The Problem with Peace: Greenstone Security #3

by Malcom, Anne

  I didn’t say more, even though there was more. More than even Rosie knew. I wouldn’t say more. No matter what. They had yanked all the truth out of me I could ever offer. I wasn’t going to say the rest out loud.

  “And maybe, if I want to be really honest, I knew I didn’t love him, not properly,” I forced the words out. “And because I knew that what I had with Heath was real, and it was going to be a lifetime of pain, I wanted to take the easy way out. Because I’m weak.”

  That was it.

  The truth.

  And it wasn’t pretty.

  Neither was love. Maybe that’s why I’d been running for so long. Because I’d pretended to be looking for love my entire life, the hopeless and scatterbrained romantic, playing the part so very well. When in actuality, true love wasn’t pretty like I was trying to make it. Like I was trying to pretend, like some little girl in a plastic crown and a polyester dress pretending she was a princess. All those men were plastic crowns, polyester dresses. They fit, I could pretend with them, but they weren’t real.

  And I hadn’t mourned them, not really.

  It was onto the next one.

  And if I had loved them, there would be no moving. There would be a lifetime of mourning. There would be a huge gaping hole in my life that I couldn’t cover up with anyone else.

  And that’s why I ran from Heath. Because it was ugly, what I felt for him. Unhealthy. Uncomfortable. Heavy. Like the weight of a real crown might be.

  Lucy had moved at some point and now her hand was tight in mine. It was comforting. Healing.

  Well, as healing as it could be.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  Until Rosie.

  “Okay, so there are people that say that nothing is certain in life, I disagree.” Rosie grinned, but her eyes were glassy from my words. “And not just because I like to disagree with people. But because there are things that are certain. Like your favorite lipstick will be discontinued the second you finish your last tube. It will start to rain the second you walk out in your new suede Manolos, or right after you’ve had a kick-ass blowout.” She scowled at this, and then down at her shoes that looked perfect in my eyes but obviously weren’t to her.

  It had rained today.

  She snapped her head back up. “You run into Chris Hemsworth on the street after a workout, makeup-free and scarier than that Stephen King book with the clown,” she continued.

  And then her face changed. Turned a little more serious. A little more kind to me. “And, this is the biggy, you’ll always fall in love at the wrong time. Most likely with the wrong person. Then you’ll fuck something up. Or he will. Shit goes down. Because life likes to screw with us, babe, whether it’s ruining eight hundred-dollar shoes, or sending us the perfect man in the most imperfect—sometimes seemingly impossible—of circumstances. But here’s a secret, we’re not people. We’re kick ass bitches.” She looked to Lucy, then to me. “And just because you don’t literally kick ass like we do, ‘cause you’re into, like, peace, or whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t mean you don’t kick ass. I refuse to hear yourself talking about yourself the way you would never talk to us. To the people, you love most in this world. You were there for both of the disasters that were the beginning of the relationships. And I don’t think it’s presumptuous for me to say we both fucked up. A lot.” She looked to Lucy for confirmation.

  Lucy nodded. “A lot.”

  “But you didn’t judge us,” Rosie said. “You didn’t say one thing about a wrong decision, a cowardly one made by our brain in an attempt to protect our heart. You understand because you’re Polly. You love everyone, are kind to people even when they don’t deserve it. But the person who deserves the most love and kindness right now is yourself.”

  Lucy nodded. “And Heath is not a blameless saint in all of this. Not from where I’m standing. You both made wrong decisions. And he has no fucking right to treat you the way he has, riding around on his high fucking horse.” Her voice was pinched in fury.

  “Do not blow up his car,” I said suddenly, wiping a tear from my eye.

  Lucy widened her own in a faux look of innocence. “I wasn’t even considering it.”

  I raised my brow.

  “I might’ve been considering it,” she amended. “But Keltan doesn’t let me handle explosives anymore so you’re safe.”

  I wasn’t.

  I was the farthest from safe I’d ever been in my life.

  Chapter Twelve

  I should’ve been getting more accustomed to seeing him.

  But I had the same reaction to him outside my apartment building the next morning as I did to seeing him outside the shelter. In the Greenstone security offices when I got back from Europe. Seeing him outside my door before I left to Europe. Seeing him standing in front of me while I was wearing a wedding dress and he was telling me to run away with him.

  Pain.

  And a sense of strange relief in that pain.

  A safety.

  His gaze was the same as it had been since I left him on my doorstep.

  Blank.

  I guessed I deserved that.

  No, I knew I deserved that. Despite what Rosie said the night before.

  I was trying to be kind to myself. But I also had to be honest with myself.

  Me lying to myself was what got us here in the first place. I had to own that blame.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him when he pushed off the wall and moved slightly toward me, but sure to keep distance between us.

  “It’s Thursday,” he said by response, by greeting.

  “I’m aware.” I was getting almost good at mimicking his cold tone.

  Almost.

  Or I was failing utterly and completely.

  “You read to the kids at St. Mary’s on Thursdays,” he said.

  I froze.

  He didn’t rush to fill the silence. In fact, he didn’t fill it at all.

