by Ali Parker
It infuriated me, but I didn’t let it show. Wesley paled at my words, but then shook off the blow and sneered, “Is that what she told you? That I’m stalking her? Why would I stalk that trashy piece of ass?”
My blood boiled, dangerously close to letting my ice cold veneer slip. But now wasn’t the time, and there was no way in hell I’d let him know he was getting to me. “That so? Then leave her alone.”
“Fuck off,” he spat. “That’s no business of yours.”
“You made it my business by following me around, by showing up at my place of work and coincidentally, by threatening me if I didn’t stay away from her. No, you’re the one who really should stay away from her.”
“I would,” he said snidely, his lips curling into a weaseling smile. “But Austin’s my son. I have every right to keep tabs on my son and his mother.”
“For all the father of the year awards you’re winning, right?” I spat at him. It was bullshit that he was ‘keeping tabs’ on Marie because Austin was his son and both of us knew it.
Sonny’s warnings flashed in my mind, keeping me from hauling off and hitting Wesley. I couldn’t do anything that would make this worse for her. A verbal confrontation with the guy when he’d come to where I was working was one thing, but it was another thing altogether to actually hit him.
But he didn’t know what was going through my mind. I took a threatening step closer to him, my eyes locked to his. My fists were clenched at my sides, and while I had no intention of using them, I flexed my fingers anyway.
The next thing I knew George, one of my guys, walked over and stepped between us. “What’s going on here boss? Who’s this?”
“No one,” I told him, not breaking eye contact with Wesley. From the corner of my eye, I could see that another one of the construction crew, a young guy called Arnold was also hurrying over.
“You can go now, George. You too, Arnold. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
George hesitated, but I was his boss and I’d given him an order. It helped that we’d fought side by side a couple times in high school. He was Sonny’s age and we’d all hung out together from time to time. He knew that if a fight did break out—let’s call it spontaneously—I would be more than able to hold my own against Wesley’s scrawny ass.
Wesley seemed to sense the same thing. As his gaze darted between us, he made his decision. He turned abruptly, jumping into his car and slamming the door so hard that the whole thing shook before he took off.
His tires spun in the dirt of the construction site, throwing up a cloud of reddish dust and gravel as he sped away. George turned to look at me, questions clouding his eyes.
I didn’t wait for him to ask the obvious. “It’s nothing. He’s no one worth talking about. Or for you to worry about.”
George and Arnold exchanged a glance, but neither of them questioned me. “Sure thing.”
“Just do me a favor, okay?” I asked as they turned to start walking back to the trucks we were loading. “Keep an eye out for him and for his car. If you see it around, I want to know about it.”
I wouldn’t put it past the guy to mess with my projects. I didn’t think he had the know-how to pull anything potentially disastrous, but vandalism wasn’t hard. Just like stalking apparently was, it would be almost impossible to prove Wesley was responsible.
Both my guys nodded and agreed to let me know if they saw him, or anything suspicious, and went back to loading the trucks. When we’d taken the equipment back to the construction yard, and I’d double checked everything there was locked up tight for the night, I made my way to my truck and punched in Sonny’s number.
My brother answered on the second ring, laughter in his voice. “Big brother, I was going to call you later. What’s up?”
“Wesley Poole showed up at one of my sites this afternoon, that’s what.”
I updated Sonny quickly, telling him everything Marie had told me about Wesley and his threats and ending with the confrontation at my project. “And you’re telling me that doesn’t qualify as stalking?”
Sonny didn’t say anything immediately, cluing me in that I wasn’t going to like whatever it was he was thinking. “I hate to say it dude, but no, it doesn’t necessarily.”
“The fuck...” I muttered, lifting my hand to grip at the base of my neck. How the fuck had Marie put up with this shit for as long as she had? “You said we had to wait for him to do something, he’s done something. The note, him showing up at the park, getting in my face at work. Does none of that count?”
“It counts,” he said quickly. “It just doesn’t necessarily legally add up to what we know it is.”
“Fuck,” I grunted, punching the dashboard of my truck. Not hard, just enough to not want to hurl my phone through the windshield. “So there’s still nothing we can do?”
“That not what I’m saying,” he assured me. “Look, you remember about our meeting with the attorney tomorrow afternoon, right?”
“Of course.” Tyson set up a meeting for us to discuss some of the financial problems my father had left behind since he went to prison. It wasn’t a meeting I was looking forward to, but I was sure as shit going to be there.
“We’ll talk after. Okay?” Sonny asked. “In the meantime, don’t do anything rash. Got it?”
“I got it,” I said grudgingly. My brother warned me to keep cool at least three more times before I finally hung up with him. Leaning my head back against the seat in my truck, I took a few deep breaths and tried to follow his advice by calming down.
I hadn’t forgotten about our meeting tomorrow, but I also hadn’t been thinking about it. Fuck, this wasn’t going to be fun.
Chapter Twelve
Marie
I moved through the salon like I was moving through dense fog. My vision was just as unreliable as my limbs, blurring and randomly zooming in and out of focus. It’d taken everything I had to concentrate on getting Austin to daycare safely and it continued to be draining to focus on not cutting someone’s ear off, I didn’t have any energy left for me.
