Chapter Twelve—Linc
As soon as Sky left my apartment, saying she needed to get back to her place and get some sleep, I called Carol. She didn’t usually work weekends, but I had her cell phone number, and I was only too eager to tell her about the situation and the twist it had taken.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said. “You got someone to agree to marry you in three days?”
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” I told her. “Can you work with that?”
“It’ll be cutting it close, but as long as it’s official and on the books, we can work with it,” Carol promised. She was nothing if not efficient—that was why she made the kind of money she did.
I didn’t see Sky the next day, but I figured she had stuff of her own to take care of, and she’d probably want space. I could only hope that she didn’t end up getting enough space to reconsider.
Carol called me Monday morning to give me the final details on the Family Court hearing, and as soon as I got off the phone with her I made an appointment at the courthouse for my wedding with Sky. If we were going to get married, and I was going to use it in Family Court, I needed to get all of my ducks in a row as quickly as possible. Once I had everything set up, I tried to see if I could get Sky on the phone to tell her what needed to be done. I couldn’t, but she’d told me where she worked, so around noon I went by to see if I could steal her away for a little while, figuring that it would all go better over lunch.
Finding her was going to be an issue, though. The place was huge, and there were probably over a thousand employees running around. The only saving grace was an information booth staffed by a nice old lady, maybe in her fifties, with a hairstyle about twenty years out of date, but dressed well enough. When I told her why I was there she wanted to see me find Sky, so she spent several minutes tracking her down while the phones rang in front of her. She was a master at ignoring them, but the incessant ringing nearly drove me crazy while I waited for her.
“She’s up on the fourth floor, in the back. You can’t miss it. Corner office on the left when you get to the west side of the building. Her name plate should be on the door by now.”
“Thank you. I don’t think I would have found her without you,” I said, trying to stick to my role of romantic hero.
“You two have a good lunch. I wish my husband would surprise me once in a while. But you know how it is once you get married, everything changes and you don’t do those sweet little things anymore.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I told her. “I can only hope I’ll know how to keep that from happening in my second marriage.” As I went up to the fourth floor, intent on finding Sky, I had to wonder if I had lost my mind under the strain of dealing with Lisa. Hadn’t I sworn to myself that I would never get married again? What if Sky turned out to be no better than Lisa had been? What if I got her to agree to marry me and then everything changed?
I shook my head to get rid of the intruding thoughts and took a deep breath to calm myself. I was eager to see her again, and I could still taste her on my lips from when we had kissed in my living room. I wanted more of that, even though time was running short on the court date. I had to focus, but it was impossible to focus when I had Sky to think about.
Stopping the first person I saw when I got off the elevator—a guy in his twenties, it looked like, wearing a suit that was a little too pricy for someone working an office job—I asked for directions to Sky’s office yet again. I’d gotten them from the lady downstairs, but I’d already forgotten most of them. All I could think about was seeing Sky, and I didn’t want to get lost on the way.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Sky.” I didn’t use her last name. The name Sky was unique enough, even in a building of a thousand. I would almost bet that no one else here had that name.
“Sky Davis?” The twenty-something guy gave me a quick up-and-down look.
I nodded my head. “Yeah, that’s her.”
The man looked at me curiously but then shrugged and pointed me in the direction of some offices. “I could walk you over,” he offered after a moment. “It can be a real maze in here.”
“No, I think I’ve got it from here,” I told him. “I’m here to surprise her.”
The guy looked doubtful for a moment longer, but then he smiled and waved me off. I was surprised by how pleasant everyone in the office seemed intent on being. I had never seen anything like that in the SEALs—at least, not when people were on duty—and I’d definitely never seen so many smiles in the apartment building. I watched all the people running around and working. I didn’t know how anyone could work in this chaos, no matter how pleasant their coworkers were. I guessed it was a civilian thing. Years of military precision, and then being on my own, had worn it out of me.
The door to Sky’s office was open a little. I heard conversation, and a deep, male voice had me stopping in my tracks. It was not just the tone and timber of the voice that alarmed me, but what he was saying when I got closer to the door and could hear him.
