I straightened his desk, turned off the computer, and emptied the outbox, carrying correspondence and paperwork he’d already dealt with to my desk where I could file it in the morning. Then back to his office, washed out his coffee cup and the tumbler from which he’d been drinking his whiskey. It wasn’t like Ox to drink that heavily, but I knew this pending lawsuit was hanging heavy over his head. I didn’t understand the implications completely, but I knew that several retired cops who’d helped his father start Caballo years ago were suing Ox personally, claiming he’d cut them out of profits the company had made since his father’s death.
I knew Ox. I’d worked for him for four years, since he took over from his father. I started at Caballo straight out of high school, planning to go to school at night while working during the day, getting my degree in art history and moving on to a cool job at some museum or something. But things never really go the way you plan them, you know? I thought I’d hate being a glorified secretary, but it turned out that I really liked Ox, I really enjoyed running the office, and I loved all the people I worked with on a daily basis. As much as I still wanted to go to school, I was okay with delaying it for a while.
I knew Ox. I knew he didn’t intentionally cut anyone out of anything. This whole lawsuit was bogus and the world would know that sooner rather than later. And I knew that, whatever else was going on, it wasn’t Ox’s fault and he would fix that, too. That’s what he did: he fixed things. That’s why he was so good at this business and why so many of his clients trusted him. This was going to be okay. Everything would be okay.
I set his coffee cup back on the desk and checked once more to be sure everything was arranged the way he liked it. When I returned to my own desk, I finished up the report I’d been writing when I’d finally decided it was time to chase Ox home, and emailed it to the appropriate people, then shut down my machine. Everything placed in proper order, it was time for me to go home, too.
Traffic was minimal at this time of night, which was one perk of staying late at the office. I turned on the radio and sang along with some popular pop song, trying to remember what was in the fridge back at my little one-bedroom condo. Not much. It’d been a few days since I’d been to the store. I pulled into a grocery store, grabbed a package of thin steaks, a couple of good baking potatoes, and a bag of premixed greens for a salad.
Prescott would be home tonight.
I reached into the glove box before leaving my car, sliding out the narrow box that held my simple gold wedding ring. Wouldn’t Ox have to eat a hell of a lot of crow if he saw this? I might not be expecting a child anytime soon, but I was married. Had been for nearly twenty months now. It seemed almost surreal when I thought about it in those terms, but it was the truth. It would be two years a week or so after Halloween.
Two years. Wow!
Snagging my grocery bags, I let myself into the condo and dumped the bags on the kitchen counter.
“Prescott? Are you here?”
I stepped into the living room, but it was as dark and quiet as I’d left it. Up the stairs, but the bedroom was empty, too. He wasn’t home yet.
I turned on the fire beneath the stovetop grill, allowing it to heat up while I seasoned the steaks, loving the sound of the sizzle as I dropped them on the heat. The potatoes, covered in kosher salt and wrapped in tinfoil, went into the oven. And the salad in a lovely wooden bowl my mother had given me when I first moved out. It would be a nice dinner. Prescott would appreciate it after being on an operation for the last three weeks.
We met at Caballo. He was from Hereford, England and he had this wonderful accent that I could listen to all day long. He came to the States to go to school, but ended up wandering the country until he wound up at Caballo, working security for Ox. And I was glad he did. He and I had begun at Caballo at about the same time, and getting to know him had been one of the reasons I loved my job so much!
Mrs. Prescott Armstrong. Who would ever imagine I would snag such a good-looking, kind, gentle man? Not my parents, that’s for sure. My mother always said I’d be lucky to find a man who could put up with my unique sense of style. And my stepdad… well, he was never home long enough to have an opinion.
Dinner ready, I set plates on the table and arranged the food, fussing over it like it was Thanksgiving rather than just a weeknight meal. I settled in my chair and played with my smartphone, waiting for Prescott to arrive. I knew he was at the office just an hour before I left. He must have stopped by a friend’s or something on the way home. He did that sometimes.
A voicemail I’d forgotten about drew my attention. I pressed the appropriate numbers and held the phone to my ear to hear the message:
“Skylar, this is Tamara Olen. I have a few concerns about your grandmother that I was hoping we could discuss. Could you call me back at the office? You know the number.”
I frowned. Tamara was my paternal great-grandmother’s lawyer. My dad had died when I was five, while serving in Afghanistan. I don’t remember much about him, but my great-gran told me about him as much as she could. She and I are all that’s left of that side of the family. Great-Gran had two kids, but one died at birth and the other, my grandfather, died when my dad was a toddler. Great-Gran raised him, supporting him in everything he did except for one: Great-Gran never liked my mother. They never found common ground, never learned to get along. The only reason my mother allowed me to spend time with Great-Gran was because I ran away to get to her one summer when I was thirteen and my mother announced she couldn’t fight us both. I also think it had something to do with the fact that Great-Gran had provided my mother with a little bit of bribery money.
