The Bad Boy Next Door (3 page)

I’d just pivoted on my heel to hurry away when a tight grip clamped around my ankle.

Stupidly, I let out a yelp.

Heart smashing up into my ears, I spun back to Lucas, my head roaring.

“Don’t…trust…” he mumbled, eyes closed, lips barely moving. His grip on my ankle grew slack.

And then he was silent and motionless again, his hand falling completely free of my ankle.

I stood frozen. Had I thought I was scared before?

Don’t trust? Don’t trust who?

What the fuck was going on?

Who the fuck was he?

“Lucas?”

He didn’t stir.

I crouched down again, searching once more for a pulse.

There. Weak, but there.

“You’re scaring the shit out of me, Lucas,” I scolded him on a whisper before straightening and hurrying for my closet.

No tight grip halted my progress this time. No mumbled warnings.

I snatched the first pair of shorts and tank my hands encountered. Yanked them on. I could do without a bra and panties. Finding them and putting them on would only slow me down, and I needed to…to…what?

I don’t know. Get back to Lucas’s side so I could prod him if he stopped breathing? Get him ready for the paramedics?

Don’t trust…

Lucas’s ominous, unfinished warning scraped at what little calm sanity I still possessed—not a lot, I’m ashamed to admit.

Pulling a steadying breath, I rubbed my hands on my butt and studied my unconscious neighbor. I noted his chest still rose and fell ever so slightly with breath.

Good. That was good.

Now, I had to do something about him being naked.

Where are his clothes?

I ran a quick gaze around my bedroom but couldn’t find sight of them. Maybe the living room?

A heavy pressure clamped my own chest at the thought of leaving Lucas alone. Where he was going to go when out of my sight, I didn’t know.

“Don’t move,” I ordered, pointing my finger at his inert form before stepping over him and almost running from my room.

Every second I spent searching for his clothes in the rest of the house felt like a bomb was ticking in my gut. My parents were off on a cruise, so I had the house to myself for the next two months. Interestingly enough, Lucas’s mom and stepdad were on that same cruise.

There was no sign of Lucas’s clothes anywhere. Not in the living room, the kitchen or the spare bedroom I used as an office-slash-dumping ground for stuff I didn’t know what to do with. Like I needed an office. Yeah, right.

What I
did
find was the window above the kitchen sink open, pushed up high enough to allow a man—a big, muscular man—to climb through.

I stared at the window, my pulse pounding in my ears. Lucas knew the spare key to our house was kept in the potted azalea. Just like I knew where his family’s spare set was hidden. If he knew where the key was, why hadn’t he used it?

Don’t trust…

I hurried over to the window and slammed it shut. For some reason, it being open made me nervous.

Turning back toward the direction of my bedroom, I screamed.

And then I pressed my hand to my mouth and almost buckled over with relief.

Lucas stood before me.

He’d wrapped himself in the blanket from my bed. His eyes were still clouded with pain. I could tell he wasn’t truly functioning properly. But at least he was conscious.

“Lucas.” I frowned, closing the distance between us until I was but a foot from him. “Can you tell me what is going on?”

“Did you call 911?”

I nodded, his question and the hoarse rasp on which it was asked tightening the knot in my belly.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Did you give them my name?”

I shook my head.

“Did you give them yours?”

“Not my full name. Not even Veronica. I just gave them Ronnie.”

That muscle ticked again. Pain etched his face for a second and he scrunched his eyes shut, hissing as he turned his head to the side.

I stepped closer to him, resting my palms on his chest with gentle pressure. “Lucas, please tell me what’s going on? What happened to you? Who did this? Why do you think I’m in danger? Who am I not meant to trust?”

He swung his head back to face me.

I gasped.

His eyes locked on mine, clear and intense and completely focused. “We have to go. Now.”

I blinked. “Go? Go where? A second ago, you were unconscious. An ambulance is on its way. You’re injured. Like blood-spurting-from-your-nose injured. We can’t go anywhere.”

A dark tension filled his eyes and he grabbed my upper arms. The blanket fell from his shoulders, revealing his body and all its bruises and cuts. I wanted to wave my hand at them and say
see?
But I was too stunned to do anything but stare into his eyes.

