Gabe (Glass City Hearts Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Angel

  Gabe

  Also by Desiree Lafawn

  About the Author

  Gabe

  Glass City Hearts Book One

  Desiree Lafawn

  Contents

  1. Angel

  2. Angel

  3. Gabe

  4. Angel

  5. Angel

  6. Gabe

  7. Angel

  8. Angel

  9. Gabe

  10. Angel

  11. Angel

  12. Gabe

  13. Angel

  14. Gabe

  15. Angel

  16. Angel

  17. Gabe

  18. Gabe

  19. Angel

  20. Angel

  21. Gabe

  22. Angel

  Also by Desiree Lafawn

  About the Author

  GABE

  GLASS CITY HEARTS BOOK ONE

  DESIREE LAFAWN

  Copyright © 2018 Desiree Lafawn

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover Design by Tracie Douglas of Dark Water Covers

  Photographer & Model: Nathan Hainline

  Editing by Tammy Farrell

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Angel

  I like to think of myself as a well-adjusted adult. Someone who makes good decisions and has her head on straight. The problem with that, though, is I am the only person who thinks so, and no matter how hard I try to stay out of trouble it always seems to find me anyway. I don’t do it on purpose, I swear. Normally things have a way of working out—everything turns up Jax—that’s my motto. Angel Jax is my name, and the motto is just a way of saying everything will turn up all right. And it usually did.

  Until it didn’t.

  I made a poor decision, and I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and now a person is missing. A girl I knew from the bar I sometimes sang at is gone. Or should I say, “she ran away,” along with a whole lot of money, and the people who are looking for her think I might know something. I don’t know shit about shit, but that doesn’t matter because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Yay me.

  I should probably backtrack a bit. I know my story isn’t making much sense, and if I didn’t know me, I would totally question that part about making good decisions, but in general, I have a pretty level head. I have a great job, my own apartment, great friends and neighbors, and I am completely satisfied with my love life.

  Okay, some of that was a lie.

  I actually have two pretty awesome jobs. I’m a musician; I play gigs in local bars and clubs. I play some original pieces but mostly cover stuff. It’s incredibly fun and fulfilling, but music doesn’t quite pay the bills, so I supplement by writing sometimes funny, always sexy romance novels under a pen name. It doesn’t make me rich, but the two jobs together allow me to live comfortably enough so I can do the things I want and not be shackled by a nine to five like most of America.

  I didn’t lie about the apartment. I really do have a great one; it’s just not a typical apartment community. I live at the Washington Arms, which is a small retirement community. I’m the only person under sixty in the whole place, and the only reason I’m allowed to rent here is because Jolene Kelly is the property owner, and she likes to read my smutty books. Not a lot of people know I write under the pen name Samantha Ice, but I would for sure use that to my advantage if it meant I got a second-floor apartment in a classy part of downtown Toledo with low rent and utilities included. Plus, old people are awesome. My neighbors are amazing, if a little bit nosy, and nosy is ok when you live in the city. It’s like living amongst a friendly neighborhood watch.

  Ok, the love life thing was a lie. It isn’t that I don’t date, I do. A lot. It’s just that I don’t do relationships for some reason. I would like to have a steady boyfriend, but I have the very worst luck with men. Not in finding them, per se. Dicks are swinging left and right in this town; it’s just hard to find a quality man who’s worth interrupting my life for. That’s the difficult part.

  My most intimate and lasting relationship lately is with the magic bullet I keep in my nightstand drawer. It has a hair trigger, and sometimes turns on by itself if I stub my toe on the nightstand, but as long as I have fresh batteries, I’m never without a good O. Orgasms are necessary for good mental health, and if anyone doesn’t agree with that, I will question whether or not they have ever had one.

  There is no shame in using a vibrator either. Whatever gets the job done. I’ve gotten used to getting mine from my friend Regina. And I don’t mean that in a gross, sharing is caring kind of way. Regina used to work for a sex toy wholesaler and I would get toys from her dirt cheap. But then she had some relationship issues, disappeared from the friend circle, and came back like six months later with a new job and a smoking hot, giant, tattooed boyfriend. I mean, good for her, her old boyfriend was a total tool, but I still miss that kickass discount. Also, I’m not jealous of her and her awesome new love life. Not at all. Bitch.

  So I have a satisfying if unconventional life. But I like it, it’s mine, and I am in control of it. That’s more than I can say for most thirty-two-year-olds out there. A lot of women my age are at the stage of their life where they realize the guy they married fresh out of high school really isn’t the one, and now they are trying to figure out how to get back the last fifteen years they wasted on a douche bag. Not me, though, I found out that high school guy wasn’t who I thought he was relatively early on, so I didn’t waste any of my twenties on that turd. I barely even think about him anymore.

  Hardly at all.

