“Excellent,” he muttered on a squeeze of his arms and she kept chuckling.
Then her amusement faded, her eyes grew intense and she pressed closer, getting up on her toes, her arms around his shoulders going tighter.
“Sucks,” she whispered. “Totally. Thought it sucked before because I want to be with my family. Totally sucks now.”
He knew what she was talking about. She’d told him she had to get home because there was some gallery showing of her work in Austin next week. She was still preparing. Darrin’s death, as deaths always did, came at a shit time.
He bent his head and touched his lips to hers, saying after he lifted away, “Go and be with your family.”
She nodded.
“Text me or phone me,” he ordered.
She nodded again.
“Now kiss me,” he finished, her eyes flared in that way he liked so fucking much, she pressed deeper and did as she was told.
He took over, lost control and they went at it like teenagers, out in the cold, Mike pressing a beautiful woman against the side of a rental car in the parking lot of a hotel in his hometown.
Then he tore his mouth away, kissed her forehead, opened her door, deposited her ass in the driver’s seat and stood, arms crossed on his chest, eyes glued to her car watching her hand moving from between the seats in a wave as she drove away.
He did this grinning.
*
Debbie Holliday sat in her rental car staring at the couple who had been standing in each other’s arms talking then the woman was laughing then they were making out.
As in making out.
In other words, going…fucking…at it.
Her sister and her ex-fucking-boyfriend.
“Seriously?” she asked the interior of her car, her voice vibrating with fury. “Seriously?” she hissed.
She’d come by before her conference call to make peace. Her mother had spilled last night that Dusty was in town. She knew this because Mike already told her. She didn’t know the whole fucking family knew all about it.
Right after her mother told her, her father gave her a lecture that he’d lost a son, his wife had too and both his girls had lost their brother. They didn’t need discord. They needed harmony.
It sucked but Dad was right. So Debbie bit the bullet and decided, unlike her little fucking sister who’d holed up in a hotel room and hidden, to do the right thing. Olive branch. Make peace. Give Mom, Dad, fucking Rhonda (who wouldn’t even know, she spent so much time sniveling) and the boys time with all the family together.
And doing the right thing, this was what she got.
Darrin was dead and somehow her little fucking sister was banging her ex-boyfriend and standing out in the parking lot fucking laughing.
Debbie hated it that all her life, even when Dusty went off the rails and exposed the bitch within, that her Mom sang her sister’s praises. “Look at this,” she’d crow, pointing at some bullshit Dusty had scribbled with a crayon like it was Picasso who had held that freaking crayon. “Listen to her, she sounds like an angel,” Mom would whisper reverently anytime Dusty had a solo in church or at the high school.
And Debbie hated it that all her life her Dad would grouse good-naturedly, “My Dusty-girl, such a rascal,” when Dusty would do something sassy or be what everyone but Debbie thought was adorably mouthy. And she hated it when Dad took Dusty and Darrin out to walk through the rows of corn and share his farmer wisdom. “My boy will carry the legacy, but even if he doesn’t, my girl will,” he’d boasted only for Dusty to take off like a shot after high school, proving him wrong. Did he care? No. Instead, years later, he’d brag about her fucking pottery like she didn’t make big, over-priced plates but like she cured fucking cancer.