by Harley Stone
Additionally, he was a good man who I enjoyed being around. He even wrote up a month-to-month contract that gave me the freedom to evict him at any time for any reason. It amazed me how he could be so dominating in the bedroom while relinquishing control over his living situation to make me feel safe.
And the way he worshiped my body gave me a different kind of power. I’d never felt so beautiful or valued in my life, and I thrived under his attention.
We settled into a nice, comfortable arrangement. Between his two jobs, we didn’t get to spend as much time together as either of us would like, but we made dinners together a priority. Some evenings we stayed at the apartment, and sometimes we went to the fire station and ate with the club, but we always ate together.
Apparently, Spade had destroyed his bike (not in an accident, he assured me), so Wasp helped him find a used 2014 Street Glide. I knew nothing about bikes, but it was beautiful and rode much smoother than his last. I made sure to be on the back of it—with my hands wrapped around his middle—as often as possible. I never could have imagined being a biker babe, but for Spade, I’d strap on leather and change my name to Biker Barbie in a heartbeat.
Thankfully, he didn’t want me to.
About a week after Spade sent Don and Chad’s information to Tap and Morse, the two hackers cornered us at the station to fill us in on the text messages, emails, and video chats they’d found between my boss and supervisor.
“They’re definitely bonin’,” Tap said, handing me a folder of correspondence printouts. “Not only that, Don’s been skimming from the company profits.”
Floored by this unexpected twist, I felt my jaw drop. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope. Serious as an embezzling charge,” Tap replied.
Spade was reading over my shoulder and started laughing. “God, Jess. Read that top page. You thought Chad was taking it up the ass, but that’s not the case. Don is.”
“What?” I dropped my gaze, searching for the passage that made him think that. It wasn’t a single passage. Several of the chats made it clear who was in charge of their relationship. Chad even went as far as telling Don what to wear and making him ditch his underwear and “freeball” at work. Disgusted by the image, I snapped the folder closed. “That’s about enough of that.”
“Holy shit, babe.” Spade squeezed my shoulders. “If anything, that should take away their power over you. Can’t put too much stock into Chad’s opinion now that you know he had to blackmail someone in order to get his dick wet.”
“I didn’t put much stock in his opinion before. Now I know he’s nothing but a desperate, pathetic pervert. So let me get this straight. Don was skimming from the company, and Chad caught him and blackmailed him into sharing, promoting him to supervisor, and… sexual things. Is that about right?”
Morse nodded. “As far as we can tell. All the information we could find is in the file. How familiar are you with the owner of the company?”
“Mike Chentam? I’ve met him at company parties and such, but I’ve never really talked to him.”
“He needs to know what’s going on in his agency,” Tap replied. “Since it would be difficult for you to explain how you got your hands on this information, we can anonymously leak it to him. He’ll never be able to trace the source, and it won’t touch you.”
“But it’ll destroy Don and Chad.” Their careers would be over, and Don’s wife would be crushed.
“You can’t sympathize with thieves and cheaters.” Spade rubbed my back. “Babe, they knew the rules before they sat at the table, but they still chose to play the game. They bid too damn high, cheated to get there, and left their books on the table. It’s up to you to rack those books and play your hand.”
I mostly understood what he was saying. “You really need to teach me how to play Spades.”
Chuckling, he nodded. “I gotta teach you when to be cutthroat, first. I’m sure you get the gist of what I’m saying, though.”
“Can I think about it?” I asked.
Morse nodded. “We won’t do anything until you give us the green light.”
Spade and I thanked the club’s hackers and left. I knew Spade wanted to let Morse and Tap leak the information, but he didn’t hound me about it. In fact, the last thing he said on the matter was, “I’ll support whatever you decide to do, babe. I told you, I got your back.”
The next few days were busy, so I put it out of my mind until Don called me into his office later that week. Chad was already waiting inside. He gleefully watched me enter like we were teens and he’d ratted me out to the principal and was waiting to witness my punishment. Fearing the worst, I took the open seat beside him.
“Hello Jessica.” Don smiled at me, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thank you for coming in so quickly. How are you?”
I glanced at Chad as more unease crept up my spine. “Okay?” It came out like a question. Clearing my throat, I tried again. “Okay. Good. I’m good. You?”
“I’m a little disappointed. Chad tells me there’s been some conflict between the two of you. Is that true?”
Disappointed? He was trying to play the righteous dad card while stealing from the company and screwing one of his subordinates? Out of the three of us, I was the only one who could claim the moral and business high ground. I sat up a little taller and reminded myself how shady these two were while trying to keep my tone and expression professional. “Chad and I have engaged in a few disagreements on ads for my clients.”
Chad snorted. “Disagreements? Your insubordination is inexcusable and will not be tolerated.”
“Please, Chad.” Don held up a hand. “I’ll handle this. Jessica, you’ve always been one of my most dependable employees.” He opened the file on his desk. “I’ve been going over your file, and I’ve never had a problem with you before.” He flipped through the few pages that held notes and reviews, and his brow furrowed. “There’s no signed non-compete in here.” He looked up at me. “Didn’t you sign one before you started?”
