Keeping Her Safe: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance

by Summer Brooks

  My father was halfway out the door before I remembered to ask him how Mom was.

  “She’s fine,” he said shortly, “spending the week in Florida. I’ll send her your love.”

  I nodded, fully aware that this was not a normal response to my question, yet fully accepting of it because really, what could you do? They were completely fucked up and dysfunctional, but they were mine.

  Speaking of fucked up and dysfunctional, Sebastian arrived to our meeting later that evening already well on his way to oblivion. It was only seven o’clock, and he was already blasted out of his mind. He had always been a bit of a lush when we were younger, but it was apparent that in the intervening years, he had set some kind of personal goal to stay as wasted as possible for as long as possible. Within the first twenty minutes of our conversation, he had downed three shots of bourbon, and it was clear that we were not going to be talking business.

  “Do you remember that night you cock-blocked me?” Sebastian asked. He hadn’t stopped reminiscing since we sat down, and it seemed like all of his memories were of ways I had wronged him. I avoided bringing up all the times he’d fucked me over in response; after all, I was really trying to smooth things over and get our merger back on track.

  “You mean the night I stopped you from getting arrested for statutory rape?” I responded. “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “Whatever! That girl was into it.”

  “She was seventeen. And she was my cousin.”

  Sebastian rolled his eyes and threw back the rest of his hi-ball. “I have to take a piss,” he announced, rising from his barstool and heading to the restroom.

  I honestly don’t know how I became friends with a man who feels the need to reminisce about the time I didn’t let him fuck my cousin. I hadn’t thought about that night in a long time, and I really didn’t want to, but now he had brought it up and I couldn’t push it out of my head; it just lingered there, festering, and threatening to drag me back to a place that I didn’t want to visit. And the girl I didn’t want to think about.

  “Eric,” Sebastian said in a tone that made me almost certain it was not the first time he’d tried to catch my attention. I turned to face him. He’d returned from the bathroom with a girl on his arm that could not possibly be more than twenty-two. Some people never change. “Sylvia would like to take this party back to my place,” he said, punctuating his sentence with a long, lusty kiss with the woman he couldn’t have met more than two minutes earlier.

  I had no desire to go to Sebastian’s loft and watch him seduce some poor, unsuspecting coed. I decided I’d try a different tactic. If I couldn’t get Sebastian to sit still and have a conversation like a grown-ass adult, I’d deal with his CFO. She was older, more mature, and easier to charm.

  4

  Grace

  Francine Fields woke up every morning at six and went to the gym. That fact alone was enough to make me hate her. I hated waking up early, especially when I knew there would be nothing to show for it.

  The somewhat rude sack of sweat and fat that had entered my office and almost broke my chair, was none other than Charles Fields. He was a lawyer at some firm on Lakeshore, and his wife Francine was the CFO for a big real estate development company. So they were just my kind of people—the kind that had more money than they knew what to do with.

  Charles played the part of the jealous husband to perfection. He was fraught with worry, tortured by the unknown, and consumed with potential erotic images of his wife in compromising positions with other men—images that he was likely both disgusted and aroused by. When you add in the fact that Charles himself was not feeling (or looking) quite as hot as he once did, it would be no surprise to anyone if he did become the poster child for cuckolds anonymous. And yet, in my experience, I had dealt with a lot of cheating spouses, and I had to say, it didn’t sound to me like his wife was cheating on him.

  Still, a girl’s gotta eat. Which was how I found myself outside the Fields’ residence just before six for the third morning in a row. After the first day, when I rode my Vespa and lost her on the El, I decided that I needed to hoof it. So I arrived on foot so that I could follow her easily. I was wearing sensible shoes, blue jeans, a Red Hot Chili Peppers tee shirt, and a smart, black tailored blazer that served the dual purpose of keeping me warm and adding a bit of style to my outfit. In all, I was relatively inconspicuous, which is necessary when you are trying to follow someone without being noticed.

  I was good at this, I reminded myself. That feeling had faded a bit when Charles Fields was in my office, grilling me on my fitness for the job, but it was finally returning.

  “I need you to follow her,” he had said to me, the desperation dripping from his lips like a dark paint that would irreparably taint the bright colors of his marriage. “It has to be you. I don’t know if you have any guys working here, but I don’t want to spook her, you know.”

  “I know.” I had heard this kind of thing before. There were a lot of jobs that I couldn’t get because I was a woman, but there were just as many that I got for exactly that reason. “It’s just me here.”

  I think that was what had spooked him. The look on his face went from having faith in me to thinking I was a little girl who was going to get hurt in practically no time at all. I had to force myself not to roll my eyes at his stereotypical behavior. That would be rude, after all. Polite, Grace. Polite, I repeated in my head on a loop.

  When his eyes turned from me to look around the small office that was also my apartment, the concern in his eyes could only be described as fatherly. My own father had given me that look when I told him I wanted to be a private investigator, but he knew even then that there was no stopping me once I’d put my mind to something. And no amount of pity from Mr. Fields was going to be able to sway me now. Still, something made me give him an explanation.

