Lucky Break Read online

  Alexis stood with her hand on her cheek, tears pouring from her eyes. A big dude was right beside her, his meaty finger pointed accusingly at Alexis. The sneer on his face spoke of passion and the definition of his arm spoke of dedication. It took a lot of arm curls to get guns like he had. Things like passion or dedication never scared me much, though. I had plenty of that myself, and I’d bet I was better trained than some sonofabitch who had quite obviously just struck a woman.

  “Did he hit her?” Mia asked in a shocked whisper. She was right beside me, and even though we weren’t physically touching, the woman breathed in and out so heavily that I could practically feel it. “Did you hit her?” Mia screamed.

  “This isn’t your business, Mia,” the man yelled, though he didn’t pull his attention from Alexis for even a second. “It’s not his either. So, if either of you knows what’s good for you, you’ll leave us alone and let me talk to my wife.”

  “See, that’s the thing,” I answered as my hands instinctively curled into fists. Somewhere in the back, I heard the fast country song give way to some Zeppelin, perfectly encapsulating the moment. Damn, that was an intuitive jukebox. “I was under the impression she was your ex-wife. I really hope so. Otherwise, I might have just wasted some of the best flirting I’ve done in years.”

  “You don’t want to do this, bud,” the man, George, said. Even though he still didn’t pull his attention away from Alexis long enough to look at me, I saw his eyes tighten as he spoke. “This is between me and her.”

  “I don’t think so, my man,” I said. As I took a step forward in an attempt to get near the man, I felt Mia’s hand on my arm, pulling me back.

  “You don’t get it,” she muttered. “He’s a—”

  “A coward?” I asked, finishing the sentence. “No. I totally get that. Any punk who thinks it’s okay to hit a woman is definitely a coward. Let’s see how he likes somebody who might be more capable of defending himself.” Pulling my arm away from Mia’s grasp, I walked toward the pair.

  George still didn’t look at me. In fact, I wasn’t sure the guy had actually even blinked since we walked in here. “You’d better stop him, Alexis,” he said. “Otherwise, when I break his back, it’ll be on you.”

  Alexis sniffled, her hand falling from her face. She looked at me. “We’re fine,” she said, her tone shaky.

  “Screaming is usually not a very good indicator of things being fine,” I said.

  “We had a disagreement about our custody schedule. I got a little bit overly emotional. It’s fine now,” Alexis said.

  I scoffed, literally scoffed with a chuckle and everything. “I bet he told you that a lot, didn’t he? I bet half your marriage was spent with him cracking you across the face with something and telling you that you’re being overly emotional about it.”

  “John, please. Just go,” Alexis said. Then, looking over at her sorority sister, she added, “Both of you. I’ve got this. I promise.”

  I didn’t have to look over at Mia. I might have just met the woman, but I knew a mother hen when I saw one. She wasn’t about to leave her friend in this situation, and luckily for the both of them, neither was I.

  “We’ll leave. We’ll leave right now, just so long as you’re with us,” I said, eyeing up the guy and trying to decide the best way to take him down. Ever since that day back in the truck stop, I had been kicking myself for not being able to throw a headlock into the array of moves that took down that burglar. If pressed, I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Even though this guy was much taller than me and had about sixty pounds on me if the look of him was an accurate way to measure it, I wasn’t scared. You hit a woman, especially a woman you’ve claimed to love, and I don’t have time to be scared of you. All of my energy was spent up on hate and disgust.

  Finally, George turned to me. With dark-rimmed glasses, a close-cropped haircut, and rage plain on his face, the man looked like a librarian who had gotten all hopped up on steroids and lost his mind. Why anyone would stay with a guy like this long enough to order dessert, let alone have a kid with him, was beyond me. But hey, different strokes for different folks, right?

  In any regard, Alexis’s obviously questionable choice in men wasn’t the priority here. Getting her out safely was.

