The Devil and Ms. Moody (12 page)

He considered her with renewed respect.

Progress. Intuition told Edwina to take it slowly, but she had so little time. “Killer, you look like a man who knows his way around.”

Maneuvering clear of the bulky girth of the tattoo artist, Edwina crouched beside Killer’s stool and spoke in conspiratorial whispers. “If I wanted to make contact with a guy—one of the brothers, I mean—how would I do that? I was told he’d be here, at the rodeo.”

He looked her over. “You the fuzz?”

“No—this has nothing to do with the police.” She tried another angle—the bearer-of-good-news technique. “I’ve got some information for him I think he’ll want to hear.”

“Yeah? So what’s his name?”

She paused for effect. “Christopher Holt.”

Killer scratched his scruffy beard and studied her through narrowing eyes. “If I did know something about this Holt dude,” he said, “what would it be worth to you?”

“Ed!”

Edwina turned to see Carmen waving her arms and rushing toward them from the stadium area.

“We’ll talk later,” she assured Killer under her breath, hastily abandoning him to the tattoo artist.

Laughing and breathless, Carmen blurted out the news the minute she reached Edwina. “You and Diablo are entered in the pig-roping competition,” she said. “Hurry! It’s up next.”

“Pig roping?” Edwina resisted, digging in her heels as Carmen tried to tug her along. “Is that what it sounds like? Who signed us up?”

“Squire did it.” Carmen’s dark eyes sparked in the sunlight. “Get a hustle on, Ed. If you and Diablo want to be in the Warlords, you’d better bring home the bacon!”

Edwina had very dark thoughts on her mind as Carmen dragged her toward the stadium. Her first glimpse of Diablo told her that he wasn’t any happier about the situation than she was. He was standing near the announcer’s booth talking to Squire, and he looked as though he were losing the argument.

Diablo pulled Edwina aside as she approached. Behind them the stadium crowd roared with laughter at something going on in the arena. “Looks like we’re stuck with this pig-roping thing,” he said. “Ever thrown a lasso?”

“Once, at a Junior League charity bazaar. I swung it over my head pretty good, but then I looked up and got dizzy.” She smiled faintly. “I sort of lassoed myself.”

He closed his eyes. “Worse than I thought.”

While they waited for their turn, Diablo gave Edwina some pointers, but he might as well have been trying to teach her quantum physics. She did master the rules, however. The event required that the man maneuver the bike while the woman wielded the lasso. Each pair had two minutes in the arena with the pig, and the team with the best time won.

The crowd was still roaring as Edwina and Diablo took their positions on his bike. They were slotted as the last team to compete, and as Edwina watched the couples before them chase the pig around, tormenting the poor squealing creature on their motorcycles, she became incensed. The pathetic animal would probably die of a heart attack before anyone got a rope on it. Her only consolation was that the pig seemed to be giving the contestants a run for their money. It dodged and darted, maneuvering like greased lightning.

“Let’s hear it for the bacon busters!” the MC yelled, stirring up the crowd. “I’m going to throw in a bonus,” he said. “The winners get to take Porky home! Barbecued spareribs tonight!”

Edwina winced as the pig was finally lassoed and brought to a screeching halt. Spareribs indeed, she thought.

She thumped Diablo on the back. “We’ve got to win this event,” she said, her voice shaking with conviction. “I refuse to let any of these bozos take that poor creature home and barbecue him.”

Diablo was incredulous. “What are we going to do with a pig?”

Edwina had no answer for that. Furthermore, she found the question irrelevant. The pig needed rescuing, and she was the only one who cared, quite obviously.

Diablo cranked around and gave her a hard stare. In the face of her unflinching passion, he exhaled. “All right, you want the pig, you got it.”

A prince, Edwina thought, smiling.

Moments later, in the middle of the arena, waiting for the pig to be released, Edwina was no longer smiling. The crowd whistled and stomped as the animal came scrambling out of the chute. Diablo gassed the bike, and they were off. She clamped her thighs tight to his hips, which left both of her hands free to work the rope.

“Now!” Diablo said as he pulled alongside the galloping pig. Edwina rose out of her seat, swinging the rope awkwardly. The pig swerved. Diablo swerved with it, and Edwina dug her knees into his body for leverage. She leaned over him, swaying precariously. The pig pulled ahead, and as Diablo shot out after it, Edwina let fly with the lasso. By some miracle, her aim was on target.

