“I know, Daddy. I just…it’s complicated, okay?”
His gaze flicked down to hers. “Complicated?” He looked from me over to Lola. “You’re in trouble.”
“In a word, yes.”
He eyed me again, assessing. It was hard to endure that piercing gaze. It was harder yet to feel as if I measured up to his standards. “You’re involved with him?” He returned his gaze to Lola, and now his expression was openly disapproving.
“Again, it’s…complicated.” Lola turned away. “Can we not do this, Daddy? Please?”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was almost a smirk on his face. “Daddy? You never call me that. Not since you were six years old.”
“Yeah, well…it’s been a long day.” She seemed to visibly wilt, as if the exhaustion from everything we’d gone through to get here was settling on her shoulders. “I just want to rest, okay?”
Tai rested his hand on her shoulder. “Go. I want to talk to your…friend.” He flicked a look at Filipo. “I have some carvings for you to bring back with you, since you’re here, so don’t go yet.”
Filipo nodded. “I’ll see Lola to the fale and gather more wood.”
When we were alone, Tai ambled over to me, moving with that slow, easy grace men of our size and power seem to have. “What’s your name?”
I held out my hand. “Thresh.”
We shook, and his grip was firm, but he wasn’t trying to intimidate me by crushing my hand. Good luck with that, anyway. “Tai Solomon.” He released me, and then handed me the string of fish. “You know how to clean fish?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
He gestured at my knife. “Then get to it.”
There was a flat wooden board in the sand near the outrigger dugout, so I tossed the fish onto the plank and got to work gutting them.
Tai just watched. “Last time my daughter got herself in any kind of trouble, it changed her, and not for the better.” There was an accusation in that statement, and a warning, as well as a question.
I chose my words carefully. “I haven’t known your daughter very long, sir, but I’ve gotten a couple hints at what happened to her. And I can assure you of a couple things. One, the trouble that brought us here isn’t that kind of trouble, and two, whatever it was that happened, I’d never allow anything like it to ever occur. I don’t need to know the details to know that I’d do anything to protect her from whatever might have happened, or anything else.”
“From what I understand, since all that trouble Lola hasn’t done much but go to work and to the gym. I’m having a hard time understanding how she got herself into trouble.” A pause. “Which leads me to wonder about your involvement in all this.”
I set aside one cleaned fish, and placed another on the plank, sliced open its belly with my KA-BAR. “It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say I sort of got her into this, but it wasn’t anything I could have predicted or prevented, I can promise you that. I’d never knowingly bring anyone else into my problems.”
“You have a gun, and you use that knife like you’re comfortable with it.” He leaned against a nearby tree and crossed his massive arms over his broad, heavy chest. “I’m not liking what that says about you.”
“This shit came to me, sir, and Lola got dragged into it just for associating with me—and trust me, she was doing a bang-up job of sending me on my way. I’m doing everything I can to get her out of it and make sure it stays that way.”
“My daughter has issues with forming relationships.”
I couldn’t help a laugh. “No shit. I caught that part.”
“But yet she brought you here. She knows I wouldn’t be happy to see someone new, but she brought you here anyway.” And thick, meaningful pause. “And she left you alone with me.”
“I can only venture to guess that I’ve earned a little bit of her trust, then.”
“How?”
“How much truth do you really want, here, Tai?”
He lifted his chin. “Tell it like it is.”
“This is a work thing. There’s a group of people who really don’t like the company I work with, and they’re…aggressively taking steps to demonstrate that. Anyone involved with any of us is fair game, it looks like, only the true extent of the prejudice wasn’t apparent until I’d already come into contact with Lola.” I didn’t see the need for details, but I had a feeling Tai wouldn’t be content until he understood the lay of the land.
And I wasn’t one to dissemble.
“And how did that come about?”
“My boss went through the ICU when she was on shift, and she and I…well, I wouldn’t say hit it off, but it felt like there was something there. So when the opportunity presented itself, I…decided to see where things might go.”
