The Key To Micah's Heart (Hell Yeah!) (18 page)

Micah couldn’t help himself any longer, he fished his wallet out of his back pocket and slid a business card across the island to Avery once the other women were out of the room.

Avery picked it up. “Get the heck out of here! You are not Don Juan!” Micah just nodded. “Oh, good heavens. I have read your stuff. I love it. And we share a publisher.”

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you Sable Fuckin’ Hunter.”

Avery laughed out loud. “And you too, Don Juan. You know, it’s funny.”

“I know. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Well yes, that too, but I was going to say, there aren’t a lot of men who write what we write.”

Micah knew what was next. He’d had to field the same questions any time a new person found out his secret, but this time he knew he wasn’t going to get annoyed. He knew in Avery he’d found a similar soul, they had something they could bond over that few others could. Avery knew what it was like to write what he wrote.

“Why do I write it?” Micah asked before the words came out of Avery’s mouth.

Avery felt immediately embarrassed. She was super excited to have found out the news, but she now realized Micah also had to answer the question everyone always asked her. “You get asked that a lot too, huh?”

Micah could see the sudden discomfort on her face. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I don’t have to tell you, but that question is usually asked in a snide, almost antagonistic way. That might not be your experience because you’re a girl, but for me, it always seems the person asking it is challenging me in a way. Especially the guys. It seems like they are actually insulting my manhood. But hey. It comes with the territory I guess. Why do I write it? There’s a simple answer, really.”

“I understand. I write what I like to read, it’s that simple.”

Micah nodded. “My story is a bit more complicated. I had a bit of a rough relationship with my father. He wanted me to be a mini version of himself. We butted heads continuously growing up. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him. And me being me, I looked for every opportunity to piss him off. So instead of staying here in Texas to play football and go to UT, I said screw him and went to Syracuse University for my first year of college.”

“You Yankee traitor,” Avery said with a chuckle.

Micah joined in with the laughter. “Yea, that pretty much sums up what I was hoping my father would think when I did it. If my decision to go to Syracuse wasn’t already enough to piss him off, I also passed up a spot on the Syracuse football team and instead walked in and played on the lacrosse team. Everything was great for the first few months. I met lots of new interesting people and I loved playing lacrosse and believe me, all of those things together went a long way in pissing off dear old Albert Wolfe. But eventually it lost its luster. I started to miss home. Before the year was over, I was back in Texas and applying to go to UT the next year.” He finished the cake on his plate. “What can I say? I was homesick. I missed my friends. I missed Kyle, Saxon, my horses and the ranch.

“Now I bet you’re asking yourself. ‘What does that have to do with writing erotic literature?’ And that’s a fair question. It’s while I was at Syracuse that I met Leah.”

“Leah?” Avery settled in comfortably on her stool, she felt like this was going to be a good story.

“Oh yes, Leah. I was new in town. Hell, I was new in that part of the world and I was definitely not old enough to drink. But in a college town, the bartenders tend to look the other way when you hand over a piece of clearly fraudulent identification. Don’t tell anyone, but Saxon made me, Kyle, and himself some of the worst fake IDs you have ever seen when we were in high school. We mostly used them to buy beer. Me and Kyle were always big for our age, so the guy behind the counter rarely questioned us, but we all felt like such badasses, walking around with fake IDs in our wallets at age sixteen.” He waved his fork in the air. “But that’s neither here nor there. As I was saying, the guys from the lacrosse team would occasionally go drink at a bar called Fifty-Eight Special. The place was way off campus. It was an older crowd. Oh hell, it was a cougar bar, I’m just gonna tell the truth. Mature women don’t play games and they don’t have the hang-ups college girls do and it was refreshing for a guy like me who’d always had to deal with the bullshit of girls my own age.”

Avery smiled. “I’m enjoying you, you’re as crazy as Isaac said you were.”

Micah laughed. “Can’t deny it. Well, my buddies on the team were always hooking up with women at the bar. Now, I’ll swear on a stack of bibles under oath if ever called to that this isn’t true, but I’ve never been much for random hook-ups. For yours truly, it’s more about the flirting, it’s more about the seduction. I hate to admit it, but I can be quite a clit tease. I’d say pardon my language, but considering present company, I think the language is acceptable.”

“Hell yeah, it is,” Avery said with a smile.

“Good one.” He laughed and pointed, realizing she’d just named her most popular series. “But like I was saying, I have a reputation to maintain, so I’ll deny it if pressed on the issue. Anyway, Leah came up to the bar one night while I was there waiting for a drink. She was confident and assured of herself. She actually hit on me. It was so bold, so brazen and unapologetic and so incredibly awkward for me–at first that is. But I started to like it, quickly. There were no games, she just introduced herself and we sat and talked and did some dancing. Now far be it for a southern gentleman like myself to reveal a woman’s age, but I will tell you that Leah was over forty and under fifty. You can glean what you want from that, but she was amazing. And by that, I mean she could carry a conversation, she could flirt and she could dance like nobody was watching. Needless to say, I was mesmerized by her. We struck up a friendship, as unconventional as it was and eventually and by ‘eventually’, I mean very quickly, that friendship began to include benefits.”

“Good for you.”

“I have to tell you, Avery. The benefits were out of this world. The woman held nothing back in bed. She was a goddess. Confident and wild. The kind of stuff that a young guy like me dreamed about at the time. I learned so much about women from her. I was smitten. Looking back on it now, she wasn’t into me in a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of way, she was just having fun, but I was all in.”

“You know I’m going to borrow this storyline, don’t you?”

