camp when she was a kid.

It was only as Edwina began to hum along that she realized it wasn’t a bird at all. It was a harmonica! A quick glance at Diablo told her he wasn’t sleeping either, which meant that she would have to postpone any immediate investigating. She smiled up at the star-strewn sky. A Warlord who played the harmonica. Now, that was interesting.

Rodeos. Edwina hadn’t been to more than one or two such events in all of her twenty-six years. She was an easterner to the bone, but she’d always fondly associated rodeos with bucking horses, sweaty Stetsons, and kids shoveling cow pies off stable floors. A bikers’ rodeo, however, was quite a different kettle of soup, she was learning.

For one thing, there was the constant thunder of motorcycles—choppers, screamin’ eagles, and monster machines of every variety varooming into the fairgrounds. The men piloting the bikes were straight out of
Easy Rider
—highway commandos, tough-talking scrappers, and rugged individualists all. The women perched behind them had attitude to spare. They were street savvy and supercool. If there was a dress code, Edwina realized, it was tight jeans, tattoos, and leather. For both men and women.

Edwina was awestruck by the gaudy spectacle and had to remind herself not to stare. She felt as though she’d walked through the looking glass Diablo had said she was searching for. It was certainly a different world, a freewheeling subculture that most people probably didn’t know existed. Fascinated, she walked around the grounds, browsing at souvenir booths that featured such diverse items as custom wheelcovers, silver slave bracelets, and solid-brass skulls.

Later she stopped to watch a trick-riding demo and contemplate a banner hanging over the hot-dog-and-beer concession: FLYING WHEELS RODEO: LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL!

Finally Edwina had to remind herself that she had more important things to do than soak up the ambience. Diablo was competing in the barrel-racing event, and she needed to accomplish several things while he was occupied. In addition to scouting the fairgrounds for men who matched Holt’s physical description, she intended to track down Killer and ask a few more friendly questions. She also had a harmonica player to locate, but since he was obviously a Warlord, that could wait.

Black leather, long hair, and Rip Van Winkle beards seemed to be the order of the day as Edwina scoured the fairgrounds. She might as well have been at a Halloween party where everyone was wearing the same costume. Not a talkative bunch either, she realized after numerous abortive attempts at conversation. More often than not her questions were deflected with monosyllabic responses that sounded more like grunts than words. It wasn’t until she began to pepper her small talk with references to camshafts, flywheels, and air cleaners that she garnered some grudging respect. But no leads.

At one point she noticed Mad Dog in furtive conversation with a short stocky man in a trench coat. She stopped for a moment to watch, curious as a flash of light drew her attention to the chrome object ticked in Mad Dog’s boot. She still couldn’t tell what it was, and after a moment she shook off the fascination. She had better things to do.

Edwina was thoroughly tired and discouraged by the time she came across Killer at a tattoo booth. Stranded on a campstool, he was undergoing the ministrations of a female tattoo artist named Mother Earth according to the booth’s sign.

A captive audience, Edwina thought, smiling to herself. What luck! She reminded herself to play it cool as she approached him, but her attention was instantly riveted by the coiled python the artist was wrapping around Killer’s upper arm. The caption underneath it advised the reader to watch his step, but in less polite language.

“My goodness,” Edwina breathed. It was not the sort of thing a man who was afraid of snakes would choose, she realized. Unless he was trying to prove something.

Killer grinned at her. “Like it?”

“It’s lovel—” She caught herself. “Bad, Killer. That’s one
bad
snake.”

“Thanks,” he said, nodding toward the flaming skull on her shoulder. “Yours is pretty gnarly, too.”

“Oh, this ...” She shrugged it off. “I’m going to get myself a boa constrictor just as soon as I can scrape up the bread.”