Free This Is a Dark Ride by Melissa Harlow Page A

in surprise as the girl wrapped her arms around Brody’s neck and clung to him tightly.
    “I didn’t know where you were!”
    “Shhh, I’m right here. I was just in the other room sleeping. You feeling any better?”
    “I don’t know.” Her hair brushed over Brody’s skinny arm, and the sheet slid down, revealing a generous amount of her upper body.
    Brody kissed her forehead. “It’s all right, everything’s good. Promise.” He disentangled her arms from him and smoothed the sheet over her. “That’s Sam,” he said without turning around.
    Her cloudy eyes suddenly flashed with recognition as they met his gaze over Brody’s shoulder.
    “You stopped up at the curb a couple of days ago,” she said with an accusatory edge to her voice.
    Brody turned and regarded him with a tired smirk. “Oh, say it ain’t so! Saint Sam was out trolling for whores?”
    It was hard to miss the cringe on the girl’s face at the word whore.
    “I wasn’t trolling for anything. What’s she doing here?”
    “I found her.” Brody picked up a twisted cigarette butt from a pile on top of what appeared to be a wrinkled napkin, and sat down on the edge of the couch next to where she lay. “Beside the building, back by the trash cans.” He shook his head, and anger flickered in his usually hollow and expressionless eyes. “They fucking dumped her there.”
    “Who did?” Sam tried to shake the image from his mind that the term found her conjured up. She wasn’t a fucking cigarette butt or some loose change; how did someone find a person dumped by trash cans?
    “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “They robbed me, that’s all. They wanted my money.”
    “I brought her up here to clean her up and to let her get warm.” His expression turned challenging, but behind that challenge there was a pleading look in his eyes that Sam was not accustomed to. “She’s hurt. You don’t have a problem with her staying here for a while, do you, Sam?”
    Sam shook his head, knowing he’d have to be an ass to say she couldn’t stay. “No…no, but why didn’t you call an ambulance?”
    “I don’t imagine her health insurance plan covers this. She probably should have called the cops. Those guys—”
    “Don’t! Don’t do this, please, Brody? I don’t want you talking about it. In fact I wish both of you would stop talking about me like I’m not even here. I told you, Brody, they just robbed me—that’s all! I don’t want to talk about it anymore, please?”
    Brody immediately fell silent. He shot the girl an apologetic look. “If she wants to talk about it with you sometime, that’s up to her.”
    Sam didn’t bother asking. It was definitely something she wasn’t eager to discuss at the moment.
    “What’s your name?” he asked her.
    “Angel.”
    A whore named Angel, wasn’t that just perfect? “Angel?”
    She shrugged and then managed a weak smile. “My mother was hopeful once, I guess.”
    Sam laughed in spite of everything. She had a pretty smile. It didn’t do much to light her sad face, but he had to admit it was dazzling.
    “You hungry?” Brody asked her.
    Sam’s jaw dropped. Brody never seemed to think about food or the needs of other people. Hearing both in the same sentence was astonishing.
    She shook her head. “I’m tired. Weird tired. I think it’s from those pills you gave me.”
    “Did they help the pain at all?”
    She nodded.
    Damn, Brody must have been extremely concerned about her if he was willing to part with pain pills.
    He made a great show of smoothing down the sheet over her again. “Go back to sleep, Angel.”
    She grabbed Brody’s arm, holding on to it the way Sam wanted to.
    “Can I sleep with you, Brody?” she asked hoarsely.
    Un-fucking-believable . His junkie, alcoholic, fuckup boyfriend had one of the most beautiful women Sam had ever laid eyes on practically begging to sleep with him.
    Brody looked uncomfortable, and he glanced over at Sam. “Um, no. I don’t…I