by Ella James
They’re so precious. Their little ears are sort of soft and floppy. Their sweet noses are all warm and damp. I set them on the rug before I think about it, and they bound around the living room.
“Dangit! Don’t pee!” Just as I catch one of them and lift the puppy to my chest, he or she does just that—pees all over me. I look at my phone, over on an end table. I don’t have his number, do I?
I text Leah instead.
LEAH. Come now!! I need you!!! (If you can’t, it’s okay, it’s just a puppy crisis).
PUPPY?!?
Come, I tell her.
I take the puppies out to potty. So nice of Dickwad to buy supplies for them. The pups bound down the steps, and that’s when I spot their stuff in the yard. Crates, collars…all of it.
So what?
He’s still a dickwad.
I get them collared and leashed, and by some miracle, they seem to know it’s time to potty. When they’re finished, I grab a pack of pee pads from the pile of supplies and spread one in the screened-in porch. If I don’t want to keep the pups, I’ll need to send them off with Leah before the kids get home from community center art class at 6:45 PM.
If I send them off, he might tell the kids I did. He wouldn’t do that, though, would he? I don’t know him.
I check my phone for a text from Leah. Instead, there’s one from an unknown number.
What do you think, Mama? You can handle four, so what’s two more?
He knows about my other dogs? How creepy.
You have problems, I say.
Only one, he replies.
I hate you.
I can be gone tomorrow. All I need is two small humans.
Dream on. I do have two small doggos you can take, though. Two doggos for one son of a bitch.
I’ll give you two mil.
My stomach rolls. You’re really trying to buy the kids? That’s disgusting.
Puppy piss on your clothes is disgusting.
I suck a breath in, then look through the screens out at the night. Are you watching me right now?
Bwahaha. Just a lucky guess. Did one of them really get you?
Should I be scared of him? Is he watching right now? Maybe he’s unstable. He must be reading my mind because he texts, If you really did get pissed on, don’t be freaked out. I didn’t know that. I’m in Albany right now.
He shares his location with me, and I feel a tinge better.
Drive right on back up to Atlanta and get on your plane, I tell him.
I’ll see you tomorrow, June Bug.
I’ll be sure to take them fishing. All day.
BURKE
It’s true that I’m in Albany, but not to stay the night, as I’m sure she assumes. Heat Springs has the shittiest 4G anywhere I’ve been inside the continental U.S.
I’ve got a mountain of work to do, and I can’t do it via ESP. So here I am—in Mama G’s Coffee & Biscuits, a freakishly quiet little place on Albany’s Main Street. There’s an apron-clad high school guy behind the counter and a bunch of little orange booths with no one in them. Except me.
The internet here isn’t great either. Gabe is having a coding issue, and he and I are working on it in tandem, so I need a healthy internet connection. I’ve just gotten into a flow with the work when a bell dings. I lift my head and look around.
The high school guy with the floppy black hair nods my way. “Sir, we’re closing.”
“What?”
He points to something I can’t see from where I’m seated—presumably the hours posted on the door. “We close at nine.”
“Dammit,” I mutter. Seriously?
I scoop my laptop up and rise from the booth. “Where else in this town has reliable internet?”
“There’s a bookstore that has coffee, too, out on the main drag. It’s called Pages. They’re open until 9:30 or 10. I think it’s 10.”
I get in my car, order a satellite modem like the one I took to India, and pay over the phone and through the nose to have it delivered to Pages. The courier will have to drive down from a southern suburb of Atlanta.
When the modem arrives an hour and a half later, I get in the car and drive back to the one-room cabin I rented on some wooded acreage just outside of Heat Springs.
As soon as Gabe and I think we’ve got the mess untangled and I hop into the shower, he calls to tell me the voice recognition company that’s working on the voluntary monitoring part of the app has run into a problem that’s ultimately on our end. By the time Gabe and I have got it figured out, the sun is coming up.
