“Oh my God,” Landry whispered as they got within three houses of the King home. “What happened?”
Zane sighed. It was only the tip of his tongue to start cursing when he spotted his boots and shoes in the middle of the front yard. His pants and shirts were decorating the shrubs and there was a pair of his bikini-style underpants stuck to the top of the mailbox. “I told you what happened,” Zane growled.
“People don’t do that,” Landry whispered. She was leaning forward with both hands on the dashboard as she peered through the windshield. Then she turned to stare at him. “People just don’t do that, Zane! I mean, they say they do. And then they kind of talk about doing it when they’re mad at a significant other. But people don’t really do that!”
“Well, I think I have to disagree with you.” Zane pulled his truck up next to the curb. He was technically blocking the driveway, but he could not pull in without running over his personal belongings.
“Is she still… Oh God!” Landry scrambled to open the passenger door and then jumped out before Zane had even thrown the truck into park. “She’s still throwing the stuff! Oh my God!”
Zane barely had time to react before Landry was striding across the front yard of the now completely littered King family home. She was waving her hands at someone in the half open front door. Jumping to the ground and leaving his door open, Zane ran around the truck just in time to hear part of the exchange between his mother and Landry.
“You can’t just throw his stuff on the lawn!” Landry shouted.
She was pointing emphatically to Zane’s clothing. It was dangling from every shrub and every tree. His socks were tangled in the rose bushes and his underpants were stuck on more than just the mailbox. It was embarrassing really. Zane hadn’t ever had a lover throw him out like this. It was pretty damned humiliating.
“You!” Tisha Olivares-King popped the rest of the way out the front door and stood on the top step of the sweeping porch with her hands on her hips and a derisive glare on her face. “What are you doing here? Your grandmama is dead and your parents killed themselves rather than face their financial humiliation! You don’t belong in this zip code, you little tramp! Go back to the other side of the tracks.”
Oh hell no! Zane started to yell back at his mother, but he needn’t have bothered. Landry Fisher slipped the leash on that red-headed temper of hers and it was almost like a sonic boom blasted through the neighborhood.
“What are you saying to me?” Landry’s voice was so loud that Zane could have sworn that the windows rattled in their panes. “You must be joking! You’re living here in a house that belongs to a company that belongs to your sons! You’ve never earned a penny in your life. You spend money that someone else works hard for and you sit there and pretend that you had something to do with it! You’re a worthless piece of over the hill eye candy that doesn’t even realize her short skirts and heels make her legs look stringy!” Landry’s mean words nearly knocked Tisha off the front step. The woman actually staggered back a step and grabbed the railing as though she could not believe someone had just said that to her. “Oh yeah!” Landry snarled like a tiger. “I totally went there, you horrible bitch! And I’ll go there again any time that I want to!”
Zane felt his mouth pop wide open. He was not entirely sure what he had been expecting from coming here with Landry, but this might have just gone better than he had ever imagined.
Chapter Eleven
Landry felt pretty bad at the moment. Here she was standing amidst the wreckage of Zane King’s personal life. The guy’s clothing was scattered across the manicured front lawn of his family’s huge University Park home. His shoes were liberally sprinkled over the grass. A pair of sexy red bikini underwear was waving on the fancy brick mailbox. And then there was the complete disarray of his jeans, shorts, dress clothes, and a collection of T-shirts that were laying in a heap on the aggregate driveway.
Until they had driven up and Landry had seen Zane’s things spread across the yard and driveway, she had not actually believed that Tisha Olivares-King would kick one of her sons to the curb. Now Landry had changed her mind and it made her so mad she could hardly keep a lid on it.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing right now?” Landry shouted at Tisha. “You don’t own this house! The whole freaking city of Dallas knows that you’re nothing but a sponge who lives off your kids! You were using your late husband for his money just like you used his best friend. You’re a whore, Tisha King! A total slut! You sleep with men to get money and you’re probably not even that good at it because they still go elsewhere!”
Wow. Landry hadn’t actually intended to go that far. Yes. Pretty much all of Dallas now knew that Mac King had a child with some other woman—now dead—who was a little bit older than Orion, but not by much. It was still kind of a low blow to talk about the illegitimate offspring of a woman’s dead husband.
Or was it? Tisha set her face in a mulish expression of fury and stomped down the front steps. Landry did not miss the fact that Tisha intentionally walked right over the top of Zane’s clothes. The poor guy was busy trying to swipe everything up off the ground. He kept just throwing it into the bed of his truck as though he knew he had a very limited time to get what he needed.
“How dare you?” Tisha did not stop walking until she was a scant inch or two from Landry’s face. “Your parents killed themselves! You’re not even part of the Dallas social scene anymore!”
“Nope, and I’m not sorry about either!” Landry straightened her spine and tossed her head. She was not going to let this bitch get the better of her. “You’re still running in circles trying to pretend that you’re better than everyone else. Well, you’re not. Not at all. Everyone knows you’re nothing but a trumped-up low life who grew up on the fringe of good society. My grandmama used to talk about it. They all laugh at you. Did you know?”
