by Kent, Julia
It was just as well, for Dylan had other issues he was working on. Hiring a private investigator to understand the inner workings of the man who was in front of Mike, now slowly standing and turning, giving Mike a friendly grin, was just as important.
“Michael Pine. It’s a pleasure finally to meet you.” Frank strode across the room with large steps, as if he owned the office. Mike stood still, knowing that being calm, centered, focused, and—most important—unflappable was key here.
His eyes bored into Frank’s as they gripped hands. What they engaged in was less a handshake than an arm wrestling, Mike’s younger, stronger clench finally winning out as he felt Frank’s bones crunch under his grip.
“Hello…” Mike gave Frank a puzzled look. “And you are…?”
Frank’s eyes gleamed with cunning. Ah, so that’s how it is? they seemed to say. Mike detached himself from any emotional reaction. One blink could throw him off. This guy needed to be treated like he was dangerous. For all Mike knew, he could be.
Laura’s reactions lately seemed to make it a possibility.
“Frank Stedman, of course.” He reached out and slapped Mike’s shoulder with enough force to rattle a smaller man’s teeth. “Surely Laura has mentioned me!” The look on Frank’s face said he’d be offended if the answer was “no,” and yet the man clearly knew he was on shaky ground.
“Laura has talked about a distant uncle, but said it’s been years since you’ve had any contact…” Mike let the sentence hang in the air, his face neutral but eyes lasered in on Frank’s.
No blinking.
“It isn’t as if I haven’t tried!” Frank protested, sweeping his arm out toward Mike’s desk. “You know Laura,” he said with a conspirator’s chuckle that made Mike’s fists clench. His jaw followed, forcing him to inhale very, very slowly to keep his cool. How dare the man claim to know Laura intimately enough to be so blasé?
“Why don’t we sit and chat?” Frank added, watching Mike carefully, clearly searching for ways to read him. Mike wasn’t giving any quarter.
“I prefer to stand.” Mike’s voice came out cold and hard. It grated against his own ears, and yet he let his eyes go dead. This was how he had to play if Frank was going to lead the charge with lies.
Lying about Laura right to Mike’s face put Frank in the dangerous category, all right.
But Mike had plenty of danger in him, too.
“Stand. Hmmm.” Frank broke eye contact and turned toward the massive window, floor to ceiling, that looked out over the large mountain that made up the ski resort. “With a view like this,” Frank said with a conspirator’s chuckle, “I’d stand, too.”
Ignoring the fact that his desk chair faced the same view, Mike clasped his hands together at his waist and said nothing, blinking evenly, forcing his throat muscles to relax. Silence could unnerve most people.
Mike was good at silence.
Frank was not.
Ten beats went by. Twenty. Frank began to cast nervous glances at Mike, which would have unnerved him on any other day, in any other setting, but instead—to Mike’s pleasant surprise—the looks only fortified him. Intensified his resolve to get this man out of Laura’s life and to bring her back to the equanimity she so desperately desired.
Frank was a threat to their happy little life, and that meant he needed to be managed.
One quiet second at a time.
Finally, Frank broke. Clearing his throat, he said, “I’m sure you are wondering why I am here.”
Mike decided to up the ante, moving swiftly toward Frank, only needing five powered steps to come within close range. Frank stiffened but did not move.
“I am.” Mike measured his words in centuries, not seconds. The slower he spoke, moved, thought—felt—the more control he could maintain. An inner fury spun in circles, building an energy within that threatened to burst out of him.
He did not like this man.
In fact, hate might be strong enough a word to apply, because Frank represented something that was rotten to the very core, as if a seed itself were defective.
Frank gave a practiced, tight smile, instantly alerting Mike to the fact that nothing that was about to be said was true. “I’ve lost touch with Laura these years, and I regret it. She hasn’t responded to my emails and I’ve started talking to her friends out of desperation.”
Desperation. Mike would use the word manipulation, but semantics weren’t important right now. Narrowing his eyes, Mike said nothing. Let the man stew in his own soup of insincerity.
