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In the end, all he recalled was standing in the middle of a dark parking lot with four unconscious men and the sound of sirens in the distance. He’d hopped on his bike and never looked back.
“Blake? What are you doing here?”
Blake blinked, forcing himself to the present, shocked to find Chloe standing in front of him. How the hell had she left the bar and walked all the way across the street without him noticing? So much for this stakeout.
Chloe looked completely annoyed. And a bit nervous.
He grinned. He could work with that. “I just got off duty, so I thought I’d take a little walk.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not much of a walk. I could see you from the front window of the Blue Note. You’ve been holding up this wall for the last twenty minutes. How did you even know I was going to be here?”
“I’m a detective.”
She smirked. “My mother told you.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
She sighed. “I’m perfectly capable of fending a guy off if he oversteps, despite my failed attempts with you.”
He knew that, but he suspected she’d prefer thinking he was just concerned for her safety rather than the fact he was so jealous he couldn’t see straight, so he let the lie stand. “Are you finished for the day?”
She shrugged. “I’m finished as far as working with Mr. January is concerned. Now I’m heading back to my studio to download the photos, find the best and tweak it.”
“Have time for lunch?”
She hesitated, but didn’t instantly refuse. Blake took that as a sign of progress. Before she could answer one way or the other, he pointed down Bourbon Street. “What do you say we grab some crawfish beignets at Bayou Burger?”
Chloe crinkled her nose. “Please tell me you don’t still eat those.”
Blake wrapped his arm around her shoulder, gently directing her toward the restaurant. Chloe fell into step easily beside him.
“Gotta say, Chloe, I’m sorry to hear you’re still a finicky eater.”
She scoffed. “The fact that I don’t cover every meal in hot sauce does not mean I’m picky. Quite the opposite, actually. It means I prefer to taste my food. You should try it some time.”
He laughed, the two of them trading barbs about their eating habits all the way to Bayou Burger. It wasn’t until they were seated and their drinks ordered that Blake could lean back and relax without worrying she’d change her mind and run.
“It was good to see your family again on Sunday, but I’m not sure who Zac is.”
Chloe took a sip from her water glass. “He’s my foster brother. You wouldn’t have met him. He came to live with us the summer after you…” She paused.
There was no point pretending. “After I left,” he finished for her.
She nodded. “He and his younger brother, Noah, were removed from their home when their mother was arrested for prostitution and drugs. Zac was fifteen and Noah was only twelve. Before they came to stay with us, they’d been living in a house with no running water and eating whatever they could steal from dumpsters behind restaurants.”
The story sounded familiar. Blake had done a bit of fine garbage dining himself when he was younger, but Chloe didn’t know that. He’d never told her anything about his childhood because at the time, Blake had worried she would either dump him or worse, pity him. There were times he wished he could go back and kick his nineteen-year-old self’s ass for being such a prideful idiot.
Listening to her tell Zac’s story, he didn’t hear sympathy as much as anger toward the boys’ mother.
“How long did they stay with you?”
Chloe sighed. “Two years the first time. Then the court—in its less-than-infinite wisdom—gave them back to their mother. Their lives returned to more of the same, only worse. Their mother kept smoking crack and sleeping with men for drug money. One of the guys—a customer—beat Zac up one night. It was really bad. Noah was scared so he ran to a neighbor’s house and called my mom. She phoned the police, then all three of my brothers. They got to the house just before the cops and found Zac in a bloody heap on the floor.”
“Jesus.” Blake couldn’t imagine how hard it would have been for those young boys to spend two years in the loving, safe Lewis home, only to have to give that up to return to the slum. Then he recalled the few times he’d found security in his young life. Every single time, he’d willingly given it up and gone back to the hell that was life with his dad.
“Mama said she’d never been so scared in her life. She thought Zac was dead. Anyway, Caliph stayed with Zac, while Jett and Justin helped Mama and Noah pack up all their belongings.”
