What He Bargains (What He Wants, Book Nineteen) (11 page)

She did as he told her, getting a thrill as her arms encircled his firm torso, wrapping around and feeling the hardness of his stomach.

Women all over the world would be green with envy if they could see what she was experiencing. Being this close to Jake Novak was like winning the lottery, only bigger. Money was one thing—this was something totally different.

This was sex. This was pure adrenaline, pure sensuality.

His body was otherworldly, the feel of him…her legs spread…she pushed herself closer behind him as he kicked the motorcycle into action, the motor humming and thrumming beneath them.

The bike was like a live growling animal and Jake had tamed it, effortlessly controlling it, making her somehow feel safe despite the power and speed of the machine.

And then they were driving—more like flying—through the streets of Watertown, to some unknown destination.

Raven knew it was crazy, knew that she was being irresponsible yet again, but somehow she felt safe with Jake. There was no explaining it rationally.

As the wind whipped across her body and she watched the scenery whizzing by her at light speed, she had never felt so alive and free and maybe even happy.

But remember what happened last time you trusted a popular boy, someone you thought was so perfect, too good for you even.

Remember what he did to you. He almost ruined you completely.

Jake Novak wasn’t a boy, he was a man. And Raven wasn’t some high school girl anymore with no real world experience. She was a grown woman who could make decisions and choices and right now her choice was to be on this ride with him.

And what woman in her right mind would turn down a chance like this?

Not a single one.

They drove for a long time, but Raven loved every second of it. She was able to smile and laugh with her helmet on, and nobody knew or saw what she was thinking. In fact, with both of them disguised by their helmets, nobody on the street was any the wiser that celebrity superstar Jake Novak was driving wildly through the streets of Boston with a crazy girl in tow.

W
hen they finally pulled up
and parked, they were deep in the heart of Boston, but a street that Raven wasn’t very familiar with.

Jake got off the bike, took off his helmet and locked it in place against the handlebars. “How’d you like it?” he asked her, glancing up briefly.

“It was fun,” she admitted, not even giving him half the truth of just how much she’d enjoyed it. Especially not showing how much she’d liked holding onto him, how she wished she could have done it forever.

She’d felt connected to him in a way that wasn’t reasonable, and Jake would have thought her crazy had she told him even a fraction of the emotions she’d been feeling during the ride.

“Glad you weren’t scared that we took it too fast,” he said, grinning as she handed him her helmet. He secured it onto the backseat and then straightened. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

They began walking down the streets, and it was nighttime, so there weren’t that many people out and about, although there were a few.

But it wasn’t exactly the cleanest, most upscale area. In fact, the street was rather rundown, the buildings looked older, and the people that were out had tired expressions. And then there were younger people on the corners shouting and hollering, making her a little nervous.

Not everywhere in Boston was safe to go at night, and she wondered if Jake Novak knew the city well enough to understand that point.

He did seem to know where he was taking her, though, and soon they were approaching a large building that had a scattering of what looked like homeless men camped around it, hanging out, smoking, talking, a few even seemed to be drinking.

“What is this place?” she said.

“Come on, you’re about to find out.”

When they got closer to the building, some of the people hanging around outside started recognizing Jake. Only they weren’t treating him the way the groupies and fans treated him.

No, there was a very different reaction from these men. They acted, she thought, as if they knew him on a personal level—as if he was their friend, maybe a distant relative.

“Hey, Jake!” someone cried.

“Jake’s here,” another said.

“Yo, my man!” an older guy said, limping over and giving Jake a big bear hug. The older man was bald and his clothes were stained and ripped. Raven noticed that he only had one hand.

“How you doing, Tony B.?” Jake said to him, looking him over.

“Not bad. Not bad.” The older man grinned and waved another person over, and now there was a group of them crowding around, all starting to talk to him at once.

They weren’t asking for autographs, though. They were wanting his attention and Jake was giving it to them, asking them personal questions about their families, about whether or not they’d eaten dinner, if they needed to see a doctor, asked about medications they were on, problems in their lives.

Each person he focused on, it was as if they were the only person who existed to him in that moment, and each person appeared to thrive on that attention.

“You his girlfriend?” Tony B. asked her.

She turned to him. Jake hadn’t heard the question, he was busy talking to another man about an infected cut on his arm. “No, I’m just…a friend,” she said.

“He aint never brought no girl here before,” Tony said.

“He comes here a lot?” Raven asked.

“Sure, when he’s in town. He’s been coming here for awhile, even before he got famous. Of course now everyone gets more excited to see him, but he’s still the same guy as he was then.”

“How do you know him?” Raven said.

“Well I been coming to the center ever since it opened.”

“Center?”

“Yeah, this place over here is the Boston Center for Homeless Veterans,” Tony replied. He gave her a strange look. “You can’t read or something?” He pointed up to the sign above the front door of the building.

“It’s dark,” she laughed.

Tony lit a cigarette. “You smoke?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good girl. Fucking terrible habit, but the least of my troubles.” He started puffing on the cigarette. “Yeah, Jake’s good people. Gives a lot of money to vets, which I happen to know for a fact. But he don’t publicize that stuff, he don’t do it for the press, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, even though she didn’t have a clue.

“He’s just good people. Some nights he come down here after a show and just hands out a little cash, or once he took my friend to a real good specialist doctor to have his eyes checked out. Then he paid for the surgery to fix his glaucoma.”

“Wow,” Raven said, shocked at what the older man was telling her. It was as if Jake had hired a bunch of actors to come down here and pretend to be veterans just to impress her, but she knew that wasn’t the case.

This was all too real, and these men had the disfigurements and scars from the battles they’d fought. It wasn’t a pretty scene and not all of the men were in the best mental condition, either.

Some were babbling, a few were very inebriated.

