The Devil and Ms. Moody (7 page)

A slender, tawny Mexican woman approached her anyway, cautiously at first. “Are you Diablo’s woman?”

“I might be. Who’s asking?”

The Mexican woman smiled, her dark eyes flashing with humor. “Nice to meet you,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Carmen. Squire’s wife.”

Edwina was puzzled for a moment. Was she supposed to shake her hand? Something as civilized as that? “I’m Edw—Ed,” she said, taking the proffered hand cautiously. She half expected to be yanked off the bike and flung over the woman’s shoulder.

Carmen’s smile widened as she shook Edwina’s hand firmly. Smiling back, Edwina decided that Carmen was perfectly charming.

“Ed—over here!”

Edwina looked around and saw Diablo signaling for her. At least he hadn’t said ‘Heel,’ she thought, sliding off the bike. The crowd followed her as she joined Diablo.

“Squire—my old lady,” Diablo said.

Edwina flashed a brilliant smile at Squire and sobered just as quickly when he didn’t respond except to look her over like a prize heifer. “Nice work,” he said to Diablo.

“She does speak,” Edwina pointed out.

Diablo flashed her a warning look, but Edwina merely smiled at Squire and extended her hand. He stared at her a moment and then grimaced and gripped it for one quick bone-crunching moment. The crowd murmured in surprise.

“You want to ride with the Warlords?” Squire asked.

Edwina nodded, massaging her hand. She was inordinately pleased that he’d addressed her, but she didn’t want to blow her tough image. “Sure. Why not?”

Edwina caught Diablo’s approval, and almost simultaneously she spotted something that nauseated her—the charcoal remains of a small animal that had obviously been last evening’s meal. An acrid taste filled her mouth as she struggled with her responses. The need to say something, to express her revulsion, very nearly overrode her common sense, but she knew an impassioned speech would do more harm than good under the circumstances. Especially if there was a way to sound out Squire and the rest of them without inciting a riot. Holt might even be in the crowd, she realized. It wasn’t the timing she would have picked, but she didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the right time. There was a tax lien on her desk back in Connecticut, and the clock was ticking.

“I’m a little uneasy about the food situation,” she said.

“Plenty of food,” Squire assured her. “We got ourselves a couple of raccoons last night.”

Raccoons?
Edwina nearly gagged on the breath she was taking. “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about,” she said quickly. “Diablo tells me you hunt, and—”

“Ed,” Diablo warned softly.

Edwina was aware of the risk she was taking, but Squire’s cocked eyebrow told her the gang leader was curious. If she could state her case,
carefully
, she might be able to sway him a little and learn something at the same time. It was a long shot, but she had to take it.

“I know you like to hunt,” she said, an appeal coloring her voice. “But with so many grocery stores around, it seems kind of unnecessary, killing wild animals, doesn’t it?”

“Ed.”

“You one of those environmentalists?” Squire asked.

“No—no I’m not. I just don’t like the idea of shooting something that can’t shoot back.” She tried to stem the conviction she felt and couldn’t, not completely. “It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?”

Squire’s brows connected in the middle. The pained look in his eyes as he glanced at Diablo said more than words ever could:
Where did you find this hairpin?

Diablo shifted his weight, and that’s when Edwina realized her plan had backfired. He was angry.
She
was going to be shot when he got her alone.

“Maybe she’s got a point, Squire,” Diablo said.

Edwina jerked around in surprise, her heart rocketing as the two men stared at each other in silence.

“Maybe you don’t want to ride with the Warlords,” Squire said at last, his voice gruff as he addressed Diablo. “Maybe you’d like to ride with a gang that chows down at MacDonald’s?”

A rumble of laughter rolled through the onlookers, and Edwina felt a quick surge of something that might have been relief—or hope. Squire had a sense of humor. Maybe it was going to be okay. It was only as Diablo turned to her that she realized the deep trouble she was in. His eyes were ablaze again.

E
DWINA KNEW ONE THING
for certain. If she and Diablo hadn’t been surrounded by Warlords, she would have been in desperate straits—one-on-one with the devil himself. She didn’t need Diablo’s protection at the moment. She needed protection
from
him. The spark of hellfire in his eyes brought her a stark reminder of whom she was dealing with. She’d seen him in action, and she had no doubt that he was quite capable of violence if pushed too far.