I make some coffee with a hunter green Keurig on the counter and step outside onto the back porch—made from the same dark-stained wood as the cabin’s exterior walls. A stiff breeze ruffles the needles on the tall pines. I watch a black bird fly from tree to tree. A raven? I don’t know what birds are what. I sort of wish I did, but that’s a little pointless. When would I ever need to know?
I step back inside and check on Gabe’s screen. Everything still looks good. I can see him scrolling through the work we did. Work I hope will translate into lives saved one day. I don’t care how hard I have to push to get this app on people’s phones or how much money it takes. To me, it’s worth it.
I take a few deep breaths and then remember my suitcase is in the car’s trunk. I haul it inside, set it on the twin bed opposite my own, and pull some clothes out. I packed like I was headed to the east coast, not the South. It seems the clothes I have are quite a bit too warm for Georgia, even in the winter season.
I slough off the dress pants I pulled on commando after showering earlier and pull on clean boxer-briefs and a different pair of black jeans. I’ve never worn them, didn’t even buy them—I pay Molly to do my shopping—but they’re my normal brand; they fit fine, maybe a little loose, although they’re my size.
I pull a thin gray sweater over my head and pluck it off my abs. Fuck, this thing is tight. I move the shirt around and check the tag. It’s a medium. I check my bag. Did she order all these new shirts in size medium?
Yep.
Nice.
I’m six-foot-one and fairly lean, but I’ve got big bones. I smirk in the mirror and shake my head. I look like a fucking yuppie in this tight-ass, thin wool sweater.
Well, you are a fucking yuppie.
I’m sure June will think so. Not that she looked the part of a “farm girl” either. She looked like any girl. Correction: any hot girl. She’s not really a girl, I guess, though, is she? I think of what I know about her, from the dead mom to her lack of high school diploma.
“You don’t know anything about my life. My family’s farm. You don’t know anything about us!”
Doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t need to.
I text Gabe and check in with Molly and call Richard, who functions a little like a chief operating officer when I’m away.
“What’s it like down there?” he asks. “The land?”
Oh, right. I told him I was here to look at land—for an investment.
“Looks good,” I lie. “Dirt cheap.”
“Far from Atlanta?”
“Nah, not very.”
“When’re you going to get down there to do the hunting?”
Hunting? Oh—I guess he thinks that’s why I want the land.
“I’ll take off time when the app is functioning cohesively.”
He laughs. “That’ll be at least two years, with all the moving parts we’ve got. Too bad fucking Gurung won’t buy in. He’s got some of that infrastructure that could really expedite this.”
“No shit.”
I ask the questions I called to ask Aes’ very own Captain Obvious and smirk to myself as I make one final phone call, letting the company I booked with know that I still need their services this morning.
“What time would you like it set up?”
“Hmm, let’s say in about an hour?”
“At the address we have on file?” the woman asks.
“Yep.”
“Thank you, sir,”
she says. “You have yourself a nice mornin’ and we’ll see you then.”
“Perfect.”
I grin, then give a low laugh, feeling pleased with myself. I can’t wait to see June’s face when she gets her eyes on this.
The dirt road from my rented cabin to the nearby county road is fucking jarring on the car. Rocks pop up against its underbelly and a hazy dust cloud rises up around it. I grip the wheel and turn the radio down, stealing glances at the woods around me. These tall, skinny pine trees aren’t as picturesque as the east coast with a coat of autumn or the snow-slung evergreens out west, but there’s a kind of magic to them. Understated, maybe you would call it. Doesn’t feel like anywhere special, I decide as I turn left onto the narrow, paved road; its faded asphalt is veined by cracks.
You could see a murder happening out here. I glance up at the blue sky, pale with white clouds peeking in between the walls of pines on both sides of the little road.
Maybe crazy shit happens in a place like this, but you can kind of see things going the other way, too. Maybe this place is a place that people love, despite its lack of everything.
