Keep It Simple (MMG Series Book 4) (10 page)

“All good?” Gage asked him.

“Yep, but it won’t be if I don’t get baby bear back to his mama soon.” Max lifted Mac out of Piper’s hands and kissed his forehead. “I missed you little buddy,” he quietly told Mac. Watching my big brother loving on his son made my heart ache. He was such a good dad. He glanced over at me and smiled. “Ready to go?” I nodded my head and ignored his questioning look.

The second we pulled from the driveway, he started in. “I’m sorry about last night. It was shitty of us to bail on you your first night back.”

Staring out my window, I listened to Mac gurgling in the back seat and thought about what to say. Finally, I just gave it to him. “Piper told me everything about the kidnapping last night.”

His eyes cut to mine briefly before returning back to the road. “She shouldn’t have.”

“Why? Because I wouldn’t be calling you out for lying to me right now or because you were planning on telling me yourself?” He answered me with silence. “I am not a child, Max.”

“You most certainly are,” he retorted.

My jaw literally dropped at the vehemence behind his words. “Is that why you wouldn’t let me come home? You didn’t need another child to take care of? Is that it? I suppose that is also why you didn’t tell me Ellie was accosted by the douchebag who kidnapped her, or Piper was shot more than one time? You were only protecting me, right?”

“That is part of it,” he snapped.

“What’s the other part?”

“You are my responsibility. You always have been and you always will be, Sarah. You didn’t need to know all the details.”

Screw that.

“I stopped being your responsibility when you sent me away, Max.”

He shot me a scathing look. “Really? Who pays your bills? Who paid for the expensive university in Scotland? Whose house are you living in?”

He had a point there, but I was too angry to concede. “Who sent me away? Who never bothered to come visit me? Who rarely called me?” I shot back.

“I fucking couldn’t!” he shouted, and Mac started crying. Max lowered his voice. “I couldn’t come see you. They wouldn’t let me. I would have led Rocky straight to you. You know this!” he hissed.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” I said with resignation.

“You know I love you and would do anything for you.”

“Then stop treating me like a child.”

“You don’t ask for much,” he wryly said. “For the record, I wanted to tell you what happened to Ellison, but I just couldn’t. I don’t know if Piper or Gage said anything last night, but I’ve been having a difficult time lately. I haven’t handled things with Ellison very well and it almost cost me my marriage last night.”

I reached over and rubbed his arm. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, well, no one did, except for Ellison.”

“Are you two okay now?” I didn’t want to think about a world without Max and Ellie together.

He glanced over at me and smiled. “We’re going to be.”

Cas

‡

S
arah McLellan.

The pieces fit together perfectly now. The woman who had been on my mind for four and a half months was none other than Max McLellan’s little sister. I stared at the file on my desk and fought back the urge to hurl it across my office.

The day after Sarah showed up on Kurt’s door step, Bobby began digging. This morning he strutted into my office and slapped the file on my desk. “Here’s everything you need to know about Sarah McLellan,” he announced. Then he swaggered back out leaving me alone with the ticking time bomb. I managed to hold out for a whopping twelve minutes before peering inside. What I discovered made my blood run cold.

Thirteen year old Sarah McLellan saw the faces of her father’s killer’s minutes before they gunned him down in his living room. She was found hours after the shooting in the back of her closet.
The image of a terrified thirteen year old Sarah, curled in the back of her closet, took shape in my mind.

Routine drug bust, my ass. Why didn’t the police grab her and keep her safe and what the hell was she doing in the back of her closet?
All kinds of crazy thoughts ran through my head.
Was she locked in the closet?
The file didn’t mention her mother. I flipped on my computer and waited for it to boot up. As soon as the cursor appeared, I typed both Sarah and Max’s names in the search engine and hit enter. After a few minutes of scrolling through the articles on the drug bust gone bad I found the obituary. Sarah and Max’s mother died of an aneurysm when Sarah was seven
. No wonder she seems so much older than she is.
I pulled the file over and continued reading.

Sarah and her brother Max left Charlotte and lived in a rural town in Kentucky for the next five years under Federal protection.

I read the next part three times before fully processing what it said.
When Sarah was seventeen, two known associates of the men who killed her father were overheard discussing the knowledge of her whereabouts on a wiretap. Less than a week later, she was sent to Scotland.

Fuck! They almost got to her.
The thought of what may have happened if the men found her…I pushed back from my desk and began pacing.
If they knew where Sarah was, they knew where Max was, so why didn’t they go after Max? It would seem the logical thing to do.

I stopped pacing long enough to read the rest of the report. All it said was the threat had been diffused.
What the fuck does that mean?
Raking my fingers through my hair, I thought back to my time with Sarah. Beautiful did not begin to do her justice, but she was so much more than her looks. She was outgoing and funny as hell. I would have never pegged Sarah as a victim in a million years. Still, the few times she let down her guard and let me in, I sensed a sadness in her that called to me
. I’m missing something. I can’t ask because I’m not supposed to know. I shouldn’t care. I should let this go.
I slammed my hands on my desk.
Why can’t I let this go?

My mind wandered to the last night we were together. I was in the kitchen grabbing a glass of water and spotted Sarah’s purse on the chair by the front door. Curiosity getting the best of me, I slid open her wallet and fished out her ID.

Sarah L. Pember, twenty-two years of age.

After she returned to Scotland, I thought about looking her up, but something always stopped me. Now, I wished I had. Once again, I was letting a woman mess with my head.
Would I never learn?

