Military Romance Collection: Contemporary Soldier Alpha Male Romance (46 page)

Chapter 7

Hesitantly, Dalton opened the door to the Cobra clubhouse, letting Billie step in ahead of him as she unraveled her braids and shook out her hair. He wanted to fist his hands in that mass of black locks that managed to shine even in the dim glow of the bar, but he hung back. He watched her as she looked around, taking it all in. The scuffed floors, the bowing boards on the walls, the scratched and gouged bar, and the rickety tables and chairs.

The pool tables were worn, and even the dart boards had seen better days, but it all added up to a cozy space where Dalton and his brothers didn’t care if they got drunk and party fouled, spilling beer or sloshing whiskey. And if there was a fight for whatever reason, any damage done wouldn’t be costly to repair.

It was Dalton’s home away from home.

He felt nervous at her assessment. Whether Billie’s designs cost a fortune or not, they were high fashion, and the people she ran with and the places she went were at a much higher status than this. He had a feeling she would be disgusted, but he watched in awe as she shrugged off her coat and tossed it over the back of a chair next to an empty table without thought.

She turned to him with her eyes dancing, and he couldn’t believe the absolute joy that seemed to encompass her entire body. This certainly wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. Despite the fact that Billie fit the part she dressed perfectly, and Dalton wouldn’t have minded staring at her all night, the truth was that he’d held out some hope she would hate it here and demand to go back to the hotel. He could wash his hands of her and come back here alone.

But those hopes were dashed to pieces now, and he knew he would be entertaining her for several hours. “This is awesome, Dalton. Thank you for bringing me. Let me buy you a drink.”

He shook his head, in wonder as well as in denial of her offer. “We don’t pay here. But we’ll get drinks.” He put a hand on the small of her back and guided her toward the bar. Doug, who was manning the bar tonight, already had two fingers of whiskey in a highball on the rocks for him and Dalton asked Billie, “What do you want? We’re fully stocked, so you can have pretty much anything.”

She nodded and told Doug, “I’d like a tequila sunrise with a splash of pineapple juice, please.”

Doug gave her a nod and then turned a questioning scowl on Dalton, who just shook his head slightly. He didn’t want to discuss anything right now. Out loud, to avoid any questions, he said, “Doug, this is Billie Roderick. She’s the special guest at our hotel, the fashion designer. Billie, this is Doug. He’s a decent bartender, but don’t get drunk and confide in him. He can’t keep a secret to save his life.”

“Very funny,” Doug said as he mixed the drink. “And I suggest you never get on a bike with Dalton. He’s a great rider, but he’s not the best mechanic in the world, and you might break down in the middle of nowhere.”

“At least I have a sense of direction and can save my own ass if I do,” Dalton challenged, and Doug gave him a warning look. Purposely ignoring it, he told Billie, “This guy has probably the best and worst story I’ve ever heard.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Doug interrupted. “He just wants to deflect.”

“Bullshit. But even if that was the goal, it’s a true story.” To Billie, who wore a curious expression, he said, “This guy went on a little excursion, looking to collect on a payment for us in some little town in Arizona, south of Phoenix. Now, keep in mind that Phoenix is huge, and there are probably at least a hundred gas stations right off the exits along the freeway. But this guy is sure he can make it the last fifty or sixty miles without stopping.”

“I still had half a tank,” Doug protested.

Dalton waved him off. “So, he gets about twenty miles from his destination and runs out of gas. He’s in the middle of nowhere at noon in the desert, and the last gas station he passed was a couple miles back. He doesn’t know how far the next one is. Tell me, Billie, what would you do in that situation?”

“Two miles isn’t so far. I’d walk back, buy a gas can and a gallon of gas, and carry it back.” She said it with certainty and eyed Doug with amusement. “You didn’t do that, did you?”

He shot flames at Dalton. “No. I thought I’d find a station closer, so I rolled the bike off the exit, secured it, and started down the road toward what I figured was a small town.”

Dalton snickered. “Now, the road forks, right and left, and Doug doesn’t know his head from his ass, so he sure as hell doesn’t know which way to go. By this time, he’s already walked like three miles. He could have been to the gas station and halfway back already. He goes left, and the road winds around, a lazy back and forth, until he has no idea where he is. When he finally sees a house up ahead, the mile markers tell him he’s gone almost eight miles. In the heat and burning sun. Without water.”

Billie gasped. “You didn’t have anything to drink?”

