Page 69 of Acceptance
Griffin’s Beach
Undertaker
“No, I won’t feel sorry for myself. I’m going to fix this,” Undertaker says after an hour of staring at the ceiling.
He pulls himself up off the bed and walks into the main room. Brock and Grayson—someone must’ve called him to join the party—type furiously on their laptops at one of the tables. It would almost be comical if they weren’t currently trying to track down a serial killer.
“Got anything?” he asks, his mind jumping between Jamie and Nina.
He wants to find the man who did this to his best friend’s sister and the first woman Undertaker ever loved, but the guiltabout how he’s made Jamie feels overwhelms him. Jamie means everything to him, but he made her feel less than that.
Colt shakes his head and sighs. “Not quite. It took a while to get into the hotel cameras. We’ve shifted from trying to find Nina to see who grabbed Marnie. What happened when you got Jamie?”
Chuckling, he realizes he was too concerned with his girl to tell the rest of them about the two men trying to break into Marnie’s apartment.
“There were two guys trying to break down the door. One got away, and I killed the other one. He had no information. I guess there’s this, like, underground temp agency sort of thing for criminals.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Grayson says. “It’s a network of for-hire guys established by men who wanted a way to stay behind the scenes.”
Colt juts out his chin. “What?”
“It’s actually pretty smart of them. Not great for the rest of us. The men are hired and given a target. No additional information is given other than what’s needed, so if they get caught, it can’t get traced back to the one hiring them. Once the job is completed, payment is received via wire transfer from an offshore account that’s impossible to trace. We’re talking everything from petty crimes to murder.”
“That’s basically what the guy said. Didn’t know who hired him, and he had no idea why the guy wanted Marnie. He was useless, so I snapped his neck.”
Pointing at the screen, Brock nods for them to take a look. “I got a shot of the guy who attacked Marnie.”
Undertaker leans down and glares. “That’s the guy that got away at the apartment.”
“Do we know anything about him?” Colt asks.
“Working on it. If he’s got a record, we’ll find it.”
“What, uh, room did Jamie get put in?” Undertaker asks.
The President shakes his head. “She said she doesn’t want to talk to you, man. I don’t know what’s going on, but she was… I’ve seen the look she had before. And it’s not a good look.”
“What look?”
“Defeat and resignation. I’ve seen it twice with Lex, and both times, she left my ass.”
“But you’re still married to her.”
Brock snorts while Grayson grimaces. “Yeah, but she disappeared for, like, a year the first time. She filed for divorce the second time.”
“How’d you get her back?”
Staring at the blond man with his long hair tied back, Undertaker waits with bated breath. If Colt could win Lex over not only once, but twice, maybe there’s a secret he can share. Something to help him win Jamie back.
“We have decades of history that starts in childhood. It’s hard to wipe away that type of foundation, but it took a lot. The way I screwed up… Let’s just say I’m fucking lucky she found a way to forgive me. I had to take a lot of ownership of shit, and then I had to put in the work to show I could be different.”
The underlying insinuation doesn’t go unnoticed by Undertaker, and it pisses him off. It implies he and Jamie have a relationship built on a foundation of sand on the beach before a tidal wave knocks it down compared to what Colt and Lex have. “Which apartment?”
“Upstairs, fourth on the right.”
Racing up the stairs, he takes a deep breath and lifts his fist to knock. He freezes when he hears crying on the other side, and it tugs at his heart. Rather than knock, he just walks in, happy she didn’t lock him out, and he climbs into bed to hold Jamie.
The moment he touches her, she jumps up and moves away from the bed. “Don’t.”
