“I’ll help him through it.”
She gestured with the gun. “Let’s go into the sitting room. It’ll be more believable there.”
I reluctantly turned, leading the way. She poked the gun into my back, causing me to step wrong on my injured leg. I stumbled and nearly fell. My hand slammed into the wall and my chest followed. I suddenly realized that Xander’s cellphone was in the front pocket of the shirt, and I carefully took it out and held it in my palm.
Margaret grabbed my arm and pulled me up straight.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“My leg,” I moaned, stumbling slightly again.
She groaned, but she held me under my arm to help me into the sitting room.
Xander’s phone was small, several generations behind the iPhone. I teased him about being too attached to the thing, but I was glad he still had it now. Margaret could see it if I held my hand at the right angle. And I knew the phone the phone fairly intimately. I’d watched Xander use it millions of times, and I’d dialed it for him over and again whenever we went on long drives together. I knew exactly which set of hot buttons to use to get the person I wanted.
I just had to stall a few minutes longer.
“You realize he’s just upstairs, waiting for me to come back with ice cream, right?”
“Then we need to hurry.”
“He’ll hear the shot.”
“It’ll take him a few seconds to get down here. By then I’ll be out the kitchen door.”
“What if you don’t kill me with your first shot? I can tell him who did it.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to get it right with the first shot.”
She was serious. And I could see that she’d worked it all out ahead of time. Her eyes were…why had I never seen it before? She was like a lost puppy, a child who’d seen too much of the realities of the world. She was broken. I felt sorry for her.
“Can I look out at the backyard one last time,” I asked. “It’s my favorite spot in this entire city.”
“It’s dark.”
“I could flip on the lights.”
“And alert Xander? I don’t think so.”
Not enough time had gone by. I had to find another way to distract her. But I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Please, Margaret. This isn’t going to get you what you want.”
As I waited for common sense, or just a piece of reality, to sink its way into Margaret’s mind, I was beginning to think that it was already too late. That this was really going to happen. I wasn’t ready to die.
And then I heard footsteps on the stairs, and a new fear blossomed in my chest.
“Hey, babe,” Xander called. “What’s taking so long?”
Margaret raised the muzzle of her gun. I leapt at her, pushing off from my healing leg in a move that was probably not very smart. The gun went off, but I managed to hit the muzzle before it did, and the bullet smashed into the ceiling. I fell to the floor, but Margaret came with me, our bodies tangled in a mess of limbs. And then Xander was there, and Margaret was screaming as she fought me for control of the gun. It went off again and the room seemed to go dark, and I was lying there, my ears ringing. And another shot and another and all I could think about was Xander.
Chapter 35
Xander
Harley was taking so long getting the ice cream that I finally went to find her. As I was coming down the stairs, I thought I heard voices. And then I turned the corner into the sitting room just as a gun fired.
All I could thing was, Fuck!
Margaret was on the floor with Harley tangled up next to her, and they were struggling over this damn big gun. I reached in, tried to untangle them and get one or both up on their feet. And then Margaret pressed the barrel of the gun against Harley’s side and wrapped her finger around the trigger. I did the only thing I could think of and that was to grab her wrist and yank. I felt something give and then the gun went off.
The next thing I know, Margaret’s on her feet, the gun pointed at my chest. There’s blood, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. And Harley is still on the floor.
“Why, Xander?” Margaret asked, her wrist limp where I broke it trying to pull her away from Harley. She calmly changed hands, holding the gun with her other hand now. She pointed it at me, tears running down her face and her hand shaking so bad the gun won’t aim straight. “Why did you turn on Daddy? Why did you have to choose her over me?”
“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Margaret.”
“I already regret it all,” she said softly.
She held the gun up not far from the center of my face and steadied it the best she could. I saw movement behind her and felt relief because I thought it was Harley. But then the gun went off, and I closed my eyes, thinking I was dead. But when the body hit the ground, it wasn’t mine.
It was Margaret.
And Jonnie was standing behind her, a pistol in her hands.
I dropped to my knees, my hands moving over Harley’s body. There was blood, but I couldn’t find a place on her that was injured. And then I realized the blood was dripping from my body, from the perfectly round hole in my shoulder.
And Margaret. She was coughing and blood was flowing from between her lips. Jonnie was with her, pressing her hands against a bloody wound on her side.
“Harley?”
Her eyes fluttered, and she focused on me. When she saw the wound on my shoulder, she immediately sat up, but then she did something of a swoon and fell back again.
“Are you hurt?”
“My leg.”
Her leg. I looked down and realized it’d gotten trapped under the edge of the couch. She must have reinjured it in the fight. I gently pulled it out and saw that it was already swelling.
“They told you not to walk around without the boot.”
“Yes, well, I wasn’t planning in wrestling on the floor tonight.”
I lifted her leg and kissed the swelling area. She winced but giggled a little at the same time.
“My hero,” she said.