“No sir.”
“That’s an HR oversight. Who handled your onboarding?”
“Onboarding?” I shook my head. “Marjorie showed me to my desk and Jeff with IT helped set up my laptop, and that was it.”
“Well, we need to remedy that immediately.” Don picked up his phone and spoke to Marjorie, requesting the form.
Seconds later, Marjorie burst through his office door, handed over a paper, and left. Don plopped it down in front of me and retrieved a pen from his desk. “Please sign this.”
Feeling like I was being railroaded (to use Spade’s term), I read over the form. It stated that if my employment with Emerald City Advertising was ever terminated, I would make no attempts to contact my clients, and banned me from working for a competitor for a period of three years. “What if I don’t sign it?” I asked.
“You’re refusing?” Chad scoffed. “See, Don? She’s completely uncompliant. Everyone has to sign it, for chrissake. You’re not any better than the rest of us, Jessica.”
Don held up his hand again. “This standard non-compete is a requirement of your continued employment here. You should have signed it when you were first hired, but mistakes happen. We’ll take care of it now.”
“So… I’ll lose my job if I refuse to sign?” I asked for clarification.
“Nobody wants that, Jessica, but you cannot work here without a signed non-compete.”
Yet I’d been working there for years without one. Don and Chad were both watching me, and I saw no way out of it, so I scrawled my signature and the date on the form before sliding it in front of Don. He added it to my employee folder and set it aside.
“Now, moving forward, Chad will be approving all your ads before you send them to clients. Any changes he suggests, you will make.” Don frowned. “Do you understand?”
Oh, I understood all too well; Don’s depraved little daddy was yanking his chain. Any respect or compassion I had left for my boss snapped. Don dismissed me, and I went
back to my desk with smoke coming out of my ears. As soon as my ass landed in the chair, I called Spade.
“Hey, babe,” he answered.
“Hi. I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re working, but I need help.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can take a break. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
I gave him a brief rundown on what had happened in Don’s office before adding, “Will you please tell Morse and Tap to leak what they found to Mike Chentam?”
Spade chuckled, sounding every bit as pissed as I felt. “With fuckin’ pleasure. You okay, Jess?”
Surprisingly enough I was. “Just brandishing my imaginary sword and preparing to slice my way through this place.”
“This is your moment, babe. Don’t forget your line.”
Touched that he’d remembered, I grinned. “Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids.” It was cheesy and silly, and it felt damn good to say it.
“That’s my girl.”
***
Spade
I managed to keep my family away from Jessica for the first few weeks after I moved into her apartment. I’d been stopping by their house every couple of days to show my face and check on Uncle Jaime, but I’d been blowing off Sunday family dinners since that was my one day off to spend with Jessica. After the fourth missed dinner, Mom knew something was up. She called during work Wednesday to ream me on my absence and read me the riot act about family time.
“It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t been prepared for the question, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to lie about Jessica. “Yeah, I’ve been seeing someone.”
“And you’re hiding her from us like she’s some kind of whore? Does she even know you have a family?”
That raised my hackles. Jessica and I were still going strong, and she’d been through multiple changes over the past few weeks. After Tap and Morse leaked the information they found to the owner of her company, he cleaned house. Jessica said Mike Chentam showed up with an attorney, two security guards, and the gal from HR. They summoned Chad and were in a closed-door meeting in Don’s office for over an hour.
When they finally reemerged, one security guard accompanied Chad to his printer room office, and a few minutes later, Don and Chad were both escorted off the premises, each carrying a box of personal effects. In the days that followed, Mike brought in a new manager whose first act of business was to promote Jessica to department manager. Jessica took over Chad’s desk—metaphorically speaking, no number of Clorox wipes could have convinced her to sit at his physical desk—and she quickly realized how little of his job he’d actually been doing.
She’d been working long hours trying to play catch up, and I didn’t want to add the drama that was my family onto her already sagging shoulders.
“Madre, Jess is most definitely not a whore. She’s a good girl. Smart, funny, she comes from a stable family and has a great job.”
“Can she have babies? Does she have good hips?”
This was not a conversation I wanted to have with my mother. Ever. “We haven’t even been together for two months yet. Babies haven’t come up.”
“You’ve been seeing this woman for almost two months and you haven’t brought her home?” Mom gasped. “Is she ugly? Does she have warts covering her face? Why are you keeping her from us, Tonio? I know I raised you to be proud of your family, so it must be her you’re ashamed of. What’s wrong with her, Tonio?”
That did it. “Nothing. She’s perfect. I’ll see if she’s available Sunday night.”
“Good. I’ll have Rosalie set an extra plate.”
Knowing I had been outplayed, I hung up and texted Jessica to make sure she was free Sunday evening.
Then I spent the next few days dreading the upcoming family meal. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was more nervous than Jessica. My family could be overwhelming, and I didn’t want them to scare her off. Hoping I’d given her enough reason to stick it out with me despite them, I knocked on the bathroom door.
“You almost ready, Jess?”
