Fugitive: A Bad Boy Romance (Northbridge Nights Book 2) (6 page)

“
T
erri Hanover
, I’m going to kill you!” I screamed through the phone.

“Admit it, Rach, it was fun,” Terri replied.

“Do you have any idea how awful the whole thing was?” I cried. My throat burned and I walked to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of water. “He dragged me skinny dipping in the Dalton! Took me gambling! And he drove his motorcycle like he was on crack—he must've been going 120 miles an hour!”

“So in short, it was the most exciting night of your life,” Terri said. I could almost see her grinning.

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Loud and clear, babe. You had an adventure.”

“More like a joyride through hell,” I said. “Now get your ass over here and bring me my stuff.”

“I'm at work, Rach. Not everyone played hooky today you know? I'll swing by later.”

I groaned when I realized I never even told Asher I wouldn't be coming in today. After downing an entire bottle of Evian, I dialed Sierra’s number. It’d be easier to explain the situation to her.

As soon as Sierra picked up she said, “No need to explain, Terri already told me everything.”

“You were in on it too?”

“Not exactly. Terri asked me to pitch in two-hundred bucks to make your night extra special, so I did. I didn't know about Kieran.”

“He was a maniac, Sierra. I was terrified.”

“Well, it'll be something to tell your grandkids one day,” Sierra said. “Anyway, gotta go. Someone has to file papers here since the paralegal here decided to play hooky today.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I said before hanging up. At least my boss wouldn’t be mad at me. I knew Sierra would cover for me. But still.

Had the night really just been something I’d tell my grandkids one day? One last reckless adventure before I got hitched? Yes, that was probably it. I strode toward the bathroom, shedding clothes along the way. A long, hot shower had my name on it.

After scrubbing every inch of my skin twice, I settled into bed and tried to delve into my new Nora Roberts paperback. But every time I turned the page, I kept hearing Kieran's voice, telling me to have a little fun in my life.
Reading about sex with a bad boy isn’t nearly as fun as fucking a real one.
Is that what he’d said?

I wasn't a boring person. I had fun. Just not the kind of fun he was used to. I mean, when I was sixteen, I went diving off a twenty-foot cliff and nearly smashed my skull. And when I was seventeen, I snuck into a frat party and got wasted.

But I was twenty-five now. Women my age didn't go around raising hell anymore. Women my age were settling down, getting hitched and popping out babies. Advancing their careers and buying houses. Saving for retirement. That's what my parents wanted for me and it was what I'd always wanted for me. Just to lead a happy, content life with my husband.

Robert Li was a compatible match for me in every way. We were both ambitious, educated and career-minded ABCs (American-Born Chinese). Intellectuals who loved to read and debate over politics as well as celebrity gossip...and besides, we were on the same page about our future. Robert was a golden boy who crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s. He was my parents’ ideal son-in-law: a dentist with a promising career ahead of him. My perfect fiancé. We'd been dating for six years now and living together for the last three. Our upscale apartment was the envy of all my friends, and at 1,250 square feet, it was very spacious and tastefully designed with a modern, open-concept framework.

Most importantly of all, Rob knew me better than anybody. I trusted him with my everything.

Which made me feel all the shittier for lying to him about where I was earlier.

Kieran Mahoney was just an unruly hiccup thrown in my path to test me. It was God's way of seeing if I'd stay true to my fiancé and true to my wedding vows: the ones I'd written almost two years ago in anticipation for my wedding day. The ones that promised fidelity, honesty and unconditional love. I would never cheat on Rob. Robert and I were soulmates, and soulmates couldn't possibly be separated by something so trivial as an encounter with a rugged egomaniac. I resolved to tell Rob the truth about Kieran when he got home later.

* * *

“
S
o
, how was your party?” Rob asked me over dinner.

“I thought we agreed not to talk about each other's stag nights,” I said, offering him a coy look.

