BRIAN (The Callahans Book 1) (36 page)

Margaret raised the muzzle of her gun. I leapt at her, pushing off from my healing leg in a move that was probably not very smart. The gun went off, but I managed to hit the muzzle before it did, and the bullet smashed into the ceiling. I fell to the floor, but Margaret came with me, our bodies tangled in a mess of limbs. And then Xander was there, and Margaret was screaming as she fought me for control of the gun. It went off again and the room seemed to go dark, and I was lying there, my ears ringing. And another shot and another and all I could think about was Xander.

Xander

Harley was taking so long getting the ice cream that I finally went to find her. As I was coming down the stairs, I thought I heard voices. And then I turned the corner into the sitting room just as a gun fired.

All I could thing was,
Fuck!

Margaret was on the floor with Harley tangled up next to her, and they were struggling over this damn big gun. I reached in, tried to untangle them and get one or both up on their feet. And then Margaret pressed the barrel of the gun against Harley’s side and wrapped her finger around the trigger. I did the only thing I could think of and that was to grab her wrist and yank. I felt something give and then the gun went off.

The next thing I know, Margaret’s on her feet, the gun pointed at my chest. There’s blood, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. And Harley is still on the floor.

“Why, Xander?” Margaret asked, her wrist limp where I broke it trying to pull her away from Harley. She calmly changed hands, holding the gun with her other hand now. She pointed it at me, tears running down her face and her hand shaking so bad the gun won’t aim straight. “Why did you turn on Daddy? Why did you have to choose her over me?”

“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Margaret.”

“I already regret it all,” she said softly.

She held the gun up not far from the center of my face and steadied it the best she could. I saw movement behind her and felt relief because I thought it was Harley. But then the gun went off, and I closed my eyes, thinking I was dead. But when the body hit the ground, it wasn’t mine.

It was Margaret.

And Jonnie was standing behind her, a pistol in her hands.

I dropped to my knees, my hands moving over Harley’s body. There was blood, but I couldn’t find a place on her that was injured. And then I realized the blood was dripping from my body, from the perfectly round hole in my shoulder.

And Margaret. She was coughing and blood was flowing from between her lips. Jonnie was with her, pressing her hands against a bloody wound on her side.

“Harley?”

Her eyes fluttered, and she focused on me. When she saw the wound on my shoulder, she immediately sat up, but then she did something of a swoon and fell back again.

“Are you hurt?”

“My leg.”

Her leg. I looked down and realized it’d gotten trapped under the edge of the couch. She must have reinjured it in the fight. I gently pulled it out and saw that it was already swelling.

“They told you not to walk around without the boot.”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t planning in wrestling on the floor tonight.”

I lifted her leg and kissed the swelling area. She winced but giggled a little at the same time.

“My hero,” she said.

An ambulance arrived a few minutes later. I didn’t have a chance to ask Jonnie how she happened to be there, or how she happened to have a gun. She disappeared before the ambulance arrived. When asked what happened, Harley gave them an abbreviated version that didn’t include Jonnie. Being the good boy that I sometimes am, I followed suit.

I wouldn’t find out until later that Philip’s help hadn’t been all bad. It turned out that Jonnie, my trusted office manager, was once a prodigy for the CIA. But after some inner-office politics left her out of the promotion game, she quit and applied to work for my fledgling company. And me, being the super-security-conscious guy I am, got the wool pulled over my eyes by a few friends that she had left at the CIA. But one of those same friends also clued her in to what I was up to, and Philip’s contacts got in touch with her, giving her information about both sides of the investigation.

She was the one who’d come to Harley this morning, and she’d told Harley the truth about who she was and what she was up to. But she begged Harley not to tell me because she liked her job and wanted to keep it.

Like I would have fired her for being a bad ass.

And then Harley speed dialed her when Margaret had the gun on her, so she came over. And disappeared for the same reason. She wanted to keep the life she’d built here in Los Angeles. Having the cops writing a report about how she killed a civilian wouldn’t allow for that.

It was finally over.

I’d said that before, but I believed it now.

Harley—Nine Months Later

I started to laugh as my little sister twerked her way down the aisle of my parent’s Baptist church. If Daddy walked in and saw that, there would be hell to pay.

Xander pulled me back against his chest as he, too, laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from deep in his chest. I loved to hear him laugh like that.

“Do you dare me to do that during the ceremony tomorrow?” Shelly asked.

“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you do,” Charlie called to her.

I smacked my brother on the arm.

“What?”

“Don’t encourage her.”

“Hey, someone’s got to inject a little levity into this whole affair. And it can’t be at my wedding because if you think our parents are bad, wait until you meet Vanessa’s.”

“When’s Vanessa going to be here?”

