Hot Summer Lovin’

by Parker, Ali

  Pain stabbed at my heart with every breath that I took at the thought that this was where Rayce had been for the last three nights. Where he’s going to be for God only knows how many more.

  The man himself stepped through the door on the other side of the glass, wearing an honest-to-God prison-issued jumpsuit and his familiar smirk. It was his eyes that gave him away, red-rimmed and tired.

  He sat down and picked up the receiver on his side, motioning for me to do the same. “Hey, bro. You came.”

  “Of course I came. I’ve been worried fucking sick about you.”

  “Don’t be.” Rayce shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I took in the slight hunch of his shoulders, the dark circles under his eyes. “What did your lawyer say?”

  He sighed deeply, his eyes flicking to the one window in the room—even if it was covered in bars. “I’m in deep shit, that’s what he said. Armed robbery with a deadly weapon is no joke.”

  My heart stuttered. “What’s the damage?”

  “Thirty years max in this shithole.” His tone had no inflection when he said it.

  “Thirty fucking years?” I spat, my eyebrows jumping high on my forehead. “Are you kidding me?”

  “That’s the maximum sentence. If I’m convicted of this, it’ll be my first conviction for anything like this, so that counts in my favor. Along with a couple of other things, but I’m not getting my hopes up.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you get out of there with me?” There were so many questions I wanted to ask him, but that was the first one that made it out.

  Rayce rubbed his eyes, then looked right into mine. “They had to catch someone … or they’d never have stopped looking. It couldn’t be you.”

  “Why not?” I hissed the question, never breaking eye contact with him. “You could have been out of there with me. We could have beaten the manhunt.”

  “No, we couldn’t have.” There was no more fight or fire in his eyes, he just looked sad. “We were never going to evade them forever, Will. It was fucking naive to think we could. I should have let you get out the first time you told me you wanted to. Hell, I never should have dragged you in to begin with.”

  “This isn’t your fault,” I said the words as forcefully I as could. “I didn’t have to keep going.”

  “You and I both know you couldn’t say no to me.” He tore his eyes away from mine then, dropping them to his feet. “I can’t let you take the fall for this, Will. Not when it’s all on me. I’ve always been your big brother. Even if this wasn’t my fault, I still wouldn’t have let you take the fall. That’s just what big brothers do. We protect.”

  “Not when the cost is this high.” I motioned at the small visitors’ room, the glass panel dividing us. “It should have been neither of us or both of us in here.”

  “No,” he said, slamming his hands onto the counter in front of him and jerking his gaze back up to mine. “It couldn’t have been both of us. You have a kid on the way. You have to be there for him or her, always. No matter what.”

  “Speaking of which, I’ve done something that you’re going to be mad about.”

  Giving me a long look, he nodded. “If you brought it up after I mentioned the kid, then I’m assuming it’s part of making things right with Heidi and taking care of your child?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could never be mad about it then, doesn’t even matter to me what it is you’ve done.” Sincerity shone from his tired eyes, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

  I couldn’t think of a word to say. A wave of emotion rose in my throat and gave me the distinct impression that I was about to cry, even if I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have tears in my eyes.

  Instead of words that would be either choked or meaningless, I lifted my hand to the glass. Rayce did the same on the other side, and I could have sworn he looked as choked up as I did.

  We nodded to each other after that, and Rayce got up to leave. I watched him tap on the thick steel door and waited for him to be ushered away before I finally stood up.

  My shoes felt like they’d been made from lead on the way out of the prison, my feet reluctant to carry me away from my brother. Everything we’d spoken about kept tumbling through my mind, but I still couldn’t believe he didn’t blame me.

  It didn’t look like he did. It actually kind of looked like the opposite: like he blamed himself about my being there at all. Guilt was a funny thing, I supposed. It was often misplaced—often missing—and people hardly ever agreed on who should be the one to carry that heavy mantle.

  Rayce and I were just going to have to agree to disagree on that one. We’d both made the decisions that had led us to where we were right now. I would never forgive myself that he was stuck back in that building while I was already in my truck and on my way back home.

  Ultimately, it could very easily have been me back there. I still didn’t know why he hadn’t escaped that day with me, or what had happened to New Guy, but I did know I would owe him forever for giving me the literal shove that got me out of that door.

  Chapter 36

  Heidi

  “Heidi, you girls are on break for lunch now.” Our manager smiled at me, grabbing a pile of menus from the stack and looking over at the door where a new group of people were waiting to be seated. “I’ve got them, but will you let your friends know about your break, please?”

  “Sure thing.” I returned her friendly smile, waiting for her to rush off to get the new table settled before I rolled my neck and released a relieved breath. My feet were killing me, and I was pretty sure that my muscles had gotten the memo that there was something going on with my body.

  Valerie came marching past me on her way to the kitchen. I grabbed her wrist and tapped my watch with my free hand. “It’s finally that time of day.”

  “Oh, thank God.” She kicked off her shoes right there in the narrow serving aisle and picked them up, letting them dangle from her fingers. “Do we have enough time to go out and grab something to eat?”

