The Problem with Peace: Greenstone Security #3 Read online

  The Problem with Peace

  Greenstone Security #3

  Anne Malcom

  Copyright © 2018 by Anne Malcom

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Malcom

  Author’s Note

  If you’ve read the first two books in this series, you’ll see that they’re different from a lot of my other books. They’re difficult. More painful. More frustrating.

  Real.

  Because in real life, life isn’t easy and smooth. Love sure as shit isn’t either.

  This series has kind of turned into my version of ‘real’ love stories.

  These characters make mistakes. They follow their head to protect their hearts. They run away. They don’t do what characters are supposed to do in romance novels.

  If you’re not ready for something difficult, frustrating, real, you should probably put this down and come back to it later.

  Because I’m warning you now, this story isn’t easy. You’re gonna want to slap Polly and Heath. Shake some sense into them. Tell them to get their shit together.

  But I tried to make this real.

  When two people are in love, and I mean real, tear your hair out, miserable, heart-wrenching love, they do not have their shit together.

  I hope you fall in love with these beautifully flawed people just like I did.

  Anne

  xxx

  Dedication

  For everyone who doesn’t have their shit together.

  Prologue

  I smoothed my dress for the hundredth time.

  It was as smooth as it was ever going to be.

  Not that it needed to be smooth.

  It was kind of the point of this whole wedding.

  It was a Polly wedding after all.

  I had flowers in my hair.

  I was barefoot.

  My dress was simple white lace, form-fitting. Chosen not because it was my dream wedding dress, but because Craig had mentioned casually how he loved seeing me in tight things. It was pointedly uttered as I was reading a bridal magazine and dog-earring a page with a long flowing princess style dress that wasn’t exactly the ‘meringue’ dress, but it didn’t hug my curves either. I’d always dreamed of a whimsical dress, only hinting at the things that my husband would discover later on in the night.

  “You’ve got a beautiful body, sweetheart,” he said, circling me from behind. “I just want to see it on our wedding day, know it’s all mine.” He kissed the side of my neck, chasing away the small amount of disappointment I had at his words.

  I wasn’t worried about forgoing my ideal dress for what Craig liked. Because I loved him. And I loved making him happy. It wasn’t a hardship. This day was for us, after all, not about the vanity of me wearing a big poofy dress.

  Plus, the poofy dress wouldn’t go with the ‘Polly’ wedding everyone imagined. The one on the rooftop of my loft, decorated with fairy lights and low-key music. Ordained by my friend who read everyone’s auras before the ceremony. Lucy and Rosie had scowled and muttered under their breath at this. But they did it. Every single one of my family did it. They indulged me.

  Because it was me.

  This was the wedding everyone expected from me.

  Not the one I envisioned.

  Not the one I’d dreamed of on and off since I was old enough to read romance novels. And solidified when I was eighteen years old when I was in a crowded and foul-smelling bar.

  Where I was wearing that whimsical, flowing dress, lightly beaded, a long flowing train, in a church—the one on the corner across from our house in Amber—despite the fact I wasn’t religious. I believed in the power of the universe, and some kind of higher being. But I didn’t think that higher being had a book of rules about how to act. Yet I liked churches. I liked the simple peace they offered when one didn’t get caught up of the politics of it all.

  But Craig had been against that.

  He wasn’t religious. He didn’t believe in a higher being. And he didn’t want to have to have meetings with the priest to get permission to be married in the church.

  “I’m not asking anyone’s permission for marrying the woman I love,” he growled.

  He didn’t ask my dad’s either.

  Not that we were old fashioned like that.

  But a tiny part of my new age persona had nurtured that little thought that my fiancé would want to formally ask my father.

  But I didn’t dwell on that. Because life happened, and it was very rarely the way we envisioned. Mostly it happened the exact opposite way.

  And in order to find joy in life, you had to find joy in moments that didn’t look at all like you’d thought they would.

  I stared at my eyes in the mirror.

  I wasn’t wearing much makeup. Craig didn’t like women who wore a lot of makeup. Which was good since I never really bothered with it anyway. My skin was clear, we were lucky, and we had good genes. It was a lot more tanned than Lucy’s because I didn’t go crazy on SPF like she did.

  She lectured me about the sun’s premature aging qualities. I didn’t think that slathering something with enough chemicals to block the rays of the sun was something that would be entirely beneficial. And I wasn’t worried about aging. I had a scattering of freckles as a result of my stance on SPF.

  My hair was long now, brushing down past my bra strap, it was bleached from the sun and in tousled curls down my back. I knew that I had that kind of look that didn’t need makeup, I was all about being natural, outwardly and inwardly.

