by Anne Malcom
But Gage’s visit, his words had shaken some of the cupboards of my minds so hard that the skeletons came out.
Not the bodies, of course. All of those were out in the open, except one. Crime and murder wasn’t something I had to keep a secret from my family, even now when things were as close to the straight and narrow as they’d ever be—that being a definite curve away from anything resembling normal society.
My skeletons were different. The ones I even hid from myself. That shameful yearning for the white picket fence, the dog—heck, maybe even the kids. The whole package. The fairy tale. With the man who represented all of that, the safety and order.
Luke.
But his version of safety and order was destroying the thing he considered a threat to that.
The Sons of Templar.
One hell of a Catch-22.
One of the many, many reasons that I shouldn’t think of that. Couldn’t. But didn’t a girl always want what she couldn’t have?
I downed my tequila, warm and cheap, but you couldn’t find anything else around here. It did the job. Kind of.
I twirled a piece of metal in my hand. An extremely dangerous one. Not a knife, or a gun. Worse than that.
A cell phone.
I’d purchased it in one of those shitty electronic shops that smelled of cigarette smoke and were packed to the gills with rudimentary rip-offs of all of the big names. It worked well enough. I was fingering the one thing I didn’t discard along with my phone. My SIM card.
Inserting it into the phone would mean that my old life would come tumbling back in, would mean that Cade, or even Luke, could find me. If he was actually looking for me, which was doubtful, if our last meeting was anything to go by.
Because of—or in spite of—tequila, my mind went there. To the last place it should have.
The past. With Luke. With my family. With everyone.
It stayed there for a long time.
I emerged from the past much like a person would surface from the water after almost drowning: breathless and gasping for air. Swimming around back there wasn’t healthy.
I tipped my head back and welcomed my shot of tequila.
I’d lost count of how many.
Not enough or too much, obviously, with my little trip down memory lane.
I regarded the SIM card. I was fucked now, so why not make it another signature Rosie Fuck-Up?
I inserted the card, waiting for the screen to light up. Which it did. Missed calls, voice mails, texts. The list was long; I guessed I should’ve counted myself lucky to have that many people caring about me. That many people who loved me.
Gwen: Hey, sis, so the hubby is a little worried about you. And so am I. I need a drinking buddy. Your nephew is entering the terrible twos, and Amy is pregnant and can’t drink. Which means she’s almost worse than the toddler. Okay, she’s definitely worse than the toddler. Please come home. I miss you and love you.
Gwen: And by a little worried, I mean Cade has broken four pieces of furniture.
Amy: Everyone’s having babies. And now Brock wants one. Despite the damage it will do to my vagina. I need backup. Not just for the vagina stuff.
Ashley: Hey, my love. I know why you needed to go, even though you never said anything. I get it. Just remember you have an entire family that loves you. That needs you. You’re the crazy glue that holds us all together.
Polly: My sister is lost without you. Which means I’m lost without you. She moved to LA. You were supposed to do that together. Come home.
PS. I’m in love and his name is Jared.
Bex: I’m betting you’ve already ditched your phone, because you don’t want to be found and you’re not an idiot. What you did for Gabriel and me, for the club, there are no words. I know what it cost you. Heal, then come home. You’ve got a wedding to be in, bridesmaid. You can wear anything you like. As long as it’s not fucking pink.
Mia: Hey, honey. Know you’re out doing your thing. Being you. Your family is a little worried, and us girls are battling toddlers trying to get out alive. We need you to dole out the drinks and keep us insane.
Lily: Hey, Rosie, I don’t know if you’ll get this, and if you do, I’m sure it’s lost in between all Cade’s text versions of frenzied grunts, lol. But I just wanted to tell you that I’m pregnant too! Asher won’t let me find out what it is. He wants a surprise. I hate surprises. Must be something in the water around here. Maybe it’s a good thing you left, morning sickness sucks.
Lucy: I’ve sent a thousand and twenty-one texts and left as many voice mails but I’m still going to send a thousand more. You’re my best friend. No matter what. Even though you leave me behind without a word to navigate this shit show called life without my partner in crime. It’s your fault if I get locked up because I don’t have you to drive the getaway car.
Cade: Get back home. Now. This isn’t fucking funny, Roe.
Lucky: Hey, honey boo boo, come home please. I’m scared Cade will shoot me. Also I’m worried about you, little sis.
Evie: Steg here, don’t have a darned cell phone and don’t get this texting shit. But we love you, girl. Don’t hesitate to call home if you need backup. Though know you’re strong enough to figure it out alone. Just remember, you don’t have to. You have a big family with bigger guns at your back.
Luke: I’m looking for you. I’m not stopping. I fucked up, letting you leave. I’ll go to the ends of the earth to find you. And I won’t let you go this time.
Each and every single one of those messages hit me somewhere in my soul, leaving it in little more than tatters when I read what I missing out on, what I was causing. It was physical, my yearning for all of them. Which I’d been ignoring, blocking.
Luke’s message hit me square in the chest. Simple. Not saying much but saying everything at the same time.