Frank was a little too comfortable simmering there, for he went on, seeming to think Mike was buying this.
“And so when she didn’t answer my email, I went to her place of business.” Frank picked up a framed photo Mike had on his desk, a shot of the four of them at a huge outdoor festival last month, Jillian on Dylan’s shoulders, chubby fists buried in his hair, a four-tooth smile lighting up the photo. Laura’s hair was windblown and her face ruddy from the spring chill, but the picture was a pretty accurate summary of their messy, authentic life.
He wanted to peel it out of Frank’s hands and hide it. The man didn’t deserve to touch a representation of Laura and Jillie, much less sit here and claim to be the poor uncle nobody would talk to.
“You spoke with Josie,” Mike said in that same cold voice.
Frank’s eyes lowered, his head nodding slightly, the whole thing so choreographed Mike wanted to laugh, a bitter sound that clogged his throat now as he held back.
“I did. Lovely young woman.” He gave Mike a bit of a leer, the kind of look men shared quietly when they talked about women as if they were compilations of soft flesh and nothing more. “I can see why she would be shared by two men.”
Snap.
The thin layer of restraint in Mike gave way.
“How much?” he spat out.
Frank pretended to be offended. Frank pretends a lot, Mike thought. Mike needed to pretend right now, too. Needed to pretend it was a bad idea to beat this man to death and hide his body in the office supply closet.
“Mike, I…this is about family, not money.”
Mike snorted, heat pouring through his skin in waves, as if someone were dipping him in hot wax. The rage, the fury, the endless assault of everything out of control whipped up in him, rising to the top. If he didn’t end this now, didn’t run for so long he couldn’t think, didn’t get home to touch his woman and his daughter, he was going to explode.
And right now, that meant losing everything that was important to him.
So he offered up something that paled in comparison.
“How much ‘family’ do you want?” Mike kept the finger quotes tight and restrained. “We both know why you’re here.” Mike strode with purpose to his desk and yanked open a drawer, finding his personal checkbook quickly. Wishing he’d prepared for this, he pulled one check out of the book, the tick-tick-tick sound of the paper’s perforated edge like a heartbeat that ended the second he tore the page loose.
“I’m…no, no, Mike, you have me all wrong. I’m not here for your money.”
“You’re here for Laura’s.” Mike didn’t ask. He declared.
“I am here to get to know my niece and grand-niece!” Frank declared in a staged voice, as if there were an audience. Mike was a singular witness, though. Shelly was long gone.
“You’re here to exact money from us, just like you forced poor Laura to cough up a bunch of her mother’s estate,” Mike said flatly. “Don’t play games. We know.”
“Is that what Laura told you?” A bitter, sad laugh followed. “I knew she was mentally fragile, but I didn’t know she was…inventing like that.”
Mike’s heat flashed over to ice cold.
“Excuse me?” If he’d possessed a weapon of any kind, he wasn’t certain he’d be able to stop his hands from using it. Shit. Dylan would know how to end this, how to make this guy leave, how to drive him out like a dog with his tail between his legs. Mike wasn’t good at this, and his internal sense of how to s
tructure his words, how to read Frank’s nonverbal cues, was falling apart.
He was devolving into something primal, the instinct to protect Laura and Jillian at full throttle, and if he gave in to it Frank was going to get hurt.
Writing a check for more than he earned in a year just three years ago was less of a price to pay than a lawyer’s defense fee on an assault charge.
A tiny voice inside him, the one that guided him through breathing deeply and not turning Frank into a pile of ground beef, couldn’t fathom that he had the potential for such violence in him.
Apparently he did, and Laura and Jillian were the trigger.
Frank tilted his head as if he were struggling to say something distasteful, as if he were being modest and not wanting to speak ill of someone. A white and red cloud of rage made it hard to actually watch the man.
“Laura always had a flair for the dramatic,” Frank said with a low chuckle, moving covertly toward the door. Perhaps Mike wasn’t hiding his anger as well as he thought.
Perhaps that was a good thing.
