I think anyone would take that deal.
Even if a killer got away with their crime in the process.
"Something like that," he agreed. "I'm sorry that you have to go through this. I know this is weighing you down."
"It's a lot," I admitted. "But I will come to grips with it eventually."
"I will be right here with you through it," he assured me, pressing his lips to mine softly, sweetly.
"Hey, lovebirds," Nia called from outside the door, making us almost comically break apart. "I have tea and coffee and a change of clothes. Quin is going to be here in half an hour to tell us how things are going to go. Oh, and he has some words for Lincoln as well."
"Is it sad that I am more freaked out about Quin finding out about us than your father?"
"My father will just be happy that you aren't covered in face tattoos with gauges in your ears, reeking of pot all the time."
"Well, your exes didn't exactly set the bar high for me, huh?" he asked, smile beaming as he got to his feet, reaching down to help me onto mine.
"And your aunt already likes me."
"We're off to a great start," he said, handing me a towel.
"Yeah," I agreed, smiling at his back as he slipped out of his soaked boxer briefs. "We are off to a great start."
And I had a feeling it was only going to get better from here.
EPILOGUE
Lincoln - 2 weeks
It was the day I had been dreading since she'd first proposed it.
It had a lot to do with the fact that while Gemma aced her written test, she failed her road test for her license five times before the DMV finally tossed one at her, likely just feeling bad for her.
She wasn't a menace behind the wheel, but she wasn't a good driver either. She had a heavy foot on both the gas and the brake. She sometimes looked with her whole car instead of her head.
And she was cashing in on a promise I'd made.
To let her get behind the wheel of one of my precious cars, ones that cost a small fortune, that I never let anyone drive before.
"You're sure you don't want a helmet?" Bellamy asked, lifting a brow.
"I want bubble wrap for my whole car," I admitted, stomach in a knot.
I'd happily give this woman a lot of things.
A place in my life.
A side of my closet.
A kidney if she found herself in need of one.
But giving her the key fob I had been gripping a bit desperately for the past hour as she skipped down the street to grab brunch with her sister and a couple of their cousins--the ones who weren't huge fans of me since I'd once accidentally hit on them both--yeah, I couldn't even pretend to say I was doing this happily.
I was doing it because I made a promise. Once I did that, I stuck to it. A man was nothing if you couldn't trust his word.
So I was going to let her drive my Camaro. And pray we all made it through in one piece.
"Here they come," Bellamy said, enjoying this way too fucking much. "Hey, look. She's bringing a drink. One pothole, and that will be all over your interior--"
"Don't you have a plane to catch or something?"
"It'll wait."
Of course it would.
It was his own damn plane.
"Sorry I'm late," Gemma said, going up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to my cheek.
"Because of straws," Jules explained, sighing.
"Straws?" Bellamy asked.
"It was totally not my fault. I was taking my reusable straw out of my bag," Gemma explained, taking a sip from the metal thing she carried with her everywhere, along with bamboo cutlery in case she might ever need them to avoid using a toss away version. "And some guy decided to come up and lecture me about how big corporations are the worst polluters. As if I don't know that. It doesn't mean that turtles aren't dying from the straws, y'know? Corporate oversight doesn't mean we don't have personal responsibilities too."
"How long of a lecture was it?" I asked, looking over at Jules.
"And was he crying when she was done?" Bellamy asked.
"That only happened once!" Gemma sighed. "I am never going to live it down, am I? But, I mean, who the hell wears fur anymore? Who wakes up, goes to their closet, and decides Hey, I want to wear the flesh of an animal today! Ugh. Anyway, it wasn't that long of a lecture."
"And by 'Not long,' she means twenty minutes," Jules clarified.
"He was interested!"
"He was shell-shocked. I'm surprised she didn't drag out that turtle getting a straw pulled out of his nose."
"At this point, everyone has seen it. They just don't care," Gemma added, eyes sad.
Soft, soft soul.
"What do you have there?" I asked, looking at her aluminum container. It could be water, if I was lucky.
"Vanilla soy latte."
Oh, fuck.
I had a feeling the smell of that would be impossible to get out of the carpets.
"Which is going to stay with me," Jules informed us, taking it from her sister's hand.
Thank you, I mouthed to her, watching as she shot me a small smile.
"You two have fun. Gemma, if you could avoid your usual curb-checks, I'm sure Lincoln will appreciate it," she added, making her way back into the office.
"I'm not that bad of a driver," Gemma insisted, pouting a little at being ganged up on.
"Yeah, man. Not too bad. She's only had like three fender-benders."
"Two of those were not my fault," Gemma told him, giving him small eyes. "Okay, come on. No more procrastinating. I want to drive your car," she told me, walking over toward the driver's side.
"Can I ask you something," I said as I got into the passenger side--a place I'd never sat before--as she fiddled with the seat settings, trying to adjust them and the mirrors to suit her slightly different height.
"Shoot," she agreed, grimacing as she flicked off my radio station.
