Sammy made a sound in the back of his throat. “To put your seatbelt on?”
I pointed my finger at him. “Winner winner, chicken dinner.”
“You write him a ticket?” Malachi asked, pulling his shirt off over his head.
I didn’t wince at the number of scars that were revealed, at least outwardly. Inwardly, I wanted to know his story.
Everybody had scars, but Malachi had more than most.
But Malachi didn’t speak about his scars, just like he didn’t speak about his demons.
Not that I blamed him. The little I did know would make me not want to talk about it either.
“Hey, did you hear about that girl that got her house broken into yesterday?” Louis, Sammy’s cousin, and another member of the SWAT team asked.
“Are you talking about Reggie?” I asked cautiously.
Louis shrugged. “I have no clue. You can only see her from the backside.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked carefully.
“I’m talking about the photo they have of her propped up in the other locker room,” he said. “Apparently she was ‘very appreciative’ last night and posed with one of the cops for a photo op. I haven’t seen it yet. Just heard about it.”
I found myself walking before I’d really told myself I needed to go.
Steps purposeful, I made my way to the regular locker room where most of the other cops changed and got ready for their shifts.
When I arrived, nobody said much of anything because they were all gathered around a photo that was set up in the front of the room.
I knew the instant that I could see the color of the dress that it was Reggie.
I’d seen her last night and my goddamn heart had decided to fall out of my chest and onto the floor at her feet.
When she’d nearly been taken out by the two dumbasses carrying the cake, I could’ve happily killed them for making her run away.
Reggie had always been able to stir the most foreign feelings in my chest.
I’d never examined them closely before, but I knew that if I did, things would definitely not be as they seemed.
And, as they seemed right now, I kept my distance because Reggie always seemed to be one step away from hostility when it came to me.
Since we were kids, Reggie had been my rival.
In baseball. In school. In everything that we ever did that allowed us to compete in some way.
Walking up to the group of men gathered around the photo of the officer that was getting a pat on the shoulder from Reggie for something he’d done last night, I came to a stop with my hands on my hips.
“I’d kindly like you to take down that photo of my wife.”
The officer who’d obviously hung the damn thing up whirled around in shock.
“We didn’t mean anything by it,” he stuttered.
My brows rose. “You didn’t?”
I was laying it on thick, but who was I kidding?
On paper she might be technically mine, but reality? She might as well be the goddamn sun. So far away, and so fucking untouchable.
It was again one of those subjects that we could think about but never speak about out loud.
“Why would someone like you let his wife live in a place like that?” another officer, the one that was actually in the photo, asked.
My brows rose at the anger that I saw on his face.
Was he pissed at me because of something I had no control over?
“Because we’re estranged,” I admitted. “And she likes to be independent. I also don’t control her. If she wants to live there, there’s no way in hell that I’m going to convince her not to do it. Why do you think we’re estranged?”
All of those were fucking true.
But I had no clue where Reggie lived.
The less I knew about her, the less my stupid fucking heart wouldn’t start beating for her all over again.
Now, though, the niggling had been planted.
I had to know where she lived.
“Take the photo down,” I ordered. “And next time, make sure that you don’t hang a picture of someone’s wife up in the locker room and ogle it.”
The cop swallowed.
He was young. About twenty-two or so, but he looked like he was much younger than that when he looked at me as I spoke about Reggie.
As if he’d never had a strong-willed girl that challenged him before.
I grinned like a fuckin’ loon then, making him take a step back.
“If you want, you can tell her you hung her photo up in the locker room,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get an idea of what it’ll be like to find your own girl.”
Not like I had a girl, per se. But when I admitted it to myself in the dark of night that I was married to her, I had this stupid little fluttery feeling in my chest start to take off.
“I’ll just…” He took the photo down and handed it to me.
“I don’t want a photo of you with my girl,” I said, refusing to take it.
The cop looked around at the locker room that had not-so-suspiciously emptied in the time that I’d been in there.
“I’ll take it to the shredder.” He nodded his head in confirmation, as if that would make me believe him.
“You do that,” I said as I turned around to leave.
I wasn’t surprised to find half the fuckin’ SWAT team standing at the door.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re married?”
I ignored every fuckin’ one of them as I headed to my patrol car.
The first stop was the hardware store. The next was the apartments after I looked Reggie up.
Chapter 5
If you’re happy and you know it, fuck off.
-Text from Reggie to Nathan
Nathan
“You can’t put those locks on the door.”
I didn’t bother to look up from the deadbolt installation I was doing.
Instead, I finished installing the bolt and started screwing it in, forgoing the pitiful screws they’d given me for two that were three inches long and would really dig in deep to the door.
“Duly noted,” I said as I leaned into the screw gun.
