Lift You Up (Rivers Brothers 1)

It's never just the work itself. And naive me had maybe thought it was when I went into it.

It was the work.

Then the emails, phone calls, messages, website updating, training, taxes.

It was never-ending most days.

It never stopped.

But sometimes it paused just long enough that I could cut out, go back into my apartment, sit with Padfoot and eat a meal out of takeaway containers for a whole hour before bed until I had to get up again to start another day.

I had just cut the lights and gotten into bed when the pounding started at the door.

Not the front door, the office door.

But the side one, my apartment. The door where only people who were related to me in some way or another knew was there.

Curiosity pulled me out of bed, my feet once again meeting the cold hardwood floor.

It wasn't until I heard screaming that panic washed over me.

I heard her screaming.

Maybe I had never heard her voice make that sound before, but I would know it anywhere.

Savea.

Savea was connected to me in the most ridiculous of ways. My sister was married to a man whose brother was married to a woman whose sister was best friends with Savea. A convoluted connection, sure, but it meant she was part of my inner circle, was at Sunday dinners, came to holidays, was randomly around whenever I spent time around my family.

She'd named my dog, for fuck's sake.

That said, she'd never been to my place. We'd never been around each other without our friends or families involved.

Which was both good and a damn shame.

Good because getting in any way involved with the best friend of a family member was certainly a recipe for disaster. But a damn shame because, well, she was a great woman.

Sweet, funny, gorgeous.

She was short and slight, but with an ass that a man could only dream about. She had this insane amount of long black hair that seemed capable of catching the light even in dark rooms, that looked like it would feel like silk if you were lucky enough to run your fingers through it. Her face was round with big, expressive, dark eyes with an impressive amount of lashes, a somewhat oversized mouth that could - in rare moments - stretch into a smile that could draw anyone in the room toward her.

Yeah, definitely gorgeous.

But this was not the time to be thinking of any of that, not with her on the other side of my door screaming like her life depended on me answering.

My feet flew across my apartment, my hands working the locks free, pulling the door open to find her sopping wet, shaking, and scared out of her mind.

I didn't get a chance to move outside until after I heard the water splattering down on the shower's tile floor, going out, looking around, seeing nothing. Not that I expected to after so long.

Upset, fearful women were not an unusual occurrence in my line of work.

When you dealt in private security, you handled a lot of rich assholes with extra-marital girlfriends who went off the deep end and started trashing their cars and shit, or stars in the area for a summer vacation, and, of course, women being stalked, being threatened by exes, having their lives pulled apart because some jackass thought they had rights to be in it, by any means necessary.

I had a woman in my office face buried in her hands weekly. I bought tissues at Costco for this very reason.

And each time it sucked.

I couldn't look at these women and not think of my sister, of how I would skin a bastard for putting her through this, how any one of my brothers would do the same.

But it sucked in a detached, impersonal, professional way. In a way where I had to gently lead them back to the problem at hand, demand they give me more details, allow me to find a way to protect them, possibly handle the situation if the police couldn't - or wouldn't - get involved.

It was something different entirely when it was someone I knew, someone I cared about in a distant sort of way. I mean, she wasn't like a sister to me or even a close friend, but I knew her. I didn't like seeing her shaking and crying.

And I damn sure didn't like the idea of some assholes chasing her around the less desirable side of Navesink Bank in the middle of the night during an epic rainstorm like some noir from the fifties.

Moving into the kitchen, I set the machine to brew as the shower cut off.

My mind - tired, worried, lacking its usual focus - drifted down the hall slightly, behind the door, into a room full of puffy clouds of hot air thanks to the fact that the exhaust fan needed to be fixed. Yet another task on the to-do list that I likely wouldn't get around to for a while. Savea was likely wrapping one of the brown towel blankets around her slight frame, tucking the edge near the corner of her breast, her long black hair hanging down around her shoulders, a drop of water slipping down the column of her neck, disappearing between her breasts...