Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
“Beer or bourbon, Detective Turner?” Chelsea Kessler asked from behind the bar.
“On call, Chels, just water.”
“You’re lucky we’re not one of those bars where when a patron orders a water, we turn the gun on them.” She smiled. “Though I’m sure every female in the place would be down for some hot-cop, wet t-shirt action.”
“I’m thinking your husband would have an issue with that.”
Issue was an understatement. Matt Kessler came across as laid back, but the former SEAL turned private security contractor slash bar owner was anything but.
He was also rich as sin, and not because Balls Deep turned over a good profit.
He was born into money. The kind of money that came with trust funds the feds couldn’t touch when his father went down for shady dealings with the mob.
Generational wealth. Yet, Matt left that life behind to join the Navy, choosing honor and service over the almighty dollar.
Chelsea sat my water on the bar in front of me, and her smile turned into something that looked a lot like mischief mixed with determination. A smile that was wholly uncomfortable, seeing as she was attractive, very married to my friend, and the smile only added to her beauty.
“I’m not a fan of whatever mayhem you’re planning,” I noted.
“Who? Me?” Chelsea drawled.
“Yes. You,” I unnecessarily confirmed.
“Before you say no, just hear me out,” she wheedled.
“That’s never a good start.” My partner, Ethan Lenox, rightly pointed out as he slid onto the stool beside me.
Chelsea tossed Ethan a scathing look before she told him, “You know I’m good with ropes, right? And I’m sure Matt has some duct tape around here somewhere.”
Before injury forced Chelsea to hang up her cowgirl hat, she was a champion bull rider.
I’d never watched her ride in person, but I’d seen the video of her last ride.
The woman was tough as fuck, not to mention brave.
I wouldn’t be caught dead on the back of a two-thousand-pound animal who didn’t want me there and was doing its best to buck me off.
Ethan raised his hands in surrender. “Please continue.”
“I was just talking to Jase about how much fun it would be to do a fundraiser. Hot cops—”
“No, you weren’t,” I quickly interrupted her. I watched Matt approach Chelsea behind the bar.
“Hot cop?” Ethan asked, smiling.
Chelsea shrugged. “That’s what Sophie calls Valentine. And lucky for me…wait! Hot cops and firefighters. Jackson and Brice could get some of the guys at the firehouse to help.”
“Help with what?” Matt asked as he pulled his wife to his chest and kissed the top of her head.
Thank fuck.
Matt would put an end to whatever crazy shit Chelsea was cooking up.
“Hot cops and firemen going up for auction to help fund Women’s Inc.’s holiday extravaganza.”
Auction?
That was a hell to the no.
“What’s a holiday extravaganza?” Ethan inquired instead of doing what he should’ve done and flatly refused.
“The holidays are always tight. They’re especially tight for the parents we work with. Our goal is to be able to fund Christmas for at least ten families. Presents, wrapping paper, food, baking supplies, the whole shebang.”
Fuck. Now I was going to be an asshole and a Scrooge when I said no.
“You know Jackson won’t say no to Quinn if she asks,” Matt told her. “And Shiloh will tell her brothers where to be and what time, and Phoenix and Echo will be there.”
What the hell was happening?
What was supposed to be a drink, albeit non-alcoholic, with my partner had turned into a nightmare.
I swiveled on the stool to make my exit when Ethan called me out. “What’s wrong, Jase, afraid no one will bid on you?”
No, I was afraid someone would. Then I’d have to take part in whatever they won.
“Detective Lenox?” A soft feminine voice called from behind me, drawing Ethan’s attention over my shoulder.
“Stacey.” Ethan greeted the newest server at Balls Deep before I could turn to face the woman.
“Uh…hey…um…Detective Turner,” she stuttered her greeting. “Sorry to interrupt.”
I wasn’t.
Stacey was the perfect distraction from Chelsea’s devious scheming.