Okay, so I thought about it and decided Rob was better off
not knowing
what really happened last night. The last thing I wanted was for him to be hurt. He was a sensitive man.

“I don't mind sharing. My buddies took me to a strip club but all the girls there paled in comparison to you. I couldn't stop counting the minutes until I could come home to you. It was a pretty lousy time.”

Rob's confession only made my stomach coil tighter. “Yeah, mine wasn't too great either. We went clubbing.”

It wasn't a complete lie. Just not the full truth.

Rob arched a brow. “That's it? I expected the girls to pull off something a bit wilder.”

“They're not nearly as creative as you give them credit for,” I said. “Next time one of them gets married, I'll show them how to throw a real bachelorette party.”

I shot Rob a smile and he laughed. “Rach, you're the most straight-laced girl I've ever met. I doubt you could do better.”

I knew Rob meant it as a joke but his remark stung like an insult. I could be wild if I wanted to be. “I have a pretty good imagination,” I said. “I could plan something crazy if I wanted to.”

“Babe, I love you to death but we've never even tried anything other than missionary in bed before,” Rob said. “You’re as conservative as they come.”

And he was right.

I really was a Plain Jane. A boring, stuck-up priss.

I would not have any good stories to tell my grandkids.

I put down my fork and looked at my fiancé. Rob, with his tapered face, shiny black hair, thin nose and large, hipster glasses. My Rob. “Am I a loser, Rob?”

“No, baby, I love you just the way you are,” Rob said, feeding me a piece of steak. “I wouldn't change a thing about you.”

My face lit up as I chewed on the steak. “That means a lot to me, sweetie. Thank you.” I washed down the meat with some wine.

See? Rob and I were a match made in heaven. If I was boring, well, at least I was getting married to someone who loved me as I was, and didn't want to shape me into someone else entirely. I was comfortable in my own skin, and I had nothing to prove.

“Rehearsal dinner tomorrow night. Did you finish your speech?” Rob asked. He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with the bottom of his shirt.

“Of course. Wrote it two years ago,” I said, leaning in and giving him a kiss. “I've been waiting to get married to you since the day we met.”

It was a very cheesy line but felt right at the time.

“And I've been waiting to call you my wife all my life,” Rob said.

Cheese alert!
I laughed out loud. “I love you. God I love you so much.” I leaned over and planted another kiss on his cheek. Rob wasn’t the handsomest man around, but he knew my heart as well as his own. And that was what I looked for in a husband. Someone who knew me intimately and accepted me, warts and all. Rob was a crowd-pleaser, and my entire family adored him. I had no doubt we’d have a long, happy life together.

That night we made sweet love in bed. The slow, sensual kind. The kind that involved hour-long foreplay and scented candles. And I decided to do something a little radical this time. I let Rob take me from behind. He was shocked but delighted by my proposition. Plunged deep inside me, over and over. Grunted like a sweaty animal on top of me…and I took everything he dished out. Even came up with a few naughty propositions.

I wanted my mind to stay a blank slate, to just enjoy the act of making love, but…Kieran’s pesky face kept popping up, taunting me. Denying me my orgasm.

I shuddered from frustration, digging my nails hard into the mattress. Sweaty tendrils of hair clung to my face and neck, itchy and hot. I just couldn’t get in the mood. Rob climaxed minutes later and I faked my orgasm so I could catch up on some much needed shut-eye. My fiancé’s face scrunched as he kissed me good night.

Tomorrow would be a long day.

It was always a long day when the in-laws came together under one roof.

I needed to be prepared.

S
omeone stole my fucking bike
. My baby.
Halle.

“Did you see who did it?” I asked Lolo, the homeless girl who lived outside Trombly. She was sleeping in a pile of old carpets that stank of piss and booze. Her matted hair covered most of her dark face as she looked up at me. Lolo crushed her cigarette on the pavement and said, “Hell if I know. I'm sleepin' most of the time.”

