Wanted: Devil Dogs MC (4 page)

“I’m sorry.” The sincerity in Wesley’s voice is surprising, not just because he doesn’t seem to be the most sensitive type, but also because his sympathy doesn’t irritate her like everyone else’s does.

“You seem to be saying that a lot recently.” She smiles at him wryly, wanting to defuse the emotion of the moment. “Do you always apologize this much?”

The corners of his mouth quirk up in answering amusement. He shakes his head. “No, actually my friends would tell you it’s usually pretty much the opposite.”

“Well, I guess it must be my influence on you.” Isabel smiles at him and, in the back of her mind, awareness dawns that she’s flirting with this guy.

“I guess so.” He looks at her appreciatively and Isabel feels something warm inside her. He has a way of looking at her that makes her feel like he sees much more than she’s willing to share with him. He blinks hard, as if he’d just realized what he was doing and he breaks their eye contact. Isabel can’t help but feel like a light has gone out. “I’ll take care of the place. You don’t have to worry. I won’t disturb anything.” He makes a gesture to encompass the boxes and workbench.

Isabel dips her head so he doesn’t see the emotion pass over her features. It’s hard enough trusting this man with a space that had been so precious to her mother, a space she is only just beginning to realize the significance of. A fact that is made even harder as Wesley seems to understand exactly what she fears, exactly what she is feeling without her having to say a word. It’s not a sensation she’s ever experienced before; it’s disconcerting and leaves her feeling like the ground is moving underneath her.

There is no doubt about it. She should have trusted her instincts, her first impression of him had been right. This guy is dangerous and not just because of how little she knows about him. In the half hour she’s been in his company he’s managed to stir up emotions she hadn’t even been aware existed behind her staple veneer of calm collectedness. In high school she had been labeled ‘The Ice Maiden’ because she barely dated and never put out. Now she feels anything but icy cold, her body still pulsing from the heat that his proximity had stirred in her.

Pull yourself together, Bishop. He’s just a guy – a cute guy, but still just a guy.
Well, that isn’t exactly accurate; she corrects the rational side of her brain. He’s not just a guy; he’s also a guest. Isabel is breaking a golden rule of the boarding house, one her mother had been insistent on whenever she hired a new employee – no fraternizing with the clients, no matter how handsome, kind, or charming. Absently, Isabel wonders what her mother would have thought of Wesley Raeburn and if she would have appreciated that he encapsulated all three of the threats that she’d warned her employees of. The triple threat was always a killer.

“I should get back to work.” Isabel starts backing out of the door, slowly, as if the man in front of her were a tiger about to pounce. “You can stick around, make yourself at home.” She waves vaguely at the dust-filled space. “If you need anything, you know where to find me!” She waves at him, cringing at how lame she must look before she turns on her heel and has to stop herself from running down the path, back up to the house.

When Isabel gets to the office, the room she still can’t stop thinking of as her mother’s room more than hers, she sprawls in the chair, breathing heavily as if she’s just run a mile. Her heart is pounding and her brain feels as if it’s firing in about a hundred different directions. She doesn’t need this, not now. A stupid crush on a guest isn’t going to help her get the boarding house out of the financial dire straits that it is in and that is her focus. That is the only thing that can matter to her now. She doesn’t need any distractions, especially none of the tall, dark, and handsome male variety.

She pulls out the wad of cash he’d given her, counting the money and, as she does so, she feels her heart rate slow a little. A measure of control returns. It is just a business transaction; there is nothing else that bound them together. She will do well to remember that. Isabel takes a look at the letters with angry red writing in front of her. She should really get down to paying some of those long-overdue bills. But, instead, she powers up her laptop, telling herself she shouldn’t waste any more time before running a background check on her newest house guest. It was the responsible thing to do and Isabel is nothing if not responsible. But that doesn’t explain the feelings of trepidation as she types in two words on her search bar: Wesley Raeburn.

Who are you?
she thinks to herself.

“Miss Isabel, you tell me the same thing last week!” Rosa’s soft, fleshy face, creases into a frown.

Isabel wants to shrink back into her chair, in front of the older woman’s accusation, but instead she remains straight-backed, confident. “I know this is hard, Rosa. But the boarding house isn’t making as much money as it used to.” She stifles a sigh at her understatement.

