by Malcom, Anne
He came into view holding possibly the cutest baby I’d ever seen. Mine included. I was not blinded by motherly love when Nathan was born. Of course I adored the absolute heck out of him since I locked eyes with him, but I was also able to admit that he wasn’t adorable. Nathan was kind of weird looking as a baby. He grew into his features once he was about two. Robert was happy about that, about Nathan finally inheriting ‘his genes,’ and I couldn’t decide whether that meant his features or his whiteness.
The kid in Luke’s arms was beyond beautiful. And not really a baby, I guessed he was about two, with a full head of hair, wearing a white tee, ripped blue jeans, and frickin’ Timberlands. I’d never seen a grown-up male look like cool—present company excluded—let alone a kid. And there was not a stain on that shirt. Or the beautiful kid.
Of course, looking at his mother and father who may or may not be vampires, for all their flawless beauty, it did make sense.
“Yes, I can definitely help with that,” I said immediately, smiling and holding my hands out to the baby. “What’s his name?”
“Rogue,” Luke said as he gave him to me, grinning with warm eyes.
Rogue. Of fucking course.
He immediately cuddled into me, seemingly not upset about being handed to a stranger. He was heavier than he looked and didn’t realize how much I missed that heaviness from when Nathan was little. He never let me carry him anymore, which was probably good since he was getting big and my upper body strength left a lot to be desired. I leaned in and inhaled the baby scent that attached itself to every child that left them when they turned about four. It was rare, pure and beautiful.
Calming.
Maybe because I associated it with a kind of safeness. Whenever things got bad with Robert—which was often after I gave birth—I would sneak into Nathan’s nursery, pick him up, hold him into my chest and inhale. He was the thing that saved me and made me strong enough to leave Robert.
“I’m Luke,” the man himself said, holding out a hand to Eliza, jerking me out of my baby scented coma.
She took it, blinking rapidly. “You’re security guys?” she clarified, looking between him and Lance.
Luke nodded.
“Wow,” she replied.
I laughed, now able to do things like that knowing Nathan was inside the house most likely on a sugar high with Karen and that I was holding a baby, in front of a man who only glared and grunted words but somehow made me feel immensely safe.
Luke laughed too seemingly not offended by Eliza’s response, then again, being that hot I was sure he was used to it. “I’m gonna get this system hooked up, might be a bit noisy, but Rosie is comin’ out with Polly in a couple of hours with all sorts of food, drinks, and shit. Just thought I’d give you some time to prepare, make sure all furniture is bolted to the wall,” he joked.
Luke’s smile was easy, as were his words. He couldn’t be more different than the man beside him. But then again, he had a beautiful kid, a scary but hot as shit wife. He seemed like he had a lot of reasons to smile easy and tease people.
Lance had shadows behind his eyes, a naked ring finger—of course I checked—and never spoke a word about any kind of family.
I guessed there were a lot of reasons why he was the way he was.
I wanted to know those reasons. I had the strangest urge to be the reason he smiled with his eyes.
But that was insane.
What was also insane—in a slightly better way—was the fact that Rosie and Polly were driving all the way out here with drinks and food.
“We can make it a party!” Eliza decided while I was staring at Lance without even realizing it.
He was staring right back, blankly.
Luckily the toddler pulling my hair demanded my attention. I held his chubby hand.
“I’ll get Karen to bring our picnic table and grill over,” Eliza continued, starting to speak faster as she got more and more excited. She loved a party. “We’ll set up the back yard. We’ve got wine and chips. You can make guac.” She winked at me then looked to the men in front of us. “Seriously, Elena’s guac will make you want to propose marriage. Karen already tried, no matter the fact she’s married to me and Elena isn’t gay. But I wasn’t even mad, I was too busy eating the guac.”
Luke chuckled. Lance didn’t even crack a grin.
I didn’t argue with her. My guac was really good.