Everything about this day felt surreal, like someone had dropped a bucket of muck over my head as soon as I thought I was stepping into the sunshine. Because that was exactly how I felt leaving Jeremy’s house on Sunday, like I was finally stepping into the sunshine again. I saw the ray of light at the end of the tunnel and it was all because of Jeremy Lovett.
I should’ve known better than to trust or hope that things would ever get better with Wesley. Getting your hopes up only to have them crushed again was worse than simply accepting that you were fucked to begin with.
That was what I knew, what I should’ve stuck with. But I hadn’t. Just like the worry I couldn’t shake even in Jeremy’s bed the other night, the other shoe had dropped and it was so much worse than I’d ever imagined.
Custody. The lone word rattled through my mind like flotsam in the ocean—adrift in the waves in a storm. Legal papers were served last night. Right after I got home from work, a man rang my doorbell and announced he had a delivery I needed to sign for.
Stupidly excited and wondering if Jeremy had sent me something, I’d practically skipped down the stairs, signing the man’s paper with a flourish until he told me that I’d been served. I tore the papers open, not understanding what the hell was going on until that one word jumped out at me.
Wesley was filing for full custody of Austin. It was my worst nightmare come true. I’d thought there were at least some things that even Wesley wouldn’t do, but I’d been wrong. I knew he didn’t want Austin to live with him. Hell, he never even wanted to see him.
The only reason he was doing this was to hurt me.
I’d been so obsessed with it all day that late morning, Sarah pulled me into the back with a deep frown etched onto her forehead. “What’s going on with you, honey? And don’t say nothing.”
“It’s my ex,” I blurted out, so freaked out that I didn’t even try hiding it or telling her I was okay. “He’s filing for full custody of A
ustin. He can’t take Austin away from me. Please God, no. That can’t happen.”
“It won’t,” Sarah said firmly. “Listen to me child, we’ll get you a good attorney. You’re a wonderful mother. No judge in the world is going to be able to deny that.”
An attorney. “I can’t afford a good attorney, Sarah. I can’t afford an attorney, period.”
She brought her hands up, resting them on my shoulders and pushing down just enough that my frantic heart slowed enough for me to breathe properly. “You’ve got a lot of people in your corner. I’ll find a way to help you however I can.”
After a giant hug, Sarah and I headed back out onto the floor. Thankfully, no one else around seemed to have heard my mini breakdown. Out in the salon, it was business as usual. My next client after Sarah’s pep talk was a girl a few years younger than me who was chatting like crazy about some reality show I’d never watched.
She wanted her hair cut just like one of the girls in the show and looked like she was about to faint when I told her I didn’t know what the woman looked like. Pulling out her phone, she tapped on the screen a few times and thrust it into my face. “Here. That’s exactly the style I want.”
Squinting at her phone and trying to take a mental picture of the style, I noticed that the actress, if that was what you called reality show stars, had a relatively long, narrow face while my client’s was more on the round side. A style that truly wouldn’t suit her, but she wasn’t having it.
As I worked, she talked about the show, while I struggled to understand how people could get so caught up in some famous, rich family’s problems that probably weren’t even real. My client swore the show wasn’t scripted, but yeah right…
“And then she found out that her boyfriend was sleeping with her stepsister. The one who used to be poor! How crazy is that?” Crazy? Try cliché. Could the show’s writers not have come up with anything better than the old Cinderella thing?
“Totally crazy.” I kept my answers vague when I gave them though, knowing better than to let my snarky thoughts find their way out of my mind. Normally, I’d be able to laugh and joke about something like this. But nothing felt normal today.
“I nearly cried when the mom said they were sending her younger brother to boarding school in Switzerland. Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?”
It wasn’t, actually. Not by a long shot. I had a real problem to worry about, not some fake ones orchestrated by producers.
Even if my personal situation wasn’t what it was at that point, there were still about a million more things I could think of off the top of my head that were sadder to me than imagining some boy getting sent off to boarding school in Europe. Before I could start making my mental list of all those things though, Sarah came to stand next to me.
“I heard about that,” she said to my client. I doubted she had, but Sarah could chat right along with the best of them. Lifting her eyes to mine in the mirror, she jerked her head to the back room. “It’s nearly time for your lunch. I’ll take over from here?”
I frowned, wondering why Sarah was trying to take reality show girl off my hands. She’d never taken over a client from me before, but I wasn’t about to turn her down. I couldn’t deal with this client, not today.
“Thanks,” I said quietly. Smiling at the client, I handed my scissors to Sarah. “I’m sure the brother will be fine. See you later.”
Before she could start telling me all the reasons the boy wouldn’t be okay in Switzerland, I waved and made my way to the back. All the way there, I could hear her giving Sarah similar updates to what she’d been giving to me. Sarah was handling it much better than I had, smiling and chatting along with her.
Yeah, she’ll be fine. I felt mildly guilty that my boss had taken over one of my clients for me, but then that darned C word flashed in my mind again and the tears I’d been fighting to hold back all morning started falling.
