Passion: A Single Dad Small Town Romance

by Bella Winters

  “Yeah.” She smiles but I can see it’s forced. “Alright then, I’ll wait here until I hear you knocking on the door to come back in.”

  I walk towards the door, vowing to be fast out there so I don’t have to see the insecurity in Tia’s eyes for even a second longer, but before I manage to get there something stops me in my tracks and pulls me back in. Her lips… those plump, gorgeous lips of Tia’s. I absolutely need to kiss them before I leave.

  Cupping my hand under her chin I bring her face up to meet mine. Worry shines in the beautiful brown of her eyes, which I want desperately to dispel. Damn me and my stupid habit. If this isn’t a clear sign that I need to give it up then I don’t know what is. Maybe when we get back to America I’ll try hypnosis or something.

  “I won’t be long,” I whisper, before gently kissing her. “I promise.”

  “I believe you,” she finally agrees with me. “But don’t be long because I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll be even faster now,” I insist. “How can I resist such sweet words?”

  My soft chaste kiss quickly turns into something more passionate which makes me think that there might even be a round two in there somewhere. Maybe we won’t get to talking tonight, maybe we’ll be too busy exploring one another’s bodies for that, but we still have plenty of time. There’s a few days left on the cruise, as long as I can keep away from management’s eyes I can keep on seeing Tia for as long as I like. I’ll get to learn all about her then. For now, her little promise has my pants stirring once more. By the time I get back I’ll be more than ready to go again.

  “Right, you little minx,” I hiss against her lips. “I will be back very soon.”

  I take giant strides across the room and I reach out to grab the door handle. Just as I turn it I take one last look at Tia. With her mussed up hair and her flushed face, she looks like a true natural beauty. A growl rises up in my throat and quickly releases itself making Tia giggle. I hope she’s excited for me to come back because now I damn well can’t wait.

  I take the steps two at a time in my eagerness which quickly takes me out into the crisp night air. As night time has fallen, the warmth has long gone. It’s always the way out on the water, I should have realized it would be like this but it still makes me shiver hard. I cross my arms over my chest, and move out. I need to get to the designated smoking area and quickly.

  This is idiotic, I think to myself. I need to make some serious life changes from today.

  It’s very quiet out here, everyone else must already be tucked away in their cabins, getting a night of sleep. It’s where I’ll be too soon enough. I smile to myself as I think about the gorgeous girl I have waiting for me back in her room. She’s wonderful, I miss her already, I already don’t feel like myself around her.

  “What the fuck did you do with the money?”

  My heart stops dead in my chest when I hear random shouting ringing through the air. My feet stop moving for a second and I listen intently. That didn’t sound good, and I have to admit I’m a bit frightened. I’ve not heard anything bad happen on this boat, and to be honest I never thought I would. Everyone seems to push for this sort of thing but I know what I heard.

  “Tell me now or you’ll be tossed from this boat now.”

  Shit, this can’t be good. Someone’s in danger. Without thinking much about my own safety I tiptoe forwards. The unlit cigarette in my hand falls to the ground but I barely notice. The idea of getting my nicotine fix is long forgotten as I try to find out just what’s happening. As an employee working on this ship, no matter the capacity, might mean I have to intervene if things get silly.

  “I fucking mean it, do you think I’m joking?”

  I suddenly spot two men in suits yelling at a guy in what looks like sweat pants and a hoodie. I don’t recognise any of the people, I haven’t seen them while the cruise has been happening, but then I haven’t been everywhere all at once. I haven’t been out of my room much actually, apart from to play, so just because they don’t look to me like they belong here, doesn’t mean they don’t.

  “I think I know what happened,” one of the suited men with his back to me declares. I can see that he’s tall and that he has very dark hair but that’s about it. Nothing that could be any use to anyone. “I think you took the drugs, you used some of them for yourself and you sold the rest, lining your own pockets with the cash.”