“I've had that bike since I was eighteen,” I said, as if that would elicit some sympathy from her.

“Sorry, man, you shoulda parked it somewhere else. This a rough hood here.”

I gritted my teeth. “Thanks anyway.” I unlocked the front door and rushed into my room. As soon as I shut the door, I checked my stash to make sure it was still safe. Thank God it was. I could not afford to lose all my savings or my weapon. I removed the crumpled paper bag from my breast pocket and added $600 to my stash.
$800 to go.
Replacing the warped floorboard, I leaned back and rested my head against the wall.

How could I have been such an idiot? Did I really think the ex-cons in this building would look out for me? Everyone was caught up in their own shit. Trying to readjust to life on the outside. Find some semblance of normal. Nobody would even think about calling the cops if they saw someone stealing my Harley. They didn’t want trouble with their POs. In fact, my baby might've been stolen and pawned by someone I pass by every day. Of course I couldn't go to the cops about it either. They had no sympathy for anyone living in this building. Turned a blind eye to all the abuse. Not just between ex-cons, but between the parolees and their POs as well. I had no choice but to accept the loss and move on. The last thing I needed was to draw more attention to myself. And I’d be damned if they called Mya about this. She didn’t even want to give me my license in the first place. The board only took pity on me when I explained that I needed my motorcycle to get to work halfway across town.

Shitsticks.

Halle was my one-way ticket out of this dump. She was an eighteenth birthday present from Cam. An unexpected and kind gesture from my estranged brother. I'd named her after one of my favorite actresses, Halle Berry. Halle had been with me through all that shit with Trish
.
Now she was gone.

Without my wheels, my options were limited.

I couldn't risk buying a Greyhound ticket; the station was right beside the police headquarters. It'd be suicide. I also didn't want to buy a used vehicle, which would dig into my already low funds. Renting one was out of the question; I had no credit card. I had no friends who could loan me a ride...I could hitchhike...but that would be my absolute last resort.

Fuck.

I needed to leave in five days.

Which meant I had five days to figure out how to get to Seattle without the cops chasing after me.

“Hey man, rough day?” Nate, my roommate asked. He was a short and stocky guy; all muscle, no nonsense. He threw his backpack on the ground and took off his jacket. The stench of his B.O. choked me and I stifled a cough. He worked for a small construction company, and always reeked by the end of the day. Poor guy did forty years at Maxfield. I couldn’t even imagine spending half my life in prison. I’d go crazy; probably kill myself after twenty years. Or at least try to.

“Yeah mate, my bike got stolen,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“Shit. Any leads?”

“Nothing. Nobody's seen it. At least, that's what they say.”

“Was it worth a lot?”

“Most valuable thing I owned. Plus, it was like my baby, you know?”

“Fuck, man. I don't have much, but you can borrow my extra bike if you want.”

“Serious?”

“Yeah. I haven't used it in years, so the tires need some air, but otherwise, it's a good bike.”

“Thanks, mate. That'd be great. Better than walking or taking the bus.”

Nate sat down cross-legged on the floor and unzipped his backpack. “You want some dinner? I got a meatball hero we can share.”

“No thanks, I'll grab something when I go out later.”

Nate shot me a grin and unwrapped his sandwich. “Suit yourself.”

A good old-fashioned bike. It was better than nothing. Thank God Nate was a good soul. His wheels would serve as a good back-up option until I could find something better.

Nate peeled back some more crinkly tin foil. “Hey K?”

“Yeah?”

“So, what's your story? What'd you do?” Nate asked, taking a huge bite of his sandwich. “You know about mine.”