Micah chuckled. “Go ahead, you have my permission. One night after a particularly vigorous roll in the hay, I asked her where she’d learned some of the stuff she did in bed. She opened up her night table drawer and pulled out a book. I couldn’t tell you what the book looked like, who wrote it or even what it was about, but I read it front to back in a day. That was my introduction to the world of erotic literature and I have been reading and writing it ever since.” He didn’t add Colton’s influence or encouragement, that was just too personal to share.

“What happened with Leah?”

“Awww. Fair Leah. As I told you a moment ago, I grew homesick. I missed my friends and Texas, but what I didn’t tell you was that part of the reason I left Syracuse is because Leah left. She was some bigwig in the corporate world. She never really liked to talk about her job, but she got transferred and moved to Japan. There was no big goodbye. No, Micah running through the airport with a bouquet of flowers trying to stop her from getting on the plane. It was what it was, a brief moment in time shared by two people who enjoyed each other. When I found out she was leaving, there was a few days of heartache, but it passed quickly. Leah leaving Syracuse was the last straw, I guess you could say. She’d been my distraction from how homesick I felt and with her gone, I decided to come back home.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“It’s a romantic tale, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“No. I never saw her again. We never exchanged info. We never arranged for me to come to Japan. It was a clean break. I think I was young and a part of me romanticizes the story more than it deserves, but that was how I saw it.”

The kitchen door opened and Kyle came through on his phone. He looked at Micah and motioned for him to join him in the other room.

Micah tipped his hat. “Excuse me, Miss Hunter. Looks like the boss man needs a word. What’s up, Gov?” Micah could see something was wrong and he had a pretty good idea what it concerned. “Noah?”

“Yea, he just called and I’ve notified the others, they’re on the way. We have to escalate whatever plans we were going to make. This has gotten serious–fast.”

“What’s going on?”

“When Noah and the others got to his mother’s apartment, all they found was the kid, Mateo. He said she’d gone down to Club Hidalgo alone to try and get a job, to see if she could gather information.”

“Okay, sounds like a risky plan. How do we know it didn’t work?”

“A courier brought Mateo a package and it was addressed to Noah.”

“What? How?” He didn’t understand. “How did they know?”

Kyle shook his head. “If you remember when we went after Aron. Bowie told us that those cartels have many people on their payroll–store owners, kids–your next door neighbor could be gathering information to pass on to the kingpins. You learn to trust no one. So, who knows – they have eyes everywhere.”

“What was in the package? A message?”

“Yea, a ransom note. One million dollars or we kill your mother. And to prove their point, they sent a severed finger.”

“Shit. What are we going to do?” Micah asked, thinking that he’d like to let Madison know.

“Well, we’re still going to talk to Santiago. We need contacts, resources and a blueprint. I don’t know when we’ll leave–but it will be soon.”

Meanwhile…Madison

Madison was on cloud nine. Sure, her car was still broken and she’d been forced to ride the bus everywhere lately, but she’d been having such a good time with Micah. The texting between them was drawing them closer, even if it was risqué. She’d had a naughty thought while waiting for the bus–when she got home, Madison planned on slipping off a layer of clothing and sending Micah an even more revealing pose. He would be so surprised! She hoped he would love it.

Madison became so lost in her planning for the picture that she missed her stop and the next stop after that. When she finally awoke from her dreamy daze she had to walk nearly half a mile back in the other direction to her apartment.

“Hey!” she waved to a neighbor lady who was carrying in a bag of groceries. Her feet were tired from the long day at work and the unexpected walk, but it didn’t dampen Madison’s mood as she seemingly floated up the stairs to her apartment. She put her key in the door and was met by the worst possible sight she could imagine.

“What are you doing here?” she asked the moment the door came open.

Rudy was sitting on her couch with a predictable smoke in his hand. “So good to see you too, darling.”

Madison thought about turning around and just walking out of the building altogether, she’d run if it meant getting away from Rudy any faster. “Where’s Mom?”

Rudy rose from the couch with a groan and a sway, he looked like he was under the influence of something. “She’s back in Fort Worth. We ran into a bit of a financial snag. I’m gonna need some money from you.”

Madison moved into the apartment and walked behind the kitchen table, using it as a barrier between them. She fished her phone out of her purse. “I’m afraid I don’t have any at the moment.”

“I thought you were gonna land that rich, good-lookin’ fella you were dreamin’ about.” He went into her refrigerator and came out with a can of soda. “What happened, he didn’t want you after all?”

Madison wished he would just leave or a bolt of lightning would hit him. She refused to answer his question, instead she just stood her ground.

Rudy strolled up to the table. “Listen bitch. I know you’ve got money. Maybe you don’t have it here, but I know you have it and Sunny and I need it, so fork it over.”

Madison knew it was a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. “What do you need it for?” Rudy moved to come around to her side of the table and Madison shuffled left to stay as far away from him as possible. She knew this was getting out of hand quickly, so she opened her phone, trying to hit the number that would bring her some help.

Rudy’s hostility skyrocketed. “I don’t have time to explain it to you. Just give me your goddamn money!” He came at her quickly and before Madison knew it, he had a hand around her throat. “Where’s the money, bitch? Where is it?” Rudy hollered as Madison sank to the floor.

The phone was still in her hand and she clawed at the screen with one hand while scratching his grip around her throat with the other.

Micah to the rescue…

Over at the Governor’s mansion, Micah was still working. As he listened to Kyle’s conversation with Santiago, his phone buzzed. Glancing down at the screen, he saw that the call was from Madison. Despite the bad news they’d received about Sofia, Micah’s heart couldn’t help but grow lighter just seeing Madison’s name. With a smile, he raised his phone and pointed toward the door. Kyle nodded, understanding. He stepped out of the room and answered his phone. “Well isn’t this a pleasant surprise.”

No one responded, all Micah heard was a muffled sound and then words that curdled his blood. “Give me the money, bitch!”