Chaos Remains: Greenstone Security #4

by Malcom, Anne

  “You’re mine,” he repeated, his words tight like he was trying to control his temper. Like he was the one dealing with a rogue alpha male who was making decisions about his life without thinking that they weren’t his decisions to make. “That means I take care of you and Nathan. That means I’m the one to make sure you’re eatin’.” His eyes flickered up and down my body, heat trailing in their wake despite the fact I was pissed at him. “Both of you are eatin’. That you’re living good. Not just living pretty, but beautiful. I got more than enough money to make sure that happens. To give you the time you need to make what you need. I’ll take care of you.”

  Tears crept into the backs of my eyes with his words. With the firmness in which he said them. Lance was not a man to make empty threats or promises. He was promising to take care of Nathan and me. In a way that made it seem like he intended on sticking around for the long haul.

  It was beautiful.

  It was write a song, a book, a movie about it kind of beautiful.

  But my life wasn’t a song, a book or a movie.

  My life was trusting a man who made similar promises to a girl from the gutter. I gave all my power to a different man who made those promises.

  So I jerked myself out of Lance’s arms.

  He let me, because he was Lance and sensed I needed it.

  “You need to let me take care of myself. My son. First. Do it my way. You don’t get to come in and decide to have it yours. So you figure out if you can live with that.”

  And then, I turned around and walked out, terrified I’d come home to the reality that no, Lance could not handle that.

  But I didn’t.

  I came home to Lance and Nathan throwing a football in the front yard. Nathan sprinted up to me, screaming about the catches he’s made and that Captain was the best coach ever.

  Then, Captain, the best coach ever and my man came up to me. Kissed me. Right on the mouth. In front of Nathan. The whole street. The whole world—or what it felt like to me.

  “I can live with this,” he murmured against my mouth.

  And that was that.

  I wish.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  We had one week after the confrontation.

  One week.

  Of some kind of perfect.

  That wasn’t at all perfect.

  Because this was Lance. He was so far from perfect that he was pure broken perfection. He was cold and hot. Hard and soft. The change in our relationship definitely didn’t change that about him. He didn’t open up to me about the demons that didn’t just lurk under his skin, they were part of him. From skin to bone. I didn’t expect a mere week to make him comfortable enough to open up. To let me in.

  I expected it would take a lifetime for something like that to happen. And no matter how deluded, or stupid it was for me to even think something this early, I wanted a lifetime.

  It was a quick change, sure, to have Lance sleep in bed with me and for Nathan to get used to him as he was. For Nathan to see that things had changed—and the little angel barely blinked at Lance kissing me, he merely commented, very calmly, that that was how you got cooties. Lance, very calmly, responded that he was okay with cooties if they came from me.

  This, of course, made me burst out laughing.

  When I was finished, Lance was staring at me, and Nathan had become distracted with something on TV.

  Lance stroked the side of my face, his thumb brushing my lower lip. “You got a nice laugh, baby,” he murmured.

  I tried not to swoon at the term of endearment that he’d been using for the past week.

  “Gonna have to make sure I figure out how to hear it every day,” he continued, making not swooning impossible.

  He might not be opening up, but he was calling me baby, touching me with tenderness, he was making me laugh, making Nathan laugh, cooking dinner, giving me orgasms that I hadn’t thought actually existed in real life. I didn’t give a crap of what seemed too soon.

  And that was my mistake.

  I didn’t have the excuse of being naïve. Robert had ensured that naivety had been beaten out of me. Instead, it was because of something Robert hadn’t ever managed to beat out of me.

  Hope.

  I hoped that I might be given this little bit of beauty amidst all this ugly. That Nathan had been given it.

  I hoped that I was maybe giving something a little bit beautiful to Lance too. That Nathan was.

  I hoped that Nathan and I were enough to quietly chip away at his walls. To show him that he could have a life with us.

  Maybe that’s why I slipped one day. Six days into our week, when I didn’t know it was the second to last day I’d get with him. I was at home. Baking cupcakes. From scratch. No box or anything.

  I’d sent Lance and Nathan out for more eggs.

  Nathan went because he went everywhere Lance went.

  It was halfway through frosting my first batch that I realized I also needed more frosting. I called Lance to tell him this.

  “Need anythin’ else?” he asked, even though I was almost certain he was pushing a very large cart full of everything I could want or imagine.

  “No,” I said, concentrating on the frosting.

  “Wine?” he probed, something resembling teasing in his voice.

  I grinned. “Only if it’s the five-dollar kind.”

  “What my woman wants, she gets,” he responded. “Except that I’ll be getting the thirty-dollar wine.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I’m plotting ways to get you back.”

  A pause. “I’m really lookin’ forward to seeing what you come up with, cupcake.”

  My breath hitched at the sex in his tone. How could he sound like that, through a phone, at the grocery store?

  It should be illegal.

  I took so long to answer, Lance spoke again.

  “Got to go, babe, see you at home for payback,” Lance said.

  I swallowed.

  Home.

  “Okay, see you soon, love you.”

  It was only after I hung up did I realize what I’d done.