It was true. The first day we met, this seemingly macho-ass man bawled his eyes out and confessed that he killed his wife's lover in a fit of rage. He'd regret it for the rest of his life, he said. Nate was a rare breed of man; one who actually repented for his sins, and tried his best to squeeze back into the cruel society that gave up on him when he was only twenty. He worked harder than anybody I knew, never said a bad word about anyone, kept his head down, and intended to make the most out of his life. I wished I could be like Nate. Sixty and still going strong. But I didn’t have Nate’s patience or fortitude. I was never good at swallowing my anger, and never good at thinking before acting. Did a decade of penance change me? Nope. The American penal system was fucked up. Prisons were criminal breeding grounds and recidivism rates were sky-high. Tax dollars well wasted. But people with a God-complex needed a job somewhere, right?

I never told him what I did. In fact, I never told anyone at Trombly what I did.

Even after ten years, I still didn't want to admit it out loud. Somehow, I knew if I told someone, it would become
real.
It didn’t seem real. All of it happened so bloody fast. Like a nightmare I couldn’t control. One I never woke up from.

I wasn't ready for questions or judgment yet. Not even Cameron knew the truth. After our parents died in a car crash (five years into my sentence), I didn’t feel like burdening Cam with my problems. They were mine to shoulder, and mine alone. My only regret was that the warden refused to grant me furlough to attend the funeral. I never got to properly say goodbye. To tell them how much I hated and missed them at the same time. How I wished, prayed, they’d see me in prison, but they never did after that initial visit.

After I got out of Maxfield…when I finally visited their grave, I didn’t know what to say to them. They hadn’t wanted anything to do with me. Always said I was the black sheep of the family. They didn’t want their reputation tainted by a convict, so they tried to forget about me. Pretend that they only had one son: Cameron, the golden boy. I was fine with that. I was hardly good enough to be a senator’s stepson. But rejection still stung like a bitch. My mother and I had moved from England to the U.S. when I was only five. She’d remarried a year later to an Irish-American senator, Patrick Mahoney, and proceeded to change all our last names. She wanted to forget about her former life of misery in London, and she wanted to erase all memories of my birth father. And she succeeded. In fact, she replaced every good memory I had of my father, Charles, with memories of Patrick yelling at me and saying I’d never be good enough to fit into his picture-perfect family.

Ever since I was a kid, I knew I was different. A daredevil who stayed just outside the lines. Always in the grey, never settling for a white picket fence kind of life. That boring shit was for brainwashed losers. The American Dream was a fat lie the government fed us to keep us enslaved by capitalism. Made us always want more; never satisfied with the life we had. My whole family ate that shit up. But me? I rejected all of it. I saw corruption and theft everywhere, masquerading as promise and hope. People needed to open up their fucking eyes. We were all slaves to materialism, couldn’t they see that?

In some ways, I sort of always knew I’d end up in prison. One way or another, the system would’ve punished me for raising hell. Anarchy was in my veins, and I couldn’t rein it in. I didn’t want to rein it in. Society didn’t like that.

In prison, I had a lot of time to read the classics, because that’s all they had. That’s where I met Machiavelli, Robespierre, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche and Hobbes. They enlightened me about the human condition, and taught me new ways of thought.

Robespierre once said that the secret to tyranny was keeping the masses ignorant. I saw my parents turn a blind eye to senseless violence, racism, bigotry, fraud and crime. No one cared, so why should I? I saw my stepfather take bribes and shift policies in favor of the wealthy. He was their pawn and puppet. I didn’t want to be anyone’s puppet. When I turned seventeen, I left home. No note, no warning, nothing. They never bothered looking for me. The only person I called two months later was Cam, letting him know I was still alive.

Trisha’s gang, the Sixteen Kings, took me in. I’d known them since junior high. They became my new family. And I loved my new family. We wanted to be different. Be revolutionary. Spark change and fuck up the gamed system. Press reset.

But somehow…we lost our way.

I looked at Nate, my eyes dry and irritated. “I’ll tell you my story some other time. Maybe next week,” I said, knowing full well I'd probably never see him again.

“Sure,” Nate said. “No worries. I'm here to listen, whenever you want to share.”

I shot him a weak grin and nodded.