"Why do you want to drive my car?"
Everyone knew she wasn't a fan of cars, that she only saw them as means of transport, not something to particularly enjoy, just a daily functionality. Loving something like a car, to Gemma, was similar to loving your water heater.
"Your cars are important to you. And, well, we both know they aren't to me. But I wanted to get a chance to see what it is you like so much about it. I figured the best way to do that was to drive it myself. Looking at them hasn't really done much of anything for me."
That was, well, incredibly sweet.
"That's nice, Gem, but you don't have to like everything that I like. Just like I can't like everything that you do."
To that, she cast a smirk in my direction. "You barely gave yoga a try."
"Babe, I literally fell onto my head. I don't even know how it happened."
"There's a learning curve."
"And I said I would give it one more try. But if I don't like it, that's okay. And if you do this and don't like it, that's okay too. We can have separate interests."
Lord knew there was no way in hell I was going to be all gung-ho about her wheatgrass shots or morning meditation.
"Okay. Ready?" she asked, satisfied with her adjustments.
God no.
"As I'll ever be."
"Oh, God," she shrieked when a tap of her big toe sent the car searching forward. "Okay. Um. Yeah. I don't like this."
"Baby, you drove ten feet," I told her, smiling.
"Yeah, ah, I don't think I want to do this anymore. It has a life of its own," she added, voice a little rough.
I couldn't keep the laugh in at that. "Okay. How about I take us on a drive? You can check out the foliage and shit." I'd never seen someone who got quite the kick out of the changing seasons as she did.
"That sounds like a much better plan," she agreed, practically falling over herself to get out of the driver's seat and into the passenger's.
"Better?" I asked, feeling much better in the driver's seat after having spent a moment restoring all my settings.
"Mu
ch better," she agreed, reaching over to place her hand over mine on the gearshift, giving it a squeeze.
With that, we took off.
She cooed over the trees.
I got to be in control over my car with my woman at my side.
It was the perfect fucking afternoon.
"Hey!" she shrieked, jerking forward in her seat.
"What?" I asked, tense.
"Someone is breaking into my car!" she yelled, jabbing a finger out the window toward where her car was parked on the street a few feet from the entrance to the office.
She was both right and wrong.
Yes, her car door was open. And, yes, someone was inside of it.
But no one was trying to rob her.
Nope.
Someone was trying to help her.
I could barely even put the car into park before she was charging out. Armed with, I don't know, her good nature.
I had no idea what she thought she was going to say to him if he actually turned out to be a burglar.
Climbing out, I heard her declare to the man's back that he was in her car.
She missed it.
The smell.
The scent that was always attached to a certain someone we both knew. Industrial cleaners, a hint of lemon, bleach.
She also missed the black bag full of garbage. And the caddy full of cleaning supplies.
At the sound of her voice, Finn's body pulled out of the car, looking over at her.
"I couldn't sleep."
He didn't mean at the moment. Seeing as we were in the middle of the day. He meant that he had been struggling to sleep every single night since he'd first seen the disaster area.
Honestly, he'd shown a miracle amount of self control in holding off this long. Clearly, it had been eating at him until he couldn't take it anymore.
Now, it could be somewhat shocking when you found that Finn had broken into your home--or car--and cleaned the hell out of it. It wasn't even unusual to feel upset, judged, or invaded upon.
That said, though, this was Gemma we were talking about, someone who was soft and gentle with people, with their individual issues.
"Oh, that sucks," she told him. "But thank you so much for channeling it into helping me with this mess. I know it had to be a lot of work."
"I like the work," Finn assured her.
It was nothing but the truth. When shit was getting to Finn, when his head was an ugly place, the only thing that helped was throwing himself into a cleaning project.
Sometimes, he lucked out in that there was a job to handle, something that required laser focus to make sure he got every little bit of blood or skin of saliva gone so that it couldn't implicate a client.
When his head was a battleground, he found other ways to get those bad feelings out.
So, occasionally, he would break into one of our homes, clean away silently for hours while we were off on jobs, or simply sleeping a floor above.
It was something we had gotten used to, being a part of his world, understanding how he couldn't help himself.
Thankfully, Gemma was part of the team, understood him, wasn't going to make a big deal out of it.
"It looks amazing."
"I should have asked."
"No, you shouldn't have," she corrected, shaking her head. "In fact, anytime you can't sleep and want to clean something of mine, you're welcome to. I love cooking. But I hate cleaning."
"I hate cooking."
"Then you can clean for me, I can cook for you. It is a perfect friendship," she added, giving him a huge smile that made the tension slide out of his shoulders.
I had no idea what the future held for any of us, but I knew for sure one thing--it would be better with Gemma in it.
Gemma - 3 weeks
I was up early.
It wasn't unusual anymore.
Bad dreams had a tendency to come regularly still. I had a feeling they would be part of my life for quite a while. I couldn't claim I was getting used to it, that it didn't bother me. The truth was that I knifed up in bed out of the nightmares, heart racing, soul aching, with bile rising up in my throat.
