by Hettie Ivers
I heard Stephen say in Spanish, “If they start fucking again, I’m out of here.”
Raul’s face pulled abruptly away from mine, his nostrils flaring, his irises swimming with gold.
I assumed his ire was for Stephen, but then his gaze turned sharply toward the front door, and I caught the sound of a key trying to force its way into the lock.
It didn’t fit.
Shit. My heart began to pound, because I just knew. “I think that might be—”
A fist banged against my door. “Fucking bitch, you changed the locks on me?” Gregg yelled from the other side. “This is my building, Bethany. Open the damn door. I want my ring back.”
My jaw unhinged. Gregg had never spoken to me like that before. Ever.
Clearly, either the doormen or one of my neighbors had tipped him off about Raul’s overnight stay.
“Raul, no!”
I hardly had time to process that it was Mike who’d whisper-shouted before the table next to me flipped over, sending food and plates flying—and me ducking for cover—as Raul growled and lunged toward the door, transforming into an enormous black and white wolf in midair.
Oh.
My. God.
Mike and Stephen flew out of the kitchen and sprang into action, tackling Raul—as a wolf—to the tile floor of the foyer, knocking my entryway stand with fresh flowers over and smashing a sizeable hole into the wall that the foyer shared with my bedroom when all three of them crashed-stopped into it.
My brain was struggling to grasp what it was witnessing, when the three of them suddenly vanished—poofing into thin air.
Kitsune came running to me, barking up a storm. I scooped the little orange and white furball into my arms and cuddled him to my chest, babbling that everything was okay. The guy at the rescue shelter had told me Akitas only bark when something is wrong and they’re unsettled.
“What the hell is going on in there?” Gregg pounded on the door again. “Bethany, let me in or I’ll get security. Fuck that; I’ll call the police.”
Kitsune continued barking at the door. Agreed. Something was definitely wrong all right. I wasn’t sure which of us I was hoping to convince otherwise as I continued to ramble soothing platitudes, carrying Kitsune past the wreckage in my living room and foyer to the front door.
I’d barely turned the knob and Gregg was forcing his way into my apartment, his eyes bloodshot and his skin ruddy with signs of another rosacea flare-up.
“Where is he?” he demanded, pushing past me. “I know he hasn’t left yet. I want to meet the loser you threw our entire future away on. I cannot believe you—”
He stopped, his eyes blinking in shock when he saw the hole in the drywall and scanned the mess of food and dishes all over my living room floor.
“What the? Are you out of your mind? What have you done to my apartment? This is destruction of property.”
I had no good answer for what had happened, so I assumed the offensive as he proceeded into my living room, stepping over a broken plate. “Stop calling it your apartment. My name’s the only one on the lease, and last I checked, I’m the one paying rent and living here, not you.” I kept my tone as steady and as calm as possible, hoping it would help to soothe Kitsune, who was now growling at Gregg.
“I own the building, Beth—”
“Your parents own this building. Along with other investors.”
He had the gall to look affronted by that truth, the jackass. When I continued to stand there calmly holding Kitsune, providing no further explanation for the destruction Gregg was still taking in, he snapped, his face turning blotchy shades of red and purple as he blustered, “Seriously? You’ve got nothing to say to me? I’ve been texting and calling you all morning.”
Crap. What had I done with my phone? I hadn’t seen it since I’d woken up—when Raul had shut the ringer off for me.
“I show up here and find that you’ve blown apart not only our future but my whole damn apartment, and nothing?”
“I’ve destroyed our future?” I took a deep breath and set Kitsune down. “Go to the bedroom, Kitsune.” I pointed to my open bedroom door, and I was shocked when the little mutt actually listened to my order and scampered off into the room instead of going straight for the food all over the floor like I’d expected.
“You’ve been fucking around on me for months, Gregg, so drop the self-righteous BS. It takes two people to ruin a relationship, and I’m not going to take all the blame for ours.”
