by Marie James
When he looks up scanning the room, the contrast of his bright blue eyes makes me feel exposed. I clear my throat, straightening in my seat as his face turns in our direction.
“Welcome,” he grunts to his captive audience. “We’re going to start with roll call, then we have some paperwork to get out of the way before we get started on the class.”
His voice is rough and gravelly, but instead of it making me feel uncomfortable, I find myself a little entranced as he calls out the names on the list.
“Hayden,” Parker says with a nudge to my side.
“Hayden Prescott?” he says, and I can tell by his tone that it isn’t the first time he’s read my name from his list.
“Present!” I snap, raising my hand with awkwardness.
He frowns in my direction before moving his gaze slightly to my right to focus on Parker.
Why all of a sudden do I feel like I should shove her out of her chair and kick her under the table?
“And who are you?” the man all but growls.
Parker preens a little, a vibrant smile spreading across her face. “I’m Parker Maxwell. I’m Hayden’s best friend. It’s nice to meet y—”
“You’re not on my list,” he interrupts.
“I signed in at the front.” Parker’s smile doesn’t fade.
“If you’re not on the list, you can’t join the class. Did you get an email confirmation?”
“I didn’t personally sign up for the class. I’m here with Hayden.”
“This class is only for confirmed attendees.” He keeps his eyes locked on her, both of them not speaking until it becomes so awkward that the other women in the room begin to shift uncomfortably in their seats. “You need to leave so we can get started.”
Now that pretty, practiced smile slides off my friend’s face.
“Let’s just go,” I mutter as I begin to stand from my seat.
“You don’t have to leave, Ms. Prescott,” the man says.
“I’m not staying if she can’t stay.”
He doesn’t say another word as we both stand and make our way out of the room.
I didn’t want to be here in the first place, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset to be called out like we were.
“We can just sign up together for the next class,” Parker says as she loops her arm through mine as we leave the building. “Let’s go grab dinner.”
That’s Parker for you—quick to make new plans when others fall through.
“I’m not going to a bar to eat dinner,” I say as we make our way across the parking lot.
Hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but I blame the setting sun and the cool evening breeze.
“It’s called a pub, not a bar.”
“And I’d prefer a restaurant that’s not crowded.”
She huffs but quickly agrees. She knows I can just as easily go home and cook and be happier than going out and being around other people.
“Fine,” she says. “But I want sushi.”
Chapter 3
Quinten
“You can suck it!”
“I’m not arguing with you about this,” Wren grumbles as I walk into his office.
“Stupid fucking cat!” Puff Daddy screeches.
I’d say he’s in rare form, throwing a fit while pacing back and forth along one of his perches, but this is just classic behavior for the verbally aggressive bird.
“What’s the problem now?” I ask, not one hundred percent sure I even want to know.
“He’s still pissed about the cat,” Wren mutters, his attention still mostly on the information he’s compiling on his computer.
“You left me here last night!” Puff wails before making a realistic crying noise.
“Because you said you didn’t want to go home,” Wren argues, his voice flat yet irritated.
“The Hilton has free breakfast!”
I laugh at the stupid bird.
“And I have a perfectly good condo. I’m not staying in a hotel because you can’t get along with your brother.”
“Stepbrother!” the bird corrects. “He’s Satan’s best friend!”
“So fucking glad I live alone,” I mutter as I plop down the stack of papers in front of him.
“He’s fine with Whitney, but he hates the cat.”
“Look at my ass!” The bird turns around, waving his little feathery butt in our direction. “It’s flat. Chicks love a full ass.”
“Those grow back?” I ask, pointing to the lack of red tail feathers.
“Takes six to eight weeks,” Wren explains. “He’s just impatient.”
“I’ve been violated!”
“And why doesn’t he just stay away from the fucking cat?”
Wren turns to face me, a wide grin on his face. “That cat is surprisingly agile, and his ability to climb the curtains is uncanny. There are only thirteen here. You’re missing one.”
Wren taps the edge of the paperwork I just handed him on his desk to straighten it.
“One woman showed up with a friend.”
“So, there should be fifteen,” he says in a tone that tells me he’s making fun of my math skills.
“They left.” He frowns. “I told the friend she wasn’t registered, so she had to leave. The other woman left, too.”
I don’t go into detail that it’s probably a good thing because that friend had a glint in her eye that only spelled trouble. She was there for the very reason so many other women completed the form. I’m still in a position to blame that stupid trending hashtag for this entire mess. Which also reminds me to smack Flynn in the back of the head the next time I see him for ending up on the front cover of those stupid gossip magazines with his woman.
Wren shuffles through the paperwork once again. “Hayden Prescott?”
“I guess,” I tell him with a shrug, but it’s fake indifference.
