by Sophia Gray
“Where is he?”
“Chasing Lisa. Where else? Shit, Lieutenant, you wanna find out about that girl so bad? What did she do? Turn you down?”
Finn’s lapse of silence was enough.
Titan smiled again and barked out a deep rolling laugh. “She did!” he said. “She totally turned you down. How often does that happen?”
“Never,” Finn said, and it sounded childish even to him. He shoved his half-finished beer aside. It didn’t taste good. All he could picture was her dark lipstick and how that might taste on his lips. “Man, she was cold. And now she’s got Oliver.”
“That a bad thing?”
Finn thought about it. “It’s a bad thing because I think she’s going to turn him away from the club, or at least stop him from being a part of this.” He waved his hand across the pool hall.
“Kids gotta make their own choices,” Titan said levelly. “So what are you mad at? That Oliver went with her, or that you didn’t?”
“Both,” Finn responded.
“So seduce her.” Titan took the half-finished beer and tossed it out. He ran the glass through the little automatic washer behind the bar and ran a dry cloth around the edges before setting it back up.
“What?” Finn was pretty sure he hadn’t heard the other man right.
Titan chuckled. “I think you heard me just fine, Lieutenant. You want this girl to come around to how you see things, and you want to scratch this sudden itch for her. That’s cool, man. I get it. So do what needs to be done.”
“I tried?”
“What, you give her a smile and bat those pretty blue eyes at her? That ain’t enough, especially when the woman has her life interrupted to come handle her troubled brother. You have to go about this a completely different way.”
It wasn’t a terrible idea. The swanky redhead could use a little fun.
“So what? I should bring her flowers and make lots of pretty promises?”
“Hell no,” Titan said leaning over the bar. “Jeez, man, how do you even get women?”
“I usually wait for them to come get me,” Finn fired back amicably. “It works better all around.”
Titan nodded his head, sticking out his lower lip so he could plop a toothpick on top of it. It bounced nimbly over his mouth as he said, “Yeah, all right, that’s not bad, but do you think a woman like that is just going to come to you, man? She isn’t some lonely housewife or giggling coed from up the way. She isn’t even just a high-strung businesswoman who might enjoy a walk on the wild side. If everything I hear about her is true, she knows all about the wild side.”
Finn tried to imagine a younger Cora Anderson. In his mind, she was long-haired and sleek with shorts and a tank top tied up between those pretty breasts. It didn’t look a damn thing like her. What on earth could she have done to get that kind of reputation? “What did she like to do when she was living it up?”
Titan shrugged again. “You’d have to ask Speed for the details. He would know better than me. But she was all about things that shine, if you know what I mean.”
Finn did. “She had a case of sticky fingers?”
Titan held up his hands as if to show that he was weaponless. “That’s what I hear. She liked all kinds of things that glittered, and that got her into a bit of trouble. When she said goodbye to public education, she supposedly made some side money by snatching up all the things that people didn’t want to snatch themselves. She even shacked up with some guy for a while.”
“Some guy?” Finn felt his brow furrow across his olive forehead. “Didn’t you just say this wasn’t that big of a town?”
“He wasn’t in town. Just some dude. I dunno.”
Finn frowned. He had been to Oliver’s house; he saw the way they lived. It was all bottom-shelf stuff. Sure, there were plenty of good people who were fine with secondhand everything and store-brand groceries. If Cora weren’t, however, it could have gotten the best of her when she was too young to fix things.
“And then what?”
“Well, I know she got caught doing something stupid. The entire town talked about it for weeks.”
Finn found himself even more interested than before. “What stupid thing did she do?”
“She broke into the church.”
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
Titan spread his hands apart again. “Man, your guess is as good as mine. A lot of people say she was going to steal the offering box. Some say she wanted that gold cross that sits up at the front of the place. I dunno. But it must have been what hit rock bottom for her. Maybe that guy had something to do with it, too.”
Finn told himself he was going to talk to Speed when he got the opportunity. Then his phone rang.
“Well, look at that.”
Titan glanced down at the phone. “Is that Oliver?”
“Sure is. Bet he’s already slipped her watch and wants me to go pick him up.”
“You do that and it’s going to put a serious wrench in the plan to seduce her.”
Finn waved it off and swiped the phone on. “If he has, I won’t have to.”
Chapter 5
Cora
The “grand room” of the rent-by-week apartments was, in Cora’s opinion, anything but grand. It was a single room that tried to be a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room all at once. It was only the linoleum that separated one area from the other. It came pre-furnished with a couch, a dinette set, and a recliner, all in shades of brown.