  “N… no,” sweat pants retaliates. “Not at all, I would never, I would not…”

  But his jittery shakes gives him away. I don’t really know what’s going on here, and I’m not too familiar with the drug world either, but to me it seems like he’s guilty.

  “You fucking did,” suit disagrees with a sharp shake of his head. “And we all know it. This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?”

  “I was mugged… I swear, it wasn’t me.”

  Suit steps back and makes a hand gesture at the other man. I take a tentative step forwards feeling that the moment to intervene is coming but before I do something happens to stop me. The other suited man pulls out something from his pocket and all I manage to catch is the metallic glint of a gun.

  A gun? Fuck, this is bad.

  My heart thunders in my chest, I can barely breathe enough to get any air into my lungs. Panic consumes me, it swallows me up whole causing my legs to freeze to the spot. I’m so covered in ice that I couldn’t move even if I wanted to… and to be honest I’m not sure that I want to. Just because I’m an employee doesn’t mean I want to risk my life. I’m sure as hell not getting paid enough to lose my life.

  “Anything left too say?” suit yells. “Anymore bullshit excuses.”

  A thick ball of emotion lodges itself in my throat as the man pleads for his life. I don’t know how, but I feel like I’ve seen enough movies to know how this is going to end and it isn’t good.

  Bang!

  Everything moves in slow motion. It’s almost as if it isn’t quite real. I hear the gun shot, even though a lot of the sound gets lost in the wind, but since there’s no immediate after effects I start to believe I might have just imagined it. Maybe I’m going a little crazy.

  But then something slams into sweat pant’s chest and it sends him flying over the edge. His body spills from the boat like a rag doll, which is a truly sickening sight. I actually feel vomit ball up in my stomach, I think it might burst out onto my feet at any given moment.

  “Fuck.”

  The word fells out of my mouth without me thinking about it. I don’t even know how loud I say it until the men in suits both spin around to look at me. My eyes widen, my frozen legs start to melt, the need to get the hell away from this horrible situation overshadows anything else. It’s as if I have a survival instinct deep inside me, and it finally kicks in.

  Flash.

  I see a bolt of lightening or a camera flash as I take off in the direction of my bedroom but I don’t stop moving. I need to escape, I need to be alone in my room, I need to lock myself away so that I feel safe.

  In all of this, Tia is long forgotten. All I can concentrate on is my fear and my need to get away from it. It’s my life on the line here, I can’t think about anything else.

  Chapter Seven - Tia

  Home, sweet home, I think sarcastically as I step through the door. Oh fucking joy.

  I don’t want to be back here, this is the last place in the world I want to be, I just don’t have any choice. Now with the cruise behind me, I really need to start focusing on my real life. There are no more excuses, I need to get back to reality.

  I drop my bag on the floor in the hallway and run my eyes over the mass expansion of house that lies before me. I’ve always thought that we have far too much room for three people, especially when there are plenty of homeless people in the world, but just like the rest of my opinions it means nothing.

  I run the pick around in my fingers, trying to draw some comfort from it. The orange guitar pick that Stephen pressed into my hand with a promise to return… a pr
omise that he obviously had no intention of keeping. I woke up eventually the next morning, still naked, still alone, with only the pick for company. At first I tried to make some excuses for why he didn’t come back. I told myself it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t be long until we saw one another again anyway. I naively assumed that there wasn’t anywhere on the boat that he could vanish to until we docked somewhere… but it seems I was wrong. Somehow, he managed to vanish forever, leaving me with only this pick to remember him by.

  I should chuck it out, I know that would be the wise thing to do, but for some reason I can’t. When I do I’ll be accepting that it’s over forever. Silly as it is I just can’t let it go.

  “Mom?” I call out, actually hoping that she isn’t home. Really, I want to be by myself for a bit. “Dad?”