  So it yawned on until I was recovered enough to speak.

  “How do you know that?”

  His face didn’t change. “Work at a security firm. It’s my job to know shit.”

  It was his job.

  “Right,” I whispered. “And I suppose there isn’t much shouting or sassing or cursing I could do to stop you from this ridiculous security detail?” I asked, realizing with everything that happened with Lucy and Rosie last night, I had not been able to further plead Lucy to work her wiles on Keltan to back off.

  I made a mental note to call him.

  Because this could not go on. Forget Craig doing me any kind of harm, this would kill me.

  Something rippled underneath Heath’s glasses at my words. “You don’t shout, sass or curse.”

  “I might if it would make a difference,” I shot back, if only to fight the fact he knew that simple yet intimate fact about me.

  “It wouldn’t,” he said, voice iron.

  I knew as much. Rosie and Lucy did shout, sass and curse during the times they had been tangled up with males who wanted to protect them.

  Regularly.

  I knew it didn’t make a difference. But then again, their stories were a little different than mine. They definitely didn’t involve them getting married to another man and having the man who they’d rejected tail them around after the fact.

  The men they shouted, sassed and cursed actually cared about them.

  “Right,” I repeated, this time slightly louder than a whisper.

  Despite the facts, I should’ve been arguing this. That was what pretty much every other woman I knew who was involved in a somewhat similar situation did. Granted I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the now infamous Sons of Templar courtships. Mainly because I was always falling in and out of love, out of majors, and always into some form of trouble.

  But I did follow them intently. Because they were the real-life version of a fairy tale. The stories weren’t pretty. Each of those women and the men had gone through types of pain no fiction writer could repr
oduce and certainly not market to children. The kind of pain that made a version of a happy ever after seem impossible.

  But they got it.

  All of them got it. And it filled me up with all sorts of hope and notions of love that no other book or movie could do.

  But no way in heck did I want any of that for myself. There were explosions, kidnapping, all sorts of violence. Battles. The Sons of Templar lived for violence, so it stood to reason that it would be involved in their courtships.

  As much as loved that it all worked out in the end, I didn’t want that for me. No matter what people might think, I had no need for dramatics in my love life. It seemed like it on the outside, what with the revolving door of boyfriends.

  But I didn’t want that violence.

  So it was why I was reluctant to fight Heath when he fell into step with me as I walked to my car. Because I knew him. Or I knew who he used to be. And back then, before the world had chipped away at each of us, he was stubborn, alpha and protective. He’d changed a lot. But that hadn’t. It had only intensified.

  If I tried to fight him on this, I’d lose. I forced myself to breathe through the pain of his physical nearness and emotional distance.

  He didn’t try to fill the silence as we walked to my car. He looked straight ahead with a tight jaw and his eyes hidden by sunglasses. I was glad of this. I didn’t want to look into his eyes. I couldn’t see the blankness in them this early in the morning.

  I got to my car. And realized I didn’t have my keys in my hand. This was something that happened every morning when I didn’t leave them on the coffee table in the apartment, of course. I’d have thrown them into my bag and then spent five minutes digging through it to find them again. It didn’t bother me when I was alone, I was never in a rush anywhere, anyway. Even if I was late. Because rushing when you were late was a sure-fire way to somehow make yourself take twice as long to do everything like find your keys in your purse. I wasn’t usually bothered by the extra five minutes looking for my keys.

  But five minutes more in front of a silent Heath was about as appetizing as five minutes of waterboarding.

  In fact, I would’ve preferred the waterboarding.

  “So, you’ll forgive me if I don’t know the procedure for something like this,” I said, looking into my purse, desperate to fill the silence. “Are you riding with me or...?”

  I dragged out the question in a prayer. I could not handle being in an enclosed space with him. The clutter of my car was nothing compared to the emotional junk of our past rattling along through L.A. traffic.

  “Fuck no,” he clipped immediately.

  My flinch was hidden by jerky movements to look for my keys. My hands finally felt the fabric of my keyring. I clutched them but didn’t yank my hand out of my purse, or lift my eyes. I didn’t trust myself to do that.

  “I’ll follow you,” he continued. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t drive like a maniac in order to make it easier for both of us.”

  I almost laughed. Easier for the both of us would require Doc Brown and an industrial amount of plutonium.

  “I don’t drive like a maniac,” I said, finally lifting my eyes up and pulling my keys out of my purse.

  He was staring at me with folded arms and the designated ‘tough guy’ stance with slightly widened legs. An eyebrow raised from beneath his sunglasses was his only response.

  I huffed, hating that yet another thing he somehow knew about me was that I’d failed my driving test three times. Because I’d told him, in the middle of the night, or the day, in that everlasting weekend we’d spent tangled up in bed and in each other.

  “Whatever,” I snapped. “I’ll endeavor to do everything I can to make this easier for you.” The attitude in my voice surprised me.

  It must’ve surprised Heath too, because something flickered in his expression. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, finally step all over the emotional eggshells we’d been pretending to be walking on. He closed it again. Took a visible breath.