“Everything alright?” I asked when I caught her look of uncertainty.
Stacey Witmore was shy, quiet, and very timid, but the way her gaze was bouncing between our huddle, with her shoulders stiff and her back ramrod straight, was next level.
“Sure…I mean, yes. Everything’s fine. You asked me to let you know if I saw Tate.”
Tate Hendrix lived two doors down from Stacey.
He was also bad news and currently wanted for questioning in connection with a missing persons case Ethan and I were working on.
That was how I’d met Stacey. She’d called emergency dispatch the night before Tate’s girlfriend, Samantha, was last seen.
During our interview, she was fidgety and nervous.
It wasn’t until she’d checked the clock on her wall for the third time that Ethan asked if she needed to be somewhere.
Reluctantly, as if admitting she was a single mom who needed to pick up her child from school was a felony, she explained why she was in a rush.
When we offered to come back, she again hesitantly told us she had a job interview she couldn’t miss.
It was obvious from the neighborhood she lived in, the beat-up old Sentra in her driveway, and the sparse furnishings that she was struggling. If there was one thing both Ethan and I had a soft spot for, it was single parents fighting to survive.
Me, because I was raised by a single mom who worked hard to keep me clothed, fed, and a roof over our heads. Being a single dad now, I understood struggle went beyond the financial strain.
Ethan, because he’d become a single dad at sixteen when he took on the responsibility of raising his daughter, Carson, without the help of her mother. His family had stepped up in a big way, but Ethan was determined to bear the brunt of raising his daughter.
Two days later, when we sat down with Stacey to follow up on the call she’d made, she told us she didn’t get the job she’d applied for.
Ethan stepped outside to make a call. When he came back in, he handed Stacey Matt’s contact info and told her there was a job waiting for her if she wanted to wait tables.
She’d taken Ethan up on the job offer, but not my offer to help her track down a rental in a better part of town.
That was two weeks ago, and in those two weeks, we hadn’t been able to nail Tate down.
“Where did you see him?” Ethan asked.
“He was getting out of his car when I was pulling out of my driveway to come here.”
Ethan was already pushing away from the bar before Stacey had finished.
With a lift of his chin to Matt and Chelsea, he refocused on Stacey. “Was he alone?”
“Yeah.”
I fished my wallet out of my pocket and tossed a twenty on the bar. “Thanks for the drink.”
“It was water,” Chels reminded me. “You know, the free kind out of the tap.”
“Add it to your Holiday Extravaganza fund,” I told her as I skirted around the stools.
“If you think twenty bucks is going to buy you off my list, you’re wrong.”
It was time to find a new place to drink. Not that I had a lot of time to drink. Hell, I couldn’t even down a glass of water before duty called.
“Stacey. Thanks for the heads-up,” I told her and followed Ethan, who already had his phone out, undoubtedly texting his wife, Honor.
“If you have to get home to the wife and kids, I can hit up Tate’s place without you.”
Ethan lifted his head, speared me with a look that said I was a dumbass before he wordlessly went back to texting.
“You drive, I’ll call the station on our way there,” he told me. “We’ll swing back around so you can drop me off when we’re done.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about his plan.
I knew Ethan. There wasn’t much he’d give up an evening with his family for. A night out at a bar when neither of us could drink, meant he had something heavy on his mind.
As soon as Ethan finished his call to the station and hit me with his opener, I was suddenly grateful for the interruption at the bar and the short ten-minute drive to Tate’s.
“Everything good with Shay?”
I had less than zero interest in talking about my ex-wife. And that wasn’t me being a dick or holding onto long-ago, forgotten grudges. I just didn’t have anything to say about her.
“We share kids. Nothing more.”
“So, you being quiet these past few weeks has nothing to do with her getting married?”
That was a fuck no.
“What? Do I normally talk your ear off?” I asked.
