Page 6
“Shh. Shh,” I tried to coo, but even my voice was trembling.
Lainey, used to all the stops being pulled out to calm her when she was unhappy, started a full-on cry.
“Alright,” the guy said, moving closer, reaching down, and sliding his hands into the carrier.
“No—” I started to object.
But he was already lifting up Lainey with the ease of someone who’d done so many times before—one hand on her bottom and lower back, the other behind her neck and head.
“Let’s let Mommy have a moment, yeah?” he asked, voice not quite baby talk, but softer than his speaking voice.
“I’d be crying if I had to take a run in the middle of the night too,” he told her as he swayed her body side to side.
“Just trying to get some damn sleep, and you’re transported into some low-budget action movie.
And not even in a fun location. Fucking sucks, man. ”
Profanity aside, he was being really sweet.
And Lainey, likely mesmerized by a man speaking to her at all, had gone from a cry to a whimper, to complete silence.
She was okay.
In surprisingly good hands, even.
So I leaned my head back against the wall, sucking in a few greedy breaths, just praying the shaking would stop so I could… what?
What was the next move?
To just leave?
Go home?
Pretend nothing happened?
Or did I call the police? Tell them what I saw? Let my name be on paperwork somewhere? Paperwork that might lead these guys right to me.
But it was wrong not to try to get that poor man justice. Could I just go on, pretending I didn’t see what I’d seen, heard what I’d heard?
I leaned forward, pressing my sweaty forehead against my knees and focused on breathing while the man told my baby all about how he was seconds away from getting in a car with a bunch of “skirts” to go back to the clubhouse and “party their asses off.”
I silently prayed that Lainey’s spongey brain was still too undeveloped to recall anything about the idea of ‘body shots’ and ‘bomb-ass margaritas’ as my body seemed to slowly work to reabsorb the adrenaline that had been surging through my veins.
“That’s a game where two pretty girls sit on the shoulders of some badass bikers,” the guy went on, completely oblivious to me as I turned my head up to watch him.
“And they use these giant inflatable Q-tips and whack each other with ‘em. Like this. Bam! Pow! ” he said while swinging Lainey to each side, making a gurgling laugh escape her.
“Right? Good shit. They just keep whaling on each other. And if we’re lucky, maybe a tit pops out.
And then, eventually, one girl gets a good whack in.
” He swung the captivated baby again. “And the other girl goes doooown,” he said, lowering both of them down so fast her belly must have fluttered, but she did a full-on belly laugh at the sensation.
The guy looked over her head, finding himself almost face-to-face with me, smirk just a little too devilish to be called sheepish at being caught in the middle of his tits-out story.
“You’re quite the storyteller,” I told him.
“Easy to be when the listener doesn’t know a damn word I’m saying,” he said, shrugging. “Feelin’ better?”
“Yeah. I think. I’m not shaking, at least.”
“Adrenaline is a motherfucker.”
“You weren’t shaking.”
“‘Cause I’m used to crazy shit. Besides, I didn’t have a baby. And I did have a gun.”
He pressed Lainey to his shoulder, using one arm to hold her there and extending his other hand to me.
I bit back the urge to tell him to use two hands. The guy was clearly experienced. Hell, maybe even more than me—who had never even held a baby before I had my own.
I placed my hand in his, promptly ignoring the weird little sizzle as our skin met, and let him pull me to my feet.
“You girls got names?” he asked.
There was no logical reason my heart felt a little gooey that he’d asked for not only my name, but Lainey’s name, but it happened regardless.
“Zoe,” I told him. “And Lainey.”
“Coast.”
“That’s your name?” I clarified.
To that, he shot me that disarming bad-boy smirk again. “Yeah, baby, that’s my name. So, the fuck happened before you damn near ran into me?”
He didn’t relinquish my daughter to me. And for some reason, I didn’t reach for her either.
She was still against him, her little legs pulled up, her lips parted like they always were at rest.
His little story seemed to tire her right out.
I went ahead and told myself I left her there because I didn’t want to wake her. Not because I kind of liked seeing her so at peace on a man’s shoulder.
That was how it was supposed to be, damnit. Until I learned that some men shirked responsibility for the sake of selfishness.
“I was, uh, dropping off an order. I do deliveries,” I added.
“Good gig for a mom,” he said, getting it.
“Yeah. Well, I was walking back. There was no parking anywhere. Even though there’s nothing around here…”
“There’s a new bar over that way,” he said, nodding his head.
“Oh, that explains it. Well, I was walking back and I heard men speaking. I should have just… kept walking. But I turned my head and I saw them.”
