Not A Gentleman (Don’t Date Him #7)

Prologue

My name isn’t Tom, but I’m Petty AF.

—T-shirt

Ramsey

I sat in the college campus coffee shop and waited for Nadine to show.

She was a professor at the University of Arkansas where she taught sociology.

She, of course, was late.

Really, really late.

I glanced at my watch again and realized that she was so late that it likely meant that she wasn’t coming.

How surprising.

It’d been the same old song and dance ever since I’d found out that she was pregnant.

I’d been pretty neutral about finding out that she was pregnant.

It wasn’t like I wanted kids—I was in the fuckin’ military for Christ’s sake with no end in sight—but I wasn’t opposed to having them.

When I’d found out, I’d said that I would be there every step of the way.

Only, she hadn’t wanted me there every step of the way.

She’d wanted me gone and never missed an opportunity to share that she didn’t want me there.

I’d had to fight for everything that I got timewise with my kid, and she literally fought me at every turn.

Hell, I hadn’t even realized she’d had Dean until three weeks later.

Which fucking sucked, because I’d missed having time off with him before I’d had to go back to work.

I’d gotten to see him for six short hours before I’d been forced to return to the base, where I’d then been sent out on a mission.

The next time I got to see Dean, he’d been two months old and terrified of me.

Apparently, Dean had never been around another man.

I’d learned from a private investigator that Nadine had been a lesbian, and she’d wanted a child. But she and her girlfriend had been too poor to go the route of in vitro. They’d tossed a fucking coin to find out who would be pregnant, and Nadine had won.

Nadine had gone out one night with her girlfriend’s permission and had fucked the first dumb bastard that gave her attention—that dumb bastard being me.

They had intended to never tell me, but Nadine and her girlfriend had had a stroke of conscience and had thought…we should tell him. But he’s military, so he probably won’t care anyway.

Well, I had cared.

I’d wanted to be a part of my son’s life.

But it’d become so increasingly hard to do that that I’d had to leave the military.

I’d gotten a place in Little Rock and had fought to see Dean.

Only, more often than not, Nadine violated court orders and never showed up for our court-mandated swaps.

I saw Dean so rarely that the kid freaked way the fuck out any time I finally got him.

And, since Nadine was still breastfeeding, I never got to keep him long enough to get him used to me.

I was just a random man who took him from time to time.

But today, that would change.

Today, we were going to discuss what the rest of our time looked like.

I now had a court order from a judge that declared that I would be given every other week with him. From now on, we shared fifty-fifty custody.

To say that Nadine was pissed would be an understatement.

But this time, she couldn’t go about violating court orders, or she wouldn’t be seeing her kid at all.

Those were the judge’s exact words.

Which she hadn’t liked hearing.

Today, we’d be meeting to discuss what this fifty-fifty custody looked like for us.

Except, she hadn’t showed.

She was now two hours late, and I was on my fourth cup of coffee.

I stood up to get a refill.

“You drink anymore,” the cute brown-haired girl with her nose buried in a nursing book called out as I passed. “You’re never going to be able to sleep tonight.”

Little did she know that I had trouble sleeping, but it had nothing to do with the amount of coffee I consumed.

I’d clocked the woman the moment I entered the store.

She was sitting in the usual booth that I preferred, which was in the corner of the room with my back to the door.

She’d been scanning her surroundings so much that I would’ve guessed she was ex-military if it wasn’t for the youthfulness of her face.

She was twenty-one, max.

“Yeah, I’m sure it won’t help,” I admitted as I walked away to get another refill. After the barista handed it back I stopped at the young woman’s table and said, “You should take a break. No way you can retain the information you’re cramming in there without one.”

She looked up and smiled, and my heart arrested in my chest.

Damn, she was pretty.

Short and curvy, she had tits for days, long brown hair that fell in waves around her shoulders and to the tabletop in front of her, and gray eyes the same color as mine.

Damn, she’s pretty.

I’d been trying not to look at her so closely this entire time.

“I’m about to leave,” she sighed. “It’s getting dark, and I don’t like walking home after dark.”

Before I could offer to walk her wherever she needed to go, the door jingled and the woman I’d been waiting on for hours finally walked through the door.

“Mayday, mayday,” the woman muttered under her breath as she clocked who’d come in. “It’s the worst professor in the history of professors, and she’s looking right at you.”

My stomach clenched. “What’s worse is I have a baby with the woman.”

“Poor you.” She paused. “I thought she was a lesbian?”

“She is,” I grumbled.

“Then how?” she wondered. “The way she talked in class, she sounded like men were like flesh-eating bacteria stuffed into a male body. The way she made it sound, she’d rather die than touch a man with a ten-foot pole.”

“Apparently, that only comes into effect when you’re not trying to have a baby with a dumbass.”

The woman snorted. “Good luck with that.”

I’d need it.

