for Jeremy King when he was six years old. Apparently, the kid had run away from home after finding a box of puppies in the woods and had become upset when his father told him that they couldn’t afford to keep them and would have to take them to the pound. Two days later, Jeremy’s childhood friend broke down and confessed that Jeremy was living in their backyard in his tree house.
Cheryl smiled every time she read the old newspaper story. Not to mention, Jeremy was an adorable kid. But even looking at those old articles, her eyes would eventually drift to a frowning Xavier standing in the background. The other material Cheryl dug up on Xavier included spelling-bee championships, high school football accolades and scholarships. At nineteen, the football accolades turned to success in the boxing ring. Xavier won the national Golden Gloves heavyweight championship in ’02 and ’03 and even made the Olympic team in ’04. But his career abruptly ended with a near-perfect 21-1 record without any real explanation as to why he left boxing.
He just stopped fighting.
As far as Cheryl could tell, Xavier just disappeared from the spotlight for two years and then reappeared as a gentlemen’s club owner, where accusations and suspicions of drug trafficking continued to swirl.
Cheryl’s gaze settled once again on the department’s black-and-white photographs of the sexy club owners. And try as she might, she just didn’t or couldn’t see them as criminals. Maybe it was something about Xavier’s dark soulful eyes. They struck her as being too honest…and playful. Now since she’d had the pleasure of being in the same room with the man, she would testify on a stack of Bibles that Xavier King did indeed dominate a room. The power of his gaze, the line of his shoulders and the unmistakable strength in his bulging arms… “Whew!” She reached for her cold bottled water and downed most of its twenty ounces, trying to put out the fire of her own making.
Something creaked and Cheryl’s head whipped around to her bedroom door. There standing at the threshold, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, was her six-year-old nephew, Thaddeus. A smile spread across her face again. “Heeey, li’l man. Whatcha doin’ up?”
“There’s a monster in my closet,” he whined. His footed pajamas shuffled across the hardwood floor of her bedroom as he made his way over to her.
“A monster?” she responded with wide-eyed shock. She circled her arm around his tiny shoulders. “Are you sure?”
Thaddeus poked out his bottom lip and nodded.
“Oh, no. That just won’t do.”
“Will you come in my room and shoot it with your police gun?” he asked hopefully.
“How about I just go in there and check it out for myself?” she suggested. “I’m tough. I’m sure that I’ll be able to handle that monster with my bare hands.”
Her bravery made his eyes grow wider. “You sure? What if it hurts you?”
“Are you kidding me?” Cheryl curled her right arm. “Check out these muscles,” she said, and waited for her nephew to give her Michelle Obama–like arms a good squeeze.
“Wow. You are strong,” he said, awestruck.
“I sure am.” She winked at him and stood. “Now let me at that monster hiding in that closet. We don’t have time for none of this foolishness, do we?”
Thaddeus shook his head and then fell in line behind his aunt as she strolled out of her bedroom and headed into his room. “That monster is going to get it,” he declared confidently.
“He sure is,” Cheryl agreed. “Just let me at him.”
They stormed into his Spider-Man–themed bedroom together. Cheryl flipped on the light switch and made a beeline to the closet. At the last second before touching the doorknob, Thaddeus gave her a quick last warning, “Be careful, Aunt Cheryl.”
She tossed him a confident wink and then threw open the door.
Thaddeus gasped and covered his eyes. But when he didn’t hear any hissing, growling or Lord knows what else his active imagination had anticipated, he slowly peeked through his small fingers.
“Huh.” Cheryl settled her hands onto her hips and looked around. “There’s no monster in here.”
Frowning, Thaddeus raced over to the closet and mimicked his aunt’s stance. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” Cheryl pretended to be dumbfounded before suggesting, “Maybe he heard you going to get me and he got scared?”
Her nephew nodded at the explanation. “Yeah.”
“Well, he better run. I was really going to put a hurting on him,” Cheryl bragged as she dusted off her hands.
“Were you going to use karate on him?” He shifted his gaze from the monsterless closet and stared up at her.
“You know it.” She tried to run her fingers through his thick blondish-brown hair, but as usual it was a bit tangled with its wayward curls. “When is your mother going to fix your hair?”
“She was supposed to do it tonight, but she fell asleep.”
Cheryl shook her head. “All right. Back in the bed you go, li’l man. You have school in the morning.”
Thaddeus poked out his bottom lip, but shuffled his way over to his twin-size bed where Cheryl peeled back the top sheet and waited for him. When he got close to the bed, he launched himself onto the mattress and laid his head on his cartoon-character pillow.
Cheryl couldn’t resist tickling his side to elicit one of his hilarious, funny-sounding giggles. Once she got it, she leaned down and planted a wet kiss on his chubby cheek. “Good night, li’l man.”
“Night, Auntie. When I grow up, I’m going to be a police officer just like you.”
Cheryl’s heart squeezed as tears quickly flooded her eyes. “And I’m sure that you’ll make an excellent police officer.” She stole another kiss and then tucked him into bed. “Sweet dreams,” she said at the door before turning off the light switch.
Her smile was still stretched across her lips as she walked from her nephew’s bedroom and headed toward the kitchen. There, her younger sister, Larissa, was slumped over her biology textbook and snoring softly into the pages.
Cheryl stopped at the entry to the kitchen and shook her head. She couldn’t help but be sympathetic to her sister’s hectic schedule. She worked full-time in a clothing store, while juggling being a single mom and going to college at night to become a nurse. It was a lot, and Cheryl was extremely proud of her sister. Because Larissa had her son so young, she could’ve continued her life making bad decisions. But when Thaddeus’s father decided not to be a part of his biracial son’s life—along with his well-to-do family—Larissa didn’t fall apart. She picked herself up, dusted herself off and got busy trying to ensure a better life for her and her son. A lot of times that meant having to lean on family members, but everyone in the Grier family was more than willing to help as long as Larissa was committed to doing what was right.
Cheryl was no different.
Three years after Thaddeus was born, the Grier sisters were thrown a major curveball when their parents were killed in an electrical fire in their family home.