Holy cow, the reaction was almost instantaneous. Tisha drew back her hand and slapped Landry hard across the mouth. Landry’s head whipped back and to the right. She felt her cheek throb as though it were going to explode. Her eye was almost instantly sore. But that didn’t matter. Not really. Not when she was pretty much about to give as good as she got.
Landry was younger, stronger, and a whole hell of a lot angrier. She drew back and punched Tisha in the nose with enough force that she heard every one of her knuckles pop in protest. There was the satisfying crunch of cartilage and the spurt of warm, coppery-scented blood as Tisha’s nose broke and skewed slightly to the left.
Oh. Yeah. Hell. Yeah. Landry smiled coldly as Tisha grabbed her face and backed off. The woman was wailing like a banshee. Landry was a bit surprised that none of Tisha’s other sons had come bolting out of the house, but maybe there weren’t any to come to her rescue at this point. Had she alienated them all? It was starting to seem so.
“You hit me!” Tisha’s words were muffled by her hands as she struggled to hold them over her face to stem the flow of blood. “Assault! Assault! I’m going to run you in for assault and you’ll go to jail so fast that you’ll be hanging yourself just as quickly as your parents took all those pills!”
“Mother!” Zane’s agonized voice cut through the fray. “You can’t say that! You cannot talk to Landry like that. What is wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me?” Tisha looked scandalized. “She punched me!”
“You hit her first,” Zane argued. “I saw it. I think the whole neighborhood did!”
“What?” Tisha looked around in horror as she now started to pinch her nose, which only made it hurt more. A lot more. “Who is watching?”
Landry glanced around and noticed that the neighbors weren’t being particularly shy about coming outside to stand on their front porches and driveways to watch. “I think it’s safe to say that your throwing all of poor Zane’s things on the street got their attention. Then you started screaming at me and that pretty much clinched it. Now they’re just enjoying the show,” Landry told her as flippantly as she
possibly could.
There was movement at the front of the King house. Landry spotted a curtain shifting from right to left as though it were twitching while someone pulled it surreptitiously to the side and took a peek out front. Someone was evidently watching the fireworks and not showing one sign of coming out to help. Not that there was any helping Tisha Olivares-King. She was too likely to bite any hand that got anywhere near to help.
“Mother, let me help you.” Zane had apparently decided he had enough of his stuff in the bed of his truck. He came toward Tisha with both hands out as though he were approaching a wild animal. “We need to get you to a doctor and have that nose looked at.”
“No!” Tisha pushed Zane away.
Of course, that released the pressure on her nose, which then sprayed blood down the front of her designer outfit. It was all very comical and maybe just a little sad. The woman was stumbling back toward the house. She looked as though she were so mortified of the possibility that she was being viewed by her neighbors that she was now just seeking shelter somewhere.
“Devon!” Tisha squawked her second oldest son’s name and made a mess on the white granite front railing of the house’s façade with her blood. “Devon, get out here!”
But nobody showed up out front to help her. Landry could not help but wonder who it was had moved the curtain in the front window. Was that Devon? Was it Orion? Was it the housekeeper who was no doubt so sick of Tisha’s imperious behavior that she probably wanted to punch the woman herself?
Landry did not care. She busied herself picking up the remainder of Zane’s clothing. She could not believe any mother would do something so embarrassing to her own son. This was the kind of thing a spurned lover did when they wanted to inflict maximum embarrassment and damage on a significant other. A former significant other because this sort of thing did not go away. It was a lingering insult.
“Are you all right?” Zane asked Landry.
She paused in her picking up and stared at him in confusion. “Me? Of course I’m all right. Your mother hits like a girl.” Then Landry grinned at him. “And I broke her nose. That’s probably going to cost me. Hopefully not a trip to jail though. I really don’t think my boss will look too kindly on that behavior. It’s not the sort of thing a teacher is supposed to do.” In fact, it was the kind of thing that got a contract cancelled if it happened too often.
“I’m sure my mother isn’t going to risk filing a police report,” Zane assured Landry. He touched her arm and then took the clothes from her hands and balled them up. “I’ll get these.”
Landry was still holding onto a strip of elastic and fabric. Glancing down she realized that it was a pair of Zane’s bikini underwear. These were navy and white striped. They were—well, they were really sexy. Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment and she let go.
“Sorry!”
“No. It’s fine. I just... I don’t want you to feel like you’re supposed to pick up my underwear.” He was now twirling them around his index finger. “That would make me a really rude roommate. Don’t you think?”
“Totally rude,” Landry agreed. Then she nibbled her lip. She had not actually told him whether or not he could stay with her. She hadn’t actually believed that he needed a place to begin with. Now though? It was kind of obvious. “But I think you’ll be an okay roommate. I think we definitely have some stuff to work out between us, if you know what I mean. Rent and food and that sort of thing.”
