If You Fall (Brimstone #1)

by S. E. Lund

  It was too soon. Or rather, Dan’s memorial was too soon and my mind was trying to get around my whole move back to Manhattan and my return to school. A hookup with a new man was the last thing on my mind, despite how long it had been since I’d been with Dan. I felt guilty even going there, although my body did of its own accord in sexy dreams with faceless men. I’d even let myself imagine what Beckett would be like as a lover. I had a feeling he’d be intense and alpha. I had a feeling he’d know what to do to make a woman thank her lucky stars.

  “Wanna go out for a drink, maybe a slice of pizza?” Steve asked as I removed my bar apron. “I don’t feel like going home right away. I’ll only be fifteen minutes.”

  I shook my head and tucked my apron into a nook behind the bar. “No, I’m beat,” I said and covered my mouth while I yawned. “Plus I have to do daily cash in the morning…”

  “Maybe another night,” Steve said with a smile.

  “Sure,” I said and shrugged, leaving the bar. He was closing so he had to do the re-stock and cleanup. It was one of the perks of being head bartender. It felt a bit strange since Steve was older than me, but he was newer at bartending so Scott and Jeanne put me in charge. Steve got the grunt jobs.

  I had the sneaking suspicion that maybe Leah was right… Steve might be interested in more than just a drink and slice. I hadn’t thought of him like that before. It wasn’t that he was unattractive. He was nice enough looking. It was that he was one of the family’s oldest friends and I always felt more like a kid sister to him than a potential girlfriend.

  The fact he was transferring to Columbia was a shock. I almost asked him about it during shift, but I didn’t want to get into a long discussion at that moment. I was exhausted and so I waved at him and left the bar.

  I walked the mile or so to the house and let myself in. The house was quiet, the lights low in the entry. I checked my watch – just after midnight. Scott and Jeanne would be in bed and so I tiptoed around, not wanting to wake them up.

  “You back home, Mira?” came Jeanne’s sleepy voice when I went down the hallway to the bedrooms.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” I said and made a face, standing in the hallway outside their room, which was just down the hall from mine.

  “No, that’s all right,” she said and I could hear her yawn. “We just went to bed. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” I said and went into my room, closing the door softly behind me.

  Jeanne was a light sleeper and always seemed to wake up when I got home, like she was waiting for me before she could go to sleep. Even if I wanted to, how could I possibly ever stay out really late with some new man for a hookup?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Beckett

  Going to North Carolina was a big mistake.

  I knew it somewhere in the back of my mind, but since Graham’s death, I hadn’t really been thinking straight.

  I went with the best of intentions, but as the saying goes, that road leads to hell. My personal hell started the moment I walked into Oceanside and saw her standing at the bar pouring drinks. When I recognized her, I should have handed over the letters and told her everything. At the least, I should have backed out, taken my bike and rode straight back to Manhattan, but there was no explanation for my behavior except I needed to get to know her.

  Mira with the pretty hair and freckles on her nose.

  Mira of the love letters to her new husband telling him how much she missed him – in her life, in her arms, in her bed.

  I should have found out where the Lewis’s lived, left the letters and gone back home. Instead, I got myself mired in it and now, even though I knew what I was doing was wrong, I wasn’t willing or able to dig myself out.

  The next morning, I rode back to Manhattan. It was the hardest thing I’d done in a long time. Every mile marker I passed, I fought with myself not to turn back and go to her, try to explain my deception. Could she forgive me for not telling her the truth from the start? I’d have to explain how I came to possess the letters, and what could I say?

  Sorry but your husband died a horrible death to save my life. I can’t really tell you any other details because it’s classified, black, off the books and I could get in big trouble…

  That sounded like a coward’s way out.

  So I kept driving, regret growing inside of me that I hadn’t played it right at the start, introduced myself, told her who I was and handed the letters over.

  I arrived back in town much later that night, hot and dusty from a long day on the road. After showering and eating something I heated up from the freezer, I sat on my couch and stared at the blank face of my flatscreen TV.

  I thought I’d get settled back into the routine of my life, but I was wrong.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. For the first few days after I returned, I was busy enough, but my mind kept turning to her when I had a moment of distraction. I remembered her pretty eyes, her lush curves, her smile. I remembered her kiss and the cheeky look in her eyes when she joked with me.

  I had to forget her. Nothing helped you forget like alcohol and new people.

  So, later that week, I stood at a bar somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen and tried to remember the name of the pretty young woman I was supposedly talking to. The truth was every woman I met faded into nothing in my mind when compared to Miranda. While the young woman spoke to me, my mind was occupied thinking about Miranda and wishing she was with me instead of what’s her name with the bottle-blonde hair and push-up bra.

  So my evening with Brandon spent with the intention of blotting it all out in a booze-filled night of dancing and drinking was not going nearly as well as planned.

  Blanc was not my usual choice of Friday night after-work clubs. Brandon was my best friend from Stanford, who joined the Marines with me, and was one of my business partners. He dragged me to Blanc after a day from hell. I would rather have gone home and straight to bed, but Brandon was looking for a second wife and so he guilted me into going out.

