“You know what, Gabe, never mind. I can see this was a bad idea. I came here today because I needed some help and I thought you could be the person to do that for me, but I can see that I was wrong. You might want to let your secretary know, though, that not every women in casual wear that walks in the door is last night’s conquest looking for a handout.” I looked over at the snotty woman who had quieted down and was looking at her desk like she was trying to keep busy. “Some of us are just old friends who remember a time when someone else sat in the big office at the end of the hall.”
Pain ghosted over his face briefly, and I felt immediate regret that I had even brought up his father. I hadn’t meant to make a shitty comment. I was actually remembering the time when his dad had been in charge, and Gabe and I were just kids getting underfoot. I have a good heart most days, but damn if this mouth doesn’t get me in trouble a lot.
The look was gone as soon as it showed up, and Gabe finally just sighed and said to his secretary, “Jeannette, this is Angel—she’s an old friend of the family.” I blanched a bit at the family part. I was an old friend of his, too. It would have been nice if I could have been introduced that way. But I had to remember my purpose. I was there to ask for help, not to rekindle our friendship. That wouldn’t happen anyway, not after what happened when we were teenagers. But that was in the past. It wasn’t even worth bringing up.
“Hold my calls for a bit, Jeannette. Come on into the office, Angel.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Anderson,” Jeannette replied politely.
“Thank you, Jeannette.”
“No need, Jeannette,” I interjected. “This was a stupid idea, I don’t even know why I came up here. I’m sorry I interrupted your work. It’s not important. I’ll figure it out on my own.” Turning on my heel to walk back out the way I came, I did a quick about-face and looked back to Jeannette. “I’m sorry I called you a bitch.” I wasn’t really, she deserved it, but I had interrupted their day enough. “You do a really good job of filtering out Mr. Anderson’s gold diggers. But, FYI, I’m not one of them. I’ve never been one of those women to him.”
I walked out of the big office and shut the door behind me. I didn’t know why I was so irritated. By Jeannette and her crappy attitude? By Gabe, who had looked put out to see me? I don’t know what I expected, but I had decided not to ask him for help. My pride had been pricked and dammit, I was aggravated. The slow as hell elevator wasn’t doing anything to take the edge off my irritation either. I don’t know how people get anything done all day if they have to cruise between floors on the slowest elevator in the history of slow. This was an empire, a company that had more money than they knew what to do with. An investment firm with a rickety elevator, how embarrassing.
The late spring breeze that blew across my skin when I walked out of the large glass doors of the first floor had a touch of wet to it, like rain that hadn’t started but was on its way. Perfect for my gloomy mood. What had possessed me to think I could just walk into that office after not seeing him for fifteen years and he would just say, “Oh hey Angel, it’s been a long time but, yes, whatever you need.” Fifteen years ago, it wouldn’t have even been a question. Now, too much time had passed for that kind of devotion.
The Anderson building wasn’t tall, only three floors high, but it was really long. It sprawled out over a huge area, which never seemed to bother me when I was younger. Now, though, as I angry stomped around the side of the building to get to the lot where my vehicle was parked, it seemed like an endless sea of concrete between my Jeep and me. If it rains tonight it will be muddy tomorrow, I thought to myself excitedly. I loved driving through mud holes in my Jeep. I would definitely do that if I could just figure out how to solve my current problem of the missing money, and the shit I’d seen that I shouldn’t have. I really couldn’t be making plans for having fun until I had that taken care of.
“You’re talking to yourself.”
I couldn’t even control the shriek that flew out of my mouth as I whirled on the person who had snuck up behind me and scared the life half out of me.
“Gabe, what the hell!” He had walked right up next to me and I hadn’t even heard him coming. His raised eyebrows registered surprise that I was surprised.
“I’ve been walking behind you for like, ten seconds. You are completely oblivious to your surroundings. I’m surprised you haven’t been taken out be an accident by now.”
“I’m on the sidewalk, Gabe. Unless a car comes flying up onto the sidewalk, I doubt I am in any kind of danger. Also, how did you even get down here so fast? That elevator is slow as hell.” There was no way he could have caught up to me if he even took the elevator right after I did, it was that slow.
“Angel, no one takes the service elevator anymore. It’s only three floors. I took the stairs. Also, I have a private elevator, but I don’t really use that either. Never mind that. Why did you come to my office today? It couldn’t have been just to get in a fight with my assistant and then leave.” He stopped walking and I was forced to do the same, or I would walk away from him while he was talking and that was just rude.
“What did you need help with? You don’t strike me as the type who would be into investments, but even so, I don’t really do that. I came home to keep an eye on things, but Anderson Investment really runs itself. I’m just a figurehead.” Head cocked sideways, he looked at me with curiosity. His comment about me not being the type to make investments kind of rubbed me the wrong way on account of us not having spoken in fifteen years and him not knowing what my type was anyway. But the other things he said, about not really doing investments—I knew that part. That wasn’t why I had come to him in the first place.
“Gabe, I know all that. I don’t need someone to move money around for me, and anyway, my issue is sort of an emergency. I needed your help for something different, but I’ve changed my mind.” I was having a hard enough time trying not to stare at grown up Gabe in a suit standing next to me. I didn’t want to forget I was mad at his secretary and by association, him. It didn’t have to make sense, it was just how I felt, and feelings aren’t right or wrong, they just are.
