by Aly Martinez
“Dat’s not fair!”
“Too bad!”
My girls loved each other, but they also fought like a pack of rabid dogs. I had no doubt a hair-pulling brawl was going to ensue, and when the phone fell, leaving me staring up at the ceiling, I got the feeling it already had.
“Ow!” they both screamed.
“Girls!” I scolded, but it was a worthless effort. The brawl carried on without me.
“Daddy!” one of them yelled, but without seeing them, I was hard-pressed to tell you which one.
Hell, without the aid of their favorite pajamas when they’d answered my FaceTime call, I couldn’t have told you which one was which on looks alone. The two of them were as identical as twins came. Since birth, they’d been the same height and weight, without so much as a birthmark to distinguish the difference. Thankfully, they’d gotten to the age where they would tell me if I got it wrong, but when they got old enough to pull the old switch-a-roo game on their dad, I’d be fucked.
But, then again, I had gorgeous twin daughters with fiery-red hair and an attitude to match. When they got older, I’d be fucked regardless.
“You two. Stop. Now,” I growled, swiping my keycard at the sensor beside the elevator. The door opened and I stepped inside. After stabbing my finger on the number four, I pressed my back into the northeast corner in order to keep my signal on the ride up. I’d learned that little secret months earlier, after we’d started these morning video chats.
After my divorce, I’d struggled with not having the kids around all the time. Melissa and I hadn’t worked out, but the day I’d driven away in a moving truck, my girls waving goodbye from the porch, I’d realized why so many couples stayed together for their kids. I had known why I was leaving Mel, even if I’d refused to admit it, but my babies shouldn’t have been a part of that. And, for that reason alone, I put up with whatever shit my ex-wife wanted to throw my way.
And that shit had been plentiful for the first year we’d been separated. Recently, since she’d started dating again, it had become more manageable. But, even when we were at each other’s throats, the girls were not involved. We both went out of our way to ensure that.
Melissa and I had a unique relationship. We’d been divorced for going on two years, but we still had dinner as a family every Wednesday night. She’d pick the restaurant. I’d pick up the check. And, for that hour or so, we were still a family. We didn’t bicker or argue about the past. We usually didn’t even do the whole “how was your day?” thing. Those dinners weren’t about Jeremy and Melissa. We talked about preschool and nannies, funny things the girls had said, and things we needed to work on with them.
Melissa was my ex for a reason, but when it came to those dinners, we were all business. I respected the hell out of her for giving that to me—to them. Now, that’s not to say she didn’t call and light into my ass about some bullshit or another every couple of weeks. But, at those dinners, our shit was secondary. We were parents. Nothing more. Nothing less.
My little girl’s green eyes, which matched her mother’s, once again appeared on the screen, only this time, there were tears dripping from the corners.
“Sophie scratched me!” she wailed, lifting her arm to show the tiniest red mark I’d ever seen, but for a four-year-old diva, it was clearly life threatening.
“Amelia scratched me first!” Sophie defended, her tear-filled eyes reappearing too, her arm lifted high as exhibit B.
Shaking my head, I mustered my scariest dad voice and snapped, “Enough!”
They both startled and the argument fell silent.
It served them right. I was no pushover—or so I told myself. They would probably tell a different story. And theirs would be more accurate. Because, as soon as their round faces crumbled and their crocodile tears became genuine, I buckled.
“Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. I’m sorry. Daddy didn’t mean to yell.” Without looking up from my phone, I stepped off the elevator, the cool Chicago air whipping all around me, and headed straight for the door at the end of the breezeway.
The building that housed Guardian Protection Agency was made up of privately owned, luxury apartments with a few offices mixed in. I couldn’t imagine how much one of those things cost. It had to have been a small fortune, considering that each floor was only one residence and roughly four thousand square feet. Money wasn’t an issue for me anymore, but it was safe to assume that, short of selling a kidney to a dying heiress, my name would never on be on the deed to a place like that.