“In the morning.”

“Cutting it close.”

Xander’s arms tightened around my waist, his hands wrapping around my swollen belly. “I think we all are, aren’t we?”

I groaned. This whole wedding thing wasn’t my idea. It was my dad’s. He insisted that we be married in a church. A ceremony on a beach, no matter who the preacher was, was not good enough. The marriage vows had to be sanctioned in God’s house.

Especially with a baby due in three months.

I just wanted to go home, curl up in front of the television, and enjoy my new life as a couch potato, but Xander had agreed with my dad. We should do it properly.

The men in my life were beginning to take over everything.

Bonnie walked in, her expression softening when she lay eyes on her son. She looked good. She had just come back from a long cruise to the Bahamas. After the trial and everything that followed, everyone agreed that she deserved the break.

Grant followed close behind her. He’d cut a deal with the feds. In exchange for giving up his law license, his practice, and paying a substantive fine, they agreed to give him just six months of parole and a thousand hours of community service. And his testimony against each of the key players in the terrorist scheme.

Turned out Grant’s clients were planning to set bombs at each of those properties they’d been buying up because they were set near important targets, such as one that was near the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.

Everyone involved has been arrested. Careers have been made or destroyed because of Grant’s testimony. And the terror attacks have been thwarted.

Margaret, on the other hand, was not as lucky.

She survived the gunshot Jonnie put in her belly. But was charged with hit and run and attempted murder. Her lawyer advised her to take a plea, but she chose to go to trial. She was found guilty a month ago and will be sentenced at the end of the year. She’ll likely get twenty to life.

Xander feels horrible about what happened that night. I try to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t predict how Margaret would respond to everything that was happening. And he took a bullet for me. How many women can say their husbands did that?

We’re moving on with our lives.

Xander and I have decided to move to Texas. We’ve purchased a piece of land not far from my parents, and we’ll put a house on it one day soon. Right now, we have a little house in the city that we’re enjoying.

Xander still runs his security firm, but he lets Jonnie do most of the everyday stuff. He even lets her chose the clients, which has significantly reduced the amount of tension between the two of them. I guess he figures if she was once considered a lethal weapon, then maybe she knows what she’s talking about when she says a client is too hot for the company.

And we’re getting married. Again.

***

I feel like there’s a bowling ball strapped to my stomach, as I wait for the music to begin. It’s so hot that I feel like I’m suffocating. But then my dad takes my arm and he walks me down the aisle, and I see Xander smiling as he watches me. He’s dressed in a dark tuxedo that he had tailored-made just for this day. It came out perfectly. It fit him like a glove. I wished I could have worn the dress I’d had designed for our wedding, the one that was cancelled over a year ago. But seeing Xander there, none of the discomfort mattered anymore.

He was mine. Nothing was ever going to change that.

He held my hand the moment we stood side by side and never let go. And that? That was everything.

~ End ~

You’d be surprised by the kinds of things a delivery person sees in a day’s work. All manners of naked people, for example, thought it was perfectly acceptable to open the door and wedge their bodies around it, greeting me like it was the most normal thing in the world. Chief among these offenders were couples who thought they could beat the delivery time having sex. I wasn’t certain this was their main motivation. Maybe they thought there wasn’t anything else to do for thirty to forty minutes, but sometimes I would ring the doorbell for whole minutes while I heard scrambling and cursing inside, until finally someone would give up and open the door, pizza more important than dignity.

So I saw a lot. Most times, much more than I wanted to.

None of that could’ve prepared me for the surprise I had the day I knocked on a door and it opened to Devon Ray.

It wasn’t even a particularly auspicious day. I would’ve thought that the sun would be suddenly eclipsed by the moon, sending the early afternoon into a dusky red twilight. Instead, the weather was fair, the world was normal, and I was standing in front of a major celebrity, one who wasn’t even staying at the nicest hotel in the city.

There he was, Devon Ray, all six-foot-whatever of him, a shining star of the silver screen—in Dallas, of all places—ordering a pepperoni pizza from my place of employment, of all things.

“Hello,” he said, smiling, his row of white, shining teeth just as bright and as perfect as they’d been at the theater when smiling at the heroine in his last romantic comedy. His chin was just as chiseled as it appeared in his promotional materials, in the tabloids, online. And those brown eyes…they just made me want to melt into a puddle and slither away somewhere, away from that gaze.

I opened my mouth to say something—anything—related to pizza, but my brain had other ideas.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded almost aggressively.

He guffawed, his eyes sparkling. “Am I not allowed to be here?”

My face went hot and my head went light. “No—I mean, I don’t know. I meant to say…” I’d meant to say “your pizza’s here,” but that hadn’t quite worked out.

