The Handler (Noir et Bleu Motorcycle Club #2) (10 page)

“Blow them away,” Hal whispered. She nodded and then held her hands palms up. He placed his palms on hers and they moved their hands in a special handshake. The crew surrounded them and clapped to jack her up. They all hopped up and down on the spot while Lincoln pumped her fist repeatedly to the cheers of the entire crew. She transitioned into the celebrity Lincoln Todd as she drew energy from them. The lights went out in the arena. She winked at me as she high-fived everyone and snuck out onto the stage with two guys who held flashlights. She took her position on a hydraulic podium. I could feel the excited anticipation of the sold-out crowd, and it made my heart pound. The podium rose slowly, and when the spotlights hit her, the crowd went insane.

The song she opened with wasn’t one I’d ever heard before, but it was obvious why it was a hit. Young girls screamed and burst into tears when Lincoln reached out to touch their hands. Middle-aged moms danced and sang along to the lyrics. Guys in their twenties whooped and hollered when Lincoln shook it. There was even a group of white-haired ladies in the first row of seats off to the side of the stage who clapped along as if they were having the time of their life.

There were twenty dancers, and Lincoln performed the same choreography they did without even getting winded. For the fourth song, she sat down at a grand piano and played a slow song that the entire audience sang along to. By the time it was finished, I’d memorized the words, too.

Five costume changes and two hours later, I was still standing in exactly the same spot watching her in awe. She stepped out to sing one last song as an encore. The band had already left the stage, so she played the acoustic guitar solo. All the stage lights were turned off except for a spotlight on her. When she hit the last note and thrust her fist up in the air, the crowd erupted. The floor vibrated through my boots and the roar made Lincoln look happy, like that was where she belonged. The spotlights scanned the sea of faces in the crowd. It was pretty fucking amazing.

After the concert, Lincoln showered in the stadium dressing room to wash the paint off. I still felt the rush from the energy of her performance, so I paced while I waited for her. She changed into a tracksuit to meet backstage with sponsors and fans who won a contest to meet her. Tim, and his two other security staff, Aaron and Stan, remained on duty scanning the room from their posts. Aaron was tall and lean. He used to be an Olympic biathlete, so he was apparently a good shot, not that it mattered since they didn’t carry firearms. Stan was shorter but, in my opinion, more of an asset because he was a mixed martial arts specialist.

Hal and the rest of the crew partied on the sponsor provided food and alcohol while Lincoln schmoozed with every music executive there. At one o’clock in the morning, her eyelids drooped heavily, and she yawned every two seconds. I walked over to her. “Hey, you can barely keep your eyes open. Let’s go.”

She leaned her head on my shoulder and mumbled, “I can’t go until Hal says.”

Hal was lounged on a couch with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a chesty blonde on his knee. “Screw Hal. He didn’t just perform for two hours. I say it’s time for you to go to sleep.”

Her hand slid into mine, and she let me lead her toward the door. Tim opened the door for us and spoke into the headset to let Stan and Aaron know we were on the move. Hal obviously noticed because he shouted, “Cain!” I didn’t stop. I rushed Lincoln along the concrete corridor toward the ramp that lead to the airlock. Footsteps followed us. We ran and were already near the bus when Hal shouted again, “Hey, Cain.”

With my hands rested on her hips, I guided Lincoln up the steps and then closed the door behind us, which made Lincoln laugh. “You’re going to give him an aneurism making him chase us.”

“Whatever. It’s good for him to get some exercise.”

A few seconds later, he opened the door, climbed the steps, and poked his head in. He panted. “Hey. You can’t, uh.” He sucked in a heavy breath. “There are more sponsors on their way.” He coughed. “They want to meet Lincoln.”

I blocked him from fully entering the bus. “She’s been up for almost thirty hours. She’s done. If they wanted to meet her, they should have shown up before one in the morning.”

He produced a lame attempt at a puppy dog face. “Linny, you can do another half an hour, right?”

She bit her bottom lip. I waited for her to speak up, but she just stood there.

I finally answered for her, “You hired me to take care of her. She’s tired. Do you want me to do my job or not?”

Hal’s face turned the same purple color as the day of the video shoot. Sweat rolled down his temple in unnatural amounts. “She has responsibilities.”

“Yeah, to perform. She just did that, and she did an unfuckingbelievable job. She did enough ass kissing with greasy old dudes in suits while you sat around with a bimbo riding your leg. She’s done for tonight.”

He pointed at my chest, and his spit sprayed out when he yelled, “Listen, you little punk, I make the decisions around here. Don’t piss me off.”

