He flushed, and she could see his struggle not to take her up on the offer right that second. She could sense it too, her nipples tingling at the idea of being so overtly ogled—and by a man who didn’t seem to care about ogling anything but cars. But his controlled gruffness won out, and he finally gave in, her breasts remaining sadly unmolested.
“There’s no need to resort to bribery. You can count me in. Let’s go kick some twelve-year-old ass.”
Amy fell into a mock swoon to hide her delight—and her boobs’ lingering disappointment. “My hero.”
Chapter Three
“I’ll run point.” Alex, the Montgomerys’ beefy lead security guard, a man who looked like he bench-pressed small children in his free time, made a series of hand gestures that none of them understood. “I want Ryan and Philip covering me from the rear. Amy and Holly, you two flank. You need to be stuck to my sides like a pair of burrs.”
“Question.” Amy lifted her hand.
Ryan waited patiently with the others to hear what she had to say—none of them finding this situation as odd as it must appear on the outside. The laser tag facility smelled, predictably, of stale adolescent sweat and burnt popcorn. It had once been painted bright purple and black, but time had worn away the best of the color, leaving the entire facility looking like a Halloween mask left out in the sun.
The sad backdrop had nothing on them, though. There were a total of five of them from the Manor here to play, each one strapped into plastic chest—and back-plates that fit a little too snugly over their adult-sized frames. He felt uncomfortable and silly. And the back of his neck was wet with spitballs the annoying soccer team kids kept shooting across the waiting area.
Goddammit. This was war.
“Yes?” Alex barked. “What is it?”
“Why do Holly and I have to flank? That sounds like the wimpy, leftover job—the one you made up just to give to the girls.”
Alex frowned, and the sight of it was so powerful Ryan felt his spine straightening in response. If that man hadn’t run an entire militia in his previous life, Ryan would be deeply surprised. “Fine. Prove me wrong. Shoot Ryan in the head from where you stand.”
“I’d rather shoot you. You’re the one being misogynistic.”
“Amy, if you can hit either one of us anywhere above the waist, I’ll let you take the whole damn operation over.”
She screwed up her face in concentration and raised her gun. Ryan laughingly lifted his hands in defense, but she was intent on proving her point. “Hold still, Ryan. I’m about to end you.”
She fired, and he could see the flash of red as her shot aimed far wide of his head and landed somewhere near the back wall. “Crap buckets!” she cried. “I’d have been better off aiming at the ceiling. Fine. I’ll flank you. But I don’t see what good that’s going to do except shield you from getting yourself shot. You’re basically transforming me and Holly into body armor.”
Alex winked. “And I’m sure you’ll be excellent at it.”
They didn’t have time to argue after that. The starting alarm—a rooster’s crow—sounded, and they filed out of the waiting area toward the oversized warehouse space like a troop heading into battle. According to the tired-looking, unamused guy running the show, they had exactly sixty seconds to get in place before their targets would be activated and all bets were off.
They moved as a collective group for the first sixty-five seconds. Unfortunately, as soon as the lights went dark, the adolescent taunting started. Amy’s restraint, which hadn’t been very reliable to start with, went up like a wisp of the fake fog kicking in. She took off after an undersized boy with his hair hanging in his eyes, her vows to teach him manners if it was the last thing she did echoing throughout the warehouse. Holly, also taking exception to his liberal use of various parts of the female anatomy as insults, wasn’t far behind.
“Pwned you, noob,” a kid shouted from the rear. Turning, Ryan got ready to fire back, but Alex had already landed a perfect shot and was moving on to take out every person within a twenty-foot radius.
“Change of plans,” Alex commanded. He was dressed all in black, making him difficult to distinguish among the low lights, moving with a kind of stealth that was unsettling. This was not a man Ryan would choose to cross on a real battlefield, that was for sure. “I’m single-handedly nailing every last one of these bastards if it kills me.”
