Kristen Ashley - Mystery Man

Repeat after me: family here, friends there and never the twain shall meet!

“Cam, things have become complicated,” I told her.

There was silence and then, “No, Gwen, you complicate things. I heard that MM declared his intentions and you contradicted him. Mitch heard it too. Stick to your guns. I know Mitch Lawson; I’ve known him for years. He’s a good cop, a good man and he wants a house with a white picket fence, two point five kids, a dog and a woman who can match his libido, which, rumor has it, runs in the red zone. He’s just never been able to find the one, even though he’s expended a fair amount of effort looking. Girl, you could be his one!”

“Yeesh, Cam, how do you know so much about him?”

“Did I not say he was fine?” she shot back. “I got Leo but that don’t mean I can’t study fine, and I do.”

This was true. She did. She’d studied fine for so long and with such diligence, she was at a professorial level in fine.

“I can’t think about this, I have to work,” I told her. “I have commandos in my house installing a security system. Hawk crushed Troy like a bug in front of Tracy and the aforementioned commandos. My sister is in some serious shit that is leaking into my life. And Tack declared his intentions this morning and there was an Official Meeting of the Badasses in my yard, the culmination of which I am not privy to but I know that Lawson and Tack retreated and, from your news, I figure it’s to regroup. I also know that I’ve seen Hawk three times by the light of day and one of those times he brought me J’s Noodles for lunch so I’m guessing he thinks he’s the front runner.”

“He brought you J’s Noodles?”

“Yes.”

“How does he know about you and J’s?”

“Cam, I told you yesterday, he knows everything about me! And now, when I say that, I mean he knows everything about me. He told me himself he follows me, or his boys do and report in. It’s insane!”

“Why would he do that?”

“I asked and his answer was, ‘Babe’, which is how he answers a lot of my questions or responds to a lot of my yelling at him.”

“I don’t know, Mitch can be broody but I would suspect he wouldn’t answer a direct question with ‘babe’.”

Good God.

“I can’t think about Mitch, I can’t think about anything,” I told her. “I seriously need to work and all this is messing with my head.”

“Well, you need to think about MM because once I heard that a man named Hawk claimed you as his own last night, I asked some questions about him and found out a lot and the lot I found out means you need to cut him loose.”

Oh boy. That didn’t sound good.

“I don’t want to know about him either. After a year and a half I’m learning fast and the more interaction I have with Hawk, the more the threat that I’ll be the first victim of spontaneous head explosion becomes imminent.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t have time to explain the complexity of everything I feel about Hawk right now. I have three hours to do ten hours of work and then I have to be at my parents’ house. They know Ginger’s in trouble and they may have disowned her but she’s their daughter and she’s my sister and they’re going to worry. I know that because, it sucks and I want to wash it away, but I’m worried. I have to gear up for facing that. I’m taking this all one step at a time.”

There was more silence then, “You don’t sound too good.”

I closed my eyes, leaned forward and my head collided with my desk.

Why was no one paying attention to me?

“Was that your head hitting your desk?” Cam asked in my ear.

“Yes,” I whispered into the phone, keeping my eyes closed.

“All right, babe, I’ll leave you alone but we need cosmos, soon. I’ll talk to Leo about a double date. Maybe since you aren’t a major player in this case Mitch’ll be able to do dinner. Or maybe we can just plan a get together at our house and no one will be the wiser.”

I opened my eyes and stared at my lap. “This isn’t letting me go, Cam, this is planning my romantic future with a man I barely know while I’m freaking out about how I’m going to get the man I also barely know but have been sleeping with for months to agree we’re over when his ideas on that subject violently clash with mine.”

Silence then, “Really? You told him it was over?”

I shot up in my chair and cried, “Cam!”

“All right! All right, I’ll let you go.”

“Call Tracy, brief her with the limited intel you have, it’ll save me time,” I ordered.

“Gotcha.”

“No double dates.”

“We’ll just get something in the calendar.”

“Cam!”

“Later, babe.”

Then I was listening to dead air.

