by Christa Wick
Momentarily forgetting I was one of the men Gaia wanted to avoid, I took a step in her direction.
Her hand dug deeper into her pocket, halting me. She hadn't noticed me, not yet, but something had caught her attention. My fingers curled into fists. If anyone had followed her out of the club—anyone but me—they were in for one hell of a surprise. And if they planned to hurt her, they were in for a world of pain they could never have imagined.
Out came Gaia's hand, loose change spilling onto the sidewalk as a city bus pulled into view. Realizing she had only been reaching for her fare and that I was about to lose her, I made a quick note of the bus number as she boarded.
If I couldn't find another nearby stop, I would at least know part of her route. I could eliminate certain transfers by the late hour, but that left open a lot of city blocks to cover.
I pulled my phone out and hit the map I had looked at earlier to find the club. I tapped the phone's built in assistant.
"Show bus routes."
The screen lit up with numbers. I found the one that had just stopped and traced the streets for its next stop.
I had nine blocks to cover. For all the advantage in speed the bus had over me, it had two lights to deal with, one of them a left turn. If the lights went my way and I took an alley shortcut, I could beat the bus to the next stop.
Shoving my phone back into my pocket, I glanced down out of habit to double check the laces on my boots. Then I was off, running faster than I had since my world started falling apart a year before.
Fortunately I was used to running like my life depended on it. And I didn't mind risking a broken arm by shoving it inside the closing door of the bus as the last waiting passenger paid their fare and the driver started to pull away.
The driver let me jog about a dozen steps, my gaze casting around for some foothold as the bus accelerated. Then the sadistic bastard opened the door, his eyes glittering with spite.
I would have spilled onto the street, maybe even under one of the bus's tires, but I had already gripped the interior handrail. I jerked myself onto the first step then bounded up to the fare box.
The driver looked nervously at me from the side of his eye as I inserted two singles.
If he was expecting me to make a scene over his dragging me, he was out of luck. I didn't want Gaia noticing me. That's the first rule of reconnaissance—be invisible or blend in if invisibility is impossible.
I walked down the center aisle until I passed the dancer. She had a small tablet out, her attention focused on the display. A thin cord emerged from the bottom hem of her hoodie to plug into the device.
Choosing the row just behind her, I sat down on the opposite side of the aisle.
Text filled the screen of her tablet, the words too small despite my 20/20 vision. I wondered what held her attention so completely. Fact or fiction? Boring textbook for some college class or a steamy romance that had her toes secretly curling in her sneakers?
Maybe she wasn't absorbed in the text at all. Maybe pretending to read so intently was just another shield against the people she encountered getting to and from her job at Tuttle's.
Shifting in my seat, I forced myself to stop looking at her. Even if she didn't notice, someone else on the bus might alert her to the fact that I hadn't taken my eyes off her since I sat down three stops back. It would only take one overly concerned rider and my reconnaissance mission would be done.
Two stops later, she lifted her head, took note of the buildings around us and moved to the front of the bus. As the bus pulled away from the curb, I switched my seat to one closer to the center exit.
When she got off, I got off, my head down and my feet turning in the opposite direction of hers so that if she glanced at me, she would see only the back of a man walking away.
Fifteen steps later, I looked over my shoulder. There was nothing but empty sidewalk from where I stood to the intersection. I pivoted and quick timed it to the corner. Figuring she didn't have time to cross either street, I looked to my immediate right and was rewarded by her fluffy figure bouncing up the steps of a large, gray brick building.
I waited for Gaia to disappear inside before I approached the steps. I expected to find an apartment building or, given the derelict nature of the street, the kind of place that rented rooms with small refrigerators and hotplates and let its clientele pay in measures of time as short as thirty minutes.
What I didn't expect as I looked at the sign above the entrance was to find myself at the threshold of a homeless shelter.
A shelter exclusively for teens.
I drew my hand away from the door handle as fast as if I had touched fire.
Had I just been ogling a minor?
Was that why Paulie didn't set a drink quota or force her to do lap dances?
I shook my head, ejecting the possibility like a spent cartridge from a rifle.
Gaia looked fresh and young, but not that young. She kept her makeup light, which aged her less than the other dancers in appearance. But no club owner would risk prison by letting a teen dance topless in his club. And no dancer who worked eighteen sets a week and scooped up as many tips as I had seen her collect right before I left needed to spend her nights at a homeless shelter.
I was missing something—something obvious. I just needed to clear my head, which meant I had to rid myself of her intoxicating presence long enough to figure everything out.
3
Wylie
For a full week, I stayed away from the club and the shelter despite a strong impulse to find out everything I could about Gaia. I spent the time organizing the hoarder's nest I had inherited when my mother, Martha, passed away two years ago while I was on active duty.
The house had four bedrooms, plus a large study, in addition to all the regular rooms found in a home. There were four bedrooms because Martha and Roger—mom and dad—had hoped for more than one child.
