Chapter 13
BECK
“ C arlos, I need your help,” I tell my friend.
The pained look on his face speaks volumes. I never wanted to have to use this “nuclear option” on him, not after all the talks we’ve had over the past couple of years. But the situation demands it, and I’m not sure I’ve got Dax and Leo backing me up for this just yet.
“What can I do?” Carlos asks, his shoulders slumped in defeat.
He knows what I want him to do.
Jocelyn, however, is going to be harder to convince. “You can’t be serious,” she gasps in genuine outrage.
“Just hold off on calling Devon PD, that’s all I’m asking,” I say. “Let me get Olivia home, let us talk to her. You owe us that much.”
“This is a dirty game you’re playing,” Carlos warns .
“You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t believe there’s something more to the whole story behind her arrest warrant.”
Carlos gives Olivia a conflicted look. He’s tempted to believe me, and that’s why he’s not really saying no to my request. “I can give you a few days tops before I file the arrest report. But it will go through the wire eventually. And once word gets back from Devon, we’ll have no choice but to?—”
“I know. I know, Carlos.”
“Beck, you can’t do this!” Jocelyn insists. “You’re putting your life, your freedom, your career on the line for this…”
She keeps looking at Olivia, searching for what I assume is yet another insult, and that makes my blood boil. I know this is a fragile and dangerous line I’m treading, but my honor demands it.
“Innocent until proven guilty,” I remind Jocelyn. “Pretty sure that’s still a thing.”
“Beck—”
“Enough, Jocelyn. I’m tired of these stupid games. And you know damn well how quickly public opinion can shift around election day for you.”
Jocelyn’s jaw drops. “Wait, you can’t?—”
“I can’t what? Tell the public what you did?”
“And torch your reputation along with mine? Dax’s, too? Leo’s? For her? Are you fucking serious, Beck?”
“As a heart attack,” I reply, then give Carlos a nod. “Thank you, friend. Just a few days. It’s all we need.”
To my astonishment, Dax and Leo are outside in the hallway, waiting for us as we come out of the interview room. Olivia is just as surprised, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes filled with tears.
“I–I don’t know what to say,” she mumbles. “Thank you.”
Behind us, I hear Jocelyn and Carlos arguing.
He’ll talk some sense into her eventually.
The guilt trip is always unpleasant, but it gets results.
And given how our lives were suddenly upended when Carlos showed up with that arrest warrant in the first place, well, I’ll use every tool we’ve got to get to the bottom of this.
“What are you guys doing here?” I ask Dax and Leo.
“Figured you could use the backup,” Leo says, then gives Olivia a hard look. “How are you feeling?”
We argued about how to approach this situation before I came to the station. Dax and Leo were tempted to go into a complete defense. I understand their instinct all too well—Olivia’s criminal activities could end up blowing up in our faces, if we don’t know what we’re dealing with.
And Leo has Luke to worry about.
The way we choose to love a woman isn’t easily understood by everyone, which is why few people actually know about it.
“I’m okay,” Olivia says.
We head out of the station and to my car. She keeps looking around, nervously searching for something or someone, and I feel compelled to dig deeper into that.
“What is going on with you, Olivia?” I ask. “Why are we here? Why are you here?”
“It’s a long story,” she says, staring at her shoes.
“We’ve got time,” Dax states firmly. “You owe us that much. ”
“I owe you a lot more than that,” she says and sighs. “But I’m afraid for your safety and mine. The people I’m running from are powerful. They have influence.”
“And you still don’t trust us enough to protect you,” Leo concludes.
She’s on the verge of tears again, and I can see that it’s tearing her apart on the inside. So I go back to my original strategy, what I suggested shortly after Carlos took her to the station.
“I’m taking her home for now,” I tell the guys. “She needs some rest, some peace and quiet. And when she’s ready, Olivia will tell us everything we need to know. Right, Olivia?”