I spent a little too long last night watching her stand from the table, gather her things, and walk out of the room. I knew why she was there, and it had everything to do with her size and nothing to do with knowing any detail about what’s going on in her life to have been flagged by Wren’s online bots leading to her selection for the class.
She’s fucking tiny, a little wisp of a woman who probably wouldn’t even come up to the bottom of my beard if she were standing on her tiptoes. Hell, she’s so slight an attacker would probably still laugh at her if she were pointing a gun in his face. If I saw her from behind, I’d mistake her for a child.
But I didn’t see her from behind. I got a full front view of the woman, and there’s nothing childlike about her. Not the curve of her breasts in that silky blouse she was wearing. Not the deep penetrating gaze she seemed reluctant to throw my way.
No. Hayden Prescott is all woman, just in a miniature package.
It’s another reason why I’m so floored that she garnered so much of my attention last night.
I like my women sturdy. I don’t want to end up hurting one of them on accident when I—
Shit, why am I even letting my head go there right now? I’ll never see her again.
“You have to call her and get her back in the class.”
“Uh, what?” If I had a little bubble above my head, this man would’ve just popped the damn thing.
“Hayden Prescott needs to be in that class. Were you not listening when I explained that every one of those women were handpicked for a reason?”
“Is she one of the ones with domestic abuse in her background?” I ask, breaking the rule I set for myself not to get too invested in any of their stories.
It’s not because I don’t care, but it’s hard to fight the urge to fix things when I find them broken, and nothing fixes a man who hurts women than his own trip to the emergency room.
“She had a home burglary.”
“People get robbed all the time. Does she live in a shitty neighborhood?”
“Her address is in a nicer part of town, but she lives alone. She doesn’t have many friends.
”
“She had a friend last night,” I mumble, still able to picture the glint in her friend’s eyes as she tried to smile her way into the class.
“What’s her friend’s name?” Wren asks as he turns back to his computer.
“Parker something or other.”
“Parker Maxwell?”
“Sounds right.”
“She’s not flagged at all for needing the class.”
“And I could tell that about her last night.”
That’s not completely true. Many women are well-versed at being able to hide what’s going on in their personal lives, but that woman is a man-eater through and through. I’ve dealt with my share of them in the past, mostly for clients who have interacted with them and were left with the short end of the stick.
“Looks like you’re going to have fifteen in the class.”
“They left. Put them both in the next class.” I make a mental note to suddenly be busy if Deacon decides to host another one of these training classes.
“She needs help now. Just give her a call and tell her that she can come to the next class with her friend.”
I close my eyes and take a long, frustrated breath in through my nose. “Sure thing.”
“And Quinten?” Wren says before I can leave his office. “It would be best if I could get that paperwork to Pam by the weekend.”
“It’s Friday,” I remind him.
He just grins before turning back around to finish working on whatever he was doing before I interrupted.
He’s back to arguing with the damned bird before I can close the door.
I spend five minutes chatting with Jude in the breakroom before heading to my office. What I did yesterday wasn’t a mistake, but there’s no way to call someone and tell them to come back after making them leave without sounding like an asshole.
As I sit in my office chair, I wonder if I could get Pam to call Hayden and get her up here to sign the stupid paperwork. After ten minutes of staring at the phone, I look up her information in our computer system and make the call.
“Hello?” she says, answering after the third ring.
So much for just leaving a voicemail.
“Hayden Prescott?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Excuse me?” I ask, confused.
“I don’t care about an extended warranty. My roof is fine, and vinyl siding would look terrible on my house.”
I fight a laugh, wondering how many calls she gets for those types of things that she went through the whole spiel that quickly. I guess I’m just lucky she isn’t screening her calls, or unlucky depending on how you look at it.
“This is Quinten Lake with Blackbridge Security. I’m—”
“The giant jerk.”
I pause, not sure if she’s using giant in reference to my size or level of jerkiness.
“I’m the instructor for the shooting safety class.”
“Look, I didn’t want to go to that stupid class to begin with. I had no idea that Parker wasn’t registered. I don’t understand a follow-up call after being embarrassed. It’s not like I’m planning on leaving a bad Yelp review or something, so you’re wasting both of our time.”
This woman is so fucking feisty, and I must be crazy because I kind of like it. She’s like a stack of short-fused dynamite in a tiny little package.
“I’ve been told by my office manager that there was a mix up. You and your friend are welcome to rejoin the class.” I shake my head, knowing that sounded like a personal apology rather than some type of processing mistake. “I’ll just need you to swing by our main office at some point today to complete the paperwork.”
Silence fills the line, but the timer on the phone display is still clicking off the seconds, so I know she hasn’t hung up.
“Let me get this straight, you kick us out of class, realize it’s a mistake, and then expect me to spend my time coming to you to complete paperwork I could’ve easily done last night?”