“Come on, Sky. Just go out to lunch with me one time. I know you want to. There’s no sense in trying to act like you don’t. You’re a bit too old to be playing the hard-to-get card with me or anyone else. Before you know it, your biological clock is going to be winding down.” My heart started beating faster in my chest as I remembered Sky mentioning that she’d had some kind of issue with her boss. She’d said it had just been a misunderstanding, but this didn’t sound like a misunderstanding.
“Really, Stephen, I don’t want to go out with you. I thought I made that clear. We work together, and you’re my boss.”
“Do you want to keep it that way?”
“What do you mean by that?” The alarm in Sky’s voice cut right through my skull, and I got the kind of too-clear vision that tended to come with an adrenaline overload. I knew I had to be careful, but the mixture of Sky’s alarm and the asshole’s words was making it hard for me to think.
“I mean that I can find another actuary if you don’t want to be nice, Sky. I told you when you started that I was going to have you. Now is the time to give in. Either that or I’ll find someone who is a little more compliant. Being friends with Cassie, I thought you would be more accustomed to how it works in the real world.”
I didn’t get to hear her answer before I was bursting into her office. I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I saw red, and when I realized that the man was actually touching her arm, and almost grabbing it hard enough to hurt her, I couldn’t stop what happened next. Instinct took over. I would have been pissed no matter who was on the receiving end of this blatant sexual harassment, but it wasn’t just any woman. It was Sky whose forearm the slick-haired asshole was gripping. Well, I was going to make sure that he would think twice before ever touching another woman in his life.
“Wait, Linc, stop!” I could hear Sky in the background, but I lost it for a minute. My mind just went blank, and I didn’t even know what I’d done until later, when it came back to me as the haze of the adrenaline rush lifted. When I finally got myself together, all I could tell was that I’d gone too far. What the hell was I thinking? The man was bleeding on the floor in front of me and everything around me was far too quiet. What the hell had come over me? Sky wasn’t even mine, but I had reacted with the kind of protective instincts that I’d only ever felt towards my daughter before.
Sky was looking at me as if I might be some kind of monster. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“He was harassing you, Sky,” I said, rubbing the knuckles on my right hand. “I walked up and heard it. I didn’t like the way he was trying to blackmail you.”
“So you broke his nose?”
“Ah—it’s not broken,” I said, trying to dismiss it. But one look at the blood on the guy’s face, on the floor of the office, and the crooked angle of his nose told me that Sky was probably right. I tried unsuccessfully to hide the smile that I felt inside. After all, the man had gotten what he deserved. But even though I wasn’t worried about the legal consequences yet, I was worried about how Sky was looking at me.
“What are you even doing here, Linc?” She was pale, and her eyes were wide—but not in the sweet-sexy way I’d seen them before. She looked pissed and scared shitless all at the same time.
“I wanted to see if you were free for lunch,” I said. It seemed like a pretty hollow reason, in light of what had happened, but that was the fact of the matter.
She looked from me to the man on the floor and just shook her head. There were a few groans out of her boss, but not many. A right hook backed up by twenty years of hand-to-hand combat training had put him down for the count, and I was satisfied that he’d gotten the point. If not, I would be more than happy to spell it out to him again anytime it was needed. Sky shook her head again and leaned heavily against her desk. “Oh my god,” she said quietly.
“He had no right to touch you or say those things to you, Sky, and I won’t let him.” She looked up at me and it seemed like her mind had settled on pissed, instead of scared shitless. The color rose back up into her face in a hectic blush.
“I’m going to get fired for this. You know that, right? Why the hell would you do this?”
“Why the hell would I do that? Because he was grabbing you. He was assaulting you, Sky. He had no right to do that. Besides, can you honestly say it wasn’t gratifying to see someone do something about it?”
I could tell that she didn’t appreciate it as much as I did. “You don’t understand, Linc. I needed to line another job up first. I can’t just get fired and hope that it all works out. I’ve got bills to pay and you come in here like Rambo.”
