I gasp, release the bottle, and raise my foot to break its fall, catching it on the bridge. I remain on one foot, and it’s a fucking miracle given the state of me. I see Beau. On a ladder under the spotlights of my office. I see her carrying endless equipment. Bumping into me. Dropping it all.

  “You know, I’ll get this finished much faster if you give me some space.”

  “Space,” I replied quietly. “I was just trying to help.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  She never did finish decorating my office. Because Beau finally decided whether she hated me or wanted to fuck me.

  She took the latter.

  Is she regretting it?

  I gasp and reach for the wall when I wobble, placing my foot down.

  Do I regret it?

  I look down my chest, my hand coming up, my fingertip moving in on the bruise on my pec from where the love of my life, my blood, my fucking heartbeat, fucking shot me. I miss it by a few inches and am forced to close one eye to turn ten bruises back into one. “Fuck me,” I breathe, letting my hand drop heavily. I go to the mirror, bracing my palms on the edge of the sink, leaning in, so close I’m practically kissing the glass. I take in my hair that’s fairer these days. Lighter.

  From being in the sun.

  From being in the light.

  “But you’re not enough,” I slur, watching my mouth move slowly, my eyes blink slowly, my body sway slowly. Even in my drunken state, I can appreciate how impossible Beau and I were. How . . . toxic. Harmful to ourselves but more harmful to each other.

  I’ve failed to keep us in the light.

  I curl my lip at the letdown staring back at me, closing my eyes, unable to face him. I pull my head away, inhale, and send it crashing back into the mirror.

  When I open my eyes again, what I see matches how I feel.

  Shattered.

  I shy away and turn, feeling my legs failing me completely now. I make it two staggered paces and fall into the tub on a grunt and a clatter. I roll to my back, close my eyes and sigh. The cool enamel on my disgusting skin feels good. Better than the reason for those scars. Trying to save a woman who didn’t want saving. Still doesn’t.

  Failure.

  “I bought an apartment for us.” I laugh out loud, thinking how ridiculous it was to ever believe we could be normal. So fucking absurd. Danny was right.

  “If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t need to be doing this. But we can’t play dead. And we can’t live a normal life.”

  “And we can’t be without them,” I’d answered. Like a fool, because I may not get that choice.

  “So let’s get the fuck on with rising and make sure we never fall, because that, my friend, is the closest we’re ever getting to normal.”

  Failure.

  I settle and doze off, the bathroom spinning like an out-of-control merry-go-round, slowing every so often, not enough to get off, but just enough and for long enough to give me a complimentary memory. All Beau. She’s dominated my thoughts since I met her, and slowly over that time, my tortured past has been replaced with another kind of torture.

  Loving Beau Hayley.

  32

  BEAU

  It’s agony seeing him like this. Knowing I’m the cause. James told me once about the aftermath of his parents’ deaths. How he coped. Basically, he didn’t. He lost himself in drink and when Otto finally pulled James out of his self-destructive mode, all hell broke loose. Many people died and are still dying. I wonder now if that’s why he doesn’t drink himself into oblivion anymore. Because it takes him to places he wants to forget. Hopelessness.

  I’ve taken him back to those times. Those feelings.

  I approach him quietly, watching his face, lines still cutting his features in his sleep. His long, hard body spans the tub and then some, his shoulders slightly bunched to his ears, his face turned in. I lower to my knees and reach for his forehead, seeing a crisscross of tiny cuts in the center. “What did you do?” I ask, brushing his hair off to get a better look. It looks like someone’s pushed gravel into his flesh. And he has a tidy bump near his temple. “You are enough,” I whisper, scanning his exquisite, tormented, damaged face.

  His eyes pop open, and my hand freezes on his forehead. And we stare. We stare for so long, I have stored every silver fleck in his blue eyes to memory. Every line on his face. Every bit of his stubbled jaw. I take comfort in the fact he appears to be doing the same, although his eyes are drowsy and travel more slowly across my face.

