Players: Bad Boy Romance

by Amy Faye

  That was a different life and a different time, and he's past it now. As long as he remembers that, he'll be just fine.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Nobody seemed to react much when Anna rejoined the household. Nobody seemed all that surprised. For Anna, though, it was all very strange. All very surprising.

  There had been a time, a long, long time, where she'd wanted nothing more than to be back here. When she'd wanted nothing more than to have the chance to be back in Mitch's life.

  That time had passed. That time had been before she'd settled into her new life, with her new baby. It had even been before the contractions began, and that was a whole exciting time by itself.

  The fact that she now had what she'd wanted so desperately through March, through April, through May… it was in her hands, now. It was completely within reach. Not only within reach. She had it.

  It boggled the mind. She couldn't imagine having what she had now. And yet, she had it, nonetheless. The entire future that she'd hoped for, the future that for a long time she'd done nothing but dream about.

  She smiled down at Ava. It was about time that she had another day with her daughter. It had been a long day of phone calls for Mitchell. He'd done it for her, though. He'd done exactly like he promised.

  He said he'd get Ava back, and back she was. Right there. With her. In her arms, in her lap. Anna smiled down at the girl. Ava smiled back, almost totally unaware of the world around her, outside of her mother.

  She gurgles happily and reaches out, and Anna scoops her up, holding the baby against her shoulder. There was nothing else that she'd ever wanted more. Nothing that she could possibly have asked for.

  Everything she needed, everything she wanted, was right there in her arms. Smiling at her. Anna laid her head back and looked at the ceiling. Nothing was ever going to separate them again.

  Not for… oh, say, twenty-two years. She's not going to let Ava start dating until she's forty, of course. But at twenty-two, she can start doing small things. Maybe a little part-time job. To prepare her for the outside world in little ways.

  A soft giggle escapes Anna's lips. She doesn't want to stop herself this time. The entire idea that she had an open future ahead of her, that things aren't going to go completely wrong… it's all a big fantasy, and she's got it. Why shouldn't she laugh? Why shouldn't she be overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all?

  Ava makes a little giggle of her own, on her Mom's shoulder. Anna pulls her back to look her in the face. She tries to look serious, but she can't keep the smile off her face.

  Her daughter is back in her arms again.

  She does a little dance with the baby girl, who laughs at the face that Anna does while she's moving the little one around. What a perfect little girl. What a perfect time. What a perfect day.

  Nothing could possibly go wrong. No matter how wrong things could possibly go, they can't go wrong enough to ruin Anna's mood today. Not unless a bunch of armed men burst through the door and take the little girl away again.

  Because that's what it would take. No more government people coming and Anna letting them take her. No more falling asleep and having the little bundle of joy taken from her. There's no way.

  She's not going to let anything like that happen again. They're going to have to come in, and they're going to have to take Ava out of her hands. They're going to have to kill her. Nothing else is going to do the job. She's not going to let anything else happen. No matter what.

  Mitch comes back in. He's got his phone to his ear. The thought flashes through Anna's head that maybe he shouldn't have come into the room with her and the baby, if he's on an important phone call. In either case, she can't exactly say anything.

  After all, it would be rude to interrupt him if the call is important. If he wanted to be here with the baby on an unimportant call—if he was calling his Mom, for example, who…

  Anna tries to remember. Is she in Italy right now? Or Spain? They're real close to each other, and she's never been to either. But Mrs. Queen is in one of them. She's been away for a long time, so it's easy to forget where she's at right now.

  Anna certainly knows, though. They told her. She just can't remember. In either case, if he wants to be close to the baby, then he wouldn't like being told that he should leave. He'd be pretty upset about it, in fact. So she keeps her thoughts to herself. After all, it could be any number of things, and she'll have to keep her concerns to herself.

  Ava gurgles in her arms, and then transitions seamlessly to whining and fussing. Anna doesn't need to look up to see Mitch's head whip over to them. He's not happy about the noise.

  Important phone call, then. Not 'here, let me put the baby on the phone' type of call. Mitch knew that they were in the library. He knew it. He shouldn't have come in if he wanted privacy. If he wanted quiet.

  Babies don't know about people wanting quiet when you're on a phone call. Mitch has to realize that. He couldn't possibly be that foolish. And yet, here he was.

  Anna doesn't say any of that. If she does, it will only make it worse. She mouths, 'I'm sorry' and stands up from the sofa with Ava and leaves the room. It's no big deal, after all. She can afford to move around a little.

  Besides, Ava's hungry. She ought to go to the bedroom now. It would be inconsiderate to just pull her breasts out in the middle of the house. The staff might see, after all. And then she'd have to have another lecture from Mitch.

  He'd have to remind her how it is that his guests in the house act around the staff. They don't do silly things like that. Either carry a blanket—a blanket that she wasn't currently carrying—or go into private. It's much more polite that way.

  Mitchell really can't stand it when people aren't polite. And for a while, Anna didn't have to worry about what Mitchell could or couldn't stand. Those times are gone, now.

  She's got to keep all of that in mind, or it could turn into trouble.