The girls were still crying when I scanned my keycard at the door to Guardian and walked inside.
The warm floral scents of whatever fru-fru reed diffuser Leo’s wife, Sarah, had put out that week invaded my nose. It was nice, but I’d be choking on it by lunch.
“What did you do to my sweet girls!” Rhion accused, appearing at my side, pressing up to her tiptoes to get a peek at the phone.
“Sophie scratched Amelia. It left a mark. So Amelia scratched Sophie. I yelled at them to stop fighting and then the world ended. Friday morning business as usual.”
She smiled up at me. “You want me to talk them through the apocalypse while you go get some breakfast? The muffins are almost gone.”
Have I mentioned that Rhion was a godsend?
As a bodyguard, I had anything but a regular schedule. After my divorce, Leo had done his best to give me every other weekend off so I could spend time with the girls, but the final verdict came down to who my client was and what their needs were. The first time I’d gotten called in on my weekend off, Rhion had been kind enough to volunteer to keep the girls for me. They loved her, and despite the fact that they had come home in full makeup and a feathered boa that later shed all over my house, I loved her too. She lived on the floor below Guardian, so dropping them off and picking them up was convenient as hell. Rhion didn’t have to keep them often, but because I was a single father, it took a huge weight off my shoulders to know I had someone I could trust.
I grinned and then aimed the camera down at Rhion. “Hey, look who I found!”
“Hey, girlies,” Rhion cooed, her tattooed arms and chest showing from beneath her pale-pink tank top as she took the phone from my hands.
“Love you!” I called, but they had already forgotten about me.
“Why are you gals crying?” Rhion asked. “Oh, Amelia, that nightgown is beautiful. Is it new?”
I gave her shoulder a squeeze and mouthed a silent, “Thank you.”
She winked and then shooed me toward the food. I did not need to be told twice. I was starving, and regardless of how much food Rhion brought for the team each Friday, there was never enough.
After squeezing through the crowd of guys surrounding the large oak table like a flock of hungry vultures guarding their prey, I lifted the lid on the first pastry box and not surprisingly found it empty.
“Shit,” I mumbled, moving to the next one only to find it empty too.
“Here,” Devon said from the other end of the table, sliding a box my way. “There’s one left.”
“Thank fuck,” I replied, opening it to reveal a lone chocolate chip banana muffin. It wasn’t my favorite flavor. However, as long as it was followed by the word muffin, I was good.
Rhion’s Friday morning breakfasts were the only time I allowed myself to eat sweets, and I’d be damned if I was wasting that on a Danish or one of those tart things. A bear claw or apple fritter, maybe. But, if it had real fruit on it, I was out.
With his hands in his pockets, Devon meandered toward me, sporting a white smile that was nearly blinding in contrast to his olive skin. “You almost missed it,” he said, stopping in front of me. “I thought Alex and I were going to come to blows when I pulled that off to the side. Ethan used a donut to distract him.”
Devon was a good dude. We’d been tight for some years. Once a bodyguard to the stars in LA, he’d joined the agency after some serious shit had gone down with one of his longtime celebrity clients. He didn’t talk about
it much, and we were all too fond of our front teeth to ask. But, considering that said client was superstar Levee Williams, singer-songwriter and every man’s walking, talking wet dream, and that Devon had gone on a three-day bender that had almost gotten him fired when news broke that she had gotten married, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots.
“We got donuts?” I asked around a mouthful of muffin.
“We had donuts. Those went about five seconds after she sat ’em down.”
“Damn,” I mumbled before going back to work on my banana-flavored slice of heaven.
He inched closer and dropped his voice low. “You talk to Leo yet?”
“About what?”
He ran a hand through his short, dark hair and flashed his gaze around the room. “Apollo’s refusing to track for him.”
My hand froze with the last piece of muffin halfway to my mouth. “Still?”
