After he left the military, he’d decided to take advantage of the training he had received in the marines and opened his own security company. A couple of guys he’d served with wanted to come in as partners, and East Coast Security was born. Now, several years later, they had been successful beyond any of their expectations. He, Dominic Brady, and Gage Hyatt mainly ran the day-to-day operations while their employees handled the work on-site. Jason Danvers, the CEO of Danvers International and a client, had offered them space for their corporate offices, which was convenient since they were located in a high-rise in downtown Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. East Coast also handled personal security for Jason’s family. His wife and child were rarely without a security tail.
Mac had also made sure that Ava was covered. Since the bastard who raped her all those years ago was never arrested, Mac made it his business to make sure nothing ever happened to her again. After he’d been home from the marines for a while, they managed to resume some part of the friendship that they’d once had. A lot of their free time was spent together, but for Mac it hadn’t been nearly enough. Sometimes he thought he saw something that looked like romantic feelings when she was looking at him on the rare, unguarded occasion, but they were gone so fast he wasn’t sure if they were ever there. He had loved Ava for years . . . and he had no idea how she felt about him.
Watching over Ava so closely also had a downside. He knew entirely too much about her personal life. Every couple of months, someone new would spend the evening at her house and walk out the door looking rumpled but satisfied. It was never the same man twice, though. It tore him up to read those reports from her security tail. To know that someone else was touching the woman he loved while he was standing around on the sidelines. In those moments he would worry about invading her privacy and consider whether to continue monitoring her safety from afar, but he couldn’t take the chance that any harm would befall her ever again.
Of course, he couldn’t say that he’d been a saint either. He was a man and he had needs. He had slept with the occasional woman when the need was there. He wasn’t vain, but he knew that women found him attractive, and it was never a hardship to find a willing woman to spend a night with. He and Declan had found many of them during their tours of duty. It had just never meant any more to him than filling a physical need. Had Ava said the word, he would have stopped seeing other women and been faithful to only her without a single qualm about stepping into a serious relationship.
When Declan had surprised them all by falling in love with Ella Webber, the receptionist at Danvers, Mac suddenly took notice of the hollowness that he had felt for years. Suddenly, it had become almost unbearable. Then when Declan married and started a family almost overnight, it had forced Mac to make a difficult decision. He had to move on with his life. He wanted a wife and a family in the near future, and he had to accept that Ava might never be at the same point in her life.
There was no choice left but for him to start pulling away, inch by painful inch. He had asked Gwen Day, who worked at Danvers as well, out on a date. She was an attractive woman with long red hair and an outgoing personality. Although she didn’t make him weak in the knees, he was attracted to her, and she seemed to feel the same.
They had been dating for a couple of months now and his frequent dinners with Ava had all but stopped. He knew he couldn’t have both. There was no way he could move past her with someone else and still spend so much time alone with her. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He missed her so much he physically ached. But he couldn’t keep going on as he had been. He wasn’t doing either of them any favors. Maybe without him as a crutch, Ava would be able to move forward. Sometimes you had to take the training wheels off and see if you fell on your face or made it on your own. This was as much for her as for him. He just had to remember that.
Chapter Three
“Oh my God, what’s he done now?”
Ava scowled at her assistant and future sister-in-law, Emma Davis, as she settled into a seat in front of her desk. Ava had been a vice president at Danvers International since she and Brant sold their family business to Jason Danvers. Truthfully, she enjoyed the work as well as the challenge of something new.
Ava gave an unladylike snort at Emma’s question and resigned herself to playing twenty questions. There was no way her nosy assistant was going to let her off without explaining her shittier-than-usual mood. She gave her best innocent look and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t you have some work to do in your own office?”