“Me? Who told you I was cheating?”
His green eyes lit with indignation, but I glimpsed the guilt behind them. He was furious that I knew. I could almost see his brain running over the possibilities as to which of his friends might have ratted him out. Yeah, he’d definitely been cheating for a while. Maybe more than the five months I’d estimated from the skanky texts I’d found.
“I’ve never cheated on you, Bethany. Don’t try and blame your whorish behavior on—”
“I saw the texts on your phone, Gregg.”
His mouth opened and shut several times. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. The sound of a phone vibrating in his pocket filled the silence, reminding me that I still needed to locate my own phone.
“That’s impossible. What texts? What were you doing going through my private texts? You had no business—”
“I needed a contact for the caterer.”
“And I sent it to you the other day when you asked me for it.”
“You sent me the wrong contact. When I called Brandi with an ‘i,’ she seemed unusually flustered when I gave her your name for the booking and the date of our reception.”
His expression paled a fraction, but he shook his head in denial, nonetheless, as I continued.
“She rambled an apology, saying she wasn’t the caterer and that she hadn’t known you were engaged, before hanging up on me. I got curious and went through the texts on your phone after that.”
He was still stubbornly shaking his head. And I couldn’t help but note he seemed oddly reassured somehow by what I’d just told him—as if what I knew only scratched the surface, and he was relieved to hear how little I’d actually uncovered.
“You had no right,” he lectured. “Whatever you think you found, you’re mistaken. Do you have any idea how many women come on to me in a given week?”
A shout of laughter escaped me before I could restrain it. Gregg may have been tall and an attractive-for-a-corporate-guy type, but his inflated ego was so far out of sync with reality it was a joke.
“They do,” he insisted. “I’m a broker, Bethany. I interact with a lot of people, and yes, sometimes that means flirting with potential female investors.”
“Strippers are investing in multimillion-dollar Bay Area real estate now? Good to know. By the way, I went through your online credit card receipts, too.”
His eyes flared and he sputtered, “Y—you have no proof of anything. You know damn well it’s part of my job to sometimes take clients to gentlemen’s clubs. So what if you found a few texts from random women on my phone? That doesn’t make me guilty of cheat—”
“It does when you’re texting them back photos of your dick, Gregg.”
“Well, you had sex in a public elevator with some roided-out meathead you met at a dance club!” he exploded, talking loudly enough for the whole floor to hear him. “I had to wake up this morning to an email from security with a link to video footage of a stranger plowing my fiancé up against the wall of my own building’s elevator, for fuck’s sake.”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
There was video footage?
Holy shit, I’d forgotten all about the surveillance cameras.
“You let him carry you through the lobby downstairs half-naked wrapped in a blanket for everyone to see,” Gregg indicted. “And you couldn’t even wait to get inside our apartment to spread your legs. No, you let him bang you in a public elevator like some desperate horny bitch in heat. You disgraced me in front of my own ma
nagement staff, my own building security.”
And that’s what this was about: Gregg’s ego. Not our relationship. Not me.
“Then I went online and checked the feed for the camera that I had installed months ago in this very foyer—for your protection,” he emphasized, “and I had the joy of watching footage of you on your knees sucking that asshole’s cock. What the hell were you thinking, Bethany? Was this your childish way of getting back at me for a few harmless flirty texts you found on my phone? You couldn’t even come talk to me first? You just jumped on the first dick you could find?”
“First of all, fuck you for continuing to assume I’m an idiot. Secondly, I did not mean for things to happen the way they did last night. I was planning to confront you about the texts—”
“Well, it’s too late now, because I’ve already forwarded your sex tapes to everyone on our guest list, letting them know that the wedding is off.” He held his hand out. “I want my ring back.”
“What did you say?”
“I said the wedding is off and I want my ring back.”
“I meant the other part!” I screeched.
“I said I’ve already emailed your sex tapes to everyone you know, Bethany.” His smirk was nasty as he watched that bomb settle.
