Her Perfect Gift (12 page)

Prior to that moment, Lacey hadn’t even considered the possibility she might be pregnant. She and Hector had used condoms the few times they’d had sex. Well, most of the time. There had been a party at his frat a month earlier, when they’d both drunk more than they should have....

With a stomach full of dread, she went to get a pregnancy test from the local CVS and took it back to the dorm room she shared with two other freshman girls.

When the blue plus sign appeared on the white stick, the bottom fell out of her world.

Though even then, she didn’t realize life as she knew it had just ended in more ways than one. Believing Hector to be the upstanding young man he’d presented himself as, she’d gone over to his frat house to tell him what the stick had just revealed. She’d found him in his nearly empty house. It was two days after the end of classes and most of his brothers had already cleared out of the house. The only reason Hector was still there was because his summer internship at Prudential didn’t start for another week, and he had decided to volunteer for graduation services as opposed to going home to his father’s splashy mansion in Wilbur Section.

“I don’t want to spend any more time in my father’s house than I have to this summer,” he’d told her. “It’s toxic there.”

She had been so proud of him for using his free week to volunteer as opposed to lazing around like his other frat brothers.

But when she broke the news to him, he’d morphed from her kind and thoughtful boyfriend, into a guy she’d never met before.

“Whose is it?” he asked, his face curling into a snarl.

It took her a few moments to process what he was asking her. Before this, she thought boyfriends only asked their girlfriends stuff like that in bad movies. “It’s yours, of course,” she answered. “You know I haven’t been with any other guys!”

He’d been so proud to claim her virginity a few months ago, but now he was looking at her like she was a stranger. “I don’t know anything, except I’m the son of one of the richest men in New Jersey and you’re the daughter of some nobody. Dad warned me about girls like you, but I thought you were different.”

Lacey looked at him, truly alarmed now. “What do you mean ‘girls like me?’”

“Girls who want to entrap me. Become my baby mama, so they can get child support!”

She shook her head frantically. “No, Hector. I love you! I wouldn’t have slept with you if I didn’t love you. And I have too many hopes and dreams of my own to want to entrap you. I wanted to finish college and get a good job before I ever had children. This was an accident!”

“A convenient accident for you,” he sneered.

And Lacey started to get angry herself. “Listen, we were
both
at that party. We
both
got drunk and you’re the one who didn’t use a condom. I didn’t set you up!”

“Then prove it,” he said. “Get rid of it!”

Her heart stopped. “We can’t just get rid of it. I’m Catholic. I don’t do stuff like that.”

“Really?” he asked. “Cuz you didn’t seem all that devout when you were giving it up to me all those times.”

No, she hadn’t. But Lacey had been sure she was giving her virginity to the man she was going to marry, a man she wanted to please, and a man who loved her as much as she loved him.

But the way he was staring at her now, she knew she had made a horrible mistake. Her father had been right. Hector wasn’t the tragically misunderstood hero she had believed him to be. He was a predator, one who lured his prey in with sweet words and kisses, only to eventually turn on her.

“How many other girls have you done this to?” she asked him then.

“You mean how many girls have tried to use me before you?” he asked in an ugly voice. “Too many to count.”

To Lacey’s everlasting regret, she didn’t sense how dangerous Hector really was until that moment, when he was emanating menace, but standing between her and the door.

“Okay,” she said, backing down, and trying to keep her voice neutral. “I’m going to go back to my dorm room now. I think we both need to calm down and we can talk about this later, alright?”

He stood there, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

And Lacey panicked. She had wanted to play it cool and just walk out but instead, she darted for the door. And she’d almost thought she made it, but at the last minute, she was yanked backwards by the hair.

She screamed as Hector dragged her away from the door and threw her to the floor.

“Slut! Bitch!!” he yelled. Then before she could get up, he kicked her in her stomach, so hard she nearly threw up.

She had enough presence of mind to curl up in a ball, so he couldn’t get to her stomach again, but that only brought on more kicks. To her back, to her front, even one to her face when she begged him to stop.

