Chapter One

 

Said in a calm tone of voice, the words would still have been hurtful and caused Emma a good deal of anger. Said by Christopher, the man who had, on previous occasions, professed his love, admiration, and respect for her and whom she had moved in with almost a year earlier the words would have been considerably worse.

Even in private.

But the words weren't said in private and they weren't said calmly. They were shouted almost in her face as he leapt to his feet from his chair, turned and, red-faced, fairly screamed them out with such volume everyone in the room turned in shock.

The words were bad enough. Publicly humiliating her was unforgivable. And as he angrily sat back down and focused his attention on the video game again she knew their relationship had come to an abrupt end. She had been tolerating his growing fixation on his stupid video game, his being fired from his job, in no small part because he was missing too much time so he could stay home and play video games, and his lack of effort at finding another.

After all, she made decent money, so what was the big deal?

Other women, especially her age, might have teared up and run away. But Teagan had long been a very stolid, confident, tough-minded girl who took shit from no one. Her mind spun like a computer as she ran through all the reasons why Christopher should now be placed permanently into that group in her mind she labeled 'losers' and abandoned.

There were two dozen people in the room, several of them her female friends. They knew that look, the narrowed eyes, the set jaw, and only shook their heads as she turned and walked calmly across the room, down the hall, and out the door.

Hannah caught up with her as she started the car.

"Hey, Lon, are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm always okay, Hannah. Don't worry about it."

"He's just been drinking and... well..."

"He's a loser," she said. "I'll see you later. I have stuff to do tonight."

Hannah didn't ask what, but probably guessed as she backed away. Emma pulled away from the curb and headed home. Christopher could call an Uber to get home if he had the money for it.

She used voice recognition to call her brother Sean.

"Hey," he said. "What's up?"

"I need you and your empty pickup at my place as soon as possible."

"Huh? Why?"

"I'm moving. And I'd just as soon be gone by the time Christopher gets home."

"On my way. I'll grab Shane."

"I can call him."

"I don't like you calling anyone while you're driving."

"It's voice calls! My phone is in my jacket!"

"Even so."

He hung up and she shook her head and gave a mental shrug. Her brothers treated her like a baby sister in all things. Which could be annoying as hell, but sometimes was useful enough to regret those times she'd punched them in the diaphragm to knock the wind out of them and leave them gasping on the floor.

She hadn't done that lately, of course. That had been something she'd done through high school while taking mixed martial arts lessons. And she'd only done it a few times. She was normally a very calm person. Overly calm, some suggested.

She was not one to throw a screaming fit or burst into tears as others might have back at the party. Nope. She would go home, pack, and get out. By the time Christopher got home she wanted nothing of her clothes, pictures, or furniture, not to mention electronics, to be left.

Sean and Shane - twins - had let themselves into her apartment with their spare key and were already loading the eight-five inch 4K flat screen into the rear of Sean's big four-door pickup as she pulled up. She hadn't actually intended to take that, though it was hers, a present from her father. Oh, well.

"Hey," Sean said. "So, what decided you to finally dump that asshole?"

"His increasing drinking and his obsession with video games."

"He's always been a geek."

"No, I'm a geek. He's a nerd. And a loser."

She went upstairs and they followed. She packed her clothes into what suitcases they had while Sean and Shane loaded up a dolly they'd brought with things like the microwave, stereo, PC, and amps. All the stuff she'd brought with her when she moved into the apartment with Christopher as he returned from graduating from college.

Emma had not attended college and didn't see the point in doing so. She'd graduated high school at sixteen, by which time she was already making money repairing and upgrading other kids' computers and laptops. She still did that, but she'd started buying computer parts, often used ones but still good, on the internet, sometimes reselling them and sometimes building systems with them and selling those.

The made-to-order ones paid especially well.

Christopher had liked the idea of a separate room for their computers, at first. But she'd gradually taken over more and more of it with her work tables and her boxes and shelves of parts and orders. That had irritated him more and more as his own prospects had dimmed. He hadn't gotten the kind of job he had hoped for and then had lost the one he did get.

He had become more bitter during that time, especially as her profits had grown. Having to set the alarm, get up early, and trudge off to work while she slept in and then worked at home at her own pace with no nagging supervisors had made him jealous.

He seemed to assume that because he was a university graduate he should be making far more money than her, and have a big office and underlings. Instead, he'd been in a small cubicle and they'd worked him like a dog, or tried to. He'd found success in playing a video game, and so had devoted more time to it.

At first, that had just meant he had less time for her. Emma had found that bewildering, at first. Every boy she knew who wasn't related to her had tried desperately to get her out of her clothes all through high school. And now he'd rather play a video game than come to bed with her? WTF?!

No, she'd been not quite eighteen while he was twenty-two and she'd been out-earning him. That hadn't made him a happy boy. And when he'd lost his job he'd gotten even less happy. Especially as her earnings continued to grow.

