Billy eased back and folded his arms over his chest. “How many more of you do you think are out there?”
“Not more of us—” Roxie broke off and sent a startled look at Lexie.
Their eyes rounded to the size of saucers. It was clear they hadn’t considered that possibility, but then Lexie’s eyes narrowed. She cocked her head, and a sly smile settled on her lips. “You’re terrible, Billy.”
“You are.” Maxie let out a laugh. “There couldn’t be…”
They’d probably thought the same thing before there were three of them.
She shook her head decisively. “We’re looking for our parents.”
And boom, there it was.
That bad feeling settled into his empty stomach.
“Birth parents,” Lexie said, a bit more subdued.
“We’re looking for answers,” Roxie said, her voice flat.
Billy tossed the bear claw in the trash. He wasn’t feeling hungry anymore.
“Be careful with that,” he said, dropping all pretense of joking. Answers could be painful, and they could just open up more wounds rather than provide the illusive “closure” all the pundits liked to talk about.
“Why?” Maxie asked.
For the first time, he worried about her sweetness. “The answers you get might not be the ones you want.”
Roxie gestured with her chocolate donut. She hadn’t taken more than a bite. “At this point, I’d be happy with anything, even another clue.”
He glanced around the table. So this wasn’t a new venture for them; they’d clearly been at this for a while. “What do you have?”
“Not much.” Lexie tapped her pen against the table. “The private investigator Cam hired has run into a brick wall. The paperwork behind our adoption is a mess. It may have been a closed adoption, but he can’t get confirmation on that.”
“Zac hasn’t made it any further either,” Maxie added. “He’s trying to pull some strings, but we were minors. The system takes that seriously.”
“The system,” Roxie snarled. “Social Services couldn’t find their asses with both hands.”
It echoed the thought running through Billy’s own head. He had little faith in anything official. He had too many scars to trust otherwise.
“We filled out their forms weeks ago, but they haven’t gotten us anything. I’ve called and I’ve emailed. I swear they lost our files and don’t want to tell us.”
Lost. He glanced around the table. That was what the four of them had in common. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so much like an outsider.
“Were you two adopted?” he asked.
Both of Roxie’s sisters nodded.
“By different families. I was adopted by the Underhills, and Maxie was taken in by the Millers.”
He frowned. All three of them had been separated? What the hell? Even back then, it hadn’t been Social Services’ policy to break up siblings. Probably another reason for the paperwork delay. Someone was sensing a lawsuit.
Frustrated, Roxie pushed at the laptop that sat on the table. “The online search has been a disaster.”
“No luck?” He rounded the bar and took the open chair next to her. Turning it around, he straddled it.
“Who can tell? There are so many sites, it’s hard to know where to start. Once we put the identical triplet thing out there, we get swarmed with well-wishers and looky-loos wanting more of the dirty details. So many people posted comments on the boards, I can’t find any piece of information that might be valuable.”
Billy grunted, swiping his hand through his hair. That headache was coming back with a vengeance. “You need to hold some things back. Don’t show all your cards at once.”
Roxie turned in her seat and that bouncing leg of hers brushed against his knee. “What do you mean?”
His gut began to twist. This was not something he wanted to get in the middle of. “Post that you’re sisters looking for your family. Maybe you could even post the triplet thing, but make the people who respond give you more. The pieces of info that you hold back could be the biggest confirmations you have that someone is telling you the truth—when and if they contact you.”
He wrapped his hand around her knee when her leg bumped into him again. He didn’t want to burst any bubbles, but they needed to be more careful. If they charged right into this without preparing themselves, they could get hurt. “You girls know how the world works. The moneygrubbers show up where people are the most desperate. They know how badly you want this, and they’ll use that desire against you.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Maxie asked. “We don’t want to stop looking.”
Hell, now he felt like the Grinch. He could feel the ache of their wanting in the air. He could practically taste it.
“There are other places you can look than just online.”
He suddenly became aware of Roxie. She’d gone quiet. Very quiet.
And her leg had stopped bouncing.
“Where?” It wasn’t just one of them. Their voices blended as they all asked at the same time.
Shit. Billy shifted uncomfortably. Now he knew exactly what kind of hell he’d gotten himself into. It was hell times three.
“Libraries, hospitals, churches…” He looked deliberately at her sisters. “How did you find each other?”
Maxie’s eyes widened. “Didn’t you see it?”
“See what?”
“The billboard on I-67 just before the bridge. It’s an advertisement for The Ruckus. Roxie posed for it.”
Billy slowly drew around to her. “Do I even want to ask?”
“Hey, I look good, and it brought in a boatload of new customers to the bar.” She examined her nails. “We put up a billboard for the bar, and Lexie came to see what it was all about.”
“Really?” her triplet said. “That’s all you’re going to say about it?”
“Come on, Miss Marketing Maven. Admit it. It’s a good ad.”
“Whoa, ladies.” Billy held out his arms, feeling like a ref in a women’s MMA match.