It was soon proven that Alex was a man of his word. Philip, one of the owners of the landscaping company the Montgomerys kept on retainer, had the kind of lean, wiry strength that would have come in handy when they rounded a corner and stepped into an ambush, but he soon abandoned them to the noble call of the ladies trapped behind a mirror on the bottom floor. Left alone, Ryan and Alex stood back to back, moving steadily toward higher ground and picking off everyone they could see. Only the occasional vibration of his chest plate signaled a hit.
Somewhere in this, there was an inappropriate comment about grown-ass adults playing with vibrating kids’ toys, but Ryan didn’t bother trying to find it.
He was too busy having fun.
With only minimal casualties, they reached a perch that was safely recessed from most of the kids, allowing them a chance to chat amid all the slaughter.
“Fuck yes.” Alex hit the loudest of the soccer kids right in the chest and lowered his weapon. “I’m kissing Amy on the mouth as soon as this is over. With tongue. I can’t tell you how good it feels to pick up a gun again.”
“You don’t carry?” Ryan had never understood what—or who—it was the Montgomerys needed protecting from, but it had never been a secret that Alex and the handful of rotating security guards were very much a physical presence at the house.
“Oh, man. I wish. Mr. Montgomery forbids firearms. It’s one of the things I hate most about this job.” Alex nodded to their rear.
Ryan aimed at a blinking light and fired, triumphant at the sound of a cracked voice calling him names he wouldn’t dare repeat. “No guns? Then what the hell do you do if there’s a break-in or attack?”
Alex leaned down just enough to lift the leg of his military-grade cargo pants, allowing Ryan to catch a flash of a knife strapped to his calf.
“I carry about eight of these babies on my person at all times.”
“I can see how that might be effective.”
Alex laughed. “So is being the only six-foot-three black man in a town of bankers and housewives. Mr. Montgomery knew what he was about when he hired me.”
Too bad no one else did. Ryan only knew enough about Alex’s military past to recognize that putting down a gun to run point on a security team as elite as it was unnecessary probably wasn’t part of the man’s master life plan. He’d wager the job had been foisted on him, slapped down as the only recourse in an increasingly depressing career path.
In other words, not all that different from Ryan’s own.
“Seems to me you’d want to avoid casual warfare like this,” he said. “Stay away from temptation and all that.”
“You think? Kind of like a former stunt driver keeping his distance from all those sweet racecars of Mr. Montgomery’s?” He nodded. “To your left. Nine o’clock.”
Fair enough. He fired.
“Do you ever miss it?” Alex gestured toward the back, and they moved as one to a hidden alcove near an emergency exit. “The explosions? The speed? The crashes?”
“Hell, yes.” The words rose to his lips before he could stop them.
For the longest time, Ryan had done a pretty decent job of not wallowing over his past mistakes, focused instead on keeping his head down and his nose clean, waiting for the day he could get his life back. It was impossible to get through the day otherwise. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d felt the purr of Mr. Montgomery’s prize Ferrari 458 revving to life underneath him and felt
actual physical pain at taking it down the street at a sedate thirty-five miles per hour. Both he and the car wept at the injustice of it, of the meeting of his hands and its leather-padded steering wheel in an agonizingly slow dance that reduced asphalt kick-up and accidental pings.
But his patience with idling was rapidly nearing its end. It wouldn’t be fair to hold Amy accountable for his dissatisfaction with life in Ransom Creek, but there was no denying she played a role. Since the moment she’d arrived, filling the Manor with her laughter and cheer and great rack, she’d awakened feelings long dormant inside him—feelings that went beyond sexual desire. He wanted action. He wanted more than this limbo that encapsulated him. He wanted to start moving again.
But none of that was happening in a laser tag facility, and Alex Morris, bad-ass bodyguard to the elite, was the wrong man to open up to. Ryan shrugged and did his best to make light of the situation.
“How could I not miss it? It was a dream job for any man with a pulse. What if I offered to let you take out one of Mr. Montgomery’s cars and race it along the Los Angeles River at a hundred and forty miles per hour, no questions asked? What would you give up for that kind of speed?”