  No one answers me, so I walk through the house aimlessly like I used to do a lot as a child. I always had a lot of friends, but I wasn’t ever allowed to have them over at the house… obviously because of my dad and his dodgy dealings. I went to their homes, but I couldn’t all the time, and because I was an only child I just used to walk around the house looking for something to do. Sure, I had all the toys, but what fun are they with no on to play with? That’s just boring. So, I would wander around aimlessly, just like I’m doing now.

  I guess some things never change.

  Maybe this is where the loneliness started actually. I’ve been blaming it on other things but there’s a very good chance that it started right here in this very house. It came for me early on and has stuck with me ever since. For one brief naïve moment, I thought my wild night with Stephen might be about to turn into something to cure that, especially when he said that he wanted to talk, but that – like everything else – turned out to be bullshit.

  I sigh loudly and shake my head. I need to forget about Stephen now, I need to push him out of my mind if I actually want to get my life in order. He’s gone, he made sure of that, and there’s no way in hell I’m getting him back. I don’t have his cell phone number or his address and he doesn’t have mine. We met on the cruise ship, we had one wild night, and that’s the end of it. I just need to shake off this sadness and start moving my life in a positive direction. That’s all. Easy peasy.

  “What do you think, boss?”

  All of a sudden I’m shocked by a voice floating down the hallway. I assumed I was in the house alone, no one answered me as I yelled out, but clearly I didn’t do it loud enough. I recognize the man’s voice well. It belongs to Adrian Walker, my father’s ‘business partner’. He’s always been a familiar face in this house, but I still don’t know what he does. Obviously, something dodgy if he works with Dad. Plus, there’s also the fact that he also refers to my dad as ‘boss’. That seems weird and mafia like to me.

  I can’t stop myself, I sneak along to the room I can hear the voices coming from, needing to know more. I’ve always been kept out the way of these business meetings, for obvious reasons, which has only made me more intrigued. Now I can discover what I think I know, what I need confirmed, without anyone giving me shit for it. I just need to make sure I’m not caught eavesdropping. No problem at all.

  I like the idea of a mystery anyway, it gives me something else to think about other than my broken heart, my aimless life that feels pretty pointless at the moment, the fact that I feel like I’m years behind my friends… I can forget it all for just a minute.

  “I don’t think we can leave him, you know. It just isn’t right.”

  Through the heavy wooden door my dad doesn’t sound impressed. I recognize that grave tone well from the times I did stuff wring as a kid. The funny thing is when I started to get older and into doing things that were worse, such as underage drinking, he had gotten so wrapped up in his business that he didn’t really care about me at all.

  “So, you think we need to kill him?”

  My blood runs cold. I know I’ve always assumed that my father isn’t a nice man, but to hear the word ‘kill’ tossed about so causally makes me feel sick. Maybe this is a bit mafia like in a way that I really don’t want to think about.

  My pulse races harder and faster, my stomach churns and twists upside down, my blood runs icy cold. I raise myself up onto my tiptoes and I push my ear right up against the door. Screw worrying about getting caught now, I have to know what’s being said.

  “You have his picture, don’t you?” Dad replies, a little scathingly. “So I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to find him. He’s just one guy, you know? Barely out of his teens by the look of it. Just find him, kill him, prevent any potential witnesses coming forwards.”

  The words I’m hearing are straight out of some terrible gangster movie, but they’re being spoken in real life, in my house, by my family member. And not only are they talking about killing someone, but someone young too. Someone probably a similar age to me. An innocent bystander probably, someone who just saw something completely by accident. They’ve already had their life shaken upside down and now they’re going to lose it over God knows what.

  I wonder what the person saw. I wonder what they witnessed to deserve losing their life.

  I step backwards, clutching onto my chest as I do. This is wrong, it’s so wrong, but what the hell can I do about it? Maybe I can work out who they’re talking about to try and warn them… or go to the cops… anything to prevent this murder from happening.

  But how can I? Realistically, it’s impossible. I don’t even know what I heard really and there are ways my father could play it off. Maybe he would pretend that he was joking. Then I’d be in for it. I know how private his business is, I’ve spent my whole life having that drilled into me. Dad will go absolutely mental at me for breaking his rule.

