I HAD JUST FINISHED STRIPPING MY PROTECTIVE SUIT OFF WHEN THE KNOB
to the door of the room jiggled. The knob and door shook once more as whoever was on the other side tried to open it again. I didn’t blame them for being confused that the door was locked. It never was.
But the fact was, I hadn’t seen Jason in hours. Not since he had walked past me into the building, leaving me out there, alone. Well, not technically alone.
It had taken me maybe ten minutes after washing my hands all the way up to past my elbows to put the pieces together. They didn’t make sense. Not exactly at least… but enough.
Someone had let my cousin and the other guy into the lot.
And it didn’t take a genius to know there had only been one other person in the lot. One other person who would willingly let someone who didn’t like me into it. At least that’s what my gut said.
The one and only person who had disappeared. I hadn’t had the heart to ask any of the guys who had wandered into the break room what happened or if they knew anything about Jason. By the time I had gotten done and Rip and Miguel hadn’t come back, I had gone to the back door and looked outside to find it empty.
What a mess. What a freaking mess.
What was my dad thinking? I didn’t think anything would surprise me, but he did. After all this time, he still did.
I wasn’t going to think about it anymore. It was done. I knew how things were for them. Even if Rip hadn’t… hurt Rudy… the point had been made. I would go to the cops again if they made me. But I knew, in my gut, they wouldn’t.
“Hold on,” I called out as I wiped at my face with a paper towel.
Taking in the face on the other side, I turned the lock and then pulled it wide.
“Luna,” Owen peeked his head inside the door.
“Hey.” I turned my back to him, needing to sit down so I could pull the rest of the suit off. “What’s going on?” I asked just as I made it to my desk and pulled out the rolling chair so I could take a seat.
“Mr. Cooper asked me to tell you to go to his office,” my coworker answered, sounding a whole lot more serious than usual.
I pulled the suit off from my feet, glancing up at him to shoot him a smile that made my cheek ache. I had iced and smothered ointment on it afterward, so I knew it hurt less than it would have if I hadn’t. I needed a freaking break. A nice, long break, and if things could go right for just a little while, well that would be nice too.
But I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
Especially not when one sister still wasn’t answering my calls and another one was being weird too.
“Okay, I’ll go up there in a second.” Owen hesitated. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “My cheek hurts and the cuts on my hands sting, but I’ll be okay.”
My longtime friend looked at me in a way that said he believed me, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He hadn’t been around when I had been upstairs, but the guys at the shop were nosey. They knew something had happened, but I hadn’t said exactly what. I’d bet within three minutes, they had come to some conclusion and were just giving me space now.
I appreciated it. There was something really messed up about a family member trying to hurt you, especially when it was your dad who had put it into effect.
But luckily none of that was anything new for me.
And if I got some pleasure at Rudy getting hurt… well, I wasn’t going to feel bad. I could feel nice after everything that had happened. It was the least he deserved.
“Luna…”
I couldn’t even find it in me to muster up a smile. “Yeah?”
His dark brown eyes slid from one side of the room to the other, and his voice dropped so I could barely hear him as he said, “You want us to deal with it?”
“Deal with what?” I asked him as I stood up.
He was still looking around the room. “With the kid.” I stood there.
He looked at me and let his stare stay. “We looked at the video. He was the one who let them in,” he told me solemnly. “You want us to teach him a lesson?”
I don’t know what it said about me that I felt more loved by my coworkers than ever before right then in that moment.
You didn’t offer to beat up someone unless they meant something to you.
And that’s what Owen was in here doing, being the representative. That was what Miguel and Rip had done for me by running out into the lot to help me. That was what family did.
And even though I shouldn’t have smiled, I did. I probably sounded way more chipper than I should as I answered back, “That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever offered me, Owen, but it’s okay.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure? Because nobody messes with one of our own.”
I had always known I was one of theirs, or they were one of mine, but to hear it…
Well, that took care of the pain more than anything else ever would. “I’m sure, but thank you. And tell the other guys I said thank you
too. I’m touched, honestly,” I told him.
“You change your mind, tell us.” Owen took another step back and then said, “It doesn’t have to be us that do it either, I know people. Miguel knows people.”
Miguel had known how to hold Rudy down… but that was something to ask him about later.
All of my coworkers had some shady pasts apparently.
It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one. It was so nice that I grinned at Owen even though it stung and said, “I’ll tell you if I change my mind, but I’m all right. He isn’t going to get to me.” More than he already had at least.