  “My father got me into the business,” I offered, hoping to ease his concern. When he still didn’t seem relieved, I added, “I’m skilled in four kinds of martial arts.” Still nothing. “And I have a concealed carry license.” At this last statement, a ridiculously visible sigh of relief escaped his chest and he looked at me with a smile on his face again. The fact that I had to defend my ability to defend myself was nothing short of annoying, but I was glad we were past it. Nothing I told him was a lie. I had been studying Karate and Tae Kwon Do since I was able to walk, and picked up Jiu Jitsu and Krav Maga about a decade ago, while I was still in school. And yes, I owned one gun. It was my father’s. And just like him, I rarely took it anywhere with me.

  “So how much is this going to cost me?” Mr. Fields had asked. Now reassured of my ability to handle myself, he was ready to get down to business. Why any of that would matter when I was following his wife to her spa treatments was beyond me, but such is life.

  “My rate is fifty dollars an hour, with a three-hour daily minimum,” I explained to him, “plus any expenses.” For his part, he didn’t flinch. I supposed his hourly rate as an attorney would put my paltry fifty dollars an hour to shame, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I waited for him to run the numbers in his brain and make a decision.

  “Let’s start with five days,” he said coolly. I noticed curiously that he became more detached and relaxed when discussing numbers. “If you don’t find anything in a week, there’s probably nothing worth finding, right?”

  I agreed and told him I would call him at the end of the week, hopefully with good news, (though, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure what he would consider “good”) and this time when I rose and reached out my hand to wish him well, he didn’t ignore it. He shook it respectfully before turning to exit. “God willing,” he said to no one in particular.

  And that phrase, as if shot from the barrel of a gun, killed my confidence all over again.

  Yet here I was, on the train, following his seemingly very sweet wife like the professional that I was.

  The supplies for a reconnaissance mission like this one were few: my Nikon, and a book. I’d b
een reading Persuasion, by Jane Austen, so I brought that along. I also had my phone, but that had become such a permanent fixture in my life that I barely thought about it anymore. I had stuffed all of these items in a large hobo-style crossbody bag that made them easy to carry along my way.

  On the El, I rode in the same car as Mrs. Fields, which may have been suspicious if she were expecting someone to follow her, but she clearly wasn’t. She was a friendly woman, who smiled at the other passengers and gave up her seat near the exit when an elderly man climbed aboard the train. The day before, she had struck up a conversation with a college student who I thought for a moment might be hitting on her, but it turned out she was just an outgoing woman. I was becoming more and more convinced that this was going to be the easiest and most boring job I’d ever taken. I sat at the back of the car, glancing up every few minutes to see if Mrs. Fields was going to exit; I was rewarded after the recorded voice came over the train’s speakers.

  “Next stop, Adams and Wabash. Doors open on the right at Adams and Wabash.”

  I watched carefully as Mrs. Fields moved toward the door, and stood once I was sure that she wouldn’t notice.

  This was a surprise.

  I’d been following Mrs. Fields for two days already. She had a routine that was easily identifiable, and on neither occasion had she descended the train at this stop. I had looked into her company and they had a few offices scattered around the city, but Mrs. Fields worked at one alongside the river. Today, she was breaking routine. And I intended to find out why.

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out. In fact, I only had to follow her about two blocks to a cozy little restaurant on Wabash Street. The only other restaurant I’d ever seen her go into was a vegan place not far from her office. On the first day I followed her, she had taken a young woman there who was presumably her assistant or something. This new place, which was more of a quaint cafe tucked into the bottom floor of a tall building, struck me as the type of place you go when you don’t necessarily want to be seen by people that you know. I hung back on the opposite side of the street and watched her enter. Through the restaurant’s picture window, I could see her greet a well-built man who had been waiting on her inside.

  The greeting was not what I would call formal, but it wasn’t necessarily romantic either. The two of them hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and then kissed each other on the cheek. I was able to get a couple of quick shots of the encounter without looking too out of place, but it wasn’t what I would call damning evidence of some kind of illicit affair. I scrolled through the pictures on my Nikon, zooming in on their faces, thinking maybe I would find some facial expression—whether it be lust or indifference—that would give me an idea of the nature of this meeting. But when I did, I found something altogether different and unexpected.

  I knew the man that she was meeting.

  Fuck.

  I can’t explain why my first instinct was to duck behind a garbage can. The moment I did so, I immediately regretted it. Someone had clearly thrown away some kind of spoiled meat, and the smell began burning the insides of my nostrils almost immediately. But, I had made my choice and I wasn’t about to move from that spot, lest he see me.

  I was being paranoid. The truth was, he probably didn’t remember me at all. Or if he did somehow have a vague recollection of my face, it was probably only as his baby cousin’s friend that he met that one time, ages ago. I had changed a lot since then, but examining the picture I had just taken, I could see that he had not.

  Years ago, when my best friend Lana and I were still in high school, she took me to this insane party in Oak Park. I shouldn’t have been there at all, to be honest. My father thought that I was spending the night at Lana’s, and I’m sure he would have never approved of my attending a party where there would be alcohol and 20-something guys, and god knows what else, but I went. And like you do when you’re seventeen, I had the most amazing night of my life—at least before it went horribly, horribly wrong.