“Feel free to invite the whole team,” I offered, thinking about what they’d done for me. The least I could do was make them some frickin’ guac. “If it’s not too late notice and they feel like making the drive,” I added, thinking of the hour—in good traffic, which was rare—each way they’d have to travel.
“Well, I’ll tell you Heath will come ‘cause Polly’s comin’. That means Skye and Ziggy—their two kids are coming, if that’s good with you to have more little monsters around?”
I nodded enthusiastically. Because Nathan would love having kids around. I loved it too. I’d always wanted a big family, a house full of kids. Happiness. It had been the plan with Robert. But he’d started beating me when Nathan was born and I’d started secretly taking the pill so I didn’t bring another child into the mix.
Luke grinned and continued speaking. “Keltan will likely come when he hears about the guac, he likes to eat. That means that Lucy and their daughter, Amelia, will be comin’ too. That good?”
I thought about what I had in the pantry, which wasn’t much. “Sure,” I said, smiling brightly. “I’ll run to the store and get supplies.” I looked to Eliza. “If you guys don’t mind watching my spawn and this angel?” I squeezed the baby in my arms again.
I thought about taking Nathan with me, but I knew he wouldn’t want to be taken away from the men and the excitement of what they were doing. Plus, the sugar that he’d probably already overdosed on.
“I got it,” a voice clipped.
We all looked to Lance.
Eliza blinked rapidly at him, I was unsure if this was because of the unexpected bite to his voice, him speaking at all or because she was still drooling over him. Maybe a combination of the three.
Luke only grinned knowingly. Knowing what, I had no clue.
“Got it?” I repeated, focusing my eyes on Lance’s shades.
“Shit from the store,” he clipped, seemingly annoyed that I was asking him to expand on his three-word grunt. “I’ll get this shit done, then go to the store.”
My eyes widened. The offer itself was unexpected but hearing it come out like it was causing Lance pain was even more shocking. I tried to imagine him with a cart, walking down the aisles of a grocery store, grabbing party items, scowling at every shopper that gawked at him. Couldn’t see it. Surely he ordered his groceries online.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “You’ve done enough for me already, and that’s going too far out of your way.” Plus it felt like charity, as if his intense stare could see into my rapidly emptying bank account and empty pantry.
“It wasn’t a question,” Lance said, voice tighter than his ass, and that was a tight ass. “You got your kid.” He nodded his head to Eliza. “Friends. Plus the preparation for Rosie and Lucy. Got it covered.”
The last three words of his sentence were structured like a decision made. No argument. A dismissal.
He even started to turn away from me.
Something heated in my blood.
And not in a good way.
“Ah, it’s my house, my guests, so I’ll cover it,” I snapped at him.
Luke somehow grinned even wider at the prissiness in my voice.
Lance paused, his jaw stiffened, eyes moved back to me. They were cold, challenging, kind of scary and also kind of hot. I could see that through my annoyance.
He didn’t speak. The stare likely worked on its own most of the time. I was tempted to give in, let him do whatever he wished. But I had my pride. What was left of it at least.
“Thank you for the kind offer,” I said through gritted teeth. “But as I said, you’ve
done enough and I want to do this as a thank you.”
And before he could say anything more, with his words or his frickin’ smoldering eyes, I turned and walked away.
Chapter Eight
I’d gone into the house feeling all triumphant over facing off with a badass who looked like he could melt paint with his eyes, I’d had another donut, my third for the day. I’d hugged my kid again. Then I’d gotten ready to leave for the store, mental list in hand and ready to spend money I didn’t really have on people who went out of their way to help me and my son when they had no need to.
I got as far as the driver’s door of my car.
A hand fastened around my wrist as I was going to open it. The grip wasn’t painful, but it was firm, intended to get me to stop what I was doing.
It did that.
And more.
I couldn’t think about the more since I had to make eye contact with the man holding my wrist without turning into a puddle at his feet. So I sucked in an uneven breath and looked up.
