Landon: Justice Series ― Erotica Paranormal Romance (2 page)

He was nearly twenty-nine years old, next week as a matter of fact. And it had been almost twenty years to the day since he’d blown up the building he’d been staying in, as well as two kids that he talked to daily, ones that haunted him still. And in all that time, since he’d been released from the hospital a month later, he’d not spoken a word to his mom and dad. That was until recently, when their attorney had reached out. They wanted to speak to him.

Getting out after washing his body again, he dried off, still not looking in the mirror. He would have had it removed as he had in every other place he’d been in, but he’d not figured out how to do it. Someone had adhered it to the wall, and other than busting it to get it down, he had yet to get it out of this room. Landon figured that he didn’t need any more bad luck.

Looking at his body was a constant reminder of that day. The scars, old and faded, seemed as fresh and raw as they had then. No pain was there any longer, but he did feel it all the same. Steele had been the only one to see them, and he’d told him that they were barely noticeable. But Landon knew they were there. And always would be.

Going to his bedroom again, he opened the huge closet and had to grin at what was there. Or in this case, what wasn’t there. The thing was as big as most bedrooms, holding not just things on hangers, but drawers for shoes and cufflinks, as well as watches and under things such as tee shirts and his boxers. Right now it had three tee-shirts hanging there, two pair of jeans that had seen better days, as well as a black suit in a bag that he’d not opened in more years than he could remember. Pulling out the worst looking of the shirts, he pulled it over his head after he’d put on his boxers and a pair of jeans. This was his attire on his day off. He headed to the kitchen, where he knew his grandda was waiting.

~~~

Logan, what most people called him, watched his only grandson move around the kitchen ignoring him. He was fine with that…for now. As Landon pulled out a big box of those flakes of corn he liked to eat, Logan suggested gently that he get him a banana to go with it.

“No thanks.” They both eyed the fruit that had been in the bowl turning darker and darker since Addie had brought it to him a few days ago. “I have to go into town today. Are you going to be joining me?”

“I don’t think so.” Logan was sort of afraid of the town. There wasn’t really anything there that would hurt him, but he didn’t like all the people. It was why he’d never met any of the others that Landon worked with. Logan just did not like the living. He’d barely tolerated them when he was one of them and avoided them even now. But he didn’t want the same for his grandson.

After he ate, Logan watched Landon put his things away and clean up the counter. He’d been alone too long, Logan thought. The boy was a better housekeeper than most women he knew. And when he finished drying his one bowl and spoon, Logan looked at the sad state of affairs that was his cabinets.

“You gonna get you some dishes today? Maybe a pot or two. I heard you telling that other man, Mitch, that you wanted him to come on by and have some dinner with you. What you planning to do, share the one plate you have and that bowl?” Landon said nothing, but Logan was used to that. That was another thing he didn’t care for, his grandson being so lonely. “You call that attorney back?”

That got a reaction. Not the one he wanted, but enough that Logan could see that he was thinking about it. He needed to get this resolved if for no other reason than to show his mom and dad that he wasn’t nearly as bad as they’d always thought. Or worse yet, as bad as they always told him he was. Landon was a good man; a great one as far as he was concerned.

“I didn’t plan on it. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it.” Sure he had, thought Logan, and I can pull a rabbit out of my ass. “I’ll call them tomorrow.”

“You’ll do it now. You might have won one of them clearing house things, and they might give it away should you don’t call and claim it.” They both knew it was his parents, and Logan had a feeling he might know what they were gonna say. He’d been visiting them too. “Landon, call the man and get it done.”

“I don’t want to.” He sounded five, and before Logan could point that out to him, Landon continued. “They want to see me. And then they want to sit me in a chair and point out all the things I’ve done since I saw them last. Twenty years is going to be a long list, don’t you think? I’m not ready for that. I don’t know that I ever will be.”

“You’re a damned grown man. What do you think you would do if they try to sit you in the corner like a child? You answer me that.” Landon said he had no answer. “Didn’t think so. You don’t like the way they’re treating you, then you can leave. But you’ve no way of knowing shit unless you go there and talk to them. For all you know, they could be wanting to welcome you back with open arms.”

“You know that’s not ever going to happen.” Logan knew that too. But a man could hope, couldn’t he? His son and that wife of his had done them both wrong. “And what do I do, Grandda, when they ask me what I’ve been doing with my life? Do I tell them I start each day with you harping on me? Do I say that I work with a bunch of men just like me that talk to the dead? I’m sure that’ll go over just fine.”

“I don’t know why not. You’ve made a living at it. And from where I’m sitting you’ve done a fine job at that too. Not the living part, but the money part. Why, you never have touched that money they paid you. Building yourself up from nothing, now look at you.” Landon snorted. “You don’t no more live than them ghosts you help. Hell son, when was the last time you were laid? I’m thinking it’s been a long while.”