“Awesome,” she muttered as she moved past the kitchen, which she hadn’t bothered inspecting just yet, and to the larger of the two bedrooms. Her suitcase was already camped out on the bed ready for her to give it the time of day. She really didn’t feel like unpacking right now. She wanted to go back in time to where she’d never taken her mother’s call.
No, she decided, that wasn’t fair. Her mother hadn’t been the reason she had come here. Oliver was. Cora was sure, deep down, Oliver was a good kid. He was just young and frustrated and acting out. She understood.
“Okay,” she told herself. “You can do this.”
She unzipped the suitcase and popped the lid open. She had only packed a few things in case she had needed to do an overnight trip. A trip into a local store was added to the mental list of everything she needed to accomplish over the next few days. She moved her clothes for tomorrow into the three-drawer dresser and laid her pajamas on the end of the bed.
“Now what?” she asked no one in particular.
Her stomach responded with a growl.
A glance at the digital clock on the nightstand told her it was eight-thirty. Most places would be closed, but she was sure something was still willing to seat the pair of them.
“Hey, Oliver?” she asked, knocking on his partially closed door. He had a cellphone to his ear, chatting quietly to whomever was on the other line. She had a sneaking suspicion it was that Finn guy.
She had known exactly who and what Finn Marks was the moment she had laid eyes on him. It wasn’t just the leather vest he wore with the “Enforcer” patch plastered over his chest. It was the way he carried himself. Like he should have bad boy tattooed all over him.
There had been tattoos, she remembered. Some were across his hands, blank ink symbols that she hadn’t understood or recognized. Others had been just visible beneath the cuff of his shirtsleeve. The arms had been worthy of a look, defined without being gym-happy muscular. The eyes had been nice, too. There was always something about a guy who had rich dark hair and blue eyes.
All right, she admitted inwardly, he had been cute. Very cute. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. A lot of guys who weren’t worth her time were attractive.
“What’s up?” Oliver asked, putting the phone to his shoulder.
“Dinner?” she offered.
“Sure, I guess. But, uh, could I maybe go down to the pool hall? Some of my friends are going to be there, and they wanna hang out.”
She remembered the pool hall. God, did people still g
o to that place? It was pretty much a pub, with a full bar and a kitchen. It had a large segment of the back room designated to pool tables. The knee-jerk reaction was to tell him no, that he had just been bailed out of jail and he didn’t deserve to go hang out with his friends, but the fact was there weren’t going to be a lot of other places open right now.
“All right, but I’m going with you.” She stood up and straightened out her suit.
His eyes went a little wide as if she had suggested some sort of human sacrifice. “Are you serious?”
“Ninety-nine percent of the time.” She wondered if she ought to freshen her makeup before they headed out. Why bother? It wasn’t as if anyone at the pool hall was going to care if her eyeliner was perfect.
“Are you going to like, sit with me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course not. That would be the end of the world.”
He chewed on his lip for a moment and then nodded, apparently deciding his older sister tagging along was worth being able to hang out with his buddies. “Yeah, all right, but I want pizza.”
“Deal.”
He informed the person on the other end of the line that he’d be there in a bit. Cora decided to fix her makeup anyway. There might not be anyone to impress, but that didn’t mean that she should look half put together. A good businesswoman always looked her best.
She was applying a fresh layer of mascara when Oliver tapped on her door.
“Hey, Cora?”
“Yeah?” she asked, plunging the mascara wand back into the tube. “What’s up?”
“You ready?” He hopped from one foot to the other in youthful earnestness. Cora found herself wondering which “friends” were going to be at the pool hall. Hadn’t that Finn criminal called himself Oliver’s friend?
“What’s the rush?” She pulled a dusty-rose lipstick out of her travel-sized makeup bag. With a practiced motion, she had the lid off and the stick protruding just enough to rub it on her lower lip.
“No rush,” he promised too quickly for Cora to believe him. He ran his fingers through his red-brown hair and shook his head. His eyes were a little on the bright side. Cora was guessing there was a girl at the pool hall. That was healthy, right? “I just wanna get there. You know, soon.”
She popped the cap back on and rubbed her lips together to smooth out the color. “Yeah, I’ll be out in a second.”
There was a distinct pause. “You aren’t wearing that, are you?”
She glanced down at her plum-colored business suit. It was a little rumpled from her drive, but it was serviceable. “Yeah. Why?”
He sighed. “Because you are going to stick out.”
He was right, but there wasn’t a whole lot to be done about it now. The only other outfit she had brought with her was similar to this one in everything but color, and the purple definitely went better with her hair. “Sweetie, I hate to tell you this, but no matter what I wear I am going to stick out at the pool hall.”
He didn’t look convinced. “How would you know?”
“I’ve been there.”
He eyed her dubiously. “When?”