“This I know, Miss Isabel. But never before have I been paid late! In your mother’s time, God rest her soul, it would never have happened. It would be impossible!”

The Italian woman isn’t wrong and Isabel is well aware of the fact. Her mother’s seamless running of the boarding house has left her confused on more than one occasion. It is still a mystery how she had been able to keep the house turning over like a well-oiled machine. Isabel felt like she had a rusty junker on her hands.

“Rosa, I know this is hard, but we’re all having to tighten our belts. I promise you, you will get your money
with
interest
next week.” Isabel keeps her tone as bright and positive as she can, despite having her own reservations.

“Your mother was a wonderful woman. For her, I would have worked for free!” Rosa opens her arms wide to demonstrate her expansiveness and Isabel has to bite her tongue from pointing out that Rose would be about as likely to volunteer at the boarding house as Isabel was of sprouting wings and flying away.

Rosa shakes her head at the tragedy of her situation. Isabel understands the woman’s shock, but, at the same time, she’s well aware that her mother had been paying Rosa over and above the going rate for a cleaning-lady for the past five years and she’d also thrown in heavy bonuses on birthdays, Christmases, and whenever the guest house was booming. A closer look at the finances had told Isabel that Caroline Bishop had taken care of Rosa even when the boarding house couldn’t afford it. Isabel figures it was time to get some of that good will back.

“It’s just this one time, Rosa. I promise.” Isabel smiles sweetly but it doesn’t seem to have any affect on the older woman.

“You know, I have been offered a job downtown in a big hotel. But I say no, because Mrs. Bishop was such a good friend and she treated me so well.” Rosa lets the sentence hang in the air and there’s no mistaking the threat in her words.

Isabel grinds her teeth at her employee’s blatant attempt to blackmail her. The problem is that Isabel needs Rosa and Rosa is all too aware of that. Rosa knows the workings of the boarding house inside and out. She is familiar with all the guests, the preferences of all of their repeat guests, as well as those of the couple of long-term guests Isabel had managed to keep hold of. She has to keep Rosa on board. There is just no other way for the boarding house to work; she can’t do it all on her own.

Isabel looks at the cash tin that sits on her desk. She knows exactly how much is in there because she’s been supplementing it for the last month with her own savings. She looks between the tin and Rosa’s unmoved expression. She knows she’s kidding herself if she thinks she has any other choice.

“I can give you half your money now and then the other half with interest at the end of next week. How does that sound, Rosa?” Isabel gives her a winning smile, a challenge when the woman huffs and sighs as if Isabel were bargaining for her first born.

“It sound better, Miss Isabel, not perfect but better.” The older woman shrugs, making it clear how unhappy she is with the situation.

Isabel doesn’t mention the fact that one call to immigration would probably make things very difficult for Rosa – who she knows, for a fact, has papers that are more than a little questionable. That’s not her style but the thought does occur to her in the dark moments when she feels more like Rosa’s employee than the other way round.

As Isabel counts out the dollars in cash she had so painstakingly saved by working in a bar during her entire college career, she bites her tongue. There would be no point in telling Rosa the money she was being given was Isabel’s own, that it was money she had planned to use to fix the run-down pipes and heating system in the boarding house. She doesn’t tell her it was the last of her savings. After all, what would be the point? Bishop’s Boarding House is a business, not a charity. Isabel knows she can’t expect people to work for free, but she had hoped for a little more loyalty.

Rosa nods in semi-satisfaction as she pockets the cash and makes her way towards the door. “Miss Isabel, if you don’t do something soon then all this,” she gestures around her at the house, “will be gone and that would have made your mother very sad.” She gives Isabel a look that would be warm if it weren’t so patronizing before striding out of the office and out the front door.

“Thanks for the insight.” Isabel plops down into the chair unceremoniously, frowning after the squat Italian woman. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Her gaze lands on the letter from the electric company, confirming the credit to their account and Isabel allows herself a half-smile. There’s an inordinate amount of pleasure in being able to stop worrying about the lights being cut off. But Isabel doesn’t have long to bask in the afterglow of that fact. There is still too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it and too many bills to pay and not enough money to pay them. Wesley Raeburn’s up-front payment for his lease has gone some way to keeping the wolves from the door, but it was still only a start; Isabel would need much more than just a start to keep the boarding house afloat.