There were dozens more of the same as I scrolled through. I decided to move to the flashing icon of my voice mail. There were a lot of those too, but I was already torturing myself, and it didn’t look like I was going to stop until I hit bone.
I may have craved Luke with a fierceness that I could barely survive, but that wasn’t the only kind of love that held me together. My family was everything to me; therefore, their absence in my life had a yawning chasm where my heart was supposed to be. And my girlfriends? Not having them? It was almost as bad as not having Luke. Because they were my true soul mates. So hearing Lucy’s voice was like phantom pain in a missing limb.
“Rosie, this is my twelve hundred and fifty-fourth message,” she joked, her voice saturated with a false lightness. “And I’ll leave twelve hundred and fifty-four more until you call me back.” I smiled a little, her words echoing the text she’d sent. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come and pick you up from the Dominican Republic, Australia, even Wisconsin.” I choked out a little laugh at that. “Just let me know my best friend is okay, please. I need you.” My laugh was stolen by the single tear that rolled down my cheek hearing the hurt in her voice. A loud sigh followed. “Just call me, okay? I—”
Instead of whatever threat she was going to make if I didn’t call her back, I heard a swift and bone-chilling intake of breath. Even through a shitty connection, thousands of miles away, I could hear the fear in my best friend’s gasp. I could taste it, because her fear was my own.
“Lucy,” I yelled, forgetting momentarily that this was a message, that whatever was happening had already happened. I could only listen, a spectator in the past.
“Please be okay. Please,” I begged as crashes echoed through the phone.
“Now don’t do anything stupid like run, darlin’. I’d hate to have to kill you before we get to play with you.”
Then the line went dead. Nothing more. I yanked it from my ear, looked at in in horror, and then slammed it down on the table.
“No!” I screamed as bottles and glasses shattered to the ground.
No one around me even looked up from their drinks.
I stood, snatching my phone with
the screen I’d shattered, my chair scuttling to the ground as I pushed it back.
I prayed it would still work to book me a flight back home and to my best friend. I prayed even harder that she was okay.
But God had never listened to me before. Why should He start now?
Chapter Five
Rosie
Age Twenty-One
When you’re young and stupid—and old and stupid, for that matter—you ruin your life when you’re drunk.
Which was precisely what I did on the night of my twenty-first birthday. I’d partied a heck of a lot before that, so it wasn’t as wild as you would’ve thought. There was a big party, of course, but I mainly just sat with Bull and Laurie and watched their happiness. Not with jealously exactly, but seeing how different they were, how much they shouldn’t fit and how perfect that made them, it made me drunkenly decide that if they could do it, we could.
So after I’d been dropped home by the designated sober prospect, I got into the car and drove to the station. Yes, drinking and driving was supremely stupid, but what happened afterward was arguably more dangerous.
I parked crookedly outside the station. It was the middle of the night and everyone else was gone.
Luke wasn’t.
I’d known that because we’d driven past on the way home and seen the light shimmering from the shadowy building. No one but Luke was that dedicated to their job as a small-town police officer.
The front door was locked, of course. I picked it with a rogue bobby pin.
“The only Templar who would break into a police station,” I muttered to myself as I walked down the dark hall.
My heels clicked loudly in the eerie quiet; it would’ve been creepy, if creepy and scary weren’t what passed for normal in my world. The only creepy thing, even through my drunken haze, was what I was about to do. There was a small, sober voice prattling in the depths of my brain, commanding me to snatch up my self-respect and hightail it the fuck out of there.
Drunk Rosie never listened to Sober Rosie.
Shit, Sober Rosie never listened to Sober Rosie.
So I kept walking, glancing around at the cookie-cutter desks, some scattered with files, other freakishly clean. Posters here and there. I was surprised to see Gage on one.
Wanted.
“Hmm, interesting,” I muttered.
I wasn’t surprised that he was running from something, but I was surprised that the police were in possession of this and he was yet to be arrested. Then again, as long as Bill was sheriff, we were unlikely to be arrested for anything. As long as Cade kept delivering him fat envelopes every month.
It was when Luke took the reins that we had the trouble.
And there I was, running right into trouble.
What’s new?
The light in his corner office was brighter now, offending my eyes that had become accustomed to darkness.
My soul had too.
And there was I seeking out the light when I wasn’t designed for it, nor used to it.
I didn’t hesitate at the door because if I hesitated, it would’ve been over. Hesitation was for cowards and sober people. I was neither.
Luke was bent over a black folder, concentrating so hard that he obviously hadn’t heard the not-so-stealthy break-in. He did hear the creak of his door opening. He wasn’t one to hesitate either, his gun up and pointed at my forehead in a matter of seconds.
Most people’s immediate reaction to having a gun pointed in the region of their brain might be to scream, cry, plead and definitely hold up their hands in the universal “don’t shoot me” gesture.
I did no such thing.
The only thing I did was reach into my purse and slip out a cigarette, put it between my lips and light it up. I took a leisurely inhale.
