Stay: A Second Chance Badboy Romance Read online

  “You think you can run from me?” a voice shouts.

  I look up and see Samuel’s father barreling toward me from the parking lot.

  “You think Boston will keep you safe?” he asks. “The law won’t give me justice, so I’ll have to take it into my own hands.”

  I freeze. Fear sinks its tendrils into me. If he has a gun, and if he’s a bad shot—he will be a bad shot—he could hit Sophie instead of me.

  I grab Sophie and put her behind me. I say in a too-calm voice to her, without taking my eyes off Samuel’s father, “Back up, go back into the hospital.”

  “But—” she stammers.

  The calm is gone now from my voice. “Go!”

  I hear her footsteps moving away from me. And I keep my body between her and Samuel’s father. There’s nothing in his hands, but he’s wearing a thick coat. He could have anything in there.

  “You gonna’ kill me?” I ask.

  “I should!” he shouts. He’s still over twenty feet away. It would be an easy shot for me, but for someone inexperienced and this upset, it won’t be easy. If he really wanted to shoot me, why did he shout at me from so far out?

  “So you’re not going to kill me,” I say. He’s stopped moving closer to me. I take a big step toward him, putting me on the offensive. Maybe that will make him reconsider. “What then? What did you drive all the way up to Boston for?”

  “Fight me!” he shouts. He raises his fists.

  “You drunk?” I ask, taking another step toward him.

  “Of course I’m fucking drunk!” he shouts. “Where you think Samuel got it from?”

  I take another step. I’m close to him now. “All right, Mr. Lightner, I’ll fight you.”

  He just needs to hit something. It might as well be me.

  I run forward and take a swing, intentionally missing him by a good foot.

  He slams a fist into my gut.

  I hit him with my elbow, putting no real power into it. It shoves him back a bit, and he raises his fists again. I step forward, my fists up, and I get close enough that he can get a good swing in. He does.

  His fist cracks against my jaw—I didn’t bother to block—and pain lances across my face. My head spins. Another hit, and another.

  I’m dazed, and I stumble backward. Mr. Lightner jumps and tackles me to the ground. I let it happen.

  He hits me a few more times, but then I hear him sobbing.

  “You guilty son of a bitch!” he shouts through tears. “You’re letting me win. I said I wanted to fight you! You’re not even trying!”

  “Will you feel better if I hit you?” I ask. I can taste the blood all over my teeth.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “You won’t,” I say, shoving him off me.

  I stand up, reach a hand down, and help him to his feet.

  “Was Samuel like this?” Mr. Lightner asks, looking down at his bloody knuckles and stinking like a bottle of rum left open all night.

  “No,” I say, wiping the blood off my face. “Samuel was a good kid.”

  25

  Sophie

  I help clean all the blood off Mason’s face, and I call up Mrs. Lightner to come get her husband. I’m not letting him drive himself home.

  I babysit Mr. Lightner while Mason goes to buy some clean clothes since his are covered in blood.

  “I raised a dumbass,” Mr. Lightner says. “The police said Samuel was too drunk to be walking around, let alone fishing.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I say. “Samuel wasn’t a dumbass, Mr. Lightner.”

  “He got it from me,” he says. “It should have been me.”

  He passes out soon after that. I lay him down on the bench and stay with him. If hospital security found a drunk with bloody hands sleeping on the bench alone, they would probably call the police.

  Mason comes back wearing new clothes and holding a big shopping bag. “I got us both some extra clothes, toothbrushes, all that stuff.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Mason’s face is still a mess. He’s washed the blood away, but the bruises will just get worse.

  “Go check and see if you can see your dad yet,” he says. “I’ll stay with Mr. Lightner.”

  “You should—” I start to say, but looking down at Mr. Lightner, I realize that Mason is right. We can’t leave him alone. I want Mason there with me when I see my dad, but it wouldn’t be right to abandon Mr. Lightner.”

