by Anna Jeffrey
He stood there, his hands resting on his hips as he gazed down at the tub. Then he looked up and showered me with a smile that left me dazzled. “Looks like fun.”
Fun? What did that mean?
Dummy. Fun. Get it?
I finally got it and a surge of heat squiggled all the way up to my cheeks. Evidently, his mind was on something besides the quality amenities. And it had been ever since we passed through the bedroom doorway. My own mind went blank. All that came to me was, “Um, here you also have heated towel bars and floor tiles.”
He chuckled. “That’s extravagant. When does it get cold enough around here for that to be important?”
My own opinion didn’t count, but I happened to agree with him. In North Central Texas, freezing temperatures were the exception rather than the norm. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. “It’s a luxury add-on.”
“But it’s wasteful if it isn’t needed. We shouldn’t be wasteful just because we can.”
Jeez! He might not say much, but when he spoke, he said a mouthful.
Now I was starting to think I needed to wind this up. A few feet from the tub, I opened a wide glass door to an oversized steam shower with so many controls it looked as if it could lift off at any moment. Mr. Tackett poked his head through the doorway and scanned floor, ceiling and walls thoroughly. “Hm. Interesting.”
Interesting? A little frown tugged at my brow as I closed the shower door. When I turned around, he was only a couple of feet away. His appraising gaze slid down my front. Gooseflesh skittered over me. My nipples tightened and pushed against my camisole as if they were reaching toward him. Could he tell? Were they showing through my blouse? Men ogling me wasn’t a new experience, but this extraordinary reaction by my body was totally unfamiliar. Was he having this effect on me because he was so damn good-looking? I pressed my tablet to my chest.
God, what would you do if you didn’t have that tablet to hide behind? my inner voice grumbled.
“Would you like to move on?” I managed to ask.
I showed him four more units, including the one on the nineteenth floor that had four bedrooms and four baths spread over 4,000 square feet. All the while, I talked a hundred miles an hour, concentrating on not letting my voice come out falsetto. He continued to say little.
I intended to end the tour on the twentieth floor in the largest unit where Gabe and I had been this morning. After a short trip on the elevator, we were at the private entrance. “This is one of four penthouse units,” I said as I plugged the passkey into the front door lock. “We had the grand opening party here last night. I don’t think I saw you.”
“Wasn’t in town last night. I flew in this morning.”
Of course. No doubt he had a private plane. I arched my brow and lifted my chin knowingly. “Ah.”
We scarcely got through the front door before Mr. Tackett checked his watch, a clunky black and gold thing that looked as if it were armed with whistles and bells. “Drake’s probably finished by now,” he said. “I don’t want to make us late for our appointment.”
“Oh. Let’s go back downstairs then.”
I had confused emotions. In a way, I was disappointed to part from his company. But the inner compass that guided me most of the time was glad for the escape. He was causing an edgy restlessness within me that had no room to thrive or even exist in my present life.
I led the way back to the elevator. The only way I was going to get through another ride in close quarters with this beautiful man without making an ass of myself was to keep talking. “On the lower floor, we have a well-equipped gym and a trainer available for someone who’s interested. Also an area called the Office that’s overseen by the concierge. It has a conference room, office machines and computers and a small post office that’s staffed nine-to-five. It’s across from the elevator. You’ll see the sign when we get off.”
Leaving the elevator, we passed up a tour of the gym and the Office and reached a large all-white space that was obviously a salon, though it wasn’t yet open for business. “Here, besides a beauty salon, we’ll have a spa that I’m sure your wife will appreciate.”
He poked his head through the doorway and made a quick perusal of the space. “No wife.”
That inner voice that had been badgering me pumped her fist. Yes!
Chapter 3
Drake was waiting when we returned to the lobby. “What do you think?” he asked Tack.
Mr. Tackett nodded. “Nice.”
Jeez, was that all he could say? The cheapest condo in this building was more than nice. Everyone who walked through the units oohed and aahed.
