Page 14

Lacey

W hen we met up for drinks the next evening, Rebel asked, “Want to come spend the night at my house? We can talk about the progress we made on investigating the office break-in and if you want to ride my glorious cock, I’ll probably let you.”

I rolled my eyes, I was getting used to his sense of humor by now. “You’re truly a generous man. How did I not notice that before?”

He just grinned. When I looked into his eyes, I saw something that hadn’t been there before. It looked like some kind of sadness or regret. It made me want to reach out to him and make him feel better. So, I reached my hand across the table to cover his. “Did something bad happen last night?”

Turning his hand to grasp mine, his expression turned serious. “There’s always something bad going on in the world. I don’t like it when the darkness touches the people I care about.”

“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener,” I told him.

“Maybe later tonight. It’s too early to spoil the evening.”

Sitting across from him, I was grateful that I hadn’t messed up so badly that he was done with me, so when he asked, I jumped at the chance to go home with him. I couldn’t be sure but being invited to his house, rather than the clubhouse, felt like a monumental step in the direction of establishing a real relationship.

I was shamelessly looking forward to riding his glorious cock for part of the evening as well. I mean, why wouldn’t I? The last time we spent the night together was amazing. Of course, a girl would want a repeat of the best night of her life. I had rarely had orgasms with the couple of partners I’d had before Rebel, so four orgasms in one night was impressive.

One of the things I liked best about Rebel was his ability to forgive and move past issues. He didn’t carry them around, or bring them up and throw them back in my face. Even though he had a quirky personality and a bit of an odd sense of humor, I was growing to like those things about him. I felt relaxed and safe with him.

I especially loved him for taking my dad out, giving him an interesting new experience, and bringing him back with a genuine smile of happiness on his face. My dad’s happiness was at the top of my priority list and a rarity in our lives right now. Rebel had given our family something precious and probably didn’t even realize how much it meant to my mom and me.

After packing a rucksack with my essentials, I climbed onto the back of Rebel’s bike and let him ride off with me. Sitting on his bike, with my arms wrapped around his waist and the cool breeze whipping through my clothes was heaven on earth. It was moments like this that I understood why he loved riding his bike. It felt more freeing than driving a car. I clung to him as his tires ate up mile after mile of road, each moment taking us closer to his home, the place he laid his head to rest after a long, hard day. I couldn’t wait to see where he lived.

He lived about fifteen miles from town. When he pulled into his driveway, motion sensor lights popped on all the way around his home. When I lifted my helmet off and handed it to him, shock filled every corner of my mind. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but his house was sleek, modern, and jet black—and made of shipping containers.

My eyes ate up the sight before me. There were two long shipping containers, side by side and another placed at an angle across the top, giving it an asymmetrical feel. There were waist-high metal bars creating a balcony with a few pieces of outdoor furniture set close to the upper level walls.

There were multiple large windows and a long porch along the front with black porch furniture. As we stepped onto the porch his interior lights lit up, revealing sleek, modern chandeliers and color-coordinated furniture in black and dark gray.

As we walked through the door, I murmured, “Your house is amazing. Did you build it yourself?”

He nodded, seemingly thrilled at how impressed I was with his handiwork. “Yes. Mostly. I wanted something I could build in stages and use the building skills I learned in the military. A lot of the materials were salvaged and some of my club brothers helped me put it together. But I insulated, finished, and painted it myself.”

Closing the door behind him, he continued, “For the first couple of years after I was discharged from the military, all my time and resources went into building this home.”

“That must have been a ton of work. It’s really beautiful. It looks like you had an interior designer involved.”

“Maybe I’m wasted as an electrician?” he said with a grin. Gesturing towards his kitchen, he added, “I could talk for days about my house, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry tonight. I’m gonna make us some drinks and show you my office. It’s where I’ve been keeping track of the evidence on the break-in.”

“Alright, we’ll get right down to business if that’s what you want.”

“What I want is to be able to leave you in the office every morning without having to worry about some asshole breaking in and harming you.”

“Yeah, I want that too,” I told him.

“I’m grabbing a beer. I have wine, wine coolers, orange juice, or milk.”

“Maybe a wine cooler. It seems a waste to open a whole bottle of wine if it’s just me drinking it.”

He opened his fridge and pulled out our drinks, handing me an ice cold bottle and taking a beer for himself.

I followed him upstairs and into a small office. He had a bulletin board with all sorts of pieces of information pinned to it. Unlike the boards they showed police making on crime shows, his was chaotic and the clues didn’t point in any particular direction.

I sat down in a comfortable armchair as he dropped down on the corner of his desk. Taking a mouthful of my drink I listened as he started to explain. “I started with the clients who were disgruntled enough to come to me to get jobs your employees screwed up fixed. I figured they would be the most likely to be angry at not getting their money refunded by Livingstone Electrical.”

“That was a good call. Shepard refused refunds even when we were at fault.”

“Yeah, and the people I talked to were pissed. I ended up with a short list of nine clients with an axe to grind, and talked to every single one of them personally.” He snatched several sheets of paper off the bulletin board and handed the neatly stapled stack to me, “You can see for yourself what the results of those conversations were.”

