One of the people in my line of view moved and I noticed he wasn’t wearing a vest like so many of the men were. Maybe he wasn’t in the motorcycle club, or was he?
It doesn’t matter. At least, it shouldn’t.
He had brought back my plastic container and thanked me for helping his brother. There was no reason to think he was a bad guy now, was there? He had dirt smudged on his neck like Louie sometimes did, and something about that reassured me.
No one was sitting next to my neighbor at that point, and as I looked around, I debated for a minute whether to pretend not to see him or just go ahead and wave to get it over with the lazy way. Then those deeply engraved manners my mom had practically beat into me overrode anything and everything else, like usual. Plus, I hated when people pretended not to see me, even if I really didn’t want to say hi, and he’d been polite when he didn’t need to be. I wasn’t going to count the first day we’d met; no one was ever in a good mood when they’d gotten rudely woken up, especially with some bullshit like his brother had pulled.
After another minute of telling myself that it would be fine to not say anything, I accepted that I couldn’t do that. With a grumble, I finally pushed my chair back and got up, grabbing my stout along the way.
One day I would grow into my own person who didn’t care about doing the right thing.
One day when hell froze over.
The closer I got to him sitting at the other end of the bar staring at the television mounted high on the wall, the more relaxed I became. He was watching a baseball game. It was Josh’s favorite major league team—the Texas Rebels. I only hesitated a little bit as I came up behind him and then tapped him on the shoulder with my free hand.
He didn’t turn around, so I did it again. That second time, he finally turned his head to look over his shoulder, a slight frown creasing the space between his full eyebrows. Pale eyelids lowered over those hazel irises, blinking once, then twice and a third time.
Great. He didn’t recognize me.
“Hi.” I flashed him a smile that was about 98 percent “why did I do this?” “I’m Diana, your neighbor,” I explained, because though we’d met twice, apparently he still didn’t remember me. If that didn’t make a girl feel good, I didn’t know what would.
Dallas blinked once more and slowly gave me a hesitant, wary look as he nodded. “Diana, yeah.”
I blinked at the most unenthusiastic greeting I’d ever been welcomed with.
And then to make it worse, his frown made a reappearance at the same time his gaze flicked around the bar. “This is a surprise,” he said slowly, his forehead still lined with confusion or discomfort, or both. I didn’t know why. My boobs weren’t hanging out and in his face, and I was standing a reasonable distance away from him.
“I’m here with my friend,” I explained slowly, watching as he turned his head enough to glance around me… to look for my friend? Or see where his friend was to get me out of his face? Who knew? Whatever the reason, it made me narrow my eyes at him. I didn’t want to be here either, thank you very much. “Well, I wanted to say hi since I saw you here….” I trailed off as his gaze switched back to my direction, that almost familiar crease making its presence known one more time between his thick eyebrows. Had I done something wrong by coming up to him? I didn’t think so. But there was something in his gaze that made me feel so unwelcome, I couldn’t help but feel awkward. Really awkward.
I could tell where I was wanted and where I wasn’t.
“All right, I just wanted to say a friendly ‘hello.’ I’ll see you later, neighbor.” I finished in one breath, regretting making the decision to come over more than I had regretted anything in recent history.
That furrow between my neighbor’s eyebrows deepened as his gaze swept over me briefly before moving back to the television as he shifted forward in his seat, dismissing me. The action was so fucking rude, my stomach churned from how insulted I was. “’Kay. See you around,” he said.
Thank God I had said I was leaving first.
I didn’t know him well enough to decide whether he was being unfriendly because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me in public or if today was just not the day for small talk. Then again, once he realized who I was, his expression had just turned guarded. Why, who the hell knew?
Slightly more embarrassed than I had been minutes before—I should have just pretended not to see him, damn it—with my drink in hand, I made the walk along the edge of the bar toward my original seat. I’d barely sat down when I faintly heard Ginny’s voice over the loud music. A moment later, the seat next to me was pulled out and so was the one on the other side of her.
“Sorry, sorry,” she apologized, scooting the stool forward as the blond man she’d called her cousin did the same at the stool beside her.