She emerged wearing a short-sleeve mid-calf length floral dress that bunched at the waist, managing to make her look both modest and sexy as fuck. “Is this okay?” she asked, turning so I could take her all in. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a complicated French braid, and she wore a pearl necklace and matching earrings.
I suddenly wanted to give her a different type of pearl necklace.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” I replied, reaching for her. “Maybe we should stay home and see how fast I can get you out of that dress.”
She grabbed my hands, preventing them from snaking around her body to attack her zipper. “We’re going. I’m excited to meet your family.”
Her gaze met mine and I stared into her big brown eyes, seeing all the love and determination I’d grown accustomed to from her. Right then, I knew she was it for me. “I love you,” I blurted out. I’d known I loved her for a while now, but finally felt like we’d reached the point in our relationship where divulging that information wouldn’t make her run for the hills. This woman was everything I’d ever wanted, and she needed to know how I felt.
Besides, if my family scared her off, this could be my last chance to tell her.
Her eyes softened and started to water. “I love you, too, Antonio.”
Hearing her say the words unleashed something wild and carnal inside me. I wanted to take her right there and then. I didn’t care that we’d be late if we didn’t leave in three minutes, I wanted to claim her and make sure she knew she was mine. I kissed her lips and she opened her mouth to me, inviting me in. My hands enveloped her and roamed back to the zipper of her dress.
Laughing, she pulled away. “Think you’re slick, don’t you?”
“I know I can make you slick. It’s not too late to stay home and fuck like rabbits.” I waggled my eyebrows at her.
“Tempting. But I want to impress your family and make them fall in love with me, not piss them off by bailing.”
“Fine.”
Since Jessica was dressed up, we took her car. Some song came on the radio and she turned it up, singing along to the lyrics. She was slightly off-tune, and laughed as she got tongue-tied and fucked up the words, but she didn’t seem to care. Once again, I marveled at how far her confidence had come since we’d first gotten together. She’d always been this amazing, incredible, sexy woman, and I felt honored to be the man standing by her side as she was realizing it.
Just driving with her was a blast. I swear, it was like every moment together was better than the last. Although I was nervous about her meeting my family, I was also excited about taking this next step in our relationship. It felt monumentally right.
Then we pulled up in front of my parent’s house and everything went to shit.
Jessica
I DON’T KNOW what I’d been expecting when Spade opened his parents’ front door and ushered me inside, but chaos was what I found. Over the past few days, Spade had been telling me about his family to prepare me for this visit, so I knew the teenager with tears streaming down her face as she latched onto him was Rosalie.
“It’s Tio!” she cried to her brother. “He fell. Mom called nine-one-one, and Dad’s giving him CPR.”
Spade’s expression went blank. Patting her back and holding her against him, he asked, “Where are they?”
“The den.”
The two of them took off. Unsure of what to do, I followed. We hurried past the kitchen and living room down to a small sunken second living room set up like a studio apartment, complete with a bed, television, dresser, and recliner. The space was crowded with what appeared to be Spade’s entire family. A girl who had to be Abril was hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her heels beside Maria who was clutching a rosary and muttering prayers. Felipe and Miguel stood on the other side of the girls, their eyes full of worry and anguish at what they saw.
Between the legs of the siblings, I could see a body lying on the floor.
“He’s still not breathing. How far away is the ambulance?” a beautiful short Hispanic woman asked. Her dark graying hair was tied back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck and she had a phone in one hand, and a rosary in the other. Spade’s mom, Maritza.
“Soon,” a male voice announced over the speaker phone. “They’re about three minutes away. Have your husband continue the chest compressions.”
A siren in the distance grew steadily louder, and I silently prayed it was the ambulance while catching glimpses of Spade’s dad as his head bobbed up and down.
“Want me to take over?” Spade asked.
The next thing I knew, Spade disappeared and his father, Javier, stood and wrapped his arm around Maritza. I looked from one face to the next, seeing fear, anxiety, and helplessness. Rosalie sidled up next to me, and tears continued to pool in her big brown eyes and race down her beautiful face.
“I don’t want Tio to die,” she whispered, her lips quivering.
I’d somehow disassociated myself with what was going on until that moment. Spade’s great uncle was dying. I hadn’t even gotten to meet the man, and his life was ebbing away. The realization hit me like a freight train, and I stumbled back and put my hands to my mouth. I didn’t want to be here for this. It was too much.
“He’s gonna die, isn’t he?”
I didn’t want to be here, but this wasn’t about me. This was about Spade and his family, and this sweet little girl who was losing someone important to her. Feeling the sting of my own tears building, I opened my arms, inviting her to cry on my shoulder. She collapsed against me, sobbing.
Then the paramedics arrived. They rushed in, sweeping us all aside to give them room to work. Feeling like I was already invading this private family moment, I stepped back further, wishing I could somehow shield Rosalie from what was happening.
The team of paramedics fired off procedures to one another. “Two hundred joules.” There was a high-pitched noise. “I’m clear, you’re clear, we’re all clear!”
They were trying to jump start his heart. The realization brought more tears to my eyes. I turned Rosalie away, wishing there was more I could do.