She gathered her books and took off, leaving me to deal with the snake slithering toward me on my own.

“Who was that?” she asked when she got to me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted truthfully. “She told me to stop drinking so much coffee.”

“You should, it’s not good for you. Almost all coffee grounds that come to the US have mold spores in them.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response.

Mold or not, I wasn’t giving up my coffee.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “I’m not giving you him every other week.”

I shook my head. “Court orders say differently.”

She scoffed. “They can say it all that they want, but he’s my child. Mine and Brooke’s. He doesn’t know you and won’t ever know you.”

“Brooke isn’t his father, though. I am,” I pointed out. “And literally, we have court orders. They said that you’d be in contempt of court if you didn’t give me my time with him.”

Nadine stayed stubbornly silent.

I sighed. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

Nadine crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s already hard. What’s a little harder?”

With that she walked out and left me standing there.

I placed my coffee by the trash cans and walked out, anger lacing my every step.

Maybe that was why I did what I did next.

My brain was on autopilot as I walked across the campus to my truck.

I’d just stepped off the curb headed toward the nearly deserted parking lot when I heard the screams.

I turned, wondering if I’d heard what I thought I heard, and saw it.

A car door opened.

The screams were coming from inside.

I hurried toward the door, my fingers reaching out to yank the man backward off of the woman in the car that was flat on her back.

When I yanked, he hit his head on the car door and practically folded in half.

I let him fall to the ground, and his head hit the curb of the concrete with a sickening crack.

I dialed 911 before I could process what had happened.

Those gray eyes that I’d seen in the coffee shop stared at me with hope and fear.

Then the person in the front seat started to move, and gray eyes jolted and latched onto the seat belt.

She moved with impressive speed, wrapping the seat belt around the man’s throat so fast that I barely even spotted the move.

But then the man that’d fallen out of the car was on me.

I cursed myself for thinking the man was down.

I knew better.

I also knew that I couldn’t be two places at once, and the most immediate threat was currently playing whack-a-mole with my right kidney.

I moved in a swift counteraction, took the guy’s feet out from under him, and kicked him backward once he went to sit up.

As I did, his head hit the side of the car, and he was once again out.

I looked toward the car again and saw the woman staring blankly at the man slumped over the steering wheel.

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency!”

I placed the phone to my ear and told them everything that had just happened.

“Are you armed?”

“No.”

“You and the girl get away from the car in case they wake back up.”

Gray eyes and I moved toward the large concrete retaining wall and sat on it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She nodded, swallowing thickly.

“Who’s your favorite baseball player?” I asked, hoping to take her mind off of what had just happened.

Hopefully reminding her that she was okay.

Hell, I could use the reminder myself.

“Nolan Ryan,” she rasped. “You?”

“Gary Gentry,” I answered. “He was a pitcher for the Mets in 1969.”

“A little out of your age bracket, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “Baseball is my thing. His stats were amazing.”

“I like Nolan Ryan because he decked Rob Ventura in the face.”

I laughed, but sobered as I watched the cops round the curve of the road.

“Whatever happens next,” she whispered as she wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I asked.

She looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “For putting you into the mess that’s my life.”

It took two and a half days for my life to fall apart.

Sometimes people think they’re at rock bottom and they’re not.

I’d seen rock bottom, though.

I’d studied the structure of it.

I’d learned that once you were truly there, there are only really two ways out. To be killed or kill yourself.

I know that people would say differently.

But those who say differently haven’t seen the actual bottom.

They don’t know that once you’re down there, there’s no way out.

There’s only pain and torture.

There’s suffering and silence.

There’s no getting better. There’s no bright side to look at. There’s no other way out.

My doorbell rang and I looked at the door, wondering if it was even worth it to get up off the couch.

Maybe I could just lie here and die.

The door to my house was opened then, and I barely spared a look to the side to see who it was.

I was just too tired.

My eyes closed, and I willed the pain in my chest to go away.

A scent hit me, and I opened my eyes and glared.

Irrational anger surged through me and I sat up, my anger aimed at the woman in front of me.

It wasn’t her fault.

None of it was her fault.

Yet, I blamed her anyway.

If it wasn’t for her, none of this would’ve happened.

“What are you doing here?” I snarled.

Sage.

Sage Jane Rice.

Daughter of Mitzi and Dominic Rice. Shit eater of the Irish Mob leader Sean O’Sullivan. Intended of Mario O’Neal, nephew to Sean O’Sullivan. Mario O’Neal that was now deceased by my hand.

She sat down on the coffee table and stared at me with those sad, broken eyes that had gotten me here in the first place.

She picked up a toy and studied it for long moments before setting it back down exactly how she’d found it.

My heart hammered when I glanced at that toy.

She pushed it behind her, and my breathing slowed.

“I need to ask one last thing of you,” she said softly. “It’ll help the both of us out.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I highly doubt it.”

“It will,” she promised.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Marry me.”