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  As she peered in the refrigerator, she cast me another quick look with those wide eyes of hers. My mother always looked like she was on the cusp of hysterical laughter, always beaming with joy. It was no wonder my parents were celebrating their anniversary in Paris. Unlike most of the young married couples from my graduating class of high school, my parents seriously hit the jackpot on each other and they knew it. I’d never seen them bicker, fight, or anything of the sort in my entire young life. Their love and compassion for each other was almost sickeningly adorable, and I knew it was one of those “lightning strikes” moments.

  If only, I thought to myself, I wound up half as lucky as them.

  “I’m really sorry, sweetheart. Truly. I know that Paris means a lot to you. But your father and I are really looking forward to this…and I promise that if you keep your grades up, we’ll send you there soon. Maybe next summer! How would a month in Paris sound as a graduation present, hmm?”

  She tilted her head slightly, with those wide, cheerful eyes. It was like talking to a puppy…a wealthy, happy puppy that was determined to come between you and your dreams. How do you stay mad at someone with that much infallible happiness?

  “Fine. At least I’ll have the place to myself all summer…” I grumbled to myself. It was a perk, at the very least. I’d already started calculating the logistics of a “Home alone for the summer” party.

  “Well, actually…” Mom started, her eyes suddenly tentative and cautious, “we wondered if you’d like to have the Beach House for the summer? As a consolation?”

  “The Beach House?” I suddenly sat up, my dejection temporarily forgotten. The vacation home had been in my family since the marriage – a glamorous building right on the edge of the ocean, down in Pensacola. Some of my happiest summers had been spent there. “But I thought you said you sold it?”

  “Well, it turns out that we didn’t have to, after all!” She laughed, pouring two glasses of orange juice for us. As she tucked the pitcher back inside the fridge, she handed me a glass and leaned against her elbows on the lower counter. “I know how much you loved that place…just be okay with us taking our trip, and we’ll let you stay at the beach house all summer. Get some relaxation in. Work on that tan! Just, no boys alone with you there…”

  “Mom…” I started, giving her a half-hearted glare over the lip of my glass. One coy, misplaced barb per conversation I could stomach, but a second was bound to push my buttons. “You know that I don’t—”

  “I know, I know,” she murmured, glossing dismissively over my rebuttal. “But there is one teeny, tiny condition…”

  “A condition?” I raised my eyebrow. “What, you don’t trust me alone there? I’m an adult, mother! I’m going to college and I’m making responsible choices. I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure you are, dearie, but your father insisted…”

  “…Insisted on what?”

  “Well, you see…it’s not that we–”

  I heard the front door, or at least I thought I did. We both paused, listening for any other noises. After a moment, it was followed by footsteps in our general direction. My gaze locked onto hers, my brow lifted again, and we both stiffened up at the same time.

  “Mom, are you expecting anyone–”

  I stopped as I saw who had entered our home unannounced, pausing at the doorway into the kitchen. With a motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm, a sly smile crossed his lips. His eyes slid from hers to mine.

  Him.

  Sawyer Samuels.

  The complete bastard who abandoned us…

  “Little Saffie,” my cocky asshole of a stepbrother chuckled as his grin widened. “Been a minute, hasn’t it?”

  “Not long enough,” I murmured, recalling that stupid nickname he’d always had for me. Dread pooled in my stomach as I bit my lip furiously. With his shaggy hair cut short and his obvious muscular makeover, he was stupidly handsome. Even with his motorcycle gear on, his build communicated all I needed to know – that Sawyer 2.0 had seriously cleaned himself up. He was stronger, healthier, and all around built. It would have been attractive, but the dumb grin on his face told me he was just as much of a jackass as before, and my spirits plummeted. I started rolling my fingertips on the countertop as I glared at him.

  Brushing off the remark, Sawyer paused to watch my gesture for a second, and then moved towards the refrigerator. As I heard the clinking of glass bottles – of COURSE the first thing he does is rummage for a beer – he called out to our mother. “Don’t suppose you’ve told her yet, or should I break the news?”

  The dread compounded, and I turned to her. “Mom…why is he here?”

  As Sawyer ducked his head back from the fridge, popping the top off on the counter, Mom turned to me with an uncharacteristically weary glance. “The Beach House…I mentioned that your father had a condition.”

  My gaze flitted from her to him and back again.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding.”

  “There have been some threats,” she explained. “An ex-employee of Chet’s…the police are looking for him, and it’s probably nothing. But your father and I want you to be safe while we’re away,” Mom smiled weakly at me.

  “He’s my condition?” I practically shouted, pointing angrily at my stepbrother. He simply took another sip from his beer, and Mom looked at me weakly again.

  “That’s right. Sawyer’s going to be your bodyguard.”