Lexie smiled wearily and rubbed her temple. “It is eye-catching. My entire family thought it was me up there on the big screen.”
Roxie inhaled sharply, and both her feet hit the floor. Billy looked at her face quickly. He recognized one of her ideas forming and braced himself.
“We should go see it,” she declared. “We’ve never been there, not together.”
Energy humming, she leaned forward. “We should go there this morning.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Maxie said, looking at her watch. “I have to meet Zac soon. We need to head back to Indigo Falls for his shift.”
“Well then, we need to get hoppin’.” Slapping the table, Roxie bounded upright. “Let’s do this.”
As far as her ideas went, this one seemed pretty tame. And it reminded Billy he had other plans—like running in the opposite direction. The walls were starting to press in, and the cursor on that damn screen was winking at him. He’d expected uncomfortable conversation when he’d walked in The Ruckus’s door, but nothing like this.
“I suppose we’d have time if we went now, and it is kind of important to us as sisters.” Maxie looked at the website they’d pulled up on the computer. “Could you show Roxie what you’re talking about later today, Billy? Maybe help us word things better?”
“And these other resources,” Lexie said. “Could you make a list?”
Damn it. He’d been so close to escaping.
He looked at the hopeful expressions on their faces. The last thing he wanted to get involved in was another search. He should leave. He had his own life now, and he needed to get back to it.
But he couldn’t let them down.
“Sure,” he muttered. He ruffled his hair. He’d keep it simple. Quick and dirty. What was another kick in the gut, anyway?
He felt Roxie’s stare boring into him. She looked just about as comfortable with the idea as he felt. Wrapping his hands around the back of the chair, he pushed
himself to his feet. “I’ll let you gals get going.”
Maxie jumped up. “What? No, you have to come with us. You haven’t seen it.”
Lexie grinned. “You could take our picture with it—if you can stop staring at it long enough to snap a shot.”
The sisters laughed, but Billy grimaced. That sounded like a challenge. “Dear God. How bad is this thing?”
Roxie sighed and pushed her chair under the table. “The word you’re looking for, honey, is ‘good’. It’s really, really good.”
Chapter Five
Quickly, they gathered up their things. Lexie took her folders, and Maxie collected everything she and Zac had found. They left copies on the table for Roxie, but she just pushed everything together in a heap. If she stayed here one second longer, she was going to start climbing the walls.
Fresh air. Sunshine. Outside in the crisp air, maybe she could clear her head and organize her thoughts. She’d been surprised when Billy had walked in the door, morning sunlight glowing all around him. She’d been laying odds that he’d be gone by the time she made it back upstairs.
Not that she’d been looking forward to finding her apartment empty, the bed still mussed and the scent of his aftershave lingering in the air…
“I drove Maxie over,” Lexie said as she pulled out her key fob. “Maybe you two should take another vehicle so we don’t have to come back over here to drop you off.”
What? Roxie’s head came up. No, no. She didn’t want to be stuck in a car with him.
“I need to move my rental anyway,” Billy said. He put on his shades when they walked out into the bright sunlight. “It’s over a few blocks.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Well, darn it all.
“You know where to go, Lexie?” Roxie called in resignation.
“Is it Fisherman’s Road?”
“That’s the one.”
“We’ll see you there.”
The day was bright, but it carried a chill in the air. Roxie stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket and followed Billy as they headed down the block. Her heels sounded loud against the concrete.
“So… Fisherman’s Road,” he ventured.
He would pick that up. “Shush.”
“Isn’t that where we used to go to make out?”
She jabbed him with an elbow. “I said ‘shush’.”
He sidestepped to avoid the blow, but came back with a chuckle. “Ah, I remember it well.”
So did she. It had been the place to go when they were teenagers.
Some of the tension drained from her body. The “mornings after” were always dodgy for them. Neither of them knew what to say or how to act. They’d been through this cycle over and over again throughout the years. He’d come back and they’d fall into bed, only to scramble out of it in the morning, usually to fight.
There’d been no fighting this morning.
She wondered how they would have reacted if her sisters hadn’t been around. Last night had been… different.
A breeze flitted through the air, lifting her hair and sending a chill down her neck. She moved a bit closer to Billy’s big body as they headed down the street. “You seem to know a lot about conducting a search for someone.”
“It’s nothing you don’t know already. It’s just street smarts.”
“Billy.” She knew him better than that. She’d seen the truth on his face. “You went looking for your mother.”
He pulled up short, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Yeah,” he said roughly.
“Did you find her?” Roxie’s voice was wispy as smoke.
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Yes, and that’s how I know it’s not all rainbows and bunny rabbits.”
He started down the sidewalk again, but she caught his arm. Her fingers snagged on the leather cuff he wore around his wrist. “How bad was it?”
He didn’t look at her, but he did focus more intently on the sidewalk in front of them. “Pretty bad,” he muttered under his breath.