Emma smirked back at her disgruntled expression, knowing by now that her bark was worse than her bite. Ava didn’t have many close friends, and with Mac now mostly avoiding her, Emma was pretty much it. Oh, Ava would never let the other woman know it, but she had grown to love her dearly since her engagement to her brother Brant. Between Emma and her other brother Declan’s wife, Ella, family occasions were no longer akin to a gathering at the morgue. Emma and Ella had breathed some much-needed life into the Stone family. “Nah, I’m on a break, so I have time.”
Rolling her eyes, Ava said, “A break, huh? You seem to have a lot of those.” Secretly, Ava knew why Brant had enjoyed arguing with Emma when she worked as his assistant before their engagement. It was just freaking fun. Emma was actually fabulous at her job and took a lot of the load from Ava’s shoulders.
“All right, enough of this stalling crap. What’s happening with Mac? I take it you’ve spoken to him again, since you’re acting like someone with a monthlong case of PMS.”
Putting all pretenses aside, Ava said, “Yeah, I ran into him and—her—in the parking garage yesterday.”
“Oh, shit! Did you, like . . . speak to the tramp?”
Ava smiled even though she felt the need to defend the woman who’d stolen her sorta man. “I don’t think she’s a tramp, Em. Mac wouldn’t be interested in anyone like that.”
Emma shook her head in disgust. “You’re totally missing the point here. This woman is messing with your guy. We don’t take that lightly. Until we get rid of her, she is the ‘tramp’ to us. So . . . how did it go?”
Ava tried to hide her pain as she relayed her run-in with Mac. “Well, he was walking her to the car when I saw them. He helped her inside and kissed her, and then she drove off. He saw me and we talked for a minute, that’s it.”
“Why do you put yourself through all this? If you leveled with Mac about how you really feel, he’d probably kick the tramp to the curb faster than you could say bye-bye. He loves you. According to your family, he’s never made a secret of that fact. And . . . you love him. Are you really going to let her have him?”
It all sounded so simple when Emma put it like that, but the reality seemed anything but simple. After years of being terrified of intimacy and feeling as if she wasn’t good enough for Mac, Ava had finally decided to do everything she could to overcome her fears. She had purchased every self-help book that she could find and was seriously considering going to a therapist. She was so very tired of being afraid all the time. Just when she was on the brink of confessing to Mac how screwed up she really was, and how she felt about him, he had pulled the rug out from under her. Apparently, they had both arrived at the same conclusion—that they needed to move forward. Only she had wanted to move toward him, but unfortunately, his moves had taken him away from her.
Since then, she had been reeling in shock. What now? He had been her reason for finally getting her shit together. He had waited for her all these years, and just when she thought they might be on the same page, he was gone. He’d freaking left her behind. And damn it, she couldn’t even blame him. “Em, it’s not that simple. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, Mac, please toss your new girlfriend aside. I’ve decided that although I’m too fucked-up to have a relationship with you myself, I can’t let anyone else have you. I’m going to need you to masturbate for life and remain true only to me’?”
Emma cocked an eyebrow, saying, “Well, that wasn’t quite w
hat I had in mind, other than the tossing of the new girlfriend. Seriously, though, grow a pair or whatever the female equivalent of that is and take Mac back.”
Ava reluctantly smiled. “So you’re going the tough love route today, huh? Given up coddling the poor, messed-up girl?” She saw the look of sympathy that Emma tried to hide as she stood, turning toward the door.
“You’re one of the strongest people I know, Ava. I have no idea what it’s been like for you all these years. But I know if you lose Mac, you’ll never move forward. He’s your white knight, but this time you’re going to have to charge to his rescue. You need to save both of you from living a life without ‘the one.’”
When the door closed behind Emma, Ava turned to stare out the window of her office. The beach town was bustling with the last of the summer crowd before cooler weather took over. She hardly noticed, though, as her friend’s words echoed through her head. Was she strong enough to finally show Mac how she felt? God, where did she even start? He wouldn’t agree to have a drink with her last night, so it was unlikely he was up for an impromptu date. Emma would probably laugh her ass off if she knew that at this moment, Ava was sitting at her desk searching “how to show a man that you love him.” Great, the most popular search result was just telling him. Fucking Google. Always making everything sound so simple.
