I wasn’t thinking straight. The adrenaline was flowing, and I was trying to figure out why I hadn’t just left that girl behind, so when we got up to the motel room, I was blindsided by the fact that I actually had a teenage girl in our room and my brother was pacing the floor, mumbling to himself. When the shit hit the fan, I hadn’t thought about what that would mean for Deke—he’d been put in a really bad position.

“Deke, man, follow us up. I can get you a meet with Slider, no worries,” I reassured him, but he wasn’t interested.

I tried to convince him to leave it all behind, but he wasn’t having it. He seemed to be under the impression that he wouldn’t have any problems, and he was a grown-ass man, so I wasn’t going to argue. If he wanted to stay, that was on him. Even though I was older by a little less than a year, I couldn’t tell him what to do. He’d been taking care of himself for a hell of a long time.

We were arguing about what had gone down, and the fact that I had a chick we didn’t know in my bed, when the girl woke up.

Everything after that was like some sort of fucked up version of The Twilight Zone that I couldn’t escape. She was as young as I’d thought when I saw her with Jose, but it wasn’t just that. She had to be around seventeen or eighteen in age, but Christ, in experience?  She was a ten-year-old. She had no sense of self preservation and she thought I was some kind of hero for saving her ass from somewhere she shouldn’t have been in the first place. I knew she was young, goddamn, but when she climbed into my lap I felt myself growing hard underneath her.

It’s not like I was much older than she was, I was only twenty, but I’d stopped fucking girls her age when I was fourteen. There was a huge gap in life experience that made anything I wanted from her impossible, which was proven when she told me she had to call her grandmother and spoke to her like she knew she was going to be in trouble. When we introduced ourselves to her, she wrinkled her nose in confusion and I could tell the wheels were turning in her head as she gave us her name. For a split second, I thought she might have given us a fake one, but I could tell by looking at her face that she hadn’t—and she was kicking herself for it.

I made plans to meet the boys about an hour north of San Diego and took Callie to her grandmother’s. There was nothing else I could do. She was fucking jailbait, and even if she wasn’t, there was no way she was staying the night in my motel room. The girl had fucking braces on her teeth. She came from an entirely different world.

When I got her home, I thought I’d feel relief, but I didn’t. She’d spent the entire ride rubbing up against my back, with her little hands clenching and releasing my chest like a kitten, and her not quite innocent actions had me hard as a rock. I wanted her. Bad.

I’d programmed my number into her cell phone back in the motel room, but I didn’t see any reason why she’d ever need to call me. So when her grandma ordered me in for food, I took her up on her offer. I told myself that I just wanted some home cooked food, that I didn’t want to ride with my jeans strangling my dick, that I wanted to make sure she was okay from whatever she’d been given earlier in the night—but none of those reasons were the truth. I just didn’t want to leave her yet.

She was so sweet—the way she looked at her Gram, the way she served up my plate without even asking what I wanted, and the way she smiled with her mouth closed, trying to hide her braces. I’d never been around sweet like that before—I fucking loved it. She didn’t talk a whole lot, but I figured that might have been because of whatever she still had in her system. Her Gram was watching her with an eagle eye while we sat at the table, but Callie didn’t seem to notice. By the time we were done eating, she’d passed out at the table.

It fucking killed me to leave her there, but I knew that her Gram would take care of her and it really wasn’t any of my business. I had gotten her home safe and sound and I’d look like a jackass if I hung around too long—not to mention the fact that I probably had forty Mexican guys gunning for me.

I needed to get the fuck out of there before I did something stupid and got myself killed.

Chapter 6

Callie

I woke up alone in Gram’s bed to bright afternoon sunlight shining through the lacy white curtains. My head was throbbing, and my mouth tasted like something had crawled in there and died. I tried to roll over, but gave up with a groan when my entire body protested the movement. It only took a few seconds for me to go from wondering why I was so sore, to remembering exactly why I felt like shit.

My mind raced over the events of the night before, and I was completely baffled by everything that had happened. Shit like that just didn’t happen to me. I rarely got into trouble, and when I did it was for normal things, like talking back to my parents or staying out past curfew. I couldn’t have imagined the night before if I’d tried.

I was busy sifting through my memories, trying to catch the elusive ones, when Gram came into the bedroom to wake me up.

“Oh, good. You’re up. I’m heading over to Aunt Lily’s and figured I’d drop you off at home on my way. How you feeling?” she asked me as she walked around the room, pulling on a sweater and a pair of tennis shoes.

“Eh. Like I got ran over by a truck. My mouth is dry like the freaking Sahara.”

“Yeah, well getting drugged by some piece of trash will do that,” she told me with a glare, sitting down beside me on the edge of the bed. “I know you were just having fun, Callie, but crap like that has a way of getting out of hand. I took care of things for you last night, but something like this happens again and I’m calling your dad myself. You put me in a hell of a position.”