Protagonized

by Shannon Myers

  It took a full minute for the tail end of our conversation and the images of my door imploding to align. My heart pounded in terror and I began hitting Jake.

  “You broke my door!” I croaked, as I was pushed farther into the chair. My hands connected with his shoulders repeatedly, but he kept me pinned down.

  “Goddammit, Hayden, stop fighting me!” He shifted in an attempt to block the next blow and I suddenly felt the presence of a new weapon altogether.

  A very large weapon.

  I halfheartedly swatted at his arms as every one of my biological instincts urged me to arch my hips and find that weapon a good home.

  “Is that a gun in your pants or do desk chairs get you going?” I panted, partly from his weight on me and partly from the fact that my libido had taken the reins.

  He pushed himself up onto his hands and glared at me. “We’re under attack and you think now’s a good time for sex jokes? Is this something you experience often?”

  I tried to think of the last time I’d been pinned to the carpet by a man and came up blank. I was certain that if I’d ever experienced this, I’d remember it. It’d be one of those memories I’d hold on to even as I wasted away in the nursing home. I would entertain all of my nurses with tales of my conquests. They’d call me the sexy granny…no, maybe the sexy maven. Maven seemed distinguished.

  “Not this, Hayden,” he ground out through clenched teeth. “The door. Someone shattered your door.”

  “You. You shattered my door,” I helpfully pointed out.

  His gold eyes glinted with barely constrained rage. “Sweetheart, I’m going to assume you hit your head on the way down because I was in the kitchen. That loud bang? That came from the balcony. The balcony is on the opposite side of the apartment from the kitchen. Do you understand?”

  A fresh wave of anger swept over me at his slow, measured tone and I thrust my fist up into his jaw. His nose wasn’t going to be the only thing that was bruised. The force of the blow sent pain radiating from my knuckles down to my elbow. “Don’t talk to me like a damn child!”

  He blinked slowly and then rolled off of me. “Stay here, Rocky.”

  I ignored his little dig and began checking my hand. If Jake’s body was made of stone, then his face was made of granite. I opened and closed my hand, trying to alleviate the stinging. He hadn’t even reacted like someone who just almost got knocked out. Just further proof that he was not human.

  I lifted my head off the carpet in an attempt to see what he was packing in those jeans. Instead, I was treated to the sight of his ass as he crept toward the balcony door. I wanted to point out that a crouch for him was the equivalent of most people standing up normally, so he wasn’t quite as inconspicuous as he imagined. I decided against it when he turned and I saw the intense look on his face.

  He reached the opposite wall and contorted the upper half of his body to check the balcony. “I think they’re gone,” he whispered.

  I rolled my eyes and whispered back, “Are they? That’s a shock. I thought they’d want to stick around for coffee.”

  Jake dropped his hand from the handle of his gun and pinned me with a hard stare. “Your life is in danger—”

  “Your life is in danger,” I retorted, like the mature twenty-seven-year-old I was.

  He sighed and began the tedious task of sliding the balcony door open while keeping the glass intact. “It’s a damn good thing you have double pane glass or the projectile would’ve come into the apartment.”

  Knowing my luck, ‘the projectile’ was probably a Canadian goose who’d mistaken my sliding glass door for a beach in Mexico. A pigeon had committed suicide in a similar fashion last fall. Bootsy had proudly brought me the corpse.

  I cracked my neck and tried wiggling my toes to regain feeling in my feet while Jake prowled around the balcony with his gun drawn. It didn’t escape my notice that he tested the railing three separate times before leaning over to check below.

  I would’ve told him that he’d been reading too many crime novels had he, you know, not been the main character in one. He was just doing what I’d written him to do. And it was only human nature to be wary of balconies after falling thirty stories; he was just reacting the way anyone else would in his situation.

  Speaking of behavior though, I had yet to see him light up a cigarette. It was completely out of character. Between that and coffee—oh, my coffee!

  I arched my back and tried using my legs to flip the chair onto its side. If I worked hard enough, I could crawl to the kitchen and retrieve my mug. Jake could search the balcony for clues until morning as long as I got my caffeine.

  With one great heave, I threw my body weight to the right and tipped the chair. When I saw it, I let out an involuntary squeak of shock.

  My Write Like A Motherfucker mug lay on the kitchen floor in a pool of coffee, but the handle was completely detached. That bastard destroyed my favorite cup and was now wasting precious time searching for a dead bird instead of dealing with the more pressing tragedy.

  My lips began to quiver, and I mashed them together in a futile attempt to stop the tears that were inevitably coming.

  He was as big as a damn redwood, what did I think was going to happen when he forced himself into my tiny kitchen?

  “You are safe. You are grounded. You are balanced. You are… uncaffeinated.” A soft sob broke free, but I tried passing it off as a sneeze.

  Jake spun around on the balcony. “Hayden?”

  I shook my head. “I’m f-fine.” Another one slipped out and before I knew it, I was having a full-blown meltdown on the linoleum.

  The cuffs fell away from my ankles with a soft click. Jake lifted me out of the chair and, instead of giving him a piece of my mind over the mug, I just wrapped my arms around his neck, buried my face in his shirt, and inhaled deeply.

