Chaos (Phoenix Undercover #2) (13 page)

Chapter 25

Josh

I fucked up.

I mean royally fucked up, and I wasn’t sure this one could be repaired. The heartbroken look in Gabby’s eyes confirmed that.

I woke up this morning and slipped out of bed before she woke, but even last night she had talked about how special today was going to be.

I went to work thinking I would get ahead of the game and sneak out thirty minutes before the appointment. What I had not counted on was for Trevor to bring me footage from the lobby of Leo’s apartment. It showed a woman slip in and leave moments later carrying a large, unidentified package. It seemed Leo still had people to do his dirty work.

I became so absorbed in the footage looking for any sign of who this woman may be, and then Zara arrived unexpectedly, blindsiding me.

I had missed one of the most important moments in Gabby’s pregnancy, and I had no one to blame for it but myself.

“Josh?” I hung my head and took in a deep breath before turning to face Zara. “I’m really sorry if I caused any problems.”

“It wasn’t you, it was all me. I messed this up,” I confessed. Not because I was attempting to make her feel better, but because it was true.

“So you’re gonna be a dad? Is it your first?” I nodded. “Congratulations! I feel like I should throw blue confetti or something.”

I knew she was attempting to make this moment a little less tense, but it felt wrong. I should be with Gabby. We should be laughing and smiling as we talked about having a boy.

I could fucking kick myself for how stupid I had been.

“Listen, I gotta go,” I told her as I brushed past her toward my office. “Good luck with everything, Zara, really, but I have somewhere to be.”

After getting my keys and rushing back downstairs to my car, I drove as fast as New York City traffic would allow, which unfortunately was not fast enough. On more than one occasion, I considered ditching my car and fucking running there on foot. But when I finally arrived at Gabby’s door, I quickly unlocked it and hurried inside. I was rushing straight down the hall toward Gabby’s room when Brook’s voice stopped me.

“Hey, Daddy, what are you doing here?” I turned to find her standing just to the side of the couch looking at me in confusion. “I figured you would have gone with Gabby to tell my parents.”

Her words made my stomach twist yet again. Obviously, Brook didn’t know about what happened. Had she known, I was more than sure I would have been on the floor cupping my balls after her foot connected with them. Audrey and Brook were both very protective of Gabby and vice versa. They were a solid trio, kind of like Mike, Greyson, and me.

“Yeah, I had a few things to finish up at work, but I got done much sooner than I thought. So I decided to surprise her.” I looked around, trying to hide my anxiousness.

“My parents decided to take Gabby to Nana’s,” Brook added as she opened up the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water. “You have never had the pleasure of meeting the great Myrtle Shannon, have you?”

I shook my head and wondered what I was about to get myself into.

Brook walked toward me and hooked her arm through mine. “Oh, Josh, you are in for a treat. Our Nana is without a doubt one of the greatest women you will ever meet.” She led me toward the front door, and I took this as her saying she was going with me. Which I was grateful for, considering I had no idea how to get to her grandmother’s.

“She is loud, and if you think I’m mouthy, ah hell, wait until you meet our Nana. She has a mouth like a sailor and she loves to gamble,” Brook continued as she led me downstairs to the parking deck and straight to her Malibu.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get in the car with her. I’d heard horror stories about her driving skills, or lack thereof, but I would have to endure it. I wanted to get to Gabby, and this was the fastest way.

***

“Honey, I’m home,” Brook hollered as she entered the small apartment. “And I brought the baby daddy with me.”

I was still trying to calm my racing heart from the multiple times I thought I would die on the way over. Brook was seriously the worst driver I’d ever been in a car with.

I stepped in behind her, and four sets of eyes locked on me within seconds. Marshall and Judith, Gabby’s parents, sat on the love seat. An older woman, who I assumed was the grandmother, sat in the recliner, and Gabby sat on the other love seat across from her parents. She smiled at us, but I could tell it was forced.

Gabby’s father was the first to stand. “It’s real good to see you, son. How’ve you been?” He held out his hand, and I reached out to shake it firmly.

“I’m good, sir, thank you.”

Gabby’s mother wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in for a hug. “It’s real good to have you here. Gabby said you got stuck at work and weren’t able to make it over, so she came to share the news of our grandson with us.”

I looked over her mother’s shoulder, and my gaze landed on Gabby’s once again. Brook was standing near her as she talked to her grandmother.