With several failed pregnancies and no kids beyond me to fill the rooms, Roger had become a rescuer of books and a collector of both minerals and fishing gear. After his death six years ago, Martha closed off all the rooms except for the kitchen, living room, my old room and the bedroom she had shared with my father for forty-seven years.
After my mother's death, I had kept the utilities on and paid someone to come by once a month for basic maintenance and yard keeping. The last seven of those months I had been out of the Army but traveling around the country to erase some of the karmic debt I had accumulated while serving in the Middle East.
Wandering into my father's library with a clipboard in hand, I paused to think.
Was all that bad karma why I had turned instant stalker with Gaia? Did I want to rescue her and erase a little more of that debt?
I shook my head. Even if she needed rescuing, she couldn't be a surrogate for the dead members of my team or the families they had left behind. I needed to push her out of my mind for good and focus on the job at hand—which included over two-thousand paperbacks, one-hundred-seventy-five fishing poles, thousands of fishing lures, thirty-two tackle boxes and several collapsed displays of now unidentified mineral samples, their cards in several messy piles on top of the samples.
I had been tempted to pay someone to bag and box everything and take it straight to a charity shop for re-sale. Based on what I had already found in my father's collection, that would have been foolish.
And Martha Wylie had refused to raise a foolish child.
On the first day of sorting, a stupid lure carved as a frog had caught my eye. A little research revealed it to be a Friend-Pardee Kent Frog made in 1907 and worth six-thousand dollars. Then I found a Hardy Interchangeable Minnow (five-thousand dollars) still in its original box (another three-thousand dollars just for the box) and realized I might be sitting on a small fortune.
So the first four days had been cherry picking lures and books from the collections and packaging others up to send off for an appraisal. By my estimate, I already had a solid hundred-fifty-thousand d
ollars at wholesale from what I had identified, more if I could find buyers to sell to directly.
But none of the finds distracted me from the thought of Gaia for more than a few minutes. I was like a damn pendulum clock swinging back and forth between cataloging and packing the mementos of my parents' lives and mulling over the mystery that was Gaia and the root of my immediate and profound attraction to her.
Sinking into the only chair in the library not loaded with boxes of books, I tossed the clipboard aside and glanced at my watch.
Ten minutes past two in the afternoon was too early for Tuttle's.
But it was a perfect time to check out volunteer opportunities at the shelter.
4
Rhea
Jackson Coombs, director of Harbor House for Teens, found me working in the common room with a milk crate full of books that needed pages glued back in.
He came bearing a gift, or so he thought.
"Rhea, I have someone I want you to meet. A potential volunteer."
I finished attaching the bundle of pages to the line of glue I had just placed then looked up. An involuntary smile pushed at my lips, but I kept it in check as I studied the man standing next to Jackson.
The would-be volunteer looked like six feet of lithe muscle hiding inside a tucked in T-shirt and close fitting jeans. The tapered crew cut hinted at time in the military, if he wasn't still on active duty.
But it was the bright hazel eyes that really stuck out and hit me in the chest. They carried a natural "fuck me" command, their thick lashes and brows shaded the same dark black as the hair that populated his scalp.
I put the book down, my attention thoroughly captured for the moment. With both men silent, I realized I had better say something.
"Hi. I'm Rhea, one of the resident peer counselors."
Holding my hand out, I waited for the man to take it. He stared at it for several awkward seconds. I thought about pulling my hand back, but my time at Harbor House had taught me to make the extra effort in winning people over—that a stranger's reticence had far more to do with them than with me, especially with the kids coming in, many of them with undiagnosed spectrum disorders that impacted their interpersonal skills.
So, instead of withdrawing, I rotated my hand a few times, making a careful inspection of the flesh before announcing my verdict. "No glue, I promise."
Smiling, I pushed it toward him again and this time he pressed his palm against mine, the flesh pleasantly warm and dry. When his fingers squeezed lightly and the bright green and gold gaze intensified, I felt a current of need sizzle through my body, zapping at my nipples before exploding between my legs.
Startled by the unexpected need pulsing through me, I wanted to retreat immediately.
Whatever Jackson might think, this stranger was not volunteer material. He was too damn good looking and naturally magnetic to have around a bunch of hormonal, highly stressed teens. Given that so many of our kids were homeless because of their gender preferences, there would be as many boys swooning over him as girls.
Hell, he had my hormones flaring higher and hotter than I could ever remember and I considered myself immune to all that googly-eyed bullshit.
I mean, I had to be immune to insta-love crushes and everything deeper than that. Any guy I wanted to date would dump me like a dirty diaper if he found out I moonlighted as a topless dancer. My number one rule was to never let my guard down with a man.
My throat and sinuses started to clog with the realization I would die an old maid. I swallowed down all the angst I didn't have time for and tilted my head at Jackson because Mr. Tall, Dark and Mute didn't have good enough manners to introduce himself.
"Oh...yes...my bad," Jackson cleared his throat, slapping a thin manila folder against his thigh. "This is Captain Thomas Wylie—"
"Retired seven months ago," the man interrupted, his intense gaze still fixed on my face. "So just 'Wylie.'"
I nodded as Jackson handed me the folder.
