The Middle Man Page 4

The front door wasn't even locked.

  But Lincoln was across the hall from me.

  I knew him well enough to know that he would never let anything happen to me.

  That, well, that was the most comforting thought in the world, wasn't it?

  He was offering me safety.

  I was going to grab it with both hands.

  I could deal with his anger--and my guilt--when he found out the truth some other time.

  THREE

  Lincoln

  I couldn't sleep.

  In general, I was someone who could pass out anytime and anywhere. When you spent so much of your life on the move like I did, you had to learn to be able to sleep on planes, trains, in cars, in a cold shack in the woods with nothing but a hard floor beneath you.

  It was a survival adaptation.

  I never tossed and turned, overthought myself to complete consciousness.

  Yet there was no denying that was exactly what happened after depositing Gemma into my rarely-used guest room.

  It wasn't uncommon for women to be in my home. Anyone who knew me knew I was a somewhat chronic relationship-guy. That mystical unicorn, as Miller would put it, having been convinced before meeting me that no guy actually wanted relationships, just casual sex.

  Don't get me wrong, casual sex could be fun. It could clear your mind, help you think more clearly, or allow you to forget your troubles for a while.

  But I had always been seeking that feeling of home. Meals cooked in my kitchen, a familiar face on the couch waiting for me when I was on my way home, someone to share my time with, my stories with.

  Everything else felt hollow.

  And, yeah, I was almost comically bad at making choices when it came to women.

  I would never live down the time I thought I found a keeper when it turned out she was actually just homeless and using me for a place to stay for a few weeks before jacking half my shit and taking off to rebuild her life.

  But I never seemed to stop trying.

  Something in me refused to settle for a life without someone to share it with.

  I figured that, eventually, I would find the right person, could build a life with them. It just took me a bit too long before I realized someone wasn't the right one.

  But the women who were in my house in the past were in the bed next to me, not across the hall. And Miller, when she happened to come by, had a few too many drinks to drive home, always crashed on my couch because the bed in the guest room Shrieks like an orgy is going on if I so much as adjust the pillow.

  Aside from Miller, I wasn't sure I had ever had a woman just... staying over. Platonically.

  Grumbling, I knifed up in bed, scrubbing a hand over my sandpaper eyes.

  She wasn't exactly there platonically either. She was there because she was scared and unsure, because she was in a little over her head.

  I honestly had no idea if she genuinely was in trouble or not. Some of her shit could be explained by assholes wanting a nice iPhone or wanting to steal her identity from her mail or a cleaning crew accidentally switching on the camera on her work computer.

  But I wasn't going to take that chance with her either.

  Partly because I just, as a man, couldn't turn my back on a woman who was scared. The other part was because she was a part of our extended family.

  Jules would have my head if anything happened to her, and I had a chance to help her, but didn't.

  Hell, she'd probably have my head regardless if or when she learned I kept this shit from her.

  I'd never met siblings so different from one another before.

  Jules was driven, grounded, organized, a little cool at times, icy when she was mad at you.

  Gemma was all things light and airy. I swear to Christ, she brought sunshine into the office with her when she showed up to work. She floated around, offering twinkling laughs and easy smiles. She was decidedly disorganized. And Jules had worried all through her senior year in high school that she would never get serious and pick a stable career. She was warmth, through and through. I'd never even seen her angry. I couldn't picture it. But I sincerely doubted it could ever be called icy. She just didn't seem like she could manage that.

  Maybe that was why I couldn't sleep.

  Because when she was telling me her situation, there was a dimming of that lightness in her eyes. There were no smiles or laughter. Her soul was heavy with it, weighing her down.

  It was a fucking crime.

  And it had me on edge.

  A part of me wanted to get up, get dressed, get in my car, drive over to David's house, and threaten the shit out of him.

  The other part, though, knew from hard-earned experience that most--if not all--people tended to see their situations through a very narrow, incredibly biased scope.