“What about Zac and Noah’s mother?”
“She’d been passed out in her bedroom. Didn’t even realize anything had happened to Zac. She came out in the hall and started screaming at my mother because she thought she was stealing her sons. She told them to get out, to leave her boys alone. Justin said Mama looked that woman straight in the eye and told her she should be ashamed of herself.”
Blake fiddled with his fork, chuckling. “Did it work?”
Chloe grinned. “What do you think? Mama’s good at guilt trips. It’s pretty much the way I was raised. She only had to look at me with that I’m so disappointed face and I’d crumble like a house of cards.”
Blake laughed. “I remember that. She used that look on me a couple times. It’s powerful.”
“Justin said the lectures we’d gotten as kids were small potatoes compared to the speech she gave Zac and Noah’s mom. He said he was nearly in tears and begging for forgiveness himself and he hadn’t done anything wrong. Their mom fell apart when she saw Zac lying on the floor and she asked my mother to take her boys, to give them a chance to grow up safe and healthy. They’ve been ours ever since.”
“What happened to their mom? Did she straighten her act out?”
Chloe shook her head sadly. “She’s still alive. I know Zac goes to see her every now and then, takes her some food and medicine, but no. There wasn’t a happy ending. She’s still addicted. You know how that goes.”
Blake knew only too well. “Yeah, I do.”
“Did you really arrest your dad?”
He nodded. He’d been expecting the question ever since he stupidly made that comment at Sunday dinner. “I did.”
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
Blake shrugged as he recalled the near-rape in the bar parking lot. In some ways, putting his dad in prison had been a hell of a lot simpler than he would have thought. “My dad and I had parted ways several years before the arrest. He’d been a criminal, on some level, for my entire life. Stealing, drunk driving arrests, drugs—selling and using—assault, you name it, it was on his rap sheet.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that when we were dating?”
Blake wasn’t pleased with his answer, but it was the only one he had. “Pride.”
She frowned. “What?”
He released a long breath. “You weren’t like any other girl I’d ever dated, Chloe. You didn’t come from the same place I did. When I was with you, I could pretend I wasn’t that guy.”
“What guy?”
“My life wasn’t all that different from Zac and Noah’s. Only I was dealing with a drunk dad instead of a strung-out mother.”
“I wish…”
Chloe’s whisper faded away, leaving Blake to fill in the blank. What did she wish? That she’d known? That Mama Lewis had shown up in the middle of the night and dragged him out of hell? That he hadn’t been such a prideful, puffed-up idiot?
He smiled. “There are a lot of things I wish too. But none of that matters. I’ve done a lot of things I regret, Chloe, but I can’t let my mind linger on that too long. Everything that’s happened has made me the man I am today.”
She studied his face in silence, glancing away briefly. Then her eyes lifted to his once more. They were shuttered, closed and he knew she was finished with this conversation.
The waiter brought their meals and they allowed the conversation to drift to safer realms. Chloe talked about her experiences putting together her book and he shared some of his more humorous arrest stories just so he could hear Chloe’s laughter.
Once he’d paid the bill, he took her hand, offering to walk her back to her place. She didn’t refuse.
When they arrived, she invited him inside, giving him a tour. The studio apartment was a large, wide-open space, filled with sunlight and color. It suited Chloe perfectly. Near the front door, she’d set up her portrait area with lighting and backdrops, tripods and cameras. Then, they walked farther into the room to her living area. A plush couch and ottoman flanked by two recliners all faced the large-screen television.
Blake whistled. “Damn. Man cave.”
She laughed. “Yeah. My brothers and I are huge hockey fans and I was tired of all of us trying to cram ourselves into Jett’s shoebox apartment on game nights.”
“Why not go to Justin’s? Didn’t he mention something on Sunday about his house?”
Chloe nodded. “Yeah, but he lives too far out of town. The trek there and back in a cab is a pain. And Caliph’s work schedule changes all the time.”