“We’ve all tried calling him, but he’s not answering. It looks like he took off right after Rip and Miguel did.”
Wait. Wait.
Did they watch the cameras… and see what had happened? Wasn’t that literally what he’d said a minute ago? We looked at the video?
“Fucker. He better not ever think about trying to come back.”
I appreciated what he said, but I was too focused on one thing. “Did you watch the security footage?”
Owen grinned… and he nodded. “All of it.” Well.
Then backed out with that sneaky, and in some way, a strangely pleased, expression on his face.
Well, if I had been worried that they wouldn’t like me once they found out I wasn’t always Nice Luna, I would have been reassured they were okay with it.
Now, I needed to go talk to Mr. Cooper. He had never asked me to his office before, and I wasn’t delusional enough to think this time would be meaningless. He hadn’t been around while I had been upstairs. He had left for a long lunch.
I figured he wanted to talk to me about Jason, but… Why wouldn’t he come downstairs then?
I realized now I could have prevented most of this by not sucking everything up. If I would have told Mr. C about how rocky things had been the entire time the younger man had been stuck with me… well, I wouldn’t be here, with my busted cheek and torn up forearms. Or if I would have just told Rip straight-out that I couldn’t stand the weasel….
It was my fault. The only person I could blame was my own freaking self.
Maybe if I would have genuinely tried to be nicer to him, we could have built a better working relationship.
Then again, probably not.
Rubbing at the spot between my breasts where the fox necklace I’d put on that morning was, I made myself head toward the door and pull it open. I waved at the guys on the main floor and gave them a grim smile when I made it to the main floor. I got a mix of a couple of head tilts, a couple raised hands, and one thumbs-up in response.
But it was Miguel standing in the middle of the room that had me pausing. “You’re good,” he mouthed with a slow smirk that seemed really pleased.
“Thank you,” I mouthed back, getting an even wider grin in response.
I shook my head at him before I turned around and headed back up the stairs.
At the office, I knocked on the door. “It’s Luna,” I called out, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans.
“Come in,” Mr. Cooper yelled back.
With my elbow, I moved the handle down and shoved the door open. Sure enough, the man who had raised this business from an auto body repair shop to include a successful restoration business was sitting behind his desk, clicking away on his computer with a concerned
expression on his face. He tried to muster up a smile, but it fell off as quickly as it had come on.
“Little moon,” he breathed, shoving his chair back and getting to his feet… mostly. It was more of a stoop as he looked me over.
“I’m okay, Mr. C. I promise, sit down.” I gave him a smile I knew was strained as I took one of the ancient chairs across from his desk. Taking my hands out of my pockets, I pressed my palms together and then stuck them between my thighs. I didn’t miss the tight nature to Mr. Cooper’s movements as he sat back down in his chair and shoved it forward to settle down. In a gray Polo shirt and black khakis, he was dressed the exact same he always was since Rip had come, and he’d stopped working on the floor.
“They didn’t tell me about your face,” he murmured quietly, his mannerisms becoming more and more concerned by the second.
“It’s just a little cut,” I told him, shooting him a small, tight smile that only slightly made my cheek hurt. It was probably about time that I put more ointment on it.
He shook his head, his eyes glued on what I knew was the cut on my cheek. “I’m sorry, honey.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry over,” I told him, honestly. “It’s all on my family, Mr. C. I’m sorry it happened here.”
My boss’s expression told me he didn’t believe me, and the way his shoulders curled and stooped confirmed it. “Rip is on his way. Let’s wait for him, okay?” he asked me, still speaking gently.
“Okay,” I agreed, flashing him an expression that hopefully said I didn’t want him to feel even a little bad about any of this.
It was my fault.
And Jason’s.
And Rudy’s.
And my dad’s.
But I could and would take responsibility for my own actions.
“You mind talking about something else until he gets there?” I asked.
Those green-green emerald-colored eyes watched me. “How’s the house coming along?” he decided to go with.
I had forgotten I hadn’t had a real conversation about my place getting broken into. The only person I’d gotten around to telling was Lily. What I hadn’t told her was that I hadn’t been staying there alone.
Much less that Rip and I had shared a couch and a bed those same times.
I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t blabbed about sleeping in my bed to Mr. Cooper either, but I tried my best not to even think about it in the first place. Then again, why would Rip tell him anything about me?
