Property Of (26 page)

“Dallas,” I got out before his phone rang interrupting my thoughts. He automatically reached for the phone to check to see who was calling. I figured it was engrained in him to answer his phone after so many years in law enforcement. Death didn’t wait for conversations to be finished, and considering with death came devastated families, I didn’t hesitate to let him answer when he looked up at me. “Go ahead and answer this can wait until you’re finished.”

Giving him privacy, I walked around his living room while he took the call. On his fireplace mantle were three pictures in decorative frames that only his sister could have purchased. All of them were of his niece and nephew at different ages. Picking one up and inspecting the smiling faces of two curious children, I heard Dallas rattle off questions to the caller as he came back into the room. When he said, “Be there in twenty,” I knew he had to leave. He swiped off his phone and placed it on his dining room table before he came over to me.

“Let me guess, duty calls?” I smiled.

“Duty calls, no rest for the weary, or cops,” he smiled back. “Think about what I said and call me tomorrow when you have an answer.”

“I don’t need to—” he interrupted my reply with a kiss that was quick and hard just like the first. A claiming kiss, one that told me what he hoped would be my answer.

“I gotta go,” he mumbled against my lips, keeping me from saying anything else.

“Ok,” I answered back, letting the topic go for now since he seemed determined for me to think about what he’d said.

Dallas grabbed my hand, locked up his house, and walked me to my car. He kissed me gently one last time before he got on his bike and drove away.

When I arrived home, I fed my cats, crawled into bed, and realized when I reached across the open space that I already missed having Dallas in my bed. I missed being able to curl around his body sated after passionate sex. I missed having his strong arms wrapped around me while he played with my hair. I missed the rumble of his laughter as I laid my head on his chest while we talked. In fact, I slept so restlessly without him that by sunrise I was wide-awake thinking didn’t need to wait to call him because I’d already made my decision.

That said, I jumped in the shower, fed my cats, and picked up coffee and muffins at the Starbucks drive-thru on my way to his house. I figured telling the man I was slowly falling for that I wasn’t going anywhere should be done in person. I also thought if I got there early enough, I might get to show him just how much I cared before he went to work. This was all running through my head when I knocked on his door while staring at a black SUV in his driveway. I was sure Dallas had told me his other vehicle was a truck.

When the door opened suddenly, I turned with a smile and coffees in my hands. However, when I saw who opened the door, I wasn’t thinking anything at all, except why had a tall, curvy blonde with sex hair, sleepy eyes, wearing only a man’s T-shirt answered his door.

“Can I help you?” she yawned.

I stepped back and looked at the house number thinking I’d come to the wrong house. That is until I looked past her and saw Dallas’ old furniture.

“Um, who are you and where is Dallas?” I bit out.

“I’m his wife if you must know and he just left for the office. Who, may I ask, are you?”

“You’re not his wife,” I answered, looking over her shoulder for Dallas while dread slowly sank in.

“Well, technically, ex-wife, not that it really stopped us from hooking up,” she replied with a smile.

“You’re lying,” I whispered, because I couldn’t find my voice past the knot forming in my throat. I didn’t know what was going on here, but I’d written this scene before and after my last mistake with Dallas I wasn’t going to jump to conclusions.

“Why would I lie about being his ex-wife?” she yawned again. “Wait, are you seeing Dallas, too?”

That did it; I pushed past her looking for Dallas or a clue to why she was there. There was no way the man who said those things to me last night had come home and been with this woman.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she chuckled as I stormed down the hall and looked in his bedroom, finding only an unmade bed.

Turning around I marched back into the living room and asked, “Why are you here?”

I watched as a slow grin pulled across her mouth, her eyes twinkling in hilarity as she answered, “It’s true Dallas and I are divorced, but we are still addicted to each other. We scratch the itch that others can’t reach if you must know. We even have a code for it. I used to joke with him it was his duty to screw me until I couldn’t walk, so whenever one of us is in the mood, we call or send a text and say, “duty calls.”