I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t wrong—but something about it felt wrong. Sky wasn’t mine, at least not yet, and even when we did get married, if we still went through with it, it was only going to be a sham marriage. She still wouldn’t really belong to me. I took a deep breath. The adrenaline was starting to fade, letting me think more rationally. “I’m sorry. I just reacted when I saw him touching you.”
There was a bare glimmer of a smile before she straightened her face out. “I can’t believe you’re jealous, Linc.”
“Something about the way you’re saying that doesn’t sound all that good,” I told her.
“It doesn’t look all that good from where I’m standing,” she said dryly.
I had to agree. This could have gone a lot better. It certainly wasn’t what I’d imagined in my head.
“I think I have to go tell someone about this. I don’t know what to do. I’m sure I’ll be fired for this.” She shook her head again, and that scared shitless look came back into her eyes. I tried to think of something I could say to make it leave again, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I remembered Carol’s advice to me and cringed.
“Let me leave before you call the police, Sky,” I said. “I know you have to—but just let me get out of here first, okay?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“My ex-wife has been trying to paint me as some unstable, unpredictable rage-head for years now, and something like this would undo everything else I’m trying to do—that we’re trying to do—to make it possible for me to keep Jazmin here,” I said.
“So what am I supposed to tell them, then? I mean, you kind of messed his face up, Linc.”
“Just tell them you don’t know who I am. I just came in and started to attack this guy.”
“His name is Stephen, in case that matters,” she said. “You want me to lie to the police?”
“Well, do what you have to do,” I said. “If you have to tell them...” I sighed. “Please, just do me one last favor, and avoid telling them anything about me if you don’t have to.” Sky held my gaze for a long moment and then nodded.
“Okay, fine,” she said finally.
I sighed. I was going to take that as short for “Okay, I won’t say anything to the police.” I wasn’t sure, and it was a lot to ask of someone, but I had to hope that she would do exactly that. I also had to get out of there before the guy on the ground woke up enough to get a good look at my face. Maybe it would all be chalked up to a random act of violence, or blamed on a former employee with a grudge. It was better than the alternative.
When I left, I tried to put the incident out of my mind. There was nothing I could do about it anyway, and there were still a few arrangements to be made and items to be picked up. I wanted everything to be perfect, even if asking for a wedding to be perfect when you only had a couple of days to make it happen was practically asking for disaster. I could only hope that Sky would go along with my plan, and that she would come over like I’d asked her to. I needed to talk over the last several details with her, and more than that I needed to make sure that she was still willing to go through with it. I supposed I couldn’t really blame her if she decided against it.
I picked up a bouquet of flowers for her, a pair of rings for the courthouse, and decided that I was going to make her a decent dinner to come home to. We would talk about what had happened, and then we’d figure it out—and hopefully we’d make everything come out okay in the end. I wasn’t all that optimistic normally, but I had nothing left to me, really, but hope.
While I was waiting, I decided to call Carol and make sure that everything was as it should be. She picked up on the second ring, and I didn’t—I couldn’t—tell her about the situation at Sky’s office.
“I swear, if you are going to call me like this I’m going to start billing you for phone hours,” Carol said. I laughed; I had to. Some things might change, but Carol was always the same.
“I just want to make sure everything is how it needs to be,” I said. “It’ll take you all of five minutes. Is there anything else that I need to get done before the court date? I just want to make sure that I’ve done everything I can to put the odds in my favor. I can’t let her go to California and take our daughter with her.”
“Not that I can think of, Linc. You’ve done far more than I thought you would, and way more than most fathers would do in your position. We will have to leave a little bit up to the judge, but everything is looking up.”
“Good, because I don’t know how much else you could ask for besides blood.”
“No blood, not yet. That’s for later.”
She laughed out loud at her own joke, and once again I had to wonder what was on her mind when she said things like that. Carol had the strangest sense of humor, but I trusted her to tell me straight. And now I could—I hoped—add Sky to the list of women I trusted. I would have to see if she was up to the challenge.