His lips thinned and his brown eyes lifted to Rhion, who was sitting on one of the overstuffed leather couches while she chatted with my girls. “She’s been in there with them all morning. Leo won’t let him leave. Apollo won’t cave. Jude and Johnson have been trying to talk sense into him, but that is one stubborn motherfucker.”
“See, that’s the problem. They need to stop trying to talk sense into him and beat the sense into him. Leo lied for Apollo. That shit comes at a price. Where I come from, you don’t pay your debts, you end up unconscious.”
Devon barked a laugh. “Oh yeah? Where you come from?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Please. Tell me more about southwest Illinois in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Whadda ya know? An old man joke.” I balled the muffin wrapper up and tossed it into the empty pastry box. “Aren’t you Mr. Originality today?”
He smirked. “It’s funny because it’s true.”
I patted him hard on the shoulder. “Well, son. Let me know when your testicles drop and I’ll be happy to sit down with you and explain how to use that two-inch stub between your legs.”
He laughed loudly.
Sarah’s voice from across the room cut off any further insults. “Lark! You got a call on line one.”
I twisted my lips and yelled back, “Who is it?”
“Do I look like your secretary?”
I opened my mouth, but Leo strolled into the room, a file folder in his hand.
“You want to keep your balls, you won’t answer that.” He put two fingers between his lips and wolf-whistled to catch everyone’s attention. Loud scrapes of the heavy chairs against the wood floors echoed through the room as the guys started taking their seats around the table. “Go take it in my office. See if you can talk to Apollo when you’re done.”
I scoffed. “With my mouth or my fists?”
He swayed his head from side to side in consideration. “Surprise me.”
My grin spread wide.
After pulling a manila file from his folder, he passed it my way. “You’re off this weekend so you can spend time with the girls, but I’ve got you on an overnight job on Sunday.”
“Good deal,” I replied, taking my assignment from his hand. Casually flipping through the pages, I blindly made my way down the hall to his office.
“Fuck you!” Apollo shouted when I opened the door.
“Don’t worry, my man. The feeling is mutual,” I smarted.
He sank down into a chair and kicked his legs out in front of him. “Sorry. I thought you were Leo.”
I waved him off. “Nah. Don’t apologize. He gave me permission to beat your ass old-school interrogation-style. We’re square.”
He shot back to his feet. “What?”
Chuckling, I tipped my chin to Johnson and Jude, who were scowling behind him. “Can you keep him quiet for a minute? I gotta take a call.”
“I am not a prisoner here!” he shouted, turning in a circle before stopping on Johnson. “This is illegal. I swear to God I’m going to get an attorney and—”
Jude’s hand came down on his shoulder. “Shut up, sit down, and stop acting like a spoiled little shit.”
I figured this task was impossible considering that Apollo was a spoiled little shit. He was also one of the best trackers I’d ever met. For years, he had been able to keep tabs on his sister and evade our every effort to locate him. And he’d done this right under our noses, appearing only long enough to taunt us before he was off again. A year ago, he’d been a huge pain in all of our asses. Now… Well, that was still the case.
Laughing to myself, I moved around Leo’s desk and picked his phone up. After shooting a pointed glare at Apollo, I lifted the receiver to my ear and clipped, “Lark.”
And that was exact moment Earth fell out of orbit.
Or maybe we’d fallen through a wormhole.
Or a portal into the past.
Because, with one word, I was transported back in time.
“Jeremy?” she said.
It had been no less than a million years since I’d allowed that woman to have any kind of control over me. The last time she’d spoken to me was when she’d screamed at me to go. But no distance I’d put between us had allowed me any freedom.
When a man hits rock bottom, one of two things happens:
He withers.
Or he thrives.
After I’d been kicked out of the Army, I’d had nothing. No job. No money. No home. No family. No best friend, and I wasn’t talking about Kurt. Though she’d taken him too.
It was just me, a broken heart, and a fucking beat-up truck filled with so many memories of her that it was a wonder I hadn’t set the damn thing on fire.