“I’m not talking about my sex life with you. Especially not you. Christ.” He got up and put a load of wash in the washer as he continued. “In the event you didn’t notice, I just purchased this house and it’s taking up a great deal of my time.”

It was two more pairs of those ratty jeans he wore and five work shirts. He’d hang them on the bar when they were washed up and pull them down when he needed them. Work shirts never made it to the upper levels all that often.

“Yeah, I can see that. Laundry and dishes. Yesterday you run that vacuum cleaner until I plum thought you were going to wear a hole in the carpets. Then you dusted. If you ever want to change jobs in the future, you can make a right fine domestic.” Landon said nothing, but the shirt in his hand wasn’t going to survive the anger he was holding in much longer. So of course, Logan decided to push him a little harder. “You should get you one of them blow up dolls to screw. That way you can shove it in the closet when you’re satisfied and not have to think about it anymore. Much like you do most of your friends.”

The shirt ripped and hung limply in his hands. Logan wanted to get up and hug the boy. Hold him like he was sure no one had done in more years than was right. Logan watched his grandson struggle with his temper and his hurt.

“If I go and do this, you’ll go with me? See what they really are so that I can move on with my life?” He said that he would. There was no point in telling him that this might not turn out the way he thought, because they both knew better. But Logan was forever hopeful. “All right, but you’ll meet the others too. It’s a fair trade for what you’ve been doing to me all these years.”

“I can do that. But what about them boys? You gonna do something about them too?” Logan wanted to tell him to vanish them, but knew that he’d not do it. Landon had been tormented by the Bobbsey Twins, as Logan called them, since the fire.

“I don’t know. You know that they come and go as they please.” He did at that. Never here more than it took for them to upset Landon. Then they’d move on to some other trouble. And it mattered little to any of them that Logan knew just what had happened that day, and it had not been the way that Landon thought. And those damned boys knew it too.

The phone call from that pansy lawyer had upset Landon. Logan wanted to go through the device and choke the living shit out of the person on the other end. But he just sat there knowing that someday, not only would Landon listen to him about that day, but his son and daughter-in-law would as well. He’d been there. Logan had seen what had gone on that day and what had happened to cause it all. And it was not Landon. It had never been the boy. He also knew why he wasn’t there for his only grandchild, and he was gonna enjoy seeing their reactions to that coming out too.

Landon called to set up the talk. That’s what he knew it was gonna be too, a talk. He hoped that Landon would get in a few words of his own. Maybe a
fuck you
or a
fuck off
would be nice as well. Landon sat down when he closed his phone.

“I have to go there at one. They have an appointment open for me and I’m to meet him at the parents’ house. I have an appointment to go to my parents’ house.” Logan stood up to leave with him, not that it mattered. He could pretty much go where he wanted when he wanted to. “You really don’t have to go, Grandda. I was only...I was pissed off, and I didn’t mean you’d have to go. There isn’t any point in both of us having to suffer.”

“I want to. I need to.” Landon looked like he was going to say more. But Logan had a feeling he didn’t want to know what it might be. “I can see how well that son of mine aged. I’m thinking not so well. What do you think?”

“I think I’d rather you just pull my nails out with a pair of plyers than to go and see them both. And if you want to know the truth, I’m sort of sick about going there.” Logan knew that as well. “When this is done and you see what you need to see from them, you don’t bring them up to me again. Promise.”

“I promise, but on the condition that you have an open mind and don’t be going in there with your head up your ass.” Landon said he wasn’t make any kind of promises. “Then I guess I can’t either.”

As they made their way out of the house and to his truck, Logan had a shiver of dread. What if, his mind kept saying, and the list was too long for him to try and work out. What if Landon’s parents were as cruel as they’d always been? What if they were only bringing him there to hurt him again? The closer he got to the house, waiting on Landon, the more dread he felt. This was a mistake, he knew it. He just hoped the letter that he’d sent out would help his grandson more than he could.

Chapter 2

Dillon ran the dust rag over the long table again. For as much as she hated this job and how bad she sucked at it, she did take a lot of pride in it. The people that she was working for were not the nicest people she’d ever met, but they were paying her, and right now that was more important than anything. Plus, it provided her with a place to hide and rest.

The doorbell rang just as she was going to the closet in the hall. There was no way that she was going to answer it again, but she did peek around the corner when Mr. Earl, the stuffy but sweet butler, went to open it. She had a feeling that he knew who was about to enter, as the house seemed to know, but she watched and waited. Touching the little charm around her neck and holding it still, she calmed her breathing as well as her heart. Her talisman from her mom was all she had left of her. Besides, there was no point in letting the world know where she was right now.