  But it seemed I should’ve had some on because my eyes were shadowed with my lack of sleep, my face a little dull, my lips thin and red from me constantly biting them.

  I was nervous.

  My hand stayed over top of my stomach.

  It was normal to be nervous before a wedding, right? It wasn’t like I didn’t love Craig. I did. I really did.

  But...

  A knocking at the door stopped that dangerous thought in its tracks. I couldn’t be thinking about that on my freaking wedding day.

  It was probably Lucy coming to yell at me about how insane this was and what a terrible name Craig was and then attack me with a concealer brush. I would welcome any and all versions of my sister. Even if it was yelling. Especially if it was yelling. Because yelling was the loud and unmissable proof that she was here, she was alive, strong enough to be pissed, to be back to her old self.

  I’ll never forget that quiet that roared from her nearly gray body as she lay in that hospital bed, one that we thought she might not ever get up from.

  But she did.

  Though I felt like a part of me was left in that bed, in that hospital. A littl
e part of me died watching my sister almost leave this world. Died a slow death in the hours we waited to see if our life was going to be shattered. It was the day I was presented with the brutal reality that the world could take someone from me, from our family like that.

  I liked to hear her yell.

  And she’d done a lot of that hearing about the wedding.

  But she ultimately supported me.

  So she was likely either coming to tell me she had a car gassed up and ready to go should I feel the need to escape or coming to try and shove a veil on my head.

  Or maybe both.

  Whatever it was, it was my beautiful sister alive and vibrant, so I’d take it. And it was also something to push unwelcome thoughts that were not meant to have real estate in my brain.

  Especially not on my wedding day.

  But the opening and closing of the door didn’t push those thoughts away. It shoved them brutally into my reality.

  Heath stormed across the room, his eyes on every inch of me.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered, backing up. “You can’t be here, you need to leave.”

  I was terrified he’d keep advancing, he’d yank me into his arms and kiss me. I was terrified because I wanted him to do that.

  But he didn’t. He stopped in front of me, hands fisted at his sides, eyes flaring over every inch of me, expression painted with purely male hunger. Flames erupted over my body at that gaze.

  It was not the reaction I should be having to a man that was not my fiancé looking at me like that in my wedding dress.

  But my fiancé had never looked at me like that.

  No one had ever looked at me like that.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna leave,” Heath growled, his voice thick. A palpable pause as his eyes moved up and down in worship and in torture. “And you’re comin’ with me.”

  I gaped at him. “Are you insane? This is my wedding day. I’m not running away with you.”

  His stare melted me. And not in that nice, romance movie kind of way. No, in the lava explosion, flaying my skin from my body until I was liquefied bone at his feet type of way.

  “You’re not runnin’ away with me,” he agreed. He nodded to my dress. “That right there, that’s running. And you fuckin’ know it.”

  I swallowed ash. Ash that tasted as bitter and toxic as the truth. “No, Heath. This is me moving on. This is me marrying someone I love. This is healthy. This is right.”

  The words hurt me coming out. They scratched my throat with their sharp edges. Because they were true.

  I did love Craig. In a simple and easy way that didn’t make me feel like I was now. Like I always did with Heath. Like I was minutes from destruction.

  “If it’s right, if it’s healthy, then, baby, that’s not love,” Heath argued. “That’s a fucking fabrication. And you know it.”

  My palms began to sweat. I kept my hand tight on my stomach. On the flat and suddenly suffocating fabric.

  “You come with me right now, it’s not gonna be easy, or healthy, or right. But it’s what you need. It’s what you deserve,” Heath continued, his voice now a low rasp. He stepped forward and his hands framed my face. “You know that I’m right. I know you want to come. I can see it in your eyes.” He paused, letting the words sink into my bones, whittle away at my soul. “I can live without you, Sunshine,” he murmured, uttering the opposite of what all the heroes said in the movies, the books. “But I don’t want to.”

  I let the moment caress me for less than a second. I entertained the idea of doing exactly what he said. Half of the guests wouldn’t be surprised. The rest would almost expect it. Polly leaving a guy at the altar was almost as predictable as Polly marrying a guy she’d known less than two months—I’d known him for three weeks before getting engaged.

  But then it stopped me.

  Love.

  Love that was simple and healthy and right, love that was an anchor keeping me here and a barrier to whatever it was I had with Heath.

  “You need to leave,” I choked out, hating that my voice didn’t sound stronger.