“I don’t expect you to cook for me,” Zane told her wryly. He was grinning ear to ear like he had just won the lottery.
His expression made her nervous. Was there something she was missing? Was he trying to pull a fast one on her? It was obvious he didn’t have a place to stay. He wasn’t wrong. She needed the financial help. But what else was she missing here?
“I can pick up after myself,” Zane added. “I’ve learned a few things over the last decade or so. I promise.”
“Decade? Please.” She rolled her eyes. Then something very important occurred to her. “I don’t have a housekeeper, Zane. You can’t just walk in and throw your shit around and expect some poor old woman to come in and pick up after you because you pay her. You’re not paying anyone.”
“I could pay you!” For a moment he actually looked like he thought this could be a good idea. “I could pay you a really good housekeeper’s wage. That would help. Right?”
“Except that I don’t have freaking time to be someone’s maid,” Landry growled. “I work, Zane. A lot. You have to help. And you can’t hire it done. You need to plan on doing it yourself.”
“Okay.”
Dammit. Why did it feel like he had agreed far too quickly? There was no way that he actually understood what she was talking about. This was a bad idea. Except she really needed the help and that had to be a good thing. Right?
“It’s going to be all right, Landry.” He lightly put his arm around her and gave her a friendly hug.
Heat shot through Landry’s body. She felt as though she could not breathe. Her blood pressure rose and her heart pounded and she thought for a moment that she was going to beg him to kiss her next.
Hmm. Maybe the worst part of this whole thing was not the possibility of having a sloppy roommate. Maybe it was the fact that Landry was so incredibly attracted to Zane that she wasn’t going to be able to control herself.
“Come on then,” Zane urged. “Let’s go back to your place. We’ll drop off my stuff.” He offered a wry laugh. “Literally in this case. And then we can go grab a bite to eat for dinner. On me. It’s only fair since we’ll be discussing the terms of our roommate agreement.”
“Roommate agreement. Right.” She took a deep breath. She wanted to blush and look away. She could not keep doing this. She had to get a grip. “Are you sure that your mother is all right?”
“Yep. Totally sure.”
But as Landry got back into the passenger side of his truck she could not help but look back at the front of the palatial University Park house that Zane had called home for most of his life. She remembered leaving the house where she had grown up. She remembered the feeling of loss and the grief of knowing that she would never see it again.
It was different.
Yes. Landry had to keep reminding herself of that fact. There were some fairly significant differences going on here. Zane was leaving not because the IRS had just seized his home and would be soon enough coming to take the contents and put them up for auction. There would be no estate sale with an embarrassing display of personal items from Zane’s family placed on display for the residents of Dallas to gawk at. Nobody would be bragging at him come Monday morning that they had purchased his toys or books.
The memories were potent and almost instantly transported Landry to another time and place where she and her parents had gone through a humiliating experience that had left both her mother and father broken people.
“Landry?”
She looked up from her contemplation of—she had no idea what she had been staring at. It wasn’t as if her brain had really been processing any of it. “I’m sorry. I just got a little lost in thought.”
“I could tell.” He didn’t sound sarcastic. There was a note of compassion in his voice. “What would you like to eat? Do you feel like anything in particular? I know it’s still a little early, but at least that means we won’t have to wait anywhere for a table.”
“Like Zane King waits for a table anywhere he goes,” Landry murmured. She shook her head at him. “I’m thinking just a regular burger. How about you?”
“I know just the place,” he told her. “It’s not far from your place so at least we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Sometimes I feel like you’re always heading in the right direction.” Landry had meant this to be a bit of a joke, but when she spoke the words she suddenly realized how true they were. “It never seems to matter what happens. You land on your feet. At some point I think your luck must run out, but it never does.”
&n
bsp; “Uh huh.” He gave a shake of his head that sent his hair whispering around his ears and forehead. “I just picked up all of my clothing from the front lawn of a house that theoretically belongs to me but because my mother believes that everything my father left behind should be hers, I’m out. I don’t feel very lucky at the moment.”
“You have clothes and a place to live.” Landry pointed this out and waited for him to get it.
Finally Zane exhaled a long sigh and then reached over quite unexpectedly to brush his fingers over hers. “You’re right. I need to be more thankful for what I have even when it seems like things are falling apart.”
Chapter Twelve
Everyone was staring at him. At least that’s how it felt to Zane as he walked into the old burger joint with Landry pacing one or two steps behind him. The place was all about casual dining. That meant an old building that was half falling down filled with closely packed tables covered in red and white checked plastic table cloths. The table coverings had even been stapled to the underside of each tabletop so that they could just be wiped down quickly between customers. Although judging from the crumbs, smears of sauce, and other mystery stains on the mix of high- and low-top tables, they didn’t get much of a cleaning during the day.
Landry did not seem to have a single problem with the cleanliness and lack of style in the place. She immediately found a spot in the short line of people waiting to order at the counter. The menu was posted above the cash register and behind that you could actually see your food being cooked and assembled on the grill.
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