“Mr. Landon.” It took Dillon a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t talking about the master of the house, but to the man with his back to her. “Shall I take your coat, sir?”

“No. I don’t think I’ll be here that long, do you?” Hard. Cold. His voice would have frozen icebergs, it was so frosty. “Has Dunn, my attorney, arrived as yet?”

“Yes, sir. He arrived this morning after your call. They are all in the study.” The taller man didn’t move and neither had Mr. Earl. “Shall I pour you a drink?”

“No, thank you. It won’t do me any good to go in there with alcohol on my breath.”

Dillon watched the man and wondered what was wrong. His back was still toward her, but she’d bet anything that he didn’t look a bit like the man in the other room. That man was a pompous ass as well as a blow hard. His wife wasn’t much better. Not that it mattered to her, but this man...he seemed to be nearly afraid to go into the other room. She looked at the woman coming down the hall and slid into the closet and pulled the door almost closed.

“Are you coming in or not? We worked this around so you could be here when it suited you, didn’t we?” Again, the cold and unforgiving voice, this time directed at the man. “We’ve been waiting for you to show up for twenty minutes, Landon. Why are you forever late?”

“It’s nice to see you too. And I’m not late, Mother, not that you’d know that about me, but I’m never late for anything. Even when I don’t want to be somewhere. But it’s not even one, the time I was told to show up. If you don’t want to talk to me, then fucking fine. I can go back to what I was doing before you intruded into my life.” The woman, Mrs. Logan, huffed but said nothing as she moved down the hall again. The man, she could see him now, only stood there with a pinched look on his face.

He was handsome. Tall with dark hair that was just a little longer than what men wore nowadays. His skin was dark, not the kind that Mrs. Logan got from the tanning bed in the basement, but like he’d spent a great deal of time in the sun with his shirt off. His eyes were piercing and dark as well. She wondered if they were black or a dark brown. When he turned and looked at her, Dillon felt her heartrate double.

She knew that he was watching her. Dillon had no idea why she knew that, but she did. But he never said anything about her snooping on him—because she knew that was what she was doing—but stood there for several seconds until he looked at the butler again, telling him he was ready. As he moved down the hall in the opposite direction from her, Dillon felt every bit of the air in her lungs move out. Holding onto the wall, she wondered what the hell that was about.

After she had herself under control again, she moved out into the hall armed with the vacuum as well as the long broom she’d use to clean the fans in the office. She hated this room in the house almost as much as she did the bedrooms that the master and mistress of the house used.

A large desk sat right in the middle of the room. Not near the window, as she might have done, or even nearer the fireplace that was as cold as the room. The large chair that sat at the desk was leather…the red darkness of it reminded her of old blood, and it creaked when she moved it to sweep. The books on the shelves were old. She had seen older, but they were never read and there wasn’t a single paperback among them. For that matter, other than the paper, she’d never seen the couple that lived here read at all. And Dillon had been here for several months now.

As she made her way around the room, moving things to one side so that she could sweep the carpet, she thought about the reason she was here. Hiding. Plain and simple, she was hiding, from her father mostly. And the newspaper too. She wasn’t wanted or anything, but she did have people wanting her to find things for them. Or, as in most cases, find someone. Not a very different story than she’d heard before or even been a part of, but she didn’t want to burn herself out, and found no reason that she should. The only thing that bothered her was not being with her friends, which, she thought sadly, were very few anyway.

“Kerrie?” Dillon looked up, almost forgetting that she was using her middle name to work here. She’d dropped her last name completely and switched her first to her last, so she was going by Kerrie Dillon instead of her real name, Dillon Kerrie Malone. Nodding at the woman standing there, she tried to think if she’d done something wrong again to bring the cook after her. The woman was positively horrid. Not just to her but everyone.

“I’ve only just begun in here.” The woman, Ruth her name was, only nodded and didn’t say anything else. Her face—pinched and tight—said it all. “Is there something you need?”

“That boy is here after all his time and I don’t know what to do.” Well, that was a first. As far as Dillon had seen the woman was always right, in her opinion, as well as never without a quick and biting remark when you thought you could speak back to her. “If he stays for dinner, then I will have to trash this entire meal that I had planned, and it was her favorite too. I’ll not be having that man ruining my cooking by sitting at my table and upsetting the mistress.”

And this was her problem how? Dillon wondered. Nodding at the woman, and wondering aloud what she needed her to do to help, all sorts of things ran through her mind about this place.