  I had been planning on wearing some boring jeans and an old tee shirt with one of those 90s grunge rock bands that nobody listened to anymore on the front. But Lana took one look at my getup and forced me into her closet at breakneck speed. It didn’t matter that she was probably four inches shorter than me and way more comfortable in her own skin than I was at the time; no amount of protesting was going to get me out of there without changing into whatever she picked out for me.

  It was a slinky black dress that was probably a good length on Lana, but sinfully short on my lanky frame. She was woefully disappointed that I couldn’t manage to squeeze my feet into any of her tiny shoes, though, so she let me wear my own chunky Doc Martens. It was definitely a punk rock look, but when I stood in front of the mirror that hung on the back of Lana’s bathroom door, I remember feeling sexy for probably the first time in my life.

  Growing up with just a dad, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to just be a girl. While my dad was awesome, and taught me really cool stuff like how to knock a guy out if he so much as looked at me funny, he wasn’t as generous with advice on how to pick out clothes that would fit my body, or putting on makeup. So I was lucky to have Lana.

  I knew from the moment I entered the party that I was completely out of my depth. The music was so loud that I could barely hear myself think, and someone handed me a drink before we were three steps inside. Lana introduced me to some people—friends of hers that were already in college—as we made our way through the living room and into the backyard.

  That’s when I saw him.

  He was sitting by the pool with his feet dangling into the water and his jeans rolled up haphazardly to show off his toned, tanned legs. His shirt was unbuttoned to reveal abs that were like something out of a dream. But none of that was what caught my attention. It was his smile that I saw—mischievous and carefree—and all I knew was I wanted to know the person who smiled like that.

  I had no idea how to flirt, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. I kind of stood to the side of the pool with a group of people closer to my own age, though probably at least already in college. And after a few minutes of pretending to laugh at their idiotic raunchy stories like I was having a blast, he approached me. When he tapped me on the shoulder, I could feel the hum of electricity pulse through my body at the connection of his skin to mine, but I pretended not to notice him. I didn’t think I was playing hard to get—I barely even knew what that meant at the time—I just thought that any guy worth talking to would let me finish my conversation before expecting me to turn my attention to him. So he waited a moment, with all of the patience of a child at the ring of the school bell. Then, without asking, he grabbed my free hand in his, interlacing his fingers between mine in a way that made my pulse quicken, and pulled me away from the group—not hard, but with enough force that I almost spilled the drink in my other hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

  “You don’t want to know those guys,” he offered in explanation, “they’re idiots.” He flashed me that award-winning smile, and I had no choice but to melt under his spell.

  “Oh, so you’re rescuing me then, I take it.”

  He laughed. “More like you’re rescuing me. Until I saw you, I thought there was no one interesting here.” He had led us to a pair of outdoor chaises, close enough to the pool that we could still see everything going on, but far enough that the music that was a deafening roar inside the house was almost inaudible. We each took a seat on the side edge of one of the chairs, facing each other, our knees almost touching. I smoothed Lana’s tiny dress over my lap so many times that my hands should have been on fire from the friction of it. But I was struck mute, unable to respond to his bold flirtation with anything that could pass for halfway normal conversation.

  “Interesting, huh?” I said finally, fully knowing that it was lame, but desperately needing to fill the space between us with sound, for fear of what else might occupy it.


  “Yeah,” he said, “I mean…look at those losers you were taking to.” He nodded his head in the direction we came from. “If we combined their collective brainpower, we might be able to come up with a knock-knock joke.”

  There was that smile again, and this time I reciprocated.

  “What makes you so sure I’m different?” I took a drink from my cup. I had tossed whatever concoction was handed to me when I entered the party, on Lana’s suggestion, and poured myself a beer straight from the keg. It tasted awful, but at least I could be confident that it was roofie-free. I did my best to not look disgusted every time I took a sip in front of the very hot guy that was inexplicably interested in me, but I’m sure that I wasn’t successfully hiding anything; I still hate the taste of beer to this day.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you aren’t different.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But you seem like someone who doesn’t take shit off of anybody, and I like that.”

  It was admittedly a strange thing to say to a girl you’ve just met at a party, and looking back now, I realize that it was probably just a line meant to entice me to sleep with him, but in that moment, I felt like he saw me—not the shy, self-conscious little girl who played detective with her daddy that most people thought I was, but the strong, confident person that I believed I would eventually be. I felt pieces of me shift inside at the sound of those words, and I wanted to hear more of them. Of course, I couldn’t tell him any of this. That would make me sound crazy.

  Instead, I asked coolly, “What is your name?”

  “Eric,” he said, leaning back confidently and extending an almost comically perfunctory hand for me to shake.

  “Grace,” I responded, accepting it. But once he had my hand, he didn’t let go, instead using it to pull me towards him. Before I even realized what was happening, his free hand was on my cheek, with his strong fingers weaving into my auburn hair. I was sure that he was going to kiss me when a sudden sound coming from the pool area stopped him.