“I hadn’t exactly planned on running out of gas, and I certainly didn’t think I’d be walking through the desert.”

“What about your cell phone?” she asked. “Couldn’t you have called someone for help? Even a tow truck would have been better than this?”

Dalton started laughing. “Oh, yeah. Doug forgets to charge his phone a lot, so it was only half charged when he left, and he went through a lot of dead areas. So, the phone roamed and the battery gave out. And on top of that, he left it in the saddle bags on the bike.”

By now, Billie was chuckling and shaking her head, and Doug looked like he was ready to sock Dalton. But Dalton was already so far into the story, he wasn’t going to let it go. “So there’s this tiny little house in the middle of the Arizona desert, and guess what this genius does.”

Slapping her hand on the bar, Billie said in a matter of fact tone, “He knocked on the door.”

Doug cleared his throat. “It was the middle of the day in the desert, and I’d walked eight miles. My throat was killing me, I was baked to a crisp, and I was about to pass out. I could have died out there, you know. So yes, I knocked on the door.”

Dalton grinned at him. “You tell this so much better than me, man. You finish it.” Despite his protests, Dalton knew Doug loved telling the story and the attention it got him. Billie was enthralled by it, and Doug wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to dominate her attention for a few minutes, even if it was with an embarrassing tale.

Taking a deep breath and looking reluctant, Doug dove right in. “This little girl, maybe five, opens the door. Her hair’s in this neat little bun, and she’s wearing a party dress. I don’t say anything because she shuts the door, and I hear her call out to her daddy that there was a weird man at the door. In opens again, and Farmer Bob with a straw hat, overalls, and no teeth is standing there, like something out of Deliverance. He invites me in, and I need to get out of the sun, so I go.”

“No way!” Billie gasped. “Tell me you at least had a knife or something for protection, just in case.”

“Also in the saddle bags,” Dalton told her. “I’m telling you, this guy broke every cardinal rule of traveling alone.”

“Anyway,” Doug continued, “I follow him to the kitchen, trying not to touch anything. These people are hoarders of the worst kind. There’s barely a six inch wide path from room to room, and everything is piled along the walls. Furniture, trash, paperwork, toys, boxes, dirt, and probably dead animals from the smell of it. There are lamps but no light, a TV that’s not playing. And in the kitchen, there’s a woman that’s wearing an actual burlap sack with holes cut for her head and arms, with a rope tied around the waist.”

Billie shuddered, and Dalton was glad she was amused. “But that’s not the worst of it. The woman offers me some water, and at least they have running water in the sink, right? So, I’m desperate and I accept. She grabs a cup from the counter and rinses it out – with no soap – and fills it with water. I look down in it, and there’s the congealed black shit in the bottom of the cup.”

“Oh, please tell me you didn’t drink it,” Billie said, scrunching her face up in disgust.

Doug shrugged. “It was life or death. So I drank it.” Billie’s look of disbelief was priceless. “Anyway, the guy said he’d give me a ride to the gas station and then to my bike. He had a gas can I could use. He kissed his wife as she leaned over to get something out of the fridge, and I realized why it was so hot in there. There was no air conditioning in the middle of the Arizona desert because they didn’t have power. And the rank odor from the fridge made me gag.

“I ran outside, and I had to ride in the bed of the guy’s pickup because the cab was filled to the brim with more trash. So, we get to the gas station, crawling at like ten miles an hour because the damn truck is so old it might fall apart if he went any faster, and I get the gas. He asks where I left the bike, and I give him the freeway and exit number.”

“And I see you made it out alive,” Billie commented, shaking her head in wonder.

“Yeah, well, it turns out the gas station we went to was the one two miles back from where I ran out of gas.” Doug looked chagrined, and Dalton laughed hysterically. Billie just gawked. “I know, it’s crazy.”

“Crazy? I don’t think even Hollywood could write something that messed up,” Billie told him, humor in her voice.

Doug turned to Dalton. “Hey, man, because I love you like a brother, I’ll follow protocol. But only for the one night. I’ll get you back, eventually.” That would require bringing Billie back to the clubhouse, and Dalton wasn’t particularly worried about it. She wasn’t going to be in town long.

As Doug walked away, Billie asked, “What did that mean?”

Scratching the back of his neck, Dalton told her, “The first time we bring a girl in, none of the guys are allowed to tell an embarrassing story about us. But after that, we’re fair game.”

Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “I guess I’ll just have to find the time to come back with you before I leave Vegas.”

He grunted. “We’ll see about that. At the moment, you still owe me an answer to my question. How did you figure out so much about me when I hadn’t told you anything?”

Her smile faltered a little, but she nodded toward the table where she’d left her jacket, a little away from the rest of the crowd. “Let’s sit down and talk for a minute.”

Dalton hadn’t expected this to be a serious matter, and now he wondered if he should let it go. He hadn’t planned on any intimate conversation with Billie. He’d just wanted to have a good time, and maybe even scare her away. He didn’t need any complications in his life, and feeling anything beyond lust for a woman definitely complicated everything else.

But he couldn’t back out now. He was still obligated to entertain Billie and make sure she was happy. Dalton couldn’t risk offending her by telling her he didn’t want to know. So, he took a seat and waited. She took a sip of her drink and then folded her hands on the table in front of her, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner.

“I didn’t grow up privileged, Dalton. I literally climbed the ladder to where I am today from a hole three feet below the bottom rung. In my neighborhood, you had to learn to recognize dangerous men and differentiate them from the ones who had a dangerous streak in them.”

Dalton was skeptical. He couldn’t imagine the beautiful, poised woman in front of him being poor. “Where did you grow up?”

She cast her eyes down, no longer meeting his gaze. Then, she lifted them, and her those dark orbs were defiant and proud. “Spanish Harlem. My real name is Belinda Consuela Rodriguez.”

Chapter 8

Dalton stared at Billie for a long time, and she grew a bit uncomfortable. Had she misjudged him and made a mistake confiding in him? But eventually, he nodded slowly. “I thought I caught a bit of an accent when you speak. I just couldn’t place it.” He didn’t look disgusted or judgmental, but Billie wasn’t sure what to think.

Still, she’d started, so she might as well keep going. It was too late to turn back now. “I shared a one room apartment with four other people until I finished college. My mother’s parents came over from Venezuela to start a new life. Chasing the American dream, I suppose. But they never made it anywhere, and they married my mother off to a rich man she hated to assure her future. She got pregnant with my brother at seventeen, and by the time she was pregnant with me, she refused to take her husband’s abuse anymore. So, she ran.”

It took Billie a moment to continue. She still found it hard to talk about, even if she was proud of her heritage. “She didn’t have anywhere to go, hadn’t finished high school, had no skills. And she already had three boys with me on the way. She took my brothers to a shelter, and they stayed there for a few weeks while my mother found a job as a maid and got her GED. When she saved enough, she got the apartment, and that’s where I lived for more than half my life.”

Dalton’s reaction surprised her. “You are a strong, brave woman, Billie.”

She shrugged with a smile. “Well, I got where I am because I didn’t like the crappy clothes my mom would find for us for free. I learned to take them apart and sew them back together to make them more modern. And that’s how I became passionate about fashion. But you remind me of the guys I knew back then, in the ghetto, who were fiercely loyal but had that dangerous streak. I could almost smell it on you from the moment we met.” She used that to segway into her own questions. “So, how did you come by that dangerous streak?”

He laughed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “This is probably hard to believe,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “but Brock and I were a couple of hoods from the start.”

She feigned shock, gasping and putting a hand to her chest. “No way!”

“Yeah, we played pranks in school, skipped class. The usual. But we were con artists, and we ran some big scams to feed our need for nice things and drugs. By the time we were seventeen, we had customized muscle cars. His was a Mustang, mine was a Trans Am. But we were street racing, and we got picked up, took a couple of drug possession charges. Unfortunately, I was carrying a lot more than he was, and I got a felony charge. His was a misdemeanor.”

His smile faded, and his brow furrowed. Billie wondered what troubled him so much. He continued, “He got off with probation. I did a year. And when I got out, he’d moved on. I had a record, and I was angry. I acted out, caught some more charges. And when I got out of prison, I felt defeated. I got pretty heavy into drugs, and it was Brock who picked me up and put me back on my feet again. He said I needed to get clean, and we’d start over together. But I didn’t think I could do that where we were. We grew up in a pretty small town, and everyone knew my business.”

“So you came to Vegas,” she concluded.