12
Bethany
My life was ruined. My character … my professional reputation … everything I’d ever worked for had just been blown to dust with one email.
“You did what?” I could barely get the words past the tightness enveloping my throat.
“Sent it to everyone,” he sneered. “Every friend, every family member, every hospital and medical school associate you invited to our wedding. Your parents, your cousins, your sweet grandma who adores me, your pastor—they all got video footage of you getting fucked in an elevator, Bethany. Followed by a clip of you on your knees masturbating and choking on some loser club rat’s cock.”
Oh, God, I was going to throw up.
My eyes filled with tears. My mind and emotions reeled as I contemplated the horrified reactions of everyone I loved and respected most in life viewing such scandalous, intimate video footage of me with Raul. I was going to have to relocate—to a remote village in Antarctica. My parents would never recover from this. Granny Jean might’ve already gone into cardiac arrest upon opening that email. I needed to call her assisted living facility immediately—send a nurse to check on her.
Amid my sickening panic, self-righteous fury mushroomed within me, eclipsing every other pressing need and emotion assailing me, and I lashed out.
“His name is Raul, and he is not a loser club rat. He’s a manny. He cares for a special-needs child, which is a more meaningful, commendable way to earn a living than any of the bullshit jobs your parents have ever handed to you on a platter. And—adore you? Ha! Granny Jean? She told me you were basic. The worst kind of basic nouveau riche. She’s probably drinking a spiked Metamucil right now, toasting the fact that I finally found a man with enough cock for me to actually choke on.”
“You told me size didn’t matter, that it was all about skill and chemistry,” Gregg balked, his shallow, narcissist brain latching onto my jab about his small penis rather than the one about how he didn’t earn his living.
“It matters when you’re also lacking in the skill and chemistry department!”
“Bethy, what’s all this shouting about?”
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more crazy or tense, Mike walked out from my bedroom, wearing nothing but boxer briefs and a towel on his head, and talking with a British accent.
“Oh, hey, I’m Mike, Bethany’s cousin.” He held his hand out for Gregg to shake as he came to stand next to me, looking like a model—or an exotic male dancer—with his sculpted, tanned physique on display.
Gregg was so disoriented by Mike’s half-naked arrival on the scene that he shook his hand, his eyes darting between the two of us. “Cousin?”
Mike shrugged. “Yeah, distant cousin—step-cousin, really—through marriage. But still close family.” He flashed me a cheesy smile before squinting one eye and pretending to connect the dots on an invisible family tree in the air with his pointer finger. “You see, I’m Bethany’s mother’s brother’s wife’s stepsister’s kid.” He dropped his hand and grinned at Gregg. “Bethy’s always been the ultimate SCILF to me.”
Dear God.
“SCILF?” Gregg took the bait.
“Uh-huh.” Mike threw his arm around me, pulling me into his rock-solid bare chest. “You know … step-cousin I’d like to fuck.”
This day was not happening.
“So I flew out here early for the wedding.”
Gregg’s face looked to be permanently frozen in a frown of disbelief. “Three months early?”
“Well, yeah. I thought I might be able to sixty-nine some sense into Bethy. Tongue her out of making the biggest mistake of her life. But then I made the mistake of bringing my best friend along with me to go dancing last night. And he got his tongue in her first.”
Of all the …
“Hands off my girl, Mike.” Raul strode out of my bedroom, dressed as he’d been five minutes ago—before he’d flipped out and turned into a wolf.
My stomach fell through the floor at the reminder of the recent episode I’d blocked out while preoccupied with Gregg’s arrival. Mike released me, his arm lifting from around my shoulders as Raul came to stand on my opposite side.
“You know I don’t share.” Raul looked directly at Gregg rather than Mike as he said it.
Gregg’s eyes narrowed, recognizing Raul from the surveillance videos no doubt. “You.”
“Me,” Raul confirmed. That one syllable somehow managed to sound like a promise of murder.
