My day had gone from bad to worse.
After doing all that we could at The Bridge, i.e., helping join the search and rescue, transporting people across town in my company truck that was brought out to me, and overall filing through debris and destruction, I’d moved back to the office only to find out that two of our crew members had been electrocuted. After spending four hours at the emergency room with them, I’d then gone back to the office only to turn right around and hit up a call of a live wire near the park.
It’d all gone downhill from there, and still, all I could think about were those sightless blue eyes staring up at me.
Parking my bike at the back of my house where I normally parked it, I spared the empty house beside mine a distracted glance, then headed up my back porch to the door.
There I typed in the key code and walked inside, instinctively listening for the alarm to disengage as I did.
But it didn’t, and I frowned.
The door had been locked, I knew that much.
But…the alarm hadn’t been set.
What the fuck?
“Monster, hurry it up,” I ordered, holding the door for him.
He went out, took a piss, and came right back in before heading to my bedroom.
Thinking that tomorrow I would need to call the alarm company about the problem, I locked the door behind me and then went to the bedroom without turning on a single light.
When I got there, I started stripping out of my clothes and dropped everything in a large pile next to the bathroom door, then flipped on the bathroom light. Reaching into the shower, I cranked it up to the hottest it’d go, then stepped inside without waiting for it to get all the way warmed up.
It took me all of two minutes to wash and rinse, and I was out before the hot water had a chance to have any effect. Moments after stepping out, I dried off with a hand towel since I couldn’t find any actual towels, and then put on my boxer briefs that were sitting on the counter that I hoped were of the clean variety.
I had a feeling that my housekeeper had picked them up and left them on the counter for me to see, wondering if they were clean or dirty.
The thing was that I didn’t put my clothes away. They all sat in a large pile at the bottom of the bed, and sometimes they fell onto the floor while I was sleeping. Which also happened to be where I kept my dirty ones.
This happened a few times a week, and the housekeeper—Rome’s wife, Izzy—tried to do her best to separate out clean from dirty. The ones she had questions about usually went on the counter in my bathroom where my hamper sat that rarely got used except for dirty towels.
It was when I was flipping off the light in the bathroom, about to dive head first into the bed, that I saw that the lump I’d once thought was my pile of clothing to put away, wasn’t my clean clothes. The pile was a person.
I froze, fury roaring through my veins, and stared at the small lump.
Then that lump rolled over, revealing semi-wet brown hair and a mass of curls.
Everything inside of me froze at seeing her in my bed.
I walked over to it quietly, staring at the woman that I could now tell apart from her sister and felt everything that’d been rioting inside of me still.
I’d known, of course, that the body that’d been dead at the sight wasn’t her. I’d known…but seeing with my own eyes was crucial. I’d been so fucking worried.
Theo.
She was in my bed.
Sleeping.
She was here.
Alive.
Not carried away by storms. Not lying dead in a ditch, miles away from where she was supposed to be.
And exactly where she should be.
I didn’t wake her to ask her how she got here.
I also didn’t think that it mattered.
Not right then, anyway.
Instead of waking her up and peppering her with the questions that were on the tip of my tongue, I only walked around to the other side of the bed and climbed in, being careful not to get too close to her.
When I woke up, I’d ask her what the hell had happened.
But for now, she was safe and exactly where she should be.
***
Theo
I woke up and everything hurt.
My head. My back. My hands.
Even my fingernails.
I groaned and rolled over, hitting something solid, and knew without even opening my eyes that the person in the bed beside me was Liner.
The solid man groaned and rolled, taking half the covers with him.
Smiling at the hog that he was, I got up and sat up on the bed, allowing my feet to dangle down.
They didn’t touch the floor. That was because Liner had a bed fit for a king.
Literally and figuratively.
The thing was at least four feet off the ground, and last night I’d had to practically drag myself into it using the flat sheet as a rope.
Monster, who’d been lying at the end of the bed, stood up and did a full doggy stretch.
His eyes were on me and his tail was wagging.
I grinned and got up, practically falling out of the bed.
A groan nearly escaped my tightly clenched lips, and I breathed out roughly.
God, I hurt.
Bad.
So bad, in fact, that I might’ve needed to go to the hospital.
Yet, doing that would’ve alerted my father that I was alive, and for now, I was happy with him thinking that I wasn’t.
The only problem I could see was that Tyson would have to be informed.
I shuffle-stepped to the bathroom, my face relaying the pain I was in the entire way.
After relieving myself, washing my hands, and using a bit of toothpaste on my finger to half-ass brush my teeth with, my ankle was once again throbbing almost as bad as it did last night.
It was sprained.
Just a sprain.
It wasn’t broken.
I’d just made the decision to go back out and get in bed with Liner again when there was a hesitant knock on the door.
I felt my heart kick up a beat and turned, slowly making my way to the door.
