Free Fall Box Set (Loving Summer #8)

by Kailin Gow

  I was out of the car and strapping on my vest and holster now, before putting a bulletproof vest on Summer. I would never put her in danger going into a situation like this, but it was her house, and it was her mother going into her house armed like that. “Summer…you can stay here, and…”

  “No, I’m going in, Nat. Something’s going down, and if it’s at my house, and it’s my mother in there, I have to be there, too.”

  I thought so.

  At least I tried to make sure she would be as safe as possible. I placed a helmet on her head, gave her two pistols, and asked, “You know how to use these?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Drew and I go to the range for target practice all the time. It’s for defensive reasons, and you never know when you would need them to protect yourself or family.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go in first, and then you follow.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t look nervous.

  We ran up to the front door and stepped quietly inside. There was nothing out of place. There were no gun fire or carnage. Summer was quiet as she surveyed her house. It had been a while since she had been there, judging from the dead houseplants and laundry on the floor. Summer mouthed, “Been busy.”

  Not to mentioned that she had been kidnapped and held hostage for a while. Of course the mess in her house was excusable.

  I took another step inside the house with Summer right behind when we heard a glass break and something shattering to the ground. “Hold it right there!” Mrs. Jones’ voice sounded, strong and authoritative. It had come from Summer’s room.

  I held my gun tight and made our way to Summer’s room as quiet as could be and stopped right around the corner where I could see Mrs. Jones standing inside, her gun pointed in the direction where Summer’s bedroom closet was. The layout of her bedroom was so familiar to me, having grown up at the Pad, and then having stayed with Summer in her room whenever we made love every weekend I visited. I cleared my head and tried to focus on the situation before me, although I had so many memories of being with Summer and loving her the entire time I lived at the Pad.

  “Where is she?” Mrs. Jones demanded. “Tell me where my daughter is, and I might just let you live.”

  “Major Jones,” a male voice said, surprised and even nervous. “I don’t know where she is, I swear.”

  “Don’t you dare lie to me, Xavier,” she said. “I know what kind of street punk you are, and while you may have fooled Stephen into trusting you, I never did.”

  “I don’t have her,” Xavier said.

  “Then why is she still missing? She hasn’t been home, and…”

  “That’s right, Major Jones, if she was with me, if I had her, why would I be at her house looking through her things without her to help me find what I’m looking for?”

  “Because you have her held up somewhere else,” Major Jones said.

  “Or maybe she’s missing because she got cold feet from marrying that Drew kid who seemed to me to be nothing but a player who got lucky for landing a lady like Summer.”

  “You don’t know Summer very well,” Major Jones said. “She won’t be marrying anyone unless she’s committed and serious about it.”

  “Exactly,” Xavier said. “Seems to me, Summer is not yet committed enough to getting married, and to break off her expensive high society wedding to the billionaire bachelor of this century, she staged a kidnapping to get away from having to go through with it. She seems to me to be a very uncommitted and free-going young lady.”

  “How dare you say that about my daughter,” Major Jones said.

  “I know for a fact she isn’t,” Xavier bragged. “I’ve had a chance to meet her, and well, let’s just say, we had a good time together.”

  I shot Summer an angry yet surprised look, and she looked just as upset.

  “Meet her? How?” Major Jones said. “There is no way in hell she would ever cross paths with a lowlife like you.”

  I moved in closer to see better and saw Xavier standing in front of Summer’s bedroom closet, looking smug and smiling, while holding one of Summer’s photo album.

  “She tastes just as sweet as she looks, Major Jones,” he closed his eyes and licked his lips. “One lick of her, and I was a goner. You have one fine hot daughter.”

  “Shut up,” Major Jones yelled. “Again, there is no way you could ever be in a position to ever experience that…unless you did take her and have her. If you harm even a strand of hair on her, I’m gunning you down until there’s nothing left of you.”

  “Okay,” Xavier said. “What if I do have your daughter, you would never find or see her again if you gun me down. And this is something you should think about. Right on her right breast, she has a crescent birthmark. Tiny but cute. I’ve licked it so often, just the thought of licking her beautiful breasts make me…”

  “You son of a bitch,” Major Jones said, before firing a shot at Xavier. Xavier swerved, ducked, and threw the album at Major Jones to knock the pistol out of her hands before he lunged at her, throwing her to the ground.

  He was a lot larger and heavier than Major Jones and clearly had the advantage. I stepped in and fired a shot at Xavier, wounding him in the shoulder.

  He stumbled back and crashed down against Summer’s bed. “You again,” he said with a grimace. “Just the guy I’ve been looking for. We have a lot to settle, you know.”

  Summer stepped into the room and ran to her mother who was still lying on the ground with her eyes closed, knocked out and barely conscious. “What did you do to her?” she turned angry eyes at Xavier.

  Xavier froze and for a moment, he looked paralyzed. “Summer,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve felt so lost without you being there for me. I’ve lost everything…my brother, my men, my operations…”

  Summer soften her eyes, but she still stood back. “Xavier, what are you doing here, in my room? What are you looking for?”