“Keys,” he ordered the second my eyes touched his sunglasses.
His hand stayed on my wrist. I tried not to focus on that. But when a man like Lance was touching you, even if it was only to restrain you while he tried to get your car keys, you focused.
“What?” my voice was far too breathy for my liking.
The grip tightened only slightly, still not enough to be painful, but enough to be forceful. To show me how easy it would be for him to make this painful. As a survivor of abuse, this should have sent me into a panic, triggered something in me. It had happened enough times at the diner, when a customer grabbed me to ask a question, or even Bobby coming up behind me in the kitchen. I got flashbacks, I flinched for a hit, my breathing got shallow and I’d come close to passing out a few times. All from contact not intended to be violent, and none of that contact originating from violent people.
Lance was a violent person.
I knew that the second I laid eyes on him.
It served me well.
It served my son well.
But I should have left it at that, been more forceful about his presence in my life. In Nathan’s life. Not because of that violence. Because of my reaction to it. To him.
“Your keys,” Lance said, jaw hard. “I’m drivin’.”
My spine stiffened at yet another sentence where my bending to his will seemed like a forgone conclusion.
“If you need to drive anywhere, you’ve got a perfectly good SUV parked right on the curb,” I informed him, jerking my head.
He stared at me, annoyance radiated off him, coated me.
The silence stretched long.
The pressure on my wrist remained.
For once in my life, I hoped for a bruise, a mark, something physical as a reminder of this contact.
And with that thought, I realized I really needed to get my head examined, or at the very least my ovaries, they were taking control.
“Figured it would take me carrying you across your front yard to get you into the SUV,” he said finally. “And figured that wouldn’t go down too well. So I’m drivin’.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, trying not to imagine what it would be like to have Lance carry me across the yard. “I’m driving. And I’m going to the store. Alone.”
“Think you’ve forgotten why I’m here,” Lance replied, his jaw ticking, obviously this conversation was too long and too tedious for his liking.
“No, I’m not soon to forget my son being kidnapped,” I snapped, my voice sharp. “I know exactly why you’re here, to make sure that doesn’t happen again. And considering my son is inside the house and not in this car, definitely not in the store, you’re not needed here.”
He stared at me for a long time. Long enough to make me uncomfortable, make me want to squirm under his gaze like ants underneath a cruel kid’s microscope.
“I’m exactly where I’m needed,” he decided. “You’re wearin’ a bruise as evidence of that.”
I flinched, even though the words weren’t flung with force. His presence was violent, his touch was coated with it, it radiated from his stare, from his very aura, but the words themselves were not meant to harm, not meant to rub anything in my face. Just a simple statement of fact, spoken as gently as the truth could ever be spoken. And truths like this were a proverbial wrecking ball to the soul.
I swallowed roughly and straightened my spine. “I’m aware of the evidence of my estranged husband punching me in the face,” I said flatly. “Unfortunately, I’m also used to wearing such things.”
It was his turn to flinch now. As much as I wanted to be indifferent to the man who practiced his own indifference like breathing, I couldn’t. The simple flinch affected me. It told me things too. That he was not wholly devoid of emotion and not some sexy man-shaped robot.
But I had to keep going.
“My husband is a lot of things,” I said. “He is a sadist, a narcissist, a cruel human being, a bad father, even worse spouse. But he is not stupid. So I do not see him walking up to me in a grocery store and trying anything.”
Lance’s lips were a hard line. “This isn’t a discussion.”
And then, he did the unthinkable. The unforgivable. He snatched a handle of my purse, which was hitched on my arm, and he rifled through it for about one second and located my keys. A feat that I wasn’t capable of. It took at least five minutes of rifling through spare snacks for Nathan, wet wipes, old Chapsticks, coupons and whatever Nathan decided to put in my purse that week to find my keys.
I was battling between being super impressed and incredibly pissed at the invasion of my privacy. A woman’s purse was sacred.
Everyone knew that.