  David-the-evil-suspicious-CFO might not have been so formidable after all, but rather just a keen-eyed man who happened not to appreciate Gemma's breezy way of life.

  Her feeling of being watched may have been her own guilty conscience for snooping around when she knew she wasn't supposed to.

  There were three sides to every story.

  If things didn't resolve themselves in the very near future, it would be my job to figure out that middle ground where most reality existed.

  Until then, all I could do was offer her a safe place and a sounding board. I could keep an eye on her and the situation.

  I would have to get used to the uneasy sensation in my stomach.

  Sometime around six, I gave up on getting any more than a few snippets of sleep. Wondering how I was supposed to get through endless files once again, I showered then made my way downstairs to start the coffee and rummage around for any tea there might possibly be tucked in a cupboard somewhere.

  Lucking on some plain oolong tea--whatever the fuck that was--I put on a pot of water to boil as I started making some breakfast, overthinking the whole process because I knew Gemma to be a somewhat particular eater. Not vegetarian, yet only ate meat sparingly. Loved fruits and vegetables, but liked to eat organic.

  To be honest, I rarely did my own food shopping, either adding the task to Jules' never-ending to-do list, or, more often, leaving it to whoever I was seeing at the time.

  It had been a bit since anyone was in my house. Which meant that Jules had set it up so that strangers walked in my open front door to load up my fridge and pantry when I was not home.

  That ended up working in my favor since Jules' was a bit of a healthy eater as well, so most of the shit in the fridge was stuff I figured Gemma would eat.

  It was almost eight when I finally heard movement from the floor above, signs of life as she changed, got ready for her day.

  Unlike many--if not most--of the women I knew, it was a short process. Gemma wasn't huge on makeup, and her hair just kind of did its own natural wavy thing that worked on her.

  It was ten minutes tops between when I heard her get out of the bed (and I had to admit Miller was right about the orgy comment) to when she was coming down the stairs.

  Only, it wasn't the Gemma I was familiar with. The Gemma with the wild hair and loose, bright clothing.

  No.

  This was Corporate Gemma.

  Her usual wardrobe was replaced with severe black slacks, clunky clogs, and a hideously mundane white button-up shirt that she had tucked in and buttoned all the way up. Her hair was slicked back, pulled and pinned into spot-on imitation of some severe schoolmarm from times gone by.

  The whole thing was off-putting, to say the least.

  There was this swirling sensation of wrongness inside me as I watched her tug at her sleeve, clearly objecting to the tight, buttoned cuff, likely longing for one of those floral sundresses I had gotten so used to seeing her in.

  "That's a new look," I remembered to say after realizing I had been staring at her for too long. And that my face likely showed at least a small bit of my displeasure.

  "God, I hate it. I feel like my skin can't breathe. Do you ever feel like
that? Like when you have to put a stuffy suit on?"

  "I kind of like putting a stuffy suit on."

  "Well, yeah, because a man in a well-cut suit is probably one of the sexiest looks available to your gender. Or even the female gender sometimes too. But this... this is not a good look."

  "It's not a bad look," I comforted her, trying to look at it as an objective third party, not someone who was expecting a Gemma that maybe didn't exist as much as she used to. As much as it pained me to even think that, to find that the world had been too big, too bad, and too ugly to allow her to continue to be the girl we had all known and loved.

  It really wasn't bad.

  The shirt was a little boxy, clearly bought off the rack, and not personally tailored, which would have softened it up a bit. And her hair pulled back did kind of let you admire the perfect porcelain of her skin, the charming smattering of freckles.

  "Those clogs, though," I added, shaking my head. "Those should be burned."

  "I can't walk in normal heels," she admitted, shaking her head at herself. "Jules has tried to teach me countless times, but my ankle kinda wobbles outward, and I fall like a baby giraffe just learning how to use its legs."