I wondered what it was that Tamara wanted to talk to me about. Great-Gran was getting on in years. She was close to eighty-five now. But she had a great caretaker and good friends. She always seemed well and in good spirits when we had our Friday afternoon phone calls. What could her lawyer possibly be concerned about?
The front door opened then slammed. Prescott appeared through the archway that led into the living room. He dropped his big, heavy duffle bag on the floor and bypassed the dining table, dropping onto the couch with a hard sigh.
“How’d your operation go?” I asked.
“As expected.”
He grabbed the controller for his game system and turned the television on, involved within seconds in some game that included lots of violent sound effects. I got up and sat beside him, watching dark, gritty figures walk carefully through a rusted old ship as they looked for monsters to shoot at.
“I made dinner. I thought you might like something homemade after being gone so long.”
“Thanks, Sky,” he said, maneuvering his game controller to take out some sort of demon-looking thing. “I’ll eat it here in a sec.”
“Can I get you anything else?”
“A beer would be really swell.” He leaned over and touched his shoulder to mine. “Thanks, kid.”
I stood and retrieved the beer for him, setting his plate of food on the coffee table in front of him. He didn’t even look up as I returned to the dining-room table and ate my food alone. I washed up the dishes and headed upstairs, passing and then returning to his duffle, hauling it upstairs with me. I sorted out his clothes, tossing the dirties into the wash and rehanging the suit he rarely wore but always took just in case, before putting the duffle away in a corner of the massive walk-in closet we shared. Then I drew a bath, wondering what it would be like to have a real marriage, a real husband, a real lover.
The thing was, Prescott had married me because he had to, not because he wanted to. For him, this arrangement was just a thing of convenience.
Nearly two years ago, Prescott had perched on the side of my desk and turned that charming smile on me, the one that made me melt all over. He looked like Sam Claflin and sounded like Tom Hardy, a combination that was just too much to resist. From the moment we met, all he had to do was look at me to make me blush. I’d waited two years for him to notice me and when he finally
did, my heart stopped and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Let me take you to dinner. I know this great little Italian place down the road…”
It had sounded like a date. It had felt like a date. It had even acted like a date.
He’d shown up at my door with a dozen roses and a big smile, that suit he hated so much hanging from his broad shoulders with just the right sort of fit, his dark hair brushed back from his face and his broad jaw freshly shaven. He’d opened the car door for me, deferred to my taste in music on the radio, even asked if I liked red or white wine. It was all so perfect. But then, at my door, instead of a kiss, there was a request:
“I need a favor and you’re the only girl I can trust in this place…”
His student visa had long expired and the INS had figured things out. They wanted to send him back to England and it would be months, maybe even a year, before he could arrange to return legally. He needed a way to stay and he’d exhausted all his other options. Marriage was the only choice he had.
“Marry me. It’s only for two years, then I’ll give you a divorce and it’ll be like it never happened.”
Silly me; I’d thought that once I had this ring on my finger, I could woo him with my charms and convince him I was the woman of his dreams. That’s why I’d agreed. I’d have a man I could show off to my family, a man who would treat me with respect and affection, a man who would fill this void there’d been in my life. I’d been alone since the day I was born, practically. My mother never wanted kids. She’d had me to trap my father—according to my great-gran—and had lost interest as soon as I interfered in her party-girl lifestyle. My dad was, by all accounts—not just Great-Grandmother’s—a doting father who thought the sun rose and set in my eyes. But his death and my mother’s subsequent re-marriage had left me with this hole, this sense of not belonging, of being in the way. I thought marrying Prescott might fix that.
It didn’t.
I turned off the water and undressed, sliding into the warm bubbles with a sigh. If only I hadn’t been so eager. I’d arranged everything: the justice of the peace, the license… I’d even arranged for a friend to create these photographs that made us look like the happiest couple to ever say I do. I’d invited him to live in my home, made room for him in the closet, patiently taught him everything there was to know about me and listened to his life story with more than just patience, with true interest and fascination. And when the INS had come to check out our story, to make sure we weren’t trying to pull the wool over their eyes, I’d been the perfect wife.
I’d made it too easy.
Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t taken the reins, if I’d forced Prescott to fight a little. It seemed to me that everything came to him easily. His parents weren’t wealthy, but they were comfortable. He’d had a perfectly lovely childhood, went to all the right schools and had all the popular toys. When he’d wanted to go to university, his parents had been happy to send him to London. When he’d wanted to do an exchange program with a university in New York, not only was he accepted, he was given a full scholarship. When he’d applied for his student visa, he’d received it weeks ahead of his fellow students. And when he’d decided he wanted a change, he’d fallen in with a group of guys who were already planning to tour the States, willing to allow their wealthy parents to foot the bill, including all of Prescott’s expenses. And when he’d arrived in San Antonio, out of cash and out of luck, he’d happened to fall into a job with Caballo, using skills learned in theater to con a conman into giving himself up and saving a case that had begun to go south. It just seemed it all came too easy to Prescott. He’d never had to fight for anything.
And here I was, just joining a long line of people who handed Prescott the world. Why should he notice me? In four months we’d be divorced, and it’d be like none of this ever happened.