No one came to help her, and after he kicked her in the face, Lacey knew she had to do something or this boy she thought had loved her would kill her.

Out the corner of her eye, she spotted a single shoebox under his bed, and in a moment of strange clarity, she knew Hector had too many shoes to keep them stored anywhere but his closet. No, he had to be using the shoebox to hide something, something he didn’t want the other frat brothers to know about.

In a burst of adrenaline, she ignored the burning pain, which she would later find out was due to a broken rib, and crawled toward the box.

“Get back here,” Hector spat, grabbing her by the ankle. But not before she managed to get her hands on the box. Even as he dragged her back on her stomach to do God knew what, her main focus was on getting the box open.

At that point, the only thing going through her mind was self-preservation for her and the baby growing inside of her. So when she found the gun inside the box, black and sinister, she didn’t hesitate. She grabbed it, flipped over on her back, shoved the gun in Hector’s face, and squeezed the trigger as hard as she could.

The recoil reverberated painfully through her body, causing her to drop the gun to the ground. But then she heard a great thunk, and when she managed to sit up, she found the boy she thought she had loved, the boy who had claimed to love her just a few days ago, dead with a bullet wound where his nose should have been.

“You’re a natural,” a voice said behind her.

Lacey jumped out of the memory to see Suro standing in the doorway of the nursery.

He wasn’t smiling. Lacey wasn’t even sure if he knew how to at this point, since she’d yet to see him do so. But the look on his face as he watched her with Spidey, who was now nuzzling his nose into her shoulder, made her feel like maybe he had been telling her the truth the day they’d made their agreement, that he really did care about her.

However, she been burned before and she was still paying the price for trusting the wrong boy. She couldn’t put her trust in this man, no matter how thoughtful his gifts were. She couldn’t trust anybody, she reminded herself.

Her eyes dropped to the key that still hung around Suro’s neck. Especially the man who had more or less bought and blackmailed his way into her life.

She handed Spidey back to Miss Beatriz and gave Suro a distant smile. “I should get back to work.”

She started to push past him, but he stood his ground, his eyes lasering in on her like he was trying to extract her thoughts via ESP. For a moment he loomed over her, too close, and putting her in mind of the way Hector had tried to use his size to intimidate her twelve years ago.

Then to her surprise, he took a few locks of her hair and pushed them behind her ear. His face softened and he looked at her now, just looked at her. Not demanding answers, but his eyes clearly asking what he wanted to know, “What were you just thinking about? Why are you pulling away from me?”

“No questions,” she whispered. “You promised.”

He had promised and apparently he took his promises seriously. He stepped away to let her pass, but she could feel his steady gaze on her as she made her way back to the office.

Don’t look back,
she said to herself. She had learned that lesson the hard way over the years, but still, she couldn’t help peeking over her shoulder before she entered her office.

Suro remained in the doorway of the daycare, leaning against the doorway as if he knew it was only a matter of time before she gave in to him and told him all her secrets no matter how dangerous it might be for them both. This caused her to rush into her office and close the door.

Because her biggest fear at that moment was that he was absolutely right.

She was trying as hard as she could to keep herself emotionally separated from what her body was doing but it didn’t feel like it was working at all.

CHAPTER 14

“
HOW’S
it going with the Dead Girl?” Dexter asked that night when Suro called to talk about the current slate of assignments. No hits scheduled, but they’d had to plot out security details for several parties going into the busy holiday season.

“We’ve come to an understanding,” Suro answered. “And she’s still very much alive.”

Most days Suro appreciated his friend’s sense of humor, but today wasn’t one of them. Technically, he’d gotten what he most wanted from Lacey. She was back in his bed. She cooked him warm meals and offered him companionship like he had never known.

His silence had intimidated most of the women he’d been with before Lacey, including his ex-wife. Often, the ones who didn’t eventually leave with exhortations that he needed to “work on his communication skills” ended up boring him when they tried to match his own silence by staying as meek and mute as possible.

