Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Rhodes

I didn’t know what I was stepping into when I grabbed the knob to Lincoln’s office and twisted. All Naomi told me when she rang my office was that Lincoln needed me for a consultation.

This had been happening more often lately, ever since Linc decided he was going to step away from the business and wanted me to take over. Anytime a new case came in, he called me in on it, basically giving me lead to handle it the way I saw fit.

To say I’d been surprised when he told me he wanted to hand Alpha Omega over to me would have been a serious understatement. I’d wanted to work for the man for as long as I could remember. Lincoln Sheppard and the guys who worked for him were legends in our small town. They were so good at what they did that they were frequently hired by famous actors and actresses, singers, athletes, and millionaires all across the country.

I’d idolized the guys from Alpha Omega. To a kid like me—a kid who’d been forced to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks because our parents had taken off on us, leaving my older sister, Gypsy, to try and keep a roof over our heads—they were the closest thing to celebrities I thought I’d ever get a chance to see. Then everything changed when Marco came into our lives.

Marco Castillo wasn’t only part of the Alpha Omega crew, he was also the closest thing to a father figure my younger siblings and I ever had. He’d fallen in love with Gypsy, and despite her baggage—five younger siblings you were responsible for raising was a hell of a lot of baggage—he’d held firm that she was the one for him. He never wavered, even when my stubborn sister did everything in her power to push him away. He took us all on, rounding out our family, and making us whole. He was the missing piece none of us knew we needed. With him in my life, the infatuation I’d had for being one of the Alpha Omega elite changed.

It became less about them as a whole and more about Marco. He became an inspiration to me. I wanted to prove I was nothing like the sperm and egg donors who had created me, but more than that, I wanted to be a man as good as he was, as kind and big-hearted.

That was why I’d followed in his footsteps, enlisting in the Army before I was even out of high school and taking off for basic right after graduation. When my time with them was done, I’d come back home and applied for a job with Lincoln. All these years later, I was still trying to emulate the man who meant so damn much to me, still holding out hope that someday I might stop doubting myself and start believing I was worthy of all the good things the people who loved me believed I deserved. I kept hoping I’d stop feeling like I was tainted because of whose blood coursed through my veins. But it still haunted me.

I’d done a ton of work on myself over the years. Between my time in the Army teaching me how to be a man and all the therapy I’d done at Gypsy’s insistence once I got home, I’d gotten better. But no matter how many years passed since I’d last laid eyes on my parents, I still sometimes felt like I couldn’t scrub their dirt off my skin. Some days I still saw myself as that boy who’d been ridiculed by his classmates for growing up poor and living in a piece-of-shit, run-down trailer.

Gypsy had done everything in her power to make sure we all had everything we needed growing up. Even going so far as dancing at a shithole strip club just to make sure there was enough money to feed us and keep a roof over our heads. Granted, it wasn’t much of a roof, that was for damn sure, but at least we had something . There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t have done for every one of us, and any good that was inside me was solely because of her.

I owed her my life.

I didn’t bother knocking since Linc and the potential client on the other side of the door were expecting me, but nothing could have prepared me for the woman sitting across from Lincoln.

“I want you to find out how long my husband was cheating on me.”

What the fuck ?

I came up short, jerking to a stop as the last word passed her lips.

She spun around in her chair, and that first glimpse of her face was an iron fist right to my solar plexus. I knew she was back in town. I’d known almost from the moment she crossed the town line. It was nearly impossible not to know something like that in a town this size, but even though I’d been waiting for this very moment for weeks—anticipating it, fucking praying for it—I was still caught off guard.

I’d dreamed of the moment I’d finally see Blythe again after all these years. Of what I’d say to her, how I’d apologize for ruining us. But all the words I’d memorized flew right out of my head at the sight of her.

“Rhodes.”

My name came out of her mouth in a single breath. The sound of her saying my name used to slam right into my chest hard enough to send me flying backward, but I was too focused on what she looked like for my body to react as viscerally as it used to. Still, there was a flare behind my ribs at the sound of it.

“Blythe.” I choked out her name, my voice a throaty rasp, as if I hadn’t used it in far too long. My feet started moving without input from my brain. All these years later and the hold she had on me was still as strong. She pulled me in without having to try, her gaze alone like a tractor beam, reeling me in, and I was all too happy to let it lead me without any fight.

Her eyes were two pools of the most gorgeous blue I’d ever seen, and looking into them felt like diving right into the warm waters of the Caribbean. But those hypnotic eyes were the only thing about her that reminded me of the girl I’d once known.

Everything else about her had changed in a way that twisted my stomach into tangled knots. Her hair lacked the luster it used to have, lying flat on her head and hanging limp down around her shoulders. Her cheeks were sunken, and her clothes hung off of her like she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. Her skin was unnaturally pale everywhere except the dark purple circles the color of bruises beneath her eyes.

She looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks or eaten in just as long, and something acutely primal and deep inside me roared with the need to haul her into my arms and carry her the fuck out of there so I could take her somewhere safe and quiet to get the rest she so clearly needed. Every protective instinct I had was screaming to take all of her problems and carry them myself if it meant I could relieve her of the burden. I’d always had a strong protective instinct, but it had been out of control when it came to Blythe, and apparently, that hadn’t changed.

It wasn’t until I was standing two feet away that I recalled what she had been saying when I opened the door.

“ I want you to find out how long my husband was cheating on me. ”

That one sentence shouldn’t have had me seeing red, not when I hadn’t seen this woman in damn near two decades, but a crimson haze was slowly spreading across my vision. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I knew in an instant I’d handled this all wrong. Her eyes widened, and I didn’t miss the flash of panic that filled the turquoise depths. She looked cagier than a rabbit facing down a coyote, ready to take off at any moment.

“Um... I think maybe this was a mistake. I should go.”

Lincoln held his hand up to stop her as she started to push up from the chair she was sitting in. “Please, just stay. And you”—he pointed at me, his face hard as he stared me down—“sit and calm the hell down.”

I was a forty-two-year-old man who’d seen more than my fair share of shit in my lifetime, yet the man in front of me could still manage to make me feel like a goddamn kid with only a few words and that damn tone of his.

It blew my mind that a man who wielded that kind of power, the kind of power that could still cause the balls to draw up on every grown man he so much as glared threateningly at, was so tightly wound around his daughter’s finger. I’d witnessed her laugh more than once when he tried using the same tone on her. She just giggled and patted his chest placatingly, like it was all some big joke. I had a feeling more than half of the gray hairs he sported weren’t due to age as much as they were from her.

Clamping my mouth shut, I moved to the empty chair beside Blythe and slowly lowered down. The last thing I wanted was to spook her and send her running for the hills, but I couldn’t bring myself to rip my gaze off her face. “Sorry,” I muttered and pulled in a calming breath, trying to steady my racing heart.

Linc bobbed his head in a single nod before turning back to Blythe and smiling softly. “All right, sweetheart. There’s no need for you to worry. Discretion is the name of the game here. You have my word. Anything you say in here stays between us. Rhodes and I won’t tell a soul.”

The muscle in her jaw ticked beneath her skin as she clenched her teeth. If I hadn’t been watching her so closely, I might have missed the emotion that flashed across her face faster than a person could blink. But I had been watching, and I couldn’t miss it. It also helped that I knew her as well as I did. It might have been nearly twenty years ago, but there was a time when she’d been the most important person in my life. She’d been my whole world.

The emotion was shame.

I hated seeing it on her beautiful face, and I swore to myself at that very moment I would do everything in my power to take her shame away.