“Headed for the golf course?” Gabe asked Drake.
Drake grinned. “Not today. We’re on our way to Weatherford. Tack’s got an appointment to look at a horse. We’re meeting my brother. He’s the man who knows horses, but I’m going along to add my two-cents.”
Ah. So he really is a cowboy. Then again, maybe not. No one knew better than a Texas country girl that owning a horse didn’t make a guy a cowboy. But an appointment to look at a horse, accompanied by Drake’s expert horseman brother, said the subject animal wasn’t slated for the glue factory.
Cutting horse was my next thought. Owning cutting horses and having them trained to compete in various shows was a big, expensive hobby in Texas, and the cutting horse culture influenced many parts of Texas daily life. Nowadays, the value of a winning cutter exceeded the value of a Thoroughbred. Fort Worth was the home of the National Cutting Horse Association. I both knew and ran into quite a few people who owned cutting horses and none of them were poor.
As Drake and Mr. Tackett started to leave, Mr. Tackett cast me a look over his shoulder that pierced all the way to my bone marrow and left me rattled. Still, I managed to lift my hand in a small wave.
Then they disappeared. I tingled all over. I needed a moment to recover from being in the company of a scrumptious man around whom the air crackled, even if he was a man of few words. I willed my attention to straightening the items on the table.
“Your face looks red,” Gabe said. “You okay?”
With my fair complexion, “flushed” was how I usually looked when I was embarrassed or stressed. I had to get my aberrant thoughts and my blood pressure under control. “I’m fine. Guess it’s the fast pace. We covered several units above the fifteenth floor pretty quickly.”
“That dude’s got your number,” Gabe said. Obviously, he was not worried that my face looked red. “If looks could melt, you’d be a puddle on the floor about now. Exactly who is he?”
Gabe’s comment did nothing to settle my nerves. I continued to fiddle with the flyers on the table. “You met him. He’s a personal friend of Drake’s.”
“A personal friend, yeah, but who is he? Since he’s from Midland, I’m guessing he’s loaded. And he’s a buyer, right? So Drake’s going to keep him for himself.”
If Harvey Tackett were not a personal friend, Drake would have already handed him off to Gabe. Since I wasn’t a Realtor who would be collecting a commission, Drake asking me rather than Gabe to show the model assured that if Mr. Tackett bought, Drake would be able to retain the selling commission for his company. This was one of the reasons he hired me.
Gabe had to know this, but his tone dripped with resentment. I was sure he believed Drake should have given Mr. Tackett to him. The competition in real estate sales was fierce. Cutthroat even. Gabe was so hardline he had no qualm about going toe-to-toe with Drake over money. He had done it many times.
I knew nothing about the fine points of his and Drake’s business arrangement and I didn’t want to stick my nose into it. I finally looked up. “He’s from West Texas,” I said, hoping to change the subject.
“I’ll bet he’s in oil. Yep, he’s loaded.”
Gabe was worse than a dog with a bone, a trait that, no doubt, made him successful in sales. I had often wondered if he ever chilled out. Give it a rest forgodsake, I wanted to say, but I said instead. “Didn’t he tell you what he d
id when y’all were having your all-male tete-a-tete over in the corner?”
“We were talking football.”
“Well, there you go. You missed out on something important while your tongue was tied up by football.” I gave him a saccharine smile.
Ignoring my sarcasm, he planted his fists on his slim hips, pushing back his jacket. “If he buys, I should get a piece of that action. I mean, after all, I’m here and you can’t close him or write a contract, right?”
“Uh, no, I can’t.”
Just then, Michael Bolton’s voice blared from inside my bag, allowing me to escape this conversation. I had downloaded When a Man Loves a Woman as a ringtone on my smartphone when I first met Donald Sloan. I didn’t need a daily reminder of the tacky end of that relationship a year and a half ago, but the song was of my favorites and I liked hearing it. I dug for the phone.
My twenty-two-year-old half-sister’s name and picture appeared on the screen. Crap! Now what?
