Chapter FIFTEEN
LEAH CHANGED HER footprinted sheets, dropped in her bed, grabbed a pillow, and moaned into it. Bob jumped up on the bed and put his paw on her arm. She looked at the cat. “I did a bad thing. A really, really bad thing.”
She closed her eyes, and her mind played images of just how bad. “I practically gave the guy a lap dance. Rubbed against him like a feline in heat. I’m so screwed up! So very, very screwed up!”
She blamed the three and a half glasses of wine she had consumed. She blamed her hormones. She blamed the fact that she’d gone soft when he confided in her about his screwed-up childhood. But damn, she was always a sucker for a stray. And that’s the way his story made him sound. A stray, someone who’d been abandoned by the person who should have loved him.
And she thought she’d had it tough. Oh, it had been hard, but she couldn’t imagine how it would feel if her mom had left her willingly. Dropped her off and just didn’t come back for her, instead of dying.
Okay, having a reason for her stupid behavior didn’t change a thing. Didn’t change the fact that she wanted him. Wanted to kiss him again. Wanted to feel his hardness slide between her legs.
She wanted to laugh. To listen to him talk. Just his voice turned her on. She wanted to learn all the little details about his life. Did he really make his own pizza? Did he really have leather furniture at his real place? Did he really turn down a hot blonde just to have wine with her?
A knot rose in her throat. She wanted to tell him things. Things she hadn’t told anyone. About her mom basically being her dad’s whore. About how she’d seen her dad at her mom’s funeral, standing in the back behind some trees. About how when his eyes met hers, for one second, she thought he loved her, too, that he was there to take her and Luis with him. But then he left, and she’d never heard from him again.
But she hadn’t told anyone about that. Never wanted to tell anyone. Not even her aunt. It was too private. It hurt too much. Maybe that was why she could relate to how it must have felt for his mom to walk away from him. Her father had abandoned her, too.
She closed her eyes. Knowing his childhood was as crazy as hers somehow made her feel connected to him.
But it didn’t really mean anything. She’d thought she had a connection with her father. She’d thought she had a connection with Brandon. Wrong on both accounts. She had to remember that.
Austin stood there staring at the door, fighting the urge to go after her. He didn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t right, wasn’t logical.
But he didn’t follow logic. He wasn’t a Boy Scout, like Tyler. He followed his gut. But he wasn’t a scumbag. And having sex with her when… when he was there under false pretenses would fall in the scumbag category.
He’d come here for a reason. To get information. Nothing more.
He spotted his headphones on the kitchen counter. He plugged them in, brought up the program, and sat down to listen to the phone conversation she’d had earlier when she’d left him in her living room.
“Luis? Where the hell are you? Are you still in San Antonio? Call me now!”
So she’d only left a message and hadn’t actually spoken to anyone. The sound of her voice replayed in his head. She’d sounded desperate. Scared. He remembered the look of sheer panic on her face when he’d pointed out the address book was missing. How was the book connected to her younger brother? And did it have anything to do with her older brother?
“Shit!” he muttered, now even more confused.
He was about to jump over to listen to the live tape, when he noticed there was another “bedroom” file, a few minutes after the first one.
The second sounded like a call from her work. “It’s complicated,” Leah said.
From the conversation, Austin got the feeling Leah wasn’t confiding in her work associate. Which really seemed odd the longer they talked because they were obviously friends. The conversation changed to them talking about a guy her friend was dating. Then Leah even mentioned Austin, and it appeared as if she’d mentioned him earlier to this person.
He listened for any info that might be important. But he heard her say, “Okay, I’m horny, but not as much as you.”
He moaned. That wasn’t important, but the tightening low in his belly started picking up again.
When the conversation was over, he clicked it off. Yet another file started uploading, a recent one. Had she gotten a call? He clicked it open. Her voice came through the earphones.
“I did a bad thing. A really, really bad thing.”
Who was she talking to? Had she called someone and bypassed the “hello” part of the conversation? He heard a slight meow. Was she talking to her cats?
“I practically gave the guy a lap dance. Rubbed against him like a feline in heat. I’m so screwed up! So very, very screwed up!”
The memory of how unscrewed up and good it felt ran through his mind. Then shot straight down to his crotch. The file ended.
Oh, hell! He took off his earphones and went to take a shower. A cold one.
Roberto sat at his kitchen table, worried and waiting. Worried about Brad. His trip to the ice house hadn’t revealed a thing. No one had heard from him.
