Bad Boy Criminal: The Novel (2 page)

“
W
ell
…Ash,” I said, ambivalent but considerate.

As my eyes trailed over this blue jay of sorts—with his chiseled length of body in an oil-splattered white t-shirt (the kind of stains that will never come out, no matter how many washes ago it was, and you’ve given up), and distressed, powder-blue jeans—with his disheveled, Coca Cola-colored hair and piercing yet soft green eyes under a fringe of criminally long lashes—I reminded myself to remain objective, because men can look like anything, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing…like being under the spell of some kind of devil. They can be whatever you need, to take whatever they want. But it won’t be long till you catch a glimpse of the real insides, and it’s never as pretty.

On the other hand, it’d been a long time since I’d met a man more quintessentially my type. (In fact…I couldn’t…remember that time, that man.)

And Bill and Hope would smell that on him right away.

It was the first thing about him they’d find to hate, in fact.

They’d hate how naturally handsome he was, of course. They hated anything that wasn’t come by through hard work and strong principle—but “hate” was such a strong word to apply to either of the Turners.

We had our differences of opinion, and at first, yes, I’d tried to burn holes through them with my eyes alone. But…they were good people, deep down, and they were
my
people. They’d taken me when no one else would dare, and they’d tried like hell to reason away my attraction to the seedy and unseemly. Basically: things just like Ashton, who had already said “fuck” three times, though he was clearly still only in his twenties (and cursing was a right which granted itself only to older gentlemen…specifically, Bill), and who had a way of standing like he didn’t even care that he had been shot. He looked like he could as easily be at a photo-shoot for
Mechanics of 2016 Calendar
(and he’s July, naturally; with eyes like that, how could he not be July).

No, they wouldn’t care for him, and when he inevitably attempted to crash on their roll-out bed, or borrow a few hundred dollars, or steal one of the cars, at whom would they gaze as they grimaced away the burden of their disappointment?

At me.

“Well, Ash,” I said, trying to start again, more womanly this time, less girlish, “I don’t know.” I raked my loose chestnut waves back and tucked them behind my ear. “The truth of the matter is that I work here with my family, and I don’t want to cause them any trouble, and I don’t want them to have to worry or think about this all too much, you feel me?”

Ash cocked his head to the side, but he nodded nonetheless. Perhaps the added “You feel me?” tipped him off to the girl I used to be, but I was probably being paranoid. I tried not to let the old Izzy peek out too often. She’d been the one to get me into trouble, and the truth was that troublemakers loved the old me. It seemed we gravitated to each other.

But that was then. And this was now. And I couldn’t have men who had been shot going into Bill and Hope’s house and introducing themselves. They’d call him an ambulance and see him spirited away, dusting their hands the entire time.

“I’m not trying anything,” Ash reminded me, extending his arms into the universal gesture of surrender. “You pointed your gun at me, remember? I’m just lost, here. I’m lost, and I’m shot.”

Still wary, I nodded. He definitely had a point. It was even possible that I was legally obligated to help him, and even if I wasn’t, I would, because—I had a weakness for those in need. I remembered need still, even vividly on certain lonely nights.

“All right,” I agreed. “Come with me to the rescue shed.”

Ash’s eyes bulged. “The rescue shed?” he prompted. “That sounds like a half-way house for reformed dogs, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“You’re not too far off base,” I told him. If he wanted to be a chooser, he’d have to stop being a beggar. “Anyway, I’ve got some supplies there that will fix you up as good as any emergency room. At least better than most veterinarians, in my humble opinion.”

“Oh, very humble,” Ash replied.

I shot him a look, but he followed as obediently as any animal in need of help. Dire circumstances tend to straighten out even the worst of us.

I
t wasn’t much
of a walk back to the main house of Turner Dairyfarm, not that we went so far. About an acre away from the main house was the rescue shed, where I kept my other strays. It was in desperate need of repairs to one side—which leaned kind of funny and had a few gaps in the woodwork—and a paint job—as its red was now practically beige, and in many places, gone altogether. But none of that was my business; this place belonged to Bill and Hope, in the end, and I was just a lucky tag-along.

My truck, narrow and brown, was parked alongside the rescue shed, and not far from that rested my forgotten backpack and the blue jay cage, alongside the boulder I had been straddling when those bushes had rustled with Ash’s weight. As we passed it, I scooped up the cage and the pack, which wasn’t home to only a First Aid kit.

There were needles and thread in there, too.

“Come on inside,” I commanded, shoving open the shed door and holding it to the side for his shambling entrance. As much as he could crack wise and pretend to be casual, he was clearly in pain.

“Please, please, tell me you’ve got something hard in here,” he sighed, collapsing without invitation onto a stool alongside my workbench. “Something like Jim Beam.”

I smiled ruefully and shook my head at him as I rested the wound blue jay cage in front of him on the workbench. “You’re looking at doxycycline only. It’s not for pain, it’s just an antibiotic, but it will help prevent infection, which would be very painful if we don’t stop it,” I informed him, leaning toward a shallow shelf built into the wall behind me, where several small bottles were lined up in a row. When I turned back to Ash, I caught his eyes traveling the curve of my buttocks and up over the mountains and valleys of the torso. His eyes found mine again, suddenly, and I cocked my head to the side and squinted at him slightly, with a knowing yet bemused smile.

I gave the small bottles I’d collected from my shelf a little shake and sat it in front of him.

“How heavy are those?” he asked hopefully. These questions may have caused a real doctor to pause and reevaluate the psychology of the victim, but I didn’t bother with it. Judgment had never been my strong suit…not after everything I’d been through.

