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Monk nodded.
Saylor walked her fingers lower, to the next—a blue-beaded rosary she’d seen before, but didn’t remember the silver cross that hung from it.
Last was the thick platinum chain from which hung a simple wedding ring that he’d told her had belonged to his mother.
The Aztec sun tattoo covering his right pec was one her brother, Razor, had too. It symbolized a belief in an afterlife. The ink continued in a sleeve of intricate symbols that abruptly ended at Monk’s wrist. His other pec and shoulder were bare, as was his back, but the same ink that covered his right forearm, covered his left.
Monk eased the shirt off his arms and shoulders, revealing his thick, dark chest hair that narrowed as it trailed down his stomach.
When Saylor unfastened the heavy copper buckle on his jeans, Monk grasped her small wrist in his big hand, and stopped her.
“Wait, Saylor. We need to talk.”
Talk? If there was anything Monk didn’t do, it was talk. “Okay,” she said, backing up to sit on the end of the bed.
PART I
1
Two Augusts Ago
“Okay, you two,” Saylor said to her brother and his girlfriend, Ava, “The girls are tired, so I’m taking them home—”
“What?” Razor asked, following her line of sight.
“Who is that?”
“That’s Monk. He’s hangin’ with us for a few days.”
“Someone you work with?”
Razor nodded.
“He’s kinda hot.”
“He doesn’t talk very much,” Ava told her. “I think I’ve heard him say a total of three words.”
“Is that why you call him Monk?”
Razor nodded a second time.
“I can live with that, as long as he’s not celibate too.”
Her brother raised an eyebrow, which she certainly would’ve commented on if the girlfriend wasn’t with him. After all, this was the first time Saylor had met her. Not that she was really his girlfriend. Her brother was a former CIA agent, current partner in a private security and intelligence firm, and Ava was an asset he needed to protect. Although judging from the PDA, it had already turned into a lot more than that.
“Anyway, we’re goin’ home. Invite me back over sometime to meet the monk.” She turned around to look for her girls and saw both had gotten back into the ocean’s freezing water. Off the coast of Oregon, the water’s temp rarely got above sixty degrees even in the height of summer.
“What the heck,” she muttered, running over to join them. They’d end up putting their ice-cold feet on her anyway, so she might as well lower her body temperature to theirs.
Her two girls, Sierra and Savannah, looked like twins, but they were actually a year apart, like Saylor and Razor were. Savannah, her six-year-old, was almost taller than her older sister, and it drove her seven-year-old crazy.
Both were blonde, blue-eyed towheads, like their father had been when he was a little boy. Saylor had dark brown hair that looked almost black, and dark eyes. No one ever asked if they were her daughters. Maybe they just assumed she was the babysitter—until one of them called her Mama.
As she tiptoed into the water, Saylor looked over her shoulder and saw the man her brother called Monk standing where he had been before.
The fact that he didn’t talk much didn’t bother her at all. She wasn’t interested in him for conversation, at least from what she could see from a distance. And she definitely wasn’t interested in a relationship. She’d done that, failed miserably, and did her best to raise the two little girls who were a product of that relationship, all on her own. The liar-cheater-beater bastard, as she called him in her head, hadn’t been in any of their lives for almost five years, and if he ever showed up again, a restraining order would keep him at least one hundred yards away from her. That is, if he ever got out of the white-collar prison her brother had made sure he got locked away in.
His lying and cheating had been going on for years, Saylor found out later. He didn’t lie only to her; he’d swindled a lot of people in the community out of a great deal of money via a Ponzi scheme similar to Bernie Madoff’s.