It took a long while to deep breathe through it, to get the images to float away, to bank down all the physical symptoms.
I was getting better at handling it, at least.
The first week and a half, when they came, I had to wake up Lincoln, ask him to hold me, stroke my hair, make me feel less alone in it.
Now, though, I was able to ground myself, bring myself back to the present.
They bothered me.
They seemed to show no signs of slowing.
But I was handling it.
That was all you could do when a situation was beyond your control--find a way of dealing with the emotions, make yourself keep moving forward.
Sometimes, I could go back to bed after. Others, I had to get up, do some yoga, or meditate. Others still, like early this morning, I couldn't seem to get my mind to relax again. So I got up. I got my day started.
Some days, that meant I started to prep food. Others, it meant I continued on my job search.
But this morning, this one was special.
This was Lincoln's birthday.
And my chance to make one of his dreams come true.
It was something really special, I thought, to know you had the power to do that for someone. Like when a newly signed professional football player paid off their single mom's mortgage. Or when your parent fulfilled your dreams of going to Disneyland.
My heart was overflowing as I quietly assembled everything I would need, started mixing and flipping and setting the island.
Then, finally, just as I was uncovering it all, there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
My smile was huge as he moved into the kitchen, eyes bleary from sleep, a little unfocused, definitely not expecting the spread before him.
My man wanted pancakes.
And, well, my man got pancakes.
Short stacks of every variety I could think of. Blueberry, strawberry, banana, chocolate, rum, pumpkin, red velvet, peanut butter, Nutella, and plain old buttermilk.
I'd also made some fresh-squeezed orange juice and picked up six different kinds of syrup.
"Happy birthday!" I cheered, watching as the shock got replaced with pure freaking joy. When that look was aimed at me, it nearly brought me to my knees.
"You're amazing," he told me, shaking his head. "I don't know what the fuck I have done to deserve you, but I'm so glad you're mine," he added, moving toward me, wrapping me up, pressing a kiss--long, deep--to my lips before pulling away. "Could kiss you all day, but, well, we can't let all these pancakes go cold, can we?" he asked, practically bouncing over to load some onto his plate.
Sitting across from him, I watched as he plowed through about half of each of the piles before declaring he couldn't do anymore. But that we had to put them away to have for dinner.
"This was the best birthday ever," he declared, as we got into bed later that night after he did, indeed, plow through the rest of those pancakes, then got serenaded by all our friends and family over ice cream cake. I was half surprised he wasn't waddling by the end of the day.
He then burned off some of those calories with me until both our bodies were spent and useless.
It was the first night that the nightmares didn't come.
Lincoln - 1 year
Gemma was a simple woman.
She got joy from our little daily interactions.
She was not someone for whom grand romantic gestures were necessary or expected.
Which made planning one all the more important to me.
The best part was that she suspected nothing. Because the cover was big enough that it didn't seem like I could possibly be planning something bigger to go along with it.
I was taking her to Jamaica to meet my father.
From there, I was going to ask her to marry me.
I'd had the ring for almost two months. And, quite frankly, it
was hard at times not to just get down on a knee and ask her to marry me when she did something sweet. Which, with Gemma, was damn near daily.
But I convinced myself that while she wasn't someone who expected grand gestures, that she would be all the more floored by one.
So I resisted the urge, I tucked the ring inside my shaving kit, buried that deep inside my other luggage, and kept planning.
Everyone was in on it.
Literally everyone.
The guys and girls from the office, her parents, my aunt, my father.
Because many of them were coming.
Jules, Kai, her parents, my aunt.
For most people, an engagement was a very personal thing. But I knew Gemma well enough to know that she always wanted her loved ones in on all her big news. It would kill her to be a plane ride away from them when she would want to celebrate it with them.
So they would be heading out two days after we landed and got settled.
My family on the island had been helping me with arrangements on their end, scouting out the best places, sending me pictures, letting me know when we could find seclusion and when it was busy. They also twisted an arm or two to get us an overwater villa even though they were almost impossible to come by on such short notice. They figured--and I had to agree--that after an engagement, we would want some time alone to celebrate personally instead of being in my father's place.
It was all set up.
Now I just had to get Gemma there.
She was unexpectedly nervous about the flight.
Which was sweet.
Gemma generally wasn't a nervous person. She got nerves, of course, but she always seemed to be able to talk herself down almost immediately.
Like the day she finally found her dream job at a local park, overseeing the planting program, teaching classes at the learning center on the premises to class field trips, helping the next generation get excited about the environment, and then had to go in for the interview.
She got it, of course.
Everyone who met Gemma fell a little bit in love with her.
And since I got most of her, I was happy to share her a bit with the world.
"I don't know why I can't stop talking," she admitted when we finally got to our gate after what felt like a lifetime of going through security.
The Middle Man Page 20