* * *
When Ava walked into her apartment, she was hit with a wave of loneliness as she realized she was no closer to a solution than she had been earlier. Embarrassingly enough, she’d even resorted to stopping at the store on the way home and buying almost a hundred dollars’ worth of women’s magazines. If there was anything on the cover pertaining to men or love, she bought it. Walking into her kitchen, she pulled out the bottle of wine she had also purchased. You had to love today’s conveniences. You could now buy everything short of a car at Walgreens. While she was shopping, she’d even paused by the condom aisle as if trying to think positively that she might need them soon. Yeah . . . that really looked likely.
Uncorking the bottle, she filled a glass nearly to the brim and walked back to the couch with her overflowing bag. The first cover promised twenty sexual moves that would drive her man crazy. She laughed under her breath. She’d have to actually have a man for that to work. She had bought it, though, just in case she ever moved on to the next level. As she set it aside, the headline on the next one immediately caught her eyes. WANT TO CATCH HIS ATTENTION? UNLEASH YOUR INNER DAREDEVIL! Okay, maybe she could work with that. Flipping it open, she found the page number in the table of contents and went to the article. The picture showed a woman about her age holding a motorcycle helmet in one hand and a pair of skates in the other hand. She grabbed a notepad and a pen off the coffee table. Her brother Brant was an organizational freak and she was more like him than she cared to admit. How many women would buy a magazine for help with landing their man and take notes along the way? She was even tempted to highlight relevant paragraphs but suppressed the urge.
Hours and almost one bottle of wine later, she had filled her notepad with suggestions from the ten magazines she had spent the evening scouring. The overall advice was the same in all of them except for the one encouraging her to be a daredevil. Shit, it was either that or start dressing like a slut and making sexual advances toward Mac. One even suggested in a roundabout way that she invite her man to her house for dinner, wear a dress, and sit in front of him. Then after a few moments of small talk, she was to open her legs and start touching herself. According to the author of the article, it would have him eating out of the palm of her hand . . . or eating something for sure. She could feel herself blush furiously just thinking about doing that. Mac would probably have her committed. “Poor Ava’s finally snapped.”
She wanted Mac in every way, but damn it, she was essentially a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. She had never had a real sexual relationship with a man. Like most single women her age, she had needs and desires. Her vibrator took the place of a real man in her bed and she had learned to live with that. It was the safe way out. When she needed to take the edge off, she used it. Sometimes . . . most of the time it was Mac’s name that she called as she reached orgasm.
She didn’t know how to function outside of that, though. She could probably talk to her sister-in-law, Ella. She had confided that she had been a virgin when she met Declan. That was where their similarities stopped, though. Ella might have lived a sheltered life before she met Ava’s brother, but she hadn’t spent her life running from past trauma. She wasn’t scared of intimacy or afraid she’d freak out during sex and humiliate herself.
Part of her knew that Mac would take care of her and help her overcome her fears, but the other part didn’t want him to know how messed up she was. His opinion of her mattered. She wanted him to see her as strong and confident, not scared and insecure. God, what would he think if he found out that she had picked men up in bars for years, paying them to come home with her for a few hours, just to keep up the pretense that she was normal? She knew it sounded bad when she thought about it, but it seemed to make people look at her with less pity when they believed that she was dating. Normal, unattached women her age had sex, right? She wasn’t normal, and she wasn’t having sex, but it was all about perception. Throw people a few tidbits here and there and they drew their own conclusions. In this case, the assumptions were wrong.
Ava had spent years believing that one day she would cross some invisible line and she would be worthy of Mac. It was kind of like holding on to an outfit in a smaller size thinking you’ll lose weight and fit into it in the future. Well, fast-forward ten years and the damn outfit still didn’t fit and she was no closer to making it happen. That was where she was: still dreaming of the day that it all came together and she woke up normal, in love, and with Mac.