  “We do,” Olive said, coming up from behind me. “But we’re trying to save, remember? I packed sandwiches this morning, so the only place we need to go is the break room.”

  Valerie and I both groaned, but neither of us argued. We needed to save for household expenses, and I for one needed to save for medical expenses too. And then for—

  No, this isn’t the time, I mentally chastised myself and pushed my worries over finances to the back of my mind. Over the course of the last few days, since running out on Will on Tuesday, I’d spent every night running the numbers in my head.

  For the first time in my life, I couldn’t live only for the moment. I had to do some real planning for the future and had no idea how to even get started.

  As a result, I’d recruited Olive to help. She’d sat me down and given me a speech about financial responsibility and saving, telling me to listen and do what she said if I wanted to have any hope of saving any money.

  Valerie had once again decided to hop on board the save train, not only to contribute fairly to household expenses, but also as a show of support to me. My friends really were the best.

  They’d both offered to help me out with however much they could, but I hadn’t taken them up on their offers. Realistically, I had realized after my talk with Olive that I might have to at some point.

  At the very least I had to answer Will’s calls and discuss what exactly the two of us were going to do, but I hadn’t quite grown the balls—or the ovaries—to do it. There was a part of me that was afraid now that I had faced the consequences of purely living-in-the-moment, I would be too tempted to take him up on that stolen money if I talked to him again.

  More than that, though, I just didn’t really know what to say to him. I still had feelings for the guy, and we were having a damn baby together, but I knew that after the way I’d run out on him, he was going to ask me what I did want from him—if not that.

  The tr
uth was that I didn’t know. I wanted him, but I didn’t want the dirty money he came with. I didn’t even know if I would be able to separate those two things: himself and the money he had so nonchalantly admitted to having stolen.

  It broke my heart to think about him, so I just tried not to. Just like with my financial worries, I only allowed myself a limited amount of time to think about it and that time was at night. I refused to let myself obsess about it all day long.

  The break room was a small, dingy room that smelled of grease and stale coffee. There was a mini-fridge in the corner, a couple of ratty couches, a single-seater, and old box-frame television that was always set to the news. I wasn’t even sure if the thing could catch anything else.

  Olive, Valerie, and I traipsed into the room, and while Val and I collapsed on the couches, Olive went to the fridge and extracted three brown paper bags. She handed the first one to Valerie. “No pickles on yours.”

  The next one came to me. “I’ve loaded you up on extra turkey, extra cheese, and extra lettuce. Don’t worry, there’s nothing processed on there and I washed the lettuce.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured, scooting over to make space for Olive on the couch.

  She waved me off, taking the single-seater instead. It had a spring that jabbed you in the ass, but she didn’t even seem to notice it. After refusing to take a seat with Valerie, either, she shut both of us up by changing the topic. “Have you spoken to Will yet?”

  The girls knew I ran out on him, but they didn’t know why. I shook my head. “I’m not ready to speak to him yet. I need to figure out what to say to him first.”

  “You need to know where you stand with him,” Valerie suggested. “You also need to know whether he wants to be part of the baby’s life and if he’s going to be making any sort of financial contribution.”

  “And that’s just for starters,” Olive added. “There are many finer details involved in all of those broad strokes. Stop looking at your sandwich like it’s going to bite you and bite it instead, Heidi. You need the nutrients.”

  Dutifully taking a few bites of my sandwich and washing it down with some water from the bottle I’d been carrying around with me at Olive’s insistence, I shrugged. “It’s just not that simple, you know. What if he wants to contribute, and I don’t want him to?”

  Olive narrowed her blue eyes, setting her sandwich down slowly, and wiping her mouth. “What do you mean you don’t want him to contribute? Of course you do! He’s the baby’s father, for crying in a damn bucket. It’s not like you’re in a position to turn down money.”

  “Okay, now you have to tell us what happened between the two of you.” Valerie sat up, also abandoning her lunch in favor of focusing on me. “You can’t ask a question like that and still expect us to believe you just need time to think about things.”

  “I do need time to think about things.” I took a few more bites of my food, hoping they’d go back to their own. When they didn’t, I groaned. “It was just a hypothetical question, okay. Figuring this stuff out just isn’t as straightforward as you guys think it is.”

  They’d been asking me what had happened all week, since I’d gotten home on Tuesday and hadn’t stopped crying until sometime Wednesday morning. I hadn’t told them, though. I wouldn’t sell Will out, not even to them.

  “You can talk to us, you know,” Olive encouraged in a gentle tone.

  It looked like she was about to say something else until Valerie spun around on her couch and pointed at the TV, clearly having caught something of interest from the corner of her eye. “Do you have the remote, Olive? Turn that up. It’s something about those robberies we were talking about the other day.”

  My tummy bottomed out, my heart bursting into a fluttery mess of nerves. What if Will had been arrested?

  No matter how much I hadn’t wanted any part of his ill-gotten gains, I still wanted the man himself.