“She’s got it!” someone screamed.

“Oh, no!” A groan went up as the rope hit the pig’s snout and bounced off.

“One more time,” Diablo said, spinning the bike around. “This time we bag him,” he told Edwina. “Let me get close. Stay low and lay the loop over his head.”

Edwina’s obsession with liberating the pig made her reckless. As Diablo pulled up on the animal, she dipped down low enough to stir up dust with the loop of the rope. It was a dicey maneuver for an inexperienced rider, and the crowd gasped.

What happened next was one of those unforeseen incidents that change the course of events inexorably. It would live on in biker folklore for years to come that Diablo’s cycle fishtailed into a one-eighty spinout just as the pig changed direction. It might have been Edwina’s weight or even a wet spot on the dirt field. Whatever the reason, for several horrible seconds before Diablo could get the bike under control, motorcycle and pig were on a collision course.

When the animal saw them coming at him, it put on the brakes and squealed in confusion. As Diablo and Edwina rolled by, the pig simply sat back on its haunches, spent. Edwina gently dropped the lasso over its head.

The crowd went crazy.

“A big hand for our winners!” the MC trumpeted moments later as Edwina and Diablo climbed the stairs to the awards podium. Television cameras whirred as the MC held out a large silver trophy and clapped Diablo soundly on the back.

“Give your old lady a kiss!” he urged. “She’s one tough little pig wrangler!”

“She is that,” Diablo admitted.

Edwina couldn’t suppress a smile. By the expression on Diablo’s face, the last thing he wanted to do at the moment was kiss her.

She was partially right. Actually Diablo wanted to kiss the hell out of her. He just didn’t want to get anywhere near her sweet little pig-wrangling body to do it. He’d been fighting his animal instincts too long and too hard to risk unleashing the beast again.

“Plant one on her, man!” the MC urged.

Diablo raked a hand through his hair and debated. Edwina looked so breathless and pleased with herself that he found it almost impossible to resist her. Anyway, he rationalized, the TV cameras were rolling. He caught her hand and pulled her to him.

“Good roping, Ed,” he said, tilting her chin up. He placed his lips over hers and heard the taut little whimper that came out of her. Good God, he thought, feeling a sharp answering tug deep in his vitals. This woman was going to kill him.

“Good riding,” she said, breaking away to touch his jawline with shaky fingers.

He stared into her russet eyes and knew it was too late. His heart was going soft around the edges, and something in the deeper regions of his body was doing exactly the opposite. The beast was free. “Come here, woman,” he said, gathering her into his arms. As she melted against him, he kissed her roughly and possessively.

A second later they’d both forgotten all about MCs and stadium crowds and TV cameras. All Diablo could think about was how unbelievably right she felt in his arms.

The Warlords celebrated that night, a party to end all parties. They congregated at the campsite with Edwina as the guest of honor, and when the gang ragged her about roasting her prize pig with an apple in its mouth, she talked them into adopting it as a mascot instead.

“Let’s call him Food Chain,” Edwina suggested. “Since that’s the fate we saved him from.”

The crowd approved. The pig approved, too, apparently. Food Chain wandered happily through the crowd, begging snacks and attention while the Warlords feasted on buckets of fried chicken and biscuits they’d picked up at a fast-food place.

Someone provided hot dogs and marshmallows for roasting over the fire, and for the first time Edwina felt actually a part of the camaraderie. Perhaps Diablo did too. He spent most of the night drinking with the guys, a Warlord ritual, but she noticed him smiling now and then, especially when he caught her eye.

Once or twice in all the commotion Edwina remembered her mission, but Killer wasn’t anywhere to be found that night. As the party wore on, it was Mad Dog who drew her attention. He was surprisingly jovial and inoffensive. And when he pulled the wicked-looking silver object from his boot and began to play it, Edwina did a double take. It was a harmonica!

As she hummed along to “Let the Good Times Roll,” she realized that Mad Dog must have been the one she’d heard playing the night before. Automatically she touched the front pocket of her jeans where the picture of Chris Holt still languished. Holt had clutched a harmonica, she thought, observing Mad Dog closely. The bearded biker was the right height and the right complexion. He was much too burly, but a man could bulk up in that many years. And she did seem to recall having seen a freckle or two on the biker’s nose when he’d tried to molest her in Blackie’s.