  Anna doesn't want any trouble. She doesn't want to have any fights. She just wants to be left alone. Alone with Ava. The rest of it doesn't matter. As long as she can have her daughter, not a whole lot else matters, so Mitch can get mad at her if he has to.

  But otherwise, she'll follow his rules, because it's not hard to figure out that if she breaks them, it won't be 'talking-to's forever.

  Eventually, when he really wants her to learn a lesson, he's going to do something that will make sure that she learns it, and it won't take long for a guy as smart as Mitch to figure out how to teach her that lesson.

  Hell, never mind 'taking time.' He'd already taught her a valuable lesson. A lesson that she'd learned time and again, but one that she could always use a reminder on, no matter how many times she learned it.

  She was too dumb to learn properly the first time, so she had to be reminded over and over. Eventually, maybe, if she was lucky, she'd finally learn her lesson, and it was a simple one.

  Don't question Mitch.

  It's just easier that way.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The apology has gone through three separate drafts. None of them have resembled each other except in passing, and none of them sound good when Josh Meadows finally reads them all aloud.

  There's a good reason that he never took up a career in speech-writing, and that reason is that he's not good at it. There are other reasons, as well, but the first and biggest is that it would be impossible for him to keep any sort of job doing it.

  Not enjoying the work comes at a distant second, though it would have disqualified the job to begin with, all the same.

  So it's with a heavy heart that he forces himself to ignore the temptation to simply not write a speech. Because this is going to be a big deal, in front of several television cameras, and he'd better not fuck it up in front of… well, at the very least, several hundred people.

  Thinking the numbers will be any higher than that might just cause more nervousness still. So in the interest of keeping himself sane and stable, Josh is using the old tightrope-walker's trick
and not looking down. Because much like tightrope-walkers, he's got a long way to fall beneath him, and he's walking a very thin line indeed.

  A thin line between sounding like an ass-kisser who won't do his god damn job if it happens to run up against the wrong sort of person, and punching Mitch in the mouth again until they need to wire his jaw shut.

  Still, if he says the right things, who knows. Some guys end up on easy street after lying through their teeth, offering to file paperwork wrong, offering to protect anyone who will pay them.

  If he offers similar 'services,' maybe he can live the rest of his life free and easy. Maybe he can get himself a nice boat house, and keep his mind off of things. Maybe he can forget that Anna Witt ever existed, that he'd ever met her.

  Maybe he can forget what she felt like in his arms. Maybe he can forget the way the pit in his stomach that opened up whenever Josh made the mistake of thinking what it would be like in that house for her daughter.

  The little girl wasn't his concern. She wasn't his daughter. He hadn't even really dated Anna. It wasn't a real relationship. It was a fling. It lasted a couple of days, and then it went away.

  Which is exactly what it should have done. He'd made a mistake falling for someone when he was working her case. He was a professional. He should have known better. He did know better. He knew better than to let himself get involved with someone like that.

  But it had happened anyway, in spite of his knowing better. In spite of the fact that he was smart, good at his job. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Which made it that much more upsetting that he was sitting on a whole lot of trouble that wasn't going away no matter what he did.

  There were things that worried Josh. Things that should have worried him more. If he'd been worried about Anna before, how much more worried should he be now?

  Now, he had a lot more concerns than when he'd first met her.

  Girls get into trouble. They get into trouble with the wrong sorts of guys. It's what they do. She'd gotten into trouble, and she's turned to him. It showed a sort of pattern. The wrong sorts of guys.

  Well, that was fine. That was understandable. Nobody could fault a girl for turning to the same sort of trouble that they know best. It's totally within the realm of the ordinary. She was just doing what she knew to do.

  It's in her bones. She's used to turning to guys who like trouble. Who are good at trouble. Mitchell's one of those guys. Josh is another one.

  But what was eating at the edge of Josh's mind was that Mitch seemed to have gotten himself into a good amount of trouble this time. The kind of trouble that doesn't just go away on its own.

  He'd looked through those safety deposit box videos thirty times before he'd been suspended. Now he only had the images, but the video played in his head just fine. It wasn't hard to remember.

  After all, there wasn't much to see.

  He'd looked through the footage, he'd looked through the papers. He'd looked through the list of what was missing. There was a lot missing.

  There always seemed to be, after all. A whole lot of everything, and not a whole lot of evidence of anything.

  It had struck Josh as a coincidence the first time he noticed it. The masks were totally ordinary. Anyone who watched an action movie would have been able to figure out to get themselves a ski mask to cover up their face. It's about as standard as ideas come.

  Nobody would have blinked an eye at it the first time. But someone else had used the same trick. Someone else had used the same trick several times. It wasn't easy to say with any confidence, of course.

  Anyone could have pulled it off. At least, anyone who could do all the things that they'd done.

  Which is why they were having trouble. Partly, because the suspect list could fill an average box of files, printed out in two columns on letter-sized paper with a twelve-point font.

  Partly because of those, the ones who really looked good for it—the ones who weren't out of town but could have done it if they really wanted to, the ones who weren't in jail, the ones who hadn't gotten out of the business years ago—they all denied it.