“It’s actually for birds,” I replied shortly, offering him a small smile of commiseration. “You can buy it on Amazon.” I fished a lighter from my backpack and ignited it, then paused, the needle I had taken from my little sewing kit hovering near the flame. I looked at him over the flickering light and said, “Now, I can call you an ambulance if you want. Do you want me to call you an ambulance, or stitch you up myself, with a sewing needle sterilized by a Bic lighter, and some yellow darning thread?”

Ash chuckled. “Honestly, I would really rather not go to the hospital,” he said. “Just get tangled up in all the red tape.”

Hmm. If you’d been shot by an illegal hunter, wouldn’t you want to—

“No insurance,” he went on.

That made sense. Except, you’d think he’d still want to call the—

Ash pulled the white t-shirt up over his head, and all thought fluttered from my mind, disbanding like dandelion seeds in the September breeze. His abdomen was trim and muscled, tenderly worked by the sun to a smoldering light caramel shade. Colorful murals sprawled over his Adonis physique. Skulls…flames…roses…snakes…all tangled around him in hot, vibrant hues.

His eyes caught mine, and I averted my gaze. Pursing my lips and nodding, cheeks probably fuming, I dipped the needle through the finger of flame still burning in my hand. Next, I slid a spool of yellow-colored thread from the front pocket of my backpack and unraveled a length to spear the eye of the needle.

“Wish I had something a little darker,” I told him, pulling my own stool closer to his.

He was busy unscrewing the doxycycline and dumping it into his mouth like Nerds.

I winced. “You should’ve taken two,” I told him. “I crush and divide those pills for the birds. It’s still—real medicine.”

“I think it’ll be all right. You got anything to drink with this?”

I dug a bottle of water from my backpack and he killed the last of it. I settled across from him…

…and found that my thigh would brush against his every time I leaned forward, but there was nothing I could do about it in retrospect. Nothing that wouldn’t make me look like some kind of high school girl; who cared if our knees bumped? Or if, whenever I had to lean forward, the interior of one of my thighs would graze the interior of one of his?

I cleared my throat.
Focus.
And leaned over his kind of perfect body. “This is a very clean wound for a hunting rifle,” I informed him. “Honestly…”
You should be a lot more messed up.
But then again, who was I kidding? Did I really believe that this guy, hesitant to involve any “red tape,” with a through-and-through shoulder cap, no scatter, was actually shot by the errant bullet of a
hunting rifle?
“Honestly, you’re very lucky,” I finished, trying to dismiss the matter in my own mind. “This is going to sting.”

Leaning forward, I concentrated instead on sliding the needle through his skin. I winced as I did it; I’d never stitched up a human before. To his credit, Ash didn’t shift one inch, nor did he grumble unpleasantly at the sensation.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question.

“Do you think we should call the police?” I broached. “Let them know what happened? I mean…somebody shot you.”

Ash didn’t respond for several seconds, and I didn’t dare look away from my work to gauge his reaction. Part of me, subconsciously, might have also been unwilling to gauge his reaction. Deep down, I still knew that nothing was as it seemed, especially in the case of beautiful devils. I had actually finished the first stitch, and was breaking and knotting its tip, when Ash finally replied: “I’d really rather not, Izz.”

I felt my heart rate kick up a notch. Most people nowadays called me Isabelle. Izz wasn’t a name I’d heard used casually in a long time. “I could talk to them for you—” I offered, finishing my knot.

“Please.” Ash grabbed one of my hands with his own, and my eyes flashed up to meet his.

They were so beautiful, and what I saw in their depths was impossible to communicate with nature similes or metaphors about drowning. I saw him. I saw him flashing back at me—him in despair.

“Okay,” I said, my chest constricted, my breath short. “Sure.”

At this, Ash’s serious expression cracked into a smile, and a veil seemed to pass over those liquid green eyes, transforming them. They were still gorgeous, but no longer penetrable. I wasn’t quite sure who I was seeing anymore, but it wasn’t down into any core.

“So, doc,” he said, shooting me a lopsided and rakish grin, “Am I dyin’?”

“Not unless you give me a reason to shoot you again,” I replied, sharing in his play-act that everything was okay. I didn’t like too much confrontation and confession myself, anyway. It was easier to leave all that behind. Instead, I scooted my stool around to his backside and straddled it again, fixated now on the exit wound. It was small, but then, I’d already assessed that this was no typical “hunting” wound, hadn’t I? The smaller wound being on his back meant that he’d been shot
in
the back. Shot fleeing.

Clearing my throat again, I warned him of the coming sting, and, as the needle and thread slid in and out of his skin, I said to him, “You can stay in the rescue shed tonight…if you want. But you can’t come in the main house up there. Okay? And I’ll come back and give you some leftovers from dinner later. I should go help Hope prep, for now, and—we can see how you’re feeling in the morning. Maybe I can give you a ride into town. How’s that?” This stitch was done faster than the first, and I was able to break and knot the thread quickly without his deltoid muscles gleaming softly up at me.

“That sounds great, Isabelle,” Ash said.

I applied some ointment to the wounds and sealed them with gauze bandaging, then stood and moved toward the door of the rescue shed; I could see that a hot, dark pink had replaced the soft orange of sunset, becoming the livid outro of deep dusk in the window. I opened the shed and saw that the sky above us directly had darkened to a gentle but rich blue. The main house was alight, and dinner would certainly be soon. I was probably too late to help with anything. I’d lost track of the time.

When I turned to smile over my shoulder at Ash, I found that his eyes were already on me—and they had changed again. They’d softened and broken open, like a suit of armor with many cracks. “Thank you, Izzy,” he said to me.

For a moment, I was caught there, in the embrace of his gaze, and forgot myself. Then I remembered: right, right! He had said something to me! He had thanked me!

So I threw a quick, disconnected smile onto my face and murmured that he was welcome as I turned and hurried out the door.