Withering had never sounded so good.
With a dishonorable discharge on my record, I moved back to Driverton, where the only light at the end of the tunnel was a dead end sign.
I tried drowning myself in the bottom of a bottle, but despite my best efforts, I kept waking up. Same ache in my stomach. Same emptiness in my chest. Same picture of her burned into my memories.
Bitter. Broken. Lost.
Occasionally, I’d try losing myself in other women, but most never got their shirts off before I was done with them.
They weren’t her.
And, because of that, I wasn’t Jeremy.
For over a year, I withered, succeeding at nothing more than failing.
Then one day, after I’d woken up on the couch at a buddy’s house, with four dollars to my name, surrounded by a bunch of idiots, none of whom I truly liked and all of whom would die in that small town before they ever grew the balls to leave, I realized that, if didn’t pull my head out of my ass and stop pining over a girl who’d never given a damn about me, I was going to die right along with them.
I was twenty-four with the world at my fingertips. Sitting still while the future faded into the past wasn’t hurting anyone but me.
So fucking what she’d chosen him?
She’d done that.
She’d done it to me. She’d done it to us. And she’d done it to herself.
Mira had always been weak. Nervous. Scared to take a damn chance on anything, including herself. When we’d been together, I’d thought I’d seen a pillar of strength hidden beneath the surface, but in the end, she proved she was nothing more than one of Kurt’s sheep following him blindly for no other reason than the promise of greener pastures. Sure, he could buy her a nice car, maybe a nice house. But she, too, would be forced to wake up one day, realizing he’d led her in circles, having wasted her entire life. And, when she did wake up, I wanted to be so far out of her reach that she’d never be able to tangle me in her webs again.
Part of that thought process was out of spite. But, more than that, it was self-preservation.
She’d told me to go.
I couldn’t risk that she’d ever ask me to come back.
After that day, I packed up, moved to Chicago, and allowed the bitterness brewing inside me to fuel my fire rather than be the acid that ate me away from the inside out.
Fuck her.
Fuck Kurt
.
Fuck the whole damn world.
I could do bigger and better things than she could ever dream of.
Life didn’t begin or end with Mira. The dreams we’d discussed late at night in the back of that truck still existed without her. Mira was extraneous. Just as I’d always been to her.
And what do you know?
Once I got pissed off enough to let her go, I thrived.
I worked my ass off. And, in the end, I got it all.
Good job. Better money. Huge home. Gorgeous family. Loyal friends.
Every-fucking-thing.
So yeah, seventeen years later when she called my job out of the blue, her sexy voice whispering my name across the line, calling me Jeremy like she had any right to utter those syllables, I had but one response.
I hung up.
“Fuck,” I breathed, staring down at my phone.
Call ended.
I wanted to throw up. I’d been pacing a hole in the floor of my bedroom while waiting for the clock to strike eight a.m., which, according to a quick Google search, was when Guardian Protection opened. It was nerve-racking, strolling into the past like that. As I’d sat on hold, the sound of elevator music playing in the background, I’d almost hung up.
But then I remembered Whitney. And stupid fucking Jonah Sheehan.
“Damn it!” I yelled, kicking the bag of money.
Suddenly, my bedroom door swung open, and Tony appeared, holding a glass of orange juice.
My orange juice.
My six-dollar-a-quart, pulp-free, the-only-thing-I-splurged-on, orange juice.
Son of a bitch!
“Everything okay?” he asked.
I ground my teeth, fighting the urge to find my bat and then utilize it on his head. “Yep. Just making some phone calls. I think I’ve got a lead.”
His eyebrows perked. “Already?”
“Old friend.” I smiled. “Who knows—maybe we’ll both be out of here by tonight.” And you’ll be in police custody, but ya know. Whatever. Semantics.
He narrowed his eyes. “Jonah’s not going to be happy if you bring in some bitch who runs her mouth.”