Hostile Territory - Marie James Page 0,1

a warning to stop glaring across the room, but I ignore him like normal. He’s a placeholder, a requirement for today’s proceedings, and that’s it.

Dani nods mechanically when her father leans in to speak to her, shaking her head in response.

I just need one glance, one sweep of her eyes in my direction and I know I can pull her back in. One quick second to change her mind. Our love hasn’t been a fairy tale, but it’s been close. Meeting in high school, all it took was that one look before we knew we were going to be important to each other. I just need that contact one last time to make her realize she’s making the biggest mistake of her life.

Her eyes aren’t the ones that meet mine.

Annalise Grimaldi, Dani’s best friend since diapers and shit-stirrer extraordinaire, turns her head and sneers in my direction. The woman would be a knockout if she wasn’t evil incarnate. She’s always hated me and going by the animosity flowing from her amber-colored eyes, nothing has changed.

Without thought, I tilt my head up in a nod, a challenge, the very same way I did years ago when we were teens. Only back then, I had the girl. Back then, Dani would smack her friend on the arm and tell her to chill out. I won the battles between Anna and me years ago.

Today, that doesn’t happen.

Today, I lose everything.

Ten years together, the last six married to the woman of my dreams ends with a fifteen-minute session in front of the judge. A couple of signatures, not one word spoken between the two of us, and I walk out of the courthouse a changed man.

Walking to my truck stiffens my spine and my resolve, but it’s the sight of Dani wrapping her arms around a man’s neck in the parking garage that will change me forever. Her dad, beaming down at his little girl as she embraces the man is something I never experienced.

Both of her parents hated me from the jump, and if I ever took a step back and examined the relationship I had with Dani, I’d realize that it started out as rebellion on her side and it’s ending with her going home. Her sacrifice, her choosing me was temporary, and somehow, deep in my gut, I always knew it would be. I was never enough for her, and no matter how hard I worked to be the man she thought she deserved, I was always going to come up short.

Somehow, my eyes drift away from my now ex-wife to her best friend. Time has been good to her, and the two-and-a-half years since I last saw her sneering face have changed her from the teen queen she thought she was to the woman she has always pretended to be. Gorgeous, thick in all the right places, the face of an angel with a heart as black as midnight. She’s finally gotten what she wanted, but when her eyes meet mine, there’s a shimmer of sadness in her eyes, a hint that maybe she feels sorry for me, and that’s worse than her animosity.

I don’t need pity, and certainly not from a woman who has spent the entirety of her adult life trying to rip a hole in my relationship with Dani. Knowing that she’s finally succeeded, I look away just completely done with the entire day.

The heartbreak I felt in the courtroom waiting for Dani to show hardens. The grief washing over me as we signed the paperwork all the while she refused to look me in the eye dissipates, and by the time I climb into my truck and pull away, I’m a changed man.

I’m impenetrable, untouchable, my heart caged in concrete, wrapped in chains, and tossed into the depths of the ocean never to feel the warmth of the sun again.

Chapter 1

Deacon

“Casing the joint?”

A smile is on my face before I can even turn around.

“Nothing around here worth stealing.” Facing Jake Lincoln fully, it only takes a few heartbeats before his arms are wrapped around me.

I clap him on the back twice, but he seems more reluctant than usual to let me go.

“Never stopped you before.” He grins wide, the corners of his eyes and laugh lines on his face deepening. The man is always smiling, always happy, always the first one to step up to help someone out. It was like that the day I met him at fifteen and it still rings true today.

“One time.”