  “I have a photo…maybe you have it. Maybe your father sent you the photo for you to keep safely. It’s the only photo I have of my brother and me together.”

  I shifted slightly as I recognized in my memory of the photo he was referring to…the one in the locket pendant.

  “Why would I have a photo of you and your brother, Xavier?” Summer asked. “Why would my father send me such a photo? What does my father have to do with you?”

  “He was my mentor, the first person who took pity on me and my brother when we were kids on the street. He taught me everything I know.”

  “I thought you said you worked for crime bosses, making deliveries for them at first before you had bigger and more important work.”

  “I did, through my brother’s contacts at first.”

  “So you were working for both my father and those crime bosses?”

  “What I was doing for your father didn’t pay anything. Sure they were important stuff, gathering evidence from whorehouses and brothels on corrupt politicians, finding dirt on heads of corporations…vigilante stuff that would never get used or sold unless there was a need.”

  “So you did the stuff that would bring you a bigger payout?” Summer asked.

  “It’s survival, baby,” Xavier said. “I did it to survive and to build an empire for my brother and me. We were never going to starve again.”

  “Did my father have anything to do with your other work?”

  “He didn’t know about it. Or if he knew about it, he turned a blind eye to it, since he was getting what he needed from me.”

  Summer glanced at me, and I could feel the relief she felt, knowing her father and mother were not the criminals we thought they were at first.

  “So Dragon,” I said, “What was so important in your servers that you risked your brother to retrieve them?”

  “Like I would tell you” he said.

  “I have the servers with me,” I said. “I don’t deal with scum like you, because I usually shoot first and ask questions later, but since I’m feeling benevolent at the moment,
if you can tell me what’s so important about them, maybe, just maybe, you can find them somewhere close by.”

  Xavier’s face brighten up, and I could tell he was interested in talking.

  Chapter 8

  Nat

  I led The Dragon to the kitchen table where Summer, Drew, Rachel, and I had sat and ate most of our meals growing up.

  It was bright with the California sun streaming through the windows and cheerful from the blue and sunflower yellow plates Summer had placed on the table. The cheerfulness made everyone relax, including Xavier, who sat across from me at the table. I had unarmed him and handcuffed his wrists behind him before I had sat him down. You could never be too careful around someone as slippery and cunning as Xavier. He’d been around the block too many times for me to just think he was harmless.

  Plus, there was Summer, sitting on the slipcover sofa in the living room with her mom’s head propped on her lap, along with a cold compress to her mom’s forehead. I had to make sure The Dragon couldn’t get at her to harm her again.

  “Glad to see you’re a businessman after all,” I said. “So you will adhere to our agreement like a professional, won’t you?”

  “I’ll honor that,” Xavier said. “Even crime lords need to make alliances.”

  “I’m not making an alliance, Dragon,” I said. “This has nothing to do with Andrew Knight Industries. This is an agreement between you and me, as individuals. Aren’t you tired of me chasing you and trying to bring you down? Are you tired of running from me or trying to find a way to get me down?”

  Xavier looked over at Summer and said, “Sometimes I am. This…this little cozy beach house with all these flowers and seashells. Sometimes all I want is this kind of life with a good woman to be with and make love to. Sometimes I dream of that.”

  I looked over at Summer and thought the same thing. It was the kind of life I would’ve had with Summer if I never left and became Andrew Hocking Knight.

  Could I ever return to that? Could I ever become Nat Donovan again?

  So much had happened to make it seem impossible.

  But looking at The Dragon, who was the most harden scumbag I had ever known, as his eyes soften while looking at Summer, I felt some glimmer of hope. Even a man like The Dragon have dreams of finding love and happiness.

  “So what do you want to do?” I asked The Dragon. “Tell me what is so important about the servers in return for the servers, and we act like this never happened or we continue our cat and mouse chase for however long until one of us die of old age or both of us can’t lift a pistol any longer?”

  “What you’re proposing sounds tempting and too good to be true. There must be a catch somewhere.”

  “How about if this is going nowhere, I could put a bullet between your eyes right now, and the winner keeps all?” I said.

  Xavier straighten up in his chair and looked like he was thinking, trying to make a decision.

  “I don’t have to be nice, Dragon,” I said. “Being nice to you is not an entitlement. But since it seemed you didn’t harm Summer when you held her, I might extend you some manners.”

  Xavier laughed and swore at the same time. Forget the polite society propriety. I was dealing with a lowlife.

  “There is a video on there whom I swore to never release and never let it get into anyone’s hands. It was taken for our own private reasons. Jorge filmed the videos of me talking with Stephen. Although he was like a father figure to me, Jorge didn’t trust him so he filmed two of our meetings. If those videos got out, it would make Stephen out to take the blame for everything my other bosses did…the crime lords I worked for. And hated with a passion, enough that I got rid of them. They were the worst scumbags you could ever meet, and,” he swallowed, “to prove our loyalty to them, they had Jorge and me perform some of the most vile acts on them. Young handsome boys who they could push around and command to do whatever they wanted with us…that’s what we were to them.” Xavier shivered, and I saw Summer’s eyes filled with tears. I knew she had a heart of gold, even for the wicked. That was why she became a doctor…I knew that now.

