Rock Star Romance: Dan (Contemporary New Adult Rockstar Bad Boy Romance) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 4) (96 page)

****

Dylan wandered the
station at Geneva, sniffing the air as if it could possibly contain some trace
of Rachel’s particular warm, spicy scent. He shook his head, clenching his
teeth and working to control his irritation. She wasn’t in Geneva, he was
somehow certain; she had landed there, dropped by the train, but if he knew her
at all—if he understood the strange woman whose life he had been part of for
over a month, until he and Brock had ruined the setup—she wouldn’t have stayed.
She’d have moved on, prompted both by the need to lose herself even more
thoroughly and the less-than-warm Swiss themselves. A big city could conceal
her well, but it would also provide plenty of opportunities for her to be
grabbed without anyone noticing it. So where would she have gone?

Some keenly refined
sense twinged, and Dylan turned on his heel, coming out of his reverie
abruptly. Something wasn’t right. He felt the skin-crawling sensation of being
watched, felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Looking around, at
first Dylan saw nothing to alarm—people milling about the station, greeting friends
who had come to meet them, rushing out to catch the next train leaving the
station. But he became aware of a group of men who were standing a distance
away, oddly still in the rush.
Brock.
Dylan felt his heart speed up. He
had a few options; they wouldn’t want to take him down in public. They wouldn’t
want to create a spectacle, reveal the falseness of their pretend-uniforms.
They’d want to get the drop on him.

There would be taxis
outside, along with the bus; Dylan could get into a vehicle, get away from
them—maybe lose them, if the driver was good enough. Or he could jump onto
another train, take the fine when they came to check tickets and get ejected
somewhere. The options flitted through his mind as he moved through the
station, doing his best to appear not to hurry; he had no more interest in
drawing attention to himself—yet—than the hired hands looking for their opening
to drop him. If they started to make their move, that would be the time to make
a scene. The Swiss might be standoffish, but they were not about to let a bunch
of people tarnish the reputation of their police with impunity.

Dylan started towards
the entrance to the station, glancing around him in quick, darting gazes,
keeping track of where Brock’s henchmen were, how they were moving to follow
him as unobtrusively as possible. As he reached the doors, his heart beating
faster, he heard one of them call out for him to stop; they had evidently come
to the conclusion about what his plan might be to evade them and decided that a
little scene was not as bad as losing their quarry.

He broke into a run,
and felt his phone buzzing in his pocket.
Fuck. Of all the times.
Dylan
slipped his hand into his pocket, darting out through the doors. He heard
another shout behind them; one of the false officers was telling him to stop,
that he was being detained—that he could face serious injury if he resisted
arrest. Dylan plowed into a woman rushing towards the station and sidestepped,
mumbling an apology in panicked, stilted French. Passersby, passengers waiting
for their train, watched with morbid interest as Dylan made for the taxi stand,
darting between and around people. More shouts from Brock’s henchmen behind
him, the sound of one of them colliding with a very indignant Swiss man.

Dylan heard the air
splitting crack an instant before he felt the impact of something hitting his
back—he had no idea what. He staggered, almost but not quite stopping, as he
continued towards the salvation of a cab; whatever it was, he was certain it
had come from one of the henchmen, and as the shocking jolt of it settled into
a sharp, prodding ache, he knew that if he let himself stop he didn’t want to
know whatever other jollies they might have to apprehend him with. It would be
in Brock’s interest to have him killed if he suspected that Dylan knew anything
about Rachel’s whereabouts. Dylan sucked in a burning breath, feeling the sharp
crackling pain settle into a throbbing ache in the back of his ribs. “I’m not
bleeding, I can pay you, let me in and get me out of here—those aren’t real
cops,” he told the driver. The man looked out at the oncoming men in uniforms
and glanced at Dylan, taking in the import of his less-than-ideal French. The
doors unlocked.

Dylan threw himself
into the back seat and pressed his lips together firmly to muffle the grunt of
pain that rose up in him as he was thrown back against the bench when the
driver pulled away from the curb in a fast, lurching turn. He took a deep
breath and unlocked the screen on his phone—somehow miraculously intact.
I
found her,
it said.
Come to this address. I suspect Brock is on your
heels.
Dylan thought wryly that he more than suspected it and took another
deep breath. “My man,” he said, looking up to catch sight of the man through
the mirror in the front of the car. “You are about to make the fare of the
month.”

