Page 236 of Handsome Devil
“Maybe you want some privacy,” he suggested gruffly. “You know, girl talk.” His patience was clearly evaporating, fast. He reached to open the door. “Make it fast,” he said to his mom. “I’ve got places to be.” Then he got out of the vehicle and shut the door.
I stared at Laurinda. She looked tired, shell-shocked. Her eyes were pink like maybe she’d been crying.
“You have a story to tell me?” I asked her.
She sighed softly, twisting her hands in her lap. She glanced at the window, but all that could be seen out there was blackness.
And her son was out there, clearly pissed at her. With a handful of other bikers. His club brothers.
She had to know, whatever this was, she wasn’t just getting out of it.
She met my eyes again. I almost felt bad for her. But I needed to know about this thing with Rolf. Why the hell was she—secretly—dating Dane’s bodyguard? Because I was pretty sure he didn’t know about that.
“I do,” she said. “If you really want to hear it. It’s not a good story.” She sniffled a little and touched a tissue she clutched in her hand to her nose.
“I think I do.”
Her watery, greenish-gray eyes held mine. “Do you love Dane?” she asked me.
I considered that, very carefully, before I answered. I considered the fact that Dane’s aunt, a woman he said he cared for, was asking. And that this same woman had very possibly been the one who tried to threaten him by sending me a recording of us arguing in our home?
No matter what I’d said during that argument, though, I didn’t want out. With every hour that passed, and the more creepy this got, the more I thought Dane might be in real danger… the more I knew that with certainty.
“Yes,” I said. “I love him.”
She listened. She nodded. She drew a deep breath, and she seemed to lock that fact away somewhere deep inside, like it meant something to her.
“Love will make you do crazy things,” she said.
“Will it?”
“You seem like a smart woman. Strong. I can tell.” She looked me over. “Be careful you don’t believe the lies. The lies make you weak, and they’ll eat away at you for the rest of your life.”
“What lies?”
“They’ll tell you it started when I fell in love with Lex’s father, Joey,” she said. “That I’m the bad girl who ran off with a gangster. And I was.” She shook her head a little. “But bad girls aren’t born. They’re created.”
She looked off into the dark beyond the window.
“Yes,” I told her. “I believe that.”
“It was easy for them to blame Joey. It’s easy to point a finger at the worst devil in the room. Everyone wants to blame a villain.” Her eyes met mine. “But this story started before all of that. It started with the baby they stole from my arms.”
It was the dead of night. I sat in Katie and Jesse’s sunroom, with Max; I’d had Darrell drive me over to Katie’s sister’s place to borrow Katie’s dog, so I wouldn’t be so alone.
Max seemed happy to see me and happy to be home, sleeping all slopped across his beanbag chair in the corner.
I sat on the sofa, watching him sleep. I felt safer having the black lab here. If something went bump in the night, the dog would sense it before I did, right?
There really was no reason to think there would be any bumps in the night. I’d listened to Laurinda’s story in the back of that van. I’d seen the look on Lex’s face. And I was pretty confident that there was no more threat. That I was safe, and so was Dane.
Even so, there was a burner phone sitting on the sofa next to me, and I was far from relaxed. I was waiting for it to ring. And I was kind of dreading this phone call.
I once had to make a “someone just died” phone call. When I was twenty years old, I had to call my distant cousins in India to tell them my grandmother had died, because my mom couldn’t stop crying, my dad was flying home from a business trip, my brother was drunk at a party and trying to get a cab home, and my other brother was fourteen. And telling people you cared about but only sort of knew, a world away, over a bad connection, that someone they loved had died and they didn’t even get to say goodbye? Not fun.
This, though? Worse.
I loved my Nani, but she was very old. Everyone knew she was going to die.
