by Katie Allen
“Walk,” he demanded, using his body to push her forward.
She did, her feet automatically moving as the rest of her brain shrieked that there was a gun being held to her head. How had this escalated to something so deadly in just a few days? She hadn’t even thought he’d come back to the bakery, much less be armed when he did return. Her thoughts were a scrambled mess, panic whipping them around into a useless tornado of fear. She needed to do something, say something, rather than just allow him to frog-march her to her death.
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice quavered so badly that the words were almost incomprehensible. “Where are you taking me?”
“This is your fault.” His words sounded as shaky as hers had, and she wondered a little hysterically if that should reassure her or scare her even more. “I was patient—incredibly patient—but you pushed me into this. You know what you did, so don’t try acting all innocent.”
“I am innocent!” The last word was a sob, and she bit the inside of her cheek, trying to fight off the tears. “All I did was sell croissants and be polite to a regular customer. That’s all. You’re the one who made it into something it’s not!”
He shook her, the gun bumping painfully against her face. “Stop it! Stop downplaying this! We loved each other, and then you ruined it!”
“I never loved you!” She knew it was a mistake to scream it, that it would just enrage him more, but she couldn’t keep it inside. “I don’t even know you, and you don’t know me.”
Except for his trembling, he was still behind her. His breath was audible, and she felt each one, gusting against the crown of her head as he panted. The gun felt like it was trying to bore a hole in her temple. Despite trying to hold them back, tears rose and burned. When she squeezed her eyes closed, they overflowed, tracking down her face. She waited, expecting the gun to fire at any moment, knowing that anything she said or did now was going to make things worse.
His breath changed, blowing over the top of her head like he’d sighed or laughed silently. “You’ve always done that.” His voice was almost light, and Leah jerked at the sound of his voice. “You’ve always known just how to push my buttons and drive me crazy.”
“I haven’t done anything.” Her voice was choked, barely over a whisper, and she kept her eyes closed. Maybe it was a bad dream, and she’d wake up in her bed with Hamilton curled around her. The gun barrel bumped the bruised spot on her temple, and she knew it was real. There was too much pain for it to be a dream.
He started moving toward the swinging door again, shoving her along in front of him. “You were unfaithful. That’s the one thing I don’t tolerate.”
She started to protest, but then clenched her teeth and held back her response. As much as she wanted to argue, to fight back against his unfair accusations, it had almost gotten her shot just a few seconds ago.
“With him, too.” His voice was thick with disgust, and his arm tightened around her throat. “It wasn’t bad enough that you cheated on me, but you picked some meathead asshole rich guy.”
Rage flashed through her, shoving back the fear for a moment. “Ham’s not an asshole. He’s worth a thousand of you.”
“Shut up!” His arm tightened again, cutting off her air. She grabbed his arm, yanking at it, panicked at the lack of oxygen. He finally eased off, letting her pull in a desperate breath as he pushed her through the swinging door into the front area. “You’ll learn. Once I get you home, thi—”
A loud thump echoed through the space, and Jude’s arm loosened. Before she could figure out what had happened, she was lying facedown on the ground, her hip aching from landing on the tile. A heavy weight draped across her, pinning her down. She blinked over and over, trying to get the world to stop spinning, and the floor finally came into focus.
She tried to push herself up, but the weight on top of her wouldn’t move, and her hands kept slipping on the floor, not allowing her to get the leverage she needed.
“Leah! LeeLee? Baby? Talk to me. Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?” It sounded like Hamilton, but this person was frantic and yelling and Hamilton would never lose it like that.
Suddenly, the weight was removed, and hands rolled Leah so she was staring up at a pale Hamilton.
“Leah? Are you hurt? Any pain?” He cradled her head, running his fingers through her hair and over her scalp. His expression was panicked but his hands were gentle as he smoothed her hair and peered at her.