  I head into the lobby, my chest feeling heavy. The last I heard was that Dad would probably make a full recovery. That the doctors are cautiously optimistic. So long as I don’t hear any further news, the relief is still there. As soon as I go in there, everything could change. My whole world could change in a second.

  I walk into the lobby and ask the receptionist if he’s ready for visitors.

  “Mmm,” she says. “Let me call Dr. Hessen.”

  She lifts up the phone, asks some questions, then hangs up. “You can go see him in Room 32C.”

  I consider going to get Mason, but I need to see Dad. I can’t wait.

  I text him as I walk down the corridors toward his room. When I step inside, he’s still flat on his back, but his eyes are open.

  He looks over at me, and he looks extremely confused for a brief moment. But then recognition flashes across his face, and he smiles. His whole face smiles—not just half of it.

  “Dad!” I rush over to his bed and wrap my arms around him.

  I feel his hands touch my back, and I know then that everything will be okay. He’s still there, he’s still my dad. And I’ll make sure he recovers.

  “How do you feel?” I ask.

  There’s a nurse in the room. I’ve barely noticed her.

  “He’s still slurring his words,” she says. “He seems embarrassed about it and won’t speak.”

  I look at Dad, and he guiltily avoids my eyes.

  “He needs to speak,” the nurse says, “in order to recover. The slurring usually goes away quickly, but only if you practice.”

  I take Dad’s hand and squeeze. “Dad, come on. You can’t be so stubborn anymore. You need to do what the nurses and doctors tell you.”

  “Will you go to the inter—inter—interview?” he asks, his voice heavy as if he was drunk.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Promise you’rr get the job,” he mutters, “and I’ll listen to the nursesh.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Deal. I’m getting that job.”

  He nods, then reaches out his hand.

  The nurse smiles and places a cup of orange juice onto his tray. “He was refusing to drink this, but I guess he’s cooperating now.”

  “Yesh,” he says, looking at the nurse. “Sophie ish gonna do research again. In Boshton.”

  “You’re going to keep talking to me like this?” the nurse asks. “Even when Sophie isn’t here?”

  “I’ll be here as much as I can,” I say, looking at the nurse, then at Dad.

  “Why do I keep feeling sleepy?” Dad asks. “I just woke up…”

  “Your body is in recovery mode,” the nurse says. “It’s trying to repair the damage. If you feel sleepy, you need to sleep.”

  “Too much sleep…” he mumbles as his eyelids drift shut.

  Mason comes in after Dad has been sleeping for a while. “How is he?”

  “He’s good,” I say, beaming. “His voice is slurring, and he’s sleepy...but I think he’s going to be fine.”

  The nurse has already stepped out, but I can hit a button to call her back in if needed.

  “Good,” Mason says. “Mr. Lightner is on his way back to Tuckett Bay.”

  I sigh in relief. “Any more crazy surprises for today?”

  “I hope not,” Mason says. “That whole Mr. Lightner thing reminds me of this time your dad gave me ‘a talk.’ He scared the shit out of me, to be honest.”

  “My dad? He gave you a talk?”

  “Of course,” Mason says, eyeing Dad. He starts to talk in a low voice, as if he’s
afraid Dad will hear him. “After we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks. One time when I came to pick you up, you still weren’t ready. That’s a teenage boy’s worst nightmare, by the way, having to sit in the living room with his girlfriend’s father. Alone.”

  I laugh. “What did you guys talk about?”

  “He told me he’d asked around about me. He talked to some other girl’s dad—I don’t even remember which one anymore—who I’d, uh, taken for a ride in my car.”

  I stifle laughter, afraid I’ll wake up Dad.

  “So he like, went Sherlock Holmes on you?” I ask. “Really?”

  I nod. “We’d already done it by then, so I was extra scared.”

  I burst out laughing, but cover my mouth and hold it down, looking at Dad. He’s snoring still.

  “What did he say?” I ask.