  “So those two videos of you talking to Stephen…you want to get rid of them, purge them so they never exist?”

  “Yes,” The Dragon said. “They’re in those servers. Jorge was dumb enough to leave them on there along with other stuff, when he should’ve gotten rid of them years ago.”

  “So you want to get rid of those videos?”

  “It would incriminate Stephen, and although I’m dirtier than dirt, he was a good person who only wanted to see justice in the world. He gave me and Jorge a chance at life again, and he doesn’t deserve to be dragged through the mud and blamed for all the crimes I’ve committed for the crime lords. If anything, if you did look through the servers, you’d find evidence against these crime lords and a list of their organizations and hackers too. You have enough info to take them down, and you have the reputation as Andrew Hockings Knight to be believed. Me, on the other hand, I would be incriminated along with them, and left to rot in prison with them where they would probably kill me in prison.”

  “So, Dragon, what you are saying is…”

  “I’ll take your offer. Now you know what was important to me on those servers.”

  “It’s better be the truth or I will go after you with a bigger and stronger force than before.”

  “I swear it’s the truth,” The Dragon said.

  “And you will swear to leave anyone I cared about alone? If you don’t I will blow off your head right now.”

  “Yes, yes,” The Dragon said.

  “Now disappear or I might change my mind.”

  “What about the servers?” The Dragon asked.

  “You’ll find them in a Louis Vuitton wardrober on a cruise ship going to the Far East. If you want them, here’s a one-way ticket on that ship. Leaves in an hour.”

  The Dragon struggled to get out of his handcuffs, and I unlocked them, as I led him out of the house and into taxi going straight to the harbor.

  When I made sure the taxi left and was headed in the right direction, I walked into the living room to tell Summer, we had to get her mother to a hospital.

  But her mother was already up and standing while Summer was on the sofa brawling.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s Drew…” Summer said, her phone in her hands.

  “What about Drew?”

  “He hasn’t waken up!”

  Chapter 9

  Summer

  Nat had no choice but to take my mother with us back to the Compound to see Drew. She needed medical attention for her head after having been thrown to the ground by Xavier.

  “Where are we going?” she kept asking me.

  “Nat’s place,” I said. “It’s part of his company, Andrew Knight Industries.”

  “Oh,” she said. “But how is it that there’s a medical facility there. Isn’t his company a security company?”

  “Well, it is, and well,” I looked over at Nat, who was driving up to the gate. “And it’s a lot more. You’ll see, Mom, but at the same time. You’ll have to be sworn to secrecy.”

  My mother made a zipped up her mouth gesture and looked solemnly at me. It was the first time I’ve seen her act girly and playful or had she always been that way but I always just thought of Mom being Mom and doing mother-type of things.

  Except Mom was a Major and a hell of a good badass fighter.

  “Mom,” I said, “what you did back there at the house. Thank you.”

  “No one was doing anything to find you, Summer,” my mother said. “What was a mother to do when her baby daughter goes missing?”

  “Show up in combat gear and armed to the hilt to go hand-to-hand with a known and dangerous killer,” I said.

  My mother shrugged. “If you got it, you’ve got it. I got the guns, honey, and I was going to use it if anything happens to you.”

  I laughed. “That’s my mom.”

  My mother hugged
me. “I’m just glad you’re alright, Summer. I’m glad that brute didn’t do anything to you to harm you. If he did, I would’ve shot and ask questions later.”

  “My policy exactly,” Nat said from the front of the car.

  “That’s why I always had you grow up with Nat and the other Donovan kids,” my mother said. “There was no one else I could trust my daughter growing up with. I knew they would treat you right and take you in just like a daughter, which is why I’m so thrilled you’re finally marrying one.”

  My heart fell. If you talked to me about marrying a Donovan a month ago, I would have been excited about the entire thing, but now…

  “Hurry!” Rachel greeted us at the entrance to the medical building. “They’re doing everything to make him wake up, but it’s like he’s in a coma…”

  Nat parked the car outside and rushed my mother and I inside.

  Drew was in the surgery room again but they had him hooked up to machines.

  “He hasn’t waken at all?”

  “No,” Rachel said, her eyes bloodshot.

  I looked over at Nat, and his face was dark with worry.

  “These doctors are the best in the country, Summer, except for you of course. They are doing everything they can to help Drew.”

  As he was saying that, a doctor approached with apprehension in his face. “Sorry to interrupt, but we need your consent. He’s not responding to the regular procedures, so we’re going to try one of the new experimental drugs.”

  “What are the chances he’ll wake up from taking the drugs?” Nat asked.

  “70 to 80 percent,” said the doctor.

  “Do it, then,” Nat said.

  “But there’s side effects, which is why it hasn’t been fully approved it.”

  “What are the side effects?”

  “It can alter a person’s mind, change their chemical balance and brain activity.”

  “What choice do we have?” Nat said. He looked like he wanted to cry. “If we don’t, we’ll lose him anyways. He’ll be in a coma for a long time, and eventually, we’ll have to make a decision to keep him in that state or not.” He looked over at me and Rachel. “Tell me honestly what we should do?”