Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(19)

I looked to Zip, gave him a trembling smile and said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Come back for a Taser,” was his reply.

I nodded, thinking I didn’t want to be responsible for someone who was out to harm me losing their brain matter, but I probably would have no issue with amping them significantly.

I then looked to Snap, who was watching me but didn’t make another move to detain me, and on unsteady legs, I walked out of the gun shop.





Chapter Three



Crosshairs



Rosalie




I timed it so it worked for me.

I was now ten days out. The bruising was fading faster. I was moving around a lot easier. A new bandage was on my nose and it was a lot smaller. And the stitches were dissolving and falling out.

But I still looked like a woman who’d had her ass handed to her.

Colombo’s was being cool. They were giving me time off with pay (though that pay sucked, it was all about the tips) for two weeks and putting me behind the bar until the bandage was off my nose, my stitches were totally gone, and my ribs were such I could heft around huge pizza pies.

So it was now or it would be never.

And too much was at stake.

It couldn’t be never.

Even if the now scared the beejezus out of me.

Therefore I was sitting in the room with all the stations, chairs facing each other on either side of a wall that was half glass, partitions delineating the stations.

Phones hanging on a partition at each station.

I watched him come out, and regardless of the fact he looked about as rough as me, and then some, I remembered what I’d thought the first time I saw him in the bar Bounty hung at.

That could be mine.

And I’d made it mine.

He copped a blank look as he moved to me, his big, powerful body no less attractive in an orange jumpsuit with a white T-shirt under it.

And it was proved.

The stitched slash that carved from just below the corner of his inner left eye across his cheekbone then down to his jaw only made him look tough, hot, and cool.

Making the trek from door to sitting opposite me, Beck did not lose hold on my gaze.

Only when I did nothing but sit there, staring at his still-handsome face, did his brown eyes slide to the telephone and back to me.

Now he wanted to talk.

I looked down at my lap where my purse was.

It was a cute purse. Total biker chick chic, black leather in a saddlebag shape with lots of rivets and a fantastic, heavy silver chain as a strap.

Since I was no longer going to be a biker chick, I was probably going to have to switch out my entire purse inventory, finding hipster purses or something like that.

The problem was the very idea of hipster purses made me want to cringe and I didn’t even know what a hipster purse looked like.

The sleek clutch Lanie was carrying, I could do.

Hipster…

No.

I stopped thinking of hipster purses, which was just my way of controlling my fingers’ need to start trembling because Beck was right across from me and the last time I’d seen him had not been a celebratory occasion. I got myself together and opened my purse.

I pulled out the folded piece of paper. I unfolded the paper, turned it the way I needed it, then slapped it up against the glass off to the side so that Beck could still see my face through the glass.

His gaze went to the paper and I thought he’d keep the blank look, close me off, shut me out, or alternately, sneer.

He didn’t do either.

He looked at the color copy of the picture of me before they’d cleaned the blood off my face in the hospital but after the swelling had bloated me beyond recognition and he flinched.

Flinched.

What was that all about?

So abruptly that I jumped in my chair, his big hand came up and curled around the phone.

He yanked it out of the cradle, tapped the top against the glass, gaze back on me, and put it to his ear.

I shoved the picture back into my purse and picked up the phone even though I had meant the picture to speak for me.

That being, I already paid, leave me alone.

I put the phone to my ear.

“Rosie.”

That was all he said but I heard the tone, I saw the look in his eyes.

The tone was guttural.

The look was suffering.

He had to be kidding me.

“I hate you,” I whispered.

His features softened in that way they did when he thought I was being cute or when he wanted to have sex or when I put his favorite meal in front of him or when he wanted me to forgive him for acting like a dick or a thousand other times when I reminded him why he’d made me his old lady or he got himself in trouble with me.

This was not in trouble with me.

As phenomenal as a soft look from Gerard “Throttle” Beck could be, we were far beyond that ever working again on me.

“Rosie—”

“Keep them away from me. From Mom and from me.”

“Why did you—?”

I leaned toward the glass and interrupted him. “Too late now, Beck. Too late to ask questions.”

“Web said—” he began, I knew to explain.

Web. Spiderweb. Bounty’s president.

What I also knew was there was no explanation. Not one I would understand.

The brothers, okay, they were in an outlaw motorcycle club, I knew the risks I was taking.