“Okay,” I told him, feeling like even more of a liar than usual. “My house got broken into a few days ago. The insurance is going to cover a lot of the things that got messed up. They didn’t actually steal anything but my laptop and my tablet.” They. My cousin and whoever else had helped him. Maybe the man I had thrown my boot at.
I wished I could throw it again, honestly. At his head. “Oh, Luna, I’m sorry. They don’t know who did it?”
There it went. “The police had said there had been some robberies in the area, but no one I know said they’d heard that.” I swallowed, ignoring the ache right in the center of my chest. “My cousin… the guy I had an issue with in the lot… he admitted he was the one who did it.” The more I said it, the easier it would get. I hoped. “So it was him.”
A hand went up to his head to scrub at the top of it, reminding me of Rip who did the same thing. Mr. Cooper sighed. “I can’t believe they would do that.”
Then he didn’t need to know that it had to have been my dad who sent him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
The older man shook his head, clearly looking devastated. “I’m sorry, honey. You should have told me sooner.”
I didn’t want to tell him that I’d called him the night it happened, but he’d had his phone off. “Thanks, Mr. C. It’s all right. I’ll get it all sorted, but if I need help, I’ll let you know for sure.”
My longtime boss’s face dropped, and I could see the argument on his face. But he held the words back and said in a tone that made me feel a little bad, “If there’s anything Lydia and I can do, tell us. You know we’ll help you with anything, little moon. We love you.”
I knew they did, of course I knew they did, but I still told him, “I know, and I love you both too.” That was maybe the tenth time in all the years we’d known each other that I had said those words. “And I will let you know, I promise. I’m still just trying to wrap my head around it all. These last few weeks have just felt like a really bad dream.”
His nod said he understood, and I knew he did. But it didn’t wipe the resignation off his face. “Maybe you should look into getting an alarm system?”
Eh. “Yeah.” I paused and thought about withholding my conversation with Rip from him, but there was nothing to hide. And even if there was, I didn’t want to. “Rip helped me out with it, the day after it happened,
that’s why he took the day off. To help me. I’m sorry if that caused a problem between you two.”
Mr. Cooper blinked, and luckily there were no hard feelings on his face from me keeping this from him but telling Rip about it. His voice was a little high, a little shocked as he basically wheezed, “Our Rip?”
Obviously, I wasn’t the only one surprised by this kindness, and it made me feel a little bad and a little defensive. “Yeah.” There was nothing to hide, and I didn’t want to keep this from him any longer. “He knew I’ve been scared, and he’s stayed with me the last few nights.”
I don’t even think he meant to ask, “He did?” But the question did come out of his mouth.
All I did back was nod.
I didn’t know what to do with the look that came over his face. So I decided to change the subject. “How’s Lydia, by the way?”
I wondered if he was still hung up on Rip helping me out, but he managed to say, distractedly, “She’s great. She was asking me about you a few days ago. I think she was planning on inviting you over for lunch or dinner this weekend, if you’re free.”
“I’m always free for you two,” I told him honestly. “Have you been going on your dates?”
“Kind of,” I told him, giving him a little smile.
Ripley had kept me company at the bar I’d been stood up at, I thought to myself. “I’ve gone on two and got left hanging at another one.”
I could tell he was distracted, but he still managed to ask. “Any winners?”
I almost snorted. “No. Not even close, but I’ve only gone on three. I don’t want to waste my time, and a lot of these guys don’t want anything serious so….” I shrugged. “I’m just being picky and don’t want to settle. I just want… the right man.” And my heart wanted the wrong one, but I wasn’t going to think about that again in the next millennium. Nope.
Mr. Cooper’s nod was grave, but his voice was even more serious. “I get it, honey.” He sighed. “I was married before Lydia. Did you know that?”
I hadn’t up until I had overheard his and Rip’s conversation—a conversation I wasn’t supposed to have been eavesdropping on. So I lied and shook my head.
He seemed to swallow, to think for a minute before saying, “I was forty when she passed. We had been together since I was twenty-one.”
His voice was quiet, serious. “We were together for nineteen years, and it seemed like six months. It was a lifetime, but it never felt like it.”
Was it silly of me that I felt embarrassed and even a little protective of Lydia? Knowing now that Mr. Cooper had been with someone else for so long?
