Outlaw's Promise(28)

We passed a phone and Carrick nodded to it. “It was Ox who answered the phone last night,” he said. He slowed to a stop. “There was a party going on, but he came and got me….” His hand suddenly squeezed mine, back to that grip that was much more than friends.

My stomach lurched as I had the same thought he must be having: what if he hadn’t? What if my tearful pleas had sat there on the answer phone, unheard, and Carrick had sat here drinking the night away? I’d be in Volos’s car, now, while he did God-knows what to me behind the privacy glass, or chained up in some cellar.#p#分页标题#e#

I felt tears spring to my eyes and tried to blink them back. I spun, searching for somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, but there was nowhere: the room was too hot, too noisy, too dark…. I squeezed Carrick’s hand as hard as I’d ever squeezed Perkins’s paw when I was a kid.

He seemed to know instinctively what I needed. A muscled arm slipped around my waist and then he was walking me across the room, through the double doors and—

I gasped in relief as sunlight hit my face. I stood there and just panted for a moment. Safe. I’m safe now. My breathing slowed and the panic slowly started to fade. “Sorry,” I muttered. I turned from him, letting my hair hang down to hide my face.

I felt hands on my shoulders, the palms warm against my bare skin. He turned me back towards him and then tilted my chin up, making me look at him. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he told me. “It’s the fucking Blood Spiders who should be sorry. But you’re okay now. They’re a long way from here.”

I took a shuddering breath and nodded. I was okay. But it wasn’t the distance from Teston or even the warm sun: it was the hand that cupped my chin and those blue eyes that gazed down at me. They made me okay. For just a second, they looked like they had twelve years before, clear and blue and free….

Then his hand dropped from my chin. “C’mon,” he said gruffly. “I’ll show you around.”

Every time. Every time I thought we were about to get close, he slammed the door in my face.

The first stop was the workshop. A short, well-padded man in his sixties with a snow-white beard was kneeling beside a bike, deep in concentration, his coveralls so old and stained with oil they were more black than blue. “Scooter,” said Carrick, “this is Annabelle. Scooter does all our repairs.”

The man glanced up as we entered and nodded curtly. I gave him a smile, glanced around….

And I was lost.

There was an engine on a workbench, stripped down and separated into shining, perfect pieces. And thumb-tacked to the wall was a huge diagram of a Harley, six feet across. An exploded diagram, all the tiny parts separated so I could see how they slotted together.

It was like being inside my own head.

There were sets of wrenches and screwdrivers. There were boxes of obscure parts. There were maintenance manuals I knew I could happily disappear into for days at a time. I closed my eyes and inhaled: gasoline and engine oil. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was home.

“You alright?” asked Scooter.

I spun. They were both looking at me—not unkindly, but I was suddenly self-conscious. I was being weird again. “Yes,” I said quickly. “Sorry.” And I backed out of the workshop.

At that moment, a biker roared up on a Harley. He sat perfectly erect, more like a man on a horse than a biker, his black hair blowing in the wind. His skin was the deep, rich tan of a man who spends every day outdoors.

Carrick leaned close to me. “Hunter,” he told me over the noise of the Harley. “Our Vice President.”

“Why do you call him—” Just as I said it, the engine noise dropped to an idle and my voice was suddenly very loud. I flushed.

The man on the bike gave me a long, appraising look and then looked at Carrick and motioned for him to continue.

“He tracked down a cougar that was bothering the town,” Carrick told me. “And he’s pretty good at tracking people, too. Even helped out the sheriff, a few times.”

I blinked at that. I thought outlaws and the police didn’t mix.

I was about to say hi when I heard something - a wrongness. I stared intently at Hunter’s bike.#p#分页标题#e#

“What?” asked Carrick.

“The timing’s off,” I thought. And then realized I’d said it out loud, and flushed again.

Scooter wiped his hands on a filthy rag and stood up. “I don’t hear nothin’.”

I shook my head. “I’m probably wrong.”

“You know something about engines?” asked Scooter suspiciously.