  “Listen to the woman, twerp,” George said in a grunt. “She’s trying to do you a favor. Get the hell out of here. Now.”

  “Really?” I asked, a sly and purposefully irritating smile spreading across my face. “Has anyone been called twerp since the ‘80s? I should probably be honored about that, right?”

  “Get the hell out of here!” George snapped, his meaty finger moving from Alexis toward the door. He wasn’t having any of my jokes. He was done with me. That was just as well. I was done with that bastard, too, and he was about to learn that the hard way.

  ‘Listen, bud,” I said, walking toward him, my clenched fists tightening up in anticipation of what was about to happen. “I’m sure that ‘big muscle man with a bad attitude’ thing works on women and men who haven’t seen enough of the world to know how big of a coward you really are, but look at me closely. Look at my eyes, Georgie boy. Do they look afraid to you? Does it look like I’m gonna do anything with your threat except laugh at it? If it does, let me prove you wrong right now.” I leaned closer. “Ha. Ha. Ha.” I looked at Alexis and gave her a little nod, as if to let her know that everything was going to be okay. “That was me laughing at your threat, in case that wasn’t already clear.”

  George’s eyes went wide and his face earned a red tint. The dude was pissed, and I had seen enough pissed off dudes to know that this one had just tipped over the point of being able to control himself. A fight was happening now. There was no way around it.

  “Let’s see how good you laugh without any teeth!” George shouted, lunging toward me like a barreling train with geeky glasses. He moved quicker than I figured a guy of his size would. In a flash, he was on me, throwing a ham of a fist in my direction. I didn’t have time for any quippy comments or to make any of this look stylish. My body seemed to react before my mind could, which was a good thing seeing as how if it hadn’t, I’d have probably flown back into the double doors with enough force to knock the damn things off the hinges.

  Turning quickly, I missed his hand and threw an elbow in the direction of his face. My intention was to connect with his nose and smile to myself when I heard the satisfying crack of it breaking. Intentions don’t always come true, though, and George pulled out of the way of my attack. What’s more, he leveled a kick into my gut, knocking the air clean out of me.

  I pulled back like an injured dog as I stepped away and looked for my next move.

  “I told you this was a mistake, moron,” George said, glowering over me like he’d just won this whole damn thing. I knew right then that his hubris would be how I won this. I mean, sure, my gut was practically on fire, and I was sure there was a boot mark running across it, but this was far from over. And it wasn’t going to go the way he thought it was, either. Of course, to get what I wanted, I would have to endure just a little bit more, let this douchebag really think he had me over a barrel.

  “A mistake for you!” I yelled, because it was the most cliché thing I could think of at the moment, and rushed toward him. I didn’t put too much effort into it. There was no weaving, no ducking, and no moving with any sort of finesse at all. I might as well have had a bullseye on my chest as I rushed toward him, and George took advantage of that. He did exactly what I thought he was going to do, punching me hard in the chest. Because I was expecting it, though, I rolled back with the hit, taking a lot of the man’s power away from him.

  He wouldn’t notice, though. Men like that never do. Guys with that sort of size, who naturally have that kind of advantage over the rest of us, tend to get lazy. They don’t have to work as hard, and as a rule, they don’t.

  I fell backward, stopping myself from falling to the ground fully with my knee and right forearm. I looked up, my eyes meeting
the girls’. Alexis was, as one might imagine, afraid and horrified. Mia, on the other end, seemed a bit calmer. She was certainly concerned, but there was a hardness over her expression that I almost recognized.

  It didn’t matter. Neither of them needed to be worried. Though I was in a hell of a lot of pain, this was all going according to plan. As I figured he would, George wanted to finish me off right then, really make a spectacle of how weak I was in front of the girls.

  Not today, Georgie boy.

