The Biker's Hidden Heiress novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Forty Days

She learns what she needs to survive until her birthday as Dorian's men arrive and Rafe shoves her into the pantry.

Rafe hung up the phone and stood there with his hand still on it.

"He says he'll send someone tomorrow," he said. "A welfare check. Nothing official."

"That means yes," I said. "It means he knows I came up this road."

"It means he knows your car did."

I turned my face into the pillow.

I did not cry.

I had learned that in boarding school at nine, when my father's driver took me back after every holiday.

Rafe didn't say anything kind.

He just shut off the lamp, and I heard the chair creak as he sat down in the dark.

He was still there when I fell asleep.

In the morning there was light in the window and a sandwich on the bed.

Mabel had left a pair of gray sweatpants folded at my feet, and a note that said, EAT, in letters that were nearly shouting.

I made it to the edge of the mattress before the room spun.

"Don't," Rafe said.

He was in the doorway with a coffee.

He had put on a fresh shirt under the vest, and his scraped arm was wrapped in white gauze to the elbow.

"I need air," I said.

"Rule one."

"Rule one was nobody sees me from the road. There's a window right there."

He looked at the window.

"It faces the creek," I said. "I checked."

"You were awake before I was, then."

"I'm an early riser. Bad habit."

Something touched his mouth and went away.

He set the coffee down, crossed the room and slid one arm under my knees and the other behind my back.

I made a noise I wasn't proud of.

"Cracked ribs," he said. "Sorry."

"You're not sorry at all."

"No," he said. "Not very."

He lifted me against his chest.

He smelled like leather, old coffee and motor oil, and under that something warm that was only him.

My arm went around his neck without asking me.

He carried me down a narrow back stair and through a kitchen full of steel pots, and out onto a wooden deck that hung over a creek.

He set me in a rocking chair with a blanket over my knees.

His hands stayed on the blanket a second too long, tucking it, and then he stepped away.

I hadn't breathed in a while.

"You did that to be nice," I said.

"I did that so you wouldn't fall off the stairs."

"Same thing."

"It's really not."

The air smelled of wet stone and cut hay.

Across the creek the mountains went up in layers of green, and not a single road showed.

"Why didn't you call him?" I asked. "Five hundred thousand dollars. I watched you not call."

Rafe leaned on the porch rail with his coffee.

"You think I'd sell a hurt girl for money?" he asked.

"I think you've got a lot of men in that bar and not a lot of money."

He didn't deny it.

"Tell me what he gets," he said instead. "If he gets you."

So I told him.

It sounded stupid in the daylight.

"My father left everything to me. Forty days from now I turn twenty-six, and every hotel, every account and every building is mine outright."

"Forty days."

"Dorian knew the date better than I did. If I married him first, the whole thing was his to run until I was well."

"Well."

"The doctor in the car," I said. "He was going to say I wasn't. A few weeks somewhere with a locked door, until I signed what they put in front of me."

Rafe's face stayed perfectly still.

Down on the creek a bird started up and stopped.

"Nobody knows your face," he said. "I never saw it on a hotel wall."

"My father kept me out of the papers. He said money should never see me coming."

"Smart man."

"He picked Dorian."

"Not so smart."

I laughed, and it hurt, and I put a hand on my ribs.

For the first time he smiled properly.

It changed his whole face, and I looked away before he caught me staring.

"So here's what I want," I said. "I want to stay alive for forty days. I want to walk into my father's lawyer's office, alive, and sign my name."

"And Dorian?"

"I want him to stand in front of everyone he lied to and hear what he is."

"That's a lot."

"I know."

"I like it," Rafe said.

Behind him, in the yard, a whistle cut the air, two notes, sharp and fast.

His whole body changed.

I had never seen anyone go from lazy to dangerous so quickly.

"Gate," he said. "That's the prospect. Somebody's at the gate."

He crossed the deck in two strides, picked me out of the chair in one move and shouldered through the kitchen door.

I bit my lip on the pain.

Through the kitchen window I saw a gray sedan coming up the gravel, slow and clean, and two men in matching blue shirts getting out.

One of them had a wire running from his collar to his ear.

Rafe kicked open a narrow door beside the walk-in cooler, a pantry with shelves of flour sacks and cans.

"In," he said.

"Rafe."

"In. Don't breathe."

He put me down among the sacks, and stepped in after me, and pulled the door shut behind us.

It was black.

He was pressed against me from chest to knee, one hand flat on the wall by my head, and outside a man's voice said, "Morning. We're looking for a friend."

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