But that wasn’t what he wanted. In fact, he hadn’t known what he wanted until he’d met the talkative black woman in Montana. Lacey had thanked him profusely for the shortened hours and the on-call maintenance man and the daycare, but it was Suro who found himself grateful for her every day.

Not just the way she cooked, but the way she smiled when he came into the room, and the way she told him about every aspect of her day, but somehow made it all seem interesting. From what she ate for lunch to the soap opera love triangle currently unfolding amongst three of the dancers—one redhead, one brunette, and one blond. The redhead and the brunette had been dating, but then the brunette left the redhead for the blond. And it might have ended there, but Lacey had walked in on the blond and the redhead kissing in the supply closet.

She summed the story up with, “Just so you know, we’re going to be losing a dancer soon. But at least they don’t live in the apartments. Then I’d have to deal with getting a new dancer
and
a new tenant. Though, why am I even worrying about that? You were smart to buy this business. It doesn’t look like much, but we’ve got a waiting list about a mile long for the apartments. You’ll never have to worry about putting in a rental ad.”

Yes, he agreed he had been smart to buy the business. It hadn’t felt like it at the time when he’d called himself all kinds of crazy and foolish for going through such extremes to position himself in her universe. But the more time he spent with Lacey, the better the investment looked to him.

In fact, he would pay double what he had for the club if he could get past the last wall she had erected.

She had let him into her life, and sometimes he caught her looking at him in a way that let him know she had let him into her heart, even if she hadn’t realized it yet. But she still didn’t trust him.

It shouldn’t matter, he thought to himself. He had what he wanted, and he had set up her life in a way that would make it very disadvantageous for her to run away again. But something in him wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. He didn’t just want Lacey’s body and her willing companionship. He wanted all of her, and he wouldn’t stop until he got it.

“Were you able to dig up anything else on her back story,” he asked Dexter now.

“Yeah, actually I was,” Dex said. “You mentioned something about her being a really good cook, all these New Orleans dishes, right?”

“Yes. Did you get a hit on her in New Orleans?”

“Naw, man, nothing there. But when I was going over the news stories about that fire Lacey Winters died in, I found a quote about the John Doe whose leaky stove set off the fire. One of the tenants, an elderly woman who escaped the fire, said and I quote, “He was a good man. He didn’t say much, but when I was laid up with my gout, he brought me some of the best jambalaya I’d ever tasted.”

Suro sat up in his office chair. “Do you think this man might have been Lacey’s father?” She’d mentioned him once or twice in passing and Suro had told Dex to look into him, too.

“Well, they never were able to identify his body, so even if it was, it might be another dead end. But I’m in D.C. again in a couple of weeks. Philadelphia’s not that far away. I was thinking I could stop by this woman’s place, ask her some questions.”

Though most of their government clients would disavow things if asked, many of their higher-level security jobs and elimination orders came from agencies who needed certain things done without it tracing back to them. Therefore, Dexter went to Washington D.C. twice a month for clandestine meetings, which usually resulted in assignments for Suro.

“I shouldn’t even be offering. You know how I feel about all the hoops you’re jumping through for this chick. She seems nice and all that, but this is some dramatic bullshit she’s putting you through.”

“She’s worth it,” Suro said.

“If you say so.” He could hear Dexter suck his teeth on the other end of the line. “By the way, your boy Rustanov called me the other day about us heading up security for Rustanov Enterprises.”

“I’ve already given my answer to that offer several times.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s why he called me this time. He thinks maybe I can talk some sense into you.”

“I don’t like working for one client. If I wanted to that, I would have stayed at my father’s company.” Not exactly true, after the last argument he had with his father, nothing would have driven him to work for The Nakamura Group again. But he’d found that what started out as the rebellious act of striking out on his own, working for any non-criminal client who could pay his fee, had been more to his liking than performing Due Diligence background checks, securing The Nakamura Group against fraud, and conducting corporate crisis management.