“Dramatic.” Mike repeated the word like he’d taken a bite of fresh cow shit.
“So you know?” Frank’s smile twisted Mike’s guts.
“I know what?”
“How she can make situations seem different from the facts.”
Oh, no. Oh, no. The man did not just do that.
“Get out,” Mike roared. The sound was so loud, so packed with sheer fight, that it made Mike’s ribs vibrate. He half expected the window to shatter.
Frank jumped, his neck twisting with shock. “Excuse—”
“Get out of my office before I show you exactly how I handle someone who comes into our life and accuses my woman of lying.” Mike bore down on him, making Frank stumble. A warning voice told him not to touch the man, but there were about three seconds left between Mike’s ability to hold himself back and the need for Frank to get the fuck out of his sight.
“Lying? No, I wasn’t—” Frank froze. Whatever he saw in Mike’s eyes made him shut up and walk to the door, as jittery as a man fleeing an uncaged game lion.
“You have exactly twenty seconds to be out of my building before I call security,” Mike ground out from his door, grabbing the edge with a hand that left finger imprints in the soft wood.
Shelly came out of her office and looked at both men. “Can I—”
Slam!
Mike picked up the phone, stabbing the numbers with brutal efficiency. Dylan’s voice cut through the oppressive cloud of everything.
“Mike?”
“He was here.”
“And?”
“Get that PI on the case now. Right now.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
Dylan’s long sigh made Mike wince. “Go for a run, man. Right now.”
“Can’t. I’m in a suit.”
“You own the place. Just run. Do the stairs, go on the trails—just run. I don’t want you driving like this.”
“Like what?”
“Mike,” Dylan said in a low voice. “You sound like you’re about to murder someone.”
Mike’s hand holding the receiver began to shake. “I was.”
“I know.” The gentle tone his partner took made the mist clear, dropping like a fine dust all over Mike’s soul. “And I know you. Run it out. Fuck the expensive suit and shoes. Pound it out before you come home. And for God’s sake, don’t go near that motherfucker. I don’t want to bail you out of jail for assault.”
“Hasn’t happened yet,” Mike barked.
“And I hope it never will.”
“That guy comes near Laura or Jillie, so help me God—”
“He won’t.”
“But if he—”
“He won’t. Just run.”
Mike could feel his heart beat again, the slow adjustment back to a more aware state seeping in. Pure fury had taken over, mingling all his body functions into a cloud of noise. Now he could feel the hard plastic of the phone against his palm, how the receiver scratched against his chin, the way his blood pounded through his thighs, needing to be drained and wrung by a long run.
“Just run,” Dylan repeated.
So Mike did.
Chapter Four
Laura
The front door opened and in walked Mike, dripping wet from sweat, wearing the same gorgeous suit he’d worn this morning, battered black dress shoes flying across the floor as he kicked them off. His hair was absolutely drenched, so wet it curled up in little ringlets around his head, just like Jillian’s did after a bath.
He was soaked through, suit jacket and all, a handful of dry patches here and there. Pants, too—sweat spots took over most of the clothing.
“Run into a sprinkler on your way home?” Laura joked. She caught a peek at the driveway outside before he closed the door behind him and stared in confusion. “Where’s the Jeep?”
“Not here.” Mike could barely talk as he peeled off his clothes in the foyer, dropping the fine cloth to the ground, where it hit with a strange thud, like a melon wrapped in a wet pillowcase.
“What do you mean not here? Did the Jeep break down?”
“No.”
She felt Dylan’s presence behind her and turned around to see an inscrutable look on his face. His eyes met Mike’s, and something passed between them, some unspoken message that she knew she’d never know. They had this…ability to do that. It used to make her feel left out.
Right now, though, she was just glad that someone understood what on earth was going on with Mike, because it looked like he’d just—
“You ran home,” Dylan said in an admiring tone.
“Yes.”
“From where?” Laura asked. “And in dress shoes and a suit?” Why would he run home? Had there been a catastrophe? A flash of September 11, 2001 shot through her consciousness, making her eyes dart to the blank television screen, the set turned off. Had some world disaster struck?