“Now I’ll be the first to warn you, my mother is full of piss and vinegar. She’ll give you shit and she has no filter, but take none of it seriously.” I found Marshall’s warning humorous, considering Brook had told me the same thing on the way over.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said with a smile as I stepped past them and walked toward Gabby. I could immediately sense her anger, but I could also see she was doing her best to hide it from her family.

I sat down next to her and leaned in to offer her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I whispered before pulling back and placing my arm over her shoulders.

“Well, this tall drink of water must be Joshua.” The raspy, shaky voice made me smile. “Oh, Gabby, I see the appeal of this one.” Myrtle slid forward in her recliner and got closer. I noticed Marshall hang his head with a slight shake, but I was prepared to accept whatever Nana was about to throw at me.

“So, listen, me and my friend Lauren went out a couple weekends ago to do a little gambling, and we stumbled upon this place called Dirty Harry’s. You know the place?” My throat tightened at Nana’s serious look. Yes, I knew what Dirty Harry’s was. It was a fucking strip club with women on the main floor and men on the second level. But the idea of this ninety-something-year-old lady in a place like that didn’t seem right.

“Well, anyway,” she said, because apparently she got tired of waiting for a response from me. “Lauren said we should check it out, and boy I sure am glad I did. It’s been years since Granny here—” She pointed to her chest. “—got a kick-start like that. Those men wiggling around, shaking their things.” She wagged her eyebrows, and I suddenly felt like the room had gotten a little hotter, or maybe it was just my face. “The reason I’m asking is, what would be the chances of an old woman convincing a handsome devil like you to take me back to Dirty Harry’s? I picked up some ones when I went to the bank on Tuesday, and I’m itching to touch those saucy buns.” She grinned widely and winked at me.

I think I swallowed my tongue. I had no fucking clue how to respond to her. I mean, that was not what I had expected to come out of their Nana’s mouth.

“Nana,” Brook whispered, followed by a laugh she was trying to hide.

“What? It’s not like any of you will take me. I thought if I could convince this handsome hunk of meat to escort me, you all wouldn’t mind. I mean, he has a gun. Plus, he carries one on his holster too.” She wagged her eyebrows once more, and I was blown away. This tiny little fireball had stunned me into silence. Not only had she asked me to take her to a strip club, she cracked a dick joke too.

“I tried to warn you,” Marshall said, and Nana smiled proudly.

During the entire visit, Gabby didn’t say a word to me. She nodded or smiled when necessary, but that was it. As I sat next to her, holding her against my side, I could feel the frigid tenseness of her body. She had not relaxed into my side but remained board-straight.

At a break in the conversation, when people were moving around to get drinks or food or simply to stretch their legs, I decided to make a move. I leaned in a little closer, keeping my voice low.

“So you didn’t tell your family how big I screwed up today?” I asked.

“I didn’t see the point in making them all angry with you. It has nothing to do with them. So to answer your question, no, I didn’t tell my family that you blew me off today. They all still think you were there with me when we found out what we were having.” My strong girl tried to act like she was unaffected, but I knew different.

“Baby, I am so sorry, and I know that doesn’t make up for anything, but you have to know I would never blow you or our child off like that. I know you feel like I did, and I don’t blame you, sweetheart, but I truly am sorry. I fucked up big, and I don’t know how to fix this.” My heart was hammering in my chest.

“Did you sleep with her before or after we met?” Her question surprised me.

“What? Who?” I looked back at her in confusion and shifted on the couch to face her. “Gabby, what are you talking about?”

“That girl in your office earlier. I overheard you two talking and—”

“I never slept with Zara.” She flinched when I said the name, but I didn’t give her any time to think about it. “I met her when I was undercover.”

“After we met?” she asked, and I nodded. “So you fooled around with not only my sister but this girl too?”

“It wasn’t like that.” I was starting to panic once more. “Let me—”

Her family came back into the living room, interrupting me. I sat there feeling as if I had a fucking dump truck parked on my chest and there was nothing I could say. I was in a room of people who would skin me alive if they got any indication I had hurt Gabby in any way.

Chapter 26

Gabriella

I think Brook may have picked up on the tension between Josh and me. I’m sure it didn’t help that when we left Nana’s, I told him that he was riding with her. Being pregnant, I have found, makes it harder to hold your shit together. Normally I would come up with some snarky comment, something that would throw everyone off, but not now. Now all I wanted to do was drop-kick his ass and force him to understand how this was affecting me.

How would he feel if the tables were turned? How would he take it if I came to him and said,
“Oh hey, by the way, today I made out with some guy. But it was only for show, no harm done.”
?