No, she thought, that’s ridiculous. Mad Dog couldn’t be Chris Holt. Vulgarity was a congenital condition with him. He was a roughneck by birth, not a refugee from upper-class stock. Besides, nobody so reprehensible deserved to inherit a fortune. She dismissed the idea and helped herself to one of the deliciously gooey marshmallows Carmen was toasting.

As the celebrating wound down, Squire walked to the roaring fire pit and called the group to attention. “I think the time has come to make Diablo a brother.”

A murmur went up among the crowd, and Edwina searched out Diablo with her eyes. He was standing at the edge of the activity, silently observant, and as always, unreadable.

Diablo watched as the club members’ heads began to nod. The positive responses told him that his efforts had finally paid off. He was about to become a Warlord. Relief was sharp, a stinging prickle in his gut that surprised him. Not that he didn’t have plenty to be relieved about, but it was more than that, he realized. Squire’s gesture felt like a personal victory. Aware that Edwina was watching him, he motioned for her to join him.

“Are we going to initiate him?” someone yelled.

“Make him eat a handful of gaskets!” another suggested.

“And drink a quart of transmission fluid,” Mad Dog chimed in. Several others hollered their preferred choice of torture as Diablo and Edwina approached Squire.

The gang leader positioned himself in front of the two of them like a country preacher about to perform a ceremony. “Your initiation will be the same as mine when I joined,” he said, addressing Diablo, “the Cliff Ride. Will you accept the challenge?”

The crowd began to buzz excitedly, and someone behind Diablo whispered, “The Cliff Ride? That’s suicide.”

Diablo’s jaw tightened. He’d never actually witnessed the Cliff Ride, but he’d heard about its hazards. It was a dangerous stunt that took two people. He glanced at Edwina, at her rising color. Fear? It might have been disbelief in her answering glance or the panic that came with not knowing what to expect. There was only one choice to make, he realized. Squire was giving him the opening he’d been waiting for, but he couldn’t subject Edwina to that kind of danger, not even to get into the Warlords.

“I’ll accept any challenge but that one,” he said, meeting Squire’s cold stare head-on. “I don’t want my old lady involved.”

Edwina looked up at Diablo in surprise, hesitating only as he warned her with a staying motion. His unflinching profile told her there was a great deal at stake.
His
old lady, she thought, as words flashed into her head. The same proprietary phrase that had made her bridle before now gave her an odd rush of pride.

“Do you accept the challenge?” Squire maintained stubbornly. “Yes or no?”

Edwina’s heartbeat was erratic as she waited for Diablo to answer. She knew he was trying to protect her. She also knew the initiation was the only way he could gain entrance into the gang. As the silence stretched, she turned to him, took in a strengthening draught of air, and spoke quietly. “Whatever the Cliff Ride is, we can do it. Accept the challenge.”

 It was midnight when the Warlords convened at Devil Rock. The full moon was a huge white discus resting on black-velvet hills, playing fields of the mountain gods. Once the roar of the cycles had died down, you could almost hear wind whistling through the treetops. The sound of it made Edwina shiver, despite the fact that the air held a late-summer balm.

Disturbed by the intruders to their lair, magnificent red-tailed hawks circled in the night sky, their wings tipped silver by moonlight. The shadows they dropped onto the steep cliff walls of the canyon accentuated the one-hundred-foot drop to the turbulent river below.

Seated behind Diablo on the bike, Edwina felt nearly ill with fear. She couldn’t look at the chasm they were about to negotiate without imagining the horror of plummeting to the bottom. Her mind was torturing her with stark flashes of their bodies broken against the rocks below.

“Are you ready?” Squire asked Diablo.

Diablo nodded, revving the engine of his bike.

Edwina made a silent request of the mountain gods for safe passage. Their challenge was to ride the bike across the twenty-foot natural-rock bridge that connected the two cliffs. Not an impossible task, except that in this case, Diablo was to be blindfolded. Edwina would be his eyes.

It would be a nerve-numbing test of their ability to cooperate, an exercise in trust that was dangerous to the point of insanity. Edwina understood only too well what was at risk: one bad call, one false step on her part, and they were over the side.