by Amy Brent
She waved some money in my direction before she nodded to a colorful drink someone was having, so I took my time making it for her. I made sure everything was just right to give myself some time to figure out how to let her down easily. There was only one woman occupying my mind right now, and I still wasn’t too sure her scent wasn’t following me around. The ocean breeze kicked up off the ocean, rustling the older woman’s hair around her face, but the moment I turned to take her the drink I’d created, all I could do was think about how her hair reminded me of Olivia’s.
“A cranberry martini for the lovely lady,” I said, smiling.
“I see you’ve been getting a bit of sun,” the lady said. “That tan looks very nice on you.”
“I try the best I can when it comes to what the ladies love.”
“I was wondering when you’d be back around here,” she said. “Figured you might’ve quit on me or something.”
“A beautiful woman like you could never chase me off,” I said.
“I was wondering what time you got off tonight,” she asked.
“I actually just clocked in,” I said. “I won’t be off until closer to midnight tonight.”
“How would you feel if a certain someone came back to see you later on?”
My eyes danced over to the woman’s, and I couldn’t help but feel a tug of guilt. She had a beautiful set of brown eyes, with hair she’d had recently highlighted, but I couldn’t rid my mind of Olivia. Everything about this woman that I once enjoyed was now simply compared to Olivia, and this woman didn’t measure up. The woman’s eyes didn’t quite shine like Olivia’s, and her skin wasn’t quite as smooth. Her lips weren’t as plump, and her tits weren’t quite as perky. I thought she was a beautiful woman, just like I had last week, but there just wasn’t that spark I’d felt then.
“Would you like to accompany me to a table?” I asked.
“I would love the private audience,” she said, grinning.
I threw my rag over my shoulder before I escorted the woman over to a table in the corner. I pulled out her chair for her before I sat across the way, and her hand slowly slid over to mine before my eyes flickered up to meet hers.
“I want to start off by apologizing,” I said.
“For what?” the woman asked, grinning. “This smooth skin? I quite like it.”
“No,” I said, snickering. “I want to apologize because something has changed.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Between our wonderfully romantic encounter and now, I’ve met someone,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, pulling her hand back.
“I wanted to tell you in person, when I caught you, that was. You’re a beautiful woman. A vibrant woman who hasn’t yet been pulled into the volatile scene of Malibu’s plastic surgery group. And you shouldn’t allow yourself to fall prey to it.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“You’re no less beautiful than when I met you last week,” I said. “I just…”
The woman panned her gaze back over to me while I stared off over her shoulder. A goofy smile slowly spread over my face, and that was when the woman began to soften toward me. I was trying to let her down easy. To make sure Chad’s paying clientele still came by to visit me. Breaking a woman’s heart or pissing her off by thinking she was played was not a way to get people into my bar.
But the woman interrupted my thoughts with a much softer tone to her voice.
“It sounds like she’s wonderful.”
“She is,” I said, grinning. “She’s full of life and absolutely intoxicating. I can’t really explain it, I guess.”
“It sounds like you’re in love,” the woman said as she wiggled her eyebrows.
“Not even in the slightest,” I said firmly. “But she’s wonderful to be around, and I’ll take that for now.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You were just daydreaming about her! You’re probably sitting here, running your eyes over me, and thinking about all the things I possess that remind you of her. Right?”
I was stunned that she could even pinpoint such a thing, and I watched as she threw her head back in laughter.
“When love strikes, it’s all the same,” she said.
“But I’m not in love with her,” I insisted.
“Whether you want to believe it or not, that doesn’t matter. What matters is what your heart has already decided. And I’ll tell you one thing. She’s a lucky woman. You’re very handsome, and I’m sure she’s running those fingertips of hers all over your back.”
I shuddered at the memory before the woman patted my hand again. She slipped me the twenty-dollar bill she’d been waving at me earlier, and the feeling underneath the palm of my hand ripped me from my memories.
“Keep the change,” she said. “You’ll need it to take her out on all those dates she deserves for putting up with you.”
With a wink, the woman slid off her chair and meandered back into the crowd. I couldn’t be in love with Olivia. That shit didn’t happen to me. I chuckled and sat back in my chair, crossing my arms across my chest. I wasn’t fucking in love with anyone. Women were absolute bullshit, and my mother had proven that to me. My father was a piece of shit who’d left the two of us high and dry, and she drank herself into oblivion instead of stepping up and raising her son like she should have.
Instead of throwing her excess love into her son, she’d thrown that shit into booze. Women were absolutely fuck ups, and just because they had a nice set of tits or a tight-ass pussy didn’t make them any different from one another.