  “Much obliged,” he said and turned on his heel and walked toward his black SUV.

  I watched him for far too long, checked out his ass when I shouldn’t have and then I got in my car.

  * * *

  “You said you weren’t gonna drive like a maniac,” a voice clipped at the same time my driver’s door was wrenched open.

  “I didn’t,” I protested.

  Heath stepped back in order for me to get out of the car. It was almost comical how much unnecessary distance he put between us in order to make sure there was no accidental brushing of our skin.

  “You almost hit three cyclists, two buses and a BMW,” he said, voice tight.

  I sighed. “Almost, but did not hit,” I clarified. “Maniacs hit things. Therefore I am not one.”

  He did not appreciate this. “You ran three red lights.”

  “They had an orange tinge.”

  I locked my car, banishing my keys back into the depths of my purse and then bracing myself for another day—another moment—of Heath.

  A grip on my hand paused my movements. Paused my fricking heart. Because it was Heath’s grip. Heath’s hand on my arm. And it wasn’t gentle, it was tight and almost violent, as was the movement that yanked me around to face him.

  At some point, he’d shoved his sunglasses onto his head. The unobstructed view of his eyes hit me square in the chest. There was fury in them. Pure and utter rage.

  “You drive like you bowl through life,” he accused. “Full of almost hitting things, near misses, almost disasters. You’ve been lucky, so far, Polly. But no one is lucky forever. The world doesn’t give almosts forever. One day, you’re gonna fuckin’ crash. I’m not gonna let you do that to yourself. So get your fuckin’ shit together and drive like you actually value your fucking life.”

  “I do value my life,” I hissed back.

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  I yanked my hand back from his, despite the fact his grip felt like home. “That’s the problem, Heath, I can’t fool you.”

  And I pretended I didn’t see the emotion on his face before I turned around and stormed toward the hospital entrance.

  * * *

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Which was good, since I didn’t know if I’d surprised another verbal assault from Heath.

  He wasn’t pulling punches.

  Wasn’t being gentle with my feelings.

  But then again, I hadn’t been gentle with his when I’d married another man. So maybe I deserved it.

  He had followed me silently from the car. He was my ghost in every sense of the word. Apart from the fact he was flesh and blood, of course.

  But it didn’t really matter, he could’ve been incorporeal for all the difference it made. It’s not like I was going to touch him, kiss him, ever again.

  So why was that all I could think about today? Even when I was reading to my kids in the rooms of the hospital? Even when I spent longer holding Ella’s hand—the little girl with leukemia who was still too ill to gather with the rest of the children in the reading room.

  Even when I went out to get my favorite nurses donuts and the good coffee because I knew that their breaks weren’t long enough to leave the hospital. They were barely long enough to suck down bitter, scalding hot vending machine coffee and slurp some instant noodles.

  I was supposed to be finished at the hospital at three, but it wasn’t until six that I was walking out the door. That we were walking out the door.

  Heath had been a silent shadow.

  Until the kids talked to him and every ounce of his ice melted with them. He smiled, he laughed. Told jokes. He transformed.

  It was utterly beautiful.

  And it somehow turned ugly and rancid on my insides. Not because I was jealous of those little children getting a part of Heath I’d never get, no, I was glad they got that. No, it was for an entirely different reason.

  A reason that sent a conversation from six years ago
hurtling into the forefront of my mind.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “I thought we’d discussed that you don’t have to ask me to ask a question,” he replied, voice light and teasing.

  I smiled into his chest. “Oh, yes, well my mind has been somewhat occupied since then.”

  The tenderness between my thighs served as a beautiful reminder of this.

  I didn’t think anyone in the history of the world had been introduced to sex as thoroughly and as often as I had in the course of this weekend.

  I was talking to try to chase away the ever lighting of the previously pitch black sky. I usually liked sunrises. Loved them. As a girl who slept little, I was usually always up to see them, to welcome a new day, a new adventure.

  I didn’t want a new day.

  And no adventure could top the weekend I spent with Heath.

  I didn’t want it to.

  But it would.

  Every day had a sunrise. And it just so happened the one coming in a handful of hours was going to signal the end of something bigger than the fricking sun itself.

  To me, anyway.

  Hence me trying to distract myself. Trying to fill myself up with as much knowledge about this man as I possibly could.

  “Does everything you went through as a kid make you not want one?” I whispered.

  His arms tightened around me. “Fuck no,” he said. “My parents controlled me when I was helpless. Until I got old enough that I didn’t let them. They don’t get that. They don’t get to take that shit away when they’ve already taken shit from me to turn me into what I am now. I want kids. Want a chance to be the father I never got. Give my sons and daughters the mother I never got. Want a family, ‘cause I never had one. Want to make a life I never had. Not gonna continue any fuckin’ cycle.”

  I blinked away tears at his words. That didn’t work. They fell onto his bare chest.

  He clutched my chin, bringing my head up to face him even though he couldn’t see me in the dim moonlight. His thumb wiped at the wetness on my cheek. “You don’t need to cry for my past, Sunshine. ‘Specially when my present is this fucking great.”