“If you had asked me, I would have told you things wouldn’t go very far. She was hurt very badly by someone she once trusted, and the experience closed her off. For good, I’d thought.”
“So I gathered. And it didn’t seem like things between us were going to go too far, but then this trouble cropped up, and when you go through something hairy with someone you’re attracted to…barriers tend to fall faster than they otherwise might.”
Tai was quiet as I finished gutting the fish. When I was done, I handed them to him.
He caught my eye and held it. “My daughter can make her own decisions. She brought you here, so she must trust you, but that doesn’t mean I do. So all I will say is this: I haven’t been to the mainland in sixteen years, and I have no plans to ever go back. But if I find out you let anything happen to my daughter, I’ll find you. Got it?”
I nodded. “I’d say that’s fair, sir.”
He turned away from me and headed deeper into the mangrove forest. As we walked, he spoke over his shoulder. “Hope you like fish, and don’t mind sleeping in the open.”
I hiked my bag a little higher on my shoulder. “Don’t mind fish, and sleeping in the open don’t bother me all that much. Wouldn’t mind some bug spray, though.”
That just got me a sarcastic snort. “Nothing like that out here. Bugs get bad enough, you could smear on some mud.”
“Figured as much.”
We entered a clearing, in the middle of which was a circular domed structure fashioned out of whole tree trunks for upright supports, with a thatched roof and open sides, and a floor suspended a good three feet off the ground. I could see some kind of shades or slats that could be lowered to keep out inclement weather. So craftily fashioned was the dwelling that until I realized what I was looking at, I didn’t immediately recognize it as human-made structure. It just blended in perfectly with the rest of the surroundings. The roof thatching was woven from palm leaves which, considering all I’d seen on the trip in were mangrove trees, I assumed he must have brought them in himself from somewhere else for this purpose. Having gone to FSU, I’d taken a few filler courses in the history of Florida and the Everglades, and the Seminoles who had once inhabited this area, so I recognized some elements of the structure as being of Seminole origin, but the photographs and drawings I’d seen had shown the Seminole dwellings to be rectangular, whereas this one was more rounded. Something was off about the structure, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Tai had noticed that I’d stopped and was staring at the structure. “Can’t figure it out?”
I shook my head. “Anthropology ain’t really my thing, Tai. I know there’s something, but…I can’t pin it down.”
“No shame there. It’d take familiarity with the traditional dwellings of two different cultures to spot it.” He thumped his chest with a huge fist. “I’m Samoan. I was born there and lived there most of my life, and my tama was a big believer in the old ways. He taught me how to build the va’a and the paopao.” He indicated the ink decorating his body: “I got the pe’a the old way, from a tufuga ta tatau. He also taught me to build the fale, in the old way. But then I came here, and discovered the mangrove forests, and learned of the Seminole culture. Some twenty years ago, I met a
n old, old Seminole man, who showed me some of their old ways. So, when I decided to make a place for myself out here, I fused the styles of my culture and that of the Seminole. So, what you’re seeing is a combination of Seminole and Samoan style dwelling structures.”
Now that he explained it, I could see it. I’d also spent a few weeks of leave time in the Polynesian islands, and had come across a few of the old-style houses, which, like this one, were rounded, with the roofs extending down to barely a few feet from the ground, and those were built flat on the ground. The Seminole, living in a wetland, built their rectangular dwellings a couple feet off the ground, and didn’t extend the roof quite as much. I shook my head in wonder; the fusion of the two styles was brilliant, blending both cultures to create a home for himself that suited the climate, used local materials, and was practically invisible until you were right on top of it. Plus, when he eventually died and years passed, it would all return to the earth without leaving any permanent mark of his presence.
If you’re gonna be a hermit, this was the way to do it.
There was a fire built on the ground near the dwelling, with a few chairs hand-made from lengths of wood and rope-knot webbing. In one of these chairs, barefoot, clad in only her bra and yoga pants, eating fruit from a can with a six-inch boning knife, was Lola.
