Layla

“Don’t worry, man, we’ll help when the time comes,” DB said quietly. “If someone makes a mistake or comes into work late, I’ll write their names down on a schedule for the house. We’ll have it done in no time.”

I burst out laughing at the prospect of seeing the guys having to paint the walls, strip the floors, or knock the tiles off in the bathrooms.

That laugh was quickly cut off when Raoul came in with a concerned look on his face.

“Yo, did you know your woman’s making grilled cheese with her forehead? Were we meant to sponsor her for charity or something?”

I don’t know what I expected to find, but her lying face down on her desk, the cheese acting like a cushion for her forehead, definitely wasn’t it.

Crouching down next to her, I kept my voice soft in case she had a headache. “Layla?”

“I hit it again.”

“Actually,” a voice said from the door, “I hit it accidentally when I opened the door. I feel awful, but she won’t let me swap out the cheese for ice.”

“S’too hard,” she mumbled, sliding her head to the side, not losing contact with the cheese, to look at both of us with one eye open. “Mark, meet Rockie. Rockie, this is Mark.”

“Uh, yeah, sweetness, we’ve met,” Rockie pointed out.

Glancing over my shoulder, I grinned at the guy who looked like he’d beaten up a puppy. He was still holding a baggie of melting ice in his hand.

“Baby, that ice is mostly water now, which will be cold and still soft. Why don’t we swap it out for the cheese?” Looking down at the mangled block, I saw what Raoul was talking about. It’d begun to squish, and chunks were breaking away from it thanks to her body heat. “We can put the cheese back in the fridge until it’s cold again.”

“What if people eat my head cheese?”

“Gross,” Rockie shuddered. “That just sounds wrong, girl.”

I didn’t disagree with him, but in the interest of getting her head sorted out as a priority, I was willing to ignore it. “Then we’ll get you more cheese if that’s what’s helping you most.”

There was a dramatic sigh, followed by, “Aww, that’s so sweet!” from Rockie.

“Okay, but I have to be quick. I’ve got a client in twenty minutes, so I need to give my ass a shake and get over it already.”

This was Layla in a nutshell. I knew the Townsends well, and they may come across as a fun, joy, and laughter family who took nothing seriously, but once you scratched the surface, you’d find out differently.

Given what they’d gone through, they were tough and resilient, but they preferred to face challenges while retaining their senses of humor because it made it more tolerable. Every person was different, but I couldn’t say their approach was wrong.

They also all had their own sad stories and tales of woe—who didn’t—but they managed to get through life without their pasts taking over their present.

But Layla, well, if I had to describe her personality, she was soft, then tough, then sweet, then soft, then tough again. Her head had to be killing her, but she was willing to wallow in it for all of twenty more minutes before she kicked her ass into getting over it and moved on with her day.

She had to be exhausted already after catching up with Monday’s missed patients yesterday, but I knew for a fact she hadn’t done it for the money. No, she’d always wanted to help people in any way she could, even going so far as to set up a charity at the age of thirteen to help kids who’d lost their parents. That’s why Raoul had asked if we were meant to be sponsoring her today.

I remember her running a marathon—even though she hated running—when she was sixteen. She’d trained for months with her brothers, just so she could complete the 5K run. It wasn’t about the timing, it was about completing it, and when she got home, she’d had to study for her exams the next day. Layla had been exhausted for them, but it’d been important to her not to let the kids down.

“Oh, wait, you’re Mark,” Rockie said as he helped her swap out the iced water for the cheese.

“I’m fairly sure we’ve spoken before,” I pointed out dryly. “I helped you carry your stuff to your car last week, and you were telling me about a show you were doing in Vegas over the weekend and asked my opinion on what songs you should sing.”

He winked at me. “Thanks for the help. They loved the choices, by the way.”

“Any time.”

“Anyway, what I meant was, I heard a cool story about you.” I tensed. There were quite a few ‘cool stories’ about me that he could have heard. It just depended on how bad-cool they were. “Something to do with a snake.”

“He doesn’t like to be reminded of that,” Layla mumbled. “I wouldn’t either. From what I saw when they showed me the photos, it was the biggest rattlesnake in the history of snakes.”

That probably wasn’t true, but it wasn’t a small one, that’s for sure. During the issues the Townsends—and my family—had gone through, someone had put an enormous rattlesnake in a car I’d been about to drive. Fortunately, I’d encountered it before I’d driven it, otherwise, I likely would have crashed. Unfortunately, the way I’d discovered it had been by it biting me on the ass.