Feeding Gators: Book 1 in the Shiner's Bayou Series

by Gen Anne Griffin

  “You could have just told me the truth.” Addison unclenched his fists and put his hands back on her waist. “You know I love you no matter how badly you fuck your life up.”

  “I love you, too.” Gracie smiled shakily at him. He was innocent as long as they kept him in the dark. It wouldn’t be fair to risk his future as well as her own if she didn’t absolutely need him. Right now, David had everything as under control as it could be. She desperately wanted her big brother, but she didn’t need him.

  “Speaking of love, have you called Mom yet and told her that you were in town?” Addison asked.

  “No. And don’t you dare tell her either.”

  “Or what?” Addy asked.

  “I’ll...I’ll...I’ll be thinking of something,” she threatened weakly. She just wasn’t used to having secrets from him. Or being on his bad side.

  Twitchy Eddie laughed under his breath. Gracie wanted to slap the smirk off of his pompous little face. Eddie was both shorter and thinner than she was. Knocking him senseless wouldn’t be hard to do. As long as she didn’t somehow manage to kill the idiot. Gracie shuddered involuntarily and Addison frowned at her.

  “Well, if you don’t want me telling Mom that you aren’t safe and sound in your dorm room, then you might want to turn your phone back on. If I were you, I’d do it before she tries to call the dorm and finds out you’re M.I.A. She told me earlier she’d been trying to get a hold of you all day and your cell is off.”

  “Oh, shit,” Gracie muttered, reaching for her pocket and then realizing the phone was still in her purse at David’s. “My battery must have died. I don’t have my charger with me. I guess I’ll pick one up while I’m here and call her when I get back to the house tonight.”

  “You better, because I’ll tell her where she can find your scrawny little hoochie ass if you don’t,” Addison threatened. “Don’t think she wouldn’t drive over there in a heartbeat if she had any clue about y’all doing- whatever it is that you’re doing.” He made a forking gesture with two of his fingers. “By the way, you are on birth control right?”

  “Addy, shut up.” She glared at him. “As much fun as it’s been talking to you, I’m sure y’all have things to do. I know I do. Get up with me later, Addison. We’ll finish this conversation somewhere where I can kick you in the balls without getting charged with assaulting a police officer.”

  Addy laughed. Twitchy Eddie took a step backwards and tripped over the leg of the chair beside him, knocking it over and onto the floor with a loud crash. Addison looked over at him with an expression of total disgust.

  Gracie wiggled her fingers at her big brother in a half-wave. She had already turned away from him when he said her name again.

  “Gracie.”

  “What?” She paused without turning around.

  “You got enough money to get what you need?”

  “Yeah, plenty,” she replied. She thought of the four hundred dollar bills that the normally tight-wadded David had handed to her.

  “Good, I didn’t want to have to give you any,” he said. “But I just got paid yesterday. If you’re going to need cash, you need to tell me now. My paychecks don’t last to Monday. You know how I am.”

  Gracie turned back around, closed the distance between herself and her brother and threw her arms back around his neck in a tight hug. Addison hugged her close to him.

  “If you need me, you call me. Day or night. No matter what. Okay?” He whispered the words in her ear, too low for Eddie to hear him speaking. Gracie nodded.

  “I will,” she lied as she pulled away from him a second time.

  *

  “She didn’t drive herself here.” Addison appeared to have completely forgotten about his chicken salad sandwich with extra provolone cheese during his conversation with the girl he claimed was his sister. Eddie hadn’t been aware that Addison even had a sister, though he supposed the turquoise eyes were a dead giveaway that the two were blood relatives. He’d actually assumed Addison’s eyes were colored contacts until he noticed the Sheriff had the same eye color. “I need to go out to the parking lot and find someone real quick.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Eddie immediately tossed his own sandwich back in its bag, earning himself a withering look from Addison. Eddie didn’t care. It was kind of nice seeing someone else get under Addison’s skin, especially after Addison had tried to chain smoke him into an asthma attack this afternoon. Eddie wasn’t planning on missing any part of the show.