He was worried that Brad’s wife was going to call again and expect Roberto to have news. Roberto wanted to assure her it was okay, but he didn’t think it was. He had learned enough about the man to know he really loved his wife and kids. And he wouldn’t just disappear without a damn good reason. And right now, Roberto was worried that the reason was that Brad was dead.
Roberto was also worried about what tomorrow night and the Thursday drop would bring. Would he be joining Brad as a missing person?
A missing person no one would miss.
After Anna and Bobby Jr. died, he’d walked away from the friends they’d had. He’d been consumed with fury toward Rafael DeLuna, and even the police who’d refused to believe that what happened that night hadn’t been an accident.
He looked at his phone. Waiting for the damn thing to ring and offer him a much-needed distraction.
Call me when the scene’s over.
She hadn’t. He picked up the glass of water he’d used to down the fast-food hamburger he’d called dinner.
He should forget about the call. Let it go. But hell! He didn’t want to let it go. He needed a distraction from all the crap going on. She was the only distraction he could think of besides the bottle of whiskey waiting in the kitchen. And he didn’t want that kind of diversion.
He dialed her number.
It rang four times. He was about to hang up when her timid “Hello” answered.
“Must be a long scene.” He ran his finger over the scarred wood of the table in his cheap-ass apartment. The table should be thrown away. The thought hit that on the inside he was just as scarred.
There was a pause. “I… it’s a romance novel.”
“I figured that,” he said. “My wife… read them.” His chest gripped. His first impulse was to hang up. Talking to a woman, a woman who intrigued him, about Anna had to be wrong, didn’t it?
Silence filled the line. He pulled the phone away from his ear and had his finger on the end call button.
“What were their names?” Her voice finally came and had a quality that he liked. Smooth and yet bubbly at the same time.
He pulled the phone back to his ear. “Anna and Bobby Jr.”
“How did they die?”
Some low-life scum killed them. Swallowing, he told her what most people believed, but what he knew to be a lie. “A car wreck.”
“Damn,” she said. And that one word came filled with emotion.
“Yeah, damn,” he said.
“I want to say I’m sorry, but I hated hearing that. Most people don’t mean it. They just say it.”
He took a deep breath, the focus shifting away from his own pain. “Who did you lose?”
“My father.”
“How old were you?” he asked.
“Seventeen. He was this big, barrel-chested man. Bigger than life. And even though I was mostly grown up, I was still his little girl. He was so good at giving advice. Love advice.”
“That’s rare,” Roberto said. “Most dads just want to kill anyone who touches their little girls.”
“Yeah, but he wanted me to have what he had with my mom.” She chuckled. “He said love made you glow.” She paused as if missing him now. “Anyway, I know how it feels to lose someone you love. But I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to lose a child.”
“Yeah.” One word was all he could say. After a second, he asked, “What happened to him?”
“Heart attack,” she answered. “It was the middle of the night. Mom says he sat straight up in bed, grabbed her hand, told her he loved her, and then slumped over.” Silence filled the line. “You know for a year, every time I heard her tell that story, I was jealous. Jealous that I didn’t hear him tell me that one more time. Grief can make you so crazy.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“How long has it been?”
“A little over two years.” He reached for his glass of water and turned it in his hand.
“You know, I also hated it when people told me it would get easier.” She swallowed. “Then when it did get easier, I got angry. I felt like I was betraying his memory.”
“Sounds about right,” he said. Just talking to Sara made him feel like a cheater. Cheating on his dead wife.
“But that sort of goes away, too. It did for me.”
“That’s good to know.” He stretched out his legs.
“We sound pathetic. We should change the subject to something upbeat.”
“To what?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
After a pause, he asked something he’d wondered about. “What happened to Brian’s dad?”
“I said upbeat.” She chuckled.
“Sorry,” he said. “Forget I—”
“No, it’s fine.” She hesitated. “He was in the banking business. We were engaged. On our way to happily ever after.”
“So what happened?”
“I accidentally got pregnant. And he accidentally turned into the world’s biggest a*shole. Or not really turned into one. He always was one. He just showed his true colors then.”
“What did he do?” Roberto already hated the guy. How could he willingly walk away from the things that Roberto had been robbed of.
“I told him I was pregnant; he suggested an abortion. I refused, so he packed his stuff up and disappeared.”
“And you haven’t heard from him since?” he asked.
“I wish. About a month after Brian was born, he called me.”
“Wanting to get back together?”
“No. He’d been arrested and wanted me to bail him out of jail. See, I wasn’t joking when I said he was an a*shole.”
He chuckled. “Arrested for what?”