“What happened?” The first word came out as a whisper and the second as a croak, but he still looked endlessly relieved. Turning her head, she stared at Jude’s limp body sprawled on the tile, a full sheet pan lying next to him. “You hit him with a pan?”
“He had a gun to your head.”
“I know.” As crazy as it was, she almost laughed. Did Hamilton think she hadn’t noticed? When there was a pistol jammed against your skull, it was hard to ignore it. “Is he dead?”
As if in answer, Jude groaned and lifted his head. At the sound, Leah’s body jerked in fear. His lips pressed into a straight line, Hamilton grabbed the roll of duct tape from underneath the counter. As Jude rolled over and started to push to his hands and knees, Hamilton was there, his knee jammed firmly into Jude’s spine, flattening him out again.
“Wha...?” Jude slurred, ineffectually swatting toward the weight on his back. Grabbing Jude’s wrists and locking them together with one hand, Hamilton used his teeth and his free hand to rip off a long strip of tape.
Finally able to shake off her daze, Leah scrambled to her feet. “Where’s his gun?”
As he wrapped the tape around Jude’s wrists, Hamilton tipped his head toward the corner, where the black pistol had slid. It looked just as scary and deadly as it had felt against her head, and it was a good ten feet away from a taped-up Jude, so Leah decided to leave it where it was. It was probably safer there than in her inexperienced hands.
“Can I help?”
“No.” Hamilton wrapped tape around Jude’s ankles with jerky, angry movements.
Jude turned his head, and his gaze sharpened as it landed on Leah. “Bitch. This isn’t over. I’m going to ki—”
With a growl, Hamilton slapped a piece of duct tape over Jude’s mouth, cutting him off.
“Thank you,” Leah said.
“No need.” Hamilton straightened, his eyes angrier than she’d ever seen him, all his fury directed toward a squirming, grunting Jude. “I enjoyed it. I’d enjoy beating the fuck out of him more.”
Leah blinked. “Please don’t. As much as I’d enjoy watching, I don’t want to have to bail you out of jail. I’m saving up for a new mixer. And a sheeter.” She wondered if she was in shock. She felt oddly numb and calm.
Hamilton moved over to wrap her in his arms, pulling her tight against his chest. She buried her face against him, glad she could block out the sight of Jude. His touch brought her skin back to life, burning off the numbness, and she started to shake. “Did you call for help?”
“Yeah. As soon as I heard you say Jude was here, I called Officer Castillo. I figured the asshole would see me if I tried to come in from the kitchen, so I went out the back, circled around, and came back in here through the front door.” His grip on her tightened, even as he recounted it in an even, emotionless tone, and Leah hugged him back. “I thought I’d come in behind him, but you were both in the kitchen already. Your voices were getting louder, heading this way, so I grabbed a sheet pan and waited for him to come through that door. When I saw he had that gun on you, I dropped him. I couldn’t give him the chance to shoot.”
Her terror at being held at gunpoint, at being choked, merged with Hamilton’s version of events, and everything started to spin around her again. She squeezed him more tightly, allowing his strong bulk to steady her, and her panic ebbed.
“Sorry,” she said without looking at him.
“For what?”
&
nbsp; Tears pushed at the back of her eyes and throat. “I think I’m about to lose it.”
“Go ahead.” His arms tightened around her as he tipped his head to the side, cradling his cheek against the top of her head. “I’ve got you.”
At that assurance, she let herself go, sobbing into his neck. Even as the terror of everything rocked through her, she knew that Hamilton had saved her, and a warm lump of gratitude sat in her stomach in the middle of all of her raging, churning emotions. She’d thought he’d left, but he’d been there the whole time, and he’d risked his life to save her.
Her stomach was still heaving with sobs when she pulled her head back so she could look directly into his eyes. His expressionless mask was in place, but she could read the subtle signs he was upset—the pulse jumping at his jaw, the twitch by his eye, the way his mouth was clamped at the corners—and she knew none of that was for him. It was all for her, for her pain, her fear.