“Deflection. So, you do—”
“I do not give a shit she’s getting married. The only thing I care about is the kids. Hunter’s good to Juni and Cole, they like him, so there’s nothing more to think or feel about the situation.”
That wasn’t true. I was also happy the woman was giving up my last name, which she’d threatened to do during the divorce but she’d never followed through.
I couldn’t say why this mattered to me, but it did.
Maybe because at one time it had been a representation of us—family, unity, love.
Then she shit all over the relationship and broke us.
“If it’s not Shay, and the kids are good, what’s going on?”
Now he was asking the right question.
Something was fucking with my head, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
My kids were thriving. It had taken a few years after the divorce for everything to smooth out and settle, but we’d had a good five years of calm.
I worked a job I loved, had good friends, provided a nice home for Juni and Cole, my relationship with them was strong, but something was missing.
Ethan being one of those good friends meant I didn’t lie to him. “Don’t know. Something just feels off. I can’t place it, I have no reason not to be grateful, but something’s just missing.”
I turned onto the street that would lead to Tate’s house. My first thought was I wished I could’ve talked Stacey into moving out of this neighborhood. I didn’t need the sun shining to see the unkempt yards and dilapidated houses. My second thought was that Ethan’s silence worried me.
And when he broke it, I knew I’d been wrong. I shouldn’t’ve been worried, I should’ve braced. “Have you thought about dating?”
“Dude.”
I thought my answer said it all. Apparently not. “Seriously. It’s been seven years. You think maybe what you’re missing is a woman?”
“I have not spent the last seven years celibate, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Picking up a woman from a bar and getting your dick wet, then rolling out with a ‘thank you’ isn’t what I’m talking about.”
Fuck.
“Wait. You’re supposed to say thank you?”
“You can joke all you want. But brother, when we're done here, I’m going home to my wife. Depending on how long this shit takes, I’ll either go home to her waiting up for me, which gives me the opportunity to take her to bed, or she’ll already be in that bed.
Which goes without saying is a bed I want to be in.
I know shit with Shay was great in the beginning but ended not being that.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for someone who makes you want to get home so you can crawl into bed beside her. ”
Ethan was right, but he was also wrong—in the beginning, everything with Shay was good—not great.
I’d had great and lost her. I had everything, but I was too young to take care of it. Too stupid and immature to know love wasn’t just something you felt—it was actionable, and if you didn’t work to keep it, you lost it.
“Do you ever think about the one who got away?”
I regretted my question as soon as I asked it. Ethan was a bulldog with a chew toy; if you didn’t want him gnawing your ass to death, you didn’t give him the ammunition to do it.
“I don’t have one of those,” he told me.
“I thought I did. After Carson was born and the way Chrissy left, I felt that. Not only for my daughter, but I thought she was the one. Time and reflection taught me otherwise. I’m grateful she gave me Carson, but if she wasn’t her mom, I wouldn’t think about her.
She wouldn’t have been anything more than a girl I knew when I was sixteen.
” Without missing a beat, he went on to ask, “Who’d you let get away? ”
“Rainy Cross.”
Just saying her name made my chest hurt.
Sixteen years later, and the hole she left hadn’t healed.
“You wanna know something fucked-up?” I asked, but didn’t give Ethan a chance to answer.
“Shay cheated on me, but part of me was relieved. I had a concrete reason to end our marriage. I do not regret marrying her when she got pregnant with Cole. By doing that, I got Juni out of the deal. I can’t even say we didn’t have some good times, we did.
When it was good, it was good, and I could forget I was still in love with someone else.
But Shay would go out, max out credit cards, and I’d work overtime to pay them off only to have her do it again and again until I was working a second job to pay for all the shit she bought, and I would think about Rainy and how different my life would’ve been if I didn’t fuck that up. ”
I pulled up next to the curb a few houses down from Tate’s and killed the engine just as two gunshots disturbed the quiet night.
So much for getting home at a decent hour.
Not that I had anything or anyone to get home to.