  He reaches up to my wrist and circles it, then pulls me into the tub with him. He shuffles up, opens his thighs, and positions me in between, easing me back to his chest. A bath with no water. But endless fire.

  “Can you hear me?” I ask quietly.

  “I’m drunk, not deaf.”

  I smile, though it’s small, as I find the courage I need to try and explain my logic. To explain my betrayal. “Waiting for my period is a pain I can mask,” I say, swallowing, digging deeper for the strength I need to do this. To make him understand. “Each time I bleed, I wonder if that part of me is broken too.” I swallow. “If I take the pills, I will never wait with bated breath to bleed. I know it will happen. I will never have a baby, but at least I am in control.”

  James remains silent behind me, but as if wanting me to know he’s hearing me, he starts stroking my scarred arm.

  “I do love you,” I say, spreading my palms on his thick thighs, stroking across the hair. “Don’t ever question that.”

  “I follow your light, Beau,” he says, his voice husky with alcohol and sleepiness. “But you’re fading fast and I’m losing you.”

  “And I’m terrified of losing yet another person in my life. Especially you. But also another baby.” I’m not equipped to cope with more loss.

  “I can’t lose again either, baby,” he whispers.

  Yes, the bath is empty.

  But I could cry enough tears to fill it.

  33

  DANNY

  There’s always one of us less stressed than the other. It’s usually because of the women. It’s easy for the other to pass judgment, throw out advice. Only James walks in his shoes, only I walk in mine. We face different challenges when it comes to our relationships, but in business, we’re both on the same page.

  I smash out another twenty reps and lower the bar, using it to pull myself up on the bench. My face still creases with discomfort, though, despite relieving my stomach and chest of the strain. I look down at the mess of my torso on a sigh. Ironic that all my current injuries are a result of a woman, and not just my own. Pops would turn in his grave.

  If he was in his fucking grave.

  I quickly shake that maddening thought away before it distracts me from my day and get up, grabbing a towel to wipe my wet brow before laying it around my neck. I fill a cup and down the water, looking at the door when it opens. I lower the cup. “What are you doing in here?” I ask Brad, looking up and down his half naked body, shorts and a sling the only things he’s wearing.

  “Working out.”

  I follow his path to the Peloton. “You look like shit.” Probably still hungover from his marathon binge on everything forbidden.

  He gets on the bike and sits up straight, keeping his hands off the handlebars. “You don’t exactly look as fresh as a daisy yourself.” Nodding at my torso, he starts pedaling and tapping at the screen.

  I refill my cup and neck some more water. “My injuries, both physical and mental, are a result of a love interest.” Rose would slice my dick off if she heard me refer to her like that. “I know what caused your physical injury. Care to enlightened me on why you’re a tetchy fucker lately?” Something tells me it’s nothing to do with his overindulgences.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Pearl.” I get straight to the point. I’ve got things to do.

  The fleeting recoil I catch before Brad manages to get his facial expression in check worries me. “Who’s Pearl?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I toss my cup in the bin and go to the bike, standing in front, hand on the bars, eyes on Brad. “How long have I known you?”

  “Too fucking long.”

  “Agreed.” I watch his shoulder jolt as he pedals. “Engage your core,” I order. “And sit up straight.” He does both with a scowl. “She’s twenty-one,” I point out. “You’re thirty-four.”

  “Is this going somewhere?”

  “Have you fucked her?”

  His mouth falls open and his pedaling slows. His reaction alone tells me no. “No, I’ve not fucking fucked her.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Brad’s face. Fuming is putting it lightly. Honestly, I’m not sure how to interpret it. “No. She’s twenty-one, for fuck’s sake, Danny. Practically a child. Whatever fantastical idea she has about this world, I’m not interested in feeding it.”

  “So why are you mean to her?”

  “What?” he snaps, impatient.

  “You’re mean to her. Impatient. You give her filthy looks.” I raise my brows as Brad visibly scrambles for a reason. “I’m not the only one who’s noticed. It’s causing an atmosphere.”

  “I’m causing an atmosphere?”

  “Yeah, by being grumpy. People aren’t used to it.”

