ADAM: A Bad Boy Romance (The ALPHAbet Collection Book 1)

by Abigail Stark

  He looked down.

  “No reason. Start packing. Both of you.”

  About an hour or so later, we were in the living room, waiting for Anthony to show up so he could pick Mimi up. The phone conversation asking him to come to the house had been a very long and interesting one where he had asked to speak to all three of us, like the claims made by one needed corroboration from the others.

  He finally showed up, ringing the doorbell. Mimi went to get it and walked into the living area with him.

  “Everything looks under control here,” he remarked. “The way you talked about this I was expecting a lot more tears. Hysterics.”

  “No need to make this any more dramatic than it is. The women just need somewhere to stay before this place is safe for them again.”

  “So the men in their life have to intervene. I get it.” I appreciated his attempt at a joke, but I wasn’t in the jolliest of moods.

  “This isn’t too much trouble. Is it babe?” Mimi asked him.

  “Not at all,” he said shortly. “Not when there’s a psycho on the loose.” He kissed her then looked over at me, sort of sheepishly.

  “Dana, I know this is sort of a weird question, but can I see the box?” he asked me.

  “It’s in the kitchen, on the counter. Just don’t take anything out. If the police need it as evidence it all needs to be there,” I said. The look on his face was restrained excitement. He went into the kitchen and looked before coming back and grabbing Mimi’s bag, taking it out with him to the car. Just like before. So many people had this morbid fascination with what had happened to me. I was not ready to see my life turn into a sideshow again.

  Mimi walked over to me and hugged me hard, saying she’d call as soon as she and Anthony got to his house. She approached Adam and sort of stood there like she wanted to acknowledge him but a hug was too personal.

  “Are you sure Anthony’s the best you can do for now?” he asked her again.

  “Unless you are inviting me into your home, yes. Why do you keep asking that?”

  Adam glanced over at me before he sighed and looked at Mimi.

  “Look. I know you don’t really trust me, but I think you should be careful with Anthony,” he said cryptically.

  “You think he’s dangerous?”

  “Not dangerous. He won’t put you in any danger… I just wouldn’t trust him too much.”

  “God, if he’s doing something illegal and you know what it is, just tell me,” she snapped.

  “He’s not breaking the law. Just keep an eye on him,” he said. I looked between them. When the hell had they started having inside conversations without me? Mimi left. Everything I wanted to carry fit in a duffel he could balance in front of him all the way to his house with me on the back of the bike.

  I had been to Adam’s before, but I hadn’t made it all the way inside the house the first time I came over. It was clearly a bachelor pad. Clean and tidy and bare in the manner of male minimalism. Guys didn’t own more than two coffee mugs because they thought they needed them, they owned more than two coffee mugs because their girlfriend or wife who had also introduced them to decorative throw pillows thought they needed them. Nothing on the walls, except a clock and a larger television that I even knew was available for use in homes. We were in the kitchen. I nursed the cup of hot tea he had made for me while he drank a beer. I was up on the counter while he sat leaning against the dining table which I had the sneaking suspicion never got used all that often.

  “Your ex who got attached?” he asked me. I sighed. If there was a time that the curtain was going to have to be lifted, it was now. “Tell me what happened Dana.”

  “Okay. Back in LA, Henry and I were together. After a few months of dating, he moved in with me. Everyone loved him. He was friends with my mom and stepdad, my brother liked him… he was great. After a while living together, he began to change.” I stopped and looked at Adam. I hadn’t spoken about the incident to anybody since telling Mimi.

  “What happened?”

  “He started being very… jealous. He yelled a lot. We started having a lot of fights over nothing in particular. He didn’t like that I used the dining table as a workstation sometimes, or he didn’t like the fact that one of Jaden’s friends had recognized me on the street and came to say hi to me. Stupid stuff. One day, I told him that I had had enough. I didn’t want to be with him anymore, and he had a meltdown. We had this horrible fight where one of our neighbors had to knock at the door to make sure everything was okay. He couldn’t move out because he had nowhere to go. He crashed on the couch while he looked for another place. Once he moved out, I stopped receiving my mail. I would come home, and my things would be moved around. People would tell me that I had sent them emails that I hadn’t sent.”

  “I got my locks changed, but he still got into the house somehow. I ended up moving back to my parent’s house, and one night, I woke up and found him standing over me. He wasn’t doing anything, just standing and staring at me. I screamed, and my parents restrained him while the police came. We took him to court, and he was charged with stalking, breaking and entering and assault. I lived in my parent’s house for a while before I finally moved here a few months ago. They didn’t want me to go, but I had to. I didn’t want it to keep being the center of my life. I wanted to move on.”

  “How long was he in jail?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s clearly out now,” I said, sighing.

  “What were the assault charges?”

  I stayed silent. He hadn’t forgotten. I was sort of hoping that he wouldn’t bring it up from the last time I had mentioned it that night at the store. I looked into my cup of cold tea. I felt tears sting my eyes. Not because I was sad; I was upset. I thought I’d finally be able to leave this in the past.

  “Hey.”

