I don’t have a fucking clue. This woman is intriguing, but also confusing as hell, and I don’t have a scrap of the time and energy it would take to figure her out.
But I don’t have to crack the code of her innermost workings to be a little bit of what she needs tonight. To be an escape from reality. Surely my brothers can handle keeping themselves alive for one night without me. They’re all grown.
Mind already made up, I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and shoot off a message.
Me: Something came up. Go ahead and start tonight’s festivities without me. Catch up with you later.
Instantly, Remy responds with a, What are you talking about, bro?, but I promptly lock the screen and move my attention back to a still-pacing Daisy.
I hold out my helmet again and jerk my chin to the space behind me.
“Get on.”
“Get on?” She repeats my words, surprise evident in her voice. “Why? Where are we going?”
“Away from the Strip, and away from tonight. You in?”
She considers me for a long moment, her eyes positively churning with the angst of endless possibilities. Whatever’s driving her inside, though, it wins.
Taking the helmet from my hands, she nods and swings a leg over the bike again, leaning into my back. I pause before firing it up, three words making my chest rumble under her hands.
“My name’s Flynn.”
Daisy
Bright lights dance through the dark window, and a car’s headlights flash by on the street. I follow the stimuli like a gnat searching for a place to land, even with an entire rectangle-shaped bar and several tables beyond that between me and the outside.
The truth is, I haven’t known what to say since my new friend Flynn pulled up outside this little bar on a quiet street removed from the busy Vegas Strip. The glitz, the glamour—we left it all behind for life just outside the bubble, and with the way he is, that means neither one of us has uttered a syllable in over twenty minutes.
It’s awkward—as I would expect it to be with a complete stranger—but somehow comfortable at the same time. There’s no overt pressure, no prying. In fact, he seems content to sit here and let me stew on myself for as long as I want.
The bartender sets a fresh glass of ice water in front of me—a pointed choice I made given that I’m on the verge of a huge breakdown and in the presence of someone I know virtually nothing about—and I heave a sigh as Flynn stares blandly at the TV above us. There’s a game of some sort on, but I can’t tell for the life of me what’s actually going on. I think it’s something European.
Rubbing my lips together roughly, I swallow once before finally clearing my throat, turning a little bit on my stool to face my companion, and I find my voice.
“I guess you’re probably wondering what would possess a person to go screaming from a hotel in the middle of the night and hop on some random stranger’s motorcycle, huh?”
He lifts his eyebrows, turning away from the TV to look at me directly, and I can only imagine the things he’s thinking. Probably that I’m reckless with my own well-being and maybe that I’m needlessly wild with my life at all times. Maybe he thinks I sleep around or prostitute myself or something. I mean, who knows at this point? I wouldn’t blame him.
His blue eyes are calm, kind even, but as far as what’s running through his mind, they give nothing away.
I nod to myself, answering for him. “Well, of course you are. I know I would be.” I scoff. “I’d be half tempted to call the police on my crazy ass, to be honest.”
He smirks, and a nervous niggle makes my chest ache. Oh God, I hope he doesn’t call the police. They’ll report me to Immigration, and if I’m convicted of a crime, they’ll never give me another visa!
I calm down briefly by reminding myself that he’s a big, tough guy and probably doesn’t have nearly the hair trigger about calling the police that a petite woman like myself would. On that thought, I lay out my thinking for him to digest. Plus, it’s always good for a man to get a little reality check about life as a woman.
“Not that you’ve got as much to worry about as the average woman does. Statistically, nearly one in every five women is raped in their lifetime, and that fact doesn’t even take non-sexual assault into consideration. I mean, mugging and murder and all that included, it has to be like one in three, right?”
“I’m not gonna call the police,” he says easily, and I’m almost surprised his voice isn’t scratchy from disuse.