  "I can picture that," I told her, lips twitching. And, come to think of it, while Jules could always be found clicking around the office in ankle-breaking heels for an ungodly long shift, I was pretty sure Gemma was always in sandals or fucking Toms shoes.

  "You made breakfast?" she asked, brows moving together, almost insultingly surprised. Like she was shocked my caveman ass knew where to find the stovetop.

  "Nothing fancy. Couple eggs, that seed-filled toast crap Jules insists on having sent here, some fresh fruit..."

  "Considering I've been running on granola bars and pistachio packets for the past few months, that sounds like a five-course meal to me. Oh, oolong. That's my favorite."

  "Honestly, don't even know what it is," I told her as I poured the boiling water into a mug.

  "So, black tea is fully crushed. Green tea isn't crushed at all. But oolong is half-crushed. So it is an in-between flavor. Not that you wanted that tea lesson," she added, shaking her head at herself as she put the teabag into the steaming water.

  "Sugar?" I asked, getting a brow raise from her. "Right," I added, remembering some tangent she'd gone off on about the evils of white sugar and how if you had to sweeten things, honey and stevia and molasses were the only ways to go.

  I wasn't a junk food fanatic in general; you didn't get to maintain a six-pack when you ate nothing but shit all the time, but I wasn't exactly attentive to every minute detail pertaining to the nutritional content of every bite that went into my mouth.

  Gemma was.

  Gemma was someone I'd once walked in on in the office half-gagging as she tried to choke down some herbal tea that smelled like fresh-cut grass simply because It is good for me.

  That was the kind of fanatical I could never understand. But could appreciate someone giving a damn about her body. I spent a lot of time on mine over the years, so I found the obsession with her food a little more interesting than someone who simply ate crap all day and night.

  "Is that grass-fed butter?" she asked, casting a suspicious look at the back of the butter box that hadn't found its way into the trash yet.

  "If that is the kind Jules would buy, then yeah."

  "You don't grocery shop for yourself ever?" she asked, more curious than accusatory like most might sound asking the same question as she loaded up her plate, heading over to the island to sit down.

  "Not that I can remember. Not in years."

  "But you eat at home a lot, don't you?"

  "Probably about fifty-fifty if I am in town," I said, joining her.

  "Then how do you know how to plan your meals if you don't even know what you have in the house?"

  "Planning meals. I think you're giving me a bit more credit than you should, sweetheart," I told her, head tilting to the side at the way her head ducked, gaze avoiding mine.

  "I guess you're not always the one cooking the meals. And Jules isn't always the one shopping for the household."

  Hm.

  That was an odd comment. Almost probing. Yet hesitant.

  I wouldn't call either of those common for her.

  Then again, it had been a long time since I had seen her. And that time between the last year of high school to your mid-twenties had a tendency to change you pretty quick.

  For better or worse.

  I couldn't help but wonder if these changes in Gemma were for the former or latter.

  "I maybe cook ten percent of the time," I admitted. "I can't claim I am very good at it. If I am left in charge, something is on the grill and a couple potatoes are in a pot on the stove. That is about as inventive as I get. Do you cook?" I asked, realizing it was something I didn't know about her.

  If I thought about it, despite working side-by-side with her for years, there was a lot about her I likely didn't know.

  "I almost never get takeout. I crave Chinese once in a blue moon, though. With this job, I don't have a ton of time to cook big meals. But I throw together a big batch of soup that I eat all week with a salad."

  "I like soup."

  "You know, I don't think I have ever heard a man say that before," she told me, watching me with those bright blues of hers. "It's always steak and bacon and burgers."

  "Soup reminds me of school lunches when I was a kid. I was never allowed to get school-provided lunch. And I was probably the only kid who didn't just have a sandwich in a brown bag. I was always sent to school with something hot in a thermos. Pasta, chili, soup. So those things have always been nostalgic for me."

  "Maybe, if I am here for a while, I can make some soup for dinner. If you would be into that."