****

Rachel could feel the
headache gathering at her temples as the slight buzz she had worked up began to
fade. She looked at James Whitley closely, trying to decide if it was even
worth the effort of thinking anymore. “I understand why you feel manipulated,”
James said, returning her regard without a trace of concern. “But I need you to
understand where I’m coming from too, Rachel.”

“What I understand is
that you could have easily given me some kind of note before I started getting
stalked by people,” Rachel said. “I mean, I really appreciate being a
millionaire and all, but a simple, ‘Hey, Rach, so there’s this guy who’s going
to come after you—I’m sending help, but you might want to vacate your apartment
and uproot your entire life right about now’ would have been nice.”

“I’ve been trying to
evade him too,” James pointed out. “In case you haven’t noticed, Rachel, you
and I have the distinction of swapping places as first on Jeffrey’s list to be
eliminated depending on what day it is.”

“Okay,” Rachel said,
standing unsteadily. She walked across the kitchen and opened one of the
cabinets to retrieve a bottle of water. “Would you like one?” She asked,
reaching for another bottle before James replied.

“Thank you.” Rachel
returned to the table, handing James his bottle and opening her own before she
sat down once more, heavily.

“I’m going to need you
to explain exactly what the hell is going on to me,” she said, taking a long
sip from the bottle. “Because honestly at this point the whole mess is as clear
as mud to me.”

“Jeffrey has been
trying to get control of the company for years,” James said, cracking the seal
on his own bottle. “Before I was put in charge, his father ran Vantech
Incorporated, and Jeffrey thought it was his just desserts to inherit the
position.”

“I can see that,”
Rachel said, taking another long pull from her bottle. Her impending hangover
was not dissipating fast enough. “Where exactly do I come into this?”

“That is a bit
complicated,” James told her, a faint smile curving his lips. He drank from his
bottle of water and seemed to think for a long moment, spinning the cap on the
tabletop. “When I came into my position as CEO of Vantech, Jeff became involved
with another company; at first, we were all relieved—it seemed like he had
decided to take his ‘loss’ gracefully.”

“Who do you mean by
‘we’? The shareholders?” The ghost of a smile crossed James’ face once more.

“The family; Jeffrey
is my step-brother.” Rachel’s eyes widened.
You bet your sweet ass it’s
complicated,
she thought. “In any case, the company he was involved with is
the one that he’s trying to get Vantech to merge with now; if he succeeds, then
he’ll have as close to a monopoly in our industry as the government will allow.
And he would use the merger as a way to boot me and take over his father’s
company for good.” Rachel absorbed that for a moment. She could see why James
would want to avoid the merger; it would remove him from power.

“So you send me the
money meant for the merger, I get that. But why does he have to come after me?
If he’s in charge of the company now with you ousted…”

“He will have to take
legal action to make it permanent,” James said. “There is a will
involved—complicated estate issues and lawyers’ problems, ultimately. He’s only
in power as long as I’m alive and able to defend myself. And from what you told
me before of his explanation to you, he’s telling the truth about one of his
motives: while you’re in possession of the money, his position is bad indeed.”

“How would killing me
fix that?”

“If he kills you,
there won’t be anyone in a position to dispute his claim that the money was
transferred in error—and he could get it back with a minimum of fuss from the
bank. The people running Vantech other than myself have no real interest in me
as a person; they’re interested in results. If Jeff gets results, they have no
reason to back me in the courts.” Rachel drained her bottle, shaking her head.

“Things just get
better and better, don’t they?” she sighed. “So what do I do?”

“You stay out of his
clutches, and give me time to get everything the way it should be.”

“How exactly does that
benefit me? Brock offered me five million to give back the money you gave me.”
James laughed.

“He would have had you
killed the moment the transfer was complete,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m
afraid I know my step-brother very well.”

“How do I know I can
even trust you?”

“I don’t seem to have
given you many reasons, have I?” James chuckled. “How about this: I have a
contract at the hotel I’m staying at in this area. It is absolutely legally
binding and states that in return for assisting me, you will receive an
additional five million dollars.”

Before Rachel could
respond to the offer, there was a knock at the door. She jumped, nearly
tumbling out of her chair. “Shit, shit, he found me,” she said. James shook his
head.

“Not just yet, I
think. That will be Dylan.”

“Dylan?” Rachel stared
at the man across from her at the table in disbelief.

“I’m going to have to
cut his pay, I think; I managed to find you before he did.” James shook his
head and stood, walking to the door.

“Do I get to have any
control or say over anything that happens in my life anymore?” Rachel asked,
directing the question to the ceiling.