  Because as it fell apart, it gave Heath threads to grasp onto. Yank at with his gaze. With the tightening of his hands at my neck. “You better rethink that choice, Polly,” he growled. “’Cause this is it. The moment in life you’ve got a chance to go beyond the ordinary. Beyond even the extraordinary.”

  He mocked me with words from the past.

  And they hit their mark.

  Too bad they didn’t change anything.

  He froze, his eyes the only thing moving, they were roving over every inch of me, like he was committing me to memory, like he was taking me in right before he walked out of my life forever.

  Which was good.

  That needed to happen.

  “You’re makin’ a mistake, Sunshine,” he murmured. “And I’m not gonna save you from it. Not gonna fight you when you chose to belong to another man. Even though we both know the parts you don’t want anyone to see belong to fucking me.”

  He didn’t give me the chance to speak, because his mouth crashed down on mine.

  He was kissing me.

  While I was in my wedding dress.

  Minutes away from marrying another man.

  A man I loved.

  Who was kind.

  Simple.

  Beautiful.

  And none of that mattered.

  Because the kiss wasn’t kind.

  Or simple.

  Or beautiful.

  How could a kiss like this be beautiful? It was impossible. Because it was full of truth. Full of goodbye.

  I shouldn’t have kissed him back. Shouldn’t have met his ferocity with some of my own, the kind that had lain dormant for years.

  No, I shouldn’t have done that.

  But I was me, and I spent my life doing things I shouldn’t do.

  So I kissed him back.

  Betrayed Craig.

  Myself.

  And then it was over.

  I was no longer in his arms, he had retreated fast across the room, rubbing the back of his hand along his mouth, as if he were rubbing away my kiss. Rubbing away all evidence of me.

  There was no tenderness in his eyes.

  No kindness.

  He wasn’t going to wish me well or tell me to be happy.

  But he was going to say something. He had to say something. In moments like these, the man always said something. One last plea. One last hurl of ugly beautiful promises.

  And I would’ve relented.

  Despite everything that I knew would end us, that I knew would make me hate myself in the future, if he’d opened his mouth and said one more thing, outstretched his hand, I would’ve taken it.

  But he didn’t.

  He glared at me with a mixture of love and hatred, the latter being the prevailing emotion, and then he turned and walked out.

  Without a word.

  Because this wasn’t a movie or a fairy tale.

  Woodenly, I turned back to the mirror. My eyes were no longer darkened underneath, my face flush in all the right places and my lips pink and swollen.

  My hair was mussed, but artfully so the flowers I’d woven into them didn’t look as purposeful as before.

  I smoothed my dress again, my hand flat on my stomach to calm the sickness swirling at the base of it.

  A single tear trailed down my cheek.

  I wiped it away with the back of my hand.

  And then I turned to go and marry another man.

  I promised myself I’d forget that moment. I’d love Craig with my whole heart. Whatever was left. And this moment with Heath would be buried among the many in the graveyard of our past together.

  But promises were broken much easier than they were made.

  Especially the ones I made to myself.

  Especially when they had anything to do with Heath.

  Chapter One

  Six Years Earlier

  “I think I might go!” I yelled at Harry over the
music.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like music so loud that you couldn’t talk unless you screamed in your date’s ears. Or crowded bars with sticky floors and water stained glasses. Or the patrons of that bar veering toward the unseemly at best and criminals at worst.

  No, all of that was completely fine with me. I wasn’t one to shy away from such things, and these were the only type of bars that didn’t card.

  But the music was bad.

  The company was only slightly better.

  Harry had seemed cool and hip when surrounded by the overwhelmingly normal crowd of our high school. He wore scuffed Doc Martins. Band tee shirts that pretty much no one had ever heard of. His hair was always artfully messed so it draped over his features effortlessly and beautifully. He carried around books of poetry and then also played music so loud from his iPod that you could hear it down the halls.

  He seemed such a contrast, complex and soulful. I’d obviously fell in total lust with him and damn near melted when he asked me to come to a ‘gig’ in L.A. with him and his ‘crew.’

  My parents knew exactly where I was because I was legally an adult, they couldn’t stop me. Lucy had told me to call her if I needed bail money and hooked pepper spray onto my keychain.

  It had been fun at first. His friends were all pseudo arty hipsters who took themselves a little seriously but were still fun to be around. But then he started slamming too many tequila shots and got sloppy and handsy and betrayed his true persona as a sleazy teenage boy after one thing.

  So I was leaving.

  I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to leave, since everyone we’d drove here with had dispersed in the bar and even if I found someone who had the keys to the van parked somewhere down the street, no one could drive.