There was nothing special about the moment. She didn’t even notice me. She was lounging in the chair, skewering pieces of fruit from the can with the knife, one leg hooked over the side of the chair, foot kicking. Her hair was loose, taken down out of the braid to flutter in the breeze, gorgeous, beautifully long, draping past her shoulder blades to nearly mid-spine. The yoga pants were shoved up to her knees, baring toned, muscular calves, and her upper body was bare but for the bra, and I just—
I couldn’t figure out what was happening to me.
It wasn’t the usual feeling I got when I saw a hot woman, which was the urge to rip her clothes off, fuck her sideways, and then have a stiff drink. I mean, yeah, that was there, because Lola was the sexiest damn woman I’d ever seen. Now that I was really looking, and wasn’t blinded by lust, I realized how fucking ripped she was. She had serious muscle development going on, from hard, rounded biceps and shoulders to flat, toned, defined abs…it was ridiculous. The girl had serious gym cred. She was fucking stacked, and ripped.
Which made her odd insecurity even more inexplicable. Sure, she wasn’t a runway model skinny girl. But she was gorgeous. Shit, you ask me, she was gorgeous because of that. She was muscular, strong, fit, healthy as all fuck. But she was still all woman. Fucking perfect.
So why the hell had she sworn off sex? Why was she so closed off? It couldn’t be physical insecurity. She’d stripped off her top easily enough and without qualm, and hadn’t tried to cover up. She was also clearly not a novice when it came to sex; the way she’d touched me, the way she’d put her mouth on me…fuck, the girl knew what she was doing. And again, that was a turn-on to me.
But then she’d just…sworn off all sex for three years, including masturbation? What the hell?
Furthermore…what the hell was this twist in my gut when I looked at her? Why did I feel so fucking protective of her? The thought of Cain’s goons getting their filthy fucking hands on her, doing something to her to get at me? That made my well-controlled temper flare.
And just looking at her sitting there, completely unselfconscious, hot as fuck, casual and comfortable in a camp in the middle of nowhere, in a place so rustic it was nearly Bronze Age. Everything inside me seemed to just…fuck, I couldn’t even find the word.
It was kind of like desire, kind of like need, kind of like protectiveness, and something more, something deeper, harder, stronger…plus all of that rolled up into a gnarled, tangled ball of seething intensity.
I tried to shake myself out of it, but the unsettling feeling didn’t go away. If anything, it intensified.
And that was when I realized Tai was watching me intently. He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and spoke in a tone pitched for my ears alone. “Son, I think you just got hooked.”
I flinched and glanced at him. “Wh—um, what?”
He smirked. “Lola. That look you were giving her. You’re caught, hook, line, and sinker.”
I shook my head. “No, I just—fuck, man, I don’t know.”
He laughed, then. “No point in fighting it. She’s like her mom, got that way of just pulling you in.” The humor vanished beneath a wave of old pain at the mention of his wife. “Don’t know it’s happening till it’s done.”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about, Tai?”
He clapped my shoulder again. “One word, four letters. Rhymes with dove. And you’re scared of it.”
Oh.
Ohhhhh.
Well…shit.
10: MEAN SOMETHING
I have a love-hate relationship with Dad’s place. I’ve spent so many summers out here, fishing, living by campfire and starlight, eating canned fruit and roasted fish and venison and the various crops Dad cultivated here and there on various islands: sweet potatoes, maize, melons, and even a small patch of pumpkins and a few canes of grapes.
I spent my summers helping him plant and weed his crops, helping him hunt, repairing the home, cleaning fish, cooking, making dugouts. One entire summer was spent replacing the thatch roof, a job which took Dad, Filipo, and me three months working from sunup to sundown to complete, from importing the heavy sheaves of palm leaves to splitting and binding the wood. I was glad to return to Grandma and Grandpa’s that fall.
