Leap of Faith (La Flor #1) (25 page)

Right now, I just want to hold my little girl. Regardless of her age, she’ll always be the little girl that I fell in love with so many years ago. Oh God! Just thinking of what she must have endured makes me tear up again.

Julia leaves with Skylar and Zane and I are left alone.

“Faith, regardless of what is goin’ on with us, Rylee comes first. I love you and I love the girls. Y’all are my world and whatever I kept from you was for a reason. Please, let me take care of y’all—let me be here for you. We need to go help her and then you and I can work out our problem. Like we agreed before, the girls come first. Let me be here for you and for Rylee. She needs us now, more than ever.”

“I just want to see my little girl, Zane. I want to see her and I want to hold her and let her know that I’m so sorry. I should’ve protected her more. While you and I were together, she was being hurt,” I say, flooded with guilt. “I just want to see her, please.”

“We’re in this together. Forever, Faith.”

He takes me in his arms and kisses my head. He holds me tight before releasing me and turning me towards the door. He takes my hand in his and together, we make our way to see Rylee.

I don’t know what to expect when I walk through the door to her room, but the sight of her lying in the hospital bed almost brings me to my knees. Her face—her eyes are swollen shut, she has cuts and bruises all over her face from blows she received. Bruises cover her arms; one arm is in a cast. She has a cut above her left eye that will leave a scar after healing.

I’m suddenly filled with an anger so great, it starts to consume me. I want to hurt whoever hurt my daughter. I literally want to kill that person with my bare hands. I want that person to hurt as much as they hurt my daughter.

Beside me, I feel waves of emotion radiating from Zane’s body. If his anger is anywhere close to mine, whoever did this in a lot of trouble. Knowing the type of man Zane is, he’ll want to do something about this situation. It’s going to be up to me to keep him out of trouble. Regardless of our problem, though, Zane is right—we’re in this together.

I pull up a chair next to the bed, sit, and hold Rylee’s hand. I feel Zane’s hand on my shoulder. I want to lean on him for strength and after a couple of seconds, I do.

“Baby,” he whispers. “I’m here for her and you. I love this girl like she was my own. I want to know what happened and find whoever did this. I want to fuckin’ kill them.”

I wipe my tears. “You know what’s seriously wrong with this?” I ask him.

He looks at me, waiting for an answer. He still doesn’t know everything I do for a living. I never got around to telling him. Not many people really know. All people know is that I work for the company my husband built. Many assume I’m a receptionist or secretary, and I let them.

“Rylee should’ve had at least one bodyguard on her for a while now. After the company started getting a reputation and . . . with the money that Jake left us, my daughter should’ve been protected. Every time I brought up the subject, she said it would cramp her style,” I say with a chuckle at my daughter’s words. “I didn’t push the subject. I didn’t think we needed it in the town we live in. The city, yes, but this town, no.
This
is on me. I know how dangerous the world can be and I didn’t protect her like I should have. If I’d done what I knew needed to be done, she never would’ve been hurt.”

“Faith, this isn’t on you. It’s on whoever did this to her—not you,” he tells me. “Now, it’s up to us to help her.”

“She’s going to need us, but are you going to be around?” I ask him. “You lied to me, Zane. You betrayed me by keeping something important from me. I need to know why. Was this a game to you? You never mentioned knowing Jake. You’ve had plenty of opportunity, but never said anything. Why?”

“Do you really want to do this now?” He asks me.

“Yes. I need to focus. Right now, I’m waitin’ on my daughter to wake up. My mind is all over the place and I need to focus on something other than the unknowns of Rylee’s situation. I’ll take care of my daughter after she wakes and tells us what happened and who did this. Right now, I want you to explain to me everything, and don’t leave anything out. This will determine if you’re gonna stay in our lives. After Rylee wakes, helping her will be my main priority. My daughters always come first, Zane, and if I feel you’re a threat, you’ll be gone.”

“Okay. . . where do I start?” He asks, running his fingers through his hair.

“Start from the beginnin,’” I tell him.

“Well . . . you might not remember, but you and I—we’ve seen each other twice before that fateful day at the stoplight,” he tells me. He sees that I’m about to interrupt. “Yes, we have, babe; you just don’t remember. Back then, I wasn’t even a blip on your radar. Like Gunner said, you only had eyes for Jake. I’m gonna tell you the whole story, but wait until the end before you say anything, please.”

I nod in agreement, but I’m not sure if I can keep that promise.

As we wait for our Rylee to wake, Zane begins to tell me his story. A story of two men meeting and of a special promise that was made. A story some might find strange and unexplainable.

Zane (26 April 2013)

“Okay, here’s how it was,” I begin my story. “I met Jake in 2007 during his last deployment to Afghanistan. I was in a mentally fucked-up place—I’d found out a few days prior that Eliza was cheating on me when she called to tell me she was pregnant.

“‘How the fuck did that happen?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve been away for almost a year.’

“Then it hit me. She’d been fuckin’ around on me.

“‘It’s okay,’ she tells me. ‘It’s Troy’s’—Troy was my best friend at the time—‘so you’ll grow to love the baby and we can go on as before.’

“She said she’d been careful, but it had failed. She wasn’t even sorry for cheatin’ on me. She figured I’d get over it.