I didn’t have time to decide which emotion I was going to land on because my purse was hitched back on my shoulder, my body moved swiftly, firmly and somehow gently out of the way so Lance could slide into the driver’s seat and close the door.
I stared at the door for a long time, gaping at it and trying to figure out what the heck was happening.
The window rolled down.
“Get in the car, Elena,” Lance said, dipping his head down slightly so I saw his irises over the top of his sunglasses.
I gulped.
Really tried to muster up the courage to be decisive, sassy, say something like Karen might say to put an alpha male in his proper place.
But I did none of that.
I turned on my heel and got in the car.
The entire ride to the grocery store was silent.
Lance obviously liked it that way.
I did not.
I had a five-year-old. I hadn’t had a silent car ride since he was born.
It wasn’t uncomfortable for me, that silence. No, what was uncomfortable was being in such an enclosed space with Lance, alone, close to him, his hand moving back and forward to the gear shift, so close to my thigh that the air kissed it with his movements.
Or maybe I was imagining it.
Then there was the heat.
Partly due to the fact it was nearing a hundred-degree day and the car had no air conditioning. But that was not the reason why sweat was beading on my upper lip, temples, inner thighs, and my butt. Yeah, my frickin’ butt. Not enough publicity was given to this phenomenon that seemed to only affect women. In fact, not enough women even talked about this, because it was embarrassing as hell, but it happened.
Mostly on the very rare—read, two times—occasion I found the time to work out. But also in really hot restaurants, or if I was wearing cheap fabric—which was always—on a really hot day and forced to sit on leather seats.
Also, when I was really nervous.
As a rule, I didn’t really get nervous about things. Namely because in order to get nervous, you had to be going really far out of your comfort zone, going on a first date, in a job interview, starting your own business, public speaking, cooking dinner for the husband who beat the shit out of you if you didn’t do it right.
I stayed well within my comfort zone since arriving here.
I’d reckoned I’d ventured far enough out of it just by finding the courage to leave my cage cleverly disguised as just another McMansion in the suburbs.
Sitting in a car with Lance was so far out of my comfort zone I forgot what comfort even felt like.
Therefore my butt was sweating.
So in addition to worrying about Lance driving my crappy car without air conditioning, about being in this crappy car alone with Lance, I was worrying about having a stain of butt sweat on my white shorts when I got out of the car.
I’d chosen the shorts because it was hot, they were clean and because they made my legs look good.
Now I cursed myself.
What was I thinking? I never wore these. Because wearing white around a child was a recipe for disaster.
Also wearing them around a hot guy that made your butt sweat was also a recipe for disaster.
So that’s pretty much what I was thinking about the entire, stifling, panic-inducing ride to the grocery store.
It wasn’t until we actually pulled up that I realized I was going to be grocery shopping with Lance. Not just that, I was grocery shopping for a large number of people who deserved some great food for being great people and I really could not afford to do that.
This thought, of course, only made my butt sweat more.
Lance, hopefully oblivious to the sweat situation, didn’t even look at me as he got out of the car.
I took a deep breath, tried to subtly wipe the dampness from my forehead with the back of my hand and got out of the car.
There was no real way to check for wet patches on my ass without looking like a maniac, so I just had to hope for the best.
Luckily, Lance didn’t seem too bothered about waiting on me after he’d locked the car, he just strode toward the entrance.
I watched him for a beat, his purposeful, lithe strides, his shirt and jeans free of any sweat and looking sinfully delicious.
I gulped in a swallow of humid air and followed him to the grocery store.
Which was where the problems continued.
He’d already gotten a cart by the time I made it into the foyer. The big kind, not the small ones I usually used with Nathan. I’d always looked enviously at the moms with the designer bags and leggings, pushing around the overflowing large cart full of name brand food. They didn’t even glance at prices when they threw things into their cart, didn’t consider whether they really needed it, didn’t look at the shelves with an eagle eye for the things that would go the furthest and last the longest.