“Saw them doing what?”
“Pushing a man on the ground. He was already all bloody. And… and…”
“Gun. Bang. Body.”
A little chill moved through me at how casually he was talking about murder. But that was quickly overshadowed by how my stomach lurched at that word. Murder. That was what I’d witnessed. Right?
“Yeah.”
“Where? Show me,” he added before I could say anything.
Not really having any choice, I followed him out of the alley. My gaze slid down, seeing his gun in his waistband, reminding myself that he could handle things if someone was still around.
“I think… there,” I said, waving toward a gap between buildings up ahead. “Yeah, that’s it.”
The broken glass on the ground was what my foot had stepped on, alerting the men to my presence.
My heartbeat started to thud loudly in my ears as we drew closer. I took slow, deep breaths, preparing myself for a dead body.
Sure enough, there was a prone figure on the ground where the men had been standing.
“What are you doing?” I yelped as he moseyed down into the lot. With my baby still pressed to his shoulder. To check out a dead body.
I couldn’t seem to unstick my feet. Not even to go grab my baby back.
I just watched as he nudged the body with the tip of his slide, then crouched down beside it.
He reached out with his free hand.
“Shit,” he snapped, getting back to his feet and striding back toward me.
“What? What is it?”
“He’s still alive. Just barely. Come on. We gotta go.”
“We can’t just leave him there if he’s alive!” I yelped, trying to turn back.
But Coast’s arm went around my lower back, pulling me with him.
It was the wrong damn time for my body to get all tingly at his touch, at his calm demeanor in the face of chaos.
It wasn’t a trait I was exactly proud of, but I had a tendency to overreact to things right at first. To catastrophize and let my confusion, fears, or uncertainty get the better of me.
Instead of taking a step back and looking at the situation at a distance to see it for what it was, not what my knee-jerk reaction wanted me to believe it was.
It was refreshing to be around someone who just… pulled me along with their calm, steady current instead of letting me get pulled in my own riptide.
“We’re not leaving him,” Coast said, reading my mind. “But we can’t be seen with him either, can we? Where’s your car?” he asked.
I pointed, and we walked quickly toward it.
“Here,” he said, his voice softer as he gently pulled Lainey from his shoulder and set her in my arms. “Get her in her car seat.”
I didn’t stop to question him. I just did as he said.
While I was busy with that, he must have reached for his phone, because I heard his voice as I was adjusting Lainey’s straps.
“Ah, yes, hi. Um,” he started, his voice pitched a little higher to, I assumed, mask his identity.
“Yeah, so I was walking to my car from the bar over on Stark, and there’s a man in the lot next to, er, the textile factory.
And he seems in bad shape. Think you gotta send him an ambulance. Yeah, real quick.”
I could hear the operator asking something else, but he was already ending the call as I quietly clicked the backseat door closed.
“Can’t they trace your phone to you?” I asked.
“Not if it’s a burner. Gonna give me a ride?” he asked, nodding toward my car.
It was the least I could do.
We climbed in.
“Where am I going?”
“Right now, just drive. Get the fuck outta here, but calmly and casually. Don’t be looking all freaked out or speeding. We’re just a young family, driving home from some event. No biggie.”
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
I could do that.
“You good?” he asked a few minutes later as I drove back in the direction of my motel, since I didn’t know where he lived.
“I think so,” I said, hearing the sirens off in the distance and saying a prayer that they could get to the guy in time.
“You can drop me there,” he said, nodding his chin toward a convenience store up ahead.
“I can drive you home.”
“Nah, don’t worry about me. Get the baby home. Get yourself some sleep. I can make my own way home.”
The guilt was immediate, but I tamped it down as I turned into the well-lit lot and pulled into a spot.
“Wait,” I called when he opened his door and climbed out.
“What’s up, baby?”
God, the casual way he threw that word around must have melted panties. Mine felt halfway there already.
“Thank you.”
“For what?” he asked, shrugging. Like it genuinely was no big deal. Saving our lives. “Get yourself and that baby home safe, alright, Zo?”
Before I could say anything else, he gently closed the door, then hip-checked it to make it click.
Then the guy just… swaggered on into the convenience store like nothing at all had happened.
“Okay, baby,” I said, forcing myself to reverse out of the spot instead of sit there watching Coast walk around the store. “Let’s go home and try to forget this whole thing ever happened.”
As if that was even possible.
I obsessed about it until I fell asleep.
Then I dreamed of piercing blue eyes and hands all over me.