He turned to Squire, his voice grim. “I’d like a word.”

The two men strode away, and Edwina smiled wanly. “It must have been something I said.”

Carmen smiled sympathetically but offered no reassurance.

As the throng dispersed and returned to the task of breaking camp, Edwina was left to her own devices. The fine hairs on her neck were still prickling from the quick fury she’d glimpsed in Diablo’s eyes, but as she watched the two men talking in Squire’s campsite nearby, she realized something. They were going to be heavily involved for a while—and that would give her the perfect opportunity to do a little detective work.

Ordinarily Edwina was a prudent woman, one who considered alternatives, weighed options, and took risks only when the situation warranted it. ‘Better safe than sorry’ governed her decisions. Certainly in any other circumstance she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything as foolish as provoking an already furious male. However, with both Diablo and Squire preoccupied, she couldn’t resist.

The risk of getting caught made her doubly cautious as she picked her way through a field strewn with sagebrush and golden California poppies. Careful to give Diablo and Squire a wide berth, she kept to the outskirts of the grounds and pretended to be taking a walk as she surreptitiously checked out members for any resemblance to Christopher Holt.

A spindly, bearded specimen hunched under a huge sycamore tree caught Edwina’s attention. He was scribbling furiously on a newspaper, and from her distance she couldn’t tell how old he was or what he was doing, but his intensity intrigued her. And he certainly had Holt’s lanky build.

She’d barely started toward the man when a snort of derision stopped her. Basking in the morning sun not ten feet away from her, Mad Dog was reclined against the sissy bar of his customized low rider. She’d been so intent on the seated man, she hadn’t noticed the other biker lounging by the thicket of willows.

An insinuating smile twisted Mad Dog’s mouth, and sunlight glinted off his mirrored sunglasses. As Edwina shielded her eyes, she saw sunlight flash off another object, a rectangular chrome gadget tucked into his boot. She thought it was a weapon at first, but she didn’t see any barrels or sharp edges.

“Like what you see, Blondie?” he asked, adjusting his pants the way macho types invariably did when they were trying to be vulgar.

Mad Dog didn’t have to try. Edwina returned his beady stare, tossed him a quick insolent headshake, and continued her walk. Her defiant gesture was deliberate. She couldn’t afford to let a predator like him smell fear, but it would have been an even bigger mistake to let him engage her in suggestive conversation. At least he hadn’t recognized her. The spark she’d seen in his eyes wasn’t awareness; it was lust. Obviously one woman was as good as another to Mad Dog.

The figure huddled under the sycamore was oblivious to Edwina as she approached. He was younger than she’d first thought, perhaps in his early thirties at most, and his only resemblance to the rest of the gang was a straggly beard and a Warlord’s leather jacket with the name Killer imprinted on it.

“Bingo!” Thrusting the paper aside, he began furiously tapping out numbers on a solar calculator. He hit the total button and whistled. “Smoked the Dow Jones again!”

A
Wall Street Journal
lay crumpled next to him, the stock section circled and highlighted. He was playing the market, Edwina realized. Her thoughts began to whir as she scrutinized him. Holt had just inherited his uncle’s stock-brokerage business, among other things. He would have been an M.B.A. if he’d finished school. Holt would know how to play the stock market!

“Excuse me,” she said as the man looked up. Brown eyes, she thought, checking off another similarity. Light brown, perhaps even hazel in the sunlight. His unkempt beard was exactly the sort of thing someone trying to hide his identity would grow. Even his bone structure seemed uncannily close—and the stab of vulnerability in his eyes. But she couldn’t be sure. She needed to get a look at the picture of Holt in her jeans pocket.

“You play the market?” she asked, sensing the man’s wariness. Edwina was still learning the advantages of being a female investigator, one of which was the ability to be nonthreatening to the subject and to disarm his fears quickly by asking “friendly” questions. When he didn’t respond, she smiled and crouched next to him. “I do too, a little. I was curious whether Bechtel was up or down today.”

The man’s eyes flicked up above her head, and Edwina froze as a shadow fell over both of them.