An ambulance arrived a few minutes later. I didn’t have a chance to ask Jonnie how she happened to be there, or how she happened to have a gun. She disappeared before the ambulance arrived. When asked what happened, Harley gave them an abbreviated version that didn’t include Jonnie. Being the good boy that I sometimes am, I followed suit.
I wouldn’t find out until later that Philip’s help hadn’t been all bad. It turned out that Jonnie, my trusted office manager, was once a prodigy for the CIA. But after some inner-office politics left her out of the promotion game, she quit and applied to work for my fledgling company. And me, being the super-security-conscious guy I am, got the wool pulled over my eyes by a few friends that she had left at the CIA. But one of those same friends also clued her in to what I was up to, and Philip’s contacts got in touch with her, giving her information about both sides of the investigation.
She was the one who’d come to Harley this morning, and she’d told Harley the truth about who she was and what she was up to. But she begged Harley not to tell me because she liked her job and wanted to keep it.
Like I would have fired her for being a bad ass.
And then Harley speed dialed her when Margaret had the gun on her, so she came over. And disappeared for the same reason. She wanted to keep the life she’d built here in Los Angeles. Having the cops writing a report about how she killed a civilian wouldn’t allow for that.
It was finally over.
I’d said that before, but I believed it now.
Chapter 36
Harley—Nine Months Later
I started to laugh as my little sister twerked her way down the aisle of my parent’s Baptist church. If Daddy walked in and saw that, there would be hell to pay.
Xander pulled me back against his chest as he, too, laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from deep in his chest. I loved to hear him laugh like that.
“Do you dare me to do that during the ceremony t
omorrow?” Shelly asked.
“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you do,” Charlie called to her.
I smacked my brother on the arm.
“What?”
“Don’t encourage her.”
“Hey, someone’s got to inject a little levity into this whole affair. And it can’t be at my wedding because if you think our parents are bad, wait until you meet Vanessa’s.”
“When’s Vanessa going to be here?”
“In the morning.”
“Cutting it close.”
Xander’s arms tightened around my waist, his hands wrapping around my swollen belly. “I think we all are, aren’t we?”
I groaned. This whole wedding thing wasn’t my idea. It was my dad’s. He insisted that we be married in a church. A ceremony on a beach, no matter who the preacher was, was not good enough. The marriage vows had to be sanctioned in God’s house.
Especially with a baby due in three months.
I just wanted to go home, curl up in front of the television, and enjoy my new life as a couch potato, but Xander had agreed with my dad. We should do it properly.
The men in my life were beginning to take over everything.
Bonnie walked in, her expression softening when she lay eyes on her son. She looked good. She had just come back from a long cruise to the Bahamas. After the trial and everything that followed, everyone agreed that she deserved the break.
Grant followed close behind her. He’d cut a deal with the feds. In exchange for giving up his law license, his practice, and paying a substantive fine, they agreed to give him just six months of parole and a thousand hours of community service. And his testimony against each of the key players in the terrorist scheme.
Turned out Grant’s clients were planning to set bombs at each of those properties they’d been buying up because they were set near important targets, such as one that was near the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.
Everyone involved has been arrested. Careers have been made or destroyed because of Grant’s testimony. And the terror attacks have been thwarted.
Margaret, on the other hand, was not as lucky.
She survived the gunshot Jonnie put in her belly. But was charged with hit and run and attempted murder. Her lawyer advised her to take a plea, but she chose to go to trial. She was found guilty a month ago and will be sentenced at the end of the year. She’ll likely get twenty to life.
Xander feels horrible about what happened that night. I try to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t predict how Margaret would respond to everything that was happening. And he took a bullet for me. How many women can say their husbands did that?
We’re moving on with our lives.
Xander and I have decided to move to Texas. We’ve purchased a piece of land not far from my parents, and we’ll put a house on it one day soon. Right now, we have a little house in the city that we’re enjoying.
Xander still runs his security firm, but he lets Jonnie do most of the everyday stuff. He even lets her chose the clients, which has significantly reduced the amount of tension between the two of them. I guess he figures if she was once considered a lethal weapon, then maybe she knows what she’s talking about when she says a client is too hot for the company.
And we’re getting married. Again.
***
I feel like there’s a bowling ball strapped to my stomach, as I wait for the music to begin. It’s so hot that I feel like I’m suffocating. But then my dad takes my arm and he walks me down the aisle, and I see Xander smiling as he watches me. He’s dressed in a dark tuxedo that he had tailored-made just for this day. It came out perfectly. It fit him like a glove. I wished I could have worn the dress I’d had designed for our wedding, the one that was cancelled over a year ago. But seeing Xander there, none of the discomfort mattered anymore.
He was mine. Nothing was ever going to change that.
He held my hand the moment we stood side by side and never let go. And that? That was everything.
