Page 3 of Hell of a Mess
He lowered himself until his eyes were level with mine again.
“All right, sugar, here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said as he pulled a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it. “You’re going to take several long swigs of this, and then I’m going to pick you up. It’s gonna hurt like a son of a bitch, but it’s the only way to get you some help.”
I shivered, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or from the man speaking.
“I…I don’t kn-know y-you,” I stammered.
The corner of his lips quirked, but like before, he didn’t smile. Not really.
“Maybe not but I don’t see you got any other choice,” he said, holding the flask out to me.
I stared at it. He could be drugging me.
“I’m not gonna lie and promise you I’m a good man,” he said. “But I’m not the kinda fucked-up monster that hurts a woman.”
Right now, that was the better of my two options. Reaching out, I took the flask, placed it to my lips, and drank it down. The burn was foreign to me, and I coughed as I held it out for him to take it.
“Good girl. Just one more,” he urged.
Blinking, I stared at him. He’d praised me. That was as foreign as the burn from what I assumed was the whiskey I’d just drunk. I’d spent years trying to earn my father’s approval but failed. Even when I did everything he had ever asked of me. Yet this man was praising me for simply taking a drink from his flask.
Like a child eager to please, I took it and downed more of the horrid liquid.
One
Luther
I had seen death a lot in my life. I knew the signs. The woman in my arms wasn’t in danger of kicking it, but damn if I wasn’t watching her chest rise and fall with each breath like a psycho. Either her pain tolerance was low or she had more than a cracked rib or two because the moment I had picked her up, she’d let out a strangled cry, then passed the fuck out. It was normal. Pain could do that to someone. But panic had set in, and I couldn’t seem to get it under control.
“She still breathing?” Locke Bowen asked me as he glanced over at her before turning his eyes back on the road. He sounded nervous.
At least I wasn’t alone in my unfound worry, but then it was Locke. He was more sensitive than me. He was younger, and while he’d seen shit, he hadn’t lived it for almost half a century.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“How bad do you think it is?”
I cut my eyes over at him as he sat behind the wheel of my truck. He was awfully curious. We didn’t know who the hell this woman was. If we’d been at a regular strip club, then it wouldn’t have been so surprising. But Sovereign House was an elite gentlemen’s club with nothing but one percenters inside. They were mostly wealthy men who sought their pleasures somewhere that wouldn’t get back to their wives. And this female in her high-neck blouse, cardigan, straight pencil skirt, and dainty fucking boots was not one of the women inside the place. There were no rooms at the Sovereign for a Sunday school kink.
“She’ll live,” I replied finally as she did a stuttering breath that had me tensing up and lifting her head as if that was going to help her inhale.
“Do we need to call Linc and let him know we’re bringing her?” he asked.
His questions were starting to annoy me. Linc’s house was my fucking house too. I owned the west wing of the six-thousand-square-foot estate we had purchased. When the day came that Bane Cash took over the Mississippi branch, I knew Linc, his wife, and his daughter would move back to Ocala. This had never really been Linc’s home, but it had become mine. I wouldn’t be leaving.
“No, but hit Doc’s number,” I told him.
Doc Burl was the family’s on-call doctor in Mississippi. He knew what we were, and he had the equipment in our basement to handle anything from emergency surgery to a simple stitch-up from a knife wound.
The phone rang over the truck’s speakers but only once.
“Luther.” He said my name over the line in greeting.
“We’re bringing in a female. We found her beaten behind a fucking dumpster. Her left wrist is messed up. It’s bent backand discoloring. She took some force to her right side. Ribs are cracked or broken.”
He blew out a breath. “How far out are you?”
“About twenty minutes.”