The man was their son, that much she knew. His name was Landon, same as the master of the house. And so far she’d figured out that neither his mother nor the cook liked him overly much, which Dillon thought might be an understatement. He was handsome and tall too. Not a lot of things that could help her in figuring out the cook’s dilemma, but Dillon asked again what she needed.

“There is no help for it. Come in the kitchen and get to work is what you can do.” Shocked, Dillon pulled the cord out of the wall and started to wind it in. “When you get this mess put back to rights, come to the kitchen and peel some potatoes. Then if he has to spoil my dinner, you can say you cooked it.”

Dillon put the sweeper back in the hall closet and paused when she heard the voices. They were raised and angry. She could hear them all the way to where she was. She knew that one of them was Mrs. Logan and the other her husband, but when there were pauses, like they were being spoken to, she had a feeling it was the younger man. He didn’t strike Dillon as one that would resort to screaming at someone to get his way. As she made her way to the kitchen, going the long away around so she could go by the parlor they were in, she saw Mr. Earl standing there with a tray in his hands. He looked to her like he wasn’t sure of what he should do now as he stared to his left. And she wasn’t sure, but she thought he was talking to himself.

“Do you want me to open the door for you?” He shook his head and nodded. “That’s not anything I can understand for you, Mr. Earl. I can open it if you want. Ms. Ruth is going to have me peel potatoes for—”

“That is not your job.” He nearly spit at her he sounded so pissed off. But he seemed to remember himself and told her again that she wasn’t hired to help in the kitchen. “You are a maid, not a kitchen helper. I shall talk to her in a moment. But for now, I need for you…would like for you to go into this room with me and help me serve.”

“Me?” He nearly smiled at her and nodded. “I have less knowledge of serving than I do of peeling potatoes. And I’m pretty sure you know my skills at housework. You might be better off just dumping it on them. It’s what I’ll do. You have to know I’m not very good at this.”

“You will do fine. And we…I like you very much. Just...when they say anything, just look at me and I’ll handle it. I should like for you to help me because...well, to be honest with you, Miss Dillon, I should very much like to dump this tray on the both of them, if you want to know the truth.” Nodding, she smoothed out her apron and pants. “Thank you. You are doing us a great favor.”

“Us?” He nodded but didn’t explain. She figured he was talking about the people in the other room, but didn’t ask again. Moving into the room with him right behind her, Dillon almost tripped when she saw them.

The anger coming off these people was almost as thick as the cotton shirt she had on. She could see it, almost taste it, and she could certainly see it on their faces. These people were not a happy family.

As she moved around the room, handing out a cup if they wanted it or asking if they wanted a scone, she wondered if someone should have checked for knives and guns before this meeting began. When she got to Mr. Logan, he glared at her like this was all her fault. He wasn’t a man to cross, even she knew that.

“I don’t know why you think this is such a big deal, Landon. Just fucking do it and shut up about it. It’s not like you’ve done anything for us in all the time you’ve been alive.” She heard the man, the younger one, snort and nearly fumbled her cup. It wasn’t until Mr. Earl cleared his throat that she glanced at him. At his nod, she turned to look at the handsome man at the fireplace.

She’d thought him handsome before. And he still was…pretty even. But right now, with his body stiff and hard, his face blushed with his anger, she thought him the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. At Mr. Earl’s prompting, she held out a cup for Landon to take.

“No, thank you.” She nodded and put the cup on the tray to move out of the room with Mr. Earl when Landon spoke again. She knew his words were not meant for her this time, but they still stung. “You’ve not done a damned thing for me either in all the time I’ve been alive. Since I got out of the hospital nearly twenty years ago, I’ve done just what you’ve demanded. You told me to keep my distance, and I have. The only reason I’m here today is because...well, I’m here because…well, if you’ve nothing else to say to me, then I’ll be on my way.”

“You’ll stay here until I get what I want.” Even Dillon thought that was a little ridiculous. The man had to be in his twenties, well past the point of having to do what his parents told him to do. “Sit down, Landon, or so help me I will cut you off without a penny.”

The man laughed, bitterly. “You mean you don’t care what your friends will think if you kick your only son out on his ass? Oh my, whatever will the social world think to find out that the Logans of Breepoint have cut their son out of their lives? Again.” He laughed again. “But tell me, do you think any of them know you even have a son? I mean, it’s been nearly two decades since I’ve even crossed over the front doorway. You think any of them remember me? I bet if I was to go and ask, none of them have ever heard you mention me. And you should know, cutting me off won’t affect me in any way whatsoever.”

“I despise you, Landon. And you’ll do this or so help me, I’ll hurt you in ways that those fools you work with will even abandon you when I’m finished with you.” She and Mr. Earl were headed to the door when Mrs. Logan said that to her son. Dillon slowed her step and actually started to turn to the woman to ask her what the hell was wrong with her when she brushed up against the suit of armor near the fireplace.