As Jake made the rounds and talked and listened, a few of the men ended up noticing her.

One of them approached her after Tony B. had limped away, muttering about a phone call he needed to make. The man who approached her was probably late twenties, not bad looking either. He had shaggy brown hair and a beard, low-hanging jeans and a t-shirt. His arms were covered with tattoos. “Hey,” the guy said, smiling.

“Hey,” she replied.

“So you’re here with the big rock star, huh?”

“I guess.” She didn’t like looking at his eyes. They were a little too bright, a little too intense. And not in a good way.

“I could be a fucking rock star,” the guy said. “I used to be in a band too, we were really good. I played lead guitar.”

“That’s nice,” she told him.

“Chicks used to fucking stand in line after a show to suck my cock, you know? Chicks follow guys like that around. I know from personal fucking experience.” His eyes were getting more intense as his words began to pick up speed, flowing together rapidly. “My fucking wife would fuck him. She’d probably line right up to suck his dick.”

Raven was getting frightened. There were too many men around, and they were all looking at her, and the man with the intense eyes was starting to talk louder and louder and he walked closer to her while she tried to back away.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s your fucking problem? If you want to suck someone’s dick…”

Suddenly, Jake was by her side, pushing through the veterans and standing between her and the crazy guy. “Calm down, brother,” Jake told him. “Just calm down.”

“I am calm,” he said.

“You sure?” Jake asked him. “Because you’re scaring my friend.”

“Yeah, I’m fine, bro.” The guy suddenly seemed as calm and placid as a sleepy dog on a rainy day.

“Okay, good. We’re leaving now.” He put his arm around Raven and looked at her to check and see if she was all right.

“Can we please go? I have a bad feeling about this,” she whispered.

“Yeah, of course.” He started to walk her back towards his bike and suddenly there was a high-pitched yell and then Jake was spinning around as the crazy man attacked him from behind.

There was a flurry of activity, all of it happening so quickly that Raven could hardly tell what was going on. All she knew was that it was violent and horrifying and sudden.

But before she knew it, Jake had pinned the other man to the ground and had a knee against his spine, controlling the guy’s wrist. “Hey, hey, hey. Easy there, champ,” Jake said, his voice almost soothing.

The man was crying now, screaming incoherently.

Some of the other men were assisting Jake in holding the guy down, and after a minute or two he did stop fighting and then they helped him away.

A few guys started explaining that the kid had been released too soon from a mental health program and was off his meds.

Jake talked to them for a little while longer but then said he had to go.

“Thank you,” she said as Jake walked her back to the bike.

“What for?”

“For what you did back there.”

He just smiled and didn’t say anything else about it.

They got on the motorcycle and she wrapped her arms around Jake, the same as she had on the way over. And then they were driving away from the center, away from the gritty streets of Boston, and they were flying once more.

She wished they could have just stayed like this forever, driving with the wind rushing by, as natural as if they’d been together like this for years.

Somehow it seemed as though she belonged here, with him, as crazy as it felt and as absolutely bizarre as anyone might have thought it was.

And then, far too soon, they were cruising back to her apartment and Jake had stopped the motorcycle and she was getting off.

As she handed him back her helmet, Raven felt the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “Why did you bring me to the center?” she asked him. “What did you want to tell me?”

Jake took his helmet off and looked at her. “I was thinking a lot about what you said to me. All that stuff about me taking the easy way out and being a fraud.”

She looked down. “I’m sorry I said that. I was angry.”

“The point is, I wanted to show you that maybe you’re wrong about me.”

“Why does it matter?” she said. “Why do you even care what I think?”

He smiled then, and suddenly he was reaching out and brushing her hair away from her face. “I don’t know why, but I just know that I do.”

“All I wanted you to do was ask Club Alpha to stop harassing me. I can’t afford to lose my job. That’s all I was trying to tell you, Jake.”

His eyes grew more intense. “I know what you were trying to tell me.”

“So will you do it? Will you get Max and whoever else to stop trying to ruin my life?”

Jake didn’t even think about it. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “that would be the easy way out.”

Raven felt her insides growing tight and hot with anger again. “I can’t believe you,” she hissed. “You really think you can just play with me this way? You think that just because you’re Jake Novak, you can hurt me for fun?”

“You better watch what you say to me, Raven,” he replied, his jaw tightening. “You might not want to burn this bridge just yet.”

“Fuck you,” she told him. Even as she said the words she regretted it.

He didn’t flinch. “As you wish,” he responded, and then he’d slid his helmet on and was driving off, his motorcycle buzzing loudly.

“I said, fuck you Jake Novak!” she shrieked, knowing he was too far away and the noise of his engine too loud to possibly hear her.

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, lady!” someone else shouted from a nearby open window.

She had to laugh at that, a laugh of total defeat. After all of that, Jake had merely toyed with her emotions and left her exactly as he’d found her.

And it was the best revenge he could have taken on her.

R
aven tossed
and turned all night, thinking about Jake, remembering the way it had felt when she’d been on the bike with him, gripping him tightly, and the world had been fast and blurry and they were the only two people that mattered.

Even when she did fall asleep, finally, as faint light began seeping in through the small window in her bedroom, Raven dreamed of being on the motorcycle with Jake again.

She was holding him tightly and laughing, knowing it was where she belonged.

But then she was awoken after what felt like mere seconds of being asleep. Someone was pounding on her apartment door. “Raven, open up!” the man yelled.

She sat up in bed, recognizing the raspy, cranky voice. It was her landlord. He also lived on the second floor, but she rarely ever saw him except when he was out mowing the tiny front lawn.

Raven got out of bed and put on a pair of sweatpants. “Just a sec!” she called out.

Her stomach was already in knots and the day had only just started.