Chapter 26: Chapter 26

CANNON

“This is you starting a normal life with your woman and your kids beside you. Enjoy you fucking retirement Asher don’t whine at everything like Jason does”

Jason was a whiny pussy, everyone knew that and although I had sworn, I wouldn’t fall in that category, shit around me was making no fucking sense.

“I hate people, you fucking know that”

“Don’t we all? But for the first time, soldier, shit ain’t about you only. They have to lead normal lives. Blend in with people if you want them to survive from the fucker that’s after them”

Berkely’s translation for, the limp dick who thought he would survive if he tried to take me on.

Lucas Hawkins wasn’t a shark in my world, he was a mere tad pole growing his skin and I would kill him any day if he tried to come close to me and my family.

“I’ll kill him before he does so”, I roared my grip on the phone hard enough to break it.

“Hey that’s our job. Your job is to be there for them, now for safety precautions lose the number Cannon”

“How sure are we the neighbors ain’t a threat?”

“Have they attacked?”

“No”

“Then you have your answer”

“I’m not holding hands and going to fucking barbeques with them just so you know”

He laughed before he hung up and I groaned,

“Fuck me”

“Fuck me”

Someone repeated and I held onto the ladder glancing at the doe eyed kid who peered at me with a grin.

“No, Connor”

Shit. Nicole was going to skin me.

Making sure the camera was angled on the backyard, I descended down the ladder, Connor waiting for me at the bottom of it.

“Fuck me”

He repeated and I knelt down holding his tiny shoulders in place.

“What did mommy say?”

“We should never say bad words”

“And if we do?”

“We owe money to the swear jar”

A jar she’d found on one of my counters the other day and declared it a swear jar.

How the fuck was it my fault anyway when I’m the one who had found her grinding her pussy against my shirt. And I had to say my fucking restraint hanged by a thread at that point in time.

I was a man after all and her pussy had been my undoing but I wasn’t going to fuck her because the shit she’d done to me burnt raw in my heart and let’s just say fucking say I wanted her but I wasn’t a god damn fool to worship her like I had done before.

And in my moment of teasing, I’d plainly said something that would bother her like how I was bothered seeing her grind to my shirt with a moan.

“If you wanted my cock to fill that tight pussy of yours you could have just asked”

Then Jr had shown up and he had been repeating the words pussy and cock two days straight prompting the swear jar.

The swear jar that was going to render me bankrupt.

“Do you want mommy to hear you say bad words? Do you want to owe the swear jar?”

He seemed lost in thought before his eyes lay on me for a minute.

“You said bad words. You owe the swear jar!”

Smart ass. He had said it too.

Whipping my wallet from my pocket, I roamed through it grunting that I had hundred dollar bills in it and not a fucking twenty or five.

“Shit, I got only a hundred in here kid”

Mother fucker. Connor gasped and I scrubbed a hand over my face.

“Shit”

“Hey no repeating what you hear from me okay? Here”

I placed the hundred-dollar bill on his tiny hand and he looked at me with a scowl.

“That’s one. You said a bad word twice”

“That’s fucking hundred. There are five twenties in it”

“You said it again!”

As I said fucking bankrupt. I pulled two bills from my wallet with a grunt placing both of them in his hands.

All that money going to a fucking swear jar and what would Nicole do with it? Buy them more fucking toys.

Connor grinned as he ran inside the house and my heart fucking swelled.

I was three hundred dollars poorer but I still had two kids relying on me to be there for them. Name any another good feeling that came with this.

I had barely walked to the pool to install the net when an angry Nicole stormed to the patio with damn leggings.

The other day it had been mom jeans. Mom jeans that had accentuated her heart shaped ass so well the only thought flinging across my mind during dinner was to fuck it all to hell and fuck her raw on the kitchen counter.

And now? She was storming towards me with those Amazon leggings that were going to e the death of the male population as we knew it.

Whoever designed them knew what he was fucking doing because forget the swell of her hips, if she as much as turned around, I would be groveling just to stick my face between her…

“Three hundred dollars? Callan that’s too much for a kid”

“You came up with the swear jar, Nicole. Not me”

“Yes! It’s a tactic to punish them to behave”

I walked ahead prying my eyes off her damn leggings. If I forgot she wasn’t wearing them on, maybe I would even forget about wishing her to fucking turn around so I would look at her ass.