Lisa was six years younger than I and we were not phone buddies. She was twelve years old when I left my mother’s house, so I really didn’t know her very well as an adult. She called me only when she or our mother needed money or a crisis had erupted. Nothing could spoil my day more quickly than a phone call from either of them. Instantly, my good mood threatened to plummet.
“I need to take this,” I told Gabe and walked toward the back of the lobby for privacy. “Hi, this is me.”
“Mom quit taking those latest pills the doctor gave her.”
As usual, Lisa hadn’t even said hello before she started on her and our mother’s issues. Mom was an alcoholic who suffered from bipolar disorder. Or if I wanted to be charitable, I could say she had always suffered from manic depression and eventually became an alcoholic. One affliction fed off the other.
As my thoughts veered to the possible result of her stopping the medication that leveled out her mood swings, my mouth quirked. “Why?”
“She thinks they’re making her fat.”
“I thought she was doing better with those pills. I hate to see her stop taking them. Maybe you should call the doctor and discuss it with him.”
“And if he wants her to take something different, how’s it gonna get paid for?”
I made a mental groan. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life managing and combating Mom’s illness and its consequences. Now, I was ten years removed from that onus, but that didn’t mean I was relieved of it. Mom had no money and her meds were expensive. I had hassled for months arranging for her to get free medication directly from the pharmaceutical company that made it. “At the moment, I don’t know. I’d have to look into it.”
In your spare time, right? my inner voice snarked. Unspoken sarcasm gave me the patience to deal with my little sister’s ineptitude and my mother and her husbands.
I didn’t want to worry about them today. Working in a PR job as I was doing, I needed to be bubbly and enthusiastic, not burdened by guilt and anger. But mentally, I was already withdrawing from the pleasant day to deal with the latest family crisis.
“I guess I might as well tell you,” Lisa went on. “Arnie got arrested for shoplifting in Walgreens in Abilene. I had to go up there and get him out of jail. Then him and Mom got into this big fight and he left. Now she’s all down and upset.”
Arnold Hamlin. My mother’s latest—and fifth—husband.
Crap! My jaw tightened. “She really needs to get back on that medication, Lisa. When did Arnie leave? Is it for good?”
“Yesterday. He’ll probably come back today. I mean, where’s he gonna go? Mom says she doesn’t care if he stays gone, but she’s been bawling ever since he left.”
“What did he try to steal?”
“Cigarettes. They caught him behind the cash register putting ’em in his jacket pocket.”
Shit! I was dumbfounded. A picture came to me of the last Walgreens I was in. “Walgreens has locked counters and security cameras,” I said. “Unless you’re a magician, getting into the cigarette display would be almost impossible. How did he get back there?”
“How would I know what he did, Miranda? I don’t even know if that was the first time he ever did it.”
My reflection in the marble wall showed my mouth turned down in a horseshoe scowl. I straightened my spine, turned in the opposite direction and heaved a loud sigh meant to be audible on the other end of the line.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” Lisa said defensively. “They put him in jail, Miranda. Somebody had to go get him out. He’s not that bad. He’s your stepfather, too, you know.”
I had never considered Arnold Hamlin my stepfather or anything at all to me. He and my mother had been married roughly three years, so he hadn’t been around when I still lived with her and Lisa.
I had mixed emotions about Arnie. At one time, he had made my mother happy, thus, he made me happy. But now, the honeymoon was over and they occupied the same cage. If you stayed around them long, you had to wonder which would devour the other first. He, too, was an alcoholic who had spent more time and energy in a quest to get disability benefits from Social Security than he had ever spent on a job. Other than being a drunk, he had no visible disability.
A part of me felt guilty for the fraud he perpetrated daily. But another part was grateful he was getting money from somewhere besides me. I should report him, but I hadn’t even looked into how I would do it. I felt guilty about that, too.
