Tempted by the Devil: Highway Titans MC Page 5

  “Okay. Okay, I’ll answer your stupid questions.”

  Charlotte smiled so wide her cheeks ached before she reined it in. Be professional, she reminded herself. Professional? You just screwed the guy so hard you both had to suppress your screams. Charlotte disregarded her internal argument and got to her feet, fastening her bra and zipping her dress back up.

  “Where are you going?” Ben complained, reaching out to grab her ankle.

  “We need to do this right. We’ll sit across from each other. There’s a process to these things.”

  Ben groaned in annoyance. “Fuck the process. Come here, lay down.”

  “Just try it once,” Charlotte suggested. “Try it once and if you hate it, we’ll do it on the floor from now on.”

  She saw Ben grin, that wildfire look in his eyes again. “So that means we’re gonna make a habit of this, huh?”

  Charlotte shrugged and shimmied away from him, swinging her hips subtly from side to side. “If you’re a good boy,” she whispered.

  “Fuck,” Ben grunted. “Okay. Okay.”

  He got up and followed her, and did as instructed when she pointed at the couch. Charlotte sat down on the chair, adjusting her skirt so an appropriate amount of leg was showing.

  Ben looked at her, tapping his hands on his knees. Anxiety came off of him like smoke from a fire. “So?” he prompted. “Shoot.”

  “All right,” Charlotte agreed. But I’m not going to hold back, she added silently. He let her in, when they were both naked and vulnerable. He showed himself to her. This wasn’t the way she usually did things. She’d never fucked a client before, but maybe there was something to be said for it. She knew things about him now that she could use later. Like the delicious curve of his ass, for instance, she thought.

  Charlotte straightened her glasses and reached under the chair to retrieve her pen and paper. She sighed once, deep and full, to prepare for the litany of questions she was about to spew. “What do you want? I mean, really, really want, down to your bones? What does your body tell you to do?”

  “Jesus,” Ben said.

  “Too much?” Charlotte asked, trying to read signs of panic on his face, but she couldn’t detect any.

  “I just—I just need a second,” Ben said in a low voice. “That okay?”

  “Sure. Let me know if you need me to repeat the question.”

  There was a moment of silence where Ben just stared at the ground before he finally whispered, “Okay.”

  ***

  What do I want? What do I want? What the fuck do I want?

  Ben shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “To be up-front with you, I want to run away from this whole godawful thing. Just get on my bike and go.”

  Charlotte bit at the bottom of her lip. “The club?” Ben nodded. “So why don’t you?”

  Ben stared blankly back at her, totally stumped. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he didn’t ask himself the same exact question every single day. “I— You know, it’s my job,” he said. “I got a job to do here. Wanna get paid.”

  “And? You make a tremendous amount of money each year. Are you saving up a certain amount before you plan on leaving?” Charlotte asked.

  It was a good question. Ben had never really thought of it that way before. “Nah, I don’t know. I guess I’ll just know when it’s enough.”

  “Interesting,” Charlotte said before scrawling a note down on her paper.

  “What was that?” Ben demanded.

  “What was what?” Charlotte responded innocently, her eyes wide behind her big glasses.

  “I saw you write something down. What was that about? You analyzing me or something?”

  “Just keeping track of important notes. I don’t want you to have to keep repeating things to me,” Charlotte explained.

  “Well, knock it off,” Ben barked. “I’d rather repeat stuff than have you write shit down about me.” What if someone found the notes, someone in the club? He could never show his face around them again. His blood was pumping in his neck, probably making his veins stick out. He felt a flush of embarrassment rise up his chest and darken his cheeks. “Sorry,” he grumbled. “But don’t fucking do that.”

  Charlotte put her pen down and crumpled the sheet of paper she’d written on up into a ball. “Fine. No notes, then. Can I ask you why you’re so scared of being analyzed?”

  “No,” Ben snapped back. “Can I ask you why you pretend like everything’s normal even though we’ve fucked?”

  Charlotte shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “It’s not the way I do things,” she said in a lowered tone of voice. “Like I said, I’ve never done that.”

  “I bet you say that to all the boys,” Ben said jokingly, although he expected her to snap at him.

  Instead, Charlotte chuckled, her eyes lighting up with joy. She looked gorgeous with light in her face. “Back to the question, though. Why don’t you leave?”

  “I will run off, eventually,” Ben said, a tone of argument seeping into his voice. “I will.”

  Charlotte chewed on her bottom lip again and slipped her glasses off her face, storing them in her auburn hair. “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, Ben. I keep asking you when you’d like to leave, and you answer in terms of ‘running away.’ As if you were a kid running away from home.”