Fuck then the thought of her naked would stir in my mind and my dick would be tenting before her faster than she would scold me about swear jars and all that shit.

“A tactic that’s meant to obviously punish me for fuck’s sake”

“Says the man handing hundred dollar bills all willy nilly”

She stood in front of me and my gaze lingered a fraction of a second at her bare face. She looked so fucking beautiful with those eyes that matched Connor’s and with a temper like that of Jr.

My eyes skidded down her sleeveless arms. The bruises were healing on nicely but I couldn’t help but fume at them.

“You never told me the story behind them”

Her shoulders closed in on themselves. Like they always did, every time I fucking brought up anything relating to abuse.

It was traumatizing for her and I seriously got her. I had seen it in my mother too but still I wanted her to tell me.

To tell me every thing that sandy haired bastard had done to her and Jr.

Because Jr was like her. A carbon copy of her emotions if I was being fucking honest.

“Callan I-I told you; I don’t want to talk about it”

“Why?”

Her head drooped as she tried facing away from me.

“Because I know you. Because when I tell you everything that happened, you’ll leave us and go for him and the boys can’t take it. You’ve been here for them unlike the man they thought was their father and—”

“I want to kill him but I can’t leave them without their father. They are stuck with their old man from now on”, I joked, Nicole laughed.

A light chuckle that warmed the air around us but that fucking hair sizzled the minute the sound of the door bell roared inside the house.

Nicole turned to me with a horror-stricken face,

“The boys”

“Get them. Stay low, I’ll handle it”

And before she ran inside the house, I couldn’t forget the face she gave me. A face full of fucking trepidation I could almost taste it.

The face of ‘what if Lucas found us?’

Holstering the gun at the back of my jeans, I scoured through the feeds from my tablet.

The guy on my porch…well four words. Not a fucking mercenary.

With a checkered sweat shirt, trousers that looked like he was some clerk of the sort, his glasses rendered eyes gazed at the camera and he fucking waved.

I would have opened the door and threatened him with a bullet between his eyes if he didn’t leave but then a kid holding a balloon stood next to him waved at the camera too.

And suddenly I wanted what they had.

I wanted my fucking kids to play with other fucking kids. I wanted them to live normal fucking lives.

Placing the tablet down, I walked to the main door very much aware that Nicole and the kids must have been hiding in the panic room by now.

I didn’t like taking chances. If something happened, case scenario people knocking on our door out of the blue, she knew where the guns were and she knew where the hiding spots were.

The smell of paper and ink hit my nostrils first thing I opened the door.

“Howdy, neighbor”, the knock off Clark Kent stretched his hand towards and I eyed it abating the fact he had started a conversation with howdy.

The boy in his hand held onto his balloon gazing at me like one of those stupid clowns in haunted houses.

I didn’t say shit and he retreated his hand with a not so ashamed grin.

“Heard from the other folks that you guys moved in. I’m William Duncan by the way folks around here call me Billy”

If he said folks one more time, I’d plunge a bullet in him and end the dreadful conversation.

“Good to know. The name’s Callan”

“Well Callan, it’s a great pleasure having you join our neighborhood. We are having a barbeque tomorrow at the Arkinson’s house and we would very much like you and your wife to join us”

My ears peaked up.

“Wife?”

He readjusted his glasses spooked by the glare I sent in his direction.

“Greg and I heard the boys inside playing. We assumed they have a mother…your wife. Forgive me if I thought—”

“What time is it?”

“The barbeque? Five, the Arkinson live just by the-“

“I got it. We’ll be there”

And I shut the door, walking towards the edge of the grand staircase. Knocking in morse code, like we had practiced, Nicole opened the door leaving the room with my boys in her hands.

“Well? Who was it?”

“The neighbors. We are going to a fucking barbeque tomorrow”

“Mommy, he said a bad word”, Jr pointed.

Nicole scowled.

And this was my fucking life from now on.