  Mason leans into me and does his best “gruff Dad” voice. “Now look here, son, I know you’re a good kid. I’ve asked around, but you can’t treat girls the way you do. Maybe you can treat other girls like that, but not my Sophie!”

  I feel my cheeks burning.

  “I told him,” Mason says, “that you were different, that I was growing up…”

  We look at each other, both realizing he hadn’t quite grown up. Knowing what he was going to do, how our relationship would eventually end.

  “He nodded,” Mason says, “and gave me this look that made me think the whole conversation was over. I was waiting for him to change the subject and talk about baseball or something, but instead he pointed to his gun case. The big wooden one with the glass front with the three shotguns standing tall.”

  “Oh, God,” I say.

  “He said,” Mason continues, “you see those shotguns, son? Well, I don’t actually have any shells for them. They’re just there for show. But if you cross me, if you disrespect my daughter, I will have to go to the gun store and buy some ammunition. You got me?”

  I laugh into Mason’s chest, and when I’m done laughing, I look up at him and whisper, “Good thing he didn’t know we did it already.”

  “Now I know!” his voice booms across the room.

  We both jump.

  “Mason! You bastard!” He raises a hand and points right at Mason.

  We freeze and stare at him, worried he will pull a Mr. Lightner on Mason. Instead, he just starts to laugh. He laughs deep from his gut, and he laughs until tears stream down his face.

  “Oh, man,” he says. “High school kids are dumbasses!”

  His voice is still a bit slurred, but when he laughs, it sounds better.

  “What do you mean?” Mason asks.

  “You flushed the condom down the toilet, son,” he says. “I guess you were used to throwing them out the car window. The toilet was clogged, and I found it!”

  My face burns, and I look down. I remember telling him the toilet was clogged before I left for school, thinking nothing of it.

  “I knew,” Dad says. “That’s why I gave you that talk!”

  “Why didn’t you just say you knew?” I ask.

  “I didn’t want either of you to know I knew. It would embarrass you. I had a good feeling about Mason, but after I heard about his reputation, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t like that. If you’d have run away, son—I mean right then—I’d have known you didn’t have any balls. But you stuck around...at least until you didnt.”

  “He’s back now,” I say. “He’s going to stay with you while I interview on Saturday.”

  Mason nods. I see what looks like intense relief washing over him. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  26

  Mason

  Six Months Later - Boston

  My first big client is some asshole professor who stole work from some other asshole professor. They were collaborating together for years, but when Dr. Winchester realized how big the breakthrough really was, he aggressively cut Dr. Nicola out of the project. I don’t pretend to understand all this shit—Sophie tried to explain to me how what Winchester did was technically above board, just sleazy—but all I know is that Winchester has a lot of cash to burn, and that he’s paying me to protect him.

  Dr. Nicola was the first guy in the Nicola family to get a real education. His brothers and cousins are all part of the infamous Nicola family, and Nicola had vowed to make a clean break. And what did playing the rules get him? Some asshole using the rules to fuck him over.

  I’ve been watching Dr. Nicola. His clean break isn’t so clean anymore. He’s been meeting with two of his cousins—enforcers in the Boston mafia—fairly regularly. Yesterday I saw them holding a photo of Dr. Winchester.

  So now I’ve ordered Winchester on full lock-down.

  “Look, Mr. Steel,” Winchester says. “I’m paying you to protect me so that I can go about my daily business. I have an important presentation to give today, and being locked inside won’t do.”

  “Give me two more days,” I say, “and I’ll get Nicola’s cousins—”

  “The lecture is today,” Winchester says, putting on his jacket. “If you try to restrain me, you’re fired.”

  Fucking Boston. Ivy League assholes.

  “Alright,” I say. “You’re paying me well, Dr. Winchester, but not quite well enough to dive in front of a bullet for you.”

  “I know,” he says, straightening his tie. “You’ve got a kid on the way, don’t you? I wouldn’t expect you to take a bullet for me. Just prevent any bullets from being fired in the first place, yes?”