~~~

Landon watched the woman as she started to fall. The suit was going to kill her if it fell atop her, so before he could think that he was going to catch hell for this, he nearly knocked his mother back to scoop the girl up from the fireplace and the armor. She started screaming the moment he held her up off the floor. He was sure that he’d been too late to help her.

“I got you.” He tried twice more to get her to calm down, with his mother behind him telling him to take the dreadful woman away, when Landon finally had enough. Turning to his mother, Landon felt his temper snap. “Shut the fuck up, will you please?”

The room grew quiet, so quiet in fact that he could hear the ticking of the clock in the hallway. Landon looked at Mr. Earl when he said to follow him. Carrying his light burden, who was unconscious now, Landon took the girl to the kitchen, where he knew a first-aid kit used to be, as well as help should she need it.

“Is she hurt, you think? Do you think she needs medical attention, son?” Landon told his grandda that he didn’t know but didn’t think she’d been hurt. “I think all she did was touch that thing. Must have had something on it for her to feel all that power.”

Landon sat down in the kitchen chair with the woman in his arms, and looked at his grandda with a stern whisper. “What did you do, old man? Did you make her fall? Did you plan this?”

“No. Goodness, boy, do I strike you as an abuser of women? I’d gladly hit that mother of yours if I could, but not this little one. You tell Earl there that you want to wipe her down. She’s all covered in tears.” He took the wet cloth that was handed to him. “I will tell you that I knew she was here, but not much else. Poor little bit of a thing.”