“Don’t piss me off or I’ll walk.” I swiped his hand away. “At this point, she’ll probably walk with me.”

He glared at me, then glanced at Lincoln. She was struggling to keep her watery eyes open.

“Look at her,” I said. “She’s exhausted. My suggestion is that you tell her what a great job she did and say ‘good-night’.” I kept my tone non-confrontational. It was only the first day of the tour; I didn’t need to start a pissing match with this guy.

After a tense pause, he asked her, “Do you want to go to sleep?”

She nodded wearily.

“Okay.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “You were amazing tonight. Have a good sleep.” He eyeballed me in a cautionary way before he left.

I checked her expression but couldn’t tell how she was feeling. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said tentatively then, as if she was nervous to hear my answer, she looked down and asked, “Do you really think I did an unfuckingbelievable job?”

I lifted her chin so she would see my expression and know without a doubt how I felt. My pulse raced as I stared at her mouth. Her eyes widened, and her lips parted slightly as she waited for my response. Under any other circumstance it would have been the perfect moment to kiss her, but that couldn’t happen. Instead, I leaned in and brushed my cheek against hers as I said, “You blew me away.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck. “Thank you,” she whispered in my ear. “For everything.” I pulled her in tightly to hug her back, and she relaxed. We stood that way for a while with her heart beating against my chest. Eventually, she stepped back and smiled. “Night.”

I nodded, not wanting the moment to end. It had to, though, so I said, “Night.” I watched her disappear into her bedroom. Then I exhaled in an attempt to remind my body that I worked for her.

One day handled. Forty-two to go.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

Chapter Ten

When I woke up, the bus was moving. It was sunny outside, but I felt groggy like it was still the middle of the night. I stumbled out into the hallway and reached for the knob on the bathroom door. Lincoln giggled. She was sitting on the couch painting her toenails. She glanced up at me and then stifled another laugh.

I didn’t bother to ask what was so funny. I just went to the bathroom. As I washed up, my reflection in the mirror revealed why she was laughing. She had taken a black marker and drawn a thick porn star moustache on my upper lip. She also wrote
I
G
Jailbait
across my chest. I smiled a little and stepped out into the living area.

She giggled again and covered her mouth with both her hands.

“What’s up?” I asked as I wandered around to open and close drawers in the kitchen.

“Not much.” She watched me walk over to the desk. “What are you looking for?”

“A Band-Aid. I stubbed my toe.” I opened the desk drawer and found what I was really looking for.

“There should be a first aid kit in the bathroom.” She chuckled. “Maybe you should go back in the bathroom and look in the medicine cabinet. It’s behind the
mirror
.”

I held up the marker and said, “Maybe you should start running because I’m going to make you pay for that little late night prank.”

She screamed and ran on top of the couch cushions, then jumped toward the hall. I caught up to her as she tried to open her bedroom door. She screamed again and squirmed as I carried her by the waist and tossed her onto the couch. “No, no, no. I’m sorry.” She laughed, kicked her legs, and squirmed to prevent me from getting the marker close to her face. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”

“There’s no point in resisting.” I straddled my knees on either side of her hips and pinned her arms underneath her. “You started a war.”

She screamed and laughed. “You’re squishing me. I can’t breathe.”

“Good. Sit still or I’ll make a mess.”

“No. Please don’t draw on me. I really am sorry.” She faked a pout and fluttered her eyelashes. “Besides, you look sexy with a moustache and a chest tattoo.”

I held her chin with one hand and wrote with the other. She screamed at the top of her lungs the entire time as I printed
OBEY CAIN
across her forehead. I did it from right to left in reverse so she would be able to read it properly when she looked in the mirror. When I was done, I pushed up her shirt to expose her abdomen. I wrote
CAIN IS MY MASTER
and blew on it to make it dry. She stopped screaming and stared at me with a big grin. When I realized that it was because she was enjoying me sitting on her and blowing on her skin, I stepped off the couch and clicked the lid back on the marker.

She sat up and curled forward to read her abs. “My master. Hardly,” she scoffed and leaned over to pick up her ringing phone from the coffee table. “Hi Hal.”

Hal shouted loud enough to hear from where I stood. “What the hell’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” she asked. At that point, I couldn’t hear Hal anymore, but her response was, “Oh, Cain and I were just horsing around. I’m fine. I didn’t know the bus driver could hear us back here.” She rolled her eyes comically as she listened. “I wasn’t screaming…I didn’t strain my vocal cords…Oh my God, I’m not going to get pregnant and screw up the US tour. It wasn’t that kind of horsing around.” She looked at me and stuck out her tongue. “Fine.” She stood and headed toward the bathroom. “I said fine. Stop worrying.” She hung up and stepped inside to look in the mirror. “Oh my God, Cain. This better come off my face or Hal is going to kill us both.”