“I’ll figure it out,” I continued, looking him in the eyes and smiling more brightly than I felt. “Everything will work out.” A hint of a smile flirted at the corner of his mouth, and for a second I got a glimpse of my old friend Gabe, the one I thought hung the moon. The Nutella to my cookie.
“Everything comes up Jax, huh?” he asked softly, the breeze picking up strands of his sandy brown hair and lifting it from his face.
“I’m surprised you remember that,” I said, almost under my breath. The ghost of a smile disappeared immediately and Gabe’s eyes turned hard and squinty again.
“You would be surprised what I remember.” There was ice in his tone now. I was already irritated, and if he was looking for an argument, I was almost in a frame of mind to give him one. “I remember that my best friend in the whole world completely stopped talking to me and wouldn’t tell me why. Then comes waltzing into my office fifteen years later asking for a favor like she didn’t rip my guts out when we were younger. I remember that shit clear as day.”
I saw red.
“I didn’t stop talking to you, Gabriel Anderson. You ghosted me. You joined the army and left town before the summer was even out. You never even said you were enlisting. You didn’t even tell your best friend in the whole world that you were going to become career military. I had to hear that shit from your mom. So don’t you even come at me with that bullshit. Did you even tell Lila that you were joining the army? Did you even tell your girlfriend that you were leaving for, like, forever?”
“Lila Dickerson?” The face that had been void of expression previously, now showed his confusion completely. Gabe was looking at me like I had grown a second head. “Why would I tell Lila Dickerson anything? She wasn’t my girlfriend. I went out with her maybe three times and certainly didn’t have the kind of relationship with her that would require me to ru
n any of my personal plans by her. Also, I would have told you about my decision, but you had stopped speaking to me right before the year was up. You didn’t even go to my graduation.”
I most certainly had gone to his graduation, I just didn’t sit with his parents, so they didn’t know I was there. I may have been angry with him over what I had seen and overheard, but I was still proud of my friend. I went to his damn graduation, and I clapped louder than anyone else when they called his name. Asshole.
“I swear to God, Angel,” Gabe continued his tirade, his voice growing louder, reminding me that we were standing in the parking lot behind his building where anyone and their cousin Dave could hear us arguing. “I swear to God, if you ruined our friendship just because you thought I got a girlfriend I will never forgive you.”
“Never forgive? Are you fucking kidding me?” I was whisper screaming now. Man, did he just accuse me of some petty shit right there. “That isn’t the case at all, you dumbass, considering I was still your best friend through your previous six girlfriends, remember?” I ticked them off on my hands as I listed them. “Katie Payton your freshman year, Hailey Peterman, Kelly Abraham and Alice Michelson your sophomore year. Must have had a slump because there were only two your junior year, and senior year you were mostly single until Lila. I could never be pissed because you had a damn girlfriend, Gabe.” I was positively panting now I was so irate. “And fuck you for thinking so.” I was thirty-two years old now, and even to my ears it sounded like some petty high school shit, but those were my feelings. Feelings are what they are, right or wrong.
“Then tell me so I understand. What exactly are you talking about right now?” There was zero recollection in his eyes, and I was not in a place where I even felt like explaining it to him. Gabe had that angry look again.
I didn’t have time for this. I had some shit to figure out real fast and in a hurry or something bad could happen to my friend Mel. There was a statute of limitations on the amount of playtime I had before shit started getting real. Real dangerous.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Gabe,” I said tiredly, and started walking across the parking lot to my Jeep. I was stopped by a large hand on my arm that turned me around to face an angry Gabe once again.
“I would like very much to talk about this right now,” Gabe said, his mouth a stern line marring the handsomeness of his face. “It’s been fifteen years and I’m finally finding out what was eating your ass. I think you owe me an explanation.”
“I am not fighting with you outside in a parking lot.”
“You were just fighting with my assistant in front of my office. I fail to see the difference.” Gabe folded his arms across his chest, and I couldn’t help but notice the pull of his shirtsleeves as they tightened at the shoulders. He must have ditched the jacket before he came down to catch me. I was an idiot for noticing.
“Gabe, I don’t have time for this.” And I really didn’t. “I’m in a bit of trouble and I need to find someone who can help. I should have just gone to the police.” The police comment got his attention and his posture changed, but I didn’t have time for any further explanation.
I heard the screeching of brakes as a car that had been careening into the parking lot came to a halt behind me. I barely had time to turn and look before rough hands grabbed me and flung me into the back seat. I was laid across several laps, and heard Gabe’s shout of surprise before the door was slammed shut and the car took off again. Less than ten seconds. That was all it took for me to be snatched right out of the parking lot right in front of Gabe.
Goddammit. I had run out of time.
3
Gabe
She was taken right in front of me. I’d been so busy rehashing shit from fifteen years ago and watching a string of different emotions fly across her face that I didn’t even hear the car approach. There was no time to react before she was grabbed and flung into a black town car that peeled out of the parking lot of my own damn building. She was grabbed on my turf after she came to me for help.
