“I know him!” I said, thinking back to the client that I saw every Sunday and Thursday. “I give him massages twice a week after he plays a few rounds of golf at the country club just outside of town.”
Mig growled.
“What’s his name?” He asked.
I closed my eyes and thought of the name that was just on the tip of my tongue.
“Larry…Leonel…no…Liam!” I said excitedly. “His name is Liam Cornell.”
“What’s he do?” Mig asked, turning to me once the car that was picking Jennifer up pulled out into traffic.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I only massage him twice a week. During those times, he has his ear phones in, and I barely say a word to him the entire time.”
Mig blinked.
“Is that your way with every male client?” He asked.
I nodded. “Every female client as well. I try to stay out of their business while I’m massaging, since it’s such a personal experience. As for doing hair, that’s when I’ll know my clients better.”
Mig nodded. “What times does he usually come?” He continued.
I pursed my lips. “Normally just after lunchtime. Around two or so. I’m guessing he comes straight from his weekly golf game because it’s not often that I don’t see him decked out in his golfing attire.”
“That tomorrow?” He asked me.
I nodded. “It’s a first come, first serve system. We don’t make appointments, so I just assume he’s coming. But he hasn’t missed one in three months.”
Mig smiled. “Well, then I guess I’ll see you at lunch tomorrow.”
Chapter 6
I hate being sexy, but I’m a bearded man. I can’t help it.
-Mig to Annie
Mig
“This better not get me into trouble,” she muttered to the man currently sitting on the counter in front of me.
Griffin shrugged, and the other man occupying her barber chair spun around for the fourth time.
Ridley stopped to study himself in the mirror.
“Do you think I could use a cut?” He asked the group as a whole, fingering his shaggy hair.
Nobody said anything.
Ridley was what you would call ‘sensitive’ about his hair.
Although it wasn’t overly styled, his blonde hair always fell a certain way.
It never went over an inch and a half in length, and rarely ever did I see it a mess.
We all secretly thought he had some kind of issue with his hair.
Some sort of fetish having to do with his locks, but none of us ever asked.
We were all in the front of Annie’s store, Uncertain Salon and Massage.
Griffin was sitting next to his wife on top of the counter next to the register.
Ridley occupied the lone barber chair, and I was sitting next to Annie on the couch.
We weren’t touching, but we were close.
I was, however, very aware of her body.
Aware of how her body heat, however slight it was, felt like it was burning me.
I wanted to run my hand up the side slit of her skirt to see what kind of panties she had on underneath the frilly, gauzy slip of fabric.
She was wearing a hot pink halter top that barely confined her beautiful breasts, and to top it all off, she was shoeless.
Her toes were painted a hot pink, and I wanted nothing more than to lick her from the tips of those toes all the way up to her lips.
My hand came down on the chair between us touching the toes in question.
She didn’t move, and neither did I.
Although the touch was innocent, I wondered if she could feel the promise.
It may only be her feet right now, but after I was officially divorced, which hopefully would only take a couple more days since it paid to know people in high places, she would be mine.
It may make me sound like a complete jack wad, but I couldn’t help it.
I’d wanted Annie since she’d moved in next to me. And now that I’d finally allowed myself to complete the final papers for filing an annulment between Jennifer and me, I knew things were about to change between us.
When my parents had divorced, I’d made a promise to myself, that if a child was ever involved, I would go out of my way to make things work between the mother and me.
I would never put my child in the middle.
And over the last six months, I’d tried.
Oh, how I’d tried.
But this was no way to live.
This would never work for us.
Jennifer had wronged me greatly, and I’d allowed it.
There was no way I could build a relationship with her after what she did to me
Annie had helped me see that just by asking a few innocent questions.
Questions that my club brothers asked me on a daily basis.
But finally listening to it from someone who was in my life but who hadn’t been around during that time had been an eye-opening experience had definitely hammered home how stupid I was being.
And I was about to be free for the first time in long months.
“This isn’t going to get you in trouble, Annie,” I said with patience. “It’s not like I’m going to talk to him while he’s getting a massage.”
I was lying.
That was what I was planning to do.
She didn’t need to know that, though.
Being naked made a person feel a certain vulnerability, and I wanted to get this over with quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.
“Well, he’s here. I’m going next door with Lenore. Let me know when the fire’s out,” Annie said, jumping out of her seat.
Then she was gone, disappearing out the back entrance with Lenore in a little less than two point five seconds.
“She looks a little nervous,” Griffin observed dryly.
I flipped him off and said, “Get gone, boys. I’ll let you know what transpires.”
Griffin and Ridley snorted.
“We’ll be in the break room. Yell if you need us,” Ridley said just before he disappeared into the small room off to the side of the salon.