I skimmed the list.

“One was an older man by the name of Orville Winthrop. He passed away a month and a half ago and his family had no idea what I was talking about, so I marked him off the list,” Rebel said.

“What about the next two? They have checks next to their names.”

Without even glancing at the list, he responded, “Yes. Ramon Fuentes and Todd Jones. Both of them were quite vocal about the work Sherman did for them. Ramon had an extension built, and Sherman was supposed to install wiring for overhead lights and put an electrical outlet on each wall. Sherman did the install, and I came out a few weeks later and did some troubleshooting, fixing the problem in under an hour. Same with Todd, only he built a new garage and wanted a garage door installed along with overhead lighting and one outlet for his power tools along the back wall. Sherman was good at half-assed installs. I fixed his mistakes in short order as well. They aren’t likely suspects because they both ended up getting me to correct the problem for a nominal charge. Neither of them were particularly irate, just annoyed.”

“Three out of nine leaves six,” I said, stating the obvious.

“The next one is marked out because he’s one of Harvey’s friends and although he got shafted on a security system installation, I fixed it in under two hours and rewired a bathroom light fixture that needed to be replaced due to water damage, for free. He was actually happy when I left.”

We went through all the rest of the clients on his list and most cases were similar to the ones from the top of the list. People were annoyed, but since some time had passed, they’d mostly gotten over it.

“Out of this whole list, I’ve got a file on two of them and will probably go ahead and refund the money they paid you to correct the work our employees did.”

He took a swig of his beer and told me, “You should refund every single one of them on the list. It’s the right thing to do.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. “Before you came along, I didn’t anticipate having the revenue to give refunds, but the business is close to being in the black. I’ll contact them and work out at least partial refunds.”

“So after exhausting that list, I looked through your reviews online and found three more people who were seriously angry but couldn’t afford to hire another electrician to correct the work. I went ahead and volunteered to make it right myself and tried to do a little extra, so they felt satisfied. Their names are on the second page.”

Flipping the page, I realized rather quickly that these jobs probably took longer than the others he’d reworked. “You should fill out an invoice for your work so I can pay you.”

“You didn’t send me on the job. I volunteered. If you move on to the third page, it’s a list Hacker, our IT guy, dug from creating a bot that crawled over several social media platforms looking for any negative chatter about you or your parents. You know, anything significant enough that it might provoke someone into tearing apart your family business. Hacker is thorough and found a couple of things that fall in the category of maybes.”

I quickly flipped to the last page and scanned through all the information.

“You’ll want to flip that page over,” he told me quietly.

One hand flew to my mouth as I saw that my ex had posted a naked image of me in some manosphere group and talked trash about what a terrible lay I was. I’d dated Rudy briefly before I left for Los Angeles, and I’d thought we’d parted on good terms. The things Rudy said about me online were humiliating, I had always thought he was such a nice guy. I felt myself choking up.

My eyes flew up to Rebel. He reached out and plucked a sealed envelope off the bulletin board and handed it to me.

He said in a steely voice, “Don’t worry, I already dealt with him.”

Holding the envelope in my shaking hands, I asked, “What do you mean by dealt with?”

He shrugged one muscular shoulder. “Hacker is working on getting the images off the website. Fucker liked to hoard shit like that, so I got rid of everything he had on his phone, laptop, and tablet. We found no evidence that he used cloud storage. I also talked to him, and I might have tuned him up a little, and impressed upon him the importance of not doing shit like that again.”

“You beat him up?” I didn’t know why I was so shocked about that.

“He deserved it. Jackass did it to several women, not just you. Losing a few teeth is the least of his worries. I sent the information he shared with them and two of them are suing him.”

Flipping the letter in my hand, I asked, “So what’s this?”

“His very convincing letter of apology. Careful when you handle it. He had himself a little nosebleed when he wrote it.”

“Jesus, Rebel. I never would have thought he’d share naked photos of me with his friends.”

“I hope I’m not contributing to your difficulty in trusting men?”

I folded the envelope in half and crammed it in my pocket. “No. That’s ancient history.”

Of course, that was a bald-faced lie. At this moment, I was not okay, but I didn’t want Rebel to feel guilty for being honest with me. Picking up the page of things people had said online, I noticed something else that shocked me. “My mom’s best friend is talking about how she doesn’t deserve my father. Did you talk to Margaret too?”

“Yeah, of course I did,” he paused when he saw the look on my face. “Don’t worry, I didn’t touch her, but I might have put the fear of God in her.”

My eyes flew open. “Rebel, what did you do?”

“Not a lot. Threatened to make sure everyone in her life knew she had a crush on a happily married man.”

“Not a lot,” I admitted.

“She kept telling me how her grandson was going to beat my ass for talking to her disrespectfully. He’s a fucking pyromaniac. I didn’t want to take a chance that she’d get brave one day and move on from break-ins to having her grandson torch your office.”

My hands flew to my mouth. “Do you really think they’re capable of doing something like that?”

Rebel told it to me straight, “Who the fuck knows? But I decided to face the issue head-on by impressing upon them both the importance of keeping their mouths shut about your family, and staying away from you and the business.”