“It’s against the apartment’s policy. You can’t install anything that wasn’t already there or installed by maintenance,” the dealer snarked.
I looked up then to spot the asshole that’d been staring at me. He’d been by the dumpster for the last half an hour as I’d used my credit card to get into Reggie’s place.
He didn’t call the cops, though.
The sad thing was, nobody called the cops.
A strange man breaking into someone’s apartment, even one in uniform, should’ve surely caused a stir.
But not here.
“Interesting,” I said as I looked back down. “I’ll be sure to note that in my phone under ‘I don’t give a fuck.’”
The dealer shuffled, kicking the grass at his feet.
I had a feeling that my being there was cramping his style, and he couldn’t sell shit while I was there and obviously paying attention.
I’d seen over thirteen cars drive into the parking lot, make some weird sort of eye contact with the guy, only to leave just as fast as they came in.
I wasn’t fucking stupid.
I knew the guy was dealing.
And I didn’t fucking like that he was doing it so close to my girl’s place.
My girl.
My inner brain was fucking nuts.
But still, it’d been something that I’d been saying since the dawn of time.
It was hard to get myself out of the habit, especially now that we’d been married for years.
She was mine and nobody else’s. That wasn’t going to change. Ever if I had my choice.
We may not ever be together, but we sure the fuck wouldn’t be with anyone else.
The sound of a car pulling in and not driving away
had me looking up to spot a familiar truck pulling into the driveway.
Travis, Reggie’s stepfather.
He spotted me right away as he put his big ass tow truck into park.
Going back to the screw that I was putting into the door, I waited for Travis to climb the rickety ass steps.
Only, he stopped when he saw the drug dealer.
“Go the fuck away,” Travis ordered.
The drug dealer grinned. “Public property, man.”
“I’m about to call in a couple of favors, man,” Travis snarked right back. “And get your stupid ass evicted.”
The drug dealer puffed up his chest in response. “I don’t even live here.”
Travis’s eyes came up to meet mine.
I reached for my mic and called in a loiterer.
“10-4,” dispatch acknowledged.
Another unit would be here soon to move him along.
If he didn’t live here, there was no reason in hell that he should be here. Especially for that amount of time.
“Where do you live?” Travis asked, crossing his beefy arms over his chest.
Being a tow truck driver for years, Travis made his muscles the old-fashioned way.
I’d always fuckin’ envied his bulk.
Though, now that I was older, my bulk stayed now, too. I didn’t just resemble some lanky teenager looking to play pro-ball.
I was an adult with an adult body.
“I don’t have to answer to you, motherfucker.” The drug dealer shifted from foot to foot, looking nervous.
I finished screwing in the last couple of screws and set the screw gun down in the open doorway of Reggie’s apartment.
“No,” I agreed as I came down the stairs, a little less calm now. “But you do have to answer me.”
The dealer’s eyes flicked to me then back to Travis.
I knew he was about to run.
“You run, make sure you don’t come back here or it’ll give us reasonable cause.” I stopped midway down the steps. “And I don’t particularly like the fact that you’re dealing out here next to my wife’s place.”
The guy looked as if he wanted to argue, but then the cruiser pulled in, and the dealer’s eyes went wide.
Taking one last look at his spot where he’d been the majority of the morning, he took off through the cars and disappeared behind the apartments.
Dax Tremaine got out of his car and looked at me curiously. “Want me to follow him?”
I shook my head. “No. Unfortunately, he didn’t do anything bad enough that he can be arrested for… yet.”
He gave a salute and got back into his patrol vehicle.
I turned my attention back to Travis, surprised when he didn’t look openly hostile upon me announcing that I was married to his daughter.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He gestured toward the open door at my back.
“Nice tactic there with telling him Reggie is your wife. He’ll hopefully rethink coming back,” he said, so far from the truth that I wanted to laugh. I didn’t. But barely. “I got a call from one of the residents that I have looking out for Reggie’s place. She said there was some man here working on her door. And since I was already in the area delivering a repo, I thought I’d run by and see if it was anyone that was supposed to be here doing maintenance,” he drawled.
I grimaced and started back up the steps.
“I heard that her place was broken into last night,” I said. “I already replaced the back lock, put a couple of window alarms on her windows, and put a new knob on this door. I’m working on a deadbolt now.”
“Her place was broken into?” he barked. “When?”
“Last night, apparently,” I answered. “I didn’t hear about it until this morning. And if the furniture that was by the door was any indication, instead of calling either one of us, she just shoved a big chair and a hutch against the front door and went about her night.”
Travis cursed underneath his breath.
“I’ll talk to her,” he grumbled sounding angry.
“I have to go drop these keys off.” I paused. “You can come with me.”
Travis’ eyes gleamed. “Does she know that you’re here right now?”
Our parents didn’t know that we were married.