“From work.” Mike’s two-word sentences were freaking her out.
“From the resort office?”
“Yes.” Now he was down to one-word utterances and she was being driven absolutely mad.
“But that’s miles!” Her own shrillness made her stop talking, swallow hard, and turn to look at Dylan, who was staring at Mike. She knew Frank had been in his office. How bad had it been?
“I run it all the time.” Mike struggled to unbutton a cuff, and after the third failed attempt simply ripped at the fabric, a button pinging off a light fixture, landing an inch from her foot. Peeling his arm out of the wet cloth, he dropped the shirt on the floor. A part of Laura’s mind did an inventory of buttons; Jillian would find one and swallow it if allowed. She bent down to get it, and her eyes found his shirt and mentally cataloged. All buttons accounted for.
Mike’s sense of balance was remarkably absent. If only it were as easy to track as buttons…
“You run home, yes,” she conceded. “But in proper running shoes and clothes! Not in tight wingtips and a business suit!”
Bright eyes met hers, feral and predatory. Dangerous. She shut up instantly.
Dylan’s warm hand covered her shoulder and she took a few breaths, trying to understand what had happened. “It’s cool. Go shower, Mike. I’ll explain it all to Laura.”
Mike was stripped down to his boxer briefs, which were as soaked with sweat as if he’d gone swimming in them. His body gleamed, muscles swollen with use, his legs strong and contoured. An urge to touch them, to run her hands along the hills and valleys they made on his thighs and calves, swept through her, her eyes drinking in the slopes of his glutes, how he looked like a tanned black diamond ski trail, all twists and turns and something she wanted to summit.
And go down.
Sex was the last thing on Mike’s mind, Laura knew, as he shook his head curtly and marched past her. The hiss of a shower turning on echoed in the distance.
Laura turned to Dylan and asked, “What the hell is that all about?”
/>
He reached for her hand, then nudged her toward the couch. Uh-oh. Something was wrong.
“Is this about Frank?” she asked in a voice so shaky she cringed, hating the neediness in her own tone. Not that she could help it. Her mind raced to locate Jillian in time and space. That’s right. She sighed and turned around to find Little Miss Sweetie spread out on an activity blanket on the floor in front of the sofa, a set of stacking cups on front of her, spilled pell-mell all over the place.
Jillian was chewing on the edge of one of Dylan’s tennis shoes.
“Yes,” Dylan said, pulling her in for an embrace she didn’t know she needed until his warmth covered her.
“Mama hug! Mama hug!” Jillian called out, clapping fat little hands. Abandoning her snack, she leaned forward, stuck her bum in the air, and pushed herself up to standing, toddling over to Dylan and Laura, inserting herself between. Tiny ringlet curls banged against Laura’s knee.
She laughed, the sound tight and almost hysterical. Dylan wouldn’t let her pull away. But she had to.
“I need to check on Mike,” she said, and as if she’d hollered Open, Sesame, Dylan’s arms parted, landing on her shoulders as his eyes locked with hers.
“Go to him,” he said in a deep, calm voice. “He needs you right now more than anything.”
“Dillie hug! Dillie hug!” Not quite mastering her Js yet, Jillie knew how to advocate for what she wanted, making Laura reach down and rub the light hair that covered the little girl’s head.
Dylan picked her up like she was a bag of sugar and tipped her, ass over tea kettle, onto his shoulder, giggles pealing out like happiness in the form of sound. “Dillie, huh? Is that my nickname?”
“You dada!” Jillian shouted, pointing to herself. “Me Dillie!”
That’s right, Laura thought. You dada. A sharp, bitter taste filled her mouth. If it had a color, it would be green. The same feeling, like a squeeze over her heart, had started when Jillian was tiny, just days old. Her own father took off long before Laura could form memories, and watching Dylan and Mike form a fortress of love around their daughter made Laura deeply jealous. Jealous. Not envious, because she certainly didn’t want to take one drop of her fathers’ love away from Jillie, but jealous? Yes.