I beeped the phone off and put it on its base. Then I got up and went downstairs because I was pretty certain I had frozen Twix bars and I was pretty certain about this because I always had frozen Twix bars but it wasn’t unheard of for me accidentally to eat my way through my stash while, say, watching a movie or just getting the munchies. Through copious experimentation I’d discovered that frozen Twix bars were proven to intensify focus. I needed my focus intensified so I was going to pull out the big guns.

I found I had frozen Twix bars.

Upon offering, I also found that commandos didn’t eat frozen Twix bars.

This was good. More for me.

I grabbed a twin pack, straightened my shoulders, with effort cleared my head and determinedly walked back up the stairs to my office.

As I headed to Dad and Meredith’s house I was feeling pretty good. I’d managed to make some headway on work and load up my files on my laptop before leaving my house.

I had a plan: eat dinner, explain shit to Dad and Meredith, do both of these things very fast then hole myself in Dad’s Den and work until my vision got blurry.

The only flaw in this plan was that I was tired. I’d only had about four good hours of sleep last night so I was running on empty. In my business attention to detail was key and getting fuzzy was not good. But I figured I had enough mojo left to squeeze in two or three good hours of concentration and, if I got a decent night’s sleep, tomorrow I could hit it fully loaded and kick some book-editing ass.

With my plan of attack all sorted out, and my excuse of having to get work done a good one so Dad would cut his lecture short, I was feeling good, totally psyched up for dinner at my parents’.

That was until their house became visible and I saw a dark, metallic gray kickass Camaro parked out front.

I was beginning to understand why people were moved to acts of extreme violence when I parked behind the Camaro.

Even so, as I turned off my car and set the parking brake, I did take a moment to reflect on the fact that it was too bad Hawk and I were so over. I would love to ride in that Camaro.

I got out, rounded the car and grabbed my bag and laptop. Then I walked to the house.

If I was a different kind of woman, in other words I didn’t have my mother’s blood in my veins, I would have walked to the house slowly, considering my options, calming myself, building a plan of attack.

I did not do this. I stomped up to the house, opened the door, encountered a wave of strong garlic smells and stomped in.

My parents lived in a big house on a slight rise. Stairs dead ahead leading to a landing with a big window. Huge living room to the left that had a small den off of it at the front of the house, another small conservatory-like space behind the den also off the living room. Enormous kitchen to the right with a big area for the dining room table. Half bath and utility to the back of the kitchen that led to a garage. Wall to wall wool carpet throughout except the kitchen which was tiled. Three bedrooms and two baths upstairs, one shared, one off the master suite.

The garden level was an apartment that they’d rented out since I could remember to a woman named Mrs. Mayhew who had three cats. In her tenure in the apartment the cats had rotated due to kitty death, and, once, kitty desertion though Mrs. Mayhew contended it was kitty theft and I was prone to believe her since she treated those cats better than most people treated their children, but Mrs. Mayhew never rotated. She had been old as the hills for as long as I could remember. She was also a silent neighbor. No loud music, no loud parties, no stream of constant visitors. And best of all, she put up with Ginger because she admired Dad, adored Meredith and cared a lot about me.

Before Ginger and I moved out (I never moved home after graduating U of C – Ginger took longer and graduated high school by what we all considered a minor miracle), there were four bedrooms upstairs but after I moved out Dad had turned one of the smaller bedrooms into a master bath. And Dad, being Dad, and Meredith, being Meredith, meant the whole pad was well-maintained, well-decorated, homey, warm and comfortable.

Like it was right then with a fire burning in the grate of the living room fireplace and candles lit throughout.

But once I’d swept the house with a glance, seeing Dad was entertaining Hawk in the living room and the table was set for four, my gaze swung left again and I took in Dad in his armchair and Hawk on the couch, his back to me, his arm stretched across the back of the couch but his neck twisted to look over his shoulder at me.

I dropped my bags and opened my mouth to shout.

“Honey,” Dad got there before me, straightening out of his chair, a bottle of beer in his hand, “why didn’t you tell us Hawk was coming to dinner?”