By nineteen, much of what she was doing was buying dirt cheap parts on Chinese websites, inspecting them, sending back the failures (or trying to), and then reselling the good ones at a much higher price elsewhere. Some of those parts were counterfeit, but that didn't necessarily mean they wouldn't work well.

She quickly figured out which sellers were more reliable, just as, on other sites, people discovered her own reliability.

"Yo."

"Oh, hi," she said as her cousin Cody came in.

"Went to the warehouse and brought you a pile of boxes."

"Oh, jeez, thanks so much!"

"No problem. Figured you'd need a bunch for all your junk."

Cody worked at a Krogers warehouse as a forklift operator.

Sean and Shane are already taking the boxes of stock. But almost everything on these tables aside from that laptop and those two small speakers in the corner, are mine. I'll pack the electronic microscopes myself. They can be delicate."

Her eyes widened as she looked past him and saw her brothers walking by holding the mattress.

"I hadn't intended to take the bed," she said.

"It's your bed. I moved it in, remember."

"Yeah but... I guess I hadn't intended to leave him without a bed."

"Fuck him," he said, continuing on.

She sighed then shrugged. There was no arguing with him when he used that tone, and she wasn't willing to put up that much of a fight. Let Christopher sleep on the floor. Maybe it would prod him to get a job.

Between the four of them, they had her moved out in record time. Some of the stuff would go into her parents' garage, others into the basement, and some into her old bedroom. She'd have to brave the I-told-you-so attitude from her mother, who had said she was too young to move in with a guy, but she was sure she could find her own place fairly quickly.

She needed to. She had orders to fulfill.

First, she went online and canceled their joint credit card. She had her own 'business' card, so could get by easily enough, or just get another one. Then she canceled their cable and then changed the password on their Netflix, Paramount, and Prime, as well as their internet feed.

Because it would serve as a public announcement, she went on Facebook and changed her status to 'single'. Then she turned off the phone.

The next morning, she woke up with a purpose. She had a ton of stuff to get done, including finding a new place. She found a long, obscene phone message from Christopher, half of which was yelled in a slurred voice she could barely understand. She deleted it and then blocked his number.

She'd worked hard in the California heat the previous evening, so started out with a quick shower. She begrudged the time but told herself, "You're single now."

She told herself that when she got out of the shower, too, and was confronted by the full-length view of herself nude. It was a view that had dropped the jaws of every guy who had seen it in the last five years. Geek, she might be, but that just meant she studied everything for the best options. And that included exercise regimens, healthy eating, the best vitamins and supplements, the best soap, the best shampoo, etc.

OCD was a thing and she embraced it.

And she'd started out with great material. Her only real requirement was to keep her body healthy and fit. And that wasn't too hard if you knew how. Thus, she'd done her Pilates before the shower, as she did every morning. It had reminded her of how delighted Christopher had once been to watch, even persuading her to do it naked.

That meant her exercise routine had often led to more exercise.

Since he'd lost his job, though, he stayed up late playing video games and got up late.

She didn't bother to dress as she brushed out her blonde hair. It was longer than it should be, requiring more attention than she wanted to put in, but Christopher had liked it that way. He had also liked it parted in the middle, without bangs. He said bangs made her look like a little girl. He wanted her to look 'sexy' to show off to his friends.

She had never agreed about the bangs. They made her look... cute. And 'cute' was what she preferred to go for rather than 'sexy'. Cute caused less envy among women, and less lust among men, especially older men. Depending on what she wore, of course. She didn't need to get hit on and leered at everywhere she went.

She'd get it cut, and maybe restyled when she found the time. Maybe she'd even go back to being a brunette.

She defiantly did her hair with so many bangs across her forehead they threatened to blind her. She brushed them a little to the side and used spray to keep them just out of her eyes - mostly. The rest of her hair spilled down the sides or was bound in a ponytail behind her. She put on a dressing gown and went back to her room, then. She was dressing solely for herself today so grabbed a black and white pair of cotton jockeys.

Part of why she'd been frustrated with Christopher was his lack of sexual interest in her the last few months, which had baffled her. She knew her own sexual value, and took some pride in that, despite doing her best not to let anyone know. She had an ego, just like anyone else, after all.

She slipped on a black thong with a wide white waistband, then the matching bra. Her breasts didn't really need a lot of support. Not that they were small. They were almost the perfect size for her frame - plus an inch or so - but she certainly didn't want them moving around any more than they had to while she did. Bras were always a compromise between too uncomfortably tight and too uncomfortably loose.

She pulled on cargo pants - she loved all the pockets - and a t-shirt, then a black button-down dress shirt she'd leave open. It was Sean's, from when he was about fourteen. The perfect, comfortable size for her, and had been washed enough to make it soft.

Then she called up various places to confirm the cancellations. She was glad Christopher had gotten the apartment himself and her name wasn't on the lease. He was going to be screwed and would have to move in with someone. Served him right. Maybe it would be enough of a shock to get him moving on with his life and not staring at a video game screen.