  Because I was so traumatized.

  I wanted to get tangled up with him.

  That was obviously just a side effect from the sudden altitude change.

  “Hayden?”

  “Hmmm?” I answered, sleepily, face and hands still very much attached to his shirt. At some point, I’d stopped crying and sent my olfactory system into overload trying to identify all the various scents that made up Jake.

  “You-uh, you have to let go now.” His voice was lower, not like he was whispering again, but the tone was different. Deeper.

  His fingers lightly moved up and down my spine and I reluctantly pulled myself away to meet his laser stare. We were on the couch; well, Jake was on the couch. I was sitting curled up in his lap.

  I was no better than Bootsy.

  Before long I’d be rubbing my body against his legs and—Jesus, what was wrong with me?

  I scrambled back onto the next cushion and perched near the side arm of the couch. A change of topic was in order. “You broke my favorite mug,” I stated flatly.

  “Your life is in danger,” he answered in kind.

  We stared each other down, neither of us willing to break first in order to hear the other person out. Bootsy poked her head out from beneath the couch and watched the standoff for a few minutes before disappearing again.

  “Hayden,” he prodded.

  “Jake.”

  He scratched an invisible itch on his temple with a wince and sighed heavily. “Aren’t you the least bit curious to know what I found?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest defiantly. “Aren’t you the least bit sorry that you broke my favorite mug? What am I supposed to drink out of now? A generic one?”

  “Hayden,” he tried again, but I turned toward the wall, choosing to give the clumpy textured patches the attention they’d been missing. “Hayden, damn it, look at me. You’re in danger—”

  “From what? The Canadian Goose Mafia?” I snorted at my own joke but quickly realized that I was the only one laughing. Jake pursed his lips, clearly waiting for me to get ahold of myself. “C’mon, Jake. It was a bird. A poor, misguided bird who made bad life decisions that led
to my balcony. He was probably strung out on some bad seed…”

  My voice trailed off as Jake held his phone up to my face. I squinted and pushed my glasses back up onto the bridge of my nose, trying to see whatever it was he’d seen when he took the picture. The blood drained from my face when I spotted it sitting near the broken glass.

  “That looks like a brick.” I was back to whispering, in case the alleged brick sniper was perched on a nearby balcony, listening in, just waiting for the most dramatic moment to lob another ‘projectile’ at my head.

  He stood up and went back out onto the balcony, returning with said brick in his hand. I backed myself up onto the arm of the couch back arched like Bootsy’s when she was startled. He moved his hand up and down. He was either trying to determine its weight or looking for a place to shove it.

  “I’ve got a proposal—my life, in exchange for yours. You get me back into my story and I’ll find out—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up my hand. “Wait a second. I’m supposed to just agree to this negotiation? For all we know, it was just some drunk kids. My life isn’t in danger. I’ve got some angry readers, but that’s to be expected after the last book.”

  Jake shook his head and rapidly lifted and lowered the brick. He was definitely deciding where to hit me with it. “Someone’s sending you a message.”

  He turned it over and the laugh died on my lips as the cover model for One in the Chamber looked down at me from his brick prison cell.

  I dumped another dustpan of glass shards into the trashcan. “Do you think we got it all?”

  Jake peered down through the wooden slats of the balcony and smirked. “Well, if we don’t count what went onto your neighbor’s patio, then yeah, we’re golden. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down and let me finish? You’ve had a pretty traumatic night.”

  I shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  Not only had someone thrown a brick at my apartment, apparently they’d decided to discard their copy of One in the Chamber in the same manner too.

  It was like something out of one of those cheesy made for TV movies. The overdone brick through a window trope. The truth was, I didn’t know what to make of any of it. I couldn’t imagine anyone hating the book enough to try to commit a murder.

  Jake hadn’t given up as easily and had been peppering me with questions about anyone who might wish me harm. With the exception of Cole, the date from hell, I couldn’t think of anyone.

  On top of that, if I wanted to avoid situations like the one I presently found myself in, I was going to have to come up with a way to resurrect a detective after his swan dive off the high rise.

  When he wasn’t interrogating me about the whereabouts of my enemies, he’d insisted that I sit down and rest. At the computer.

  As if I could just magically summon up the words and get him back into the book by sunrise. It was unfathomable. Not only that, but Laura had hightailed it out of my head right about the time my balcony door had a brick thrown at it.

  So, now I had no one to solve Jake’s case and, without someone to solve his case, there was no realistic way to bring him back into the story.

  I put the dustpan back under the sink and moved on autopilot to the couch. I just needed one good idea. Something to break through the block…

  “Hayden?”

  I jerked awake. “I wasn’t asleep!”

  Jake pursed his lips and nodded condescendingly. “Of course you weren’t. It’s completely normal to rest your head on your chest and snore for an hour when you’re brainstorming your next bestseller. I solve most of my cases in the exact same way. I can’t wait to hear what you came up with.”

  I groaned, wishing I’d taken the opportunity to snag an edible once the handcuffs were off. I found my tolerance to him got higher at roughly the same pace I did. “I’m tired, Jake. And, in case you’ve forgotten, I haven’t agreed to the terms of your deal. I have a storyline in place that doesn’t involve you miraculously reappearing.”