  “Suit yourself,” Addison told him and headed out the door, leaving Eddie scrambling to keep up.

  “Just out of curiosity, why are you so mad that your sister snuck home from college?” Eddie asked.

  “I don’t care that Gracie isn’t at college.” Addison paused at the front of the parking lot, obviously looking for a vehicle he recognized. “I’m just pissed off that they didn’t tell me what was going on.”

  “They?”

  “Let’s just say that I was a little surprised to find out who my sister ditched college to come spend time with.” Addison started walking towards the far right side of the parking lot. His long legged strides were nearly impossible for Eddie to match, forcing him to jog along beside Addison like a Chihuahua trying to keep pace with a mastiff.

  Eddie had just about caught up when Addison stopped in his tracks. They were standing next to the bed of a rusty, heavily-dented, dark blue single cab Toyota pick-up truck with a lift kit and a set of those oversized mud tires that Eddie hated because of the roaring noise they made when the offending vehicle was traveling down the road.

  Addison thumped one hand down on the edge of the tailgate, hitting it hard enough to make the entire truck shake. The driver’s side door opened and David Breedlove stepped out.

  Eddie’s heart sunk in his chest and an involuntarily shiver shot down his spine. It took everything he had not to spin around and bolt back into the safety of the store.

  What’s up, Addy?” David hadn’t changed much since high school, if Eddie didn’t count the tattoos. David had only had a handful of tattoos when they had been in high school. Now the ink covered both his arms. Otherwise, the bad-tempered high school bully was still unhealthily thin with the same dark green, hooded eyes that had always made Eddie’s break out in a cold sweat. Eddie felt his right eye quiver involuntarily. He gulped and steeled himself. He would not twitch. Would not. He was not that kid anymore. He was an adult. And a cop. David could not intimidate him anymore.

  Addison’s turquoise eyes met David’s green ones without hesitation. For several moments the two of them just stared at one another. It was Addison who finally broke the gaze.

  “You’re seriously screwing my kid sister?” Addison asked in a resigned tone. He was clearly annoyed but apparently had decided to give up the fight.

  “Gracie’s an adult,” David said. His nose was swollen to double the size it should have been and he had black and blue bruising around both of his eyes. Eddie wondered if Addison had been the one to cause the damage. The thought of someone using David as a punching bag gave Eddie an unexpected rush of pleasure. Maybe Addison would be an unexpected ally for him in his quest to put David behind bars for good. Eddie struggled to appear neutral as he watched the two of them continue to square off. “Also, I’m not screwing her. I’m dating her. There’s a difference.”

  “Not with you,” Addison glared at David. “I swear to God if you hurt her-.”

  “You’ll kill me. Yeah. Get in line. Cal’s already claimed first right to disembowel me with a rusty butter knife if I so much as make her cry.” David tentatively touched his nose. “I think that crazy SOB would do it, too.”

  Eddie nearly choked on his own spit. He remembered Calvin Walker just as well as he remembered David. Cal was the spitting image of his tyrant of a grandfather. He stood good three or four inches shorter than David but probably weighed twice as much. He was broad-shouldered and stocky. He’d been a linebacker for Shiner’s Bayou High School before someone with a lo
t more talent and a lot less name had shattered most of his right leg during a game.

  The good people of Shiner’s Bayou liked to gush over Cal Walker, but Eddie remembered all too well how inseparable David and Cal had been in school. It was impossible to like the guy who’d spent too much time out of fourth period every day convincing David to just leave Eddie stuffed in his locker and come to class already. Or skip class. Whatever the particular mood was that day.

  Eddie would never forget the heavily chlorinated taste of the toilet water at Shiner’s Bayou High School. The back of his throat burned right now just thinking about it. He fought he urge not to throw up on his own feet.

  “He already did a number on you,” Addison almost laughed, then sighed. “I didn’t even think Cal still had it in him.”

  “Me neither. I actually thought Jo Beth had cut his balls off and was keeping them in a jar on her desk at work for all the other girls to see.”

  “You just better be glad it was Cal who caught y’all and not me,” Addison grumbled. “Your balls would be on my desk at work if I’d walked in on you screwing my sister.”