I love it out here. It’s peaceful. It’s beautiful. It’s a whole other world totally removed from the bustle and chaos of Miami. It’s a primeval world, and thanks to Dad, I’m still comfortable out here, even though I don’t come out very often anymore.
But I also hate it, because this place stole my father. When Mom got sick, he began spending more and more time out here between visits to the hospital. I was the one who sat by her bedside all day every day while she wasted away. Dad couldn’t watch it. Just couldn’t. So he’d vanish into the mangrove forests in his little paopao and fish and hunt until he felt strong enough to face her withered form again. But he wouldn’t stay long, and the visits became fewer and fewer, until the doctors told him she was going to die any day, and then he sat on the floor beside her bed, reached up to hold her hand, and told her it was time to go.
So she went.
And so did he.
And then the forest took him.
It was years before he was anything like his old self again. For the first two years, not even Filipo knew where Dad was. I think he just paddled the Ten Thousand Islands in his paopao and survived on fish and tubers, and focused on forgetting her. He hasn’t spoken her name since—which is why I took her last name, so at least one of us had to remember her—but I know he thinks of her. I catch him staring off at the sunset sometimes, which was always Mom’s favorite time of day, and that’s when Dad says a prayer for her spirit, as the sun sinks beneath the horizon.
I sat in my favorite chair by the campfire and let my thoughts roam.
I knew Mom would want me to trust Thresh. She’d want me to give him a chance. What that means, what it looks like, I don’t know. She’d see the sweet, tender person buried beneath the warrior’s tough exterior. She’d get him to talk about his past and the things that make up his personality. She’d ask about each and every scar on his body, and listen to the stories, no matter what they were. She’d understand.
But I’m not sure I’m as strong as Mom.
I’m more like Dad. When something doesn’t make sense, or hurts or scares me, it’s easier to push whatever it is far away, to run from it, to hide from it, to not face it.
But I can’t do that. Not anymore. Not with Thresh. It’s…inexplicable, in some ways. It’s not like insta-love, where I’m just immediately falling head over heels for him. It’s instant chemistry, yes. It’s something about him, his size, his strength, his rugged masculine beauty, his
bravery, and now, fuck…the way he touched me, the way he kissed me. All that, yeah, it’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. But that doesn’t mean I’m in love with him.
And what does that mean, anyway? In love?
I thought I was in love, once, and look how that turned out.
Yeah, fuck that.
No way.
But there he was, standing on the edge of the clearing, staring at me with a stunned expression on his face.
And there was Dad, a string of cleaned fish in hand, his kukri sheathed at his side, carrying his favorite fishing rod and reel. He knelt by the fire and got to work getting the fish roasting, and I, out of habit, went over to help.
We worked in companionable silence for a few moments, and then Dad eyed me sidelong. “He’s got it bad.”
“Dad.”
“Just saying.”
“Don’t just say. I’ll handle it.”
He worked in silence for a few more moments, filleting the fish and laying them across the roasting stone. “I got a good feeling about him. Won’t hear any arguments from me. Maybe he can help you really put everything that you went through fully behind you.”
I sat back on my heels. “Dad, for real. Stop, please.”
“Why?” he asked, tilting his head to one side.
“Because…it’s—because I’m—”
He hid a grin, ducking to fillet another fish. “Ohhhh, I get it. You’ve got it just as bad, and you’re just as freaked.”
“Since when are you this nosy?”
He shrugged. “Since my baby girl finally finds a man who’s worth half a shit. And that one? Strikes me he’s worth a lot more than that, you give him a chance to show it.”
“You just met him, Dad.”
“So did you. But you’re telling me you don’t get the same feeling from him? You got my sense about people. Most of ’em aren’t worth shit. That’s why I stay away, can’t stand most of ’em. Filipo, your mom…that was it. Only people I trust. But I have a sense about people, and he’s a good one.”
Thresh: Alpha One Security: Book 2 Page 14