Still, I sat there for fifteen minutes, reminiscing on my meet-ups with Olivia. How her body writhed for me. How her sounds felt against my ears. How our banter back and forth showed her strong mind and her sharp wit. I thought about her curves and the way she confidently held herself, having no mercy and taking no prisoners in her wake, while she gobbled down what she wanted.
Olivia was very different from the girl I enjoyed in high school, but I still enjoyed her all the same.
“I’m not fucking in love,” I said.
“Well, I’m glad you got that shit figured out. Now, get back to work.”
I jumped off my chair and stumbled to my feet. Chad was behind me, gathering up glasses, but the smirk on my face told me I’d been sitting there a hell of a lot longer than he would’ve enjoyed. Chad shook his head before he headed back to the bar, and I was hot on his heels.
Silent but following close.
I continued to sling drinks all night, flirting with the older women while they continued to sip their expensive, fruity cocktails. Number after number was slid my way, but all I did was toss them in the trash can. I had absolutely no desire to call any of these women. The only thing I wanted to do was get off my shift, take my tip money, and go get the shit I needed to prepare for my dinner with Olivia tomorrow.
When a lull in the crowd finally happened, I pulled my phone from my pocket. I sat along the edge of the bar and pulled up a text message to Olivia, asking her if we were still on for tomorrow night. If shit got caught up with the paperwork, I needed to know so I didn’t spend all that fucking money on food.
If shit got caught up with the paperwork, I wanted a chance to convince her to come anyway.
Still on for tomorrow night?
I sent the message just as someone came up to order a drink, so I set my phone behind the counter and got to work. Before I knew it, another hour had passed, and Chad was tapping me on the shoulder.
“Go home,” he said. “It’s eleven-thirty, and you need to prepare for whatever dinner or shit you’ve got going on. You’ve got tomorrow off, but I’ll need you through the weekend.”
“You got it,” I said. “Thanks, dude.”
“I want details!”
“You always do!”
I grabbed my phone and clocked out before I checked my text messages. I saw a pending message from Olivia, and at first, I froze. For whatever reason, my mind began to whirl with all the thin
gs this message could possibly entail. Maybe she was turning me down, or maybe she was simply no longer interested. Maybe she was playing me, fucking around with me just to get me to lower the price of the property. Maybe I would open this message, and it would tell me the deal was off, or the deal was too much, or she’d reported me to whatever the fuck she could in order to rip me off even more than she already was.
With a trembling hand, I swiped across my screen and furrowed my brow at the two words Olivia had sent back nearly an hour ago.
I guess.
She guessed? What was she guessing about? That didn’t really sound like a woman who was amped and ready for a man to cook her dinner. “I guess” wasn’t what you told someone if you were excited to see them.
I tossed my phone in the car before I flopped down into my seat. I felt anger beginning to course through my system. There were plenty of women in Malibu, like the one I’d just turned down, who would be more than ecstatic to spend an evening with me. Women who wouldn’t even require dinner to spread their legs for me. There were so many fucking women tonight I could’ve picked up and staked on my fat-ass cock that Olivia soon would’ve been the smallest blip on my radar in my crusade to show the women of this world what happened when you screwed men over.
When you screwed me over.
I cranked my car and decided to head home. I wasn’t sure what to think of the message, nor did I understand why it made me so angry. I wanted to sleep on it. To give myself time to think and piece it all together. If she didn’t wanna come to dinner, that was her fucking loss.
What I didn’t understand was why the idea of her not being excited to see me angered me so badly.
“I’m not fucking in love!” I roared.
But then again, maybe I was.
Chapter 14
Olivia
I had it. All of it. I ran my software, tracked down all of Wesley’s aliases he’d used thus far, and printed off all the pictures. It was Wesley all right. Same face, same jaw structure, and same mischievous glint in his eye. I printed off sixteen different pictures of him with older women wrapped around his body, and it made me sick. Brown eyes with blond hair, green eyes with red hair. Black hair with blue eyes, and some with streaks and blond tips. Gray eyes with silver hair, and wild-colored hair for the midlife crisis women who had just gone through hefty divorces.
And in every single picture, he was there smiling.
It absolutely boiled my blood. What the hell did he think he was doing? He was wrapping these women around his stingy little fingers, playing with their hearts, and then robbing them blind. I cross-referenced the pictures of the women to find their names and see if any of them had filed police reports for stolen things. I was going to burn him. Make him pay for what he was doing to these women.
But with every single woman I identified, none of them seemed to file a police report about anything. I couldn’t check private detective files because they didn’t operate on the same open network, but as far as regular police action was concerned, there was none. Destiny would be the first to file a report on him, it looked like.
