Page 113 of Force At Third

The Locke Marks Group is the company’s new name, and she and Marks are well underway in doing precisely what they set out to do—grow the business. They have the moms doing work in the background. Lawson runs things on the West Coast, Wren on the East Coast, and Alice, aka EchoFury, is doing the digital dirty.

For the past few months, Gwen and Marks have been trying to narrow the services they want to offer in the future. Much talk has been about growing a force of highly trained operatives to serve high-profile businesses and other wealthy clients, offering armed personal escorts, executive protection and support, and crowd control. Gwen wants to branch out into cyber security, and they will.

I love the idea of her being a badass boss, with a focus on that end of it for a while. A long while. She’ll handle that well until something of a personal matter comes up, and I’ll deal because that’s who she is.

Marks is slowly gaining the hours he needs to get his pilot’s license, and he and I have been looking at private planes. Gwen thinks buying one is ridiculous, but that’s bound to be like her dissing Brunello Cucinelli tees that she sleeps in every night. She’ll love being able to avoid airports someday soon.

We bought fifty acres of lake property in Walton, Texas. There’s a nice home on the property now, but we’ll be building a new one that my wife and I designed in the town where we met, fell in love, and got married.

Life is crazy, for sure, but even the ugly parts are more bearable when we experience them together.

The bad guys are behind bars, and a court date is set.

William Center, who shot my wife, will never see the world without his view obstructed by bars. His assets are frozen and will be until the civil suit brought against him by Gwendolyn and Rome takes every damn cent from him. The Shaw girls deserve that money and so much more.

We passed weeks fifteen and sixteen with zero issues, yet she’s determined we tell no one, and I’m determined to stand by her decision. No matter how insane it is, like right now.

“I gotta ask,” Rudy G whispers beside me as he stares at my wife sitting on the end of a chaise lounge by the pool, got a coverup with an extremely deep V over the bikini she’s wearing to hide her little bump but not her pregnancy tits. She’s a D right now, and I’m not complaining.

“I’d strongly suggest you don’t,” I warn.

“Locke, straight up, when I get hitched and my wife wants bigger tits, I need the name of Gwen’s surgeon. They’re amazing.”

I walk away before I start laughing or drowning him in CeCe’s pool.

“How you gonna talk about Gwen’s boobs right in front of her husband?” AJ whispers.

Walking past Bennett, he gives me a dirty look, and I give him a big-ass smile.

He’s pissed I turned down the All-Stars game. When I told him that I understood because it was an honor, but I’d been on seven times already, he was even more pissed.

I grab a couple of lemonades and head toward her. I move behind her, straddle the chaise, sit down, and rest my chin on her shoulder.

Reaching around her, I hand her a lemonade. “Mrs. Locke, your tits are going to get me in trouble.”

“Oh yeah?” She leans into me.

“Rudy G. wants your surgeon’s name for his future wife.”

Her body shakes in silent laughter. Yep, my little troublemaker.

Before I have a chance to say anything, Nour walks over, sits beside us, and he doesn’t say a word.

“What’s up, Nour?” Gwen asks.

He pulls his hat down and shakes his head. “Just fucked up, you know?”

“You had too much to drink?” I ask.

“I …” He shakes his head. “Fuck, I’m twenty-four.”

Gwen glances back at me, eyes widening.

So, I pull some shit out of my ass. “Not a bad place to be sitting at twenty-four, right?”

“What if I fuck it up?”

“I’m going to guess your first year in the majors, halfway through the season, leading the divisions, got you feeling some way. I get it. I’ve been there a few times. Made it to the division series year three, and we got outplayed. I blamed myself, but being in this game for so long, I know it isn’t me who loses a game; it’s the team. Me saying that to you isn’t gonna change how you’re feeling until you get that in here.” I tap the side of my head. “We rise together, we fall together. At the end of the day, we’re getting paid a ton of money to play baseball together. That’s pretty fucking epic.”

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