Not that I even liked to smoke. It made my clothes smell like shit, fucked with my teeth and may or may not give me cancer. It was something I was trying out. Plus, it went with my look. I was wearing tight leather pants with some third-hand Manolos, towering me high above my regular 5’7, and a see-through blouse that showed off my lacy red bra. My hair was straight—it took about two hours to do that—and tumbling down my back. My red lipstick left an imprint on the white filter as I took the smoke from my mouth.
“Jesus, Rosie,” Luke yelled, letting his gun clatter onto his desk.
I took another inhale, mainly to hide my nerves. “Nope, it’s just me. Don’t think the other guy’s been seen in a few thousand years, and even if he was in this neck of the woods, he wouldn’t be hanging out with me.” I watched him glance down at the file he’d been so focused on, snap it closed and shove it in a drawer. I wondered idly about that, for about a second. “He’d most likely be in here with you, Luke. The saint.”
I wandered into the room, glancing around with interest. It was clean. Neat. Obsessively so. Framed photos spaced evenly, diploma on the wall.
“You know I’m not a saint, Rosie,” he gritted out.
I focused on him, raising my brow. “Oh really? Because you’re pretty sure who the sinners are in this ’burb, and I thought only saints had the authority on sinners. The rest of us can’t see the grass for the trees, being sinners and all.”
He glared at me, then at the plume of smoke. He was out of his seat and in my face in seconds, my cigarette out of my mouth in the same time.
“You can’t fucking smoke in here,” he growled.
He didn’t leave my atmosphere immediately, holding my lit cigarette with the red lipstick kiss on the end, watching me.
“You’re not a sinner,” he murmured. “And I’m not a saint.”
“What makes you so sure?” I whispered.
The moment lasted longer than it should have, giving me butterflies of hope.
“Because saints don’t want things that they can’t have,” he said finally.
And before I could grasp onto that moment of hope, hold it in my hands and use it as proof that coming here—drunk or not—was a good idea, he was gone.
Luke rounded his desk, stabbing my smoke out on a scrap piece of paper before throwing it in the trash. He stayed on that side, keeping the piece of furniture between us like a shield. From my feelings or his, I wasn’t sure. I just knew it wasn’t working for me. There was no shield thick enough for that.
“What are you doing here, Rosie?” he sighed, crossing his arms. He looked me up and down, and that time really looked. He couldn’t really look in public. Or that’s what I told myself. Not that he wouldn’t. Or didn’t want to. That truth would make me all the more pathetic.
I entertained the idea that now that it was just us, with no one to hide from, real hunger danced in his gaze.
But then it was gone.
Maybe with just us, there was so much more to hide from.
“How’d you get in?”
I smirked, a good ploy to distract from my hurt. “The front door was open.”
Luke frowned. “It was not.”
I shrugged. “It is now.”
“Jesus, Rosie, you broke in?”
I looked around. “You keep mentioning this guy. Can I just not see him or something?”
“This isn’t a joke, Rosie,” he clipped. “You broke into a police station.” He looked at me again, but it wasn’t the Luke look. This was the Deputy Luke look. “You’re drunk.”
I eyed him. “It’s the middle of the night and I broke into a police station. You think I’d do that sober?”
He looked at me for a long time. “How did you get here?”
That was not the question I expected him to ask. I expected a lecture about the laws I’d broken, not to do it again, yada yada yada.
Knowing that telling him I drove would not be a good idea, I shrugged. “Flew in on my broomstick.”
Luke’s glare deepened to the point that one could possibly call it pure fury. “You fucking drove?” he roared, not buying the broomstick thing.
That time he forgot the shield between us and rounded the desk.
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” he shouted. Right in my face. No more Mister Nice Deputy. No more Mister Deputy at all.
This was Luke, pure and simple.
But not simple.
Because this was the rage of that night he’d wrenched the guy out of my car. The rage that didn’t make sense. Because rage like that was only roused when you cared about someone. A lot.
“Most of the time!” I yelled back, deciding that I was a little raging too.
Luke didn’t let go of my shoulders with my returning shout. Instead he shook me again, just on the edge of violently. “Driving fucking drunk is stupid and dangerous, Rosie. Fuck. Don’t you have people to drive you home? The one thing your brother does that I agree with is that he doesn’t let you drive drunk, and he even failed at that,” he seethed.
I narrowed my eyes. “Let’s get one thing clear, buddy. No one lets me do anything, I do what I want.”
“Including wrapping your car around a fucking pole and then making me come and find your dead fucking body?” he hissed.
“My car is in the parking lot, unharmed. And I’m very much alive, as you can tell,” I snapped.
My gaze was pointed at his hands which were bordering on painful. His eyes followed but his grip didn’t loosen.
“Yeah, you’re alive,” he said. “For now. You keep pushing it, Rosie. The boundaries. The rules. One day, they’re gonna push back. And I don’t want to ever fucking see that day.”
I blinked at him. “And why is that, Luke?” I whispered. “Why is it that you’re so passionate about my well-being when I’m just another dirty outlaw?”
He flinched at my words, the quiet tone that screamed loud, too loud, with my emotions. Alcohol made me honest. Too honest.