  He reared back and then flung his arm forward, ready to punch me squarely in the jaw and put an end to this. As he did that, he shifted his balance. Twisting my body away from his hit, I swept his legs, knocking him down. He fell sideways, thank God. Otherwise, he’d have crushed me like a bug when he tumbled. I pulled upward, leaping on top of him and doing what I had wanted to do for quite some time.

  “This is a headlock, bitch!” I muttered under my breath, pulling my arm around his neck tightly. “More specifically, it’s the sleeper.”

  George seemed to panic, pushing himself back up on his feet quickly. Because he had such a size advantage over me, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him. I did manage to hold on, though, my arms clenching around his neck and my legs looping together around his waist.

  The sonofabitch might as well have been branded for the rodeo for all the thrashing and bucking he did. It wouldn’t do him any good, though. My high school wrestling team didn’t call me the Vice Grip for nothing. When I got ahold of something, I didn’t let go. That was all there was to it.

  It wasn’t long before George slowed down. I knew the big boy was losing steam. In a few seconds, he’d lose consciousness too. He tried to punch me, but I was at a weird angle and all his efforts did was waste what little energy he had left.

  George stumbled again and then fell to the floor. His eyes fluttered closed and he fell unconscious. I took a deep breath and finally let the guy go, standing upright.

  “There we go,” I said, straightening up my shirt and running a hand through my hair. “All sorted.” I looked from one of the girls to the other. “You wanna call the police or something?”

  “Wouldn’t do any good,” Alexis murmured under her breath. I was about to ask what that meant, but the woman walked up, stood up on her toes, and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you, John. I don’t know how I could ever repay you.”

  “I didn’t do it for payment,” I answered, smiling. “Though, the last time this kind of thing happened, I got seventy million dollars for my trouble.”

  Alexis chuckled. “I’m not sure I can swing that, but I’m having a party, a bonfire tonight at my place. I'd be thrilled if you and your friend could make it. What do you say?”

  A bonfire? I had never been to one, but it sounded like an excuse for people in skimpy clothes to get drunk on the beach and for Alexis to tell them all about my feats of bravery. Who the hell was I to say no to that?

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said, grinning at her.

  Chapter 4

  “I can’t believe you got invited to this party,” Davey said, looking around as we stepped out of the car at the address Alexis texted me earlier. “Got us invited to this party, I mean.”

  “What is it with you, man?” I asked, looking over at my friend as I closed the car door and rounded to the front. “Every time a pretty girl gives me something, you can’t believe it. Has it ever occurred to you that I just might be the kind of guy that ladies like?”

  “Not seriously. No,” Davey said, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he stared at the house in front of us. Now, I had never been one to make assumptions about people. My mom taught me from an early age that books and covers don’t always look like they belong together. Still, knowing what I knew about Alexis, namely that she slung whiskey and tequila in a bar like the Rusty Bucket, led me to believe that she came from a certain financial standpoint. I wasn’t one to judge, either. Until very recently, I came from that same financial standpoint. I still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of being able to have the salad and the soup, let alone the fact that I was, by anyone’s standards, ridiculously wealthy.

  As I looked at the house in front of us, a two-story bungalow with a balcony overlooking the beach and a fountain in the center of the yard, complete with a lion’s head that shot water from the beast’s open mouth, I realized that Alexis probably wasn’t exactly the destitute single mom barmaid I figured her to be.

  “Did we bring anything to this party, Johnny boy?” Davey asked, uneasiness creeping into his voice as he looked over at me.

  “Just our smiles,” I answered.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna be nearly fancy enough,” Davey said, sighing as he looked back over at the house.

  “Don’t be so nervous,” I answered, staring at several people as they walked into the house. Thankfully, they weren’t in tuxedos and ball gowns or anything fancy like that. The group was dressed in bathing suits, which was a good thing, seeing as how hot it still was tonight. Florida was like that, though, as muggy and warm as you’d expect from a swamp in the moonlight. “We’re just as good as any of these people.” I motioned to the folks walking through the door.

