WAYLON Page 4

  Her words put a new filter on my conversation with Waylon before he locked me in that room. The way his eyes kept scanning my face….had that also been about the bruises and swelling?

  My heart flips and flops, not quite knowing what to do as my chest fills up with all sorts of feelings I shouldn’t be having.

  Persy’s right. He’s a total psycho. Last night proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  But a weirdly warm, protected feeling flows through me before I remind myself and Doc out loud, “For a price. He left Jonathan alive for a very steep price. And I’m not his woman.”

  “Got it.” Doc rolls her eyes and gives me a sympathetic look. “I’ve never dated any of them, but I know a few of those Reapers will stake a claim even after you’ve told them no way in hell. Several times….”

  She scowls in a way that makes me think she’s talking about a very specific example.

  And it occurs to me that maybe she can help me out with more than coffee, over-the-counter painkillers, and an ice pack for my face. “Could I ask you one more favor?”

  “Sure,” Doc answers. Her voice remains cheery enough, but she glances over my shoulder.

  And when I look in that direction, Hades is watching me from the bottom of the stairs. Not possessively like Waylon. But I can tell he's definitely monitoring the situation in Waylon's stead.

  Nothing I’ve seen since arriving here would lead me to believe that Doc would be able to help me with Hades watching us like a dark shadow.

  So instead of asking her for the money and guidance I’d need to get out of this place, I shove all four pills into my mouth and wash them down with a big gulp of coffee. The scald of the hot liquid is just another piece of pain to throw on the pile.

  “Thank you,” I tell Doc again.

  She flashes another smile. But it’s a lot more brittle than the ones that came before it.

  It’s a long, painful walk for me across the empty bar space. Every knotted muscle in my body cramps with dread at the prospect of having to spend several more hours holding onto Waylon for dear life on the back of his monster bike.

  This is why my heart soars when I find him parked right outside the roadhouse in a black Ford F-150 pick-up truck with the bike we rode in on strapped to the back.

  “Figured this’d be more your speed for the second half of the trip,” he says, leaning out the driver’s side window. His voice is gruff, but his expression is strangely gentle in the morning light.

  Tears of gratitude prick my eyes. At first, I’m so relieved. But then, I remember everything that happened yesterday.

  Gratitude has no place here.

  And as if to confirm that conclusion, Waylon’s expression hardens again as he commands, “Get in the truck.”

  I climb into the passenger side and pull the seatbelt across me. “Where are we going?”

  Silence.

  And there's no display screen like in Jonathan's Mercedes. No robotic voice chiming about how many hours to go until we reach our destination.

  The lack of technological direction doesn’t seem to matter, though. Waylon puts the truck in drive and surges forward down the roadhouse’s private road without so much as pulling out his phone.

  He might not be telling me where we’re headed. But apparently, he knows how to get there by heart.

  CHAPTER 5

  Where we're going turns out to be another place without signage and located down a private road in a heavily wooded area. Except, in this case, it's in Iowa.

  And this time, when we turn down the side road, there’s not a single roadhouse at the end of it, but an entire town.

  Okay, not a town exactly. More like a giant dirt-shaped plus sign with trailers in each quadrant.

  At least, I think it’s mostly trailers. Only a few structures have lights turned on at their front doors. I can only assume the other hulking shadows are also RVs.

  But the trailer Waylon stops in front of at the very top of the dirt plus sign doesn’t have a helpful light attached to its front. If not for the illumination of the truck’s headlights, I wouldn't know it was even more run-down than most of the other ones we passed. It’s the kind of RV you see in old 90s films, featuring a ragtag gang of underdogs on a road trip mission to complete some sort of goal.

  Anyway, this one sits several yards away from the rest of the mobile homes—as if the other trailers don’t want to be associated with it. And I notice there are no other mobile homes beyond this one.

  When Waylon kills the engine and gets out, the only illumination comes from the cab's overhead light. Which makes the dark between the truck and the trailer seem particularly pitch black. I gulp, my born-and-raised-in-a-city brain unsure what to do with all this backcountry night.

  Waylon comes around the side of the truck and pulls open the door. Not to be a gentleman. I discover that when he reaches over me and unbuckles my seatbelt himself before grunting, “Come on”—like I’m a dog he’s letting out of the car.

  But I’m not a dog, and I don't budge.

  “Where are we?” I demand. “What is this?”

  “My place,” he answers. “Come on.”

  This time, Waylon doesn’t give me the chance to argue. He clamps a hand around my wrist and yanks. No more questions allowed, I come tumbling out of the car.

  Last night, I was too dazed and confused to do anything but follow him toward that stage. But today, with a few hours of car sleep tucked away, I dig in my heels, refusing to stumble along after him.

  “No! I’m not going anywhere with you!” The truck window is down, and I hook my arm around the doorframe to keep him from just dragging me away. “I'm not going anywhere else with you until you answer some questions!”

  Now that he can’t move me, I ask him many of the same questions he’s been refusing to answer all day: “How long are you planning on keeping me here? When do I get to go home? What do you want from me?”

  Waylon wheels around on me without warning.

