"You've got to be kidding me," I groaned softly.
I used the dumpster to pull myself back up and found a couple standing about five feet away from me. The guy had the woman pressed against the brick wall. His pants were shoved down past his knees, and his pale butt practically glowed in the moonlight. The girl's eyes widened when she caught sight of me, and then the guy turned to look at me over his shoulder. I pivoted on my heel and ran for the door, but not before I recognized him.
"Crap, crap, crap," I muttered to myself. Of all the people to have caught having sex in the alley, it had to be a married politician who ran on a family values platform. The woman he'd been banging against the brick wall had not been his wife.
I ducked into the bathroom to wash my face and hands before heading back behind the bar. Between the puke, touching a dumpster, and witnessing alley sex, I desperately needed to get clean again. It also gave me a little time to pull myself together. The small amount of composure I'd been able to gather was sorely tested when a slick looking man approached the bar, his beady eyes searching me out from the moment he walked in.
"Addilyn Johnson?"
The fact that he knew my name only creeped me out even more. "Yeah?"
"I was hoping to speak with you in private."
I instinctively took a step backwards. "About what?"
"Something confidential." He slid a hundred-dollar bill across the bar towards me. "And I'm willing to make it worth your while."
I picked the money up, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it back at him.
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "You don't want to talk? That's fine, as long as you keep your mouth shut about what you saw in the alley tonight."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
His eyes gleamed with satisfaction. "Keep it that way, or else things will get unpleasant for you. I'd hate to see something horrible happen to a pretty girl like you."
My hand shook as I dug in my jeans pocket for my cell. I punched in Dane's number and didn't even have to wait through a full ring before he picked up the call.
"Dane?" My voice came out shakier than intended, and I was close to bursting into tears. My emotions had been all over the place lately with so many changes happening in my life all at once, and my little confrontation with that guy hadn't helped at all.
"Addilyn? Baby? Are you okay?"
"Yeah. No. I don't know." Hearing the sound of his voice helped a lot, but I wasn't sure if I was good or not.
"Hold on a second." I heard a quick, muffled conversation and then he came back on the line. "Are you at the bar? What happened?"
"I went to take the trash out, about thirty minutes ago," I started, but he didn't let me get any further before he interrupted.
"Why in the hell didn't someone else do it?"
"Please let me get to the point, Dane," I sighed. Then I waited a couple of seconds to make sure he was going to let me continue. "There was a couple back in the alley. They didn't see me at first"-I neglected to mention why because he'd have a shit fit if he knew how bad I'd been feeling the past couple of days-"and they started going at it, right up against the brick wall."
"Fuck, baby. You have the worst luck when it comes to walking in on people in comprising situations."
"Not until you came into my life." If I hadn't been so scared, I'd probably find the situation funny. What were the odds that I'd stumble across my roommate having a threesome and a famous politician having extramarital sex in a dark and dirty alley? All within the same month, too.
"Did something else happen? You weren't this upset about your roommate, and that had to have been worse than what you saw tonight."
I took a deep breath before I gave him the bad part of the news. "The problem is that I recognized the guy. It was Dalton Gentry." Dane's sharp expletive confirmed he knew who I was talking about. "He saw me and sent a guy into the bar afterwards. Someone who offered me money to talk with him privately. When I refused, he threatened me about what would happen if I told anyone what I saw."
"He fucking threatened you?" I heard the slamming of a door in the background, and his voice sounded like he was running.
"Not in so many words, but yeah, he made it clear that I needed to keep my mouth shut."
There was the loud roar of an engine starting before he spoke again. "What exactly did he say?"
"That if I didn't, things would get unpleasant for me. And how he didn't want to see anything bad happen to a girl like me."