I opened the file back up and stared down at her name.
Sarah A. McLellan. Twenty years of age.
According to this file, she would be turning twenty-one on September seventeenth.

“So young,” I whispered. Too bad my body refused to get on board with my brain. I could hear my sister right now, “It’s okay Cazzy, guys have been led around by their dicks since the stone ages.” It looks like I was no different than all the rest because little Sarah McLellan had me tied in all kinds of knots. All I had thought about for months was how good we were together.

I hit rock bottom after missing Sarah the night I checked Alexandria into rehab. When I finally pulled myself together, I decided to wait until after the divorce was finalized before pursuing any type of relationship. I didn’t want to think about explaining my wife to the woman I was seeing, especially if that woman was Sarah. Thankfully, that was right when we were hired by Max to watch Piper. That was more than enough to keep me fully occupied. The thought of Piper made me smile.
Poor Gage has his hands full with that one.

My mind wandered to Dooley Shane. Even six feet under, the douche was still causing trouble. It turns out he had a longer reach than we’d realized. Garrett had given me and Bob the responsibility of tracking Dooley’s finances and it was proving to be a giant pain in the ass. What happened to those girls that day weighed heavily on all of us and the fact that Dooley got the drop on us did not sit well.

The sound of my phone ringing interrupted my thoughts. I checked to make sure it wasn’t Alexandria before answering. Somehow, it always circled back to Xandria.
In four months I will finally be rid of her.
The phone said, Unknown Caller, so I sent it to voicemail, let out a big yawn and rested my head on my desk
. Four more months and I will be free.

Three months to the week after my first night with Alexandria Gibson, she showed up at my office to tell me she was pregnant and I was the father. Of course, I called bullshit on that. Clearly, the woman had no idea what I did for a living because she was shocked by my skepticism.

“What do you mean bullshit? Here is the positive pregnancy test.” She slapped the stick on my desk. Not able to help myself, I glanced down and, sure enough, it was positive. “See, it’s positive.” The smirk on her face pissed me off. Standing in front of me was a desperate, spoiled woman who I wanted nothing to do with.

“I see it. What I don’t see, is my name on it. Do you?” I calmly asked. There was no way I was the father of this woman’s child. I used a condom all three times I nailed her.

“Well, no, b-b-but you are,” she stuttered. She was clearly having trouble processing my less than enthusiastic response.

“And you know this how exactly?”

“I’m not a whore!” she defensively shouted. Her reaction told me otherwise.

“You cannot expect me just to accept this without proof, Alexandria.”

“What are you talking about? Here’s the proof!” She picked up the stick and waved it in my face. Enough was enough.

“Darlin, that’s a pregnancy test. As far as I know, you could have shown your bare snatch to five other men that night and screwed them all. If you want me to step up, you’re going to have to show proof of paternity. Until then, we have nothing to talk about.”

“You have got to be kidding!” she hissed.

“I have never been more serious,” I informed her.

With a melodramatic huff, she grabbed the pregnancy test and stormed out the door.

Good riddance.

That night I received a visit from her father. He was all up in arms about my earlier meeting with his daughter.

“She says you are the father, Cas.”

“She does,” I agreed. “It doesn’t make it true.”

“So you are saying you didn’t sleep with her?” His arched brow and I-dare-you-to-deny-it look on his face made me pause.

“I didn’t say that. C’mon, Sterling, you’re telling me that if one of the women you slept with came to you with a positive pregnancy test and claimed you were the father, you would just accept her word for it without demanding proof of paternity?” His silence told me all I needed to know. “I know she’s your daughter and you want to protect her, but I don’t have sex without using protection…ever. There is no way that child is mine.”
I felt bad for the guy, but not bad enough to get trapped in a loveless marriage with a kid I didn’t want.
Hell no.

Sterling held up his hands in a show of peace. “This is my grandchild we’re talking about, Cas. I have to do right by my daughter and her child. Surely you can understand that?”

“I completely understand your position, but you are barking up the wrong tree. If I were you, I’d make damn sure paternity was rock solid. As you said earlier, this is your grandchild and one day heir to your fortune.”

A less than certain look appeared on his face, but he shook it off. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the child is yours. Will you step up?”

“Do you even have to ask?” If, by some unfortunate twist of fate, Alexandria Gibson was carrying my child, I would do right by them both. Just the thought made me want to hurl.

Sterling studied me for a minute. When he realized I meant what I said, he nodded and walked out of my apartment.

Later that night I dropped by my parent’s house. The last time I had visited, I’d spent the whole evening listening to my father rant about how I needed to quit my job and join the family business. That was several months ago. My mother had been bugging me to stop by ever since, but I kept finding excuses not to. My father was a world class asshole. Nothing I did was good enough and he had no problem telling me so. He hated the fact that I forged my own path and didn’t jump into the family business
like he wanted. At one point in time I would have done anything to gain his approval. Now, I no longer needed it. In a weak moment, I found myself in search of fatherly advice and hoped maybe we could bury the hatchet and talk for once. I should have known bett
er.

“Why are you even thinking about this, Caswell? Sterling Gibson owns most of this town. If you marry his daughter, you will be his son-in-law. Who gives a shit whether the kid is yours or not?” my father asked. Like always, my dad was thinking of the angles he could play rather than the possibility of ruining some kid’s life. As long as it involved money, the rest was irrelevant.

Taking a drink of my gin and tonic, I pretended to consider his words. What I really wanted to do was spit my drink in his face. “I don’t want to be married, and I especially don’t want to be married to her. Hell, I’m not even sure I want kids, Dad. For fuck’s sake, I am only twenty-four years old.”