The momentary silence that fell upon my living room was disturbed only by the still-constant buzzing sound of Gregg’s phone going off in his pocket.
“And you’re a babysitter?” Gregg had the idiocy to ask.
When Raul didn’t reply, but continued to stare Gregg down like he was contemplating which of his limbs to tear off first, Mike jumped in.
“Manny. We’re both mannies, actually.”
“I’m a manny as well,” Stephen’s deep voice proclaimed as he, too, emerged from my bedroom, wearing nothing but white grape-smuggler briefs that he filled out so surprisingly well I had to force my shocked eyes to look away from the disturbing size of his package.
I stole a glance at Raul and noted he’d ceased staring Gregg down long enough for his eyes to roll to the ceiling.
Mike coughed and covered his mouth with his hand when Stephen came to stand next to him, muttering, “I still don’t get why I’m dressed like this.”
Gregg’s bloodshot green eyes swept over the three huge men flanking me, and while his ego had always been bigger than his dick, I could tell the moment my ex-fiancé’s pea brain wisely deduced that he was outnumbered and outsized by built, hung “babysitters.”
“I was just leaving,” he announced, his gaze leveled on Raul. “You can keep her.” His smile was ugly as he looked Raul up and down like he was trash. “Shacking up with a hot doctor is a boon for a nobody babysitter, I’m sure. Bet you think you’ve hit pay dirt. Well, don’t get too comfortable here, because she’s under eviction.”
Turns out I’d given Gregg’s pea brain too much credit.
“For what?” I challenged. “You have no cause to evict me.” I was for sure moving out in order to relocate to a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere, but I’d be damned if I’d admit to Gregg how much he’d just destroyed my life.
“Fornicating in public, indecent exposure, destruction of property—”
“Oh, fine, fine, I’m moving out. The hot water pressure in this building stinks anyway. Goodbye, Gregg. Try not to trip over your wounded ego on the way out.”
He thrust his hand at me, palm up. “I want my ring back first, you cheating whore.”
Mike whistled low, then murmured, “Hold it together, man.”
I knew Mike’s warning was for Raul, because a growling sound was emanating from Raul’s chest, and I could’ve sworn I’d felt the energy shift around me like wind at the words “cheating whore.”
Gregg didn’t know when to shut up and save his own life. He looked from me to Raul. “What the hell was that?”
I patted my stomach. “You’re giving me indigestion.” I turned to Raul and placed a calming hand on his forearm. His skin was hot to the touch. I could feel the anger vibrating off him as his muscles twitched beneath my fingers. “You wouldn’t happen to know where my engagement ring ended up last night, would you?”
He shook his head minutely, his deadened gaze fixed on Gregg. “Uh-uh. Haven’t seen it.” His voice was guttural, raspy, as he prompted, “Have you, Mike?”
“Nope,” Mike readily replied. “Not since last night when I gave it to a homeless woman outside the club.”
Oh, shit.
“You did what?” Gregg erupted, his face turning a brighter shade of blotchy red. “That was a forty-three-thousand-dollar rock.”
Mike hunched one shoulder. “Well, I did apologize to the little old lady for the tackiness factor. Told her I’d give her something nicer the next time we came through town.”
“You owe me fifty grand!” Gregg shouted at me.
Mike laughed. “You just said it was forty-three.”
“I’m tacking on the cost of invitations and wedding deposits I can’t recover.”
Granny Jean had been right. Gregg was hopelessly basic.
“I’ll mail you a check,” I told him. “You need to leave.” I gave him a pointed look, hoping that some self-preservation instinct within him would kick in. “Now.”
He scowled and retrieved his still-buzzing phone from his pant pocket. “Fuck that. I’m calling the police and reporting the ring as stolen. As far as I’m concerned, all four of you are responsible for its loss.”
There was no helping some people.
“Are you out of your mind? It was my ring to lose. You gave it to me.”