  Olive glared at Valerie, sliding her eyes to the side to glance at me. When she saw me scooting forward on my seat with all my attention on the TV as well, she let out an exasperated huff but turned up the volume.

  A plainclothes policeman or federal agent was addressing the media in front of the latest bank that had been robbed. We’d missed the introduction, but Valerie filled us in. “That’s the policeman who gave the last media briefing on the robberies too. I caught it during my shift on Tuesday.”

  Blood rushed to my ears, pounding so hard it was a struggle to hear what the man was saying. What I did hear, though, made me wonder if I were hallucinating.

  “Millions of dollars, more than what was stolen from the Standard Reserve Bank behind me, has been returned to the branch that was robbed.” Reporters yelled out questions to the man, all speaking over one another until he lifted his hands and waited for them to quiet down. “We don’t know at this time where the money came from, but we will keep the public updated of any developments in the case.”

  The reporters exploded with more questions. Pointing to a man in the front row, the policeman waited to hear a question I couldn’t quite make out. I did hear the answer, though, and it sent a rush of joy through the confusion I was feeling over all the money that had been returned … and more.

  “Everyone involved with the robberies is in custody. We don’t believe there are any other people out there who had a hand in these incidents. Like I said, that’s all we have for you today, folks.”

  I shot up from my seat even as more reporters accosted the man to get answers to their questions. Sometime while watching the report, I’d eaten the rest of my sandwich.

  Brushing the crumbs off my uniform, I swung my gaze to the girls. “Will you guys please cover my tables? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Vaguely registering their agreement to cover for me, I replayed the news I’d just heard over and over through my mind. The money had been returned, which had been exactly what I had asked Will to do.

  Would he really have done that for me? Would he have returned millions of dollars just because I asked him to? I didn’t want to believe it, but if he had, then he was every bit the man I’d thought he was. And that was the kind of man I could raise a child with.

  Chapter 37

  Will

  A new house came with new sounds and new smells. So many new things to get used to. I welcomed the change, sitting on my new couch and staring at the sunshine pouring in through my new windows.

  At this time of day, just after noon, the light reflected off the gleaming surfaces in the kitchen. The pool glittered out in the yard and the house was warm and full of natural light.

  It was so far removed from my ratty apartment that I felt like an intruder, sitting on a stranger’s couch totally unsure what to do with myself. I sighed, bringing my hands up to lodge my fingers in my hair.

  As much as I had wanted the change and welcomed it, as different and as much better as it was to my old place, I couldn’t get comfortable here. There wasn’t much here that felt like mine.

  When I’d packed up my apartment, I’d pretty much only brought the essentials with me. The rest of the threadbare, second- third- and fourth-hand stuff I’d picked up over the years, I’d left behind.

  I was starting to wish that I hadn’t. That stuff was shitty, but it had felt more like mine than anything in here. Given that the previous owners had relocated, they’d wanted a fresh start and had left most of their stuff behind.

  With my permission, and my thanks, but now I felt like a stranger in my own home. Shifting on the couch, I realized it had no springs poking into my butt. I couldn’t feel the frame beneath the tattered upholstery, probably because the thing wasn’t in the least bit tattered.

  For some reason, that made it feel even less like a home. I guessed that was the problem, though. Having grown up in a foster home, I was used to having people around me all the time. Even in the Fortress of Solitude that had been my apartment and my very own space, I could always hear the neighbors, or the traffic. I could see people on the sidewalks
if I opened my door.

  There was no one out on the sidewalk here. Maybe a mom with a stroller every once in a while, or teenagers zooming past on their bikes or skateboards, but that was it. I also couldn’t hear any signs of life, which was downright fucking weird.

  The silence was almost stifling. The worst of it all was that there was no one coming by to break it. That was my real problem. The only family I had in the world was rotting in prison, and the woman I wanted to become a family with refused to talk to me.

  The reminder felt like a knife twisting in my heart. I hunched over, resting my head in my hands. God, how had everything gotten so fucked up?

  In my sudden frantic mission to prove that I could provide for Heidi and my baby, I had lost sight of myself. I wanted to provide for them, sure. But not that way, not with that money.

  Shaking my head at myself, I was just about to do another deep dive into why exactly I had turned to that when I had wanted nothing to do with it myself, when there was a knock at my door. At least I thought it was my door. Had to be. My neighbors were too far away for me to hear a knock on their doors.

  I jerked at the realization that there was someone at my door, lifted my head, and frowned at it. When another soft knock sounded, I finally lifted my depressing ass from the couch and went to get the door.

  Who I had been expecting, I didn’t know. But it sure as shit hadn’t been Heidi.

  Heidi was who was standing in front of me, though. I had the urge to reach out and touch her just to make sure she was real. Her green eyes met mine, the expression in them softer than I thought I would ever see from her again.

  “Heidi?” It came out as a question, even though it was perfectly fucking clear who it was. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a navy blue work shirt, buttoned up almost all the way to the top. Her long hair was so dark it looked almost black on most days, but out in the sunshine, there was an auburn to it I hadn’t noticed before.