  What I’d said.

  I’d freaked out for the next twenty minutes pacing the kitchen and screwing up cupcakes until the boys came home.

  My boys.

  Lance did not act different. He kissed me. Hard. Despite the numerous cootie warnings. He poured my wine.

  He acted like I hadn’t just declared my love for him over the phone, after a week of being his woman. Nor did he act like it had scared him off.

  So I relaxed. The number of orgasms and creative use of frosting after Nathan had gone to bed helped. Falling asleep in his arms helped even more.

  I hoped like anyone hoped, that some kind of fairy tale was coming true.

  My mistake.

  At least Lance only took a week to show me that fairy tales were bullshit.

  I should have thanked him for that, really.

  But he didn’t give me the opportunity to thank him.

  He didn’t give me the opportunity to say a word, in fact. Not after he’d said a whole lot of words.

  It was after a wonderful day. One of the best since the fire, once of the best in recent memory.

  It was unremarkable.

  A Saturday.

  Rosie was over with Rogue.

  We were sitting outside, drinking iced tea, talking, watching Nathan play with the toddler, watching Lance paint the shit out of the fence in the back yard.

  I didn’t ask him to paint the fence.

  Just like I didn’t ask him to paint the door.

  Replace the mailbox.

  Do small things that made this place more of a home. Do things that weren’t small at all.

  Things that I thought, meant that he was staying.

  But it turned out, he was doing them because he planned on leaving.

  That very night. On that beautiful, unremarkable day.

  Rosie had left.

  Nathan was in bed.

  I was co
ming from his bedroom to see Lance standing in the living room.

  There was a duffel bag beside him.

  The sight of that seemingly unassuming duffel bag chilled my blood.

  My bones.

  “What is that?” I asked, voice calm, even, eyes focused on the bag and then on Lance when he didn’t answer me.

  “I can’t stay here, I can’t be with you two,” he said, not looking me in the eye.

  My breath hitched. Loud. Like someone had hit me. It felt like that. A physical blow.

  “I can’t give you calm, peace,” Lance continued, still looking at a spot on the wall above my head.

  I laughed. Through the pain. Through the panic.

  I knew he definitely wasn’t expecting that since his eyes snapped to mine. “Peace is something that is lost to me whether or not you’re here,” I told him, my voice still strangely calm.

  “I have a child, a full-time job, full-time friends, and a mind that demands a constant state of crazy. Each of those scrapes a little bit of whatever peace would’ve been left from my childhood, my marriage. Add them up, it’s all gone, only chaos remains.”

  I stepped forward to reach up and cup his face. He stiffened slightly at my touch, but not as much as he would have if anyone but me had tried this. Though, no one but me actually try such a thing. “I don’t want peace,” I said, my voice a whisper. “I can’t live in it. The world has swallowed up all my peace, and I’m glad. I want all the chaos that remains, I want all that you can give me. Don’t try and use what you think I need as a flimsy excuse. If you don’t want to be with me,” I paused, thinking about the little human sleeping down the hall. “If this is all too much for you, I want you to tell me straight up. I’m a big girl, I’m well aware that I’m not exactly uncomplicated. I’m a single mom who works at a diner and currently has a house that is half burned down.” I swallowed as the weight of all those words settled on my shoulders. Although it felt like I couldn’t handle any of it, I knew that I could. That I had to. That I would, no matter what.

  I straightened my shoulders. “Don’t do me any favors by trying to find the right version of the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech,” I continued. “The truth works best with me. I can handle it.”

  That was a total lie. No way could I actually handle the truth if he said I was either not enough for him or that my life was too much for him, but it was a lie all women found themselves telling men at some point in their lives.

  “What if I can’t handle the truth?” he murmured. “What if I can’t fucking handle the knowledge that there are two people in this world who have the power to damage me when I thought there was nothing left of me to hurt?”

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. Because that’s when he kissed me on the head, picked up the duffel bag and left.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Didn’t tell him to stop.

  Didn’t chase him.

  I just collapsed.

  Right there in the middle of the living room.

  My knees were pressing into my chest, arms around them, hands shaking. My entire body was shaking. Tears ran in rivers down my face and I couldn’t stop them. Nor could I stop the loud pathetic sobs escaping from somewhere deep inside my chest. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to smash everything around me. I wanted mostly to chase after him and beg him to come back. But my body didn’t let me. So I just continued sobbing until long after he was gone.

  Lance

  His decision to leave was not easy. It was the hardest and most painful thing he’d ever done. And it was prompted, by all people, Rosie.

  Not because she didn’t want him to have some kind of ending, but because she did.

  He knew that on reflection.

  The afternoon that had been perfect. It was carved into his memory, how unnatural such contentment felt. Knowing he was gonna go to sleep with Elena, after fucking her, after feeling her pussy contract around him, with her clinging to him like a fucking clam, whispering about nothing and everything at the same time.

  He’d wake up with her.

  Eat her pussy or fuck her depending on how he was feeling.

  They’d get up. Listen to whatever crazy dream Nathan felt like telling them about, watch him eat whatever insane thing he’d decided would taste good.