He kept going, his voice still holding onto its gravity… and something else that might have been bittersweet. The hard bob of his throat confirmed it. “She was… she was the love of my life,” he admitted. “Lydia is too in a way, but Bea was my world. It’s been twenty-three years, and I don’t miss her any less than I did when she first died. Lydia came into my life a lot sooner than I would have dreamed of, a lot sooner than I would have liked, but….” His shrug looked like he had three hundred pounds on his shoulders. “It was meant to be. Lydia came when she came, and I can’t say that it wasn’t fate that brought us together.”
Oh jeez. I blinked. “How soon after?”
He swiped his hand over his head again and looked up at the ceiling. “I met her six months after.”
What was I going to do? Judge him? If he had been anyone else, I would have scoffed or thought something terrible, but Mr. Cooper had always been honest with me. He had loved me back when I hadn’t loved myself much. I had seen him with Lydia. I knew there was a deep love there.
I was the first person in the world to understand that life wasn’t white and black. I hadn’t even been able to find one person to love me romantically, much less two. All I knew was that based on the face he was giving me, other people in the past had given him a hard time for moving on, for finding love. After all this man had done for me, I wouldn’t be one of them too.
“Can I ask what she passed away from?”
His hesitation made me feel terrible. The breath he sucked in and then let out made me feel like an asshole. “She was—”
The sound of knuckles hitting the door came a second before the door creaked open and a familiar voice said, “Ready?”
Mr. Cooper ’s face instantly flushed, and he lowered his voice, “We’ll finish this conversation later, okay?”
He didn’t want to finish the conversation because of Ripley, did he? I wondered… but nodded anyway. There were some things in this life that you didn’t want to talk about. Not ever. And especially not in front of certain people.
I understood that better than most. There were plenty of years that I didn’t enjoy talking about.
“Come in, Rip,” Mr. Cooper called out a moment later.
Sure enough, the biggest man I had ever seen in my life, swung the door completely open and stepped inside, shutting it behind him. He stood there in a gray shirt that was plastered to his upper body. I glanced back at Mr. Cooper as Ripley took the seat that I had left unoccupied closest to the door. He glanced at me once, grunting out a “Luna” that I replied with, “Hi, Ripley.”
“You all right?”
“I’ll live. It’s not the first time he’s jumped me.” Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.
“Well,” Mr. Cooper continued on the moment his co-owner seemed to have settled into the seat beside me. “We brought you in here because of what happened earlier.”
And, I was right. This was about Jason. Or maybe my cousin coming to my job and starting issues…. But I didn’t think Mr. Cooper would blame me for that. Luckily, there hadn’t been any customers around to see it, so it wasn’t like it would impact business.
Rip leaned forward and took hold of the conversation, his gaze leeching straight on me. “Tell us what’s been going on with Jason.”
Mr. Cooper jumped in immediately. “From the beginning, Luna. Tell us what’s been going on with him when he’s with you. You’ve told me some of it, but I think Rip should hear it from the beginning too.”
So this was where we were going. It had nothing to do with Rudy— thankfully. But either they had watched the video or heard that Jason had been the one to let him into the lot, and his disappearing act afterward hadn’t helped either. The dummy hadn’t thought that through at all. Didn’t he know that even if he never came back, employers checked references?
So I told them, “I never said anything, but I knew him before he started working here.”
Somehow I missed how Rip’s eyes narrowed as they flicked from Mr. Cooper to me and back to the older man again. I didn’t like the look that came over Rip’s face before he asked, “How?”
Here we went. “He dated my sister two years ago. It was a mess. I didn’t like him when she introduced me to him, and I didn’t like him six months later when it turned out he got another girl pregnant. I stayed out of it, but when he would come by the apartment and try to see her, if I was home, I would tell him to leave. Anyway, then he applied here—I
hadn’t even known he was interested in working in this field back then— but I didn’t want to bring up personal stuff to either of you. I could live with thinking he was a… you know, not a good person.
“But almost immediately after he started here, he began being really rude and disrespectful. I wasn’t exactly the nicest and warmest person to him, but he was really defensive about everything. I didn’t like him, and he knew that, but I tried to be professional. Nothing helped though.
“He’s messed up a bunch of times since he started coming to help me, and I swear he does it on purpose. He doesn’t listen. He’s got a bad attitude. Insubordinate. He’s petty and lazy,” I kept going. “We get into it over everything, even before he came over to my section. Mr. C knows he’s done some petty crap, but it was on purpose, I swear. And, Rip, you’ve heard him on the phone with me, you know he’s a weasel.