  Maybe I’ll even end up on his hit list.

  “Do you have a preference how we do it?” Adrian asks, his voice travelling even though I don’t want to hear anymore. He’s like a fog horn, he just booms. I don’t know how he’s ever managed to have a private meeting in his entire life! Maybe that’s why it’s always been here. “Shooting, stabbing, something a little more… fun?”

  He sounds twisted and excited, which only makes me feel sicker. How can he be such a messed up man? How can my mother and father have let me be anywhere near all of this? I’m certain Mom knows and she just doesn’t care, but how twisted of her to let it affect me. If Dad is a criminal, which I’m not sure he is, then that life could have come back to haunt him. Someone could have kidnapped, harmed, or killed me just to get to him. Unless everyone knows he doesn’t really care about me of course…

  “I don’t care,” Dad replies dismissively, as if he’s talking about what to have for dinner rather than cold blooded murder. “He’s a pest, just get rid of him before he becomes a squealer.”

  Then I hear footsteps which is my cue to leave. I spin on my heels and take off running as quickly and as quietly as I can manage. I need to get up to my bedroom, I need to hide and lock myself away from the world while I try to process this. I cannot deal with being caught listening in, especially not to that conversation.

  As I reach the front door, I grab my bag to bring it up to my room with me. Maybe Dad will guess I’m in anyway, but I don’t want to give him any clues to my whereabouts. I race up the stairs, taking some of them two at a time as I go, and soon I find the room I’m looking for.

  I tear inside and lock the door behind me, before collapsing breathlessly to the ground. My lungs are constricted, I can’t seem to suck back enough air for them, and that only gets worse the harder I try. Even a tear runs down my cheek as I think about the horror that I’ve just experienced.

  My father is a criminal… a killer… the worst sort of man around.

  I feel utterly helpless, hopeless, like I have a huge weight on my shoulders that I can’t do anything about. I don’t feel like I can just sit here and do nothing while someone’s life is in danger. I want to, need to, take some sort of action. Maybe I can’t go to the cops yet, but that’s because I don’t have
any evidence. If I think about it, my father runs a lot of his business from this house, he always has done. He must keep something incriminating in here. If I find something and I take that to the police then I can stop him before someone else dies at his hands.

  It isn’t right for my bloodline to be killers, I just can’t accept that. Maybe my mom doesn’t mind because she gets to wear fancy things, but blood money doesn’t do it for me.

  I have to get out of this house, I think determinedly to myself. Once I’ve done this I need to escape. My family are hell and I have to get away.

  I glance around the room, confirming that thought. My bedroom is a shrine to the person I was years ago before I left for college. Pictures litter the walls, all my old stuff is scattered everywhere, it’s been left exactly as it was as if to let me slide right back into the person who I once was, as if I never left her behind at all. The immature school girl who cared more about her friends and make up than anything else. In a way, I’m miles away from that person now, but in another way. I’m still just her. Insecure, scared of the world, no idea where I’m going to go. Only now I have new knowledge, and it’s the information that my father likes to kill people. There’s no coming back from that.

  Chapter Eight - Stephen

  I glance behind me for what feels like the hundredth time, a sick iciness consuming me. I don’t think I’m being paranoid, I’m pretty sure I’m still sane, although my brain does feel a bit like it’s cracking under the pressure of everything. I hope I’m just imagining things because the alternative is unbearable to think about… but I do think there’s someone in the shadows, chasing after me.

  It’s been that way for ages.

  Ever since that night on the cruise ship, things have been going downhill for me. I couldn’t leave my room on the boat the whole time, I had to feign sickness for the rest of the time I was aboard, just because I was so damn scared of getting caught by one of them… the murderous men who put a man to death over what seemed to be some drugs money. If the suits can kill that easily without even thinking about it, then there’s no telling what they’ll do to a man like me.