“For holding up a bank. Supposedly, that’s what he’d meant by the banking business. I felt like an idiot. I lived with a bank robber and didn’t even know it.”
“If you bailed him out, you were an idiot. If not—”
“Oh, hell no. I said I felt like an idiot, I didn’t say I was one.” She sighed. “What really got to me, though, was that he never asked about Brian. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t even know if he had a son or a daughter.”
“He doesn’t deserve to know.”
“I agree.”
The line grew quiet. He wanted her to keep talking. He wanted something to focus on besides his own miserable crap. “So what do you do when you’re not taking care of your kid and kittens? Besides reading romance novels?” He chuckled.
“There’s nothing wrong with romance novels,” she said.
“I didn’t say—”
“Have you ever read one?”
“No.”
“Then don’t judge them,” she answered. “As a matter of fact, you should read them. All men should read them.”
“Really?” He smiled, and it felt like a first in a while.
“Really,” she said.
Silence reigned again. “So what else do you do, Sara?”
She paused as if to shift mental gears. “Well, I’m into music. Singing that is.”
“Like performing?” he asked.
“Yup, I do my share of performing.”
“Where?” He wondered if he could ever manage to go hear her. “What kind of music?” He hoped it wasn’t opera or anything. He wasn’t sure he could even pretend to like that crap.
“I dabble in different kinds. I’m known mostly for the ABC song, and ‘Little Bunny Foo Foo.’ Oh, and outside of music, I’m an expert in all things SpongeBob.”
He laughed.
“What about you?” she asked. “What do you do besides work construction?”
Besides endlessly hunting down the killer of my wife and son? Which means, as of Thursday, I’ll also be delivering drugs… And now trying to find my boss, who I’m pretty sure is dead.
His grip on the phone tightened. It occurred to him how stupid he’d been to call her. He had nothing to offer. He’d just selfishly wanted to reach out and touch something… normal. Something not tainted by the ugliness he’d surrounded himself with for the last two years.
“Not a whole lot,” he finally said.
“Do you read?” she asked as if she somehow sensed he’d withdrawn.
“I used to,” he said.
“What did you read?” she asked.
He let himself get pulled back in. “Not romance.” He listened to her laugh. Soft, sweet. “Some mystery, intrigue. You know, Patterson.”
“How did you end up in construction?” she asked.
“I was always good at building things. I was going to school for architecture,” he said, remembering when his life had been so different. It hit then, a revelation. He no longer just missed Anna and Bobby, he missed his old life. He missed who he’d been.
“You didn’t finish school?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Do you ever want to try to finish? I do.”
“You want to finish school to be an architect?” he asked, knowing that wasn’t what she meant, but curious to learn more about her and not really wanting to talk about himself.
“No.” She laughed. “I was a year away from graduating to be a vet when Brian was born.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“I want to. But it’s hard. I’m already away from Brian forty hours a week to work. The thought of having to be away from him even more, it feels impossible. Mom’s offered to let me move in with her and just work part-time and go to school part-time. But that’s if I could even get back in. And moving in with Mom feels wrong.”
“She wouldn’t have offered if she didn’t mean it,” he said.
“I know, but she’s got her own life and she already watches Brian two days a week. Plus, I see how much time Leah, my boss, puts into having her own office. It’s a lot of overhead, a lot of work. I’m not sure I want to give all that right now. Maybe when Brian’s older. And besides, I get to do most everything I wanted to do. Taking care of animals. Except the surgery, I kind of liked doing that in school. I actually got to take a bullet out of a dog once. I even considered specializing in it.”
“Did you have a lot of pets growing up?” He leaned his head back and enjoyed the cadence of her voice. He wondered if she’d ever really tried to sing. Her voice had that quality to it.
“Oh, yeah. Dogs, cats, hamsters. I even had an iguana once. A male.” She chuckled. “But I cross-dressed it. I used to tie a pink bow around its neck because I was afraid people would think I was a tomboy having a big lizard.”
“I can’t see you as a tomboy,” he said.
“I wasn’t. I was Nurse Sara. Took care of all the injured animals in my neighborhood. I was eight when I told everyone I wanted to be a vet.”
She paused, and he worried where her mind had gone.
“Why did you call me back?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he lied, knowing he’d called her just to feel a part of something decent, something not sleazy.
“It’s not that I mind, or that we can’t just talk, but—”
“Then let’s do that. Let’s just talk.”
“I think I’ve done most of the talking,” she said.
“All women do,” he said. “Haven’t you ever noticed how many more words a woman says a day compared to men? So, don’t stop.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me why I should read a romance novel?”