According to Annie, Liam Cornell would enter into the building and go straight to the back room.
Usually around this time, Annie was grabbing her supplies she’d need for the massage.
Liam Cornell would go into the room on his own, after calling out a hello to get ready for the massage.
So I didn’t confront him in the lobby.
I might have confronted him while he was naked.
Ok, I did. There was no might about it.
I waited until he’d gone as far as to lay on the table, face down.
I entered the room like I owned the place, ignored Cornell’s call of greeting and immediately placed my hands viciously on Cornell’s neck.
“I’m going to ask you one time and one time only. Are you fucking my wife?” I asked calmly.
Cornell stiffened under my hands, and I let him move when he put his arms onto the table and pushed up.
I stepped back, waiting to see what he’d do, and I wasn’t disappointed.
“And what if I am fucking your wife, Mr. Konn? What are you going to do about it?” He asked. “Furthermore, are you even sure that the baby she’s carrying is yours?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not that stupid. I know the kid’s mine.”
“Do you? Are you sure she didn’t fuck someone at the hospital to switch the results?” He countered cruelly.
The doubts started to swirl.
She’d done that to me.
Fucked me over.
Who’s to say she didn’t do the same thing by blackmailing someone else?
“I see my words hit home,” Cornell said silkily. “And let me tell you this,” he said, moving closer. “I fuck her every night since you’re not there… right in your bed.”
Everything degraded from
there.
My fist swung out and connected with his face.
There was a satisfying crack as my fist connected with his jaw.
Pain exploded in my hand as bone met bone, but I didn’t stop.
I hit him with a left. Right. Left.
Over and over again I hit him.
He, of course, tried to hit back.
But it didn’t work.
I was too quick.
I had skills he could never even imagine.
I’d grown up fighting.
I’d had to fight in order to survive.
My father may have been a Vodka billionaire, but he’d made me earn every single penny he gave me.
By fighting.
And to a kid of ten years old, I hadn’t known any different.
My mother never understood why I’d become the way I had.
Never understood why, after spending every summer at my father’s after their divorce, I was a different kid each time I came back to her.
And to this day, she still didn’t know just what my father made me do.
I understood it now, though.
Understood that my father was trying to prepare me for life.
I took no satisfaction in the way I effortlessly took Cornell down until he was panting and barely able to lift his head.
“The kid’s mine. My wife, however, you can have if she wants you,” I said, moving away from him. “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
I had to admit, I wasn’t happy with the way I’d reacted to him.
And by the smile he gave me as he shuffled out the door with his clothes in his arms, I knew that wouldn’t be the last time I saw him.
I just hoped that he didn’t do anything to Jennifer.
However, never once did it occur to me that it shouldn’t have been Jennifer I should worry about.
***
“You want me to leave?” Jennifer asked with fat tears running down her face.
I shook my head.
“No, you don’t have to leave. But I want you actively trying to look for a place of your own,” I answered. “Close by so we don’t have to fight over our kid.”
She closed her eyes and looked down.
“Why?” She asked.
I narrowed my eyes.
“How could you even ask that? After everything you’ve done, you have the nerve to ask me why?” I asked with disbelief.
She seemed to slump in on herself further.
“I’m not sleeping with him,” she said stubbornly.
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“Then please, enlighten me,” I growled.
She looked away, clutching her hands to her stomach in a protective gesture.
I looked up.
“The annulment will be filed at the court house by the end of the business day tomorrow. I’m giving you ten grand to get you on your feet. There’s also going to be more papers coming for you, telling you the visitation schedule as well as the custody arrangements for the baby. We share custody, fifty-fifty. I get all major holidays except for Thanksgiving and New Years,” I informed her.
She looked up at me, tears glimmering in her eyes and down her cheeks.
And I wasn’t affected in the least.
“Where are you going?” She asked as I turned to leave.
I swiveled back to her.
“You’ve got no right to know that anymore. Move your shit to the second bedroom.”
With that, I left.
And didn’t look back.
Chapter 7
Bearded men make better lovers. They also make prettier babies. It’s a proven fact that was established at the beginning of time.
-Mig to Annie
Annie
Two weeks later
I was almost giddy as I hurried out of the backdoor of my store.
It was three o’clock, and I had Mig coming over later so I could cook him some homemade enchiladas—my mother’s secret recipe.
His annulment was final yesterday - yes, he apparently knew some people - and he hadn’t made it a secret that he was going to pursue a relationship with me.
And I made it known that I would reciprocate.
I’d wanted him for a long, long time.
There was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.
And I didn’t care that his ex was still living with him.
In fact, I thought it was actually nice on his part.
