“If you have something to say to me…,” I threaten.
“Like I said, not one thing.”
“Good,” I reply coolly. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Roger that, boss.”
I push past the elevator and into the stairwell. Even though I just came like a freight train for her, my heart is pumping overtime. I need to get the blood flowing before I get behind the wheel of a car. I jog down the stairs and push the door open at the main parking garage level, jump in my SUV, and head out.
As soon as I clear the garage, the sky opens up and it pours. In the fucking desert. If that isn’t a sign of how my life is going right now, I don’t know what is.
“I love you.”
Fucking hell, she loves me.
And she wants a baby.
Maybe not now, but she does.
She was pushing my buttons—that much I know for sure. But the way her face closed down when I threw her birth control in her face told me everything I needed to know. She wants a baby eventually. And she wantsmybaby.
The one thing I could never give Mae.
I never expected to find my one true love in a sophomore biology class, but there she was. Blonde and beautiful and so fucking shy. I knew she’d make me work for it. I also knew she would be worth it.
Somehow, I got her to go out on a date with me. And then I got her to let me kiss her. And then other things. I’ll never forget senior year. Manny knocked up Marisol, and he was scared shitless but also happier than I had ever known him to be, because even though they were young, he was getting everything he ever wanted. I was secretly jealous. I wanted what he had. So when Mae told me she thought she was pregnant, I thought all my prayers had been answered. I was already enlisted in the Marines like Manny was. So after graduation, I’d marry her, tie her to me in every way, and then we could start our lives together. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Military life never is, and we were young, so fucking young. But I thought it would be a beautiful life.
Two weeks later, Mae called me crying and asked me to come over. Her parents were with her. They had always liked me, and I knew I was going to do right by Mae and our baby, so I wasn’t worried her dad was going to shoot me on sight. But still, it was a little daunting to an eighteen-year-old kid.
But then they sat me down, and everything changed.
Mae wasn’t pregnant, and she likely never would be. They prayed she wouldn’t ever be, because it would shorten her lifespan. I didn’t understand until her dad calmly explained that when Mae was two, she was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia. By all accounts, she had beaten it. That was until right then. Her cancer was back, and the doctors who promised her a long life now couldn’t promise her anything at all.
My beautiful, sweet, so fucking shy Mae was going to die young.
I told her I loved her and I always would. We were going to do exactly what we said we would. Nothing had to change.
After graduation, I married Mae in a small church in our hometown of Tall Pines, and two months later, I left for bootcamp. She had a setback while I was away but was fine. We arranged for her to move to San Diego where I was stationed, and we rented a little apartment.
Every time I deployed, she went home to stay with her family so she wasn’t alone. They kept her busy and her mind off of me and what I was doing.
On the last deployment, Eric, who was in the army but his unit was working with ours, saw a suicide bomber when I didn’t. He shot the woman where she stood before she had a chance to get close enough to me and Manny to take us out with her.
Eric had known that Mae had cancer. We talked at chow and when on patrol; there’s not much else to do in the desert. He said afterward that I needed to get home to her alive, not in a pine box. We were bonded from then on out.
When I got home, I found out Mae had taken a turn for the worse. My enlistment contract was up, so I left the Marines and we moved to a horse farm back in Tall Pines, where Mae could spend the rest of her days in peace with our families nearby.
She spent the next two years slowly withering away until one day she was just gone. By October, we buried her in the cemetery of the small church we were married in. It seemed fitting. She said our wedding day was the happiest of her life, and I couldn’t have agreed more. In fact, I couldn’t fathom ever being happy again when she no longer walked this earth.
Over that time, I had been taking security jobs here and there. I was good at it, and I knew it. The skills the Marines taught me only made me better. King Security was born, but Sky King might as well have been laid in the grave next to Mae. He was gone too.
And then a decade later, I got a phone call from the one and only Adrian Malone. I love racing. It’s one of the few sports I can watch all the time. Malone was a hero of mine from when I was a kid, and I jumped at the chance to work for him. So I took my best guys back to California to work a job for him. I was going to post Eric and Manny on her until the criminal was caught. I read the letters the creep had been sending and was pissed. No woman deserves to feel that kind of shit from any man.
But when Adrienne walked into the room, it was like I was struck by lightning. My heart skipped a beat, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And for the first time in ten years, my dick was getting hard. To say I was unhappy would be putting it mildly. I hated her. I didn’t want her. I didn’t want to be stuck protecting her. This spoiled brat who had everything she ever wanted handed to her on a silver platter.
Why should she get to have everything, when my Mae couldn’t even get to live?
But that was wrong.