  David yawned, clearly bored with Addison’s threats. He studied Eddie for a moment. The blank expression in his cold eyes made Eddie wonder if the murderer who had haunted his nightmares for years even remembered him.

  “Got a new trainee?” he asked Addison, appearing disinterested.

  Addison grinned and thumped Eddie’s should hard enough to make Eddie’s knees buckle. “You remember Eddie Von Hussant, don’t you?”

  David seemed about to say something when Gracie slipped down the side of the truck and appeared off to David’s right side. She slid her long, delicate fingers around his wrist. Addison’s eyes narrowed visibly as David shifted back away from him and wrapped one of his arms around Gracie’s shoulders, pulling her to him.

  Eddie noticed that she had changed into a strawberry red halter top with little leaves trimming the bottom hem and a pair of tight jeans that left very little to the imagination. Her long blonde hair had been freed from the ponytail holder and brushed out so that it fanned around her shoulders. She had put on shimmery eye shadow and lip gloss and she was carrying several plastic Walmart bags on each arm. Her eyes narrowed into a glare when she turned towards Addison.

  “Don’t tell me, you’re here to make more ‘don’t hurt my little sister or else’ threats?”

  “Nah, screw it. I’ve decided I don’t give a shit what he does with you,” Addison snapped.

  David chuckled under his breath but quickly looked away when Addison shot a nasty look in his direction. David pressed his chin against the top of Gracie’s shoulder and grinned smugly at Addison.

  “I reckon I’ll see you around, man. I promised her I’d take her to Italiano’s. If it gets too much later, I’m afraid we’ll end up having to wait for a table.” He released Gracie from the embrace and gave her a peck on the cheek. She stiffened for a brief second and then turned into him so that her lips brushed lightly across his.

  Addison nearly barfed on his own boots. “Get a room, y’all.”

  “We have a whole house,” David pointed out.

  “If I were you, I’d start locking the front door.” Addison made a punching gesture with his right fist. “But I guess y’all had better get going. I’d hate to fuck up your date night by making you miss your dinner reservations.” Addison’s voice was thick with sarcasm as he rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, that’d be a real shame,” David agreed with a smirk on his thin lips. The two of them stared at one another over Gracie’s head for a moment before Addison backed away.

  “We’d probably better be getting back on patrol already. It was just lovely running into y’all. Be careful tonight.” Addison said as he caught David’s arm with one hand. “And just remember, if you touch her, I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll kill me herself if I do anything out of line,” he said with a straight face as Gracie choked hard on the bottle of Coke she’d just opened.

  Addison turned and walked back to his truck. He got into the driver’s seat as if he planned on going somewhere but instead sat in the parking lot and wordlessly watched the Toyota until Gracie and David had gotten back into their truck and driven away. Eddie buckled his belt and waited for the next step as he watched Addison.

  “David Breedlove, huh?” Eddie threw the name out there hoping Addison would take the bait, but Addy just nodded. Eddie didn’t know Addison very well, but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would take too kindly to someone mistreating his kid sister. Eddie decided to take a chance, hoping he could form an alliance against David with another law enforcement officer.

  “I went to high school with David. He’s a scary guy,” Eddie said. “I wouldn’t want him dating my sister.”

  “David’s one of my best friends. I don’t give a shit about him dating my sister.” Addison turned and scowled at Eddie. “I’m just pissed off because he didn’t tell me he was with her until after they’d already been caught. He should have been straight up about it.”

  “Oh,” Eddie sighed and slumped down in the passenger’s seat, any hope of having found a partner in his quest against David shattered.

  *

  Gracie decided the short wait for a table at Italiano’s had definitely been worth it as she leaned back in the booth and sipped the pretty, fruity frozen daiquiri David had ordered with his ID and then pushed across the table to her.

  As she watched David order a bottle of beer and drum on the side of the marinara bowl with a bread stick, it occurred to Gracie that this was all that she had wanted from her miserable date with Austin last night. Just a decent meal that wasn’t cooked by the poor unfortunate souls who had landed in the dining hall as a student work job and some conversation with a decent looking guy.