Shit piss hell damn.
This must have been the trouble she was talking about before we both got angry and started yelling at each other. I’d been back in town for almost a year and she had never tried to contact me. I hadn’t tried to contact her either, but I sure as shit bugged my mom for all the information I could. Mom always thought we would grow up and get married to each other, but that was mom’s dream, it was never what Angel and I wanted.
At any rate, it didn’t make sense that Angel would be mixed up in anything nefarious. Nefarious was my business, and since I’d come back to Toledo, I tried to keep track of all the troublemakers. Angel Jax was not on that list, and it was my job to be informed. Well, to most people my job was being the head of Anderson Investments, and that was what my dad wanted for me, too. His dream was me taking over the company someday, but it was never my dream. And it chapped my ass to agree with Angel, but the truth was, she was right. I had run into the military without telling her. I hadn’t told anyone—not even my mom and dad until the last minute.
The pressure of following in my dad’s footsteps, of having my college and my future picked out for me before I even knew what I wanted to do—it had been too much. So I ran. I joined the military right after high school and it stuck with me. Mom and dad forgave me early, they were my parents, of course they would. I didn’t get a chance to ask Angel for forgiveness. She managed to avoid me those early days when I only got a couple days to come home on leave. By the time I was invested in the military enough to take actual time when I wanted to, she was off to college on the west coast. It looked like Angel and I had some things to discuss before we were okay with each other. Clearly there were misunderstandings on both sides of the fence.
My parents thought I was going to be career military, but that wasn’t actually true. I put my time in with the United States government, and I did my duty as a soldier, but my specialized skills weren’t actually put to use on formal assignment. See, in the army, you are at the mercy of your orders, and those orders need to be carried out no matter what. I’m not really the kind of guy who likes to be told what to do, especially considering good guy and bad guy can be a really gray area on a worldly scale. I do better making my own decisions, taking my own jobs, and after a few years of trial and error, I found that working independently allowed me the freedom to become good at all kinds of things. Personal protection and information gathering. Those were my specialties. And from what she hinted at, Angel knew that about me, which meant she must have been coming to me for some kind of protection, and I let her get snatched right out of my hands like some dickhead who didn’t know what he was doing.
Now, I may be an asshole, but I most definitely know what I’m doing. I may have been retired from the bodyguard business, I may be a guy in a suit running the family empire, but I still had my hands in the information network.
Jogging up the private stairs to my office, I pulled my cell out of my pocket and punched in the number that would get me to Dino. He and I went back a ways because we had worked together on some projects. We weren’t close friends exactly, I don’t know if Dino actually had any close friends, to be honest. Dude was a complete spook and could change his personality at will to blend in. We did, however, respect each other’s skill set. Dino was in the area, from what I remembered. He might know of some underlying issue that would necessitate someone being snagged out of a parking lot. Some shit must be going down for civilians to get nabbed out in broad daylight, especially someone with a squeaky clean background like Angel.
“Jeannette,” I said as I stepped from my office into the waiting area occupied by her desk, “Code Yellow.” I saw her straighten, eyes going wide behind her glasses. Jeanette wasn’t just my personal assistant at the company, she and I went back a ways, too. She knew stuff about me and I knew stuff about her. It was a pretty good working relationship. She knew that our code yellow meant missing person, and her whole demeanor changed as she snap
ped to attention, awaiting orders.
“Yeah, Boss? Is it something that has to do with that girl who was just here?” She and Angel may not have hit it off, but it really wasn’t Jeanette’s fault. I was a guy with a lot of money at my disposal, and after my dad passed away and I took over as head of Anderson Investments, they oozed out of the woodwork. Money Bunnies was what Jeanette called them. She could probably make a full time job out the work she put into keeping the gold diggers out of my way. Desperate women could get really creative with extortion, even if they have never met the man they were trying to get money from. If I had actually slept with even half of the women who came forward claiming to have a relationship with me, my dick would probably snap right off. That was par for the course of having a lot of money. And as the son of a highly successful business mogul, I had more money than I could spend. I didn’t ask for that to be my life, it just was. I was lucky I had Jeanette to go to bat for me. She was a good woman who had been through some rough shit. I was grateful to have her in my admittedly small trust circle.
“Angel really is an old friend, Jeanette. Actually, for a long time she was my best friend. Some horseshit happened when we were kids and we haven’t talked for a really long while, but she came here for help and ended up getting kidnapped in the parking lot.” Jeanette’s eyes widened even further at that. I watched as she removed the tortoiseshell glasses I knew were just for show, and she placed them on the desk next to her. She was all business now.
“What do you need me to do, Boss?” That was it, Jeanette was on board, and with my heart thundering in my chest—probably with the fear of having watched someone I once cared about getting yanked off the street right in front me—I gave instructions.
“I’m trying to get ahold of Dino but he isn’t answering.” That was no big scare, Dino rarely answered. You either left a text or a voice mail and he would get back to you, on Dino time. I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Dino time to roll around, so I was going to hammer at him from all angles. He was going to be the guy with the knowledge to help, so I would do what I had to do to get that sly fucker’s attention.
Gabe Page 2