  Ben gritted his teeth for a moment. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Running away implies that there’s a home to run away from, a place you have responsibility for. It suggests to me that subconsciously, you feel a sense of obligation to this place that’s greater than what you let on. That you see it as your home. A home is a difficult thing to leave behind, Ben.”

  Ben stared at the ground for a minute. “It was just an expression,” he said finally.

  “In my line of work, we don’t think that anything is just an expression. There’s always a meaning lingering behind our words, like ghosts.” Her eyes were focused intently on Ben, making him squirm a little. He had to fight himself to keep still and not betray how uncomfortable she was making him. “We can move on if you like.”

  “Ghosts, huh,” Ben murmured, rubbing his chin in thought.

  “Does that make you think of something? We can talk about whatever you’d like,” Charlotte said. Ben got the sense that she was treating him with kid gloves, letting him think he was leading the conversation. He resisted the powerful urge to get up and walk away.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing,” Ben said, averting his eyes from Charlotte’s still-red face to stare at the back wall of his apartment.

  He could see her staring at him in his peripheral vision, but her body language changed, her legs crossing and uncrossing and her shoulders relaxing, like she was switching gears. “Okay, let’s move on—”

  Ben cut in before she could finish her sentence. “It’s just. Somebody died a while ago. A year and a half ago. That’s all.” He tried for a casual tone, something to suggest that he wasn’t that bothered by it anymore, but he probably failed.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Charlotte said, pushing her glasses up further on her head. He could see that her brows were furrowed again. “Who died?”

  “Nobody. Nothing. It doesn’t matter,” he said quickly, shooting his gaze back down to the floor.

  “If you didn’t want me to ask you about it, why did you bring it up?” Charlotte asked.

  Ben’s mouth fell open to respond, but no words came to him. Why did I tell her? Why did I do that? It honestly hadn’t felt like a decision. The words had left his mouth like sweat pooling out of his body. It needed to escape. He didn’t have a choice.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled in response.

  “How did this person die?” Charlotte prodded him.

  His tongue felt heavy and dry in his mouth, so he swallowed a few times to get the courage to reply. “Shooting that caused a crash. It was complicated.”

  Charlotte stared at him silently for a long time, probably just over a full
minute, but to Ben it stretched on forever. This is what hell feels like, he thought. When she finally spoke, it felt like an act of mercy. “It was someone close to you? Family?”

  “Felt like family,” he replied, nervously picking at his knees. “She was my family.”

  “She? Your girlfriend?” Ben didn’t say anything in response, which was its own answer. “What was her name?”

  “Danielle,” Ben said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. It felt dirty, saying her name now. He felt like he wasn’t allowed to, like he’d abused his privileges when it came to her, and the only fitting punishment would be an inability to talk about her ever again. “Her name was Danielle.”

  “Did you see it happen, Ben?” Charlotte asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I was... I was right there.”

  Charlotte clicked and unclicked her pen a few times, and Ben looked up to make sure that she wasn’t writing anything down. It seemed more like a nervous tick, like she needed something to fill the silence. “Ben,” Charlotte said, her voice soft and low. That tone was probably meant to relax him, but Ben felt himself tense up in anticipation. “Ben, do you blame yourself for what happened to Danielle?”

  “I don’t— I mean. Maybe,” he stuttered. God, he sounded so stupid. Why the hell wasn’t he more put-together? Does it really only take a roll in the sack to turn him into a useless, scared little boy?

  “Do you blame the club?”

  Ben shrugged, but he already knew the answer to the question. “I mean, you tell me. If she hadn’t been on drugs we brought into the country, she’d still be alive. If she hadn’t been riding with us when the Kings attacked, she’d be alive. If she hadn’t been on a goddamned bike, she’d be alive. What does that say to you?”

  Charlotte nodded. “It makes a certain amount of sense. But it sounds like it was the result of her choices, not yours.”

  Ben felt anger flare up in his belly. “Are you saying it was her fault?”

  Charlotte shook her head rapidly. “Of course not, Ben. Of course not. But she chose the life she wanted to live, Ben. She must have decided it was worth the danger. She knew the risks.”

  He scoffed. “Really? ‘Cause I didn’t.” He cleared his throat. “I never expected it to happen. And I fucking grew up around it. So what does that say?”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  Ben stared down at his feet, looking at the scuff marks on his shoes as he pushed the next sentences out of his mouth, trying to focus on anything other than the pain. “The only life I’ve known… took away the life I wanted. So what the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

  “Well, you could leave,” Charlotte said, as if it was that fucking easy. Ben had to bite down on his tongue to keep from yelling at her. God, how could she be so ignorant?

  “You don’t know the life,” he told her, “or you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Charlotte said. “But I’d like to know more, if you’d be willing to teach me.” She crossed and uncrossed her legs again, and Ben couldn’t help but stare between her thighs, into that sacred dark corner.

