Page 5 of Take The Risk

​“MOM!”

​“I’m coming!” I hollered back, snapping back into myself. On my own I may be a mess, but as a mom, I was all kinds of put together. “Thank you again, officers.”

​“What’s taking so—” Lachlan appeared in the doorway before I made it back inside, his indignance transforming into suspicion. “I’m not sharing my pizza.” He crossed his arms over his chest, taking in the four men.

​I closed my eyes. Only my kid.

​He wasn’t done there. “Strangers aren’t allowed to come into the house,” he repeated the rule I’d drilled into him.

​Behind me, the men snickered as Alex prodded, “What if they have the pizza?”

​“Then they leave it and themselves at the door,” Lachlan declared with a firm nod. Sizing them up, he frowned at his aunt. “Where’s the pizza?!”

​“You’re being rude!” I admonished Lachlan, smiling bashfully. My heart started to hammer, making my vision blurry. Sometimes being me really sucked. “Sorry, gentlemen. Thank you again for your assistance, but we should—”

​“By all means,” Wade said, his eyes crinkling. “We can’t have our citizens starving. You all have a good night.”

​“Thank you,” I repeated, ushering Lachlan back in the door, knowing Alex would be right behind me.

​With the door firmly closed and Lachlan reassured pizza was the most urgent priority for us, he took off back upstairs.

​Leaning heavily against the door, I sank down, knowing my knees wouldn’t hold me much longer.

​“Well, I may have to break a few laws on my way out of town if that was a sample of the police—ah, hell.” Alex sank down beside me, pulling my head into her lap. She started to play with my hair while everything crashed over me, reciting ancient Egyptian facts in a well-practiced move. Sadly, she’d had a lot of practice since high school.

​By the time the world wasn’t spinning, the pizza came.

​Later that night, I got a text from her telling me she’d been pulled over for speeding before she’d hit the town line. Oh, and that sample of the police was just as tasty as the one we’d been served earlier.

Chapter 3

​“Why do I have to go to church?” Lachlan stood with his legs braced apart on the well manicured lawn.

​Pinching the bridge of my nose, I leveled a look at him. “Because it’s a good place to learn about God. It’s important to believe in something bigger than us, buddy.” I continued the argument that had started over breakfast when I told him to change into nicer clothes. He demanded proof God existed before he got out of his “Sunday comfies” and into impress-people clothes.

​My explanation about how faith was a kind of proof and the universe is so much bigger than us, so it makes sense something, or someone, bigger than us made it, fell on deaf ears.

​He left with a disgruntled look. I’d thought he was changing until he came back down, my phone in his hand with a smug “Aunt Alex wants to talk to you.”

​By the time I was done with my best friend’s and my son’s antics, I was reminding myself every minute on the minute that “Thou shalt not kill.”

​It was a mantra I’d all but tattooed on my tongue this past week.

​As you can expect, the first thing I did Monday was call my divorce lawyer.

​I would never know how he did it, but not two hours later, I had a new court order ordering Jeremy to have court-supervised visits. I was also now the proud owner of some delightful photos of Jeremy with his arm twisted behind his back, his black hair wild, and his face maroon with rage, being led from the courtroom. Well, those I got from Abby. The sly shutterbug.

Abby was almost as devious as her sister, and Alex was the crowned queen of deviousness. I’ll never know how she managed to get those photos when there was a camera ban in court, and I didn’t want to. If I weren’t worried about Lachlan seeing them, those suckers would have been framed and on my desk.

​I should have known better than to think my day was going to continue its upward trajectory.

​My publisher called just as I’d finished lunch, kicking off my new mantra.

​Apparently, an anonymous source on some website claimed to know who the real P.J. Alexander was. Not only that, they’d linked P.J. Alexander, my romance pen name, to A.J. Lane, the pen name I used for my romantasy books. Something that had never been linked before, letting us know that whoever was making these claims might be closer to me than I realized. They were auctioning off the information to the highest bidder. I knew it wasn’t long before the online sleuths would be hot on my tail.

​My publisher’s investigators were on it, but my agent and I had a pretty good idea who was behind it.

​I made another call to my lawyer, and the post was deleted, confirming my suspicions, but the damage was done.