I printed off all the pictures before pulling out a manila envelope. I scribbled Wesley “Fox” Wilton across the front of it, and then I placed the pictures I’d printed out inside. I pulled the phone records of all his aliases and burner phones and put them all on a thumb drive and then stuck that thing in there as well. By the time I was done gathering all this evidence, I’d hand over enough to the police for them to lock him away for years.
But then, a final picture flashed up on the screen. A picture of the two of us from high school. The software was still running in the background so I shut it down, but not before I got a good glimpse of the person he used to be. That beautiful blond, shaggy hair and those golden gray eyes. His smile was so soft in high school. A boy who was all arms, legs, dreams, and passions.
I sat back in my chair and sighed. What had happened to Wesley? There were always rumors of the bad home life he had, but he always came to school with a smile on his face. The girls gravitated toward him, sure. He was a horny bastard, too, but what teenage boy wasn’t? I thought back to all the wonderful memories. Memories of my first kiss underneath the goal on the football field. Memories of my first homecoming dance and how we first met. I’d been stood up by my date and was crying in a corner. Wesley had come over and asked me if I wanted to dance, and he held me close the entire night.
I closed my eyes, smiling at the memory before another thought hit me.
It didn’t matter who he was then. The truth of the matter was, he was robbing women blind.
I shoved the manila envelope into my desk and locked it before I grabbed the real estate paperwork. Clipping them with a paper clip, I strode from my office and down the road to my lawyer’s office. Nelson Wainwright was the local lawyer I used when I needed help with a few things, and I figured I could have this conversation in person. I walked into his office, blowing right past his wife-slash-secretary, and then knocked on his door before I called out.
“Nelson. It’s me. We gotta talk.”
His door flew open and there he stood. His thick, black-rimmed glasses slid down his nose as his dark brown eyes pierced directly into my skull. His lips were downturned, frowning heavily at the intrusion. But the look of panic must’ve been evident in my eyes because he quickly stepped aside and let me in.
“Sweetheart, cancel my plans for the next couple hours,” he said.
“Will do, honey,” his wife said.
The door shut with a thud behind me and I jumped. Nelson stared me down all the way to his desk before he ushered me to take a seat. I slid the papers to him, and he studied them closely, cocking an eyebrow when he saw they’d already been signed.
“Buying some property, I see?” he asked.
“I’m actually working undercover on a case,” I said.
“I take it the punchline is you need them filed but not really filed,” he said.
“Yes.”
“All right. Back up. What’s going on?”
“You know my friend Destiny?” I asked.
“Everyone knows Destiny,” he said. “Go on.”
“Well, she was robbed about a week ago. By a guy she’d been sleeping with for a few weeks. Apparently, things were going well, so she asked him to stay the night, but when she woke up, all four of her credit cards were taken, as well as all the cash in her wallet.”
“Any jewelry stolen?”
“Nope. Just a quick grab and go. I’ve figured out that she’s not the only person he’s been doing this to, however. I’ve got sixteen different pictures of him in different outfits with different colored hair and eyes. Different names, too. It’s pretty extensive.”
“And you’ve posed as a what, this time?” he asked.
“Real estate developer and investor,” I said. “The name he lives under legally is Wesley Fox, and he works at a cabana bar on the beach. He was selling a piece of split property right there on the ocean, so I posed as someone interested in buying it.”
“If you’ve got the information to nail him, why don’t you just do it?” Nelson asked.
“Because I need a bit more time to put everything together. If I’m going to get him off the street and into the hands of the police, I need everything in order. Some things are taking a bit more time.”
“Like?”
“Nelson, do I poke and prod at this type of detail with your work?” I asked.
“All the time,” he said, grinning. “Spill.”
“I’ve got his pictures, the names and pictures of the women he’s done this to before, phone records for all his aliases on a flash drive, but none of the women, other than Destiny sought out help. There are no local police reports, and it’ll take me a couple of days to contact some other P.I.’s in the area and ask them if they had anyone approach them about it. But since he’s still on the street, I’m assuming—”
“No other PIs have been looking for him, got it,” Nelson sa
id. “So, you need that one last thing to tie him to everything. Thinking it might be in his personal possession?”
“I was honestly hoping not to go there.”
“Why?”
“Because I know the man I’m targeting,” I said.
“How so?” Nelson asked.
“We dated in high school.”
Nelson sat silently in his chair as his hard glare bored into my forehead. His black suit draped over his towering form, and he shifted in his chair before he placed the papers on his desk.
“Are you using your personal connection to get closer to him?” he asked.
“In a way. I’ve positioned myself and dropped a few lines here and there that I’m a wealthy individual. If I can catch him in the act or rummage around in his home for a few things I could use, then I’m done. Filing but not filing this paperwork will buy me time to do just that.”
“And you’re certain that’s all this is?” he asked.
