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I scrutinize Piper’s outfit. Her straight-legged jeans and knit green sweater. Her white sneakers are scuffed and worn, but they aren’t the only thing straight-laced about her. “You look like you’re off to knock on doors and talk to people about your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
“I do not!”
“It’s obvious you’ve never stepped foot into a drug house. It would be obvious to everyone there, too. They’d assume you were with the police. Or the neighborhood watch, at least.”
“So they’d get out of my way.” She shrugs. “That sounds like a good thing.”
I drag a hand down my face. “They’d gut you before you got a toe through the door.”
“What do you know? You don’t even know where she is.”
“A tumbledown, two-story shithole that used to be painted blue, with a faded ‘For Sale’ sign in the overgrown lawn.” I would ask Piper if I’m correct, but I can tell by the widening of her eyes that I’m on point.
She gapes at me. “How do you—”
“Your friend has been in trouble since well before you yelled at her the other day. I tracked her there after the night you and I met. She had a black eye at the time, if that helps with your timeline.”
Piper closes her eyes. “I knew she was involved with Jason again, but I hoped she wasn’t—I didn’t know she was back in this deep.”
“Of course you didn’t. Which is why she tried to manipulate you into thinking it was your fault.” I shake my head, anger building into a dark cloud inside of me. “She wants you to feel bad enough that you’ll come yank her out of that house and pay off whatever she owes. It’s as predictable as it is pathetic.”
“Pathetic for her?” Piper asks.
“For both of you. You’re better than this.”
She looks up at me with wide, pained eyes. “You keep saying stuff like that.She isn’t worth your life. You’re better than this.How do you know? You don’t even know me.”
“I know enough.”
Piper stares at me long enough that the sadness and frustration in her expression drain away into an exhausted kind of acceptance. “Then you have to know that I’m not going to stop until I can help her.” I grimace and Piper shrugs again. “I know you think I’m pathetic. I know you think my friends are leeches. I know you probably think I’m the dumbest woman alive—”
“That depends on what you decide to do now.”
“But,” she continues over my interruption, “at the end of the day, I don’t care what you think of me. The only thing I care about is how I feel when I climb into bed at night. If I don’t try to help my friend and something bad happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.”
There’s an earnestness to the way she’s talking to me. Each word out of her mouth is a travesty, but I have no doubt she means every single one of them.
“You can’t really believe you had any chance of saving Ashley anyway,” I finally say. “Were you going to hotwire one of my cars, or what?”
She chews on her lower lip for a second and crosses her arms. “My bike is still here.”
I stare at her for a second before I tip my head back and laugh.
“Shut up,” she grumbles.
But I can’t. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in a good long while, and I’m enjoying it.
Piper slaps my arm. “You’re an asshole.”
I stop laughing and grab her wrist. Gently, I twist her arm. Her entire body moves with it. I spin her around until her back is against my chest, my lips pressed to her ear. “And you’re incapacitated. That’s how easy it would be for someone to take control of you.”
“Let go.” She squirms, her ass grinding against me. My cock twitches, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I have a point to make.
“You’re not prepared to fight,” I explain. “And on a bike? Fuck, Piper. It’s laughable. The thought of you peddling away from the crack house with Ashley riding on your handlebars… I mean, come on.”
She huffs, but doesn’t say anything. Because she knows I’m right.
Finally, she turns her head and looks at me. Her lips are less than an inch away. She’s so close that I can’t take all of her in at once. My eyes flick from her full lips to one green eye and then the other. Her eyes stay focused on mine.