  I looked up. Adam was right in front of me. His hands were on my knees. “What did he do to you? Did he make you do something you didn’t want to do? Force you?”

  “No, never,” I sniffed. That was the second time he had asked me that. “When we were together, he would always make coffee in the morning. A lot of times he would bring it to me when I was still in bed. One day, right before I ended up moving back to my parents’ house after the breakup, he woke me up. He was standing over my bed and yelling at me to get up. It was still dark outside. I woke up, and I panicked because he wasn’t supposed to be in the house. We had broken up. He was holding the coffee pot, and he was saying he had made me some… talking about how much I loved my morning coffee. He… he pulled the covers off of me and spilled the scalding hot coffee over my hip and legs. I was wearing shorts… the damage varied, but it was mostly third and second-degree burns.” I ran a finger over my clothed thigh where the almost invisible scars from the graft were on my right leg. “I was in recovery for a while, and you can hardly tell that it happened because I got skin grafts but… yeah.”

  The grip that Adam’s hands had on my knees tightened. I peered up at him.

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “You’ll go back to prison if you do that.”

  “If I get a reasonable judge, I could explain it to him. He’d understand.”

  “Adam. It’s fine. You’ve seen me naked. You can hardly even tell.”

  “Does your dad know?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t… and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “That’s no longer an option, Doll. If Henry’s in town, your father has to know. Your mom in LA needs to know too.”

  I shook my head.

  “My life here is finally turning into something, Adam. I can’t start over again. How? Where?”

  He took the mug and placed it on the counter while he hugged me. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Doll. He wants you; he has to go through me.”

  I hugged him back and just let myself feel safe in his arms. How was he planning on doing that exactly? Who said Henry didn’t have guns now or wasn’t above arson? Who said he wasn’t watching us r
ight now? I closed my eyes. I didn’t know a lot of things, but I did know one; Adam would look out for me.

  I didn’t know how, but I knew he would.

  21

  Adam

  I wouldn’t say that Reggie Forester liked me. He sure didn’t hate me, but I doubted I would be one of the people he would send a Christmas card to, or allow to date his daughter.

  That was that then, I guess. I was that guy. The one who had a girlfriend. She had never called me her boyfriend, and I had never called her my girlfriend, but we were exclusive. Oh yeah. We were definitely exclusive. No man was coming within a five-foot radius of her if I had anything to say about it.

  Especially not Henry Neal.

  You know what. I wish he would. I wish he would try and come near Dana again. I wish he would try and intimidate her. That would be twenty-five to life for me, no question. He could touch her if he wanted. As long as he was okay with consequently losing whatever part of his body made contact with her.

  The Superbird was now in the shop where I was reworking the interior and doing the paint, so Reggie wasn’t out front to see me roll up on a Harley with his daughter on the back seat. Why was I so nervous? I had been here dozens of times. It wasn’t like this was going to be news to him. He had seen us together; shit he had probably even heard us fucking the last time.

  That wasn’t even what we were there to talk about. The issue at hand was his daughter’s safety. Safety from Henry. That was the person she had to look out for. Yeah… that guy.

  Why did I sound like I was trying to convince myself? I felt Dana’s hand touch mine and laced our fingers together—practically a reflex. I looked down at her.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  About how much I don’t deserve you and how your father will disapprove of us being together. About how I’ve never had to impress someone’s dad in the past and now I’m feeling inadequate in ways I’ve never had to think about before. About how gorgeous you are and how much I love you.

  “About how much this looks like you’re taking me to your father to receive his approval for us to date,” I said lightly.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Nervous? What is that? Is that a type of bread? Never had the experience,” I said. She smiled a little. Fuck, she knew.

  “Don’t be nervous. That’s not even what we’re here to do. He’s going to love that I have someone he trusts looking out for me.”

  “Who says he trusts me?”

  “He lets you touch his old cars,” she said.

  I shook my head. “If it weren’t me, it would be any other car guy.”

  “Well, then he lets you touch me,” she said flirtatiously. She surprised me sometimes. I leaned down and kissed her, my hand squeezing her ass. Was there a worse image for her dad to see when he opened the door? She rang the bell.

  He had been expecting us. Technically he had been expecting her, but he didn’t look upset about seeing me. We talked cars for a couple of minutes while she got us drinks from the fridge. Dana sat on a couch and urged me to sit next to her. She grabbed one of my hands in both of hers and rested them on her lap. Reggie looked at them pointedly before he sat down and started asking Dana how she was. Transitional small talk.

  “Daddy, I have to tell you something,” she began, when most of Reggie’s beer was gone.

  “Are you two pregnant?”

  I froze. Dana was laughing nervously. He hadn’t said it like it was an accusation, but I felt like he was onto me. He was onto me, and I didn’t even have anything to hide.

  “No, we aren’t pregnant, Dad.”