“God, like…a decade ago, thanks for reminding me.” She debated telling him more and decided against it. Now wasn’t the time. Cora wasn’t sure there was a good time to tell her little brother what an epic screw-up she used to be, but now wasn’t it. Never seemed like a good option. “It’s not like there are a lot of places for teenagers to hang out in Carson.”
Oliver’s hands disappeared into his pockets as he went back to shifting from foot to foot. “Yeah, okay, but you are still going to get looked at.”
“That’s the price I pay for trying to be a good sister. Come on, let’s get going. I’m starved.”
# # #
The pool hall was actually called Carl’s Pool Table, but no one had called it that since the original Carl had declared the Nevada temperature didn’t sit well with him and decided to head up the west coast to Washington state. He had sold the pub to a man whose name Cora couldn’t actually remember, but after that it had just been called the pool hall.
It was little more than a long rectangle of brick, with a few scarce windows located too high on the walls to see out of, and too darkly crafted to allow for any real light. The sound of music leaked out into the otherwise empty street and through Cora’s rolled-down window as the hall’s door swung open. It, like nearly everything else in this town, hadn’t really changed.
“I’m gonna head in,” Oliver said as soon as the BMW came to a stop. His seat belt was already unfastened, and he was halfway across the minuscule parking lot when she pulled her key out of the ignition. Oh, how nice it must be to move that fast. Then again, he was almost half her age and he wasn’t wearing heels. She tugged her purse over her shoulder, bumped the door closed, and hit the alarm button on her keys. It chirped merrily back at her as she sauntered inside.
Once upon a time she had known everyone who came here. It had been her and her crowd who would stroll in after seven to hang out until the wee hours of the night. It hadn’t mattered if it was a school night. It hadn’t mattered if people gave them looks for being too loud at a particular table. They were kings and queens of their tiny kingdom, and they didn’t have a clue about the world.
“Cora? Cora, is that you?”
Cora whirled as she heard her name called. A tall slender man with a mop of messy blond hair and a round face was walking toward her. For a moment, she thought she was caught up in a mirage of nostalgia. The face had barely changed, and he was still dressed like he just rolled out of bed.
“Wes?”
“Hey!” He threw his arms open and swept her up in a spinning hug. “Holy shit, girl, it’s good to see you.”
He laid a loud kiss on both of her cheeks and another one on her mouth. When he pulled away his lips were Passion Plum and smiling.
She laughed. If it had been anyone else she would have been offended enough to slap him, but it wasn’t. This was Wes, and he had been her best friend through a good portion of her childhood. He stepped away to get a better look at her and wiped his mouth clean. “You look good.”
So did he. He had that long lanky build that would have looked at home on the range or in a business suit, depending on how he was feeling. Apparently, what he was feeling was criminal, because there plastered on a denim vest was the symbol for the Violent Spawn. She reached out and plucked it. “I’d say the same for you…but…”
He slapped his heart against his chest as if she had shot him. “Ouch.”
“You know how I feel about it.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. And if you were my girlfriend or my Ol’ Lady, I’d feel like I have to explain myself to you. Lucky for us both that never worked out.”
It was lucky. Oh sure, there had been a couple of summer nights when they had tested the bounds of their friendship. It had ended with awkward laughter and a roll of the eyes as they split a pizza and realized they would never be more than platonic.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you here,” she said. “But I am.”
He rolled his shoulders. “Hell, tonight’s my night off. Usually I’m working the bar, but I have minions for that kind of thing now.”
She blinked. “You own the pool hall?”
He laughed and dipped his head in embarrassment. “Well, yeah, I mean. So about three years ago, my uncle Bobby died.”
“The creepy one?” she asked, having a vague memory of a guy with a huge collection of guns, and a face that had once been the battlefield for acne.
“Yeah, man, that’s the one. Anyway, he died, right? And no one was really broken up about it because, like you said, he was a little creepy or whatever. But check this out.” He linked his arm companionably with hers and escorted her farther inside. “Apparently, I was the only one who ever visited him, right? I mean, sure he was weird, but he always had candy. So he ended up leaving everything to me. At first I was like, cool, man, I got a trailer that’s already paid off, wh
ich was cool. But turned out he was one of those weirdoes who didn’t believe in banks. So he kept all of his money in a jar.”
“A jar?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Well, more like fifty jars. Like those really big ones that you get from Costco? With the pretzels and stuff? Yeah, he had rows of them hidden behind those blankets he hung up.”
“I thought he was just protecting himself from the CIA with those.”
“Well, yeah, that, too. But when it was all counted up, it was like, a hundred thousand bucks. It was insane. So I went and put my momma in a nice retirement home up near Tahoe. It’s a nice place, like totally legit. They do activities and she Skypes with me every day.”