  “Oh, we certainly are not,” Davey said. “I mean, you might be, what with the mega millions and all, but I saw that blonde with the flowered two-piece as she walked in. I’m definitely not as good as her, nowhere near it.”

  “Shut the hell up and put your party face on,” I answered. “Besides, look on the bright side. There’s bound to be at least one person here who hasn’t heard the war story you told earlier.”

  Davey’s eyes lit up at the suggestion. Suddenly, he started walking forward. “What can I say, John?” my friend asked, a skip in his step now. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Walking into the large beach house, I found the interior was every bit as nice as the outside had led me to believe. Plush but contemporary furniture, the kind you knew cost a fortune just by the look of it, sat in the center of the large, raised living room. A staircase spiraled up in the corner, leading to a second story that couldn’t have consisted of more than a couple of rooms, given the open nature of the house. A large chandelier hung just over where Davey and I were standing. Still, even though this place was a sight to behold, two things stuck out to me, one because of the sheer beauty of it and the other because I found it odd.

  The entire back wall was made of glass, giving Davey and me a breathtaking view of the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. It was like a painting had come to life and stretched itself out right there in front of us. If I had ever had any doubt about why the wealthiest people in the world almost always settle in places like this, they would have been quelled in this instant.

  The second thing, the thing that struck me as odd, turned out to be answered by the first thing. Though this was a party, the entire living room was empty. There wasn’t a single soul standing there, only soft music playing as Davey and I stepped forward. Looking through the plate glass wall, though, I saw where all the partygoers had gotten off to. A huge bonfire stretched toward a cloudless, star-filled sky. Fifty people must have been standing out around it. They all looked to be laughing, drinking, and sharing stories. My shoulders pepped up just a little. This was just the kind of thing I needed. Everything since the day in that truck stop in Illinois had been a whirlwind. A gathering like this in a setting like this one, even if it was a gathering of people I didn’t know, would certainly do wonders to make me feel like myself again.

  “Damn, is this what people are going to start expecting from you?’ Davey asked, looking around the extravagant home and shaking his head. “Seeing as how you’re all rich now and everything.”

  “I would hope not,” I muttered. “Seeing as how they’re not going to get it.” I might have just bought a house, and sure, it was the nicest place I’d ever lived in, but it wasn’t anything like this. My tastes had never leaned toward fancy or opulent or any of those five-dollar words that people throw out at you
to justify spending a thousand dollars on a couch. I preferred the simple things that I enjoyed. Beer was better than high-dollar wine, baseball was better than the opera, and I’d take fishing over polo any day of the week. I couldn’t imagine that having a touch more money than I did a month ago was going to change that, even if the touch was to the tune of seventy million.

  “Can’t say I blame you,” Davey said. “All I can think about, looking at this place, is how much Cheeto dust would be on everything after I lived in it for two weeks.”

  “That’s the plight of the wealthy,” I muttered.

  “Lucky John!” a familiar voice sounded from the other side of the room. Looking over, I saw Alexis coming toward me. She was dressed in a simple white top and cutoff jean shorts, which instantly made my shoulders loosen. She might have looked hot as hell in her little outfit, but it also told me that I hadn’t underdressed, and that was a good thing. “Lucky John’s friend!” she continued, looking over at Davey.

  “That’s what people are going to call me from now on, isn’t it?” Davey asked, biting his lower lip.

  “You’ve been called worse, though that’s not exactly my name either, is it?” I asked. Walking over to Alexis, I grabbed what the woman was holding, a cooler filled to the brim with Corona, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and some kind of twisted Long Island iced tea concoction in a can. “Calling in the reinforcements?” I asked, looking down at the cooler.

  “Gotta give the people what they want,” she answered. “You don’t think they came here ‘cause they like me, do you?” She chuckled. “Free booze and fresh seafood. That’s how you win hearts in these parts.”

  “Not just in these parts,” Davey answered, walking up and settling beside us.