  “Fair enough.” He reached for my hand. “Let’s get you to bed then. You get a good night’s sleep and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  I reluctantly took it and let him lead me toward the bedroom, too exhausted to put up a fight. He waited outside the door as I changed into my pajamas and washed my face before leading me over to the bed like a parent. I lifted my wrist dutifully.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting for you to handcuff me to the bed,” I answered with a yawn.

  He grinned. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that.”

  I frowned. “You would. Look, are you handcuffing me or not? I just want to sleep until my life makes sense again.”

  Jake moved to the small window next to my nightstand and lifted a wooden slat. “I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he said absently, as he searched the parking lot down below. “I thought my offer was beneficial for both of us. I’ve never had a case I couldn’t solve, you know it’s true.”

  He’d never had a fictional case he couldn’t solve. This was the real world though and villains here rarely followed a script.

  Bootsy jumped up onto the bed, having been M.I.A. for the better part of the evening.

  Jake turned back to the bed and began waving his index finger at her. She flicked her tail and looked up at the ceiling.

  I cracked my neck and settled against the pillows. “Jake, what the hell are you doing?”

  He kept his focus on Bootsy as he answered. “I’m playing with her. Does she do any tricks?”

  I definitely should’ve had the edible. “Tricks? Dogs do tricks, Jake. Cats are companions.”

  “Look at her tail though. That means she’s happy.”

  I lifted my head to look at her. “No, she’s actually pissed. I’d stop before she decides to shred your finger with her teeth.”

  He gave it up and sank down onto the carpet. “I was thinking that maybe I should stay in here tonight. Just in case they try something else.”

  My eyes popped open. “No. Absolutely not. I am not getting pubic lice or whatever the hell else you carry. You can stay on the couch or at the Super 6 down the road, but not in here. Nope.”

  I closed my eyes and refused to look at him again. It was a dick move, but I couldn’t tell him the truth. What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, sure, stay in here with me and I’ll try not to dry hump your leg?’

  The dry spell, coupled with his appearance, was wreaking havoc on my lady organs.

  “Goodnight, Hayden.”

  I slowed my breathing down and pretended to be asleep. I was afraid if I opened my mouth to tell him goodnight, then everything else would come falling out with it.

  I had to agree to his terms and get him back into his book even if it meant career suicide. If he stayed here, then my heart wouldn’t stand a chance. I fell into a restless sleep, riddled with guilt and confusion.

  Who wanted me dead?

  Eight

  “Yeah, put it there. I want to see everything.”

  I sat up in bed with a jolt at the unfamiliar, and downright pornographic sounding, conversation taking place outside my bedroom. A quick glance at the clock confirmed that it was just a little after eight, yet my apartment had suddenly become a hub of activity.

  I relieved my bladder and put on a robe before venturing out into the hall to investigate. A couple of guys were up on ladders, drilling into the ceiling, while several others were grouped together outside the open front door. I didn’t recognize a single face.

  “Jake?” I called out hesitantly.

  He stepped inside from the balcony, cup of coffee in hand and looking like a million bucks. “Good morning.”

  Nothing about his stern expression or clipped voice indicated that it was indeed a good morning. I’d definitely overstepped the line between trying to keep my panties on and downright obliterating the man’s character.

  “Hey,” I tried. “I’m sorry about last night—”

  He stepped around me. “No need to
apologize. I get it; we’re not friends.” He was right, but the words still stung. “I’ve got the guys installing security, so we’ll have eyes on this place at all times. I also talked to the complex and they’ll have someone out for the door in a few hours. I told them I wanted the glass reinforced.”

  He paused, clearly wanting to say more. “I think you’ve been briefed on everything, Ms. Michaels. Have a nice day.”

  Ms. Michaels?

  Oh, he was definitely pissed.

  I stood in half-alert shock when he turned away and stepped back out onto the balcony.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Jake looked back at me before taking a sip from his coffee mug, his eyes never once leaving mine. I was being investigated without words. “That’s great, Hayden,” he finally noted in a voice heavily laced with sarcasm. “You’re a real humanitarian.”

  “Hey!” I protested. “This is what you wanted.”

  Wasn’t it?

  “Look, lady. If you’re expecting me to fall at your feet in gratitude, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. You hold up your end of the bargain and I’ll hold up mine.” This time he didn’t wait for a response before striking up a conversation with the two men working on the balcony.

  Bootsy appeared out of nowhere and began winding herself through my legs, apparently having realized over the last few hours that, while Jake was great, he didn’t know where the food was kept.

  She met my bewildered gaze with a look that seemed to suggest she’d decided to hold me personally responsible for the entire debacle.

  “Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” I said, more to myself as she continued to glare at me. Knowing I wasn’t going to win the argument, I went for my secret weapon; a tin of the most noxious smelling cat food known to man.

  Bootsy tried to play it cool, but not before I saw a look of complete adoration in her eyes.

  “Look who’s reclaimed her pussy,” I noted victoriously.

  “What the hell did you just say?” I jumped in fright as a man swung down off the ladder in the dining room.