Alex didn’t even pause. “My right nut. My left nut. Both my nuts wrapped in a bow.”
“Exactly.”
Alex gave him a nod of complete understanding, and Ryan felt a sudden overwhelming kinship with the man. After seeing how many shots Alex picked off without even blinking, it was clear the man was sitting on a well of untapped potential. Wasted, weeping, perfectly aimed potential.
The rooster crowed again as the lights came on, revealing their war zone to be nothing more than a stained, dirty cement block and a handful of overgrown youths whose voices had yet to change. It seemed fitting somehow, that their adrenaline would ebb away to leave only the sad vestiges of a game they were too old to be playing in the first place.
“Do you think you’ll ever go back?” Alex asked, blinking his eyes, one then the other, as they adjusted to the lights.
“I sure fucking hope so,” Ryan said.
“Sucks, man. I know just how you feel.” And with that, Alex thwapped him heavily on the back and leaped over a retaining wall toward the exit, pumping his fist in victory at Philip.
Ryan followed slowly, chewing on the conversation, savoring the bitterness it left behind. Hope was such a fleeting thing to hinge a life on, but it was all he had.
Every single insurance agent he’d approached after the accident—and still approached every few months, hoping for a backdoor policy that would clear him for work again—had turned him down. But he kept approaching. Every movie production company he’d called, offering to sign a contract—any contract—that would clear them of responsibility for injuries incurred on the job had politely declined. But he kept asking.
They all said the same thing, that no one was willing to take a risk on the stunt driver who’d crashed a half-million dollar car into a freeway overpass on the job, his blood alcohol level teetering somewhere near the point-two level. A liability, they called him. A drunkard. Burned out. Finished. Done.
But he didn’t feel done. He wasn’t ready to give up and reconcile himself to a life of Driving Miss Daisy. Ransom Creek was the end of the line for a man like him. The bottom of the barrel.
The bottom of the barrel was definitely not where he’d envisioned spending the rest of his life.
Ryan caught up with Amy, who was red-faced and laughing, her bangs plastered to her forehead with sweat and what looked like war paint. He had no idea where the paint had come from but knew better than to question it. If anyone carried spare war paint in her pockets, it would be her.
“I hope you and Alex put on a better show than we did,” she said. “My trigger was stuck and I got cornered.”
“I’m pretty sure Alex made a clean sweep of it. That man has some scary shooting skills.”
She waggled her eyebrows. “Why do you think I invited him? Come on. I’ll buy us some six-hour-old celebratory pizza. Then maybe I can whoop your butt at pinball. I may not be very good at laser tag, but I’m a wizard at pinball.”
He followed her out, forcing himself to focus on the here and now. Amy, here. Her kind gesture in setting this night up, now.
He was lucky to be around people who cared enough to change their plans to suit his weaknesses. Luckier to have a job. Even luckier still to be alive. That had to count for something.
One of these days, he’d figure out what.
* * *
Amy sat in the middle of a circle of brightly colored plastic blocks, building a tower that defied the laws of gravity. She’d swear that ninety percent of her days were spent building things out of unrelated objects. Mountains out of mashed sweet potatoes. Forts out of pillows. She thought she might try a house of cards tomorrow, but chances were Evan would want to help and demolish the whole thing.
He was destructive, that boy. And sweet little Lily did everything her brother wanted of her, even if that meant knocking down the beautiful creations they made and sobbing her heart out at the senseless loss of it all.
Amy’s heart pinged for the poor child. She knew all too well what it meant to feel too much, to want so hard to please. Even with a gazillionaire family and what had to be the most gorgeous pair of blue eyes in existence, that girl was in for a world of hurt someday.
“More blocks, Amy! More!” Evan clapped his hands and watched, rapt, as she stood on her tiptoes to get a blue block on top of the red one.