“Ronnie, you’ve got three minutes to throw some clothes into an overnight bag and put some shoes on. If you’re not ready, I’m throwing you into your car and we are out of here.
Comprende
?”

I didn’t argue. I had no idea what was going on, but I didn’t argue. It was pointless. He’d already proved he could overpower me when he was semi-conscious. He looked far from that state now.

Holy crap, he looked scary.

It took me less than the three minutes to get a bag together. I had no idea where we were going or for how long. I threw in two pairs of panties, a bra, however many pairs of shorts I grabbed in my wild handful: ditto with my shirts. Thankfully, I always keep a toiletry bag packed and ready to go.

I ran back to the living room. A worried part of me expected to find Lucas unconscious on the floor. What would I do if that were the case? He obviously didn’t want the paramedics to see him, but I still didn’t know why.

Another part of me considered the possibility he was insane. No one knew what he got up to when he went missing. Maybe he had a split personality and the Lucas currently in my house was a delusional psychopath. Of course, if that was the case, the delusional psychopath had tongue-fucked and finger-fucked me to the most incredible orgasms of my short life, so I didn’t really know how I felt about that.

An even smaller part of me pondered the notion—in the few seconds it took me to run from my bedroom to the living room—that this was all a big prank Lucas was playing on me. That when I arrived in the living room, he’d be laughing and wiping away the bloody wounds from his body with a tissue. I could almost hear him say “Gotcha, Ronnie. You sucker!”

He was neither laughing nor unconscious when I arrived back in the living room, but to be honest, I had my doubts about the psychopath part—delusional or otherwise.

He’d killed the lights in the room, plunging it into darkness. It was only the fact my DVD unit had the world’s brightest LCD display, thereby throwing the room into a dim blue hue, that I could make out what was going on.

He stood at the window, one finger parting the drapes barely a sliver, watching the world outside. He was still naked. Despite the surreal moment I found myself in, I couldn’t help but notice the way the LCD’s light emphasized the sculpted hardness of his muscular body.

When this was over, I was having a damn good conversation with myself about the way I was sexually reacting to him.

Stepping a few feet into my living room, I opened my mouth to tell him I was ready, but before I could utter a sound, he released the drape and turned to me.

The darkness made it impossible to see his eyes. If he really was delusional, I had no way of knowing.

“Let’s go,” he said, although it definitely sounded more like an order.

“Where?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he strode past me, scooping up the blanket he’d worn earlier as he did so. I heard what sounded like my car keys chink, and then he was at the door leading into the garage.

“Oh,” I muttered, hitching my bag farther up my shoulder as I followed. “We’re going there? I always wanted to go there.”

“Of course you have, Ronnie,” his low response came to me from the darkness a split second before he opened the door.

A moment later, we were in my car, Lucas wrapped in the blanket behind the wheel, me buckled into the passenger seat, frowning at him with a mix of frustration and concern.

Turning over the engine, he threw me a grin. By the light of the dashboard, I could see his eyes had that same scary and yet at the same time sexy as all hell intensity they’d had inside when he’d told me I had three minutes to get ready to go.

“Ready?”

I snorted, my tummy knotting. “Sure.”

His grin stretched wider. “That’s my girl.”

“I’m not your fucking girl,” I snarled.

He drew his head closer to mine. “You’ve been mine, Ronnie, since the very second we met.”

Before I could tell him what I thought of that statement, he crushed my lips with his.

The savage kiss made my head spin and my pussy throb. By the time he pulled away, I was giddy with breathlessness. Or something far more disquieting—concentrated lust.

He chuckled, as he threw the Camaro into reverse. “Buckle up.”

I had a split second to think,
shit, the garage door
, and then we were speeding backwards and out of the garage.

I blinked. When had he opened the automatic door? While he was kissing me? Had he pressed the button while he was kissing me? While I was drowning in lust and aching with hungry, debauched need, was he pressing the button on the remote control?

The thought sent a hot, dark lick of anger through me.

Fucking prick.

