Putt it in the Hole’? That was really the best name they could think of?”

Leo gives me a serious face. “Nobody talks about my home field like that.”

I can’t help smiling a little. “Really? Your home field?”

He grins. “Yeah. They usually roll out the red carpet when I pull up. I’m not sure where they are. Maybe they didn’t want to intimidate you too much.”

It’s a beautiful night out. The air is just crisp enough to mean I have no fear of sweating, but not cold enough to make me shiver. I threw on my outfit quickly, putting a tunic on over grey leggings. I have my favorite elephant earrings in. They were a gift from my mom years ago because she knows I love elephants, and wearing them now helps me remember what things were like before she was sick. I can still remember the anticipation in her face as she watched me open them. She’s always loved giving gifts more than receiving them. My vision blurs a little as the tears threaten to come.

Leo looks at me, face growing serious. I expect him to ask if I’m okay or to force me to tell him what’s wrong, but instead he just puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder and pulls me into his side, wrapping me in his warmth and protection. I breathe in deeply, getting lost in his scent. I’ve never been good at identifying smells, but the way he smells makes me think of hiking through chilly forests and of sex beneath the stars. I blush. It’s almost impossible not to think about sex around him.

He wears a t-shirt and jeans, but somehow looks like a million bucks. His dark hair is pushed out of his face, but a few stubborn strands dangle in front of his smoldering eyes. His powerful chest is clearly visible through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, and I can even see the hint of his abs when his shirt lies against his stomach just right. It takes considerable effort not to slide my hands across his body. My thoughts still burn with the memory of how he felt beneath my fingertips, soft skin and hard muscle, perfectly sculpted.

We step inside the building, which is built to look like an old, aged water-mill. It’s a little tacky, with Christmas lights strung haphazardly, but the trickle of water passing beneath and the winking lights of the city in the distance are peaceful. I wait while Leo pays for us and picks out a putter for me.

A pang of guilt stabs through me. Roman would love being here, and yet I just made him stay with Lauren all night so I could figure things out with Leo. It hurts to think of it that way, but I know it’s partially true, at least. If I’ve learned one thing about parenting, it’s that doing what’s best for my child almost always means doing what’s hardest. It would be easier to write Leo off and refuse to talk to him. He’s persistant, but I know he would keep his distance if I made my intentions clear. I’ve treated plenty of stalkers and people with borderline personality disorder, and he doesn’t fit the profile.

The strangest thing about Leo is that he defies my training. When I’m around him, the never-ending focus on ticks and word choice and body language fades into background noise. The only sense I get from him is an overwhelming impression of protectiveness and sexuality. Yet all I have to do is look at his tattoos and watch for the flickers of darkness that pass across his face to know why I should stay away. He’s trouble. He’s a criminal. He’s exactly the kind of man I should be keeping away from my son, so what am I doing here?

We step outside to the practice green and Leo lets me take the first shot. It’s a flat, straight path to the hole. I sink mine in two putts. Leo lines up, squaring his hips, and breathing out a deep, slow breath. His eyebrows draw down in concentration. His eyes dart from the ball to the hole a few times before he takes a practice swing. He finally taps the neon blue ball and I watch with annoyance as it rolls straight into the hole.

He quirks an eyebrow at me.

“Shut up,” I say, falling in beside him as we cross through a narrow path between bushes to the next hole, which is at the top of a bridge over the winding stream that passes through the whole course. “You take this way too seriously.”

“Shut up?” he asks. “I thought you would be trying to get me to talk.”

“I don’t need your life story, I just want to know why. Why did you leave, and why did you come back?” I ask.

“Because of you,” he says, kneeling to set my ball on the green.

I watch him silently, not sure if he’s blowing off my question or answering honestly. I try to judge his body language for a clue, but he betrays nothing. He’s a single-minded man, always moving forward, never looking back, never hesitating. Normal people give away their intentions because they reflect, hesitate, or over-think. Leo just acts, unapologetically. There’s nothing to read or interpret except the words that leave his mouth.