  I nod.

  Sophie’s not exactly thrilled about this client. And I haven’t even told her that the mafia is involved.

  I made it sound more like a pompous professor worried about some amateur attempt at violence. Even that has her worried.

  We arrive at the lecture hall, and I stay close by Dr. Winchester. The place is pretty packed, apparently there are a lot of people fucking excited about detecting gravitational waves via quantum foam aberrations in the cosmic microwave background radiation—I’m sure as hell not one of them, though. I only know what a few of those words even mean.

  All I gotta do is stop Dr. Nicola’s cousins from shooting Dr. Winchester while he drones on about quarks and bosons.

  I definitely won’t take a bullet for him, but if Winchester takes a bullet while under my protection, it might just be the end of my company.

  Winchester starts rambling, and the two extra guys I hired on temporary contracts are positioned at both of the back doors. They’re not just guarding the doors, but they’re also watching the crowd from different angles. We’re all wearing earpieces, and at the first sign of something suspicious, we’ll be ready to move.

  Winchester starts his lecture. I’ve heard it six times now, which is six times too many.

  I watch the crowd, not him. I know what Nicola’s cousins look like, but I don’t expect them to be the ones to do it. They’ll use hired goons. It shouldn’t be too difficult to pick out hired mafia goons in a room full of Ivy League nerds, but as I scan across the room, I realize that it is that hard.

  I need something.

  I hear Winchester building up to his God awful joke. I’ve googled all the terms in the joke, and I think I sort of get it, but it’s still not funny.

  “The Higgs Boson walks into a Catholic church,” Winchester starts, already smiling. “The Priest asks ‘What are you doing here?’ And the Higgs Boson—which can’t smile as it is an elementary particle—says ‘You can’t have mass without me.’”

  The room erupts in laughter, even as I roll my eyes.

  Then I notice something. There are two men who are not laughing. They look at each other as everyone around them laughs. They don’t get the joke, just like I don’t. They’re bigger men, and they’re here to kill Winchester.

  “Two in row six, one balding and the other with an undercut,” I say into the mic.

  I consider just pulling Winchester off the stage while my team swarms the two, but I can’t risk a shootout in a crowded lecture ha
ll.

  I try to anticipate their plan. The Nicola family may want to send a very public message. Shooting Winchester while he’s on the podium, with everyone watching, would achieve what they want a lot better. But it’s riskier too—and more expensive. Did they pay two guys enough money to almost certainly end up in jail? Or do they want to do this more quietly? If Winchester dies, Nicola will probably get credit back for his work.

  From everything I’ve read about Nicola, that’s what he’d prefer. These two assassins will probably go for Winchester after the lecture is over. When everyone is moving around and talking, filing out of the auditorium. Maybe even when Winchester is walking back to his car?

  “Keep your eyes open,” I say into the mic. “But don’t spook them.”

  I watch and wait. I’ve already decided that if one of the assassins stands up or moves in any way that makes me suspicious, I will dive into Winchester and drag him off stage.

  I wait through his entire tedious lecture, and the two assassins stay seated, pretending to be interested with more patience than I myself have.

  Winchester takes questions for what feels like hours, and finally the host comes up on stage to say that time is up.

  “That went well,” he says to me. “They loved the joke. I put a little extra flair on it.”

  I smile and nod.

  I decide I’m not going to tell him that two of Nicola’s men are here to kill him. He’d panic. I need to just do my job and take them out. He’s paying me for peace of mind.

  Everyone files out of the lecture hall, and my men and I watch intently as the assassins stand up. They split up. One heads for the back entrance, the other for the side door.

  “You two on baldie,” I say. “I got the other.”

  My men disappear out the back, and I run down toward the side door.

  Winchester shouts after me. “What about my protection?”

  The side door empties into a hallway, which leads down to a door near the parking garage. I see the door to the garage shutting as I turn the corner.