I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be pleased.

I understood his job, I did. But I had a hard time accepting other women having their hands on him. It was hard enough to think about what my own sister had been forced to do to him. I still felt jealous whenever they were in the same room together, even though I knew they didn’t feel that way about each other.

Now I had to imagine Josh and that girl too.

My stomach twisted at the thought. I should have known when I walked into my building that Josh would be waiting. Hoping I would have time to myself was just wishful thinking. Gerald the doorman greeted me as I walked by him and went straight for the elevators.

“So are you just going to give me the silent treatment?” Josh asked as he stepped up behind me while I waited for the elevator to arrive. I could feel his warmth, he was so close, and his breath fanned out over my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Gabby. Please, will you just talk to me, yell at me, something?”

“I started out this day thinking it would be one of the best days of my life, and it just turned out to be the opposite. I wanted to share that moment with you, Josh. That was our time, but you couldn’t even spare an hour for me and the baby.” The elevator door slid open, and I stepped inside, then turned and watched as he followed. “I know you have a demanding job, I understand that completely. But I need to know if I’m going in alone, or if I can count on you.”

He moved in on me faster than I could prepare for, bracing a hand against the wall on either side of me, his face only inches from mine. “There is nothing or no one that will ever keep me from you or this baby. I’ll admit that today was completely my fault. I knew about that appointment for weeks, but I screwed up and there is nothing I can do to change that. But I promise you it will never happen again.”

His eyes remained locked on mine, and his intense stare made my stomach tighten. He looked as if he was fighting to hold himself together.

The elevator door dinged behind him, and I bent down and slipped underneath his arm. He let out a frustrated sigh, but I continued to move toward my apartment door, which I quickly unlocked, pushed open, and rushed through.

I could hear his boots against the floor as he followed close behind. “Damn it, Gabby, we need to talk about this.”

Brook looked up at us in confusion from her place on the floor in the living room with her textbooks scattered around her and a pen held between her teeth.

“Gabby,” Josh’s demanding voice ricocheted off the walls of the apartment, and I slowly turned around to face him, glaring up at this towering man that overpowered the room. He took a step toward me, his jaw ticking in that way it does when he is angry or agitated.

“I spent three months locked away from every person I love. Three months of fucking wondering if you were moving on without me, finding happiness with another man. Then when I found out you were carrying my child, I had to fight with everything inside of me not to come to you. Now you want to play this game of acting like I don’t want this.” His nostrils flared, and I stayed frozen in place, fighting my own anger. He was like a ticking time bomb ready to explode.

“That shit pisses me off,” he said through gritted teeth. “I fucked up. I know that. I should have been there today, and that is inexcusable. Nothing should have kept me away, but damn it, Gabby, I made a mistake. I got wrapped up at work. But don’t act as if I’m not here, like I don’t want this.”

“How can you expect me to feel otherwise? When you’re here, you’re not. We’re back to you slipping into bed next to me, putting your fuck-’em-and-leave-’em methods back to work. Most of the time I can be talking to you and it’s like you’re not even there.” My body shook with anger.

Brook still sat in the middle of the living room floor looking shocked and confused as her gaze shifted back and forth between Josh and me.

“You don’t understand what I’m up against, Gabby,” he said, sounding defeated.

“That’s because you don’t talk to me. You never share things with me. How can I understand when you keep me in the dark?” He was always throwing that at me, that I didn’t understand. I was tired of it.

“I have a man running around the streets of New York City who wants me dead. Not ‘hidden away in some crappy-ass apartment on the west side of town’ dead, I mean truly fucking dead. He wants to make me pay for the way I flipped his shit upside down. I took away an operation he spent years building, and now he has nothing. He is a murderer, a rapist, and he loves to fucking torture people just for the fun of it.” My heart raced as he took in a deep breath.

“I can’t let him remain free, because as long as he roams the streets, I’m not safe, and the people I love aren’t safe. I fucked up, Gabby. I lost something today I can never fucking get back, and that shit sits on my shoulders. But never fucking throw that shit about me not being in this for you back in my face again. I’m here. I’m fucking in.”

His chest was heaving, and I chose to remain silent. I had nothing to say. Actually, that was a lie. I had plenty to say. I just felt it wasn’t wise to taunt the angry bull.

We both just stared at one another, waiting for the other to speak. When minutes passed and neither of us said anything, Josh turned around and walked right out the front door, which had remained open this entire time. I was sure the neighbors greatly appreciated the show.