"Mr. Wylie wasn't sure where his skills would fit in and...I thought...well..."
I tried not to smile as Jackson tap danced around the fact that, despite being hired into the shelter as its new director six months ago, he hadn’t yet figured out Harbor House's needs, at least when it came to staffing or dealing with the kids. If it was a number that could go in a spreadsheet, it was his friend. But humans were messy to him, something I noticed from our very first meeting.
Taking the folder from Jackson's hands, I turned my gaze to "don't call me Captain or Thomas" Wylie. Letting my boss off the hook and giving myself a promotion to a non-existent role, I gestured for the newcomer to take a seat at the work table.
"I'll find a spot for him," I answered quickly. "Don’t you worry."
My plan was to interrogate pretty boy long enough to convince him that he wasn't suited to volunteering at Harbor House.
I hated my plan.
It thoroughly sucked that I needed to reject him. We didn't get a lot of volunteers and we needed all we could get. But with Coombs gone, Wylie was already drawing too much attention among the few teens loitering in the common area.
"Books," he said as he sat down, a trace of a frown in his voice but not on his face.
"Something wrong with books?"
He would certainly earn a demerit or twenty from me if he had the audacity to respond in the affirmative. Stories had saved me growing up. Jane Eyre was my Sister from Another Mister, Jude the Obscure my Brother from Another Mother. The main characters in both books had grown up despised, worthless to those around them despite all the value and talents they possessed, their light unseen by the blind, vengeful souls tasked with raising them.
Wylie shook his head before I could get a full steam going inside my mind.
"It's just funny," he answered. "I've been dealing with books all week."
Another shake and a faint wave of his hand over the table and then he corrected himself. "Well, books and fishing gear and a bunch of fancy rocks—or 'minerals' as my father used to correct whenever he would let me look at them."
I nodded. Papa Wylie had been right, but I wasn't going to bond with his son over books and minerals. I was going to kick his fine ass out onto the street as soon as I found a good excuse.
"Is he still alive, your dad, or did he just give up correcting you?" I asked as I flipped open the folder to read the minimal amount of information Jackson had already collected.
Unemployed but lived in a nice neighborhood and had a current year Lincoln MKZ.
"Six years ago," he answered, his voice retreating inside of himself. "But my mother wouldn't let me get rid of any of his collections."
"I see." I felt my own voice retreating as I intuited where this story was going. "But your mother isn't protesting now, so you have a lot of work to do."
"Yes," he agreed.
He didn't elaborate and I didn't want him to. I didn't want to feel sorry for Thomas Wylie with his six-years dead father and his mother who was either more recently dead or institutionalized.
I had fifty teens to feel sorry for on an average day. Wylie could find someone else to smooth his furrowed brow because these kids only had me and a few other staff members with whom they could genuinely connect.
I was about to politely point out that Wylie already had too much, at least for the time being, on his plate to volunteer when Alex approached, a crippled book in his hand. Seeing the glitter of mischief in the teen's brown gaze and the side glance he gave Wylie, I was pretty sure how the book had become crippled.
"Sorry, Rhea," Alex said, blushing with either guilt or from Wylie's proximity. "This is missing a chunk of pages. Has anyone turned them in?"
Irritation flared across my face so that my cheeks were probably as red as the young man's but for a different reason. I had no doubt I would find the missing pages stuffed between the cushions of the chair Alex had just vacated, but I didn't call him out on it.
Dipping his head and reading the title, Wylie managed to innocent
ly turn the problem from bad to worse and he did it by trying to be helpful.
"Catcher in the Rye, huh?" He wiped a hand against his clean-shaven jaw while his brows danced in rough calculation. "I think I have about four copies at home I could bring by."
"Really?" Alex cooed and took a seat on the table top close to Wylie. "That would be awesome. Where do you live?"
I swatted at the teen's hip as a reminder that no one, not even Director Coombs, was allowed to sit on top of tables or desks at Harbor House. The kids had a hard enough road ahead of them without acquiring more decorum, starting with little things like not leaning on walls or sitting on tables.
"Leave it with me," I said. "I'll take care of it."
He pouted, not wanting to leave yet. "But what about the four copies?"
"I'll discuss it with Mr. Wylie when we go over his volunteer sheet—"
"You're going to volunteer here?" Alex blurted, his excitement ramping up from a modest bonfire to one level below a nuclear power plant meltdown.
"Not unless we get through the volunteer interview," I warned softly and pushed at Alex's hip a second time because he hadn't yet moved off the table.
The teen jumped up, eager to get out of my way if it meant having the gorgeous man sitting across from me officially around for longer periods. Bounding back to the bookshelf, he selected something that I recognized as a volume of poetry before finding a chair to sit in that faced Wylie but was thankfully out of earshot.
"I guess the kids don't have a lot of male role models around," Wylie offered.
I answered with a burst of laughter that took me a few seconds to recover from. Wiping amused tears from my eyes, I smiled apologetically.
Instead of looking offended, Wylie seemed absorbed in a careful study of my face.