If I’d found out that my ex had been cheating on me, he would’ve been gone before he could finish saying, ‘I’m sorry.’
Hell, my ex had been cheating on me, but it hadn’t been a secret.
I’d let it happen time after time, not caring in the least.
The only thing my ex offered me was stability, and after I was able to save up enough cash, I’d filed for divorce.
But never once, in all my years, had I felt so many butterflies in my belly at the idea of seeing Ross.
But with Mig, I felt like those butterflies could burst right out of my belly and take flight.
Even the idea of only spending some time with him had me bouncing on the balls of my feet.
The door to the office slammed shut behind me, and I turned to lock the door.
I never even saw the blow coming.
One second I was fitting the key into the hole of the lock, and the next my brain was exploding in agony.
***
Mig
“So,” Griffin called from his half of the office. “Have you fucked her yet?”
I held up the phone from underneath my ear and pointed it at him.
He started to laugh.
I was dawdling.
I’d completed the final papers for the annulment two weeks ago.
It was official yesterday.
I was now a free man, but I hadn’t made Jennifer leave.
We were living exactly as we had been…but I couldn’t find the nerve to tell her it was time to go.
I’d told her all about finding out about her affair.
She wasn’t even sorry.
Hell, I wasn’t sorry.
That didn’t make it any easier to kick a pregnant woman carrying my child out of the house she’d been living in.
I felt nothing for Jennifer. Absolutely nothing.
I felt for the child, though.
I didn’t want my child to suffer because I kicked his or her mother out of the house.
And I was being a coward.
I didn’t know how to tell Annie I was going to let Jennifer stay as long as she needed to.
Annie, I knew, would be fine with me letting her stay.
What she wouldn’t be fine with was letting me fuck her while my ex still lived in my home.
So I had a dilemma.
Griffin made a wide-eyed look when he saw I was on the phone before turning back around to his desk to finish a report.
I rolled my eyes and went back to the conversation I was having with my boss.
“One of the men we brought in yesterday swears that the drugs came from your way. So I want you to be aware that you may have a new supplier in town now that you took out the kid’s source,” my boss, Drew Logan, explained.
A couple of months ago, Griffin and I had lucked out and seized a huge drug shipment all because we’d needed a ride back up the river when the fuel pump in our boat had gone out.
It’d all been very innocent. We had approached a man getting his boat ready to go out on the river but the man had fled, and we did what we did best, we gave chase.
The man had started throwing out things from his pockets, which Griffin had collected as we ran, and we assumed were drugs.
Since he was trying to disappear into the thick of the woods, I’d continued the chase while Griffin had called in a K-9.
Ridley had arrived while I’d apprehended the subject, and Ridley had discovered nearly a thousand pounds of marijuana
in his boat.
“Did you get the report on the Coach Purse Kid?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm. Good work. I’d be interested to know if anything else comes out of that,” Logan said.
I agreed.
Although we hadn’t had any more instances where we found anyone else trying to buy and sell drugs that way.
That, or maybe they were changing the code words or something.
There was no fuckin’ telling.
“Alright,” I said, standing up. “I need to go with Griffin to meet with an informant. I’ll ask him if he thinks a new supplier is in town.”
“Good. Check in tomorrow with what you find out,” Logan said, then hung up.
“What was that about?” Griffin asked once I looked up at him.
I went to the water cooler in between his desk and mine and filled up a glass of water before I answered.
“Long thinks a new supplier is in town because one of the busts the boys in the office did last night said they got ‘em from the river,” I answered.
Griffin looked at me in disgust.
“What the fuck ever happened to transporting actual goods down the rivers instead of fuckin’ drugs and guns? This is a fuckin’ never-ending nightmare,” Griffin grimaced.
I agreed.
And I would’ve commented, but Ridley burst through the doors like his ass was on fire.
“What the fuck?” I asked him.
Ridley’s eyes turned to me.
“Annie was found unconscious about twenty minutes ago outside of her salon. She was taken to the hospital with a suspected brain injury caused by a blow to the head,” Ridley said without preamble.
My stomach clenched, and I lurched out of my seat.
“Which hospital?” I asked, jerking my phone and keys off the desk and shoving them into my pocket.
Ridley gestured to his cruiser.
“I’ll take you.”
I didn’t bother to argue. I just got in and rode, all the while trying not to freak out over my fuck up.
***
“She suffered some major trauma to her right temporal lobe from where the piece of wood struck her across the side of the head,” Dr. Mack gestured to his face. “I can’t tell you now what kind of effect that’s had on her since there’s so much swelling. Only time will tell.”
I watched as the doctor explained all that was wrong with Annie to the people who I guessed were her parents and sister.
Jack & Coke (The Uncertain Saints Book 2) Page 5