I look at the course as I line up my shot. It’s a snake-like set-up with a bulb at the end and an off-center hole. I can’t see how you could hit a hole-in-one, so I settle for aiming to get me as close as I can. I take my shot and drop my putter in frustration when the ball catches the first bend in the course and bounces to a standstill less than a fourth of the way to the hole. “Shit!” I purse my lips angrily, stomping toward my ball. I feel myself clenching the putter too hard, but I swing anyway, this time hitting the next bend so hard that the ball bounces backward, nearly landing right where it started.

I suck in a deep breath through my nose, feeling myself fuming. I’ve always been competitive, and I do not want to lose to Leo. I’m about to swing again, probably too hard, when Leo’s strong hands take me by the forearms. I feel his chest against my back.

“Relax here,” he says, running a finger along the center of my forearm.

My tense muscles ease and relax at his touch.

“And here,” he says, stroking my wrist. “Lower your hips.” His hands guide my hips down, brushing my ass into him. He moves his hands to my wrist and guides me through my swing, making the motion feel smooth and right. The ball clinks off my putter and perfectly sails along the hidden dips of the course, winding its way straight into the hole where it clatters home.

“Yes!” I yell, turning to hug him and then pulling back abruptly.

He grins. “Nice shot.”

I frown. “It probably would have taken me five more tries if you hadn’t helped me.”

“Yeah, well tough shit. You’re going to have to get used to me helping you. I’ll always be looking out for you.”

My heart flutters and my stomach turns over. God, I wish I could believe him. I wish that was true. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted a strong man to be in my life, ready to help me and step in to shoulder some of the responsibility. Hearing him say it ignites an ache so deep in my chest that I feel like my breath is taken away. I wish.

“Where were you all the times I needed help since you left?” I ask.

He doesn’t look away. “Wishing I could be here with you.”

“Where were you instead?” I ask.

He looks down, eyes growing distant. “Doing whatever I could to keep you safe.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” he says, looking down and putting the ball smoothly. It winds perfectly through the course, weaving gracefully and then sinking straight into the hole.

I glare at him. “Do you get a lot of time to practice miniature golf in your line of work, Mr. Citrione?” I ask.

He walks to the hole and collects our balls, leading us on to the next course. “What is it you think I do for a living?”

Something in his tone holds a warning. He tries to cover it with humor and that smirk of his, but I can see through it. This is a dangerous subject, and he may close up if I push too hard. But screw being gentle. He gave up his right to gentle treatment when he sauntered into my life four years ago, got me pregnant, and then disappeared without so much as a text. “I think you hurt people.”

He looks thoughtful, nodding slowly. “You could say that.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

He idly checks his putter, making sure the shaft is straight. “Not everybody gets to build a life around what they enjoy. I think you know that just as well as I do.”

His words cut through me. Yes. I wish I didn’t know that to be so true. Okay, wrong question. “Why do you do it? Why not do something else. Something legal.”

“Why do you keep letting that asshole blackmail you into working for him?”

His question is rhetorical. He knows the answer, but I say it anyway. “To protect my son. You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So you’re saying you do what you do to protect someone. Who are you protecting?” I line up over the ball he drops for me on the green, hitting it without even thinking. My mind is still on Leo while my body just goes through the motions. I turn to him, not watching where the ball goes.

He raises his eyebrows, looking over my shoulder. “Hole-in-one.”

I turn, cocking my head in confusion. “I didn’t even…”

“You’re a natural,” he says, hand grazing my back and sliding down just low enough to brush the swell of my ass. I think he’s about to take it further, but his eyes leave mine and settle on something that causes him to frown. I look where he’s looking and just see two men renting clubs at the main building.

His touch triggers a heat in my lower belly that spreads, igniting dirty thoughts that I wish I could suppress. Who is he protecting? Is it another woman? Have I just been letting him play my emotions all this time while he really cares about some other woman?