  “You seem smart,” Ben said. “Maybe it’s just the glasses, but you come off like a smart lady. If you are, you’ll leave now and never come back. This place is death. It’s got nothing to offer somebody like you.”

  Charlotte stared at him for a moment. “With all due respect, Ben, you don’t know me. Yet.”

  “Likewise,” Ben retorted.

  “You’re right. I don’t know you,” Charlotte admitted. “But I want to.”

  Ben felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, tingling almost painfully. “Listen,” he began, his voice dropping to a gentler tone. “Listen, um, what happened today? I enjoyed it. A lot.”

  Charlotte smiled, this time looking sweet and shy, almost like a schoolgirl. “Yeah, me too. It was… really hot.”

  “Yeah, it was. And, um, I’d like to do it again, you know? As much as possible, honestly, because you got… you got some good stuff going on under those little dresses,” Ben said, feeling a smile start to stretch across his face. Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off, feeling his smirk start to melt off as quickly as it had arrived. “But that’s as far as it goes, okay?”

  “As far as what goes?” she asked, her face screwed up in confusion.

  “This,” Ben said. “You and me. It can’t go beyond fucking, all right?”

  Charlotte looked away from him, seemingly glancing at the far wall, then the floor, then the window, then the door, before finally meeting his gaze again. “Yes. Of course. That makes sense. Otherwise it could interfere with my objectivity in helping you.”

  “I mean, sure. I didn’t mean that, but yeah, whatever,” Ben said in agreement. “I just meant we can’t be boyfriend-girlfriend here, you know? It’s too dangerous.”

  Charlotte nodded slowly and crossed her legs again, pressing her knees together tightly. “I don’t really do that anyway, the dating thing. This works best for me.”

  Ben was tempted to ask her why, pick apart her brain for a change, but he held himself back. “That’s good then,” he said instead, his voice hollow and distant-sounding.

  “Good,” Charlotte said, getting to her feet. “I have to be getting back. I have an early appointment tomorrow morning, at 7 am. But I’d like to come back soon and walk through your day with you.”

  “Like, me telling you what I do every day?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No, I mean me following along with you on your day. It’s important for me to get first-hand experience to help you gain insight into your problems.”

  “Um, no, sorry, that’s not going to happen,” Ben said.

  “And why is that?”

  Goddamn, why is she so fucking stubborn? “Because you’d get in the way. I have a job to do. You’re here to make me better at that job, not worse.”

  “I’m here to help you solve your problems. Your uncle may have hired me, but I’m here for you,” Charlotte retorted.

  “Then fucking listen to me, maybe!” Ben half-yelled, getting up from the couch and marching over to the kitchen for another drink. He was way overdue for one.

  Charlotte followed him, barely keeping a foot of distance between their bodies as they both stomped their way to the kitchen. “Do you want to feel this way? Do you want to feel shitty all the time?”

  “What kind of fucking question is that?” Ben said as he grabbed another beer from his fridge.

  “An honest one. I really want to know. Do you want to feel this way forever?”

  “No!” he full-on shouted before cracking open his beer and draining half of it in one huge gulp. “No, I don’t want to fucking feel this way. Are you happy?”

  Charlotte didn’t say anything.

  “I want to feel… less shitty. I don’t know. That’s what I want. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not going to happen no matter how hard you try, Charlotte.” It was the first time he’d said her name out loud, but it felt like he’d been saying it for years.

  “What about how hard you try, Ben?” she shot back. “You’re right. I could sit here and analyze you until my eyes start bleeding, till I keel over and die, and it won’t make a lick of difference if you don’t meet me halfway.”

  Ben finished his drink and tossed it into the trash before heading back to the fridge and grabbing another one. He wanted to get fucked up, absolutely obliterated, till hopefully he forgot that he ever had this conversation. “I don’t… I don’t even know how to start.”

  “How to start trying?”

  Ben shrugged, but he meant to say yes. I don’t know how to try to get better. I don’t even remember what it feels like anymore, to be okay. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

  “I can help you,” Charlotte said, stepping closer until she could put a hand on his elbow. His skin itched, but he didn’t push her away. “I can help you,” she said again, “but only if you let me.”

  “And what
? Letting you help means letting you tag along on all my drug drops and arms deals?” he said, his voice rising again even as her fingers started stroking over the skin of his arm.

  “It means listening to me,” she said.

  “Well, how about you listen to me?” Ben shot back, pushing her away finally. “I’m not… I’m not getting another girl killed, okay? Can you just accept that?”

  “I can take care of myself,” Charlotte argued.

  “Yeah, just like Danielle did,” Ben whispered, taking another large sip of his new drink. “Forget it. Come back tomorrow night, and we’ll talk through the day, okay? That’s meeting you half-way.”