That transparency spoke to the duped woman inside of me.
I pulled into a space in front of a bar that occupied the downstairs of the building and cracked the window, as the last day of March proved to be much warmer than the day before. I killed the engine and picked up my phone to check my messages. Patrick Vitt had called, offering an apology and a refund and relaying that he had not told Scott who hired him. Well, there was that.
After a few minutes, the sun streaked through the gray clouds, warming the van, making me sleepy. My eyes drooped, closing in spite of my phone jittering with responses to texts.
Until someone banged on my window.
“Oh my God!” I screeched, reaching for my center console, where I kept the pepper spray Scott had bought me at a gun show. It was probably in the bottom with the lost ChapSticks and packages of crumpled saltines. Could I reach it in time?
But then as I groped a bottle of forgotten hand sanitizer, it registered who was lurking outside my van door.
Griffin Moon.
“Hey, yo, it’s me,” he said, pressing his ginormous hands in a somewhat calming manner. “It’s Griff. Remember?”
How could I forget? He’d witnessed the single worst night in my life.
Slapping a hand against my chest to calm my galloping heart, I managed, “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”
I pressed the button to roll down the window, but the van had been shut off too long. Instead I opened the door.
Griffin stepped back, giving me room. “Hey, sorry. I thought you saw me.”
He was a hulk of a man, even bigger than I remembered. Standing about six foot three or four, Griff had muscles that bulged, a jaw that could rival granite, and dark eyes that didn’t pussyfoot around with being shifty. A very direct man. A man who fit easily into this industrial world of motor oil, fast cash, and liquor.
“I didn’t see you,” I said, standing and ignoring the way my knees cracked. My night on the couch watching our dog vomit and listlessly roam the living room had caught up with me. “What are you doing here?”
He gestured to the left, and I saw a fenced-in area with razor wire spiraling across the top. In front of the small garage sat a sign that mimicked the one on his tow truck. BLUE MOON TOWING. “That’s my place. What are you doing here? I sent the car to the shop you wanted.”
He thought I was here for him? No, wait, he thought I was here for the convertible.
“You did, and I already have it back in my garage. Um, I have some business here,” I said, unable to stop my glance toward the redbrick building to my right.
“The bar doesn’t open until one p.m.,” he said, one side of his lip quirking up.
“Not the bar.” I started to add moron, but I wasn’t pressing my luck with this tough customer. Griff’s sense of humor was somewhere between none and nonexistent.
“So you’re here to see Juke?” His question was more than a simple question. I knew that.
I sort of rolled my eyes. “You know why.”
“Yeah, I get it,” he breathed, propping his arm on the top of my open door. It drew my eye to his bicep and sort of closed me in with an intimacy that was both unnerving and a teeny bit exciting. Which was stupid. Like, way stupid. Because I was a woman about to divorce her husband. A brokenhearted, scorned, PMSing woman who would not look at men or ice cream for at least a year. Okay, I was going to eat ice cream. Who was I kidding?
“Thank you for your assistance that night. I know I was a little, um, bitchy. I’m not usually that way, but it was a bad night.”
Griffin’s eyes may have softened. Or maybe the cloud passing over the sun played a trick on me. “Seemed like it was, but I’m glad I could help. Usually, I’m not on call at night. But one of my guys didn’t show.”
I wasn’t sure why he told me that. It was an odd thing to say. Was it an apology for his being grumpy? “Well, again, I’m thankful.”
At that moment, a ginger cat curled about his boots with a plaintive meow. Griffin reached down, and I nearly closed my eyes because a guy like him might give it a thumping. But Griffin, the tough biker-looking dude wearing work pants that hung perfectly on his hips, a tight polo with his name scrawled across the left of his chest, and a dangerous-looking tattoo that twined up his neck, nuzzled the cat and kissed it right between its green eyes.
I may have melted a little inside. Just a wee bit.
“Zeus,” Griffin explained, setting the cat down. “He’s a rescue.”
If the man would have said, “I’m the principal dancer in Swan Lake,” I wouldn’t have been more shocked. I tried to recover by pretending to look for my phone in the van. “Well, he’s a pretty cat.”
Of course, my phone was still in my hand, so then I acted like someone had texted me. Which they had while I was napping. Shawna Kincaid wanted me to call River Cities Jewelers about the donation for the gala.
Griffin started backing up, inching toward his place, which I hadn’t even noticed earlier because I had been so intent on finding the right office building. “I’ll leave you to it. I was just passing by and noticed you. I try to keep an eye out. We don’t have a lot of mischief out here, but every now and then . . .” He left off, allowing me to fill in the blank.
“Oh, well, thanks for checking.” And I meant that.
“Later,” he said, shoving his hands in his front pockets and turning his back to me. The cat followed him like a puppy.
“Later,” I called, checking the time on my phone. It was 10:27 a.m. Close enough to the meeting time, so I climbed the metal stairs up to the office of Juke Jefferson, private investigator. The stairs were a bit rusty, but I felt optimistic. Not because of Griffin, who I was certain still thought me a blonde piece of fluff, but because . . . I wasn’t certain. Because last night my husband had caught me trying to catch him cheating. And then he tried to have sex with me like I would want him to even touch me. And then I had to clean up two piles of dog vomit. So why I felt better, I hadn’t a clue. But I did.
I knocked on the door, and someone hollered for me to “come on in.”
I pushed inside, and my immediate impression of Juke and his office made me wince. Not merely because it was decorated in early-eighties shag carpet and wood paneling or because Juke looked a bit rumpled with a swatch of shaving cream on his chin, but because the overall aura (if one believed in such) was of despair. My hopefulness darted behind reality and hunkered there.
“Hello,” I said, saying a prayer that my first impression was dead wrong.
Juke didn’t rise but waved toward a chair that had seen better days twenty years ago. “Hey, take a seat.”