Chapter One

 

Gabe

 

A donde el corazón se inclina, el pie camina.

Follow your heart.

 

The guy standing in front of me is a pussy. Granted, I don’t know him, but I can tell. Little wire-rimmed glasses, floppy brown hair, T-shirt with the damn chemical formula for coffee on the front of it—a pussy. And he’s just answered the door at the apartment of the woman I’ve come four thousand miles to see.

“Can I help you?” he says as he fiddles with his iPhone.

“Yeah, I’m here to see Alexis.” I inhale and smell the faint odor of bacon from inside the apartment.

The guy finally quits fucking with the phone and looks up at me. I see when it happens. That moment he realizes who I am.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mutters, a scowl settling on his face.

I smile—sort of. “Excuse me?”

“Marco? Who’s at the door?” I hear her call from inside. The adrenaline shoots through my system and I clench my fists, the need to take some sort of physical action nearly overwhelming. Knowing she is so close, but this asshole is literally and figuratively in between us, is almost more than I can bear.

Marco, the pussy, is still standing there, staring at me, and before he can gather himself to answer, Alexis peeks out from behind him, trying to see who’s interrupting their domestic bliss at nine a.m. on a Sunday morning.

The smile she starts with drops from her face, and I can see her skin visibly pale. She steps out from behind her boyfriend, the same boyfriend she’d said she was done with two years ago, and gapes at me.

“Hey, babe,” I say cheerfully. “How the hell are you?”