  She let go of my hand, reaching for a Coke on the coffee table. My hand closed lightly around her thigh. Her knee almost—very innocent. Her dad certainly didn’t miss that. His eyes glanced at me before going to her face again. I didn’t think it was a secret that she and I were together. I didn’t know what she had said to him about me—if anything—but I was nervous. I had kissed her in front of him before, but this was different. For one thing, we were sitting, and he was standing. I felt like he was sizing me up, trying to see how good a mate I would be for his daughter. It wasn’t a pissing contest; we weren’t trying to see who the alpha was, but he definitely wanted to see whether I would measure up. To what, though? I had no frame of reference for this.

  “It’s about what happened in LA in the months before I moved here,” she sighed.

  “You were living with your mother then, right?”

  “I was, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t find a house… I had a house. A great place in downtown LA. I was living with an ex there, and I had to move away because when we broke up, he started to stalk me.”

  Reggie was silent. His face didn’t give away what he was feeling either. Stone face. Like a mask.

  “Stalk you?”

  “After he moved out, he refused to leave me alone. He would keep getting into the apartment, moving my things around, taking my mail, stealing my belongings. One day, he attacked me. Remember when you would call, and I would tell you I was in the hospital?”

  That got a reaction.

  “Dana did that man… force—”

  “No, Dad. He didn’t sexually assault me. He… he emptied a pot of freshly brewed coffee over me. I was in the hospital for weeks getting skin grafts over the second and third-degree burns.”

  Reggie started pacing. I had to give it to him for his ability to stay calm. If I were him, I would have broken most of my arm punching the wall. Screaming. Generally scaring Dana to death.

  “The next part of this story is that he’s rotting in jail, right?”

  “After that, I moved in with Mom and Frank. One night, I woke up, and he was standing over me. I screamed and woke the whole house. He was taken away by the cops, and he got jail time.”

  “How much?”

  “Not enough because he’s out again.”

  “What?”

  “I got a box at the house. It was full of pictures of me, all taken here in San Diego. He knows I’m here. He knows where I live.”

  “Why is this the first I am hearing about all this Dana?”

  “I didn’t know that Mom never told you. When I found out that she didn’t, I got scared. I knew you had to hear it from me, but I didn’t want you to worry about me like that.”

  “You didn’t want me to worry about you? Sweetheart, I’m your father. My only job is to worry about you.”

  “I thought it was over when he went to jail, and I moved away. I know that was stupid of me to think, but I didn’t want to believe that I was that easy to trace. I didn’t want to believe that he would come after me again. Not after the threats from Mom and Frank.”

  “You have to move in with me,” he said.

  “One of the pictures was taken outside this house, Dad. He knows this address.”

  “She’s staying with me. Her roommate’s also moved away temporarily,” I said to Reggie. He looked at me.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “I was with her at her house when she received the box.”

  He kept looking at me, and I swear to God his eyes narrowed.

  “Dana, honey. Go upstairs.”

  Dana looked between us.

  “I’m not a kid, Dad, you can’t send me to my room.”

  “I want to talk to Adam, Dana,” he said.

  “It’ll only be a minute,” I assured her. She kissed me before heading up the stairs. We watched her leave in silence before I spoke. I had to say something. I just hoped I’d say the right thing.

  “I care about your daughter, Reggie. I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  He looked at me like he was sad.

  “Thank you for letting her stay at your house,” he said. “You don’t have any kids, Adam. That’s my little girl. I know you won’t let anything happen to her, but that doesn’t mean I won’t spend the whole night worrying. You know the guy who’s doing this to her?”

  “She only told me his name. He
nry Neal.”

  “Henry Neal… I want to wring his neck,” he said.

  “That makes two of us,” I said quietly.

  “How old are you Adam? Thirty? Thirty-one?”

  That was sudden.

  “Thirty-three next year,” I said.

  “Dana’s twenty-five.”

  Oh shit.

  “She is,” I said, agreeing. Seven years. That wasn’t that many. Fuck, it wasn’t that many, was it? I wasn’t going to lie about my age to her dad.

  “Her mother and I were younger than she is now when we had her. You know about her stepfather, in Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah. She told me her mom remarried.”

  He looked at me. We were about the same height, but I probably had some weight on him.

  “That’s two fathers you need to impress, Adam. And her mother. Most guys just get one guy mad-dogging them and questioning their intentions with their daughter.”

  Oh. My. God. I had only ever seen this sort of shit in movies. He wasn’t, was he? It wasn’t like I was proposing to her. We were just… what? Dating? What the hell was I supposed to say? I had never felt so sleazy in my life. Sure, I was actually the guy who was fucking his daughter but the way he was looking at me, talking to me, made me feel like the guy who was fucking his daughter. Slimy. A dirty mechanic who wanted to defile the pretty blonde from Los Angeles.

  “Dana was really lucky growing up, having both of you around,” I said, not knowing what the hell to say to that. It sounded like a threat. She had two fathers to my zero.

  “What I am saying Adam, is she has a lot of men who love her. A lot of men who are going to take her side if you put them in a situation where they have to choose—either you or her. Do you understand?”

  That one was definitely a threat.

  “Reggie… Mr. Forester. I would jump off a bridge before I hurt your daughter. I would get twenty-five to life before I let that guy near her.”

  He laughed a little.

  “Frank and her mother are going to be a little less accepting of your criminal record. I should warn you.”