  And as clever as the hook your arm around the truck window move seemed earlier, it feels like I have to either move it or lose it when he pushes his heavy body into mine, pinning me into the part of the truck's cab that isn't currently open.

  "You think you're going home?" He growls down at me, his face a work of shadow and stone. “To what?”

  Scenes from my disastrous wedding reel through my mind when he asks that.

  Seeing Waylon on the balcony….

  The astonished looks on my co-worker’s faces when I said no….

  The dream guy who punched me and was preparing to do worse when Waylon burst in on the scene.

  I don’t know…. I don’t know what’s waiting for me back in Delaware. But my whole life is in Wilmington. My job, my work friends, and the apartment I still have to pay a few more months of rent on for my lease.

  I’ve put so much time and energy into improving myself and becoming a better person. I can’t just erase all that by getting charged with abetting an assault and not at least trying to explain what happened to the people at work.

  “You can't….” I have to stop and swallow when my voice comes out a dry squeak.

  I lift my chin and try to at least look and sound brave as I inform him, “You can't keep me here forever! And I’m definitely not going in there with you.”

  Silence.

  Waylon stares down at me with that scary look I’ve become all too familiar with over the last forty-eight hours—like Violence and Crazy have lit a bonfire behind his eyes.

  “What did I tell you about backtalk, angel?”

  The memory of him lying across my bed, handcuffed and wounded but not truly subdued, flashes inside my head.

  But somehow, I manage to swallow again and tell him, “That rule no longer counts. It was from a long time ago. When you had consent and weren’t keeping me imprisoned against my will.”

  The truck's overhead light chooses that moment to blink off as if it's tired of waiting for us to finish our argument.

  I can no longer see Waylon, but I can feel him in the darkness. Crazed and ticking like a bomb.

  His lethal voice sounds like an explosion in the pitch black when he says, “You’re lying to me. And you’re for damn sure lying to yourself. This is where we’re supposed to be.”

  The memory of the last time he said that sears through my brain. Right after he pushed inside of me and implanted himself so deep. So deep, my body didn’t know what to do.

  He grinds himself against my core now as if to remind me how deep he got back then. The heat of his long thick erection burns into my skin as if the denim of his jeans and the polyester of my scrub top don’t exist. And this shouldn’t be my body’s reaction, but the gas stove spark igniter starts clicking again.

  “You feel this,” he growls as if he can hear that clicking too. His breath is hot on the side of my face, and his beard prickles over the sensitive skin on my neck, raising goosebumps.

  “No, no…” I want to say the words, but they come out on a breathy gasp. “You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, I’m crazy,” he agrees. “I’m a crazy devil, but I want your hands on me, little angel—that’s what I said in Spanish to you that one day with the sponge bath. But you were too afraid even back then. Afraid of me. Afraid of yourself. You couldn’t work up the courage to ask me for a translation.”

  “I should have been afraid,” I answer with a tremble in my voice. “I mean, look where I am now because of my poor decisions. Stuck with a psycho who won’t let me go.”

  He chuckles like I just told a joke for the sole purpose of amusing him.

  “Yeah, you’re probably wishing right now, you ain’t never met me. You want to go back to your safe little world—keep pretending you don’t belong to me, keep denying it. But
there is no denying me, denying this. You feel this thing between us. You feel it.”

  I don't know if he's talking about the intense arousal thrumming in the air between us or the heavy erection pressing into my stomach.

  Either way, he’s right. I feel it.

  But that doesn’t mean I should.

  I make myself point out, “There's nothing to feel. There's only your delusion and me not wanting to be here.”

  He makes a sound—a sound so feral and angry, it really does feel like I'm in the dark with a predator.

  “You want me to lose control, don't you?”

  His harsh voice, his hot breath—it’s in my ear now, hitting some secret erogenous zone I didn’t know I had. And sending shivers down my back.

  “You made me wait all these months, and now you're testing me like this."

  “I'm not testing you. I’m just trying to talk some sense—”

  Waylon doesn't let me finish. “You’re fucking with me, angel. You're trying to find out how far you can push me before I flip out.”

  He drags his sharp nose up the side of my neck, his lips grazing the sensitive skin. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like me to fail your little test by dragging you into my place and fucking you like I've been dreaming about. You want me to make you bend, so you don't have to submit—don’t have to admit you’re in this just as deep as me. A doctor’s what you wanted, but a devil’s what you need, and you can’t accept that. But I’m going to teach you. You’re going to learn to accept this crazy devil into your life, angel. Let him teach you, possess you, do everything you secretly want. And need.”

  He presses and grinds into me as he says this, surrounding me with his heat, his intensity, his utter madness. His words pick at something deep inside of me, digging at the parts of me I try to keep suppressed. My heart beats erratically, every nerve in my body lighting up with feral arousal from the church.

  “You want to come in there with me,” Waylon growls into my neck. “You want to be mine. You and me both know that. Or else, you would've said yes instead of no back there at the church—picked that doctor douche over me.”

  “No, no,” I deny even as the feral arousal swells even hotter inside of me, like a fever on the rise. “I was confused. Because you showed up there. I saw you, and I got confused. That’s all.”

