Prologue
Grudgingly, I pushed the door to my parents’ bedroom open. The pungent smell of death kicked me square in the nostrils. I held my breath to keep from gagging. The odor wasn’t unfamiliar. It lingered here for months as my mother laid dying in her bed. Doctors, nurses, and my father moved in and out of the room, caring for her. We all hoped beyond hope that she would pull through and survive the cervical cancer that’d been in its fourth stage by the time it was diagnosed.
But life's a bitch on wheels. That bitch loaded up her vehicle with gas to spare, to deliver my mother to the gates of death. At twenty-five, I didn’t know how to exist in a world where my mother didn’t, but I was about to find out. I felt the pain of her death down to the caps of my knees. Yet, I wasn’t ready for the scene before me as I moved across the carpeted floor, toward the opened balcony door.
My breath stuck in my throat at the sight of my father, standing over the balcony, a sound I’d never heard another man make emanating from his body. Pure agony. He stared down over the railing. From my position, I could see him peering at the ground below.
Is he going to jump?
The vice around my heart tightened further as I moved forward, stepping onto the balcony.
He stilled, aware of the fact that he was no longer alone.
“Ace and Gabe are eating Aunt Amanda’s lasagna,” I stated, at a loss for words of what else to say.
Joel lifted his head but kept his gaze forward. I suspected it was because he didn’t want me to see the tidal wave of tears streaming down his face. Even as he tried to wipe them away discreetly, they kept coming.
After a minute of total stillness, he nodded. “Good. They’ve been up all day.” His voice was so choked and strangled. I had heard my father be many things. Boisterous, loving, mocking, pissed, but never devastated. The ravages of his grief for my mother pulsed over every syllable he spoke. Seconds earlier, I thought I’d felt pain just walking into their bedroom and not seeing her in the bed. Earlier that day, at the funeral, I thought real pain was watching her ivory casket be lowered into the ground. But no. Listening to the strongest, most virulent, and savage man I’d ever known, appear this damned broken, was what real pain was all about.
I had to force myself to release my clenched fists at my sides and let go of the breath I’d been holding. The anguish was so great.
“She was so damned p-proud of you.”
I shook my head. “Stop talking about her like she’s in the past,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.
Joel made a noise at the back of his throat, finally turning to me. “You think I want to refer to her like that. Like a fucking memory?” he spat out, turning his head away from me, wiping more tears.
I watched his entire body shake and shudder. It was then I saw the collapse happening and reacted on impulse. His knees buckled first, but before he could fall to the ground, I was there, enfolding his six-foot-three build in my arms. Joel was a big man, and the heaviness of his weight toppled us both to the ground.
He fell back into my chest while I sat on my parents’ balcony, in the black suit I’d worn to the funeral. My own body and heart were as oppressive as my father’s. He let out another noise that I’ll never forget to the day I die. The strongest man I knew defeated by death. Not his own mortality, but that of his wife of almost thirty years.
I held onto him tighter than I’d ever held on in my entire life. Why I didn’t know. I pushed away my tears and grief because they were fucking useless. After my mother’s diagnosis, I spent many nights alone with my sorrow. The worst were days I had off and took her to her chemo treatments. I held her hand throughout those hospital visits. The lessons she desperately tried to impart on me during her chemo sessions pushed their way to the forefront of my mind.
She tried to share with me lessons on love, such as what to look for in the right woman.Don’t worry about that, though. You’ll know when you come across her. Like your daddy did.She said all of that with a wistful smile on her face. While a needle in her vein fed her potent chemicals that were supposed to kill the cancer inside of her body.
“It’ll be like that with you. You’ll have your socks knocked off by some woman. For her, you’ll be willing to change everything you thought you believed. I wish I could be there to meet her. To see it unfold. For all you boys.”She said those words with tears filling her golden eyes. I told her to stop talking like she was going anywhere. That she’d be here to see all of us get married and start families.
It was bullshit.
She knew it and so did I. My mother was stronger than me. Her oldest. She was tougher than Joel, too. She faced death with a smile on her face but sadness in her eyes, even when we denied the inevitable.
She’ll turn your entire world upside down.
“It’s bullshit,” I spat out.
I looked down at my weeping father, reduced to a puddle of emotions. He spent months holding it all in, and now he was no use to anyone. Not even to himself.
Thinking back over those conversations with my mother, I began shaking my head. She was the smartest person I knew. Yet, she was wrong about this. That was the moment I declared that this would never be me. Love, if it left you like my father—broken and a shell of a person—wasn’t in the cards for me. There would be no happily ever after.
There were other ways I could spend my time. None of which included falling apart when love decided to up and leave … however it chose to depart. Whether by death or the inevitable falling out of love, followed by divorce and, at times, murder. I’d seen all of it in my line of work in the three short years I’d been with the Texas Department of Public Safety as a Trooper.
Seeing Joel, a quivering mass in my arms, was the final nail in the casket, closing off my heart to any woman who dared to enter it.
Chapter One
I sighed and rolled my eyes as I stepped off the elevator onto the tenth floor of the hotel.
“This way, ma’am,” the concierge of the fancy, five-star hotel directed.