  Then they’d drive him to school, with not a fuckin’ second of silence. Nathan would request Lance hold his hand as they walked into school. He’d say yes, because there was no other option.

  Then he’d drive with Elena to the job she still hadn’t quit. They’d talk. Or maybe they wouldn’t. What was certain was his hand on her thigh, feeling her warmth, her goodness.

  He might grab a coffee at the diner, sit, watch her. Or get other jobs done.

  A week shouldn’t have been long enough to become routine. But it had. And instead of it making him feel like crawling out of his skin, it made him feel like he finally fucking fit it.

  That’s what he was feeling, like his skin fit and that the sun was nice and he couldn’t wait to fuck Elena when Rosie left.

  The fence at this place sucked. The wood was rotting in places and it stained from the sun. He was replacing the pieces that needed to be replaced, painting the pieces that didn’t. Nathan had been ‘helping’ him for an impressively long time for a five-year-old while Rogue napped. He hadn’t complained. Not once. Lance didn’t think he’d ever heard the kid complain. Or pitch a fit.

  He looked like he might when his mother declared it was his bath time and he had to stop helping Captain.

  The name was a sock in the gut every time it came outta the kid’s mouth.

  It was a name he didn’t deserve, but one he never wanted to stop hearing.

  The kid didn’t pitch a fit having to go inside. Elena had given a knowing look he felt in his cock before she herded her son inside.

  He watched her do so, or more specifically, he watched her ass do so until Nathan had gone inside and she followed, presumably to make sure he was actually going into the shower and not just run the water.

  Then, and only then, did he turn his attention back to the fence.

  It didn’t stay there for long.

  “Dude, you are literally painting a picket fence white right now,” a voice said from behind him.

  Rosie was the only bitch who could creep up on him like that. Fuck, she was better than most men at Greenstone. And not just at creeping up on people. All of them were man enough to admit that Rosie was more hardcore at almost everything.

  Growing up in an outlaw biker club had a lot to do with it. The rest was just Rosie.

  He respected Rosie. Even liked her.

  Right now she was irritating the fuck out of him. Because even though she’d surprised him, he knew exactly why she was here.

  Therefore he didn’t look up.

  “You’re in a back yard filled with flowerpots and kid’s toys, in the ‘burbs, painting a picket fence white,” she continued, leaning on the portion of the fence that wasn’t done. “Up is down, white is black, Adam Lambert is straight,” she continued, grinning. He didn’t need to look up to know that. It was in her voice, that smile, that smugness.

  As much as he was pissed the fuck off with her right now, he was glad to hear that shit in her voice. Know she was smiling with real happiness in her eyes. It had taken her, and most of the team a while to get back to that. The war with Fernandez had been rough. The blood had seeped into all of them, even if they won against the notorious head of the flesh trade.

  Wars against a man like that were never won easy, or without casualties. It had been messy. Painful. Even for him, someone who didn’t really feel pain, didn’t really have that attachment.

  So yeah, part of him was glad Rosie was smiling and joking again, the rest of him was fucked off that it was at his expense.

  He kept painting.

  She didn’t make a move to leave.

  “Of all the people who I thought would be the one to jerk you outta your shit, I didn’t t
hink it’d be a single mom who liked to read tarot cards and a kid who is arguably one of the most awesome to exist,” she said. “I mean, they’re both fucking amazing human beings and I already adore the fuck out of them, but with your history, I would’ve thought they would be the last people to puncture that titanium outer.”

  This, of course, made Lance snap his head upward. As Rosie had planned. And this time, no matter how well practiced he was, he couldn’t keep the surprise from his face.

  He knew Rosie was good. He knew she was like a fucking dog with a bone when she got it in her head to find out shit, or kill someone who was hurting innocents. But he didn’t think, amidst everything going on in that bitch’s life, that she’d trouble herself to look into him. And even if she did, he’d been certain that she wouldn’t have been able to find shit.

  This was Rosie.

  It was on him for underestimating her.

  When he met her eyes, they weren’t dancing with that smug happiness that had been injected into her tone before. They were saturated with pain. A knowing. Not pity, Rosie was smart enough not to look at a man like Lance with pity. Furthermore, she’d been through horrors of her own, she knew that well-meaning pity could do more damage than vicious words.

  But there was a knowing that told him she knew everything, he hadn’t buried his shit deep enough.

  “You tell anyone?” he barked at her.

  She didn’t flinch at his tone. “Of course I didn’t tell anyone. Do I look new?”

  He didn’t answer her, just clenched his jaw and started to think of new plans he would have to make to move away from Greenstone.

  There was a pang to that.

  He had told himself it was just a job.

  He’d never been good at lying to himself. So he knew it was more than that. It was as close to a family as someone like him could ever get.

  Or so he’d thought.

  Now, as Rosie pointed out, he was in a back yard painting a fucking picket fence white. And the thought of leaving it behind, leaving them behind filled his stomach with acid.

  But he’d have to. He’d made a promise to himself that if shit ever even came close to the surface, he’d be gone before the rancid truth polluted his life.