  “Don’t look now but we’re getting the evil eye.” David smirked at her from across the table.

  “Huh?” Gracie didn’t know how he still had the energy to fidget. She was exhausted as she pushed her salad around her plate with a fork, chasing a black olive. She’d bought him a dark green polo shirt when she had been in Walmart. It matched his eyes and actually fit across his chest and shoulders. He had shaved his face and put on some kind of good smelling aftershave. He was attractive, in his own way. When he decided to be. If a girl liked tattoos.

  He jerked his chin to their left. “Olivia Barker is sitting at that corner booth. She’s been watching us since we walked in.”

  “Oh, charming.” Gracie sighed in irritation. All dressed up, she suspected they made a believable enough couple so long as whoever was looking was dumb enough to believe what they saw. “I’m surprised she hasn’t come over here yet, just to make sure we know that she’s going to tell the entire Shiner’s Bayou Baptist Church exactly what we did tonight.”

  “That’s fine,” David smirked and reached one of his hands across the table. “Remember, we’re fixing to be the talk of the town anyways. Might as well make sure they have something good and juicy to talk about.”

  Gracie couldn’t help laughing as she let him take her hand. He made a big show of stroking her fingers in the middle of the table while the waiter dropped off more bread and took their order.

  “You are so bad,” she said as they watched the waiter depart. She still couldn’t believe she had kissed him in the middle of the Walmart parking lot. Granted, it had just been a little kiss, and it had just been for show, but she had felt his surprise when she’d brushed her lips across his.

  It had been a friendly little kiss but there hadn’t been any passion in it. Gracie missed passionate kisses. She missed Cal. It wasn’t fair to be missing Cal right now, but it seemed like the more time she spent one-on-one with David, the more obvious it was that there was a gaping hole in her life where Cal belonged and that she, as a person, was just flat out incomplete without him.

  “I know, but I’m good at being bad,” David said as he grinned at her. The swelling around h
is eyes was starting to fade into his tanned skin. She suspected that his nose was going to be very crooked from now on since he hadn’t bothered going to the doctor to have the broken part set back the way it was supposed to go. She was also quite certain he didn’t care.

  “I don’t know how you’re still sane,” Gracie admitted before she thought better of speaking what was on her mind.

  “Never said I was.” He shrugged his shoulders and bit into another bread stick.

  “I’m starting to feel like I’ve lost my own mind,” Gracie confessed. She closed her eyes for a moment and then reopened them. “I mean, I feel like I’ve ruined everything. I went away to college because I thought it would help me figure out where I wanted to go with my life. Instead it just made me think I made a horrible mistake when I walked away from what I had.”

  He raised an eyebrow and waited for her to continue.

  “College is absolutely nothing like I thought it would be,” she told him. “It’s hard to explain. I thought it would be different from Shiner’s Bayou, and it is, but not in the way I thought it would be.”

  “What do you mean?” He raised one eyebrow at her.

  Olivia chose that moment to come waddling past their table. David had apparently noticed her approaching because he chose that moment to lean across the table and give her a brief kiss on the forehead.

  Gracie thought she heard Olivia gasp as she passed by. David smirked and Gracie giggled. For a brief moment, as she watched him stick his tongue out at Olivia’s retreating backside, she felt like everything would work out. One way, or another.

  “I guess I’m just too old-fashioned,” she gestured at the restaurant surrounding them. “I thought that when Austin asked me out to dinner, he genuinely wanted to take me out to eat, so we could get to know one another better. When I was getting ready to go, I put on what I thought was a really cute outfit and Brittany, my roommate, made fun of me and said I looked like an unsophisticated redneck.” She shrugged her shoulders. “She went over to my closest and picked out that stupid mini-skirt and that slutty shirt I bought last spring but never had the guts to wear, and next thing I know I’m sitting in the drive-thru lane of this stupid Mexican place with a guy who doesn’t think he should have to buy me dinner and then calls me a whore when I tell him to quit trying to feel me up.”