  Except for this moment, where I find myself standing in front of the office building he owns, a building I hadn’t been inside of since it belonged to his dad. At the time, I’d been paid ten dollars an hour as a sixteen-year-old to clean in the evening with a group of my girlfriends. That was a sweet job, and Mr. Anderson was an awesome guy. He was a rich guy, so he lived in a different world from us middle-class folks, but still a good guy. He said that giving us teenagers the office cleaning job was a good investment. He didn't have to get into any lengthy contracts, and we could get job experience without having to work in fast food flipping burgers. I don’t think there is any shame in getting money any way you need to, but at sixteen, I was glad to get a paycheck and not smell like fried onions at the end of my shift.

  Nevertheless that was a long time ago, and I haven’t been in that building since. Mr. Anderson has been dead now for almost a year, and there’s a new head dick in charge. It’s still an Anderson, but now it’s Gabe Anderson who wears the suits and sits at the big desk in the office on the top floor. It’s Gabe who gets the office with all the windows, which were a real bitch to clean as she recalled. I hadn’t seen Gabe in even longer than Mr. Anderson, but I kept up on what he’d been doing. Not like a jealous ex-girlfriend or anything like that. Gabe Anderson was never my boyfriend.

  He was my very best friend.

  Until he wasn’t.

  But that’s in the past and there’s no reason to think about it now. There never would have been another reason for me to go into that building at all ever again,
except for I needed some help. I had gotten involved in something completely out of my control, and if I didn’t get someone to back me up, I was going to end up in trouble.

  The kind of trouble where you end up six feet underground and people say nice things about you and throw roses down on your casket. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t think I had lived long enough to amass enough friends to say nice things about me while they buried me. And I hated roses.

  2

  Angel

  I didn’t know why my knees were shaking as I got into the elevator to take me to the third floor of the Anderson building, but it was probably because the elevator dipped between floors, taking my stomach with it, and not in any way because I was nervous about seeing Gabe again. No way could it be that.

  We’d been inseparable as kids. Middle school and through high school. My mom had been Mr. Anderson’s personal assistant for a long time, and Gabe and I were raised almost like brother and sister. Even though he was a year older, we did everything together, until we got to high school and our interests changed, but we were still best friends. Gabe was the popular rich boy who played sports and every girl wanted him to be her boyfriend. I was his chubby sidekick and every girl hated me for that coveted spot under his arm. They didn’t have to hate me for it though; he would never have seen me the way I wanted him to.

  I’d had a mega crush on Gabe Anderson, but he would have never known it. And he was never going to know because I was never going to tell. At one point I’d thought I might work up the courage to say something, but that moment had passed by quickly and made me glad I never went out on that limb. It wasn’t important anymore anyway. The dynamic duo days of Gabe—the high school superstar and Angel-the Chubster-Jax were long gone. I didn’t have those insecurities of developing too early, becoming too round in all the wrong places, and getting made fun of for it any longer, and Gabe Anderson didn’t have the kind of power to make me care about him that way anymore. No. I needed him for something else now.

  The third floor was completely different than I remembered it, but I guess that was to be expected. The carpet was a tan and green scalloped pattern, and not the deep blue and gray that I remembered, and the walls were a warm beige instead of the white of years ago. People change and things change, I thought to myself as I walked down the hall, my shoes making scooting noises on the carpet. I drag my feet when I walk. A bad habit, I know, but at thirty-two years of age I’m probably past the point of correcting that behavior.

  The door to the big office at the end of the hall still looked the same. It was heavy and made of solid wood. I could tell because when I pulled it open, there was resistance like the door was so heavy it took some serious muscle to get it open. Not like a flimsy hollow door that would swing open and slam against the opposite wall if swung too hard. This was definitely a rich man’s door.

  I walked through the doorway and into the outer office. The big office wasn’t just one room. It was a receptionist area and another doorway before you could get to the actual big office. That was another obstacle I had to clear before getting to talk to Gabe, and honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me until I walked into that room that I might not be able to see him. That he might not even want to see me. It had been almost fifteen years since we had seen or said words to each other. I hadn’t even seen him at his father’s funeral, although his mother had said it wasn’t his fault. That he had been on assignment.

  Being special ops meant everything was “on assignment,” and he didn’t get to pick when and where he had to go. It must have been horrible to not have been home for his dad’s funeral, I thought at the time. I took for granted that I could be there, and my mom and I held Mrs. Anderson and let her cry on our shoulders in her son’s stead. She was like an extension of my family, Mrs. Anderson was. But Gabe, I didn’t know him anymore. Not since high school, and that had been a long damn time ago. Then again I was in trouble with some sketchy people now, and I needed Gabe and his particular set of skills, so I had to swallow my pride and walk into that office. If his secretary would let me through, that was.