  Well, of course they denied it. But they seemed a little surprised to hear that a job had been done at all. It was a big damn surprise to them, according to the Lieutenant's interview notes.

  So who the hell could have done it? Well, there was a little thought that Josh, in spite of himself, couldn't get out of his head.

  The thought that Mitch didn't seem all that surprised when he'd heard that Ava had been taken.

  At first it had seemed like he was numb. Like he might have had thoughts about it, but he'd kept those thoughts to himself.

  Now it was harder to think that way. It was easier to look at it and see things from the perspective of seeing a guy who liked to yank his ex-girlfriend's chain.

  Josh is struggling to see it any other way, really. Because that's the kind of guy that Mitch Queen is. The kind of guy who yanks chains. He yanks them because he likes yanking them, and when he yanks them, he yanks damn hard.

  It's a purely instinctive read, of course. It's a pure gut feeling. He shouldn't even have thought it, because proving it all is not just impossible, it's beyond impossible. People call shit impossible, but they mean it's very difficult.

  Well, this is impossible with a capital I. Josh met the guy a few times, got a good sense for him, and it means that he hired a crew of guys to go grab his ex-girlfriend's baby.

  He wouldn't just be thrown out of the courtroom with them laughing behind him. They'd be laughing so hard that it would be a real struggle for the lawyers to file their slander suit. Somehow they'd find the strength soldier on through it, in spite of the difficulty.

  Which meant, the same as he'd repeated to himself a thousand times, that he'd have to have something real solid before he even dreamed of doing anything about it.

  Which is where his little thought came in. The ski masks and covered-up eyes sounded a hell of a lot like what Anna had described the fellow in the Subaru to be wearing. It had sounded a lot like that, in fact.

  Now, it could be nothing. Two guys wearing ski masks. They both figure, they'll hide their skin tone by covering up what little skin is showing. It's not much of a connection.

  But it's a connection.

  And now that he's writing these God damned speeches, trying to find ways to turn everything around, to figure a way to get out of this damned rat race, it's starting to fit together.

  Because just as he reads the fourth draft of his apology speech, another total rewrite that still sounds like he thinks he's holding his nose and bobbing for apples in sewage, his phone buzzes in his pocket.

  'Terry,' the Terry who works for Al Queen's estate, is Terry Green. He's a rough sort of guy. It doesn't take more than a glance at his face to know that, though. His entire life story seems like it's written there.

  The guy's got 'rough sort of guy' plastered across his thrice-broken nose. But what he's also got is a history of violence. He used to be a knee-cap breaker for the mob, and did some time in the pen.

  When he got out, Al was mayor. Rehabilitated the guy. Now he's as upstanding a citizen as you can ask for, aside from the nose. And that's what interests Josh Meadows.

  Because if you rehabilitate one guy, how many others could you have working for you?

  A guy like that gets out, an ex con with a history of violence, he knows exactly what the work-force looks like for him. It looks like 'fuck you and get out of my office.'

  You hire a guy like that, you get him going straight? That's the kind of loyalty that you can't buy for a dollar. And that's the kind of loyalty that Mitch Queen has in his hands, for whatever needs doing.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Anna had seen dresses more beautiful than this one. Once, when the prince got married. That was a unique case, though. It's not every day that royalty gets married, and you expect a certain amount of exorbitant attitudes.

  But in this case, it's not royalty. What she'd done to deserve
it, she can't begin to say. But she's got a lot to look forward to in either case. Such a beautiful dress. The wedding is sooner than she might like, but that happens. Sometimes you just have to accept it.

  Josh's face pops into her head. It's not a good time. She shouldn't be thinking about him any more. She keeps it to herself. Mitch wouldn't be happy to hear that she'd been thinking about someone else.

  More than that, though, is that in spite of herself, she doesn't want to stop. She doesn't want to get the lecture, though. Because if she gets the lecture, if she gets into the fight…

  That all comes together to meaning that she needs to stop. She'll need to be corrected. He hates it when she tries to keep things from him after he's already found out about them.

  So she'll have to make sure that he doesn't find out in the first place. It's the only way, really.

  Anna swallows her pride and swallows her worry and looks at the dress and thinks about how wonderful it will look on the altar. How everyone will be looking up and seeing her. How perfect it will all be.

  Josh will be beside her—she closes her eyes. No, that's not right. He won't. He'll be somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Not even in the same building. Probably not in the same city.

  He'll be far away and he won't be thinking about her. Because nobody thinks about Anna. Nobody remembers her or wants to remember her, and that's just how it is. That's how it has to be. Because she's not special and she's not memorable. Not like other people.

  She's just nobody. It was easy to think that she was special, somehow. Easy to fool herself. When she was all alone except for Ava, it was easy to think that she should be allowed to get some sort of ideas about who she could be.

  Luckily for her, it hadn't taken more than a day or two of staying in the guest room at Mitch's place for her to remember her place. He hadn't looked at her much. He hadn't demanded that she do much of anything. That, at least, was nice.

  She wasn't ready for that. Not with him. Not now.