Page 2 of Every Breath

“Don’t tell me to calm down when that bastard is going to marry my wife and raise my children! I can’t let that happen!” Damon yelled in frustration.

“I feel for you, man, but there’s nothing you can do about it.” Paul touched his friend’s shoulder in a sympathetic gesture.

“So you say.” Damon hung his head in despair as the sheer sense of futility swept through him.

“Just because they’re engaged, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the marriage will happen. Brandi is a perceptive woman. She’ll soon realize what kind of man he is.”

Damon found those words comforting, but it wasn’t enough. He looked at his friend and sighed. In the short time they were Watchers together, the two men became close. They shared a lot in common. Both men heavily volunteered in their respective communities, and they each had dangerous careers when they were alive. Paul had been a firefighter and Damon a police officer. It was why they had been chosen to be Watchers. The living referred to them as guardian angels.

Some of the other angels had even commented that they looked alike, which Damon found amusing because other than them both being tall African American men, their physical similarities ended.

They were also, still madly in love with their wives, but all they could do was watch their loved ones from the other side.

Paul had been a Watcher longer than Damon and had more time to adjust to the fact that his wife moved on with her life which included a new husband and family. But there was no way Damon could get used to the fact that his wife was going to marry the man who murdered him.

He could remember that fateful night as if it just happened rather than two years ago. There wasn’t a day that he didn’t think about it, and he felt raw and empty inside every time the details played in his mind.

Now he was here, watching his wife at her engagement party. For nearly two years he had to sit back and watch Rodney ingratiate himself into her life, stalk her, and finally seduce her. It just wasn’t right.

Paul broke into his thoughts. “I sense your pain, but what’s done is done.”

“Why? My family doesn’t deserve this. Please!” Damon pleaded. If it were possible, he would have cried to release some of his pain, but he was spitting mad.

“I think I might know of a way,” Paul said hesitantly.

“What? Tell me!”

“I have to talk it over with Peter first but….”

“But what?”

“There are certain conditions you would need to agree to first.”

“You look beautiful tonight.” Rodney came up behind his fiancée, pulling her soft body against his. The smell of freesia and honeydew filled his nostrils. His pulse quickened. She’d always had this effect on him, from the first time he laid eyes on her.

Rodney found everything about her appealing: the way the corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled, her soft husky voice, and the tiny cute gap between her front teeth. Her chocolate-brown eyes slanted upward, giving her an exotic, feline look, and her closely cropped hair accentuated her perfectly shaped head and high cheekbones. She was an ebony goddess in a pint-sized package. No woman ever made him react as strongly as she did.

He loved to watch her. It didn’t matter what she did; he enjoyed looking at her beautiful face while she slept, ate, and showered. Of course, Brandi didn’t realize that he watched her all the time, but that was just fine. He loved her, so that gave him the right. His love meant he could clip souvenir locks of her hair while she slept, to take articles of her clothing to hold close to him when he went to sleep at night. It also gave him the right to be with her by any means necessary. He would kill, and had killed, for her.

Rodney bent down to press a soft kiss on the nape of her neck, reveling in the feel of her silky skin beneath his lips. He felt as if he had waited forever to hold her in his arms like this. In his heart, he knew Brandi belonged to him and only him. He didn’t care that she was already someone else’s wife when they met. When she smiled at him so sweetly, he knew he had to have her.

New to the police force, his partner invited him to dinner at his house. He didn’t expect to fall head over heels in love. Brandi was waiting for them at the door with a huge white smile lighting up her entire face and encompassing him in the magic created by her very presence. She was a pocket Venus: gorgeous and tiny but curvaceous in all the right places. She had the darkest, smoothest skin he had ever seen, and more than anything he’d wanted to touch it.

The fates had dealt him an awful hand. For seven agonizing years, he had watched as she gave all of her special smiles and kisses to Damon, and he’d had to pretend that it didn’t bother him. Rodney endured the pain of watching her belly grow large with his partner’s children, children who should have been his. Instead, he’d played the doting godfather to the two brats.

As his love grew for Brandi, his hatred for Damon gained even more strength. Images of Damon holding, kissing, and fucking her gnawed at his insides until he could barely think straight. Brandi belonged to him! He knew her husband couldn’t possibly love her as much as he did. The final straw came the night Damon had the nerve to brag about the family vacation they were going on. Unable to take any more, Rodney did what he should have done from the start: he got rid of the obstacle standing in his way.

Now, holding her in his arms, her body so warm against his, he didn’t regret what he’d done to possess her. He would do it again, if only to see the shocked look on that bastard’s face when he’d pulled the trigger. Rodney only wished that he’d done it sooner so the children she bore would have been his. Better yet, had he claimed her in the beginning as he should have, there would have been no children.

He wanted her all to himself. As it stood, the little brats were monopolizing way too much of her time, but that was okay for now. He would pretend to care if that kept her happy, but when she was his wife, there would be changes. No one stood in the way of what he wanted. People learned that the hard way, some a little too late, just like Jeffrey. That was in the past though. Brandi was his future.

Brandi turned around in his arms and smiled up at him. “Thank you for the compliment, kind sir. You look pretty good yourself.”

His heart skipped a beat when she smiled at him like that. “What are you doing out here on the balcony and looking so pensive?”

She had the expression of a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar before turning her head away. His eyes narrowed. He didn’t like it when she got that far away look in her eyes, because it usually meant she was thinking about him.

“You can tell me anything, Brandi. You know that don’t you?” He lifted her chin with his fingers, and his gaze bore into hers.

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