Page 22 of Playing for Keeps

As my sixteenth birthday approached, I asked my dad for the one thing I wanted more than anything: a trip to Florida. He relented, sticking me with Stefano Donati, my favorite of his security guards—the one I’d blackmailed into allowing me to do anything I wanted by the time I hit my teens. Stefano and I took the private jet, flew into Orlando, and checked into a hotel near Disney World.

Stefano stayed put while I pulled out my fake ID and rented a car. I drove the cheapest rental I could find, one that looked as far from my home life as I could get, and headed straight toward Thatcher’s house.

When he answered the door, his blue Hawaiian shirt open at the collar and a thick Cuban cigar in his hand, he took one look at me and scowled. “I’m not buying whatever you’re selling,” he grumbled before he slammed the door in my face.

I laughed and took a seat on the swing on his front porch. I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and connected to his WIFI, then proceeded to drain all of his bank accounts and max out every one of his credit cards. His incoming email grew with new messages full of advertisements for penis enlargements and little blue pills, pictures of women’s lingerie and hardcore porn. Thatcher's curses carried over the sound of his air conditioner, through the windows and the thick front door. When I was finished, when I’d taken all that I could and messed with him as much as I deemed fitting, I pulled out my cell phone and gave him a call.

“Are you buying now?” I asked when he answered. His silence spoke volumes, the quietest he’d been in the past forty-five minutes. The front door was flung open, and Thatcher stood there staring out at me, eyes wild and hair sticking up on end, cigar abandoned somewhere inside.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked through the screen door.

I disconnected my call and tucked my cell phone back in my bag on my shoulder, taking my time. When I looked back at him, I smiled at the disheveled man in front of me. “King Arthur, at your service.”

* * *

Thatcher was more than enemy-turned-friend. He was my best friend. My mentor. The father figure I needed before my own father stepped up and started to try. He was my biggest cheerleader and the guy who would be there to slap me across the back of the head when I made a stupid mistake. He was the man I’d looked up to since I met him two days before my sixteenth birthday, the one I went to when I needed to talk. He called me on my shit, guided me when I floundered. He’d always been there for me.

So it was no surprise to me, when I showed up at his house in the middle of the night last night, to find him sitting on his front porch swing waiting for me to arrive. He ushered me into the house, into the guest bedroom, asked if I wanted to talk, then left when I told him not yet. In the morning I found him much the way I did nine years ago, in a red Hawaiian shirt, open at the collar, his chest hair graying where it wasn't back then. He was barefoot, in khaki cargo shorts, eating a bowl of cereal and scrolling around a news site on his tablet.

He rose when I walked into the kitchen, the mid-morning Florida sun shining in the window over the sink and casting shadows across his eyes. He extended his arms and I went to him, giving him a hug the way a child would to his father. When I sniffed, he pulled back, eyeing me with one brow raised. Then he released me, turned to the fridge and grabbed a gallon of milk from the door.

“How’s Vivian?” he asked as he took a bowl out of the cupboard and set it in front of me.

“She’s home,” I told him with a shrug, clearing my throat and swiping my knuckle across my nose. “The whole thing shook her up. She doesn’t trust a damn soul.”

Vivian. My twin sister. A month before, she was drugged, abducted, and held in a filthy basement by a sick, delusional man, for an entire week. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Between all my plans and Ford’s situation, the fear of losing my sister was the last thing I needed.

Thatcher, Angel, Butterman, and Ford were there for me when I needed them. They helped me find her, tracking her down the way only a bunch of hackers could. I’d been traveling like crazy—out to New York after she was found, then back to the Midwest when she came home. Back to New York to help Ford, and now here I was in Florida, running from what I wanted to the one person who understood.

“And this guy, Mitch?” he asked as I shoveled a bite of Wheaties into my mouth. “He’s a good guy?”

I smiled as I finished chewing my cereal. “He is. They’ve been together for months, neither of them told anyone about it. They love each other.”

My eyes dropped to my bowl. I moved the cereal around with my spoon before taking another bite. I’d hated Mitch just over a month ago, before I knew he was seeing my sister. With his carefree, don’t-give-a-damn attitude and the way he flirted with every woman he was near, I was insanely jealous when I thought he was going after the one person I wanted more than anything.

But now, knowing that he wasn’t my competition, knowing the lengths he went to save the second most important woman in my life... Now I loved him like a brother.

“And Jen? How’d that go?”

Fuck.

I pushed back from the table and swept my hair out of my eyes. It fell back in place as I looked across the room, diverting my gaze from my friend. Even though this was the reason I jumped into my father's private jet and flew to Florida in the dead of night, my throat clenched at the thought of speaking a word. Like I’d jinx it. Like saying it aloud would make it all come true.

But I forced it out anyway through a rasp in my throat. “She met a guy.”

I was met with silence. It was a long couple minutes before I dragged my eyes back to his. He was staring at me over the top of his glasses, his hand cupped around the stubble on his chin, his elbow resting on the arm draped across his middle.

“Don't look at me like that.”

“Then explain yourself,” he told me.

Leaning forward, I stirred the milk in my bowl again before I pushed it away from me and collapsed back in my chair. I sniffed, then cleared my throat again.

“She was walking to work yesterday, torrential downpour, and this guy walks up with an umbrella.” I didn’t tell Thatcher he dragged her downstairs to the locker room. That I went against everything I promised I’d never do by hacking into her phone and listening to their conversation. That I used the holes I left in my father’s security system to hijack the building’s electrical system and mess with the lights in the basement. Anything to keep the guy from getting too close.

But it didn't do any good.

“They left the building together last night,” I told him. Thatcher didn’t move. Just kept staring at me like I hadn’t said a thing. So I gave him what he wanted. “Holding hands.”