Free DAMON: A Bad Boy MC Romance Novel by Meg Jackson Page B

he was going and all that. You know he’s not big on talking these days, and he probably thought we’d have something to say about it.”
    “We do have something to say about it,” Ricky grumbled into the phone. She ran a palm over her eyes, pinching the sides of her nose. “I’m going to call Tricia now, you guys let me know if you find a note or whatever.”
    “Baby, try to stay calm,” Cristov said, his tone lowered slightly as though Kennick and Kim couldn’t hear him perfectly well.
    “I’m fine, Cris,” she said. “Talk to you soon.”
    Hanging up, she dialed Tricia’s number; it went straight to voicemail. She left a message, a casual what-the-hell-are-you-doing message. Then she got up and went to her little balcony, overlooking Kingdom. It was past 9 on a Tuesday night, and the sleepy little hamlet was doing what it did best; sleeping. Only a few lights illuminated the summer evening. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she tried to see the town as Tricia saw it. Someplace she belonged – and yet never would belong again.
    I understand that you want to leave it all behind, Ricky thought. But you left us behind too. And the last time we couldn’t find you…
    She didn’t let herself linger on that thought. Instead, she grabbed her keys and went down to the car. If Tricia wasn’t going to be sleeping there that night, there was no reason for Ricky to sleep alone.

12
    M orning found Tricia and Damon back on the road after a breakfast of oatmeal and pop-tarts, enjoyed in the cool mists of early summer. They were headed towards the Outer Banks in North Carolina, which Damon jokingly referred to as “an amusing diversion worth the waste of half a day.”
    Tricia pulled her phone from her bag. She’d kept it off for the first day and a half, but now felt compelled to check it. Ricky and Kim would definitely have been trying to get in touch with her. Probably her parents, too. As she turned the phone on, she noticed Damon sending her a wary glance. She ignored it and waited for the phone to boot.
    As expected, it started buzzing wildly as voicemails and texts filtered in, one after another. A part of her wanted to smile at this; she felt a little like a teenager who snuck out. A bigger part of her understood that the last time she’d been unreachable, her life had been in immediate danger, and her friends and family would be in a panic. She scrolled through the texts from Ricky and Kim and her mother, each one asking where she was, if she was alright, what the hell she thought she was doing.
    “Popular girl,” Damon said, acting distracted but obviously unsettled.
    “Everyone wants to know where I am,” Tricia said as she started to type out a text.
    “Tricia,” Damon said, his voice having a hard edge to it. “I’d rather…”
    She stopped typing, looked at him expectantly. He shifted in his seat.
    “You should tell them you’re okay, but…can you not tell them where we’re going?”
    There was a faint pleading to his tone that made Tricia’s eyebrows raise.
    “Um,” she said. “Why?”
    “Ricky and Kim talk to Kennick and Cristov,” he said.
    “…and?”
    “And they don’t know where I’m going, and I’d rather they not know.”
    Tricia bit the inside of her lip. That didn’t sound good. That didn’t sound good at all. The Volanis brothers were basically attached at the hip. If Damon was keeping this – whatever this was – from his family…
    “Why?” she asked again. She felt entitled to an answer. She wasn’t just along for the ride – well, she was, in the most literal of terms, but she still didn’t know why the ride was happening at all. Damon glanced at her, torn.
    “They wouldn’t understand,” he said, simply. “They wouldn’t – they’d try to talk me out of doing what I need to do. But what I need to do….well, I need to do it.”
    “Okaaaay,” Tricia said, her fingers still poised over the little on-screen keyboard. “That’s