I paced toward the fire exit. “He’s a fifty-five-old man who’s been a jerk for as long as I’ve known him. Nothing I hear about him comes as a surprise. Good grief, Lisa, who’s dumb enough to go behind the counter at Walgreen’s and steal cigarettes? Do you think rescuing him was worth the cost?”
I sensed Lisa’s growing frustration and I didn’t have to wait long to hear the real reason for her call. “Listen, did you send us a check? It wasn’t in yesterday’s mail.”
The U.S. Government, the great State of Texas and I provided the livelihoods for this trio. The government supplied monthly checks, Medicaid and a Lone Star card. I carried out my part by working Monday through Thursday nights as a bartender at Smoky Joe’s, a neighborhood cocktail lounge not far from where I lived.
I had learned to tend bar while I was still a student and so far, that knowledge had served me as well as what I had learned in college. I sent most of my earnings from Smoky’s to Mom and Lisa. I had done this at first to avoid taking money out of my fledgling business. Gala was profitable now, but I still wasn’t confident enough to give up my bartending job. The lounge was upscale and I did well on tips. Usually, it was enough.
“I haven’t gotten around to sending it yet. I’m working all weekend.”
I had blocked out the entire weekend for this gig with Lockhart Concepts and I normally wouldn’t even be thinking about anything else. Drake Lockhart paid me well and I gave his events my undivided attention.
“Oh,” Lisa said.
The disappointment in my little sister’s reply was impossible to ignore. “Why are your finances in such an urgent state all of a sudden? I sent you money last week.”
Thinking of the four nights of four-to-midnight on my feet at Smoky’s, I did a one-eighty and paced in the opposite direction.
“It took all of that to get Dad out.”
Dad? Besides hating that Lisa had spent the money I had worked for on getting Husband #5 out of jail, I hated hearing her call him “Dad.” “You shouldn’t call Arnie ‘Dad,’ Lisa. He isn’t your father.”
“It’s just easier, Miranda. You don’t live here, so you don’t know.”
My sister was no more acquainted with her natural father than I was with mine. If she needed to call Arnie “Dad,” so be it. I said no more.
But at least her father is somewhere out there and he and Mom were married when she was born, my irritated inner voice reminded me.
“Mom’s been so down since her and Arnie had that big fight,” Lisa went on. “I’m scared she’ll get into one of tho
se moods where she starts talking about killing herself.”
Oh, hell. My mother had never attempted suicide, but until she started the meds she had just stopped taking, she had talked about it, which was scary enough. A trip to West Texas loomed in my immediate future.
“I was gonna use the money to put gas in the car and take her out to eat,” Lisa said. “Maybe go to a movie.”
I couldn’t help but think of all the times I hadn’t gone out to eat or gone to the movies because I was always working. Now I was feeling pissy, spoiling for a fight. Miranda the Cynic rose to the occasion. “What, restaurants stopped taking Lone Star cards?”
Lisa didn’t take the bait. Maybe she didn’t even recognize the derision. “Mom maxed out that card,” she said. “She found a sale on Dr. Pepper up in Abilene and used the card to buy all of it. You know how she is about Dr. Pepper. Now we’ve got cases of that shit all over the house. I told that state counselor the way Mom is, trying to get her to add money to the card, but she wouldn’t.”
The more Lisa talked, the clearer it became that our mother had been—or maybe continued to be—in a manic episode. Anything might happen next. “Please tell me that Dr. Pepper is all she’s drinking.”
“She spikes it with a little vodka, but I’m keeping an eye on the bottle. I marked it with a Sharpie.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Anyway, we’ve all been stuck here in this old house, Miranda. We need a change of scenery. Could you send a little extra?”
As I thought about all that Lisa had told me, I also had to consider that I never knew what to believe when she or Mom asked me for extra money. Mom had told me fibs my entire life because that was just what she did. Fabrications and exaggerations were part of her illness. One of my most vivid childhood memories was when she had come to an elementary school party dressed like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. My classmates had thought she was cool. At the time, I had thought so, too, but later, when I was older, I realized how far out there Mom had been that day and that my teacher had been horrified.