She heard raised voices from outside and looked out, then ducked back.

The car was Christopher's, though, she'd made the last few payments. He was welcome to it. She'd left the keys downstairs, along with her key to the apartment. She didn't want to deal with him, and he'd be a lot calmer facing her brothers, both of whom were well over six feet tall and neither of whom had any reason to be polite to him any longer.

As he quickly discovered and sped off.

Good luck keeping away from the repo guys, she thought.

Sean and Shane were twins and had started a renovation company. It was going reasonably well, so far. But investing in all the expensive tools, including Sean's pickup with the crew cab, kept them still living at home for now. They owned a storage unit, where they kept most of their gear, and were only delayed in getting their own place by the need to get one big enough for everything. No condos or apartments would do.

And really, she'd like to avoid them, too. She had a lot of stuff delivered, too much for the little mailboxes an apartment had. She'd had to rent her own mailbox. Which meant carrying everything between there and her apartment, and up and down the elevator.

After perusing the costs she figured she could rent a bungalow for almost as good a price as an apartment. Of course, that came with additional costs for things like water, electricity, and gas. But she'd be able to write off a share of the costs as business expenses.

No one was going to rent an apartment, much less a house, to a just shy of twenty-year-old girl who had no job. But that was why God invented parents.

Nor was she going to go visit places alone. God knows what the landlord would be like, and she was a very attractive and apparently helpless girl. But that was what brothers were for. And as a bonus, Sean had a truck.

They were a little jealous of her getting her own place before they did, but they'd always accepted her as being 'smarter' than they were without evident jealousy. They knew a lot about home repairs, about how to build things like stairs and shelves and tables, about how to do drywall and frame houses and fix leaky roofs. Those were all extremely important and she respected their knowledge.

She knew about electronics, the internet, and security, and quite a bit about apps and how they worked. There wasn't an electronic gizmo they had she couldn't fix. And when they'd gone shopping for a laptop to do design work for clients they'd come to her for it and she'd built one for them for the cost of the parts.

When she was seventeen.

So she was not much daunted at the idea of going around visiting different places to see which might be best for her and her little business. Until her father decided he would be the one driving her.

Emma loved and trusted her dad, of course, but she'd gone through selecting an apartment with him before she'd moved in with Christopher, and his jaundiced comments about every place they saw were intended to keep her at home and impress upon her the dangers of whatever he found that might be dangerous. Out there. In the great big world. When she should be safe at home.

And things went about as she'd suspected. Every place they looked he examined the heating system and the CO2 detectors, checked to see how secure the windows and doors were, and muttered darkly about how 'anyone could get in here.'

Their own house had alarms on the windows, CCTV all around, and steel-core doors with double locks. Her father was slightly paranoid. He first ruled out most of the parts of the city that had cheaper houses as not being safe enough. Then she insisted it have an enclosed garage so no one could jump out at her from some bushes when getting into or out of a car.

Each of the places they visited had him grumbling about ground floors being easy to break into, and not liking the quality of their doors or locks or windows or heating or air conditioning or the looks of the owner.

"Probably a pervert," he muttered more than once.

"You think every man is a pervert," she grumbled.

They finally found a place in Bay Park. It was on the east, unfortunately, not the west, which would have put it nearer the Bay and the ocean. And while it was a single floor it was on the second story of a garage built in the large backyard of someone else.

More importantly, the someone else was a cop, and her father liked him. They immediately started talking about security, and the cop showed them the security features of the patio doors and the glass door next to them (since you couldn't lock and unlock patio doors from the outside with any degree of confidence in their security). Then they moved on to the safety from any carbon monoxide coming from the garage below where the cop demonstrated all the ways he'd put insulation and spray foam and detectors.

Emma, on the other hand, was pleased with how open and airy the place was. Most of the cheap bungalows were older than her dad's and had low ceilings and small windows. This place was recently redone, and was bright, shiny, and newly painted, with large windows and new stainless steel appliances.

The big window in the living room could actually see the bay! True, it was only a small blue further off, but it was still a reminder of how close the ocean was. The kitchen was small but bright and had snazzy new appliances, a big island with three lights hanging over the quartz counter, a deep sink, and two more windows!

And there was a balcony, though she couldn't say much about the view. The patio doors let in lots of light, though, as did the large window on one side, and the glass door on the other.

The flooring looked like large, aged wood but was actually laminate, as Mr. Stone pointed out. Emma didn't care. It looked nice. The bedroom had two windows, one larger, and one smaller.

Emma decided she was going to take it regardless of how her father's questions turned out. It was cute and airy, and the second bedroom would give her space for her business while the garage was deep enough to hold some of her stock and a small car.

Which she would need now. Damnit. And that was going to involve more negotiations with her father about what car was safe and reliable enough for her. Which would add to the cost.

On the plus side, he knew people and could probably get her something used, but reliable and reasonably cheap. As long as she agreed to the 'safe' model.