He takes his putt, once again scoring a hole-in-one by timing the shot just right to get it to go beneath the arms of a windmill. We walk down the green to retrieve our balls, but Leo stops beside the windmill. The arms woosh beside us, churning the cool night air so that I feel chilly for the first time. Somehow my back ends up against the windmill and he’s positioned in front of me, arm on the rough rock beside my head. His dark eyes bore into me.

“I need you to listen to me carefully,” he says, looking past me toward the building where we rented our putters. I try to look but he moves closer, blocking my view.

“What are you—”

“Listen to me. I’m going to tell you as much as I can, and you’re going to have to accept that. For now. I left to keep you safe, and I came back for that same reason.”

I narrow my eyes at him in confusion. “That doesn’t—”

“And the people I’m trying to keep you safe from are here. Right now, so I need you to come inside the windmill with me.”

“The windmill? Really? I thought you would have better pick-up lines than—”

His face hardens in anger. “Look for yourself.”

I follow his eyes to the path leading to the first green. Two men are moving through the course with putters in hand. They hold the putters like weapons, and they are dressed like dads on vacation, but they have hard eyes and hard bodies. They look like killers. I notice for the first time how deserted the course is. There’s an older couple on one of the last holes, but the place is otherwise empty. My heart races and I look to Leo. “What do they want?”

“Come on,” he says, pulling me beneath the sweeping arms of the windmill and inside the shadowy room within. There’s a narrow door that was barely big enough for Leo to duck inside, and a path of green where the ball passes through. Leo’s body is pressed against mine as we huddle in the few sparse feet of space that are almost entirely shrouded in darkness. The only sound is the creak of gears overhead turning and the woosh of the arms passing in front of the doorway at first. Then we hear hurried footsteps and low mutters.

“Check over there.”

“Yeah.”

“...didn’t see.”

I can feel Leo’s heart beating powerfully and slowly against me, then Leo is pushing past me. I turn just in time to see him deck one of the attackers. Leo and the man crash to the ground and Leo rips the club free from the man’s grip, back arching as he straddles the man and brings the club down on his face like a hammer on an anvil. The sound is grisly and wet. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m behind Leo, pulling his arms back and urging him to stop. He hesitates, looking at me, eyes wild for a moment before he seems to calm again.

I’m relieved when Leo stands and the man on the ground rolls, groaning through his already swollen and bloody nose. The other man rushes Leo from behind the windmill, but Leo bends at the waist, reaching behind to grab the man by the shoulders and sling him forward like a sack of potatoes. He lands hard, bouncing on the artificial turf of the course. The attacker rolls, reaches in his pocket, and starts to pull a gun, but Leo is faster. My skin prickles when I realize both men are poised to kill. Leo’s long arm is extended, glistening chrome pistol pointed straight at the attacker’s head, but the man on the ground holds a gun toward Leo, too.

I don’t know how he does it, but Leo holds his nerve, staring the man down, saying nothing at all for at least a minute. Finally, the man on the ground drops his gun. Leo moves to him, pulling his gun back like he’s about to hit him in the face, but I stop him with a hand on the shoulder. Leo glares at me, kicking the man hard in the stomach before kicking the gun in the nearby stream.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

I’m sitting in the car beside Leo a few minutes later, thoughts racing. I’ve never seen violence like that in real life. It terrified me. My thoughts go to Roman. If anything had happened to me here… Tears well in my eyes when I imagine him waiting up for me to come pick him up from Lauren’s, waiting and waiting and eventually passing out on the couch, his little dreams filled with whatever innocent things three-year-olds dream of.

I marvel at how fucked up I am for not running right now, for not telling Leo to let me out of the car and never talking to him again. I try to tell myself it’s because I want to give Roman’s real father a chance to be in the life of his son, and that I want to give Roman a chance to have a male role model, but I would be lying if I said that was all. As much as I’m ashamed to admit it, I’m both repulsed and attracted to Leo’s power. Seeing him hurt men like that, dominating them effortlessly has an appeal I can’t deny. I try to psychoanalyze myself, digging into why that would be. All I can think of is that it makes some sense for a woman like myself whose life is so far out of control to be drawn to a man who is so in control. At the same time, the violence and power that draws me to him can’t be in the life of my son. I can’t let it.