By the time I got there and pulled it open, I had tears in my eyes.
Liner took one look at me and stiffened.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I held up my foot and gestured to it with my good hand. “I think I sprained it.”
He looked down at it and hissed.
“That looks like it hurts,” he murmured.
I shrugged. “A little.”
He bent down to examine it, gingerly picking up my foot in his hand and probing it.
“How would I know if it was broken?” I asked, trying to breathe through the pain.
“You’d know,” he said. “If you can walk on it at all, I’m guessing it really is a sprain…it just looks rough.”
That was true.
“I need to sit,” I said softly. “Can we go to the bed?”
He stood up and instantly was at my side, bringing his arm around my back to cup my waist.
“Lean on me as you walk. Use me as your crutch,” he ordered.
I nodded my head and did as he’d asked, using him as a crutch.
“Your bed is freakin’ tall,” I mumbled as I stared at it. “I don’t know how…eeep!” I laughed out loud, which caused my ribs to smart, as he picked me up as if I weighed nothing more than a feather and placed me on the bed.
He sat me on the bed and was gone seconds later.
My ears strained to listen as I heard him moving around the house, talking to Monster and then letting him outside.
He came back what felt like forever later with a bag of ice in one hand and a water bottle in the other.
He gestured for me to lean back against the headboard, then grabbed the pillow he’d used last night.
Once he had the ice situated on my bad ankle, he sat on the edge of
the bed and stared.
“Tell me how you got here last night.”
Not ‘tell me how you bypassed my security system.’ Not ‘what the fuck are you doing in my house.’ Just ‘tell me how you got here last night.’
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, to be honest,” I answered honestly. “Last night, we were in the hallway with the entire staff and residents of The Bridge. The tornado came…and then I can’t remember anything from there until when I was walking. At first, I felt like I was dreaming due to all the destruction. Then, when I got out of the area that the tornado had hit, it was like just any other night. As if nothing had happened but a small little rainstorm.”
“Walking,” he said. “Walking where?”
I shook my head. “That’s what I’m saying…I was just walking. I came to, and I was on the street that led to your house.”
His brows rose.
“I remember you saying that you lived next to Tara,” I said softly, looking into his beautiful eyes as I explained. “And it was between this house and that house over there,” I gestured somewhere behind me. “But then I remembered you saying that you saw me in her room…so I went to this house. I saw Monster through the window…and I broke in.”
His lips tipped up. “You’ll have to let me know how you accomplished that.”
I felt heat rise to my face.
He wasn’t mad about me breaking into his house. He just wanted to know how I’d done it so he could fix it.
“It was a necessity to know how to get out of places,” I said softly. “After everything that Tara put me through, then my father and Andy…well, I learned really quick not to be stuck somewhere that I didn’t want to be stuck. That also means that I can get out of places—or into places—that I want to. Your system was fairly easy. Just a basic alarm system.”
His eyes twinkled, then sobered. “That’s all you remember?”
I nodded, feeling horrible. “When I came to, I thought about going back. I was actually fifteen steps in the opposite direction of your house when I realized that this was the perfect opportunity…to disappear.”
His eyes narrowed. “Disappear?”
I nodded. “I wanted to see if you could help me disappear.”
Chapter 9
Look, I’m sorry. I simply don’t meet the minimum height requirements for your rollercoaster of bullshit.
-Meme
Theo
“But what about your daughter?”
I’d thought about that.
I’d thought about it a lot.
“My daughter doesn’t even realize that I’m her mother,” I said softly. “I think she suspects it…but I don’t think that she really knows. Plus…what kind of life is she going to be able to live where I’m in the picture? I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”
“What kind of life is she living right now?” he countered, looking like he was getting mad. For me or at me, I wasn’t quite sure. “From what I’ve observed of her, and what my PI has observed of her, your brother doesn’t really even try to be a parent to her. She’s just there…existing. That’s not how a kid should be treated.”
I started to get mad.
“What do you want me to do in this situation?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t have much choice here. I’m lucky that Tara and my father haven’t taken an interest in her yet!”
“Then why did Tyson keep her at all?” he countered. “Why not give her up for adoption? Why not go drop her off at some random fire station? At least then nobody would be able to find her. She might have a good life.”
I looked away. “You don’t think I haven’t thought about that?” I asked. “Because I have. A lot since it happened. But my family watches my every move. Watches Tyson’s every move. They know. They know everything. And if they saw how much we cared about her…they’d take an interest. And I don’t want them to take an interest.”
He looked at me with pity in his eyes, and I absorbed that.
Hell, I even pitied myself.
My life sucked.
There was nothing good about it except for one bright spot when it came to my daughter, but even that was tainted.
“I should’ve never had her,” I whispered softly. “It would’ve been less cruel. I should’ve found a way.”