Looking down at the magazines spread over her couch and coffee table, she felt a wave of despair. This was it? All that was standing between her and losing Mac to another woman was a bunch of magazine articles? Self-help and advice for the romantically hopeless. Shit, short of the boob job, she planned to try some of the other suggestions. What did she have to lose? Mac was probably with Gwen tonight, maybe having sex. While she was sitting home alone, just like always. When had she given up? At what point had she stopped trying to get better and instead accepted that she was broken beyond repair? Had her friendship with Mac unwittingly become a replacement for a real relationship with him? While he was in the military, there hadn’t been any real pressure. Actually, it had made it easier for her to communicate with him knowing he was too far away to drop by unexpectedly. She saw him when he was home on leave, they wrote and talked on the phone, but she didn’t see him every day. When he finally came home for good, they just fell into the routine of spending most of their spare time together. They went for drinks, had dinner, hung out at each other’s apartments, and attended family events together. They were more of a couple then than many married people she knew. Things had been going so well that they were almost back to where they were before her attack, only now they were both very much adults.
Mac had never been one to verbalize his feelings, but he showed her in a million different ways that he cared for her. In the last year, though, it was as if his patience was wearing thin. His touches had gone from fleeting to lingering. A few months ago, before he had started dating Gwen, he’d kissed her. Not the usual brief peck either. There had been lips and tongue involved and . . . she’d freaked out on him. They’d been watching a movie at her place and she’d been curled up next to him, half-asleep. When she felt hands sliding through her hair, stroking her neck, she had nestled closer, instinctively seeking the comfort of his touch. When he had lowered his mouth to hers, she had allowed it, more curious than anything. But things had quickly escalated. She had found herself returning his kiss, tangling her tongue with his. Desire raced through her until he pulled her closer, embracing her solidly against his hard chest. Then she’d panicked. She couldn’t breathe; she had to get away. So
she had jumped from his arms and crossed to the other side of the room to put some distance between them.
Things had gotten awkward after that. He had apologized that night and she had thought things were okay until he started pulling away. Day by day, she lost him gradually. Until finally he was formally dating someone else right in front of her for the first time since they were teenagers. Oh, she knew that Mac had sex; she wasn’t that naive. But he didn’t have relationships, and she never saw him out on a regular date. Ava always came first with him, but no longer. Now Gwen was the priority and she felt a very distant second, if even that. He gave up on her that night just as plainly as if he had said it aloud. He was no longer content to wait around; he wanted more out of life. He wanted the fairy tale. He wasn’t going to be satisfied with half measures; it was going to take more to get him back. And scariest of all, he wasn’t coming back to a friends-with-no-benefits relationship. In order to get Mac, she would have to become part of his fairy tale. She would have to put the ugliness of her past behind her and become his freaking Cinderella.
She put the notes that she had made from the magazines in her purse. “Okay, Cosmo, let’s give it our best shot.”
Chapter Four
Ava looked at herself in the full-length mirror and cringed. She wasn’t used to going to work and showing this much skin. The one thing all the magazines had agreed on was dressing more provocative and sexy. She usually just wore pantsuits, and as she hadn’t been shopping since putting her plan in place, she was wearing the same today, with one change. She had unbuttoned her blouse far enough to take her from all-business to a mix of business and pleasure. She had also dug through her vanity drawers until she’d found the tube of red lipstick that she had received free with her last makeup purchase. Instead of wearing her hair up, she left it hanging in loose waves around her shoulders—another suggestion from Cosmo. She planned to have Emma go to the mall with her at lunch to buy some less conservative clothing. She needed a new look for the next item on her agenda, “unleashing her inner daredevil.” She couldn’t very well do that in plain black slacks. Her last addition to today’s outfit was a pair of high-heeled black sandals. She preferred her lower-heeled flats, but apparently that wasn’t sexy enough.