“Your stock is down, Princess. Way down.”

Edwina didn’t rise immediately. She couldn’t. An electric current had arced through her at the sound of Diablo’s voice, and she had to fight to regain her equilibrium. Her fingers shook as she pressed them against the ground to steady herself. Odd, how he had such a disastrous effect on her—everything from raw fear to melting sexual urgency.
Who is it that throws the switch and puts me out of control?
she wondered.
Is it him or me?

“Bechtel?” the man asked, as though it was now his job to reassure Edwina. He picked up the paper, but she stopped him with a grateful smile. No use dragging him into her “domestic” problems.

She took a fortifying breath, rose under her own steam, and turned to face her own personal devil. Surprisingly, his eyes conveyed no emotion other than the cold flicker of arrogance she’d come to expect.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer her until they were well out of earshot of the stockbroker biker. “We’re on probation,” he said. “Squire’s agreed to let us ride with the Warlords as far as the rodeo. Then,
if
he’s feeling generous, he’ll let me take their final test for membership.”

“Test?”

“The Cliff Ride.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

His features darkened as swiftly as though a cloud had dropped in front of the sun. “One more word about defenseless animals, and you’ll know more than you ever wanted to about dangerous, Princess.”

Edwina hung on tight as Diablo kicked the bike into high gear and opened it up with a quick twist of the throttle. They swooped up Telegraph Hill and careened down the other side, seeming to fly like a hydrofoil, just above the black ribbon of asphalt. Below them the city of Long Beach slumbered in the late-summer heat, unaware of the herd of bikers about to stampede through its environs.

The Warlords had been on the road for over two hours, riding the freeways to the ocean and then zooming down Pacific Coast Highway like so many bats out of hell. The run to Rosarita Beach had officially started that morning, and the entire pack was on the prowl—freeway outlaws, taking their share of the road right out of the middle.

The wind whipped Edwina’s blond hair, and even though she could feel the strain of the bike’s acceleration on her neck muscles, she welcomed the physical stress. Outlaws, she thought. Was she one of them? She smiled at that, bemused. Edwina Moody, no stranger to danger.

She wasn’t sure whether her blood was rushing from the thrill of the ride or from pure fear-induced adrenaline, but she was definitely on some kind of natural high. Even her fingertips seemed to be trembling in rhythm with the cycle’s vibrant energy bursts. The machine gave off a finely tuned, barely perceptible vibration that moved through her limbs like light waves.

Moments later, as they pulled up to an intersection and stopped, she felt Diablo’s stomach muscles contract under her fingers. She quickly relaxed her grip and managed a bright smile as he glanced over his shoulder at her. Maybe he wanted to call a truce? The smile died on her lips. No such luck. The banked anger in his expression carried enough electric potential for a summer lightning storm.

“I have this thing about helpless animals,” she whispered, not wanting the other bikers to hear her. “I can’t help it. When are you going to let me out of the doghouse?”

His eyes darkened. “Ask me nice.”

Edwina never got a chance to ask him anything. The light turned green, and they roared off, Diablo cranking the throttle, and Edwina grabbing for his body. It bugged her that he always put her in a position of having to hang on to him for dear life. The fact that she
liked
hanging on to him for dear life was another problem entirely.

Her attraction to him baffled and amazed her. She couldn’t explain its intensity unless it was a fascination with the forbidden. Rebels had never been her type, and yet everything about this one was rivetingly sexy, from his torn low-slung jeans to his mercurial green eyes. Foremost on her mind was his physical condition when they’d awakened this morning. She could still feel the heat of him pressed against her back, his hand caressing her breast. Remembering now gave her a hard jolt of longing.

A painful shock of excitement took her as he geared into low and they roared around a curve. Edwina felt vibrations penetrate clear through to her spine. No wonder she was so twitchy and overstimulated. It was the bike, she realized. His motorcycle was rolling foreplay.

By the time they reached their destination in the Santa Ana Mountains, she was limp as a kitten from physical sensation. It had been a grueling ride for someone new to the rigors of long-distance biking. Exhausted, she rested her canvas tennies on the upper footpegs and leaned against the bike’s padded sissy bar as Diablo followed the pack to the campsite.