My eyes closed slowly as I thought about how many times in the past week he’d left me saying, “duty calls.” My stomach wanted to get rid of the muffin and coffee I’d snacked on during the drive over when I thought about how I’d trusted him. When my eyes opened, she smiled sweetly, ran her hand down my arm as if she felt sorry for me, and told me, “I can see by your reaction he’s used that excuse before. I’m sorry, Hun, but if you don’t believe me, he forgot his phone when he left and I can show you the sexy pictures I text to him all the time.”

Cool as can be, she walked over to his dining room table and picked up Dallas’ phone. With mirth in her eyes, she sauntered back like the model she was, all arms, legs, and swinging hips, before scanning through his messages. She enlarged the screen once she’d found what she was looking for and with a cat-like smile, she showed me lingerie clad pictures of herself. One after another after another. My lips started trembling so I turned my eyes away, unable to look. I’d woken this morning with excitement about my future with Dallas and now I was plummeting to the depths of despair. I was at the finish line of the relationship before it had even started and I wanted a redo to last week making sure I never ran into the man.

How can someone become that important so quickly that all you wanted to do was find a hole and crawl into it?

Looking around his home as if I was lost, his ex, with her perfect model body, who I figured would be hard to forget, stated, with contained glee, “Sorry to break it to you this way but I thought you should know before you got your hopes up. We’ll never stop sleeping together, married or not. I’m duty, and I’ll always call.”

Sixteen

Up all night and running on nothing but coffee and fumes, Dallas walked into his house to shower and grab a bite to eat. For once in his career, he wasn’t upset by what he found when he taken a call about another drive-by shooting. No witnesses, of course, but he was inclined to hang a medal on the chest of whoever had taken Jerome Warner out. The world would not mourn that loss, and was safer for having him gone.

He spotted his phone that he’d forgotten the night before and checked to see if he’d missed a text or call. Walking into his bedroom while he scanned his phone, he stopped short when he saw his bed wasn’t made. Making his bed daily was a habit, something that was drilled into him by his mother, therefore his hackles rose when he saw crumpled sheets. He’d stayed the night at Nicola’s the day before, so he knew he hadn’t been in his bed for two days. Looking around the room, he caught sight of one of his T-shirts thrown on the end of the bed, one he hadn’t worn this week, and he picked it up. The smell of perfume drifted up as he sniffed the shirt. He knew that fragrance, knew it intimately because it used to make him hard when he’d smell the subtle perfume. Smelling it now, he was pissed.

She’d still had a key.

Scanning through his text messages, he saw he had at least five new ones from Brynne since he’d left. All pictures in different degrees of undress. She had contacted him for the first time in two years the night before; professing her undying love to Dallas saying she wanted him back. It had taken all his self-control to keep from laughing when he’d heard her crocodile tears. Then the text messages had started. He’d ignored them all, which is probably why she’d been persistent with the pictures hoping the memories of her body would sway his mind.

Two years ago, unhappy with how much Dallas worked and made as a cop, she’d found a replacement for him. One who made twice as much as Dallas did.

He and Brynne had married young and bought the house Dallas currently lived in with dreams of flipping it so they could buy a bigger house once kids came along. Renovations on a cop’s salary were slow but steady. However, not steady enough for Brynne. She’d complained constantly that she wanted a bigger house. Coupled with his promotion to detective and his constant calls in the middle of the night; the tension in their household rose to a fevered pitch. So much so, that Dallas stayed later and later at the office and Brynne went searching for another man.

He’d met her new husband one time, on the day he showed in court to finalize their divorce. He knew when he met the man she had him on a short leash and would be bored quickly. However, he never dreamed when she decided to trade up again, she’d come sniffing around Dallas. He neither wanted the attention nor gave a fuck that she was calling. He’d been done long before the divorce was final and intended to keep it that way.

Scrolling through his recent call list to find her number, Dallas hit dial and waited for her to answer.

“It’s about time you returned my call. You know, ignoring all those pictures I sent could give a girl a complex,” Brynne breathed sensually into the phone.

“You still have a key?” Dallas gritted out, wanting to end the call quickly.