“Fuck. That. Shit. I threw her ass to the curb. I thought, let that motherfucker own up and claim that bitch and her poor unfortunate unborn baby because with a mother like her, I felt sorry for that child, but not enough to stay with her cheatin’ ass.

“Anyway, so I wasn’t in a good place and I thought that all women, aside from those in my family, were deceitful bitches with no sense of morals or loyalty. I’d lost faith—I was fightin’ for my country and here my almost-fiancée—because I thought I’d marry her one day—was fuckin’ around on me.

“Then I met Jake. He sure was somethin’ else. He was well respected and admired by his men. He had plenty of confidence but he didn’t come off as arrogant. There was somethin’ about him that made me want to talk to him. And, he had somethin’ I didn’t think existed anymore. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know what I looked like until much later.”

“What do you mean?” Faith asks. “How could he not know what you looked like when you first met him?”

“Babe, you promised not to interrupt,” I remind her, chuckling. I knew full well she wouldn’t be able to resist—that’s just how my Faith is.

“To answer your question, my job in the Army was very different than that of the traditional soldier. I was one of those soldiers that you’d read about in books, the guys that you see but you really don’t. My uniform required me to be covered from head to toe. I was one of
those
soldiers—the ones many only whisper about
.
But like I said before, there was somethin’ about him that made me break protocol. We were in the aircraft, minutes away from jumpin,’ when I see this soldier take out a picture and kiss it. I remember seein’ him say somethin’ to the picture. You have to remember, I’d recently found out about Eliza and I was kinda messed up. So I broke protocol—I spoke to him, and I discovered the true meaning of love and loyalty.”

10 May 2007, Southern Afghanistan

What the fuck is that guy doing?

“Did you just kiss that picture and speak to it?” I ask him, shocking the hell out of him and myself.

I just broke protocol.

Well, fuck.

I’ve never done that before, but I really need to know why the hell this shmuck did that. Was it a girlfriend’s picture? I hope not because he’ll be in for a fucking rude awakening when she cheats on him while he’s away on missions. Shit, she’s probably fucking his best friend right this second, as he’s about to jump in a war zone—that’s what that bitch Eliza did to me. Knowing that women are fickle bitches that can’t keep their legs closed, I wouldn’t put it past her.

Yeah, I’m fucking jaded, but that’s what happens when your girlfriend of two years—the woman you think you might marry—calls you and lets you know that she’s pregnant by your best friend.

“You talkin’ to me?” The guy asks me. “What the hell, man? You ain’t supposed to do this shit.”

“I saw you doin’ that and figured I’d save you a heartache by lettin’ you know that women aren’t meant to be trusted. They’ll cheat on your ass and expect you to take it layin’ down. Your girl’s probably with your best friend right this second. Your ass is here in a fuckin’ war zone and she’s back home doin’ whatever the hell she wants.”

He laughs at me. “You’re fuckin’ delusional and paranoid. If I wasn’t afraid you’d kill me with your bare hands, I’d call you a stupid fuck.”

“Nah, man,” I say. “That shit really does happen because it happened to me. Now, I know that the only women you can trust are your mother and your sisters—only family.”

“First off,” he says, “the person in the photo isn’t my girlfriend.” He sees my shock. “What?”

“I didn’t know you rolled that way. I won’t tell anyone you like guys,” I assure him. “I’ll keep your secret if you don’t tell I spoke to you. Oh, and I’m not hittin’ on you or anything.”

“You’re fuckin’ hilarious, you know that?” He says. “If you’d let me finish, I’d have told you that I just kissed my wife’s picture. Yeah, I know; I look way too young to be married and a father, but I’m old enough. Trust me. Faith’s my wife and the reason I love goin’ home. She’s the one that holds our family together. She took me on with a little girl and all.” He laughs and continues, “She was only seventeen when I met her. She came up to me and told me I was gonna be hers. She’s my everything—my queen, my treasure.”

I just look at him. “You’re fuckin’ pussy-whipped.”

“Damn straight I am, and fuckin’ proud. You ever meet my wife and you’ll understand. She’s fuckin’ beautiful and a badass on the soccer field—a damn good player. She’s on the US Women’s National Soccer Team,” he tells me proudly. “I’m hopin’ to get out of here in time to see her at least play one game this World Cup, but you know how deployments are—sometimes they get extended. You know, instead of bein’ pissed that I’ll probably miss seein’ her play, she understands this is my job. She says I go out and do this job so she has the freedom to play the sport she loves so much. She tells me I’m her hero. I’m sorry that shit happened to you, but try to keep that shit away from these guys. Some of them aren’t as lucky as me and it’d fuck with their minds.”

“Sorry man,” I say ashamed of my behavior. “I’m kinda fucked up right now. More pissed than anything, really. It just pisses me off that I’ve kept my dick in my pants for almost a year and that bitch so easily spread her legs. That was a dick move on my part and I apologize. Your woman sounds like a good woman—a rare breed.”

“She is a good woman—the best. And in the bedroom, she’s fuckin’ amazin,’” he says. “I’m countin’ down the days till I get back to her. She’s the best wife and the best mother. She’s not my little girl’s biological mother, but she’s her mother in every other sense. She’s the true hero.”