Cavan, wisely, was quiet for a long time while I calmed down. “You okay?” he finally asked.
I wasn’t. I was still angry—furious—and on top of that, I was horrified. Horrified at the bad decision I’d made seven months ago, at the fact that I’d even spent twenty minutes in that man’s company. I’d been so blind in my need to rebel, and so stupid. So terribly, terribly stupid.
I wasn’t going to be stupid anymore.
I turned and looked squarely at Cavan, watching his profile as he watched the road. “I didn’t tell you, who I am,” I said. “I get it. You’re probably mad.”
“That you’re the daughter of the president of the Lake of Fire MC?” He glanced at me with those gray eyes, and even through my anger and my confusion, part of me melted. “It complicates things,” he admitted, looking at the road again. “But I’m not mad. You don’t owe me that shit.”
This man. I wanted to kiss him and I wanted to pry him open, find what made him so damned reserved. “You’re not going to pull over and make me get out?”
He frowned. “Are you fucking serious? No, I’m not.”
I licked my dry lips. He was such a contrast to McMurphy, so starkly different. I hadn’t known there were men like Cavan until I met him. “You know, you’re nicer to me than he ever was,” I said.
“Why? Because I don’t drop you to fend for yourself at the side of the highway? Or because I bought you some K-Mart shoes and a sandwich?”
“Because you left your life to help me get away.”
“I did that for me,” he said, “not for you. Is your last name Preston?”
“No,” I said, realizing with surprise that he wouldn’t know. The Black Dog didn’t use full names very often. “He and my mother were never married, and I never had his name. My last name is Farraday—my mother’s name.”
“You ever meet your father?”
“Only twice. Once when I was five, and again when I was thirteen. Right before he went away.”
“So he knows you exist. He knows who you are.”
“Yes. Mom spent years trying to get child support out of him. Sometimes he sent it, and sometimes he didn’t. Most of the time he didn’t.” Mom had worked in a supermarket while I was growing up, eventually being promoted to manager. She’d been overworked, tired, and stressed all my life. It was only now that I was an adult that I was realizing what she must have gone through, a single mother raising a kid on a supermarket salary.
Cavan Wilder wasn’t the only one who had hurt people in his life.
“He have a good relationship with your mother?” Cavan asked.
It was a lot of questions, but I supposed he deserved some answers. “As far as I know, he has no relationship with my mother at all.” I had no idea what had happened between them when I was conceived, but aside from support payments, my mother had s
teered clear of Robert Preston. Mostly because he’d been into a lot of awful illegal shit, first on his own and then as the president of the Lake of Fire. It had culminated in a series of drug smuggling charges, followed by extortion charges, followed at last by a second-degree murder conviction when a border patrol officer had been shot during a border run. Dear old Dad had been in prison for seven years so far, and unless he got parole—which was unlikely—he’d be in for fifteen more.
That was me. The daughter of a convicted felon and murderer. Maybe there was a reason I’d lost my way, a reason I’d drifted into doing stupid, risky shit. Mom had no money for counselors or therapists or any of that stuff. My therapist, it turned out, had been seven long months under McMurphy’s hard thumb. Free of charge.
I stared at the scrubby landscape going by. I felt like broken glass—fragile, smashed to pieces, but sharp at the edges. Dangerous. I felt like screaming. I felt like dancing. I felt like having hard, dirty sex with someone—anyone.
No, that wasn’t true. I wanted sex with only one man. The hard, dirty man in the driver’s seat next to me.
The sun was setting, its rays slanting hotly into the car as we drove west. An exit sign loomed ahead of us, and Cavan signaled, switching from one highway to another. We were going north now. Curving away from L.A. Heading into the desert.
“Where are we going?” I asked Cavan.
“You don’t already know?” he said.
I licked my lips. I did know. We were going to Nevada. The territory of the Lake of Fire MC. We were leaving McMurphy’s territory and heading into my father’s territory instead.
If we stayed on this road, we’d get to Vegas. We’d also pass near the maximum security Nevada prison where my father was waiting out his sentence.
I glanced at Cavan’s gorgeous, flawless profile. The tousled hair brushed back from his forehead, the scruff on his sexy jaw. We didn’t even have to exchange words in that moment, like we hadn’t had to exchange words while I was in his tattoo chair. I just got him, and he got me.
Instead of leading the Black Dog to my mother, we were going to lead him to my father—if McMurphy had the guts to follow. It should have been my plan from the first.