“What’d you mean to say?” he asked, sounding both curious and kind. He probably got this a lot—blathering from idiot fangirls who couldn’t perform even the most basic functions around him. I mean, I wasn’t entirely a fangirl. Nana was much more of a fangirl than I was. I knew who he was, at least. There probably wasn’t a person in this country who didn’t. But, faced with my very first celebrity encounter, I found myself completely useless. I opened my mouth to give it another try.

“I saw your movie,” I blurted out, blushing heavily as he laughed.

“Which one?”

God, why was he so nice, and how had I been reduced to a moron in a matter of seconds? I stood on the threshold of his hotel room, shifting from foot to foot, wondering what I was doing, what he was doing. Didn’t he have assistants to take care of something as mundane as ordering pizza? Was he alone in there?

“Um. I don’t…could I have your autograph?” This wasn’t getting any better. I became acutely aware that it might very well be possible to die of embarrassment. It would be a mercy killing.

Devon laughed again, but the tone was good natured.

“Do you want to step inside for a minute and collect yourself?” he asked.

He stepped aside, and my feet shuffled forward of their own accord, leading me inside the hotel room. Devon turned and shut the door behind me, and suddenly, I was alone in a room with one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars. I wasn’t the fainting type, but now seemed like a pretty good time to do so. The tension was electric and palpable.

“Can I take that from you?” He held his arms out and I realized it was for the pizza box I was still clutching.

“Your pizza’s here,” I said, too late to be regarded as anything but stupid.

Devon Ray didn’t seem put off by my sudden inability to do anything correctly. He was so gently amused that it was beguiling. Celebrities—they’re just like us. Charming, patient, as beautiful as some fallen angel.

Well, that last part wasn’t ordinary.

“I’m not who you expected to open the door, am I?” he said, smiling and cocking his head at me.

I finally relinquished the pizza box to him, watching as he set it on a side table.

“This isn’t even the nicest hotel in Dallas,” I said, repeating an observation I’d had the moment he’d opened the door. It were as if I’d lost the filter between my brain and my mouth somewhere between knocking on the door and him opening it.

“Well, if you expect me to be staying at the nicest hotel in Dallas, guess who else would?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “The paparazzi. And guess what they’d be writing about if they see me ordering pizza?”

I stood, dumbfounded and still unable to believe I was in Devon’s presence.

“They’d say I was sloppy and single,” he said, laughing at himself. “That I was letting myself go. That my career was plateauing.”

He grabbed a glass on the table that I hadn’t noticed before—really, it was hard to notice anything other than Devon Ray, standing in front of me. But the way he carefully swirled the liquid that remained in it, making the mostly melted ice cubes clink together, made me realize that the actor was drinking—no, he was drunk. Well before five o’clock. Alone. Ordering pizza. In not even the nicest hotel in the city.

Celebrities—they’re just like us. Day drinkers, miserable, insecure.

His apparent imperfections made me a little more comfortable to be in his presence.

“I think they only say that about actresses,” I offered. “If someone got a photo of you with a pizza, they’d say how your workout requires lots of calories to be consumed, or that you were carb loading for your next musclebound role.”

Devon studied me for a moment before throwing his head back and laughing, the sound probably echoing down the entire floor. For someone drinking in the middle of the day, he sure seemed chipper.

“The drinking alone thing, though, you’d have to work hard to spin,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and eyeing him critically. “You’d have to say you’re immersing yourself in an unsavory character for an upcoming project. That you’re method acting. And even then, there’ll probably be backlash. But you probably have a good publicist.”

“Maybe I’ll just hire you,” he suggested. “You seem to know a lot about Hollywood.”

I shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“And you watch my movies.”

I thought I’d been able to move past the embarrassed stage, but there I was, flushing all over again.

“I watched the latest one. The one where you’re an idiot for half the movie, but you get the girl in the end.”

Devon snorted. “You’re going to have to be more specific. That’s about half my lexicon.”

“It sounds like you’re not very excited about being one of the biggest actors in the game right now,” I observed. Celebrities—they’re just like us. Disenfranchised.

“Just tired right now. That’s all.”

He didn’t look tired to me. Devon Ray was probably incapable of looking anything except for hot and hotter. The skin beneath his eyes had probably never bruised into circles after a sleepless night, never bagged after having too much to drink.

“Why are you in Dallas?” I asked him again. “And why are you hiding from the paparazzi?”

“I’m not hiding,” he said, grimacing as he sipped again from the glass, moving across the room to a tray with an ice bucket and bottle of vodka. I took the moment, away from his beauty and fame, to breathe again. Looking around the room for the first time, I noted the piles of clothes, the sheaves of paper spread out across one of the beds. This wasn’t even one of the nicer rooms in this hotel.