No one at work even knew we were married because Prescott thought it would be easier that way—fewer questions to answer when the marriage came to an end. The only people who knew were the INS and my diary.
But I knew.
I lifted a leg and ran my hand over the bubbles, rubbing the silky things into my skin. I knew we were married. I knew we’d shared my condo for the better part of two years. Yeah, Prescott was gone for weeks at a time when he was on an operation, and, yeah, he slept downstairs on the couch. But we shared the closet and the bathroom, his things mingling with mine just in case the INS decided to conduct a surprise inspection. We shared a home, the occasional meal, even a few rides home from work. We shared a life. I thought… But clearly that wasn’t the reality.
I was a stupid girl. Married to a man who didn’t see me, paying the bills and making his life easier, but getting nothing in return. I couldn’t even show him off and take pride in the appearance of our marriage if not in the reality of it. I was getting absolutely nothing out of this and it was my fault. All my fault.
Ox was right. I had no life outside of that damn office!
Chapter 2
Prescott
“What kind of a name is Prescott, anyway? Are you from Australia?”
“No, darling,” I said, deepening my accent as much as I could, aware of what it did to a woman’s resolve. “I’m from England.”
“Hmm, like The Beatles?”
“Exactly like The Beatles.”
The woman smiled, her sticky lips spreading but not growing any thinner. In fact, they were still quite full, the kind of lips that would look beautiful wrapped around a man’s—
“Prescott!”
I glanced over my shoulder, surprised, and deeply irritated, to see Skylar coming toward me. The office mother hen, she was dressed in a perfectly schoolmarm type of outfit: a green-and-black tartan skirt with pale-blue tights and an Aran-style cardigan that was bright red. Her hair was pulled back into a messy bun, decorated by way of a silk scarf she had knotted around the center of the bun that then hung down her back, longer than her hair when it was left down. It was such a combination of colors and shapes and sizes that she looked like a doll some child had attempted to dress in the dark. The only saving grace was the dark eyeliner that was actually quite a nice accent to her pale-blue eyes.
“Who’s that?” the woman I’d been chatting up asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
I pushed away from the bar and met Skylar halfway, touching her arm to push her back away from my quarry.
“What are you doing here, Sky?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked up at me. She used to like it when I called her Sky, but lately I’d gotten this look more and more, a sort of irritated, do-you-even-know-my-name sort of look. Made me wonder what I’d done to make that little bit of expectation disappear from her pretty eyes.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No, it can’t.”
“Well, what’s it about?”
She glanced around the place, noting the quickly filling tables and basic business attire of the other patrons. I caught her glancing down at her own clothing before looking back up at me. “Can’t we go somewhere quieter?” she asked in a loud whisper.
“I was in the middle of something. Maybe you can just spit it out.”
“It’s personal.”
“Yeah, well, I was engaged in some personal stuff I’d like to get back to. So spit it out, darling.”
Her eyes narrowed again. I couldn’t remember a single time when she’d looked at me with that bit of disapproval before I’d convinced her to marry me. It was a little unnerving, to be honest. I didn’t like it when people weren’t happy with me. I was an easygoing guy and I liked to be liked. And Skylar had initially been one of those who would turn to jelly every time I walked by. I liked it that way. This new Skylar was a little unnerving.
“I need to go out of town for a while. My great-gran… she called and asked me to come visit.”
“You want me to house-sit? Shouldn’t be
a problem. Things are slow right now and Ox said I likely won’t have a new operation for a week or so.”
“That’s not it. I… I need you to—”
“Hey, sweetheart!”
The blonde I’d been talking to at the bar came up behind me and slid her hand up my back, a promising sign if I’d ever seen one. I turned into her and carefully drew her into my arms, smiling at the slight pucker of her lips. She was ripe and ready to go.
“Excuse us. We were having a conversation,” Skylar announced.
“Who are you?” the blonde demanded, her eyes skating over Skylar and dismissing her like she had little to do with anything. “Come back to the bar, sweetheart. I want to finish our conversation.”
“You should go,” Skylar said, pulling the woman’s hand from my chest. “He doesn’t have time for this right now.”
“You better back the hell off, bitch!” the blonde announced, moving between Skylar and me in order to get into Skylar’s face. “I saw him first.”
“No, sweetheart, you didn’t. I’m his wife.”
The woman paled, then began to laugh.
I really wished she hadn’t started to laugh.
“You have to be fucking kidding me! Someone like you married a man who looks like him? What’d you do, trick him into knocking you up?”
“Okay,” I said, grabbing the blonde’s upper arm and jerking her back a few steps, “that’s enough of this. Go back to your drink.”
“She’s not serious, is she?” the woman asked, staring up at me with wide, slightly drunk eyes. “She’s not your wife!”
“She is, actually. And I can’t let you insult her that way.”
The woman’s brown eyes narrowed as anger flashed in them like fire in a darkened room. “You’re married, and you were chatting me up? Do you think I’m some sort of slut or something?”
Caballo Security Box Set Page 47