“Welcome to the life of
wealth and prestige,” James said wryly from behind her. Rachel heard the door
open.

“They’ll be here soon,
I think,” Dylan said, and Rachel deliberately kept her eyes in front of her.
She didn’t want to see him; even if the effort in his voice implied that he was
struggling in some way.

“Were you followed?”
James asked. “I see they caught up with you at some point at least.”

“Cracked rib, not much
of a thing; I don’t think they could get their hands on legal guns, felt like a
bean bag.” Rachel felt her stomach lurch—Dylan had a cracked rib? She turned
her head almost involuntarily and watched as he approached the table in a slow,
slightly staggering walk, with little of his usual upright cockiness. “Hello,
Love,” Dylan said, smiling. “You learned well from me, picking an
out-of-the-way place like this.”

****

“So,” Rachel said,
looking from Dylan to James as they watched her. They had managed to get Dylan
to a hospital using James’ car, and after a five-hour wait, Dylan’s cracked
ribs—both of them—were taped down, and he had taken some ibuprofen for the
pain, not wanting to dull his senses with narcotics. “What’s next?” She tried
to focus more of her attention on James rather than on Dylan.
He’s being
paid.
The galling thought that he might only have started having sex with
her due to convenience or because it would keep her close still hovered in her
mind.

“We get you out of
here,” James said, glancing at Dylan. “I can pay someone else to take over
guarding you.”

“I’m fine, James,”
Dylan said, shifting slightly in his chair. Rachel saw him wince as the
movement sent pain through him and couldn’t quite help feeling a flicker of
guilt and remorse that he’d been hurt tracking her down.

“You have two cracked
ribs, Dylan. You don’t have a gun, and Jeff’s people are going to want to take
you out as much as they do Rachel.”

“I said I’m fine,”
Dylan said, setting his jaw in a way that Rachel immediately recognized. He was
going to be stubborn about it. She didn’t know why; he had already made plenty
of money from protecting her—something that James had confirmed while they were
waiting as the doctor saw to Dylan’s injuries. Dylan was not making quite as
much money as the amount that Rachel was seeing, but it was enough that he
could take a good, long vacation once his service was over.

“You’re sure you can
keep her safe?” James asked Dylan.

“As long as she
doesn’t go running off without me,” Dylan answered, glancing at Rachel.

“Maybe if people would
have given me the full information I kept asking for in the beginning, I
wouldn’t have run off,” Rachel countered, pinning him down with a scowl. It
wasn’t entirely true, and they both knew it; she had run off not only because
she didn’t know who to trust—but because she didn’t want to be around Dylan,
sleeping with him, being protected by him, when she didn’t know what his
motivations were or whether she herself mattered to him as a person at all.

“Well, Love, you’ve
got all the information now. Jeff wants the money back, and he wants you out of
the way so that he can clean up this mess that James here made.” Dylan gestured
to her benefactor and Rachel rolled her eyes. She could understand that James
had made decisions about her—about his company—with self-interest in mind, but
it had certainly made her life a lot more difficult, being the person who
apparently was going to keep his company from going out of his control.

“I wouldn’t say I have
all the information, but I have enough to know that running to Brock isn’t
going to prolong my life any.” Dylan held her gaze steadily for a long moment
and smiled slightly.

“So, where are we
headed, boss?” he asked, glancing away from her to look at James.

“You can’t go to
Geneva, that’s for damned sure,” James said. “I’m going to make a few calls and
arrange for the two of you to get on a train at Annecy, head north towards
Belgium. That probably is not going to be your destination, but it’s a start.”
James stood and stepped away from the table, taking his phone out of his pocket
and moving towards the other door to step outside, leaving them alone.

“Are you hungry, Love?
You seem cranky.”

Rachel narrowed her
eyes, frowning. “I am not going to get sucked in by that ploy again,” Rachel
told him firmly. “Besides, I ate while you were in the hospital.”

“Aw, Love,” Dylan
said, smiling slightly. “I will say that you picked a good hideaway. I don’t
know how James figured it out, but I’d have had a hard time finding you here if
he didn’t give me your address.”

“That was kind of the
point,” Rachel told him. “I didn’t want to even be part of it at all anymore.
Just… alone for a while. To think.”

“Well, you’ve had a
bit over a week, and now Brock is after you.”

“It seems to me he’s
after you,” Rachel pointed out.

“Both of us, then.
It’s not a competition, Love.”