“How did they take that suggestion? I can’t imagine it went over very well, since she comes and goes at my parents’ house like she owns the place.”

“I decided to beat her at her own game and threatened to make sure everyone in her life knew she had a crush on your father. I also told that grandson of hers that if I had to come back, I was going to let all the bikers I left outside come inside and take turns using him for a punching bag. Since his talent is starting fires and not fighting muscle bound bikers, he agreed to steer clear of your family and the office. I’m not sure I got through to Margaret though. Although we settled on a compromise, she was still acting the fool when I left.”

“Oh my god. My mom is going to be furious.”

“Don’t worry, she’s fucking off to Florida to do her snowbird thing early this year. I told her that either she shuts her fucking mouth about your mom, or I share all the other awful shit she says about people with everyone on her social media list.”

Finally understanding, I said, “She’s been talking about everyone behind their backs. That sounds about right. Margaret Pensay has always been a gossip. You know that you didn’t need to get involved in that, right?”

“I had to make sure she wasn’t involved in the break-in and since I was there anyway, I decided to deal with her mouth. Your mom’s a nice lady. She doesn’t deserve to have that bitch saying ugly shit about her behind her back like that.”

“My money is on her staying in Florida. Do you mind if I take this with me?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s just a printout of what’s on my computer.”

If he objected to me sharing this with my mom, he didn’t say. I wanted to share it with her because Margaret sometimes visited our house when my mom was out, and I didn’t want her taking advantage of my dad one day when he was really compromised.

“So, what’s the bottom line?” I asked.

“No one panned out to be a viable suspect,” he replied grimly. “That fire-setting grandson of hers took Margaret to the ER the night your office was broken into. They had proof, so they couldn’t have been involved.”

“I don’t know why, but I’m glad it wasn’t them. She’s been involved with our family for a long time.”

Rebel gave me a strange look and I responded, “Yeah, I know that’s weird. You don’t have to say it.”

Not commenting on my words, he asked, “What did you and Zoe come up with?”

“I sifted through every client that made a formal complaint to my office and Zoe decided that none of them seemed angry enough to break into our office and mess it up. Then we got to thinking. Maybe it was a former employee.”

“As in Sherman or Mark, right?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t pay to rule either of them out, but I think Mark is exponentially more likely to ransack our office and destroy it. He was super pissed at being let go, and he has a terrible temper and is a shitty human being in general.”

“Were either of them awarded unemployment?”

“They both applied and were denied. A former employee only qualifies for unemployment if they lost their job through no fault of their own. Both Mark and Sherman were fired for a reason.”

“Were either of them notified of the denial on the day of the break-in?”

“Yes. Mark was notified the afternoon before the break-in. I still think if it’s either of them, it’s him. He lost a well-paying management job and like I mentioned before he’s a truly despicable person.”

“Alright, that’s the direction we’ll go in next” he responded firmly. “We’re not giving up until we know who did this and they’re behind bars.”

“Mind if we get out of here? I was kind of hoping for a romantic evening, and looking at all that evidence is killing the mood.”

Rebel grinned and came to his feet. “Sure. You want to go downstairs or lounge in my bedroom? I have a little seating area in there and a minifridge with more drinks, so I’m not just steering you towards the bed. I often chill there in the evenings rather than the living room.”

“Your room sounds great. We can crash when we get tired of talking about the break-in.”

“Oh, I’ve almost had my limit of talking about that.” I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t even joking about that.

I was right there with him. Throwing everything I just learned into a little box in the back of my head and forgetting about it for just one night sounded pretty good, right about now. Everything over the last week or so had been not only difficult but overwhelming. And learning that my mom’s best friend had been backstabbing her, and that my ex had turned out to be an asshole who violated my privacy, was more than I could deal with tonight.

That’s why when Rebel handed me another wine cooler, I gratefully accepted it and opened it right away. I tilted my head back and took a long drink. It was just what I needed to quench my thirst. When I glanced at Rebel, he was staring at me with concern etched over every square inch of his face.

“You realize that none of what happened was your fault, right?”

“Except the ex. I guess that I had poor judgment back then. I honestly thought he was a relatively nice guy. The only reason we broke up was because I went off to college.”

“Yeah, that was one of the things that caused him the most angst.”

“Well, that’s not exactly how it went. Initially we were both going to UCLA, but he didn’t get the grades. He tried to persuade me to stay in Griffinsford and attend the community college instead, but I wasn’t going to give up my opportunity.”

“You don’t have to justify to me why this asshole had it all wrong. The thing is, you had every right to break up with him for any reason or no reason. He’s now clear on the fact that you didn’t owe him shit. Please don’t give that fucker a second thought.”

“I don’t know how I could have had such poor judgment,” I told him. I was embarrassed to have been exploited by him. “He turned out to be worse than I could have imagined.”

Rebel shrugged. “Maybe he wasn’t like that in the beginning. It might be that when the two of you went your separate ways for college, his choices took him down the wrong path.”

“I guess that’s possible. I’m done talking about him, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. So what do you wanna talk about?” he said with an easy grin.