  “Then I’ll apologize.”

  “Probably best you just stay out of her way. She thinks you’re a dick.”

  He flinches. “Why?”

  “Well, because you fuck hookers and own a strip club.”

  “How does she know that?”

  “Because I told her.” I’m certain I can hear his teeth grinding. “Rose thinks she finds you repulsive.”

  “Is everyone talking about this?”

  I shrug, amused, taking this light relief while I can get it.

  “Good,” Brad snaps. “I’m glad she finds me repulsive.”

  I nod, not convinced, “So why the fuck are you a miserable fuck lately?”

  “Has everyone around here amid the drama their women are creating—which, I will add at this moment in the aftermath of your interrogation, is the very fucking reason I will never take myself a woman—missed the fact I’ve been fucking shot? And my fucking apartment was fucking blown the fuck up, Danny. I don’t have a home.” He starts pedaling again, his top half jerking all over the place.

  “I think it’s you who’s missed the fact you’ve been fucking shot. Doc will string you up if he sees you on that thing.”

  “I’m stressed.”

  I laugh. “You’re a dick.” He totally wants to fuck Pearl. It’s a good job she hates him now because that would only end in tears. Hers. And Brad’s when Rose and Beau beat him black and blue. “I’m going to get a shower.”

  “Hey, your cell,” Brad calls as it starts ringing from the mat in the corner where I was stretching. I wander over and crouch, swiping it up and turning it over. I look back at Brad. His pedaling slows. “Amber?”

  I connect the call and rise, walking to Brad, waiting for whoever’s on the end of the line to speak.

  “Danny?”

  Brad’s eyes shoot to mine, and I exhale. I’ve never been so glad to hear her voice. “Amber.” Tread carefully, but not too delicately. This woman has only ever known brutality and coldness from me. “What do you want?”

  “I’m in trouble, Danny. Serious trouble.”

  I figured. The gym door opens, and with the lightest of breeze comes the most incredibly pungent stench of stale alcohol. I look over my shoulder and grimace. He looks like death warmed up. And what the fuck’s happened to his head? “The kind of trouble you get in when you take the inheritance that rightly belongs to someone else?” I ask, trying to clue a comatose looking James into what he’s walked in on.

  “I had no idea about the money.”

  James walks over, interested, as I laugh. “Come on, Amber.”

  “Danny, I swear. Tom and I split up. He called me and said he missed me. Wanted to have dinner at his place. I went and we rekindled.”

  So was Amber who Tom had been dating? “You loved him? Didn’t just want his money?” We all huddle in, waiting, listening. I can’t say Amber is transparent, because I’m pretty sure she loved me, despite the fact I showed her no love, fucked her regularly, and shared her. My money and power were a bonus. But, and forgive me for bashing a dead man, I’m a fuck load better looking and a few decades younger than Tom Hayley.

  “I did what I needed to do to survive after you threw me out.”

  “Oh boy,” Brad murmurs, pulling back from the phone, his worried eyes on me.

  “What can you tell us about Tom’s death?” I ask, knowing James is going to be jumping in any moment if I don’t get this moving.

  “I need something in return.”

  “What?”

  “Well it ain’t money, is it?” Brad says on a sardonic laugh, earning dark looks from me and James. “Hi, Amber,” he adds.

  “Brad.” She strains his name, no love lost there. Yeah, I shared Amber, but never with Brad. He despised her. Prefers to take his women as strangers, mostly in hotels. There’s never any backlash for him. No whore biting at his ankles wanting money or safety.

  James nudges me, pushing me on. He looks green, like he could throw up at any moment. “Well,” I push.

  “Protection.”

  “My protection is expensive. It depends what I get in return for protection.”

  “You get a teddy bear.”

  The room becomes still and quiet, all our bodies straightening. Somehow, this offer feels more serious than any other. What I’m thinking though, is how the fuck does the lover of Beau’s father have information about The Bear? “I can give you protection.”

  “How?”