Isabel’s mind wanders to her new tenant, to the mysterious man who had appeared on her doorstep a week ago. She knows almost as little about him now as she did that first day. Despite her best efforts, the background check she had tried to run on him had proved pretty much fruitless. There is hardly any information about the man. The only facts she had been able to find were that he had been in the army, straight out of high school, that he’d become a Marine and then there was nothing. It was as if he had dropped off the map three years prior and there was nothing else she could find out about him. His past is as much of a mystery as the man himself and Isabel finds herself intrigued, more so than she can blame on her professional interest in his story.

Over the past week she has tried to glean some idea about who this man really is by the way he behaves, by the way he interacts – or doesn’t, as the case seems to be – with the other tenants. He tends to avoid more or less everyone; even she has barely seen him since he arrived. He keeps odd hours, going out at night, the roar of his motorbike echoing out into the darkness. Isabel doesn’t hear him come back, which, with her insomnia, is something of a feat. But those are nowhere near the most disconcerting aspect of his habits.

That morning, when she was sorting through the laundry – again, doing one of Rosa’s jobs – she had found what looked like dried blood on his clothes. She had explained it away. After all, there are a million different reasons why he might have blood on them; he could have had a terrible nosebleed or fallen over in the street and cut himself. But having seen him just that afternoon, he didn’t look like he had a scratch on him and, she knows from experience in a hospital, that amount of blood loss would leave a mark.

Perhaps he was a vigilante by night and he’d pulled a mother and her baby from the wreckage of a car accident. Isabel was able to invent any number of reasons why the blood had mysteriously found its way onto his clothes, each more implausible than the last. But her mother had always said the most obvious answer was, usually, also the right one and Isabel had worked in a hospital long enough to know that whosever the blood was, it wasn’t his and that person was probably in a pretty sorry state.

With the other guests, he’s polite but nothing more. One of her only long-term guests had tried to engage him in conversation a couple of days prior, only to be stonewalled at every turn. The older man, Lionel, was intrinsically curious and the presence of the mystery man in what Lionel considered his home was too much of a temptation. After a morning of waiting for the new arrival at the breakfast table, to no avail, Lionel had realized his prey was no early bird and had managed to corner him in the hallway. “So what brings you to our humble home, Wesley?”

Wesley had shrugged. “This and that.”

He made a move as if to walk past Lionel to his room, but the older man wasn’t about to give up so easily. “You been to Chicago before?” Lionel edged around Wesley so he was now between the newcomer and his means of escape, his bedroom door.

Wesley’s shoulders sank a little as if he was resigning himself to the fact that the other man clearly wasn’t going to let him just brush him off. “A few times.”

The light in Lionel’s eyes shined with the little victory he had achieved. “But never staying here before. I’m very good at faces and I would remember you.” He waggled a finger at Wesley and Isabel had read the sign. She’d seen it before; Lionel was just warming up. “So what kind of business are you in, Wes? May I call you Wes?”

Wesley shrugged again, nonplussed. “Sure, everyone else does.” It wasn’t lost on Isabel that he had deliberately avoided the real question and Lionel was no fool either.

“Excellent, so what was it you said that you did for work?” Lionel had leaned in a little to the other man, as if he were afraid he might miss anything Wesley was about to say.

“I didn’t.” Wesley’s voice was flat, not inviting any further interrogations.

From her vantage point, Isabel saw Lionel blink hard, his shock at the open evasion evident.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.” He stepped forward, not threateningly, but making his size and his strength known. From where Isabel was hiding or – as she preferred to think of it – observing, she couldn’t see Wesley’s face, only Lionel’s and whatever she had missed was clearly worthy of note.

Isabel watched Lionel shrink back involuntarily and step aside to let Wesley pass to his door. “I can see you’re a busy man, Wes. So I’ll leave you to it.” Lionel hurried away without waiting for any kind of a response from the other man. He’d looked scared, as if he had seen something on Wesley’s face that had spooked him.

She had remained still, not wanting to give her position away so late in the game when it would become quite clear she had been eavesdropping. Wesley put the key in his bedroom door and turned it, but stopped short of pushing it open. Instead, he paused with his hand on the doorframe and turned to look at the exact position where she was hiding on the porch.