Page 20 of All Out of Love

But Bam put that gun to her head. “I said let’s go!” he demanded. When she still resisted, he dragged her by the catch of her shirt all the way out of that store.

Still holding her, he got in first, slid over, and pulled her into the car behind the steering wheel. “Drive!” he demanded. “Let’s get out of here!”

But they could hear the sirens already, as if that Korean had pressed his emergency button when Bam first brandished that gun.

“Are you insane?” Toya said to Bam. “There’s cameras all over this place.”

“You think I’m stupid? I scoped out this place for days. None of them cameras work.” He pressed that gun against her skull. “Now drive before I blow your head off too!”

She could tell Bam was scared out of his mind. She could see it in his eyes that he was regretting this whole ordeal already. But he was in it now. And he was determined to keep her in it too.

But she wasn’t about to be driving his crazy ass anywhere. She tried to snatch away from him and get out of her car, but Bam slung her back in. “I’ll kill you girl!” he yelled as he fired a shot just past her feet, which caused her to scream. “Quit playing with me! Now drive!”

That warning shot woke her up from any delusions she had about getting away from him. She drove.

“Take me home,” Bam said in a defeated voice. “Take me to Keisha. She’ll know what to do.”

Toya’s heart dropped. Because she knew he wasn’t going home for long to anybody. He just robbed a store and shot a man. And that man could be dead! “You done messed up now, Bam,” she said as tears streamed down her face. “You done messed up now.”

She knew he had to know it, too, because they weren’t a mile away from that gas station when police cars were racing up behind them.

“Floor it!” Bam yelled hysterically as he kept looking back to see where they were.

“What do you mean floor it?” Toya couldn’t believe he didn’t realize the jig was up. “We can’t outrun no police!”

“Floor it or I’ll blow your motherfucking head off, Toya! Floor it!” He placed the gun against her skull even harder.

Terrified, Toya floored it and found herself in a high-speed chase with law enforcement.

But her driving skills were no match for theirs. They caught up to them in less than a minute, and one of the patrol cars initiated a perfect PIT that caused her Chrysler to go into a spin and then slam against a guardrail that mangled her entire front end. Then the police hopped out, all guns pointed at both of them, and Bam finally dropped his gun and held up his hands. Even his stupid ass realized in that moment that his successful armed robbery, a robbery that was probably going to put him in prison for the rest of his life, lasted five minutes tops.

But as the cops flung her out of the car as if she was resisting when she wasn’t resisting at all, and as they threw her to the ground and handcuffed her just like they were handcuffing Bam, she knew she could go to prison for life too. If Bam was right and there were no cameras inside that place anywhere, what was to stop them from claiming that she was in on it too?

But unlike the last time she was in police custody, there was no way she was mentally prepared to languish in a jail cell for months on end on an armed robbery and shooting that could even turn into a murder charge. There was no way!

But if she wasn’t able to make bail on that assault charge, how in the world was she going to make it on a robbery - possibly homicide - charge?

As those cops grabbed her up like she was a piece of trash and threw her into the back of their squad car, she knew she had no chips to play. She had to go for broke.

She was calling Carrington Capital.

She was going to beg them to put Mr. Carrington on the line, even though she knew the chances of that were slim to none. But the rumor mill said he had a thing for her. The rumor mill said they were an item. Maybe that lying rumor mill would finally work in her favor and somebody would actually let him know that she needed him. Because she needed him!

And she knew that if she could just explain to him what happened, what really happened, he just might believe her. Somehow she knew it.

She also knew that getting whomever was going to answer that phone to put him on the line, if anybody answered that phone at all this time of night, was going to be hard. But when had anything in her life ever been easy?

Hard was all she knew.

Hard was all she had.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Verdi’s La Traviata was not an opera Grayson ever enjoyed. How could he? the heroine Violetta dies in the end every single time! But his father was on his feet in raucous applause and therefore everybody in their private box were on their feet too. Because his father was their biggest patron, he made the opera company perform that same opera once nearly every other month it seemed to Grayson. Simply because his father loved that tragic opera that Grayson abhorred. But that was the nature of their relationship: opposites.

Grayson’s limousine pulled away from the opera house as they all were seated on either side of the spacious compartment staring at the bustling city none of them lived in. His father and mother, Sebastian and Petita Carrington, sat on one side, while Grayson was hemmed in the middle with chief-of-staff Dena on one side of him and his date, twenty-five-year-old Charlotte, on the other side of him. Charlotte was his father’s choice in mate for him when Dena, his father’s previous choice, didn’t work out. Grayson knew his love-life, or more specifically, his lack of a wife, was where the conversation would end up.

It didn’t take long.