I open my mouth to argue that I didn’t ask her to leave, that it was her friend who was the unauthorized attendee, but there’s no sense in arguing the point.
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” I say instead.
“The drive wouldn’t. Can I not just complete the paperwork at the next class?”
“We’ll need to go over the information you missed at last night’s class.” I find myself wanting to rile her up just to get another taste of her hair-trigger attitude. “I’ll need to reschedule that class for you sometime during the week. What day—”
“I can give you an hour before the next class, and that’s it.”
The corner of my mouth turns up. “Are you a fast learner?”
“I’m not an idiot, if that’s what you’re asking. What does the first class entail?”
“Missouri laws regarding handguns,” I answer.
“So nothing that requires actually touching them?”
“Correct.”
“I’ll bring a notepad an hour early.”
“I have a pamphlet. So, you don’t—”
The call goes dead, and I find myself equally entertained and annoyed as I place the handset back on the receiver.
She’s like a chihuahua. The size of a small animal with the attitude of a fierce lion.
Finding myself restless, I head back to the breakroom for a bottle of water.
“I hear you kicked someone out of your class last night,” Jude says as I enter the room.
Deacon’s head swirls around, his focus on the sandwich he’s making gone. “What?”
I glare at my friend for throwing me under the bus.
“Of course, you heard already. I would question Wren’s dedication to gossip if he let an hour go by without relaying our conversation word for word.” I make my way to the fridge, opting for an energy drink instead of water. “One of the women showed up with a friend that wasn’t registered.”
“You should’ve let her stay,” Deacon says before bringing his food to his mouth and biting into it.
“She left with her friend, but before you complain, I just got off the phone with her and let her know that her friend was more than welcome to come to class. We’ve made arrangements for her to come early to cover the material she missed last night.”
Satisfied with my explanation, Deacon nods before leaving to head back to his office.
I kick Jude’s foot when our boss’s office door closes.
“Dick,” I mutter.
He grins widely. He knows that we aren’t micromanaged by Deacon like some people are by their bosses, but I still don’t like having to explain myself. If I’m going to be given autonomy to work, then I don’t need those decisions being analyzed.
“Just for that, I think you need to come help during one class.”
He doesn’t answer, instead pulling a length of rope from his pocket as he begins to tie it in different sized knots.
Chapter 4
Hayden
“He’s full of shit,” I grumble, my foot tapping on the linoleum floor with my arms crossed over my chest.
“Maybe one person in the office told him one thing and someone else told him something different. It happens at your job all the time,” Parker says.
“And that explains the reason for making us leave last week, but then to have the audacity to expect me to drive across town to sign some paperwork? Geez, doesn’t the man know how to scan documents into email?”
I shouldn’t be taking my irritation out on Parker, but even though I argued about what time I’d be here tonight when Quinten called last Friday, I had no real intention of showing up. If I hadn’t been so fired up that I called Parker to complain about the jerk, I could be sitting at home in my pajamas watching baking show reruns.
She all but squealed when I told her we could go back, and here we are… waiting because although Quinten was adamant about needing to go over this information, he’s the one who’s late.
“Would you quit?” Parker hisses when I tu
rn my arm to look at my watch again.
“He’s late. It’s rude.”
“It’s two minutes past. Maybe he got caught in traffic or had a—” The door to the classroom opens, cutting off her words. “There he is. Hi, Mr. Lake.”
“Quinten,” he grunts. “Sorry I’m late.”
He doesn’t offer an excuse, and I know I’m just being petty over two minutes, but that annoys me too. Not that I should be concerned about where he’s been. Only a crazy woman would wonder what a man she doesn’t even know has been up to, and I’m anything but crazy.
“Sign these.” He pulls two sheets of paper with fine print on them and places them in front of each of us.
Parker uses the ink pen on the table to scribble her name at the bottom.
“You need to read that,” I hiss.
She shrugs as I turn my attention back to the form, reading it word for word, slower than it would normally take me because if he’s going to waste my time, then I’m petty enough to waste a little of his.
Only when I finish reading about liability and instructional rules, do I look up at him. I find a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth instead of a frown of irritation. I can’t tell if he’s happy I’ve taken the time to read it, or if it’s an agreement to my pettiness that he’s accepting as a challenge.
I scrawl my name before sliding the paper back across the table to him.
“I was trying to explain these when you hung up on me last week,” he says as he hands each of us a rather drab looking informational pamphlet.
“You hung up on him?” Parker hisses as if the man isn’t standing just a few feet away.
I shrug, refusing to apologize. “I thought the conversation was over.”
“As you can see…”
He spends the next twenty minutes going over the pamphlet word for word, as if neither one of us can read. Parker seems a little too happy to listen to him talk, and personally, I find myself listening to the tone and cadence of his voice rather than the actual words.