I laughed and opened the fridge. “You started it.”

Her phone rang again. She sat at the bar and watched me cook as she talked. “Hi, Auntie Bev. How’s it going?” Her aunt talked for a long time, and Lincoln just nodded a lot and said ‘okay’ every once and a while. “Okay. Okay. Yeah, I’ll think about it. Thanks for calling.” She hung up and started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I flipped two eggs onto a piece of toast and handed her the plate.

She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “My aunt had to put my mom in the psych. ward because she burned down the guest house—she thought there were aliens living in the walls.” She reached up and pressed the unicorn pendant under the palm of her hand. “My dad missed his court appearance, so now the police are looking for him.”

I didn’t say anything while I let it sink in. I cut an orange into segments and fanned half of them out on her plate. “Well, look at it this way; if they’re both locked up, you don’t have to worry about them for a while.”

She shook her head, annoyed. “Yeah, that’s great. Thanks for being so practical, Cain.”

I sat on the barstool next to her to eat my eggs. “What do you want me to say? It’s fucked up, but it is what it is.”

“Profound,” she muttered.

I finished eating quietly while she pushed her food around on the plate. She eventually loaded a forkful of eggs in her mouth and glanced at me. “These are pretty good.”

I smiled as she ate the rest. “What did you tell your aunt you would think about?”

“She wants me to take my parents’ names off my bank accounts so they don’t have access to everything.” She shoved the empty plate away and thumped her head down on the counter. “What do you think I should do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” she groaned.

“It’s probably not a good idea to let an addict and an insane person have access to your bank accounts.”

“They’re my parents. It’s not normal for the kid to be in charge of the finances.”

“Why are you worried about normal? Nothing in your life is normal.”

She frowned and chewed at the fingernail on her pinkie finger. “I can’t just let them starve.”

“They’re not going to starve. You can still support them without letting them have full access and control over the accounts.”

“How?”

“Take their names off the accounts and pay them a monthly salary instead.”

“What kind of salary do normal people make? Is a hundred thousand dollars a month about average?”

I laughed. “No. Most normal people would be lucky to make that in a year.” I stood up and cleared the plates.

Her forehead wrinkled with stress. It made the
OBEY CAIN
squish together, which made me laugh. She looked up. “What?”

I pointed at her face. “You look ridiculous.”

She smiled and seemed to relax as she moved to the couch, dialing her phone. “Hey, you can go ahead and arrange to take my parents off the bank accounts. Ask Pete to set it up so they get paid a monthly salary instead.” She moved the phone to hold it against her ear with her shoulder and picked up her guitar. “Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks.” She hung up and tossed her phone on the cushion. “Hal told me to tell you, ‘Good job.’”

Not that I cared what Hal thought since I suggested it for Lincoln’s benefit, but it did give me a surge of pride to hear that he thought I did a good job. Even if his idea of a good job was a common sense solution. Anyone who worried less about kissing her ass and more about helping her could have come up with it.

She tuned her guitar, then asked, “What types of songs do bikers listen to?”

“Nothing that you would know.”

She played a couple of notes from
Bad To The Bone
by George Thorogood followed by the riff from
Wanted Dead or Alive
by Bon Jovi. “Try me. I can play any song I’ve ever heard.”

“Really?” I was genuinely surprised since I had always assumed that manufactured pop tarts only knew how to shake their asses. “Sounds like you might have some real talent.”

“Some.” She rested her right foot on the coffee table and leaned over the guitar
.

“Can you teach me how to play the guitar?”

“I could, but I should teach you to play the piano since your long fingers would make you a natural.”

I looked at my hands and sat on the recliner. “Can you play Skynyrd?”

She smiled and started to play and sing
Freebird.
It was her own version and I actually liked it better than the original. Her eyes closed, and her head swayed with the melody as it floated past her lips. Without a pause, she transitioned into Eric Clapton’s
Tears in Heaven
. When she finished, she leaned her chin on the body of the guitar and said, “Your eyes seem bluer when they’re watery.”

I didn’t say anything, because I was choked up and not sure I could hold it together if I attempted to speak.

“Does that song mean something to you?”

I blinked a few times and swallowed to get rid of the lump in my throat. It took a minute before I felt composed enough to respond. “Huck played
Tears in Heaven
on the piano at my dad’s funeral. She wasn’t talking then, so she wrote me a note to tell me that she wanted to play a song for the service. She burst into tears and ran out into the parking lot before she could finish.”