“Stop calling me
that.”

“Why? You are a little
Love, you know—with your scowl and your arms crossed over your chest like I
don’t know what’s underneath, looking like you’d love to rip my ankles to
shreds.” Rachel found herself letting out a sound like a growl. “See? There’s
that Pekingese growl I’m so fond of.”

“What if I don’t want
you to protect me? You’re busted up and I can’t trust you anyway.”

Dylan shrugged,
wincing only slightly at the pain the movement caused. “Told you the day we
met: I will follow you anywhere. Even if James stopped paying me.”

“That makes you sound
a little bit like a stalker,” Rachel said.

Dylan smiled broadly.
“If you didn’t have any feelings for me at all, you wouldn’t have stormed out
when I couldn’t answer your questions fast enough.” Rachel gritted her teeth,
irritated with Dylan. She stood quickly, not even entirely sure of what she
actually intended to do. “You like me, little Love. Admit it.”

“Liked,” Rachel said,
turning to go into the bedroom and pack the few possessions she had managed to
acquire since her arrival in the Alps. Dylan didn’t follow her, and Rachel
wasn’t sure whether she felt relieved or disappointed.

Rachel fought back the
urge to fidget, glancing at Dylan occasionally as they strode through the train
station at Annecy. She told herself that she didn’t want to trust him; that she
didn’t even want to be in his company. But she had to admit that she felt
slightly less jumpy with him around, even if she knew that he was injured.

“Shame we couldn’t
take in the old town,” Dylan said, acting as if there was absolutely nothing
amiss.

“I’ve heard it’s
beautiful; the lake, too.” Rachel had passed through Annecy on her way to her
secluded village in the Alps, a tiny little town in the Haute Savoie region
called Tannings.

“Maybe once you’re all
good, we could come back.” James had ordered additional security efforts around
them, saying that while he appreciated Dylan’s dedication to the contract, he
wasn’t going to trust Rachel’s safety solely to a man who was barely able to
walk upright.

“When are you going to
give up?” Rachel asked him, her irritation rising once more.

“When you tell me flat
out and honestly that you have no feelings for me. And trust me, Love, I know
when you’re lying.”

Rachel had no response
for that; she couldn’t honestly say that she didn’t have some kind of feelings
for Dylan, even if a large component of her feelings at present was confusion.
All she wanted at the moment was to keep living, to get out of the mess she was
in, and have something approaching a normal life.

Dylan winced as they
descended the stairs to the platform and Rachel shifted her backpack to one
shoulder, wrapping an arm carefully around Dylan’s waist to cushion him against
the jarring. “See? I knew you cared.”

“I don’t want my body
guard to have a punctured lung,” Rachel retorted.

“That would, in fact,
make it harder for me to keep you from getting killed,” Dylan admitted. “But I
think you mostly just wanted an excuse to get close to me.”

“You’re infuriating,”
Rachel muttered lowly.

“Says the woman who took
five trains so I wouldn’t be able to track her.”

“If you had left me
alone you wouldn’t have two cracked ribs.”

“Ah, but I also
wouldn’t have this story to tell about chasing after the woman I love,
following her from one country to another and then back to the original
country, risking life and limb.”

Rachel stopped, her
grip on Dylan tightening convulsively in surprise. He groaned, taking a deep
breath. “The woman you
love
?” she asked him, ignoring his discomfort for
the moment.

“Did you really think I’d
keep protecting you after getting shot just for money? I’m greedy, but not
that
greedy, Love.”

Rachel stared at Dylan
for a long moment. “If you’re just saying that,” she said, holding his gaze.
She couldn’t think of how to finish the threat.

“I thought we’d agreed
that I don’t disclose information that isn’t important to you?” Dylan said,
raising an eyebrow.

“No, our agreement was
that you don’t disclose information that isn’t vital to you doing your job.”

“Same thing. Wouldn’t
you say it’s vital to me doing my job for you to know I will keep protecting
you until someone ends me? I’d say it is.”

Rachel bit her bottom
lip. “We have a train to catch,” she said, turning to look away from Dylan’s
probing stare. She heard his chuckle but pretended to ignore it as she helped
him the rest of the way down the stairs and towards the voie.

The feeling of being
watched didn’t leave her as they boarded the train carefully, finding their
reserved seats and settling in them. Dylan had suggested that they travel as if
they were tourists, backpacking their way through the country; their tickets
were first-class, but the distinction was not as obvious as it was on a flight.
Rachel looked around her constantly, even as the train pulled away from the
station. “Don’t look so nervous, Love,” Dylan said, sitting back in his seat
heavily.