“Kids are miracles,” he countered. “We’ll figure out a way to make this work. I’ve…already been doing that. My dad and I have already been looking into it. I’ve also been in contact with a few men that are in a nearby town. They are friends of some of the guys in our club. They specialize in making families disappear.”
“Your dad?” I smiled softly. “Sounds like you got one of the good ones.”
His face changed slightly.
“I can’t have kids. Thanks to my dad.”
I looked over at him in surprise. “What?”
The gasped half screech/half outraged murmur that came out of my mouth was near comical.
“Beat my ass so bad that I got an infection that wracked my body for days. I laid on the floor of my bedroom for four days with such a high fever that I nearly died. When I came to on day six, fever free, it was to find out that I was in the hospital after my mother finally thought I might die and not make it. Killed all my swimmers,” he answered.
I looked at him oddly.
“The man that you’re working for beat the crap out of you, and you’re still working for him?” I asked incredulously. “Asking him for help. Genuinely spending time with him and asking him for help. What the hell?”
Liner’s lips twitched.
“Does it make you feel better to know that, at the time, he had a brain tumor that was making him say and do things he would’ve never said or done if he was of sound mind?” he asked.
I…might have to think about that.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not sure. Should that be something that’s forgiven?”
Liner shrugged. “Dad knows exactly what he did now. After the brain tumor was removed, he remembered exactly what he’d done when he was in that altered state. He feels terrible. I still catch him looking at me like I’ve ripped his heart straight out of his chest.”
“Why’d your mother wait so long to bring you to the hospital?” I asked. “And what happened from there?”
“My mother was scared,” he admitted. “Of my dad, and of my dad getting taken away. She’d lived with him for twenty-two years with him being the perfect, devoted husband and father. And then he turned into a maniac for about two weeks. When they arrested him, my mother got a lawyer for both him and me. The lawyer had a psych hold put on my dad, and while they had him, they did a couple of scans of his brain and found the tumor.” He paused. “It helps that I was sixteen at the time and didn’t want to press any charges. I’d lived with my dad that long, too. I knew that he would’ve never done that under normal circumstances. I also was dumb and allowed him to beat the shit out of me because I’d done something stupid.”
“What was that something stupid?” I whispered.
“Totaled his car after a night of joy riding, drinking and smoking marijuana,” he admitted, looking flustered. “I also ran over our cat.”
My mouth fell open.
“That’s…awful,” I finally admitted.
And it sounded like it was a lose-lose situation. That nobody in that entire story had won.
“Clusterfuck,” he agreed, reading my face. “And the cat lived, if you’re wondering. We called him Lucky after that.”
I just shook my head.
“That’s just…a tragedy,” I admitted. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
He shrugged. “Nothing to say. I’m just saying that you don’t always know what’s under the surface. But that aside, I think that if we’re going to make you disappear, you need to disappear with your kid…give her a chance to have a life that both of you deserve.”
***
A little over seven days later, we w
ere parked across the road, in Liner’s work truck, fixing a line.
Well, I wasn’t fixing a line, and neither was Liner. His crew was though. We just so happened to be parked amongst them as they worked.
And while they did, I stared across the road that separated us from the school and watched my daughter.
“It’s hard raising a child that’s not your own,” I said softly to the man that was beside me, watching as my little girl played in the sand all by herself. “Tara, Andy and my father scare the crap out of her. Which they should since they’re scary,” I said softly. “And then there’s Tyson, who’s scared to show any affection to her at all in case my family decides to use her against him.” I felt sick to my stomach.
“What about the multiple nannies?” he asked softly.
I looked down at my hands, then back up at Linnie, hungry for a few more stolen glances of her.
I loved her with my whole heart.
There wasn’t one thing on this earth that meant more to me than her.
“I think that was Tyson’s gift to me,” I said softly. “He didn’t want his little girl to love anyone more than me. So he changes them up every so often so she can’t form attachments to them. He’s so standoffish with her, she doesn’t really know what to think about him either. But when she comes and sees me? I don’t pretend not to love her. And she knows it.”
He looked like he’d been hit in the stomach.
“You told me you couldn’t disappear?” he asked. “Why? Why not get her and run? Change your name?”
I smiled sadly.
“My father is high in the government. He can do things, get to people, that are normally untouchable.” My voice quivered. “He’s a bad man, Josiah. Words can’t even explain how bad.”
He made a grumbling noise in his throat.
“I have a friend,” he murmured. “Just got out of prison. Used to be a cop. I’m going to have him look into your father and brother. Sister. But the other friend of the friend? They’re going to get back to me on what you should do next. This tornado that hit? It was perfect. It’s the perfect excuse, and you should use it.”
She shivered. “What you see with Tara is what you get. She’s just a pawn. She has no conscience, so she does what she’s told and doesn’t care what happens to her or to others as she does. Andy? He and my father are the ones you need to worry about.”
Snitches Get Stitches (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 8) Page 7