Maybe all the things it doesn’t have are things nobody really needs. I wonder if Heat Springs has things like food delivery and laundry service. I try to imagine going to some job here—the farm supply store or the police station. Or maybe doing carpentry. I bet they always have a need for that in parts like these. And what about June? What the hell is her day-to-day like? By herself out in that little farmhouse. Does that make her happy?
I remind myself that I don’t care. June is no one to me. After I take Margot and Oliver back home, she’ll be someone I see once or twice a year at most. And I will take them back with me.
I know I can make her see things my way. I just have to get her past that bite of horror she felt when I mentioned giving her money in exchange for guardian rights. To someone like her, it probably sounds sinful. Maybe even like a lie. But I’ll show her that it isn’t. I’m going to show her today that I’m a cool dude, that Oliver and Margot know me—probably better than they know her—and I have all the money needed to make them happy. Plus some for her.
There’s nothing wrong with needing help, and I’m a helpful guy. She’ll see. I turn onto the dirt road that leads toward her house, and there’s a dust cloud right in front of me. I think the evidence of how fun I am is en route to her house, just like I am.
Chapter 5
June
Should I go for the satisfaction of a hands-on killing—maybe good old-fashioned strangulation—or will this be a hit job for the sake of the kids? Either way, I’m going to have to kill him. Burke Masterson is going down town Charlie Brown—something that my mother used to say when we were kids, though I have no idea why. What was Charlie Brown going to do to us once we got downtown? Or were we going downtown like Charlie Brown? Did he go downtown a lot? I know surprisingly little about the famous comic strip star.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Burke sucks.
I narrow my eyes at the scene before me—a scene in which his suckage is at center stage. Burke is sitting on a mossy rock below a pecan tree in my front yard. Mario and Peach, the puppies, bound around his black-jean-clad legs and shiny new black leather boots, while Oliver and Margot the humans climb all over his broad back and shoulders, frolicking around him like sad orphans who just found the family member they like best. Which is exactly what they are—maybe.
I blow a breath out. Covertly, of course. I can’t have Mr. Masterson glancing over here and seeing how annoyed I am. And conflicted. But mostly annoyed. You see, the frolicking is taking place about ten feet from the monstrosity Burke had set up on my lawn: a massive, Super Mario-themed bounce house, rented from a blow-up bounce house company in Atlanta.
He rented a bounce house for my lawn two days ago from his lair in San Francisco. And unless I throw a giant shit fit, it’s going to be here killing the grass for three more days. I would have never let the company set the damn thing up, but we weren’t here when they arrived. The kids and I had driven to the fire station to grab some fresh fruit from the farmer’s market.
When we spotted the thing—from way back at the end of the driveway—Oliver recognized it right away. Apparently it’s a Bowser castle. Bowser is a villain, Oliver said, so at least Burke got that part right.
The worst part of all of this is that despite the bouncy house right there in plain sight, the kids have been glued to Burke since they leapt from the car and raced toward him. It’s awkward, and it’s worrying. What if they actually want to go home with him?
I’ve been staring at their frolic-fest for probably what feels like eternity, and I can’t even hate him properly because he’s so attractive. He looks like an Instagram model posing for a dad-themed photo shoot.
Not that I would ever follow male models on Instagram—especially not the gorgeous, statuesque foreign ones from far-flung places like Milan and Hamburg and Johannesburg. But if I did do that, I might think he looked just like one with those sleek black boots, his slightly snug black jeans, and an even more snug gray wool sweater.
It’s not a regular sweater. It’s thinner, more like a shirt, and I can tell from looking at it that it cost a lot. You can just tell when something’s well-made—even when you don’t know that the person in it is worth like nine gamillion dollars.
Yeah. So he is rich. I knew he was some kind of tech smarty, but I didn’t know just how successful my new arch nemesis really is until I did some web browsing this morning. Apparently the villain Mr. Masterson has started and sold two startups already, and is working on a third one, financed mostly by him.
