Dirty Ties

I wanted more than that. I wanted his arms around me while I slept. His warm body curled around mine, sharing our bed and protecting me from the things I couldn’t fight alone.

I wanted to be the one he fought for, to be the reason he lived and breathed. I wanted him to choose me over revenge. “If I tell you to kill them, that will make me just as evil as they are. If I turn them in, you’ll disappear to evade the repercussions of your crimes. If I walk away, their greed won’t end, and more people will die.” I raised my chin and stared deep into his eyes. “I want the fourth option.”

His eyebrows pulled together, one higher than the other. “There is no fourth option.”

“You know there is. You just have to decide if you want it, too.”

22

Logan

I paced the basement warehouse, weaving between motorcycle parts and circuit boards, hands in the pockets of my jeans, then pushing through my hair, and returning to my pockets. Restless energy skittered over my shoulders, my thoughts caught in an endless loop.

Benny was due back any minute. I should’ve been focused on the message she was retrieving. But my convictions, my plans, every damned thing I knew about myself and my life, shifted and pulled toward Kaci. All that mattered was her happiness.

It had been fourteen days since I’d touched her, smelled her, and talked to her on a level that didn’t involve corporate initiatives. Fourteen days since I’d held her in her office, the curves of her back against my chest, my hands clinging to her tiny waist. Fourteen days since she told me she wanted the fourth option.

You just have to decide if you want it, too.

I wanted her above all else. I knew it then, and I positively knew it now.

Hungry, possessive desire was my constant companion, burning my chest, muddling my mind, and pulsing through my cock. So I paced. To redirect the path of my thoughts. To burn off the jealousy that gripped me when I thought of her with her husband. But the sound of my footfalls only intensified the buzz in my head.

Finally, the basement filled with the sounds of the elevator descending, the door shutting, and the squeaks of Benny’s boots on concrete. A moment later, her small frame appeared in the doorway between the warehouse and the garage.

The braided pigtails of her orange wig fell over her shoulders. A blue leotard gloved her arms and chest, the rest of her covered with pink overalls. The outfit, combined with the mischievous bow of her lips, reminded me of a smurf.

She held up a dollar bill and waved it at me with a twinkle in her huge expressive eyes. “We got him.”

I waited for the rush of excitement to vibrate my insides, but my breathing continued its even rhythm, and my legs strode toward her without any real sense of purpose. My body didn’t feel a fraction of the energy it should have.

I took the dollar from her waiting hand and stared at the handwriting on the front, the scrawled numbers blurring into a trail of zeros. “He placed the bet.” Finally.

“I verified it on the network. Every dollar is there.” She smoothed a hand down one orange braid and flicked the end back and forth. “The fact that he sent the confirmation on the smallest bill in print adds a kind of pathetic irony, doesn’t it?”

I nodded numbly and stuffed the dollar into my wallet. The final piece of the plan was complete. Trent took the bait. The months of anonymous offers I’d made through the Timex watches worked.

October twenty-seventh was only two days away. My last race. Everything was in place.

But everything had changed.

Benny narrowed her eyes, the glare dramatized by the drawn-on eyelashes that swept half-way to her temples. “Why do you look so butt-hurt?” She put her hands on her hips. “You’re supposed to… I don’t know, smile with crazy eyes or something.”

A decade of preparations and meticulous work, and here I stood, two days before D-day, imagining a life without the finality of revenge, without finishing a plan with a gun in my hand.

Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that life in Technicolor. Two bikes side-by-side on a racetrack. The fierceness of her forward incline on the Ducati. Her braid whipping over her back as she looked at me. That look, my God, it was searching, hopeful, demanding. The same expression she wore when she told me she wanted the fourth option. The option I felt in the deepest reaches of my soul.

But what if I was wrong? What if I let her in, gave her everything I had to give, and it wasn’t enough? It was in my nature to choose the path with the most resistance, to not back down from a fight. Maybe I’d win this race, win her. But what if she left me down the road? What if she left me like my mother?