  “Good afternoon,” she said brightly as the door opened and I walked inside. Her smile dimmed a bit when she took in the scuffed chucks I had bedazzled on the toes, my extra comfortable jeans and slightly off the shoulder sweatshirt I had gotten off the Classic Kinda Ratchet website. I hadn’t thought about what I was wearing when I left the house. I’d been in one of those tunnel vision frames of mind and freaked out over the night before. I’d just dressed in my normal clothes and left the apartment, but now, looking at my posh surroundings, I thought that maybe it would have been better if I would have dressed up a little.

  “Can I…help you?” The pause was a little longer than was necessary, and her disdain for my appearance was not lost on me. Her reddish brown hair was perfectly pulled back into a business chignon, and her dress looked tailored and expensive. Her nose wrinkled a little under her fashionable tortoiseshell glasses, and I wondered if it was possible she was actually as big of a bitch as I thought she was at that moment. I have a tendency to judge early but it isn’t my fault. First impressions are a real thing. On second thought, I probably wasn’t making too good of one myself, considering I’d walked into the office of a fancy investment firm wearing what could be considered “weekend college kid” apparel.

  Starting over, I walked to the desk and gave her my friendliest smile. “Hi, my name is Angel Jax and I was wondering if Gabe is in the office today?”

  Not impressed by my use of his first name, her facial expression didn’t change, but she did look down at her desk and sigh. “Do you have an appointment with Mr. Anderson, Miss Jax, was it?” The emphasis she put on my name pissed me off for one, and for two, I hadn’t called him Mr. Anderson, I’d called him Gabe. Mr. Anderson was his dad and just because she was bound by some sort of professional necessity, didn’t mean I was.

  “I don’t have an appointment to see Gabe,” I told her, reining in my temper so I didn’t rage out and embarrass myself before I even got to ask for my favor. “But if you push that little button on your phone box over there to the left, I am sure he will see me if you tell him I am here.”

  I was swallowing enough pride even coming to him in the first place, but damn if I was going to kowtow to his snotty secretary to make it happen.

  “Mr. Anderson doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the secretary said, dropping some of her professional attitude and letting a touch of steel edge her tone. “Now he may have gone out with you once, but you don’t get special privileges just because you spent the night together, honey. Get in line along with the other yesterday’s girls knocking on the door and looking for cash.”

  Excuse me, what did she just say?

  “Look bitch,” I said, my voice rising in anger, no longer caring that I had come to ask Gabe for a favor. All my nerve endings were on fire at the woman who had just accused me of trying to get money out of Gabe. I wasn’t even going to touch how it made me feel to hear that he had a lineup of one-night stands handing around—that kind of stuff was none of my business. “You did not just essentially call me a prostitute, someone you have never met before in your life. Correct? I’m going to give you thirty seconds to change your tone and issue an apology, or I’m going to come over that desk and rattle your chain for you. You need some sense knocked into you lady, going around talking shit like that to strangers.”

  “What in the hell is going on in here?” The other heavy wooden door had opened behind me, and I jumped at the intrusion. I had been prepared to be announced, I hadn’t been prepared for Gabe Anderson to walk out of his office and scare the hell out of me. Secretary Sour face looked triumphant, but I wouldn’t let her get to me. Uppity bitch. I turned around and pasted on my brightest smile. “Hey Gabe, it’s been a while.” Then I promptly forgot what I was going to say.

  Gabe, the boy I remembered from my school days was gone. In his place stood Gabe the man, and I did not recognize the body that stood in
front of me. The Gabe I remembered wore jeans and sneakers, hoodies and basketball shorts. Later in life, when I was letting his mom regale me with tales of his heroics, I looked at pictures of him in his army uniform. This man in front of me was none of those things. The man in front of me had a presence.

  I had never seen Gabe in a suit before, and I probably would have been just as tongue-tied as I was now even if I had. His medium brown hair was cut shorter than I remembered it being, but still longer on top than it was in his military photos. His eyes were the same deep brown, but maybe a little harder than they used to be, there were no squinty laugh lines there anymore. He was bigger than I remembered, too. Not taller really but...wider. Like he had thickened up in the arms, chest, legs, and neck. A big man in a suit was a trigger point for me. Some women like athletes and some women like rock stars. I’m a sucker for a nattily dressed guy. A handsome man in a three-piece suit did things to my insides that made me go soft and weak at the knees. Gabe Anderson in a suit made my insides burn like molten lava.

  He didn’t look happy to see me. He did, however, look surprised. “Angel?” he asked, his raised eyebrows the only indication that he was shocked at all to see me. Unfair. I see him and fireworks go off behind my eyeballs, but he sees me for the first time in years and just looks mildly put out. This was not going like I thought it would. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea, but I had already come in and been insulted by his secretary so I would get my digs in while I could and then say piss off to the whole mess.