I shrugged, shoving the moment with my neighbor to the back of my mind. I wasn’t going to let it bother me. There wasn’t anything worth bothering me about the situation. Good for him not being a giant whore, I guess, if that was why he hadn’t been friendly. “It’s okay.”
And then, of course, the blond named Trip leaned forward and tipped his chin up at me. “You know Dallas?”
“The guy over there or the city?” I asked, gesturing toward the end of the bar with a quick and not-so-inconspicuous head jerk.
He nodded with a grin. “The man, not the city.”
“Uh-huh. We’re neighbors.”
That had Ginny turning her red head to look in the direction we’d both gestured to. I could tell her eyes narrowed.
“No shit?” Trip asked, bringing his mug of beer to his mouth.
“He’s two houses down, across the street.”
“You’re across from Miss Pearl?”
How the hell he knew who Miss Pearl was, I didn’t understand. “Yep.”
“I remember seeing a for sale sign up in front of that house. How ‘bout that.”
Someone knew my neighbor well.
Meanwhile, I noticed that Ginny was still trying to look over at the other side of the bar to search whom we’d been originally talking about. I touched her elbow and, with my palm flat to the surface of the bar, pointed right at my neighbor pretty damn discreetly if I did say so myself. “The guy in the white shirt.”
Then she turned to look at me over her shoulder, her eyes a little too shrewd. “You live across the street from him?”
“You know him too?”
“I didn’t…” She flubbed her words before shaking her head and using her thumb to gesture to the blond beside her. “He’s our cousin.”
That man was Ginny’s cousin? Really? She had never, ever mentioned him before. I’d pegged him to be about forty, right around her age. The same age as I figured the cute blond on her other side might be also.
“So, you cut hair too?” Trip asked, ending Ginny’s explanation of the man at the end of the bar, damn it. I could always ask her about it later… maybe. After the way he’d just been, I wasn’t exactly interested in hearing his life story. Plus, he was married. Married. I wouldn’t roll down that hill even if he’d been interested. Which he hadn’t. It was fine. I wasn’t interested either.
“Yes,” I answered, focusing on the blond’s question, even as Ginny snorted into her beer. “I prefer hair artiste, but yeah.” Doing hair color was my favorite and what I made more than half my money off, but who needed to be specific?
“You wanna cut mine?” the flirt just went ahead and asked.
I scrunched up my nose and smiled. “No.”
The big laugh that bubbled out of him made me grin.
“It’s nothing personal, I promise,” I explained, smiling at him and Ginny, feeling a little like a jerk for how that had come out.
Ginny’s cousin shook his head as he continued cracking up, his handsome face getting that much more good-looking. “Nah. I get it. I’ll go cry in the bathroom.”
My boss groaned as she put her beer mug up to her face, rolling her eyes. “Don’t believe anythi
ng that comes out of his mouth.”
“I wasn’t going to.” I winked at her, earning us another laugh from the only man talking to us.
“Fuck, you two are brutal.”
We didn’t even have to say “thank you.” Ginny and I grinned at each other over his compliment that wasn’t supposed to be one. I had just sat back into my stool when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my neighbor’s face. He was looking right at us.
Before I could process that, Trip leaned his forearm onto the counter, catching my attention once more, and asked, “What did you say your name was again?”
Chapter Five
Fuck.
Ginny pulled the words right out of my mouth. “Why is it so bright out today?”
I squinted against the shaft of sunlight beaming through the glass doors and windows of the shop. Despite suffering through the worst of my hangover yesterday, I still wasn’t back at 100 percent after our drinking fest. My head ached and my mouth still tasted faintly like a dead animal.
God, I was getting old. Five years ago, I wouldn’t still be feeling like shit almost forty-eight hours after going out.
“I’m never drinking again,” I muttered to the redhead who had woken up on my couch the day before.
“Me neither,” she moaned, practically hissing as the door to Shear Dialogue swung open and even brighter sunshine poured into the salon at eleven in the morning as Sean, the other stylist, stepped inside with his phone to his ear. He gave us a chin dip in greeting, but we were both too busy acting like we were Dracula’s children to care.
God.