“It looks like you’re hiding,” I told him.

His drink refreshed, he turned back to me. “I’m just going through some stupid shit right now. Can’t a guy lie low?”

“So you are hiding.”

“I’m going through a breakup,” he said, shrugging. “There it is. Breaking news. Post it online, if you want.”

“I don’t have social media,” I said, peering at him. “Nobody knows yet?”

“Just her and me.”

I racked my brain, wondering if Nana had talked about it, but couldn’t come up with a face or name of an actress last seen attached to Devon Ray.

“Well, sorry if you’re having a rough time of it,” I said. “I didn’t know Dallas was a place you come when you get your heart broken.”

He laughed at me again, rubbing his face. “I had some business to take care of here. A couple of appearances. I’m not hiding.”

He kept saying that like he was trying to convince himself it was truth. I decided not to call him out on it.

“Where are your appearances?” I asked him, out of politeness.

“Why? Are you going to come?” He stepped closer to me, and I suddenly found myself considering all of the possible definitions of the word
come
. From what I could tell, Devon Ray definitely wasn’t letting himself go. I could see the faint outline of washboard abs beneath his thin cotton T-shirt. My eyes traveled downward, drawn to the zipper of his jeans, the way the pants clung to him, the value of having a tailor apparent.

“See something you like?” he crooned, and I jumped, ashamed of myself.

“Uh…sorry,” I stuttered. “I…you’re my first celebrity sighting. That’s stupid. I mean, I’ve seen Cowboys players downtown before, but I only knew because other people around me were freaking out. I’m…not myself right now.”

“That’s okay,” Devon said. “I’d like to be someone else right now, too. Can you help me do that?”

He’d set his drink down on the table, beside the pizza box, and before my brain could even process it, I was in his arms.

“Um, Devon?” I was afraid to move. I was afraid to even speak—I’d squeaked out his name. I didn’t know what I was more afraid of: staying in his arms or him letting go of me. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” His face was very close to me, and I could smell the vodka now. His breath was probably flammable.

“It looks like you’re trying to kiss me.”

“Mm-hm.” He leaned even closer.

“Devon.”

“Yeah.” His lips were mere inches from mine, his strong hands on my back, searing. I…I wanted him. I didn’t want him. I was attracted to him. He repulsed me. I was so damn confused in this moment, filled with conflicting feelings, warring desires. I wanted him to get away from me. I wanted him even closer.

“You don’t even know my name,” I said, our lips perilously close even as I arched my back, trying to get away from him, unsure of what I wanted, what my next words would be.

“All you have to do is tell me.” It was apparently as simple as that.

“June,” I said. “June Clark.”

“I’m Devon Ray,” he replied.

“I know who you are.”

“Well, now that we’re properly introduced, I think we can get on with it.” He puckered up again, leaning closer, but something about that turn of phrase turned me right off. It was almost as if he expected this to happen. As if he’d called delivery places until someone fuckable turned up. I didn’t want to be that girl. I wasn’t going to be.

“You can have anyone you want,” I said, slipping my hand between our mouths just in time to make contact with his tongue. “Why me?”

“Because I want you.”

“No.” I shook my head exaggeratedly, making sure he understood just what that
no
meant. “You want something that I’m not so sure I want to give you.”

“June, I’m probably the most famous person you would ever be with,” he said, his eyes glittering with something much less charming now. “Just think of the stories you could tell…if you just let this happen.”

“I’m never going to just ‘let’ anything happen to me unless I want it to happen,” I said, shoving him away. “And I definitely don’t want this.” Even as hot as he was. Even if my body still thrummed from where he’d been holding me. Even if the air continued to crackle between us in spite of my rejection.

“You know, most fans would pay me just to kiss them, even,” he said, alternating a scowl with pursed lips. He looked like an idiot, and I realized that I was an idiot to tolerate this as long as I had.

“Well, I’m not a fan,” I said.

“Don’t lie,” he scoffed. “You’re the one who wanted an autograph.”

“I only asked for it for my grandmother,” I spat at him. “She’s your biggest fan. But now I don’t even think I want to get your autograph for her. I think she’d be disappointed by the person you really are. I’d like to keep her in love with the characters you play in your stupid movies.”

I elbowed my way around Devon, stumbling and nearly falling over a pile of clothes on the carpet as I fumbled in my jeans pocket for my keys and phone.

“Careful,” he warned, catching my elbow, but I flailed out of his grasp.

“You’re a slob!” I exclaimed. “How can you even live like this?”

“You think I choose to?” he demanded.

“I think you’re rich enough and famous enough and entitled enough to choose whatever the hell you want to choose,” I said. “Enjoy your pizza.”