  “I have a place abroad. Secluded, solitary, no one knows about it.” I am saying and thinking so many things lately that could get me a divorce. “What do you know about The Bear?”

  She’s quiet, for so long I wonder if she’s hung up, but a quick glance at the screen tells me she’s still there. “Not on the phone,” she eventually says.

  We all sag. Fuck. “Where?”

  “Where’s safe?”

  I immediately look around the gym that’s in my safe home but quickly dismiss it. That wouldn’t end in divorce, that would end in death. Whether at the hands of Rose or Beau, I couldn’t say, but it is not a risk worth taking. But . . . where else? Fuck it. “Come to the house,” I tell her, looking at Brad who shakes his head. “Three o’clock. Call me when you’re at the gates.” I hang up.

  “I don’t like this,” Brads says, now motionless on the bike.

  “Here is safest.” We all know it. I get another strong waft of stale alcohol and move away from James. “Mate, get a shower, I beg you.”

  Brad’s nose wrinkles too and he slips down off the Peloton after a pointless workout. “My question now is, how are you two going to distract the girls while we deal with this?”

  I look at James. He doesn’t look capable of dealing with anything. “Are you and Beau okay?” I need him on the ball today. It’s a ridiculous statement when he’s drunk enough vodka to sink an island, but whether he and Beau are all right will tell me if we’re at risk of an AWOL woman again and if that might steal his time chasing around town looking for her.

  James lowers to a bench and sinks his face into his palms on a groan. “I know nothing.”

  “Are you saying she’s a flight risk?”

  “Who the fuck knows?” He scrubs down his face. “She wants a baby, she doesn’t; she thinks her dad wasn’t murdered, she does; she wants to be married, she doesn’t; she wants to be a cop, she—”

  “We get it,” Brad says. “We can’t depend on Beau to behave. What about Rose?”

  I laugh. “If she sees Amber in her house, she’ll attack.”

  James raises his hand, a message that even if we contain Beau and stop her disappearing, we have to then stop her attacking Amber too.

  “Do we put her in a cage?”

  James’s head slowly lifts, his mouth a twisted shade of murder, and I purse my lips, thankful on Brad’s behalf that he’s not on form today, or I’m pretty sure Brad would be embedded in the wall right now. “Why don’t you ask her?” James growls.

  “No, thanks.” Brad takes a seat next to him. “So if we can’t cage both of your pets, what do we do with them?”

  “You’ve got a death wish, Brad.” I start pacing, chewing the edge of my phone, thinking about what we can do with the women that won’t have them suspicious. The boatyard, nope. Fuck knows what might go down. And Hiatus isn’t an option when we’re not there. What does Rose want? A school for Daniel. I’m working on it. Driving lessons. When I have time. Another baby. Check. Do regular shit with the kid. I sent them for pizza yesterday. “Independence,” I blurt, slowing to a stop.

  “What?” they both say in unison, impatient.

  “Rose wants independence. A job.” I face their frowns. I’m a fucking genius. “She’s going on about jobs and freedom constantly, not just for her but for Pearl and Anya too.” I get on my phone and pluck out the first one I find, dialing, then lowering to the bench beside them.

  “Good afternoon, Red’s Salon and Spa, this is Petal speaking, how many I help you?”

  “Hello, Petal,” I say in my most friendly voice, very thankful Petal won’t be meeting me in person. “I would like to book your spa facilities for a private party.” Brad laughs under his breath, and James puts his head back in his palms.

  * * *

  It wasn’t possible for me to privately hire Red’s today. Something about existing appointments. So I gave them a reason to make it possible. One hundred thousand reasons. A bargain, if you ask me.

  The one thing I didn’t consider, and it’s quite an important thing, is Daniel. I’m not sure a mani or pedi is going to get the kid excited, so I’ve sold my soul to the fucking devil. A good-looking devil who happens to be a single dad and a private banker. Rose mentioned they were visiting his parents. Great. So after talking very nicely to Mr. Benson, he agreed to let Barney go shark diving for the day with Daniel and Tank. Tank looked traumatized. Fury laughed his big Viking nuts off.