~ End ~
Pizza My Heart
Chapter 1
You’d be surprised by the kinds of things a delivery person sees in a day’s work. All manners of naked people, for example, thought it was perfectly acceptable to open the door and wedge their bodies around it, greeting me like it was the most normal thing in the world. Chief among these offenders were couples who thought they could beat the delivery time having sex. I wasn’t certain this was their main motivation. Maybe they thought there wasn’t anything else to do for thirty to forty minutes, but sometimes I would ring the doorbell for whole minutes while I heard scrambling and cursing inside, until finally someone would give up and open the door, pizza more important than dignity.
So I saw a lot. Most times, much more than I wanted to.
None of that could’ve prepared me for the surprise I had the day I knocked on a door and it opened to Devon Ray.
It wasn’t even a particularly auspicious day. I would’ve thought that the sun would be suddenly eclipsed by the moon, sending the early afternoon into a dusky red twilight. Instead, the weather was fair, the world was normal, and I was standing in front of a major celebrity, one who wasn’t even staying at the nicest hotel in the city.
There he was, Devon Ray, all six-foot-whatever of him, a shining star of the silver screen—in Dallas, of all places—ordering a pepperoni pizza from my place of employment, of all things.
“Hello,” he said, smiling, his row of white, shining teeth just as bright and as perfect as they’d been at the theater when smiling at the heroine in his last romantic comedy. His chin was just as chiseled as it appeared in his promotional materials, in the tabloids, online. And those brown eyes…they just made me want to melt into a puddle and slither away somewhere, away from that gaze.
I opened my mouth to say something—anything—related to pizza, but my brain had other ideas.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded almost aggressively.
He guffawed, his eyes sparkling. “Am I not allowed to be here?”
My face went hot and my head went light. “No—I mean, I don’t know. I meant to say…” I’d meant to say “your pizza’s here,” but that hadn’t quite worked out.
“What’d you mean to say?” he asked, sounding both curious and kind. He probably got this a lot—blathering from idiot fangirls who couldn’t perform even the most basic functions around him. I mean, I wasn’t entirely a fangirl. Nana was much more of a fangirl than I was. I knew who he was, at least. There probably wasn’t a person in this country who didn’t. But, faced with my very first celebrity encounter, I found myself completely useless. I opened my mouth to give it another try.
“I saw your movie,” I blurted out, blushing heavily as he laughed.
“Which one?”
God, why was he so nice, and how had I been reduced to a moron in a matter of seconds? I stood on the threshold of his hotel room, shifting from foot to foot, wondering what I was doing, what he was doing. Didn’t he have assistants to take care of something as mundane as ordering pizza? Was he alone in there?
“Um. I don’t…could I have your autograph?” This wasn’t getting any better. I became acutely aware that it might very well be possible to die of embarrassment. It would be a mercy killing.
Devon laughed again, but the tone was good natured.
“Do you want to step inside for a minute and collect yourself?” he asked.
He stepped aside, and my feet shuffled forward of their own accord, leading me inside the hotel room. Devon turned and shut the door behind me, and suddenly, I was alone in a room with one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars. I wasn’t the fainting type, but now seemed like a pretty good time to do so. The tension was electric and palpable.
“Can I take that from you?” He held his arms out and I realized it was for the pizza box I was still clutching.
“Your pizza’s here,” I said, too late to be regarded as anything but stupid.
Devon Ray didn�
�t seem put off by my sudden inability to do anything correctly. He was so gently amused that it was beguiling. Celebrities—they’re just like us. Charming, patient, as beautiful as some fallen angel.
Well, that last part wasn’t ordinary.
“I’m not who you expected to open the door, am I?” he said, smiling and cocking his head at me.
I finally relinquished the pizza box to him, watching as he set it on a side table.
“This isn’t even the nicest hotel in Dallas,” I said, repeating an observation I’d had the moment he’d opened the door. It were as if I’d lost the filter between my brain and my mouth somewhere between knocking on the door and him opening it.
“Well, if you expect me to be staying at the nicest hotel in Dallas, guess who else would?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “The paparazzi. And guess what they’d be writing about if they see me ordering pizza?”
I stood, dumbfounded and still unable to believe I was in Devon’s presence.
“They’d say I was sloppy and single,” he said, laughing at himself. “That I was letting myself go. That my career was plateauing.”
He grabbed a glass on the table that I hadn’t noticed before—really, it was hard to notice anything other than Devon Ray, standing in front of me. But the way he carefully swirled the liquid that remained in it, making the mostly melted ice cubes clink together, made me realize that the actor was drinking—no, he was drunk. Well before five o’clock. Alone. Ordering pizza. In not even the nicest hotel in the city.
Celebrities—they’re just like us. Day drinkers, miserable, insecure.
His apparent imperfections made me a little more comfortable to be in his presence.
“I think they only say that about actresses,” I offered. “If someone got a photo of you with a pizza, they’d say how your workout requires lots of calories to be consumed, or that you were carb loading for your next musclebound role.”
Devon studied me for a moment before throwing his head back and laughing, the sound probably echoing down the entire floor. For someone drinking in the middle of the day, he sure seemed chipper.
KYLE: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 4) Page 34