“Where are the guys
James is tailing us with?” Dylan shrugged.

“Tailing us, I would
suppose.”

“Ha ha. You trust
James?”

“I wouldn’t work with
him if I didn’t trust him.” Rachel absorbed that for a moment. She looked
around again. There was something that wasn’t right; some sensation, some
presentiment she had. “It’s unlikely that they’ll attack us on a moving train,
Love. They’d want to get the drop on us.”

“Unlikely isn’t the
same thing as impossible. They could be getting desperate. You got away from
them and they shot at you in a train station.”

“With a bean-bag gun.”

“Which only means that
they’ll want to use a real gun next time.”

“Are you worried for
me, or for you?”

“Both of us.”

“They’d have a hard
time bringing a gun on a train. Be more worried when we get to our
destination.”

Rachel sat back in her
seat, but couldn’t quite shake the feeling—the near-certainty—that Brock’s
people were there, waiting for them. Halfway into the trek, the ticket-takers
came into the car, and Rachel got her ticket out irritably.
I won’t even
know what to do with myself when I’m no longer running away from people,
she thought. She handed her ticket and Dylan’s to the man, barely looking at
him.

“Ma’am, I’m going to
need to see your passport,” the ticket-taker said. Rachel rummaged in her
purse; Dylan’s hand came down on hers, and she looked up. The uniform was just
close enough to pass inspection from jaded, harried passengers on a train; the
look the man was giving her was not the bored, ready-for-an-argument expression
of a ticket-taker, but something more interested. It occurred to her then that
not a single other ticket-checker on any of the trains she had been on had been
the least bit interested in her passport.

“Can I see your
credentials?” Dylan asked in French.

“Sir, Ma’am, please
stand and we can discuss this situation in private.”

Rachel looked from the
fake ticket-checker to Dylan. He held her gaze for a moment before nodding. She
was surprised to see that as he stood, Dylan did not cringe or even wince,
despite his pain.

The man grabbed her
arm as they moved away from the incurious first class passengers, pulling her
towards the door between cars. Rachel twisted, digging her heels in. “I know who
you are, asshole,” Rachel hissed.

In an instant, they
were surrounded by fake uniforms, pretend ticket-takers blocking them from the
view of other passengers who probably thought that they were just in the wrong
section or had counterfeit tickets. She heard a ratcheting clink, the snick of
a knife flicking out of its handle. “Mr. Brock said to take care of him first,”
one of the men said, and Rachel saw a flurry of movement.

Dylan dodged a blow,
and Rachel saw his reactionary wince for the instant it flickered across his
face. “How exactly are they getting all these uniforms, do you think?” Rachel
asked as she tugged her wrist free of a man’s hands, aiming a kick with her
heeled foot into another man’s shin.

Dylan’s hand closed on
her wrist and he pushed forward, hitting the toggle to open the door between
cars. The pretend authorities crowded them, and she heard one person mutter
that Brock hadn’t said they had to kill the girl right away; they could take
their time with her. There was something sinister in his voice, something that
implied that they weren’t just going to ask her nicely to give up the money
before killing her. She felt a flash of cold and then hot rake along her arm
and Dylan shoved her through the door, following her into the second class
passenger compartment.

They hurried up the
aisle, luggage and over-spilling passengers slowing their pursuers. “As long as
we can keep them in front of other people, they can’t do much,” Dylan said
lowly. Rachel felt hot liquid streaming down her arm and looked down to see a
flash of red along her sleeve.

“Motherfuckers cut
me!” she said with a gasp. Dylan nodded hurriedly, shoving her through another
door. Rachel glanced at him and saw that he was holding his already-cracked
ribs. “They got you too, didn’t they?”

“It’s nothing. Keep
moving.” But their progress into the adjoining car was blocked by more fake
ticket-takers. Rachel turned; they were surrounded again.

“Shit,” she muttered.
“What do we do?” Dylan looked from one group to another.

“Keep fighting. Try
and snatch a knife. Protect your middle.” Brock’s henchmen surrounded them in
the space between cars, and everything became a blur to Rachel. She kicked, she
punched, she grabbed for flashes and glints of metal. Next to her, she heard
Dylan’s grunts of effort, crunching sounds, gasps. She clenched her teeth as
she felt a burning, searing pain along her hand, and the next moment, it seemed
her hand was full of something hard and cold—a knife.