Roxie’s eyes stung. They’d always known that his mother was out there somewhere. The circumstances surrounding his stay in foster care weren’t as cloudy as hers. Social Services had separated him from his mother when he was nine.
“She’s a meth head,” he said bluntly, with no attempt to soften the blow.
“Oh, Billy.” The wind left Roxie’s lungs. She took another step closer and wrapped her arm through his. She leaned a little his way, letting him feel her as they walked down the sidewalk, side by side.
There was no distance between them in this. She wasn’t expecting a happy ending for herself, but she’d wished one for him. “Where did you find her?”
“Under a bridge in Minneapolis. She was homeless at the time.”
Roxie leaned her head against his shoulder. “Did she know who you were?”
“Once I explained it, yeah. She was sorry.” He stopped to clear his throat. “Really sorry about everything.”
“But?”
“But she’s sick. That crap has a hold on her… She was too high to take care of me when I was a kid, and then losing me apparently played games with her head.”
Roxie tried to work up some sympathy for the woman, but it was difficult. His childhood had played games with his head, too.
“Was it worth it?” she asked. “Tracking her down and finding her?”
“I don’t know.” He raked a hand through his hair. “She was all weepy and begging for forgiveness, but by the time I left, she was asking me for money.”
Roxie closed her eyes against the fury of red that flooded her vision. To support her habit, no doubt. Talk about a knife in the stomach.
“Have you kept in touch?” She kept the words soft, but her jaw was set.
“She’s in a care facility now.”
“Are you paying for it?”
He didn’t deny it. He looked out over the river as they walked down the street that ran next to it. “I suppose it was for the best that she gave me up.”
For the best.
Funny how that knife so quickly changed directions. Roxie felt the twinge and she stiffened. With a twist, the pain became anger all over again. Moving deliberately, she unwrapped her arm from his and stepped away to walk on her own.
For the best.
The clenched muscle in her jaw began to ache. Three little words.
Amazing how she could still hate them so much.
He finally looked at her. His eyes were hidden by his sunglasses, but she could feel the weight of his stare. “Are you prepared for something like that, babe? Do you really want to know all the deep, dark secrets?”
She was used to being let down.
“I wasn’t lying. I just want an explanation for the way things turned out. I don’t want to meet anyone or form any bonds.” She certainly didn’t want to listen to excuses and pleas for forgiveness. She just wanted that damn sword that constantly hung over her head removed.
And if she found someone she could direct her anger towards, all the better.
“I don’t have any illusions that a happily-ever-after is out there waiting for me.”
The tilt of his head indicated he didn’t quite believe her, but lucky for him, he didn’t say so.
He gestured towards a truck on the street. “The least we should be able to do is find out why your sisters were adopted and you weren’t.”
Boy, all with the jabby-jabby today. Roxie rolled her shoulders in discomfort. “Already know the answer to that one,” she said as she yanked the passenger door open. “There was a couple there for each of us, but mine backed out.”
He stopped with the keys hovering over the ignition. “Backed out?”
“Yup,” she said, staring out the window. It had been the start of a long series of her being the one who was left behind. The unlovable one.
But—oh wait—her parents had done that to her first.
“God, Rox.” Reaching out, he caught her hand.
&
nbsp; For once, she didn’t pull away.
She leaned her head back against the headrest. The truck was plush with leather seats and a high-tech dash. Trust Billy to upgrade. If he was driving a rental, it wasn’t going to be a basic model.
“Wait until you see this billboard,” she said chirpily. She didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “It’s a wing-dinger, if I do say so myself.”
He stared at her for a long, long moment. She thought he was going to push the matter, but then he fired up the engine. The tires peeled against the pavement as he pulled away from the curb. “And just how many wings have gotten dinged looking at it?”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Now you’re getting the idea.”
He shook his head. “Fisherman’s Road. My wing got dinged a few times there.”
She finally relaxed. “If I do say so myself.”
The drive across the bridge didn’t take long, although navigating to the dirt road that looped back took a bit longer. Fisherman’s Road was exactly like it sounded, a rough road that fishermen took down to the Cobalt River. It also happened to pass right beside the billboards that were directed towards the busier interstate.
Billy soon caught up with Lexie’s Acura. She was driving about ten miles per hour and trying to avoid all the ruts in the road.
“Wouldn’t want that car to get dusty,” Roxie muttered.
“It’s a nice car,” Billy said, siding with her sister. “And she’s not in a hurry to make kissy-face with her boyfriend.”
“True.” Roxie braced herself in the corner of the cab so she could watch him. Right ahead was the bend in the road that would take them parallel to the interstate—and offer him his first glance of her modeling debut.
He took the corner at the sedate pace that Lexie had established, but Roxie knew when he saw it, because the engine gunned. He stomped on the brake to keep from ramming into the back of the Acura, but his gaze was directed up towards the sky.
She leaned forward so she could see the billboard, too. It was amazing how much bigger it was up close. It was like looking at the King Kong version of herself. Her hair was bigger, her eyes were bigger, and her boobs were… curvy, to say the least.
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