  Again, the head duck, the lack of eye-contact. It was such an oddly insecure move for her that I found myself wanting to see it gone immediately.

  "I would be into that. In fact, I plan to be hungry around dinnertime this very evening. And I happen to have a lot of shit in my fridge right now that can make soup. If you think of anything else, text me a list. I can have Jules get it sent here for later."

  "I can order it. Jules already does too much."

  That was true.

  And I felt a small stab of guilt at allowing her to do such a banal task for me.

  Normally, I figured that with the insane salary Quin paid her, that it was a small task. And also that she likely just had a list saved on some app somewhere that she just hit 'check out' on whenever she thought I needed groceries.

  But now, well, I was second-guessing that.

  I wasn't so fucking busy that I couldn't order my own damn groceries.

  It would be yet another excuse not to do paperwork.

  "What time will you get back here after work?"

  "Ah, if I drop by Whole Foods... probably around six-thirty. Maybe a little bit later."

  "Would you feel freaked out here alone if I am a bit later than that?"

  "Well, unlike you, I will lock the front door," she said, rolling her eyes as she finished her egg, moving quickly on to the fruit.

  "Alright. I think I should be able to slip out around eight."

  "Gives me time to get the food made."

  "Before I leave today, I will shuffle the cars around so you can park in the garage. I will text you the codes to get in the garage and toss a spare for the inner garage door too."

  "Perfect. How are you going to get your car back from the office?"

  "I'll Uber in today. Tell them I left the office to grab a drink. They'll buy it if they even ask at all." It would depend on who was in the office. "You still have the same number, right?" I asked, reaching for my phone.

  "Same one since I was fifteen," she agreed.

  "If anything freaks you out at work or after, text me. Text me a location," I added, wanting to be clear. If shit went down, it would save valuable time to know where she had sent her last text from without having to wait on Nia t
o figure that shit out.

  "Okay. I will."

  "I want eye contact when you agree to that," I demanded, watching as her head lifted. "Tell me that if anything feels even slightly sketchy that you will call or, if it is not safe to call, text me with the location. I will know from the location alone that shit is going down. No need to waste valuable time on specifics if you don't have it to spare."

  "I got it. And I promise," she told me, voice even.

  "Listen," I said, reaching across the island to put my hand over hers, taking the briefest of seconds to notice how pale her skin looked compared to mine. "I know from experience that women don't like to think they are inconveniencing anyone. And that means they tend to wait too long to ask for help. By the time they do, it is too late. Don't be that woman. Don't be a statistic. If anything feels off, reach out. Immediately. Got it?"

  To that, she sent me a soft, sweet smile I remembered. "I got it," she agreed with a nod. "Now I have to get going, or I will be late. Can you let me into Automobile Fort Knox, please?"

  "Yep, let's get you going," I agreed, brushing her off when she tried to clean up the dishes.

  I got her the keys, texted her the codes, got her car out, watched her drive away, jaw tight, back oddly straight.

  I had a hard time shaking my unease as I cleaned up after breakfast, shuffled the cars, locked up the house because I thought she would be more comfortable with that, then headed in to work in the backseat of a fucking hippie van.

  "You're even later than usual," Jules murmured, back to me, as I came in the front door.

  "I was here late. Trying to catch up on paperwork."

  To that, she turned, lips curving up. "How'd that go?"

  "I'm sure you saw my office."

  "It doesn't look like you made any progress."

  "Even after working on it for sixteen hours."

  "I'll keep the coffee stocked," she said by way of comfort.

  "What's all the noise?"

  "What else? Nia and Quin butting heads."

  "I'll go see if I can play the intermediary."

  "That's what you're paid the big bucks for."

  We were an office full of strong personalities with varying belief systems. We all went at it at times. It was part of working with people on the same cases. As a whole, though, most of us backed down from going toe-to-toe with Quin. Seeing as he was the check-signer and all. And his word was the final one.