  (Return to Table of Contents)

  Chapter 2 – Sawyer

  New Orleans, Five Years Ago

  I knew they were going to take it pretty rough when I left in the middle of the night. I did my best to push my guilt away, although separating myself from them – from her – was harder than I’d anticipated. But I knew that Saffron would be fine. She hated me, after all. I also knew why I had to go. I willingly embraced this path…but not before doing a little due diligence first.

  Carrying only fifty bucks to my name, I arrived down in New Orleans – fresh off a Greyhound bus and far from the opulence of my parents’ gilded little world. I realized that I had made the right choice when I saw the city. No longer would I be living under their roof, sitting in their lap of luxury and feeling my brain start to rot.

  Normalcy, luxury, comfort.

  These things bothered me.

  That’s a major part of the reason why I left home at the earliest opportunity. I’d spent eighteen years on this planet and I’d never seen what the world was really like. Screw endless bank accounts and high-end meals; I was determined that I was going to live. My parents could keep their wealth – their comfortable life of smooth edges wasn’t for me. What I needed was to feel the jagged lines of this world; I craved the roughness of a life forged out of the burning blaze of circumstance.

  I meant to carve out my own way.

  If I told you it wasn’t an adjustment, I would be lying to you. But I was streetwise enough to improvise. I’d sought out trouble during my early teenage years while my father was dating my stepmother-to-be. It wasn’t out of any malice or rebellion against the memory of my mom. I just needed to learn my limits, and that meant testing my mettle through the occasion fight or pissing off the authorities.

  I enjoyed pissing people off…

  Except Saffron, after she became my stepsister.

  I pissed her off just because.

  Through observation on my first afternoon in the city, I learned quickly to stick to the business district, perhaps the garden district if I really wanted to spread my wings. The former had everything I really needed, whereas the latter clearly contained nothing of any significance to me.

  But I’m not stupid.

  So I taught myself the land.

  As I sat on one of the streetcars, themselves mobile landmarks of the old, beaten-but-never-fallen city, I allowed my eyes to take in the prominent Garden District. While we slowly chugged along St. Charles Avenue, I allowed my disgruntled gaze to soak in the multimillion-dollar houses, sta
nding proudly three stories tall and boasting of their rich, exorbitant culture. My eyes fell upon the parked cars lining either side of the street, and the occasion driver desperately trying to snatch a small, inconvenient spot with anything less than a twenty-point turn. Lining the street on either side were the large, majestic oaks, stretching the tendrils of their pavement-cracking roots and cloaking the entire area in shade. As we continued along, the expensive houses and their accent treeline receded for the back-to-back universities of Tulane and Loyola. They were beautifully sprawling fortresses jutted against the sky, overflowing with students either carrying a direct line to Daddy’s checking account or resigning themselves to decades of crippling financial debt.

  The streetcar carried me to the other end, but I remained on board. I was in hardcore observation mode, determined to learn the immediate layout and any points of interest to me. A small crowd of people stepped on and off the tram with each stop, and we swung back up St. Charles Avenue headed the other direction.

  I took the time to learn common denominators between the people I saw. Various levels of class and dishevelment greeted me; in this city, everyone from primped Southern women to shaggy, unkempt street ruffians used this transit. Another observation: with the exception of a pair who recognized one another, nobody spoke. Everyone operated as if the entire streetcar was otherwise empty, neither opening conversation nor even glancing at the others.

  Good, I thought to myself. That’ll make it easier to blend in.

  My firm grip on my duffle bag relaxed; my shoulders released their tension. Every major city carried veritable rot in its sprawling underbelly, from the disorderly and desperate among the homeless to the alleyway muggers that vanished into the crowds. I had been mindful of the risks to coming here. From what I had seen since arriving, it appeared that I had overestimated. I could see now that by playing it safe and keeping to myself, sticking to the safer districts, I was going to be okay.

  I was wrong.

  Pennsylvania, Present Day

  Flying down the interstate, I felt the engine of my Suzuki throttling hard between my legs. With the slightest shift against the handlebars, I leaned just slightly into a lane shift, and then back, weaving between traffic as the sun began to descend in front.

  This is what I lived for.

  Although I could easily tell why I’d been seen that way, I never considered myself a daredevil. The five years since I had left Pennsylvania had made me find myself in one thrill after another. Riding the open road and cage fighting were simply parts of my everyday life, and I handled them the same way that I did with anything else – by throwing myself completely into it, feet first. I figured out every moment as it came, whether it was dodging the next haymaker or popping between cars on the interstate.

  My confidence came with inertia; its own momentum carried it forward. I never had the patience for hesitance. It had no place in my life, and I was determined to keep things that way. I lived on instinct. Reactionary. I was always in the instant.

