He’d probably ask for dinner, and most days, since I felt sorry for him, I would give in to him despite not wanting him there at all.
When I tried to say no to him, he’d get this pitiful look on his face that reminded me of a small child not getting the sucker he asked for and then pouting until he got it.
Most of the time I gave the man what he wanted, but today wasn’t going to be one of those days.
I didn’t feel well, I’d started my period a few hours into my shift, and I was wearing stained underwear that needed to be removed from my body hours ago. Unfortunately, as a nurse, you didn’t get the option of going home in the middle of your shift to change because you got period blood all over your panties.
Hence the reason I was in such a bad mood.
Resigned that I was going to have to pull out the bitch card, I pulled into my garage, and quickly shut the door before Josh could round the house.
Then I shut the car off, ordered Sienna to her room to finish her homework and headed to the front door.
Josh was waiting for me the minute I got there.
“Hey, how are you?” Josh caught the screen door as I pushed it open, but I blocked his entrance with my body.
“I’m not feeling well today, Josh,” I informed him. “I’m going to need a rain check.”
He frowned. “Time for me to cook then?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “Honestly, Sienna and I want some time to ourselves. We’re going to eat on the couch and watch a movie.”
His lips thinned.
“I’ll see you tomorrow!”
I closed the door on his frowning face and felt my heart slamming in my chest at ninety to nothing.
“Mom, my homework was in my backpack, but I think I might’ve left it at the tutor’s because I can’t find it.”
I closed my eyes.
“We’ll run by there tomorrow before school, and we’ll work on it in the car in the drop off line…”
“But I have a spelling test tomorrow, and that’s in there with them, too.”
I growled in annoyance.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Let me go change my clothes, and we’ll go.”
So after changing clothes, I drove the twenty minutes across town to the tutoring center, then all the way back home.
Only, this time, when I got home, there was no Josh standing outside my door.
Most people would’ve thought that he’d gone to his own house. Hell, that’s what I thought he’d done, too.
But ohhh, no. Of course, he wouldn’t do that.
Instead, he’d gone into my house and started using my kitchen to make dinner.
“Josh, what are you doing in my house?” I snapped loudly.
Josh didn’t even bother turning around.
“Cooking you dinner, darlin’,” I could tell he was grinning. “What does it look like?”
My hands clenched and I stared at his back as he continued to move about my kitchen as if it were his.
“Josh, I’d like you to leave,” I said. “Baby, head to your room and get your homework finished.”
“But Mom…”
“Listen to your mother,” Josh ordered.
I turned a glare on him.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” Sienna said. “You’re not my daddy.”
I closed my eyes. This was definitely what we didn’t need right now.
“Listen to me, little girl,” Josh stepped out of the kitchen and headed toward Sienna. “You’ll listen to me, or I’ll take you over my knee.”
I stepped in front of Sienna. “I think not.”
Josh stopped. “I’ll leave,” he told me. “But I just want you to realize that I’m not stopping. This is only the beginning. I’ll have you, even if I have to lie, cheat and steal to get you. And tell your brat to get ready for a new daddy.”
With that he left, and I stared after him as if he’d just grown a second head.
Then I heard Sienna’s door slam, and I whirled to see her gone as well.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered hoarsely. “Tunnel, what the hell did I just do?”
Chapter 5
Tell me not to do something, and I’ll do it twice and take pictures.
-Ghost’s secret thoughts
Ghost
I’d heard through the grapevine that Mina was seeing somebody, and like always, I came right out and did something about it because I couldn’t not do it.
I had to make sure that whomever she was seeing was a decent person—but this guy wasn’t any good. Not even a little bit. I knew after my inside man who handled my rentals for all the houses I owned in that area had given me the information on the guy. He filled out the rental agreement for him, so finding the information out was really quite easy to come by. And I didn’t like the guy. At all.
So I’d driven all the way to where my wife lived, a long six-hour drive away from where I now lived.
It wasn’t the man’s rental agreement that had me scared, though. It was the fact that he didn’t have a history. Not a parking ticket or credit cards. There was nothing about him at all for me to find, and that wasn’t a good thing. Everyone had some sort of paper trail of their life – a warning ticket for speeding or a bank balance that fell into the negative at least once or twice.
“I hate you!”
My head turned back to the scene before me.
I was staring into my daughter’s window, about ten feet away from the house, and I had a listening device pointing at the two of them behind the glass.
I stared at the crying little girl, with the tears pouring down her cheeks as she glared at her mother like she’d just betrayed her. The little girl with the two French braids that started at the top of her head and fell to nearly mid-back…hair that was the exact same color as mine. Her eyes were the same color, too. Deep green, almost the color of an olive, with whiskey colored striations that broke that green up beautifully.
“I hate you!” the little girl screamed again when my wife still didn’t move away from her.
My wife was beautiful. She had brown hair that fell just between her shoulder blades, and the most soulful brown eyes that looked like they’d literally been poured from melted chocolate. She was skinny—too skinny. Much skinnier than the last time I’d seen her, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on here.
She wasn’t eating, and that was because something was bothering her enough that she couldn’t.
“Sweetheart,” my wife whispered to our daughter. “Please.”
“It’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. He’s not my father. I’m not ever going to call him daddy. I only ever had one and he’s gone. You don’t get to decide that for me!”
My heart shredded into a million pieces, and murderous rage started to fill my veins at hearing those words come from her mouth.
“He didn’t ask you to call him …”
Bullshit.
“Let’s go.”
My soft command had Sean at my side turning and following in my direction, but that didn’t stop him from looking over his shoulders periodically to get one last glimpse of the nightmare going on inside.
I stalked around the house and headed next door, stopping at the home that was only a mere house length away from my family’s, and knocked on the door.
The man who we’d seen leaving my house just five minutes before opened his own door and stared at me. “Who’re you?”