“Babe?” A low voice called shortly after I sank into a chair pushed back into a dark corner and drew my knees up against my chest. “You in here?”
“Jeremy?” I asked, my voice hoarse from tears. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.” Stepping around the corner I’d been trying to hide behind, Jeremy crouched at my feet. His hands reached for mine and when I didn’t move them from where they were clasping my knees to me, he settled for resting his on my sandal clad feet.
Holding Jeremy’s hands would’ve made me feel better, I was sure. But it felt like the only thing that was keeping my insides in and my heart from breaking right out of my chest was that I was holding my body so tightly together.
“What happened?” he asked softly, looking up at me with eyes dark with worry and his brows knitted together. Tension was radiating off him in waves.
Ignoring his question, I dabbed at my eyes with my thumb and tried to swipe away most of the tears. It didn’t work while I refused to let go of my legs. “What are you doing here?”
“Sarah called me,” he said. “She was worried about you. She said she heard we’d gone out on another date. I think she figured she’d meddle to push us together so you wouldn’t be alone right now.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” I said with a hiccup, unable to stop the tears from falling. I knew Sarah thought Jeremy was a good guy and he was, but I didn’t want to burden him with any more of my problems. Even worse, I knew deep down Wesley was doing what he was doing to get back at me for getting involved with Jeremy.
This custody situation was a terrible burden, and I didn’t want him to have to carry it with me. It was all mine, in all its awful, heart-wrenching glory. Jeremy sat up on his knees, bringing his hands up to wipe my tears from my cheeks.
We were eye to eye now, with him on his knees and me in the chair. Wrapping his arms around me, he pulled me forward until I was sobbing into his chest.
Again.
Christ. I was pathetic, such a mess. “Why are you even here? I’m not worth all this trouble I keep putting you through.”
“You’re right,” he whispered, his lips brushing my ear. Ice started spreading through my veins as it dawned on me that he agreed with me, that he’d finally realized I wasn’t worth it. “You’re not only worth all this trouble, you’re worth so much more to me.”
More tears broke free as he kept talking in a low, soothing voice as he hugged me, rocking us back and forth. “You promised baby, you remember? You promised you wouldn’t shut me out anymore. You sealed it with a kiss, so you can’t go back on it now. What’s going on? What happened? Please tell me, Marie. I promised you I’d be there for you and here I am. What did he do?”
“I feel so terrible that we’re right back here, with me bawling my eyes out and you having to comfort me,” I mumbled into his shirt, sobs punctuating my words.
“It’s not your fault,” he murmured into my hair as he held tightly onto me. Slowly but surely, I unfolded my arms from around my legs and wrapped them around him instead. He didn’t push for an answer, only holding onto me as I eventually slid down the chair and onto his lap.
“He’s suing me for custody of Austin,” I told him finally, barely able to breathe through the tears as I said the dreaded words out loud once more.
Jeremy tensed, his whole body freezing when I spoke. He knew exactly what this meant, exactly how much it would hurt me. Without saying a word, he shifted so I was in a more comfortable position and held my head to him, quietly supporting me. He had this way of making me feel like everything was going to be okay. That I was and would be safe.
Despite the pain shattering my heart at the thought that Austin might be taken away from me, I wasn’t blind to the fact that every time I was open with Jeremy, our bond became even closer. Sitting in his lap, crying as he buried his face in my neck, somehow I believed I’d get through to the other side of this with Austin. No matter what Wesley tried to put us through, he wasn’t scaring Jeremy away from me. If anything, everything he was trying to do was bringing us closer together.
/> Chapter Thirteen
Jeremy
I beat back my frustration with the situation because it wouldn’t do a damn thing. Although, god knows, I wished I’d pounded my fist into Wesley’s smarmy face when I’d seen him. It might not’ve changed anything, but he deserved it. If Marie hadn’t been clinging to me like her life depended on it, I would’ve been out there right now tracking down this asshole. Sonny didn’t think the law could, or would help us right now? Well, fine.
Beau and Evan, my two older brothers, they could help me. We’d been in more than a few fights together when we were younger and though Beau was a renowned architect now, I was sure he could still throw a punch.
Unfortunately, I also knew that wasn’t the smartest way of going about doing things. As I calmed down and recovered from the shock of Marie breaking the news while I waited for her sobs to quiet, I was grateful that I hadn’t taken off immediately.
Be that as it may, I wasn’t ready to leave her for the day yet. I also didn’t want her to be alone tonight, not with this. I wanted to offer to come to her place and spend the evening with her and Austin. Yet, I had to respect that she was a single mother. Though I wanted her—in every way that mattered—I had to consider Austin in any plans I wanted to make.
I was more than willing and more than ready to make her feel good, even if just for a little while, but that wasn’t the answer right now. I also had to meet my brothers and our attorney in just about two hours, so I had that to consider as well.
Tyson knew the attorney we were going to see, and he clearly trusted the guy if he was taking our problem to him. I didn’t know much about the law, but I decided there and then that I’d check with this attorney about recommendations for an attorney for Marie.
