It’s what I had spent the rest of my adulthood trying to work for, and damn if I wasn’t going to do everything in my power to try and make it happen. Maybe it would all be a failure. Maybe it would result in me meeting the man, only for myself to decide I wanted nothing to do with him.
But I had to fucking try.
I just had to. I couldn’t bear the thought of Charlotte never knowing her father.
Chapter 4: Liam
I had thought on many occasions to leave Breckenridge.
I liked small towns, but this one strained how much I liked it. Though within roughly an hour of Denver, it wasn’t like that hour was easily accessible many times during the year. And frankly, there just weren’t many women in the area, and I loved women.
But you know what? I was a loner enough. I needed to not get too attached to anyone. I wouldn’t call this a punishment staying there, but it was the place where I belonged.
I stepped outside on a frigid day, wearing too many layers of clothing for how cold it was. Maybe later, I’d have to shovel out my driveway. For now, though, I was content to wake up, grab my mail from the day before, sit down with a cup of coffee, and read a book for the day.
The steps to my front porch creaked under my weight, a sure sign that if I didn’t fix them soon, my ankle would join them in collapsing. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have a ton of free time these days. Work had slowed down a bit, though some of that was, admittedly, my own choosing.
I got to the mailbox, skimmed through the various spam, advertisements, and…and a letter from D.O.M. I froze, and not because of the cold weather.
And then I laughed. Still sending me work, huh, Scott? You still want me to take over it all so you can dick around with your twenty-something girl?
I ignored the thoughts for now and took the letter inside. I had a lot of conflict with Scott—the founder of D.O.M., the guy who had gotten me into this world—for what I perceived as the ultimate in hypocrisy. Scott had laid down three rules for D.O.M., namely that we didn’t exist, we had no family, friends, or other commitments, and we didn’t sleep with our clients.
Easy enough for the most part. I didn’t mind disappearing from the face of the Earth. I had distant family like most people, but I didn’t keep in contact with them. I was a loner because of my past. And really, I got laid enough that I didn’t have to sleep with my clients.
Show Scott a twenty-five-year-old reality star, though, and apparently, rule three no longer existed.
Granted, the girl was incredibly hot, and she was a fucking spitfire of a lady. For all but the top one percent of men in self-control, she would have won them over and done whatever she wanted with them. But the point of having our standards, of asking our clients for enormous sums of money, of handling cases the police and the federal agencies failed to succeed in were because we were in that one percent.
Guess pussy had a grip on him.
He’d tried pawning the business off to me as some sort of, I don’t know, self-sacrifice? Like he was admitting that he could no longer run the business, having violated rule three? I got it, but I wasn’t much interested in helping him at the moment. He’d saved my ass on the mission, I his, and now we were even.
I still always read my mail, though. You never knew what would pop up that would catch your eye.
When I got back inside, I brewed a pot of coffee, quickly made some bacon and eggs, and sat down at the kitchen table to start my day. I read through some of the news on my tablet before eventually opening the letter from D.O.M. Expecting some sort of correspondence from Scott or maybe even Burke, I didn’t exactly take the greatest care in opening the letter, at one point accidentally ripping the paper itself.
“Shit,” I grumbled to myself.
And then I opened the letter and, unlike most people, directed my attention to the signature. Whoever signed it would determine if I gave a shit.
And…holy shit.
It wasn’t Scott. It wasn’t Burke. It was an old client.
Emily Lorne.
Back in the day, she’d had a real shithead of an ex that needed some lessons taught in manners. Normally with my clients, I never gave them the opportunity to reach back out because they either sucked at following instructions or were so needy and frequent in their communication that it was never worth it. Emily was the rare exception, though. She did exactly as I said, didn’t badger me with questions, and despite the shitty situation, remained friendly. I would never call her a friend, let alone a romantic interest, but she was perhaps the only person in the world I would have taken repeat work from.
I began reading the letter with a lot more openness than I usually did.
“I need help searching for the father of a child in Breckenridge.”
Wait.
That was about as far out of left field as I could have asked. When the hell did Emily make her way out here? Granted, I never told her where I resided, so it wasn’t like I could have gotten mad about her not reaching out for a drink or something. But still.
“I know