I think the therapist in me also wants to help Leo. I can see he wants to be different on some level, but he thinks he can’t. He thinks he needs to be as hard as he is to protect the things he cares about. I can’t quite bring myself to leave because I want to help him heal, as much as I can.

Leo looks to me, eyes fiery. “You shouldn’t have stopped me. Those guys will come back.”

I shrug. “I won’t apologize for stopping you from killing two men on a fucking putt putt course.”

“Yeah,” he says, smirking, “Because you know you were going to lose if I didn’t bend my putter on that guys’ face.”

My stomach suddenly feels sick as I recall the image and I feel the blood drain from my face.

Leo makes a sour face. “Bad joke. You’re right.” He reaches to touch my cheek, turning my face toward him. “You have to let me protect you, no matter what it takes. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”

His words carry so much weight. So much power. I feel myself being drawn toward him, like a sailor walking toward the edge of the shore, taking step after step into the frigid, dark waters toward the siren’s call, knowing somewhere distantly that I’m walking toward doom, but unable to resist.

He kisses me. His mouth is warm against mine. His touch is like a vortex, consuming all my senses and drowning out my thoughts with the roar of its power. Worries of my mom are temporarily pushed down. For a single knee-weakening minute, I’m absorbed in the moment. It’s only after he pulls back from the kiss, leaving me breathless, that reality crashes back into me with such jarring force that I have to press my feet into the floorboards to keep from slipping down in my seat.

Leo licks his lips, running his hand up my thigh and then slipping it inside my pants. His hand is warm against my flesh as he finds the inside of my panties. I press my hand to his, intending to stop him but only pressing him into me harder. What are you doing, Julia? My eyes squeeze shut and I bite my lip as a moan slips from my mouth. He leans across the seat, kissing my neck and cupping my face with his left hand while his right works between my legs.

“Wait. Wait,” I say.

He pauses, pulling back to smirk at me, hand still down my panties. I feel myself throbbing against him as my body practically begs for more.

“I’ll wait, but can you?” he asks, taking my breath away with a warm, hard kiss.

“It’s common,” I say between kisses, breathlessly. “For subjects of—mmm—shock to make…impulsive decisions…excess endorphins can…cause…”

He pulls back, smirking at me. “You’re saying the only reason we’re about to fuck is because someone tried to kill us?”

I nod. “So maybe we should think about—”

He’s kissing me again, and I can’t bring myself to care anymore. My world gradually fades away as my senses are consumed by him. His fingers circle again over my clit, sliding down my valley, and plunging inside me, pumping rhythmically. I bite his lip, my hand moving up his thigh and finding his cock through the jeans he wears. My eyebrows flick upwards.

“Jesus. I thought I had exaggerated the memory of how big you were.”

I unzip his jeans, freeing his length and feeling a sudden and uncontrollable urge to please him. I want to see this man of power and strength at my mercy for a change, hanging on my every movement, gasping in pleasure as I take control. I have to pull his jeans down to the middle of his thighs to get his cock free because it’s too big to pull through the zipper while erect.

I grip him, still gasping in pleasure as his hand sends electric pleasure through my body with every movement. I wrap my lips around the head of his length, struggling not to scrape my teeth against him. I steal a glance upward and love the way his head is thrown back as he groans with pleasure. I cup his cock, kissing and licking along its length and finding my way back to the tip, taking him in my mouth and swirling my tongue around it. I know I’m doing a good job when he hand freezes inside me, his two fingers held motionless in my core, forgotten as I find my rhythm, loving the way his face is contorted with pleasure.