He wasn’t kissing me again. In fact, the second we stopped, I was getting out and leaving him.

Screw this. I didn’t have to stick with him. He was no one to me. Just a bad boy who’d moved in next door to me and proceeded to make my high school years hell. Sure, he was always wonderful to his parents and mine, but he used to laugh at me over and over. And then confuse me with those freaking brownies. And those enigmatic smiles… Dammit, I owed him nothing. He had—

The screaming wail of an ambulance cut my surly resolute thought dead. Or maybe it was the way Lucas propelled my car into speeds I don’t think it’s ever been driven before. Certainly not while I was behind the wheel. Just because I owned a muscle car, didn’t mean I drove it like I was in NASCAR.

But Lucas found the grunt in the Camaro’s engine. Found it, whipped it into a lather and proceeded to find more. He gunned the engine, red-lining the RPMs as he flew through the gears.

Before I could take stock of the situation, my home was long behind us, not a sound of the ambulance’s siren to be heard.

“Lucas,” I began, pretty certain I was going to break my nails clinging to the dash as hard as I was. I didn’t want to break my nails. It had taken a long time to break my habit of biting them, and only two days ago, I’d spent a ridiculous amount of money on my very first manicure. “You need to tell me what’s going on. Now.”

He flung us around a corner so fast I think my poor car went up on two wheels. He made doing so look easy.

The blanket he wore was pooled around his waist, leaving his upper body bare. The wounds peppering his torso continued to seep blood, but he didn’t seem to care.

Nor did he seem inclined to answer me.

“Lucas,” I snapped, that dark anger I’d experienced earlier over the garage door flaring up to epic proportions now. “If you don’t fucking tell me what’s going on, I’m going to throw myself from this car and go to the cops.”

He shot me a quick look, his eyes and expression unreadable in the muted light from the dash.

“I mean it,” I said, closing the fingers of my right hand around the door handle. “Now spill.”

He eased back on the accelerator. A little. Not a lot, but enough for me to not feel like we were participating in an insane race.

The trouble was, a part of me suspected we
were
, with an unseen pursuer more menacing than even Lucas. And right now, he was incredibly menacing.

“The less you know, the better,” he finally answered, just as I was about to repeat my demand.

I laughed; a dry, sarcastic bark of a sound I’d never made before. “No. The less I know, the worse for you. At this point in time, I can’t decide if you’re deranged and I need to check you into a loony bin, or if you’re unhinged and I need to call the police.”

He surprised me by uttering his own laugh. If it wasn’t for the fact it disintegrated into a coughing fit that ended with bubbles of blood on his bottom lip, I think I may have hit him.

Instead, I almost gasped with worry.

Wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, he frowned briefly at the blood and then returned his focus to the road. “The cops aren’t who you want to call, Ronnie. Not now.”

I swallowed. He sounded…shaky.

He coughed again. No blood this time, thank God, but a lot of wincing. What made a person cough up blood? I don’t know. But whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

“You need to get to a hospital,” I said, unable to keep the concern from my voice. Damn it. I wanted to say angry with him. When I was angry, it was easier to forget how scared I was. When I was angry I forgot about those times when he would intimidate the shit out of the school’s quarterback every time the jerk tried to feel me up in the lunch hall. “And you need to tell me what’s going on.”

He didn’t answer. Not straight away. What he did do was keep flicking glances in the rearview mirror.

Finally, as if satisfied we weren’t being followed, he slowed a little more—to a speed somewhere in the vicinity of the posted limit—and shifted in his seat.

Once more, I frowned. “Who
are
you, Lucas? Where do you go when you disappear? Who beat the shit out of you? Why did you turn up naked in my bed, and who do you think is going to try to hurt me?”

A ragged breath left him, the sound becoming a gurgling cough. He slid a quick look my way. This time I couldn’t hold back my gasp. Whatever adrenaline he’d been running on, whatever dogged determination to get us as far away from my home as possible, had left him.

If a freshly dug-up corpse had been driving, I would have been less dismayed. Less concerned.

“I’ll tell you everything,” he answered, the words close to a mumbled slur, “when we’re safe.”