  Unlike Brandon, I didn’t make long-term plans when it came to women. I learned my lesson a few years earlier when Sue was taken from me.

  Don’t plan on love. If it happens, great, but don’t go looking for it. Don’t expect it.

  Life had a way of fucking up those plans so it was better to assume you’d be alone than plan on marriage and family and end up broken-hearted. I didn’t plan on getting married but if I did, I would never set out to find a wife. You fell in love or you didn’t. Being so mercenary about it was wrong, to my way of thinking. But since I wasn’t ever going to get married, it really didn’t matter. I never promised women anything I couldn’t deliver. No strings and no demands.

  Brandon, on the other hand, was desperate to look for his second wife. He wanted to create a business empire and an empire needs an heir.

  As to the girl who was leaning in close to me, squeezing her tits together for me to admire, I wasn’t usually bad with names, but I was so damn preoccupied that I didn’t really listen when we were introduced earlier in the evening. The talk was loud and the music, too. My mind was elsewhere. I’d downed a glass or three of bourbon and was working on a serious drunk.

  I wanted to forget everything.

  So when she asked me to dance about an hour into the evening, I couldn’t remember her name, despite spending the previous fifteen minutes bending down to pretend I was listening raptly to everything she said.

  “Let’s dance, Beckett,” she said and grabbed my hand. I smiled and allowed myself to be pulled away from the bar.

  “What’s your name,” I asked when we arrived in middle of the dance floor.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. “You don’t remember my name?”

  I shrugged and tapped my head with a fist. “Sorry,” I said and shouted into her ear over the noise. “It was a hard day. I’m pulling a blank.”

  “You’ve been talking to me for an hour and you don’t know my name?”

  She gave me a look of disgu
st and then went back to the bar, leaving me standing all alone, surrounded by writhing people. I didn’t really care, because I hadn’t planned on picking up a woman that night, but I could get into dancing. I needed something physical to work out the stress.

  So I did what any drunk red-blooded American male would do when stood up by his dance partner. I started to dance by myself, slowly integrating into the mass of thronging bodies. No one cared that I was alone. In fact, everyone was happy to dance with me, male and female alike. Soon, I lost myself in the music, dancing song after song until I was so hot that I had to remove my suit jacket and throw it on a table at the edge of the dance floor.

  I seriously needed to work out a mega-dose of business-related stress.

  When I finally left the dance floor, I saw that the young woman whose name I most un-chivalrously forgot was now leaning in close to Brandon. They looked hot and heavy and so I smiled to myself and went to get a beer at the other end of the bar. I’d let them romance each other while I cooled off.

  I met up with another staff member and we stood at the bar and talked about the day at work, drowning our mutual sorrows. I switched to tonic water about then because I could feel I’d almost reached my limit.

  About an hour or so later, I left the bar and went to the men’s room for a leak. I stood at a urinal in the washroom and thought back to my day. I was a lot drunk, dealing as I was with a death of a best friend and potential death of the company he and I had founded and nurtured after we returned from the war.

  I closed my eyes as I stood at the urinal and tried to blank out everything but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t help reconsider my life.

  Something nagged me. I couldn’t say what it was, exactly. It was this nameless, faceless darkness that filled me. Maybe due to a dead war buddy and a business in jeopardy. And something else, but I decided to save the existential angst for some other time.

  Whatever it was, it was enough to take the edge off my enjoyment of the night. I glanced around the tiny bathroom, the walls of which were covered in crude graffiti. Oversized dicks competed with hairy and hairless pussies, boobs and the names of women with numbers beneath them along with ratings. There was water on the floor from a toilet that overflowed, and cigarette butts had been ground into the tiles.

  The grout was black from filth.

  I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror.

  Longish unruly dirty blond hair falling in my eyes and below my collar, my grey tie and the first few buttons of my white shirt undone, three days’ worth of stubble on my jaw, some liquid spilled on my suit. Bloodshot blue eyes. A very bad taste in my mouth and the start of a headache brewing somewhere in my cranium.

  Fuuuuck…

  What the hell was I doing with my life?

  I spent the next morning with Casey, one of my oldest and best female friends from Stanford who enlisted in the Army the same year Graham and I enlisted in the Marines – and no, we never fucked. The butchest lesbian I knew with biceps that rivaled mine when I first started lifting, she was my go-to girl when I needed a shoulder to cry on, which was almost never, of course. But after firing half my team and most of all, after losing my oldest friend, I needed a sounding board. Other than a few moments last night at Blanc, I hadn’t seen her in weeks since she’d been out of country on some consulting job.

  I needed my Casey time.

  “How are things?” she said as I helped her with the barbell. I spotted for her in the weight room at the club we both belonged to.

  “The shits,” I said, and stood back, watching as she did her reps.

  “Still upset about Graham?”

  I nodded without speaking.

  “That’s tough, man. Sorry I missed the memorial. How’re you doing?”

  I shrugged. “How could I be doing?”