“Today though, we got into a disagreement and he walked out of the room and didn’t come back for half an hour, so that was when I went to look for him. You can ask Owen and some of the other guys, they saw me or asked what I was doing, and I told them. Miguel told me he saw him outside, and that’s why I went out there in the first place. I saw him, and he ignored me and walked right by me, and the next thing I knew…” I’d gotten shoved from behind.
“You saw it happen?” Mr. Cooper asked Ripley with a frown.
“I got there after,” my younger boss confirmed, his expression tight. “Miguel and I were by the back door when we heard Luna yell, and we went right by him on the way out the door. I was too… distracted to stop and think about what he’d been doing.” I didn’t miss the way he fisted a big hand.
“You should’ve gone back in and made sure he didn’t leave,” Mr. Cooper replied pretty freaking crisply, sounding angrier than I had ever heard him, and that was saying something because I’d eavesdropped on his arguments with Rip before.
My younger boss’s mouth slackened, and I knew whatever was about to come out of his mouth was no good.
So I tried to but in. “It’s my fault. I should have said something to one of you and told you the truth when he was being a pain over the last few weeks. I should have followed him back into the building when he was making it obvious he was ignoring me—”
Rip cut me off, blatantly ignoring me as he asked Mr. Cooper tightly, “I was busy making sure Luna was all right. What should’ve happened is that you should’ve listened to me when I said you needed to quit trying to make him Luna’s apprentice.”
Wait. He’d told Mr. C not to stick him with me?
Rip kept right on going. “I told you there was something off about the kid. I told you she didn’t like him working with her.”
He’d done that too?
“I told you we should have fired him after his first fuckup, but you said ‘Let’s give him another chance. He’s young. Everyone makes mistakes,’ didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” the older man claimed in a wobbly voice, his face flushing.
“Me telling you wasn’t enough?” Rip returned. “Her telling you wasn’t enough?”
Shit, shit, shit. “No, it’s my fault. Mr. Cooper, I should have insisted
—”
Ripley’s hand came up and he waved me off. “No. I told him.” He
pointed one thick, long finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction. “I told you, and her fucking cousin could have had a gun on him. He could’ve had a bat on him, a tire iron. She could’ve gotten her brains bashed in because you always think you know what’s right!”
I could have not been there or within ten miles based on how intense the stare down they were having with each other was.
And suddenly, I had a feeling that this conversation had just taken a sudden turn to This Has Nothing To Do With Me.
I would have been right. “I had no idea—”
“You never have an idea,” Ripley said, loudly.
“This is nobody’s fault but my own,” I tried to tell them, trying to make eye contact with one of them, but they were both staring too hard at each other. It was like I wasn’t even in the same universe. “It was my cousin. My family. And I don’t know if he paid Jason to open the gate and let him in or what, but it’s my fault,” I tried to say… but they weren’t listening. They weren’t even close to listening.
“That’s unfair, Ripley,” the older man said, completely focused on him.
“You think?”
Mr. Cooper swept another hand over his head. “I know it is. I told you I didn’t know.”
“You don’t think that excuse is getting old after all these years?” “Son, give me a break,“ Mr. Cooper almost croaked, rubbing his
hand over his chest, his face reddish pink.
But the man in the chair decided he wasn’t going to give anyone a break, not his business partner, not the man who had been so kind to me for so long. “Don’t fucking ‘son’ me. You always think you know better than anyone else, but you don’t.”
Okay. All right. I needed to calm this down. “Hey, Rip. Don’t put this on Mr. C. It’s on me. I should have said something from the beginning
—”
They were still ignoring me as their voices got louder.
“I didn’t know!” Mr. Cooper shot back as Rip stood up. “It’s not fair for you to keep bringing up things from twenty years ago.”
How had they known each other twenty years ago?
“Hey, you two, can we agree it’s nobody else’s fault but Jason’s?” I piped up, getting to my feet to hopefully remind them they weren’t in here alone.
I was invisible though because nothing changed.
Nothing changed because Rip jabbed his finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction and hurled,
“Twenty-two years ago, not twenty, and it could be another forty and I still wouldn’t forget what you did to Mom—”
Wait.
Wait.
Mom?
Mom?
Mr. Cooper wheezing had me snapping my eyes toward him just as he reached up and slapped another hand over the center of his chest.
“Mr. Cooper?” I asked, taking a step toward his desk as Ripley’s voice seemed to trail off.
Mr. Cooper sucked in another gasp as his fingers curled over the shirt he had on. “I… I…”
“Call 911!”