Our parents also didn’t know that, eight years ago, I’d sold my soul to be able to keep her close to me, in any capacity at all.
What they also didn’t know was that I was in love with the girl that would rather set me on fire than ever marry me.
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t expect it to be a pleasant experience.”
Travis threw his head back and burst out laughing. “I’ll go. This should be fun.”
For him, anyway.
***
“She gonna come out here?”
Travis’ question would have had me smiling had the question not been one hundred percent legitimate.
I’d told the nurse that’d gone inside my name, not Travis’.
There was a high possibility that she wouldn’t come out for me.
“I…” I trailed off when the doors of the NICU swung open.
Seconds later, Reggie was squealing in excitement and throwing herself at her father. Her father caught her up in his arms and crushed her to him tightly.
God, how I wished she’d do the same to me.
Travis set her back down onto her feet and let her go, pushing her away from him slightly so he could glare at her.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you had your place broken into last night?” he asked.
Reggie’s accusing eyes swung to me, anger written in the aquamarine of her eyes.
I held my hands up in surrender, her new keys dangling from one finger. “It wasn’t me. Well, kind of. I wouldn’t have told him at all but he showed up as I was installing a new lock on your door.”
I extended the key to her, and she took it as if it was a ticking time bomb.
“I put in new locks on both the front and back door. Also, a new deadbolt. Window sensors, and I kicked that little asshole off of his spot.” I pinned her with a look. “How long has that drug dealer been dealing right there?”
Reggie wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“He didn’t actually used to do it right there until I said something.” She sighed. “Then he moved it closer to my place. But since he seems to know everyone in the apartment complex, I thought it better to just leave it alone. As for dealing? I just assumed that was what he was doing. But since plenty of officers liked to roll up in the apartment complex, I assumed they knew what they were doing and were just trying to catch him in the act. Why?”
I gritted my teeth, angry that she had to deal with a little prick like that drug dealer.
I held my tongue. Barely.
“If you ever have any other trouble, I want you to call me. Like what happened there last night,” I tacked on, knowing it would piss her off.
“I wasn’t going to ever call you if I could help it,” she muttered.
But just as she was about to continue, the elevator doors behind us whooshed open, revealing the very last person that I ever expected to see.
Out of more habit than anything, I’d been turned so that my gaze was aimed at the elevator so that I could see who got off, making sure that I always knew who was coming at me.
Which was why I saw the exact moment that Eerie saw me and realized exactly who I was.
She was dressed in scrubs, but she didn’t wear the same purple ones that Reggie was wearing, meaning this wasn’t her usual floor.
She came to an abrupt stop right outside the elevator doors, her eyes wide and fearful.
Fearful?
What had I ever done to make her scared of me?
If anything, I should be the one fearful of her. I wasn’t, of course, but she’d been the one to make my life a living hell when we’d been dating, and then tried to make it out to be m
y fault.
A blank mask settled into place over Eerie’s face, and she held her chin high as she skirted around all of us and headed for the sinks outside the NICU to wash her hands. Moments later she was gowned up and in gloves as she waltzed through the doors as if she owned the place.
It was only when she was inside the NICU that I said, “What the fuck is she doing here?”
Reggie cleared her throat.
“Umm,” Reggie said. “She has a baby inside.”
I blinked. Then blinked again.
She’d done it.
I snorted.
“When I said that she couldn’t use our shared embryos, she’d said that she would find someone to do it, even if it cost her every last penny. And it’d all be my fault. She wasn’t lying. I wonder what poor fool got suckered into that.” I sighed.
Reggie snorted. “You were one of those poor fools once.”
I loved when she pointed out my mistakes.
Especially in front of her father, said no one ever.
“Let’s just not,” Travis said, sensing that things were about to take a turn for the worse.
I snorted and looked to Reggie. “I have to go back to work, sadly. Some paperwork came up that I have to take care of before I’m finished. But if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call me next time. Even if it’s to walk through your house. Oh, and if that dealer comes back, make sure that you call me. I don’t want to find out later that he’s back. I think I might’ve pissed him off today, and I don’t want him doing anything to you out of spite.” I backed away toward the elevator. “And I don’t approve of your living space. If you want to rent somewhere nicer, let me know. There’s a couple of duplexes almost finished being built on cop row. They won’t mind if you have one.”
I’d heard Hastings discussing it with Sammy and Louis the other day.
Hastings was a sweetheart. I knew that she’d give her friend a place to stay.
Reggie’s mouth twisted into a frown. “Thank you.”
No ‘I’ll think about it’ or ‘okay’ just ‘thank you.’ She likely wouldn’t consider moving at all just on general principle alone.
The stubborn little shit.
God, I loved her.
With one last look at my girl, I gave Travis a jerk of my chin and got back to work.
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