  She eyed me. She’d been trying to get me to come to VA group grief counseling sessions for the past month but I didn’t need that shit – airing my personal problems in front of complete strangers.

  “What were you doing at a dive like Blanc?” she asked.

  “You were there, too.”

  “Only because you invited me.”

  I laughed. “It was Brandon’s pick, not mine.”

  “What happened with the girl you were with?” she asked, this hopeful look in her eyes. “You two looked pretty hot and heavy when I saw you at Blanc. Did you go home with her?”

  “Umm…” Although I didn’t always volunteer the truth, I couldn’t lie to Casey so I shrugged and said nothing, biting my bottom lip to keep from grinning. “Nope.”

  “What happened? You’re usually pretty smooth with women.”

  “I forgot her name.”

  “You forgot her name?” she said with disgust in her voice. “You manwhore.” She gave me a glare and pushed the bar up, concentrating while it lowered. Finally, she relented and the glare turned into a grin. She liked pussy as much as I did.

  “You need a real girlfriend,” she said, staring at me over the barbell. “None of those chicks you bring home for a fuck and suck and never see again.”

  “I don’t need a girlfriend,” I said, frowning. “I need a partner with ten million to invest in my company so I can keep the wolves – I mean bankers – from the proverbial door.”

  “The proverbial door or an actual door?”

  “Grammar Nazi,” I said, not quite under my breath.

  “Go to your uncle. It’s your money, Beckett.”

  I frowned at the mention of my uncle. “You know better than to suggest that.”

  A mid-level tough guy in what remained of Hell’s Kitchen’s Irish Mafia, he was my father’s oldest brother, who inherited my father’s technology business when he died. Not my mother. Not me. My uncle had no experience or interest in superconductors except how he could use the corporation to launder money.

  We contested the will, but when the other side has a judge in his pocket, it was hard to win. Since then, my uncle had perverted my father’s business. The money was tainted, dirty, and the respect the corporation garnered over the years was being slowly eroded.

  One day, I’d get the business back from him, but not until he croaked off – hopefully at the hands of one of his little Mafia friends.

  After I left the service, I’d been recruited and worked undercover for the DEA, reporting on what I overheard at family dinners about their mafia ties and business dealings, listening when sitting around with my uncle and his boys shooting the shit over Guinness. I’d reinserted myself into my uncle’s life with the intent of finding some way to kick him out of the family business, get something incriminating on him so I could take over and clean it up.

  At least, that was my long-range plan. In the meantime, I started my own company with Graham and now that was on the rocks. Casey didn’t know I worked for the DEA, and so I could tell her none of this. Instead I let her think I was refusing to take his money on principle.

  I let the barbell rest in her hands a bit longer than I should, to pay her back for being such a hardass. Soon, Casey’s arms shook and she grimaced from the strain. “Beckett, you bastard… Help me!”

  I grinned and lifted the barbell into place. She shook her head and sat up, adjusting her gloves. A serious bodybuilder, she worked out every day and was far more serious than me. I did it just to get visible abs and biceps because the ladies were all about abs and biceps. Casey – she almost – almost – had a better clean and jerk than me.

  She won competitions.

  “Beckett, I know you like to think of yourself as a lothario, but men like you cannot live on nameless pussy alone. You need the love and companionship of a good woman.”

  I laughed out loud at that and smiled at her. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious. I know more about you than anyone alive. You’ll find someone new if you let yourself. Things will be good again if you give it a chance to develop with the right person. I know it’s hard for you to hear, but there are other women out there b
esides Sue.”

  I was going to say something smartass, but she was right. I was almost married to Sue three years earlier – until Sue died while we were on vacation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands off the coast of India.

  Stung by Synanceia horrida, the dreaded Stonefish. Her death was one of those freak of nature accidents that you would never believe could happen. A rogue wave threw Sue onto a bed of corals on which the stonefish was lurking, camouflaged from view. It stung her on the chest, which is about the worst place to be stung if you hope to survive long enough to get anti-venom. Stonefish are the most poisonous creatures on earth. Sue died in the local hospital within a few hours and there was nothing I could do. None of my training in special operations forces helped. The medical training – the survival skills – evasion and resistance skills – they were worthless.

  Casey was constantly bugging me to find someone new and make something real like I had with Sue, but I couldn’t. Nothing felt real after her death.

  No one could replace her.

  I couldn’t connect with women any longer. Really connect. They all seemed petty and boring, more interested in my money or fashion than in anything real. Sue, on the other hand, was as real as they got – a nurse I met in the war and pursued once we both got out of the service.

  Instead of trying to meet anyone new, I poured all my energy into building up my corporation. I was a bona fide entrepreneur, with a multi-million-dollar business developing innovative technology to assist the military. After several tours of duty in a Marine Recon unit, then Marine Special Operations Forces, I had a pretty good idea of what was needed, what was lacking, and had watched my fellow Marines die in too high a number due to inadequate communications. My goal was to provide superior communications tech for reconnaissance to better protect soldiers on the battlefield.