I look directly at her. She knows this is a courtesy she doesn’t really deserve, and I’m still angry that she’s been keeping secrets from us, but I can’t deny what’s in my heart either. Neither can Dax or Leo, since they’re here, mustering every ounce of patience they have left.
“Right,” she says with a nimble nod. “I need some semblance of normal.”
“Good. We’ll give you normal. Normal has become our specialty since we got back from the service. We’re good with normal,” I reply.
She gives me a wry smile. “You fight fires and save people from horrible accidents for a living. How normal is that?”
“As normal as men like us could ever wish for,” I say.
At the Jackson house, the guys and I sit patiently on the sofa in the living room while Olivia slips into the shower, probably crying her heart out for a bit. I’d like nothing more than to be up there with her, but the situation leaves no room for intimacy until we get the truth out.
Once she’s ready and changed into comfortable clothing, she comes down and settles into the armchair.
“I owe you an apology, first and foremost,” she says.
“For lying?” Dax replies curtly. I give him a frown.
He isn’t bothered. I guess his feelings of anger and betrayal ring true on a level for all three of us. He’s simply more vocal about it. But as I look at Olivia, I see her vulnerability, her softness, her desire to do good, to be better—it’s all out there, on display, impossible to deny.
“For omitting the truth,” Olivia sighs deeply. “I came to Ember Ridge to hide.”
“From the law?” Leo asks.
Her eyes grow wide as she shakes her head. “I had no idea he was going to do that, I swear, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s all bogus, and it’s complicated.”
“We can understand complicated if you explain it to us,” I calmly reply.
“I was raised in a good family until I was about fourteen,” she says, lowering her gaze and focusing on her hands, anxiously resting in her lap.
“The Fairchilds were respected in the Devon community. We were well off, too, due to an inheritance and some good investments in the eighties. My dad did alright. He was able to provide a lot of jobs with his businesses across the district. Old New York money, you might say. Then my mom fell ill with an aggressive form of cancer.”
My heart breaks for her because I know how it feels; the helplessness of a child losing a parent.
“Her treatment cost a lot,” she goes on, “but it didn’t help. We lost her when I was twelve. And from there, everything spiraled out of control.”
“How so?” I ask.
“Dad started drinking, started making bad investments. Slowly but surely, I watched our life get smaller and harder until he drove himself off a bridge. I had no immediate family, no one else to look after me. I’d just turned fourteen.
So I ended up in foster care. I got bounced around a few homes, each worse than the last. My grades didn’t suffer, much to everyone’s surprise.
I’m really good with numbers, with math, computers… it was all I had during that time.
“But I aged out of foster care at eighteen without a penny to my name. I had few friends, so I turned to the streets. Moved money around. Optimized a drug dealing distribution ring for one guy. I never touched the stuff. I never dealt with the product. I just spun the numbers and found good places for them to stash it, that kind of stuff,” she says.
“What about Chloe Jackson?” Dax asks her with a furrowed brow. “Isn’t she your best friend?”
“She is. Was. Or still is, if she’s alive,” Olivia replies, and I catch something there that I hadn’t noticed before—a new level to her fear.
It’s making her hands tremble. “I didn’t want her to be associated with me, not with the kind of work I was doing.
Chloe was going to a good college. When I turned nineteen, I got arrested.
Not exactly a shocker,” she adds with a scoff.
“Marcus Bennett was the arresting officer, a promising deputy at the time.”
Marcus Bennett. I make a mental note of that name. I’ve got a feeling he’s the key to everything.
“He gave me a second chance,” Olivia says, “and I believed everything he told me. I fell in love and I fell for his lies. That was the beginning of the end.”
The more she tells us about her past, the clearer it becomes: This woman’s softness and sweetness survived some truly horrific events. No wonder we’re so smitten with her. No wonder she snuck into our hearts and is now holding each of us hostage.
She belongs with us.
Whether she’s ready to admit it or not.