“Yellow, red, blue,” she chanted. “What comes next?”
“Lellow,” Lily solemnly replied. Amy dropped a kiss on her strawberry-blond curls in reward for her diligence.
She’d made patterns out of the three primary colors as she went, so she figured it counted as a learning game. Mrs. Montgomery—Serena, she insisted Amy call her—was a big proponent of adding an educational component to every second of every day. The woman had been against hiring Amy right from the start, as she admittedly had no training in early childhood education. Three years of hurried high school studies shoved in around a rigorous dance schedule made her an expert on absolutely nothing at all, but she had one undeniable advantage in the nanny arena: family.
As a second wife, married to the head of the family just three years earlier, Serena didn’t share Mr. Montgomery’s sense of loyalty when it came to things like this. She’d wanted her children to learn French and dress all in white and get into the best preschools before they were even born, but Mr. Montgomery would have no more turned Amy down for a job than he would have disowned one of his children. Mr. Montgomery was practically a father to her, and had been since the day her mom had been hired here. He trusted her to raise his second crop of children, and that was good enough to silence even Serena’s protests.
No one crossed John Montgomery the Second once a decision was made. She doubted anyone had ever tried.
“Now here’s a sight I never thought to enjoy.”
Amy stopped, suspended mid-tiptoe, unable to move. She could hear the squeals of Evan and Lily as they gave up their engineering futures to run to the legs of the half brother they barely knew but unquestionably adored. They never reacted that way when Monty came around to say hello—he was the sort of man who was powerful and generous to the point of perfection, the guy everyone worshipped as a leader but sort of cringed from as a man.
At least, Amy had always done that. He’d once caught her in the kitchen stealing sugar flowers from the top of a cake destined for Jenna’s eighth birthday party. Instead of yelling at her or going straight to the cook with tales of her infamy, he’d just offered his grim, thirteen-year-old smile and said, “I know you didn’t mean to do wrong, Amy. Want me to make you some cocoa instead?”
But Jake?
He wouldn’t have stolen sugar flowers alongside her—he would have foun
d them a pair of forks and helped her to eat the entire top tier. And most of the second.
She turned slowly, doing her best to slow the nervous leap of her heart, to school her features into those of a calm, reasonable young woman meeting an old friend for the first time in eight years.
It didn’t work.
With a squeal that cast Evan’s and Lily’s into the shade, her good intentions imploded in on themselves. She launched herself across the room and into Jake’s arms. His arms were waiting for just such a thing, and he lifted her in an impromptu twirl around the nursery. Of necessity, it was a short twirl, and he let out a soft grunt as he deposited her safely out of reach of her two charges.
“Geez, Amy. You got heavy.”
“Maybe you got weak,” she countered, feeling breathless.
She took a moment to straighten her lace tank top and appraise the now-grown man opposite her, and realized her words couldn’t possibly be true. Of course Jake Montgomery hadn’t gotten weak. He looked taller, more self-assured, with actual muscle packed inside his once-lanky frame. Like all the Montgomerys, he wore his signature red hair with pride, the dark auburn strands standing up in a casual, windblown sweep above his impeccable bone structure and the charming, freckle-smattered visage she knew so well.
“I take it back.” He licked his lips as he took her in, his own exploration similarly unabashed. “You didn’t get heavy. You got...full. Christ, Amy. Why didn’t you tell me? Or at least text me a few pictures?”
She felt hot annoyance sweep through her at his words, a feeling quite at odds with her expectations. Ever since she’d returned to the Manor, she’d lived in anticipation of this moment. Jake and Amy, against the world. Jake and Amy, all grown up. Yes, maybe even Jake and Amy, these happy golden years. Stranger things had happened.
But the real thing was both better and worse than her imaginings. Better, because he was real and he was here. Not off seducing socialites with perfectly cascading locks and large trust funds, or racing around the world on a yacht run by a crew of able-bodied men—actually here, so close she could touch him.
If I Stay Page 4