  “You belong to me. You belong in my bed.” His voice, his breath is at my lips now—his mouth hovering so close, I know he’s about to end all of my protests with another claiming kiss.

  But then he says, “And I’m going to need you to admit that before I give you what you want. What you need. We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way, angel. It's up to you.

  CHAPTER 6

  It's up to me.

  That's what he tells me with his lips hovering over mine. With his cock pressed into me, long, hard, and hot. With his voice fuzzing over my brain.

  Okay, I belong to you. Take me like you want. Teach me again. Teach me everything….the words vibrate in my throat, wanting to come out, just like another part of me wants to be filled up by him again…

  But….

  “No!” I remember myself and spit the word out. A desperate soldier throwing a hand grenade. “No! I don't belong to you—you’re a psycho. I'm not going into your trailer with you. I'm here under duress. You need to let me go. You need to let me get back to my life in Delaware. The one you blew up.”

  Waylon stills.

  His body becomes so tight and rigid against mine. I wonder if he'll listen. And I wonder how I’ll feel about that. If he was right about me, and I truly do want him to take me in there by force just so I don’t have to submit out loud.

  But in the end, he slams his hand against the car. And as heavy and durable as the truck is, it reverberates under the hit.

  “All right, guess we're doing this the hard way,” he bites out before grabbing my wrists. Again.

  The next thing I know, I'm being pulled forward, but not toward his trailer this time.

  “What are you doing?” I demand, trying to tug my wrist out of his grip. “Where are you taking me?”

  He stops in front of a charming mobile home. One of the ones with a light on in front. It’s two stories with a set of concrete steps leading up to its front door, and it even has rose bushes lining its front. If the head nurse hadn't shown me pictures of the single-wide modular home she and her husband just got installed on Lake Erie for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I might've mistaken it for a traditional house.

  “Stay here,” Waylon commands, leaving me at the bottom of the steps.

  I'm beginning to wonder if the somewhat charming devil of a patient I met back in the fall was an illusion. This version of Waylon only seems to know how to speak in hard commands.

  No charm. All devil.

  His back is turned, and I think about running. This is the first time I haven’t been either locked in a room or under the careful watch of Waylon or one of his minions. There's a chance, a tiny chance, that I could run and hide in the woods without him being able to find me.

  But I’ve never been on so much as a camping trip. If I’m speaking the truth, the only thing that scares me more than the man who kidnapped me is all this country dark full of I-don’t-know-what in its woods.

  In the end, I do as commanded. I stay right there and watch Waylon bang his fist against the door on the well-lit porch.

  Lights come on inside the house in an instant. But Waylon’s so tall, I can’t see who’s on the other side of the door when it opens.

  He starts issuing commands before whoever it is has the chance to speak. “Got somebody here who needs to stay with you for a while. If you have anybody upstairs, you’re going to have to kick ‘em out.”

  The other person must be asking questions I can’t hear because Waylon answers, “No, she's not staying with me…it's gotta be with you…she's making us do this the hard way…no, she doesn't have anything for me to bring in…. Yeah, call Lucinda…you can take it from here. I just needed to make sure the room was empty for her.”

  With that, he steps back and waves me forward. “C’mon.”

  I widen my eyes when I see the person he's been talking to—not another biker like back at the roadhouse or even a topless groupie.

  It’s an old lady. But not the biker slang kind.

  A real, certified senior citizen waves at me from the door. She has stark white hair pulled into a long braid, and she’s wearing a thin housecoat.

  Her face crumples with pity when she sees me like Waylon’s brought her a starved puppy he found at the side of the road.

  “Oh, look at you. Aren’t you a sight? Poor thing!” she says as I walk up the steps. “That must’ve been quite some trip. Now you come right on inside with me, and I'm going to heat you up some of the casserole I made tonight.”

  “She already ate. We went through a drive-through a couple of hours ago,” Waylon informs her from where he’s now standing behind me.

  She waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, that fast food doesn't have anything on my casserole. Are you sure you’re full, honey? Crazytown—that was my old man—he couldn’t get enough of my potato chip and tuna fish casserole—Lord rest his soul.”

  I've heard about it but have never had a casserole. However, potato chips and tuna fish doesn’t sound remotely appetizing. So it’s easy to answer, “I’m sorry, but I'm full.”

  “All she needs is a bed,” Waylon repeats.

  He throws the older woman an irritated look. But he doesn’t even glance my way before jogging down the steps without so much as a goodbye.

  The little old lady doesn’t seem too surprised by his behavior. She just opens the door to her home wider and says, “I've got a nice fresh bed all made up for you, isn’t that nice? Crazytown whispered in my ear this morning that I should make up a bed because maybe I was gonna have a visitor. He's always telling me things like that. Still watching over me. Even from the other side.”

  The inside of her home is just as pleasant and inviting as the outside. Peak little old lady— sofa covered in a flowered fabric, blonde-wood dining table with a lazy susan on it dividing the space between the half-kitchen and the half-dining room. She even has figurines lining the windowsill as if to say, “I really am just a sweet little old woman. You don't have anything to worry about from me, Amira.”