His breathing grows more rapid, and I know I’m close to making him cum when my phone buzzes. I’m snapped out of the moment immediately as guilt replaces lust. I don’t need to look to know the text is probably from Lauren, wondering when I’ll be by to pick up Roman. I move my mouth off him, finishing the job with my hand, when moments before I was planning to straddle him and let him do whatever he wanted to me, now I just want to go get my son.

Leo doesn’t notice my change of heart, and he sucks in a breath, groaning as his hot cum sprays over my hand. He moves to resume fingering me, but I shift, pulling his hand from my pants.check his center console and find some tissue, wiping the cum from myself as he does the same.

He narrows his eyes at me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing. Can you just take me home please?”

I sigh. What’s wrong? Just that I worked all day and left my son with Lauren so that I could come play putt putt and give an ex-con a blowjob in the parking lot. I could try to justify what I’m doing. I could say that I’m a person, too, and that I need to take care of myself. Or that I need to find out if Leo is the right guy to be in my son’s life, but it doesn’t feel right. No matter how I put it, my little guy has been waiting all day to see me, and he needs his mommy. I feel the anger in me rising, and even though my training tells me I’m projecting anger at myself onto Leo, I can’t stop myself.

“You would have killed those guys back there if I hadn’t stopped you,” I say, less a question and more a statement. Whether he admits it or not, I know it’s true.

He starts the car, backing out of the parking spot and heading to the main road. “Yes. I would have.”

“Just like that? No questions, no ‘who sent you’ or ‘who do you work for’? You’d just kill them because you were pretty sure they were the bad guys?”

“This isn’t like the movies. Guys who hesitate don’t last long. Whether it makes you happy or not, I’m never going to let anything happen to you, whatever it takes.”

I look out the window, watching the yellow streetlights streak by. And guys who don’t hesitate probably don’t make very good fathers. Maybe I’m so upset because I’m seeing how much our worlds clash. He comes from a world of black and white, of kill or be killed, and I don’t know how someone like that could ever fit in and function in my world full of grays.

I rub my temples, leaning forward in my desk and sighing. Six patients today and every single one was a parolee. Ted has started exclusively sending the parolees to me, just to save himself the headache of hearing the other therapists complain. Everyone sees what’s going on and has offered to take some on, but Ted won’t budge. His bigger concern is making my life miserable. I think somewhere in his twisted, hair-product encrusted head, he thinks I’ll eventually come to the conclusion that dating him is the only way out of this living hell he has created for me at work.

I open the envelope and frown. Three hundred dollars? My normal check is for a little over two thousand every two weeks. I stand, storming to Ted’s office. I find him leaning back in his chair, tossing a paperweight up idly. Of course he’s not actually working. He just overworks everyone else.

“What is this?” I ask, shaking the check in his face.

“That’s your paycheck. Don’t I pay for vision insurance?”

“Actually no. You make us go through a private insurer for vision.”

He purses his lips, disinterested.

“Where is the rest of my money?” I ask.

“Didn’t you see the renovations I did to the waiting area?”

“You mean the two broken chairs you replaced?”

“Yeah, well, they didn’t pay for themselves. If our waiting room looks like shit, we’re going to lose clients. If we lose clients, then there won’t be any money to pay you.”

I clench my teeth, feeling my nostrils flaring. “My check is almost two grand short. Did you import those fucking chairs from Italy?”

He sighs. “Look, Julia. I really don’t have time for this. I’m waiting on a call, so maybe we can talk about this next week.”

I slam the check down on his table. “We’re talking about this now.”

He turns his chair slowly to face me. “Don’t make me remind you. One call, and you won’t even be getting a three hundred dollar paycheck from me.”

“I could get three hundred dollars working at McDonalds.”

“Go ahead,” he says. “You could probably find more tattooed neanderthals to fuck at McDonalds than you will here.”

I grab the glass paperweight he was playing with from his hand and throw it as hard as I can at his window. “Maybe you can use some of the fucking money you stole from me to pay for that, too.”