Lincoln’s expression filled with compassion. “Sorry. I wouldn’t have played it if I knew that.”

“It’s okay. You sound like an angel when you sing it.” I walked away and locked myself in the bathroom. I turned the shower on and let it run for a long time, hoping to erase the image of Huck’s distraught face from my mind. Eventually, I stepped under the stream of water and tried, unsuccessfully, to rub the marker off.

After my shower, I wanted to call Huck, but it was only two in the morning there, so I changed and went back into the living area.

Lincoln laughed. “You kept your stache.”

Instead of telling her that I couldn’t get it off, I said, “I’m going to keep it until you wipe the writing off your forehead.”

She reclined in the lounge chair with a smug expression. “In that case, be prepared to wear it all day.”

I chuckled, since the joke was on her. I sat down and turned a movie on. After the movie, we played cards. After that, we played video games for a while. Then I read a few chapters from my textbooks and did an assignment on the laptop while she read. I sighed and stared out the window for a while.

“You’re bored, aren’t you?” she asked around dinnertime.

“Stir crazy.” I closed the laptop and got up to prepare roasted turkey breasts and potatoes. “How can you stand being cooped up inside for so long?”

“I can’t. It makes me crazy, remember?” She moved to sit at the counter and watched me.

“You’re not crazy. You’re just stressed out.”

She raised her left eyebrow, unconvinced, and chewed the nail on her pinkie finger.

“Hey,” I said firmly and waited for her to look up at me. “You’re not crazy?”

“Yeah, we’ll see. My mom didn’t turn completely insane until she was twenty.”

“You’re not crazy.”

She sighed, then changed the subject, “Did your mom teach you how to cook?”

“No, my dad did. He went to culinary school before he joined the Noir et Bleu.”

“Did he work as a chef after he quit being a biker?”

“No, he worked as an electrician, and he fixed bikes on the side.” I slid a cutting board, peeler, and a bunch of carrots in front of her.

She frowned at the peeler but figured it out without being shown. “Who did you get your blue eyes from?” she asked once the carrots were thoroughly stripped of about five layers of skin.

“I don’t know. My mom’s eyes are green and my dad’s were gray. Huck’s are gray like my dad’s were.”

She opened the fridge and grabbed two Italian sodas. She handed me one and asked, “What did your mom do?”

“She was a nurse, but she didn’t work after Huck was born.” I cut the potatoes into wedges. “What did your dad do?”

She tipped the soda bottle back and took a slow sip as she thought about it. “Is get-rich-quick-schemer a profession?”

I chuckled. “I guess it depends how successful you are at it.”

“He was dismally unsuccessful at it until he discovered that he sired a child that could sing.”

“Are your parents divorced?” I filled the sink with soapy water.

“I guess. They haven’t lived together in six years, and they haven’t talked in two. I haven’t talked to him in two years, either. He got mad at me when I banned him from the tours for making drunken scenes in front of the sponsors.” She stood next to me. “Will you show me how to make the chicken?”

“There’s not much to do. Just throw everything in this dish.” She dumped the potatoes and carrots on top of the breasts. “Add a bit of oil and seasonings.” She sprinkled a little from the jars I handed her. “And pop it in the oven.” She held the pot with both hands and frowned at the oven. “I already preheated it. You just need to open the door and slide it onto the rack.”

“What if I burn myself?”

“You won’t burn yourself.” I reached over and opened the door.

She slid the pot onto the rack as quickly as humanly possible, then stepped back and squeaked, “Eeek.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do with you.” I shook my head, equally surprised and amused that she was intimidated by something most people did every day, but she was fearless when it came to doing something that would give ninety-nine percent of the population a panic attack. “Keep an eye on the timer. I’m going to go call Huck.”

She nodded and stared at the oven window as if I’d just given her the most important job in the world. I shut my bedroom door and flopped down on my bed to call.

“Hi Jamie. Where are you today?” she blurted out as if she’d been sitting by the phone waiting for my call.

“We’re on our way to a show in Milan tonight.”

“In Italy?”

“Yeah. How are you?”

“Good. What’s Lincoln like?”

I smiled when I said, “She’s pretty cool.”

“I hope I get to meet her.” Her voice was dreamy as if she was imagining how popular she would be at school if she could say she’d met Lincoln Todd.

“I should be able to arrange that,” I said and braced myself for the shriek that I knew was coming.

She screamed, and I heard her shoot up as if she was rushing to tell our grandparents. “Really?”

It was so nice to hear her sound happy. I got choked up again, and I had to take a few breaths to pull it together. “Yeah.”