He nodded. “On a wing and a prayer. We were both pretty broke, and we decided to run a quick con, pick up some cash so we could find that fresh start. Otis, who was a junior manager at the hotel, caught us red handed and took us back to his office. He gave us a choice of calling the cops or coming to work for him as bellhops and keeping our noses clean. We chose wisely. As it turned out, he was a Cobra, and when we’d proven our value, he brought us into the fold. From there, we worked our asses off to climb the ladder.”

Billie pointed to him. “You know, Dalton, you and I are not so different. It takes a lot of balls to pull yourself out of the sort of situation you were in, and you should be proud of where you came from because it drove you to this place where you’ve succeeded in life. And you should be even prouder that you survived all of that and accomplished so much.”

He quirked a brow at her. “How many people have told you that along the way?”

She shook her head. “Only two. Myself and my mother.” He cocked his head in curiosity, scowling, and she said quietly, “No one else knows where I come from. I changed my name when I got my first internship in fashion. You’re the first person I’ve confided in since then. I was twenty. I’ve held that secret for fifteen years.”

He stared at her blankly, as if he couldn’t process what she’d just told him. “Why me?” he asked finally.

Billie couldn’t really answer that. She’d felt compelled to do it. There was something about Dalton she couldn’t ignore, and it made her feel things she’d never felt for anyone before. It didn’t make sense; they’d only known each other a few hours, and yet, she felt like she’d known him for years. With a frustrated sigh, she said, “I’m not sure. Kindred spirits, I guess. Like I said, we aren’t so different from each other. We’ve both been at the bottom without hope and managed to pull ourselves out of it. And then we found a way to thrive.”

He nodded and twirled the empty glass his drink had been. Laughing, Billie said, “Come on, we’re not going to let deep conversation ruin a fun night. I think having a heart to heart like this was good for us, but now it’s time to play. Are you up for some pool? I used to be pretty good, back when I was a teenager.”

“I’m always up for pool,” he told her, standing and helping her to her feet. He grabbed their glasses. “I warn you, I’m pretty good.”

“And I warn you, I’ll give you a run for your money,” she retorted.

“Good. I could use it. Why don’t you go set up, and I’ll get us another round of drinks?”

As it turned out, it was close, and Dalton beat her by one game. Billie didn’t mind – men had egos, and they typically couldn’t handle being beat by a woman. Besides, she practically threw the last game, or at least, that’s what she told herself to save her own pride. Actually, she’d been set up for the shot at the eight ball, and she could have made it. But Dalton stood so close that her body heated. And then a waft of his cologne assaulted her senses, and her vision blurred. Her concentration blew out the window, and she missed.

But it put a smile on his face, and that was reward enough for Billie. They had a few more drinks, and she tried her hand at poker, with Dalton’s guidance. She’d never been very good, but she was impressed when she and Dalton split the pot with one other guy as the game wrapped up. Stretching and yawning, she finished the last of her drink.

“It’s late. I should get you back to the hotel. You’ve got an early morning,” Dalton said.

Billie frowned, looking around for a clock. How did he know what time it was? As if reading her mind, he took his phone out of his pocket and flashed the time at her. It was a little after midnight, and she wondered where the time had gone. She certainly didn’t want to think about what time it was back home.

Reluctantly, she nodded, said goodnight to the Cobras she’d met, and followed him out to the bike, pulling on her coat and tying back her hair. The ride back was fulfilling, and despite the chill of the wind, she was warm from the alcohol and Dalton’s body, her arms wrapped tightly around him. This was like a fairy tale, and she didn’t want it to end.

He pulled up to the front of the hotel and stopped, tossing the motorcycle keys to one of the valets. “Here, Michael, park her close. I’ll be back soon. And be good to her.”

“Yes, sir!”

Billie’s heart pounded as he walked her to the elevator. “I hope you had a good time,” he said. “And I hope you get enough sleep.”

It was going to be difficult to get up early enough to arrive fifteen minutes before she’d demanded everyone else be there, but she wouldn’t have changed it for the world. “Aren’t you going to walk me to my room?” It was really just an elevator ride, but for some reason, she couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving yet. And as she looked at his mouth, she realized what it was. She wanted to kiss him.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He was silent on the elevator, and he seemed nervous when they stepped off.

She put in the code and opened the door. “Thank you, Dalton. I had a wonderful night.”

“It was pretty fun, huh?” he said with a crooked, boyish grin. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

He turned, and Billie’s shoulders slumped. But as he stepped onto the elevator, she called out, “Dalton, wait!” He turned to her with a question in his eyes, and she said, “Don’t go.”