At that moment, she knew she loved Anthony Fitzgerald Hamilton III more than anyone or anything else in the world.
Chapter Eighteen
“Maybe I should just torch it.”
“Yeah.” Annabelle’s voice was thick with sarcasm as she turned away from the front of the bakery to eye Leah. Her overly nice, walking-on-eggshells, bringing-breakfast-in-bed attitude had lasted a couple of days after Jude’s visit to the bakery, but now things were pretty much back to normal, except for the occasional times when Leah caught her roommate giving her the concerned, tragic look that Leah was convinced Annabelle had copied from Hamilton. “That’s what I always say: Whatever the situation, arson always makes things better.”
Blowing out a heavy sigh, Leah leaned against the warm brick of the building—her building. That was one of the worst parts of it, how it had shaken her feelings for her bakery, the shop that she adored, the success that she’d built from nothing. “I hate this.”
“I know. It sucks.” Wrapping her arm around Leah’s shoulders, Annabelle gently steered her toward the front door. “It could’ve sucked a lot worse, though.”
“Yeah.” Leah did know. She dreamed about those horrible alternative endings every night. “I’ll still pay you a hundred bucks to burn it down. Just make sure that Hamilton isn’t in his loft.”
“A hundred bucks?” Annabelle huffed, sounding amused. “You’re a cheap bastard.”
“Hey, you’re unemployed. I figured that you could use the cash.” She smirked until she turned back to the door and saw the familiar, yet oddly alien-seeming, dim interior of her bakery. Digging out her keys, she unlocked the door.
She stepped inside, feeling strangely timid. It had just been a few days, but it felt like so much longer. It was the same bakery, with the same speed racks and display case and check-out counter and cappuccino machine, but everything was different. Now the counter was where she’d faced off with Jude, and the kitchen was where he’d caught her and shoved a gun against her head, and the floor by the swinging door was where his unconscious body had fallen on top of hers.
Taking a deep breath and then letting it all out slowly, Leah moved around to the employee side of the counter. She needed to get over her nervousness or whatever it was and get back to work. Her customers weren’t going to wait forever for her to reopen, and she and Annabelle couldn’t both be unemployed.
“Where is Hamilton today?” Annabelle asked, leaning against the counter. “He’s been your shadow lately. I’m surprised he let you come here for the first time after the Jude thing without tagging along.”
“He had to meet with his boss.” Although she tried to keep her voice light when she talked about Hamilton, Leah could hear her words falling flat. “Something about his schedule. He was pretty vague. He’ll be annoyed I came without him.”
Annabelle, being Annabelle, immediately cocked her head and eyed Leah in that see-right-through-her way that she had. “What’s wrong? Is there something going on between you two? Something bad, I mean, not something-something, because that’s obvious.”
“He’s just being very...solicitous.” Tipping her head back, she resisted the urge to bang it on the nearest hard surface.
“Solicitous?” Annabelle repeated slowly, not dialing down the X-ray soul vision at all. “In what way? And why do you sound so annoyed by that?”
“Like you said, he’s been around a lot.” She searched for the right words, feeling like the world’s biggest whiner for not appreciating a solicitous friend. “During the day, at least.”
“Ah.”
“Ah?” Leah was being only partially sarcastic. She really did want to get Annabelle’s take on what was happening—or wasn’t happening—between her and Hamilton. “Why do you sound like a mad scientist who’s just discovered a new mind-control drug?”
“Wow.” Annabelle blinked at her. “That was very—and weirdly—specific.”
Leah circled her hand in a get-on-with-it gesture.
“He’s gone all brotherly protective on you.”
“Yes.” As usual, Annabelle had put her thumb right on the problem. “He’s acting like my brother, and I don’t want a brother. I want a...”
“Sex god?”
“Yes, but he’s more than that.”
“Orgasm friend?”
With a groan, Leah strode toward the swinging door. “Usually you’re very helpful, but sometimes you’re not helpful at all.” She couldn’t help but smile at the term, though, even as she wished Hamilton was her orgasm friend. Now, he was just a worried nanny who never, ever touched her. Her grin fell away as she shoved through the door into the kitchen.