  A big rig was coming up on the side.

  Only a moment to decide.

  I leaned into the handlebars again.

  For a brief flicker, remorse at my antics around a machine like that popped into my mind. I understood how hard it was to slow those huge things down, and I could only imagine that the trucker was cursing me as he overcompensated on the brakes. But I was already weaving back into my original lane again, freed from the tyranny of the speed-limit jackass cutting off my passing lane.

  I turned my helmet towards said jackass, and I got the finger for my efforts.

  Yeah, okay pal.

  The passing sign on the right told me what I needed to know: that the exit was finally nearby, just two miles away. I allowed myself to wonder again why I was even doing this. Everything that I had experienced these last few years had come to redefine me, fine-tuning my instincts and hardening my resolve – none of which I could have done here. The life I had left back in my teenage years had retained nothing of use to me – if anything, I might grow softer by being here. Weaker.

  I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  Something had clicked in my head when my father called. Turns out he didn’t need private investigators to find me. Even by being careful, I’d become well enough known that Google pointed my somewhat savvy father my way.

  Still, I hadn’t been prepared for the nature of the phone call itself.

  Saffron might be in danger, he had told me. I need your help.

  Nothing about coming back to Pennsylvania had ever been remotely appealing to me, but for this… I didn’t have much choice. He still sounded surprised when I took him up on his offer. If I’d have taken a minute to think about it, I might have felt the same why. Why the hell did I agree to this? As much as I hated to admit it to myself, there were tougher people he could hire – people with guns and decades of experience bodyguarding defenseless people in and out of danger.

  Was it because of her?

  Saffron Samuels. Originally Saffron Tate, before the marriage – and my father’s adoption of the scrawny little teenager – had seen to that. We had only lived together a couple of years, and it had been easily double, maybe three times that since I’d seen her last.

  Who the hell would want to hurt her? Sure, Dad had a few corporate enemies, but that was just business. Death threats against family were a bit more serious.

  I slowed down, letting the Suzuki’s throttle dampen as I turned onto the exit. Dropping from eighty to forty in a couple of seconds, I put a knee down and leaned into the wide curve, past the green light, and continued onward.

  Not long now.

  I remembered my first assessment of the girl. It wasn’t favorable. She was incredibly shy, and more or less stayed totally out of sight until the marriage was finalized.

  Hell, I didn’t even know about the girl until Dad married her mother. But my father was so busy at the time that he barely told me anything – electing to spend late nights at work, and when Ellen entered his life, it was late nights with her instead. I didn’t particularly mind. My father wasn’t distant by any means, but he picked a convenient time to be less than accessible, because I was a teenager and there was oh so much trouble I could get up to while he was gone.

  But I knew my place, and I followed the rules.

  Most of them.

  Well, some.

  He never suspected, and I never planned on him finding out about the types of friends I had over – or the fun we got up to. I wanted something new, something more meaningful than what I had. They say sex can become an addiction…

  It wasn’t my only vice.

  I was more addicted to fighting. It was all about honing my body and learning my limits. I pushed myself continuously, even without any real weight lifting. I picked fights with the tougher guys around, and I got my ass handed to me more than a few times before I started winning. I learned from every loss and came back harder, faster, tougher. Soon, I was virtually unbeatable in a fair, one-on-one fight – and I took on any challenger, just to prove my mettle.

  And then the scrawny twerp popped into my life.

  Like I said, I didn’t know she existed until the marriage. Apparently, she didn’t know I existed until the day she came back. I remember her little outburst when she met Dad and realized that there had been a marriage. That should have tipped me off, but I’d brushed it aside, because what kind of daughter doesn’t know her Mom remarried?

  Nobody offered to clue me in. I thought that she’d been MIA for the duration of our parents’ relationship, maybe as some sort of silent rebellion. That’s why I chose to mess around with her a little bit.

  It was all in good fun, anyway.

  It wasn’t until a few weeks after I met her that I found out what had really happened: she had been out of the country the entire time. Studying a late year of high school in some British city. Bristol, I think it was. Not only that, but in today’s day and age, her mother had barely kept her updated on anything �
� and barely responded to her messages. If I’d known that before, I would have recognized that she had been locked completely out of the loop, even less so than myself. Probably would have been a lot nicer to her from the get-go.

  But by that point, I’d already settled on screwing with her. Inertia… It’s a bitch.

  A couple of more turns, and I was in the right neighborhood. I could already see the place up ahead on the left… my family’s proud little hilltop, looking down over everybody lesser.

  Of course, that wasn’t fair. My father had never been anything less than favorable towards his fellow man, and my stepmother really rubbed off as being infallibly appreciative of her new lifestyle. The two of them were a good fit, and they visibly made each other happier…they even made each other better.