“Who are you?” If I don’t answer the phone, the security company will send someone out.
Is my front door locked?
Is he alone?
Fuck.
He spreads his hands like he’s harmless. “I’m a friend.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I didn’t say I was your friend. I said I was a friend. I have friends. You don’t want to meet them, but I have them.”
He’d look like an out-of-shape grandpa if he were anywhere other than unexpected and unwelcome on my back porch.
“What do you want?”
“I told you. Quit digging up dirt on my favorite niece.”
This fucker’s related to Lila?
No wonder she doesn’t share much. I wouldn’t talk about him either. Except Beversdorf was supposedly her only living relative, so who is this? “Think you’ve got the wrong house.” And I think the cops can get here anytime now.
“Don’t worry. I bypassed your security system. They don’t know I’m here.”
Fucking damn it.
My blood pressure doesn’t need this.
“Leave,” I growl.
I don’t know who he is, but he’s too close to my kids. He might only be on the deck, but he’s in my sanctuary. He’s crossed a line. He needs to go. Now.
“Temper, temper, Mr. Wilson.” He clucks his tongue.
I go up on the balls of my feet, ready to toss him over the balcony. I’m riding the high of living on vitamin C, zinc, and elderberry since Emma’s first sneeze, along with all of the heightened awareness that comes from paranoia, and I don’t think anyone would blink at finding an intruder’s body in my backyard.
He studies me, and his face breaks out in a grin. “Son, you missed your calling. The Company could’ve used that spark.”
He’s probably armed, but I still stalk toward him. Don’t usually lift as much as he looks like he weighs, but I’m not too worried about handling him tonight.
“Stop,” a familiar, yet out-of-place, voice yells.
His nose twitches and his gaze slides to the stairs down to the yard. Someone’s pounding up them.
If I’m going to toss him, I have to do it fast and clean.
“Uncle Guido, I’m going to freaking kill you,” Lila pants, and suddenly she’s flinging herself between me and him, grabbing him by the collar, and pulling him out of the chair. “Out. Out. Do you want dead fish in your Christmas stocking? Or maybe arsenic in your Thanksgiving stuffing? What the hell is wrong with you? Get. Go. And do not call me again.”
“Lila,” he says, and that calm down, honey, there there tone makes my jaw clench so tight and my fist go back before I can stop it.
But I can’t swing, because Lila’s between us, jerking the old man around like he’s light as a feather. “I told you to go back to New York. That’s it. I’m done. I’m calling your ex-wife.”
“Whoa—”
“You crossed the line. And now you have to pay the consequences.”
“Lila, baby girl, you don’t—”
“We’re done, Uncle Guido. Done.”
“And who’s going to help you with you know what?” he growls.
The two of them stop at the edge of my deck, stare-down going to a level eleven. Levi and Davis had a level eleven stare-down on the bus once, back in the day, and Davis ended up with an eye infection over not blinking for so long. Wore an eye patch to a concert. Fans went nuts, and he used it the rest of that tour.
That’s how I know about eye infections.
From my boy band days, which never involved a guy who looks like he belongs in the mob showing up on my doorstep.
I shake my head. What the fuck am I doing?
Because it’s not calling the damn cops.
“Don’t, Tripp,” Lila says.
I haven’t even moved, and I have to pause to make sure she’s talking to me and not threatening Uncle Guido with the subtle hint that he shouldn’t trip and fall down the stairs.
Uncle Guido.
Who the fuck has an actual Uncle Guido?
She murmurs something too softly for me to hear, but whatever it is, it sends the old man clattering down the steps with a string of curse words that I better not hear my kids repeating.
“Gimme your phone,” I order.
Naturally, she plants herself at the top stair, blocking me from following the fucker, and also refusing to hand over her phone at the same time. “He’s harmless.”
“He bypassed my security and came here to tell me to leave you alone. You wanna explain that?” My heart is going to pound out of my chest.
And my kids.
My kids.
Jesus.
I spin on my heel and race through the house, up the stairs, and burst into Emma’s room.
She’s snoring softly in her crib, unaware of anything in the world beyond whatever’s making her eyelashes flutter like that. I triple-check that her window is locked, then dash into James’s room.
He, too, is snoring softly in his toddler bed—a firetruck bed—and he’s clutching a truck in one hand. His window’s locked too.
And I’m not sleeping a wink tonight.
Or possibly for the rest of my life.
I check the playroom. My bedroom. All the windows. The door to the third floor. The attic access. And then I plant myself at the top of the stairs.
I should hit that emergency panic button on the alarm panel in my bedroom.
The fact that I don’t suggests there’s something wrong with me.
Lila peeks up at me from around the banister at the bottom. “He’s gone.”
“He needs to be behind fuc—behind bars. What the he—heck are you doing here?”
“Interviewing team manager candidates. I flew in this morning after Denise emailed to tell me you’d called in sick again.”
And I thought my blood pressure couldn’t go any higher.
“Who. The fuck—” I whisper it as softly as I can, because god knows what my kids absorb in their sleep, even if they’ve already heard that word a hundred times courtesy of their uncles “—was that?”
She opens her mouth.
Goes red as a pickled beet.
And closes it again.
My phone buzzes two inches to my right, and I realize James propped it between the railings in the banister.
Awesome.
And I’ve missed seventy-three texts from the guys, all about the news covering three different manager prospects seen going into Fireballs headquarters this afternoon and the Fireballs mascot poll finalists leaking to the press before official nominations are closed.
“Never mind,” I tell Lila. “I’m calling Pakorski. You’re done. You’re just fucking done.”
“My mom was a CIA agent,” she whispers.
I stop with my thumb hovering over Pakorski’s number, and it randomly occurs to me that I don’t know what I did with the steak I took out onto the back deck.
Why the hell am I thinking about steak when Lila’s talking about her mom being in the CIA?
“Talk. More.”
“I was born in Prague and grew up mostly in Germany. We came back to the States every other year or so, and when I was twelve, they brought me for an extended stay. We went to a ball game, and then she and my dad left for a vacation. And never came back. The CIA thinks someone blew her cover. Uncle Guido—he’s the only family friend I have left. He gets…overprotective. And he…knows people. And things. But he’s harmless. At least when it comes to actually hurting people. I think. He’s just…bored and feels responsible for me.”