The tall, dark, slightly scruffy male-model knockoff occupying my mossy rock and wrestling with my charges is worth a screaming 120 million dollars.
So he’s ridiculously wealthy, enviably smart, and he’s clearly good with children. I was skeptical, based on his absence at the funeral and his absolute asshole act when he knocked on my door yesterday. But it seems crystal clear now that the kids adore him.
I chew the inside of my cheek—the cheek angled away from him.
He lifts his head, laughing at Margot’s tickles—which I know from experience are a lot more like pinches, so he’s probably impervious to pain like the super-villain he is—and his gaze catches mine. He looks radiant. Like he’s waited his whole life for this one shining moment. Like Margot and Oliver are all he needs to live his best life. I lift a brow and try to smile when our eyes lock, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure it comes off as a grimace.
When we rolled up a few minutes ago and the kids first ran to tackle hug him, he smiled at me as he wrapped them in his muscled arms. It was a gotcha smile, an I-took-over-your-lawn smile. A this-is-what-my-money-can-buy, and-it-can-buy-you-too smile.
So yeah. When he looks at me again a second or two later, still wrestling with the kids, I give him the full scowl he deserves. I can be civil when the kids are looking, but right now they’re climbing on him.
Burke winks at me.
The mothertrucker winks. As if he thinks I think he’s charming or attractive.
I arch a brow. Nope. I don’t.
He grins as he tickles Oliver, and it’s a wicked, evil grin. I know, it says. And I love it that you hate me. I’m a villain, so this is my version of fun.
Fuck villains, I say with my face. But not literally.
He heard my freaking thought. He smirks as if he means to tell me, yeah, I know you want it, and he winks again. That freak!
I stand up…because I can’t just sit here all day. I stride over to the bounce house, and the kids scamper over behind me.
“Look, you guys!” I wave at its arched entrance. “Uncle Burke and I rented this castle for you!”
Now it’s my turn to flash a villain’s smile his way.
“Are you our uncle?” Margot asks, frowning up at him.
Burke laughs, a husky sound. He swipes a hand back through his wavy, dark hair. “Of course I’m you
r uncle, silly.”
“How come we don’t call you uncle?” Oliver asks.
“I don’t know.” But I can tell from his face that he’s lying. I smile down at Oliver.
“Sometimes, people don’t like to be called uncle if it makes them feel old.”
A notch appears between Oliver’s eyebrows. “‘Burke’ sounds like maybe he could just be your buddy. Uncle means he’s old enough to be—” Your dad, I almost say, but stop myself. “Your uncle.”
Margot smiles up at Burke. “You are old! You’re as old as Santa.” She says it matter-of-fact like, with a cute little grin, then shrugs and disappears into the castle.
Oliver follows.
I stare at the air-inflated castle wall for half a second, then take a few steps back so I can pretend to focus on the kids; I can see them jumping through a mesh spot on the wall.
“Santa does bring all the toys, huh?” he says.
I lift a brow, not taking my eyes off the kids.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware,” I lower my voice. “But that’s a myth. For children?” I smirk his way. “It’s actually the children’s guardian who does that.”
He steps closer to me. “And you want that to be you, huh? You’re the new Santa?”
I nod, not looking at his devil face. “I’m the new Santa.”
“I could buy them this, you know.” He steps closer, so close I can feel the heat of his big body. “I could put this in the backyard of their old house. More than one of them.”
“Because what children need is extravagant toys. That solves every problem.”
“It doesn’t, but you know what does?” he asks me.
“Benjis and sports cars?”
“No,” he deadpans. “Therapy. It’s expensive, and it’s hard to find a good psychologist unless you’re in a bigger city. I could do that, though.”
“Oh, yes, I have full confidence that you could pick a qualified therapist for children.”
“I could read reviews, June.”
It’s the first time he’s ever used my name. I swallow.