“We don’t have to do this today,” Annabelle said.
“It’s okay. We won’t stay long. The longer I avoided this place because of what happened with Jude, the scarier it got in my head, so I needed to see it. This is my bakery. He doesn’t get to make me afraid of being here.” Looking around the kitchen, she tried to focus on those good things, on joking with Q and watching Hamilton create gorgeous sugar cookies and that first taste of frosting hitting her tongue. Still, when she looked around, it had that same alien feeling as the front had.
It was tidy. Even though nothing had been knocked over or torn apart, she’d expected the place to look trashed for some strange reason. Instead, everything was as it should be, tucked away in cupboards and coolers and drawers and bins. It was just that the memory of being chased by Jude—and then dragged back to the front—made it seem chaotic and messy.
“Sure you want to do this?” Annabelle asked again, and Leah stiffened her spine, pulling her shoulders back and raising her chin. Jude didn’t get to keep affecting her this way. He didn’t get to scare her anymore. Officer Castillo told her that he’d been admitted to a psychiatric facility. Although she was glad he was getting help, she was still completely furious with him for what he’d done to her. He didn’t get to take her bakery, too.
“I’m sure.” She walked through the kitchen, trying not to show her remembered fear or the almost overwhelming urge she had to run out of the bakery and never return. Annabelle followed quietly, staying close, as if she could read Leah’s thoughts and was on alert in case she had to chase her down.
Standing by the butcher-block table, she turned a slow circle, making herself look. She’d spent months and months in this space, and just a few minutes of that time had been the nightmare with Jude. She could work in this kitchen again, even if her panic was trying to convince her otherwise. Even though her brain was urging her to leave immediately, she forced herself to stand there until her heart rate started to slow. Once her panic ebbed, she blew out a long breath and turned toward the swinging door. “Okay. I’ve done it. First post-Jude bakery visit accomplished. Now let’s go.”
“You okay?” Annabelle asked cautiously, following her to the front.
“I will be.” I hope. “I have to be. This is my bakery, and I have to work in here.” S
he sent a sideways glance at her roommate. “We can’t both sleep on your parents’ sofa.”
Annabelle shoved her shoulder, forcing Leah to hop sideways to catch her balance. “Neither of us is going to sleep on my parents’ sofa. You’re going to be the tough-as-nails baking badass that you are, and I’m going to work for Louis-fucking-Dumont.”
Grateful for the distraction, Leah gave Annabelle a curious glance as she pushed open the front door. “He called you? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Not yet, but he will,” Annabelle said, making Leah snort a laugh.
“You sound so threatening,” Leah said, climbing behind the wheel of her car. She never let Annabelle drive if she could help it. “Are you going to track him down and cut him into small bits if he doesn’t hire you?”
“Quite possibly.” Although Annabelle’s tone was teasing, there was an anxious undertone that made Leah look at her more closely. She’d been so preoccupied with the Jude craziness that she hadn’t been paying close enough attention to what was happening with her friend. Instead of starting the car, she turned toward Annabelle.
“Are you okay?” Leah asked.
“I’m a little freaked out. It feels like I’m never, ever going to get another job right now.” She straightened in her seat and gave Leah a fierce grin. “Like you said, though, I will be okay. Eventually.”
Before she could respond, Leah heard a familiar masculine voice calling her name. Hamilton was striding toward her car, wearing his everyday scowl. Annabelle giggled.
“What?” Leah asked, rolling down her window without looking away from the approaching man. He was just so nice to look at.
“You get the dumbest, dopiest grin whenever you see him.”
Hamilton bent to look in her window, saving Leah from having to respond. She was relieved. There was no arguing the fact that she did get dumb and dopey when she saw him. She couldn’t help herself. He was just so darn pretty. And sweet. And hotter than a lit firecracker.