“No, but I remember where you hide the spare.” Dallas could hear a smile in her voice as she tried to taunt him with her sexuality. She had that in spades with her long legs and flaxen hair, but Dallas found out recently that a tiny woman with jade-green eyes and a cupid-bow mouth appealed more to his baser desires.

“I’m only gonna say this one time so you’d better listen carefully, Brynne. No more calls, no more texts. I don’t want you comin’ to my house and I don’t want you crawlin’ into my bed. You lost that privilege when you fucked another man.”

“Dallas, baby, I miss you. I know you still have feelings for me or you wouldn’t be this mad.”

“What feelings I had for you died when you wrapped your mouth around another man’s cock,” Dallas growled.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. He could hear Brynne breathing hard, formulating a comeback for her actions that wouldn’t mean shit to Dallas.

“You worked all the time and I had needs, Dallas. You weren’t here to take care of them. What was I supposed to do?”

“Jesus, this excuse again?”

“It’s not an excuse, it’s a fact. It’s your fault we broke up,” she whined.

“I’m not havin’ the same argument with you again. Go back to your husband if he’ll still have you, I’m done, been done for two years.”

“But he’s not you,” she whispered into the phone.

“And you’re not Nicola. I’ve found a woman who’s so goddamned sweet that after you I feel like I’ve won the lottery. If you think I’d give that up for you, you’d be wrong.”

“You bastard,” she shrieked. Not one to reign in her temper before speaking her mind, fortunately for Dallas, Brynne let loose before she could check herself, giving him a heads up to what she had done. “You know Dallas you really shouldn’t leave your phone lying around,” Brynne hissed, “you don’t know who might look at it. Maybe even “sweet” blondes with big green eyes.” Dallas caught her meaning as soon as the words left her mouth, and knew immediately that she’d met Nicola here at his house.
Jesus, she’d been in my bed, in my fuckin’ shirt.

“What the fuck did you do?” Dallas seethed.

His answering reply was dead air.

***

Devastated after finding out about Dallas and his ex, I ran home and packed a bag so I could check into a hotel and lick my wounds for a day or two. I didn’t want to talk to anyone; I just wanted to hole up where no one could find me and order room service. I couldn’t bring Simi and Snape to the hotel, which meant I had to drop them off with Mom and Dad, while I ate my weight in ice cream.

My parents lived on a quiet street in Maple Ridge, an older neighborhood in midtown Tulsa full of historically maintained homes. In the early days, Tulsa was the center of the universe for oil and gas production and was aptly named, “The Oil Capital of the World.” This distinction quickly brought oil tycoons, such as Waite Phillips, J. Paul Getty, and William G. Skelly, to Tulsa. The insurgence of these tycoons and others into the small city of Tulsa required stately houses to be built with modern conveniences. Due to Maple Ridge’s close vicinity to the Arkansas River and downtown Tulsa, those stately homes were built on the winding streets trimmed with cherry blossom trees. Most of those mansions were built in the popular Art Deco style of the time, giving Tulsa a treasure trove of architectural gems. Mom and Dad lived in one of those gems and it was my mother’s full time job, in her opinion, to maintain the historical home for the generations to come. Their three-story Art Deco home, with its red-tiled roof, soft yellow exterior, and large black shutters framing the windows, stood at a corner of Madison Avenue. This house was my touchstone, the place where I grew from a child to an adult. Nothing signified family, security, or love more than that three-story home on that quiet street, but somehow, as I sat in my car with tears streaming down my face, I didn’t think it could help me this time.

I had my lie all figured out as to why I was leaving the cats on such short notice. I’d tell them my editor called and I had to fly to Chicago to work out some bugs with Highlander’s Pride. This would kill two birds with one stone. A) I could cancel the barbecue without having to explain and B) no one would worry or come looking for me, this way I could be alone. I could hole up until this emptiness in my chest healed over and then come home as if nothing had happened. I knew eventually someone would ask about Dallas, hopefully by then I’d be able to explain without bursting into tears that we didn’t mesh. Don’t ask me why I was hiding Dallas’ deception other than I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the pity in their eyes if they knew.