Why did I do this to myself? I knew better. Hell, of course I knew better than to drink so much in one night, but after we’d left the biker bar, aptly named Mayhem, in a cab together—because there was no way either one of us had any business behind the wheel of a car—we’d gone on to drink a bottle of wine each.
When I’d woken up the day before on my stomach and felt that first stir of nausea and flu-like symptoms hit my body, I’d promised God that, if he made my nausea and headache go away, I would never drink again. Apparently, I had to accept that he knew I was a damn liar and wasn’t going to do a single thing to ease my suffering. My mom had always said you could lie to yourself, but you couldn’t fool God.
“Why did you make me drink that entire bottle of wine?” Ginny had the nerve to ask.
Slumping deeper into my work chair, I slanted a look in her direction. I didn’t trust my neck to do what I requested. “I didn’t make you do anything. You were the one who said you wanted your own, remember? ‘I don’t want white. I want red.’”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Of course you don’t remember it.”
She let out a snicker that made me smile until my head hurt worse.
“I don’t know how we’re going to make it through the rest of the day.”
“I don’t have that many appointments left. You?” Mondays and Wednesdays were my slowest days of the week usually; those were the two afternoons I picked the boys up from school.
She groaned. “I’ve got two hours until I’m busy. I might go take a nap in the break room.” She paused. “I’m thinking about going to buy one of those travel-sized bottles of wine from the gas station and drink it. I think it might make me feel better.”
Ginny had a point. I had eyed the last bottle I had in the fridge that morning and talked myself out of a few sips to ease my hangover. My next client was in an hour, and then I had a fifteen-minute break between customers after that until I got off. Actually, having clients when you were hungover was a curse disguised as a blessing. “Go. I can wake you up if you want.”
We both let out a moan of suffering at the same time Sean slammed the break room door closed.
Slumping in my seat, I folded my arms over my chest and tried not to taste my saliva. “Your cousin is pretty cute.”
“Which one?”
How had I forgotten my neighbor was her cousin? I didn’t have the energy to ponder Dallas and his brother, whose name I didn’t know, being related to her. It didn’t make sense. “Trip.”
That had Ginny making a noise that sounded like a pathetic attempt of a scoff. “Don’t even go there, Di.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“How can I say this? He’s a great friend and family member, but a partner in a relationship…? No. He has two baby mamas.”
“Oh.” Oh. One baby mama? All right. Two baby mamas? Nope.
“Yeah. He’s great. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great dad, and other than my dad, there’s nobody else I love more in my family, but he’s a player, and I doubt he’ll change any time soon,” she explained in a way that gave me the feeling she’d gone through this spiel in the past. So… Trip was her favorite, not the cousin who sat on the other side of the bar from us and not once came up to her to say hi. Shocking. “His oldest son plays competitive baseball like Josh.”
Huh. I slid her a look, intending to just mess with her. “So, you’re saying we have things in common?”
“I’m doing you a favor, Di. No. Don’t go there with him.”
“There goes my dream of us being family.” I laughed until my brain told me to quit doing stuff like that.
She let out a snort that lasted all of three seconds before she moaned. “I have other family, you know.” After a pause, she asked, “So you live across from Dallas?”
“Uh-huh.” I thought about it for a second. “He’s really your cousin?” The coincidence was almost too much for me to believe it was true.
“Yeah.” There was another pause. “His mom is my dad’s sister. Trip’s dad’s sister.”
There was something about the hesitation as Ginny talked about this specific side of her family that gave me the clue there was something about them that she wasn’t fond of for some reason or another. In the time we had worked together, she wasn’t stingy talking about her family. She’d mentioned Trip enough times, but she had never once brought up Dallas. I wondered why; I just didn’t want to ask.
Ginny knew me well enough to recognize when I was curious about something but didn’t want to be the first to bring it up.
“We’re not close. He didn’t grow up around here like me and Trip did, and he’s younger than we are by a little.” Ginny was forty-three; “younger than” her didn’t really explain much. “He retired from the marines… or one of those branches. I don’t remember which exactly. From what I heard, he moved back a year ago. I haven’t seen him but once.”
“Oh,” was the only thing that came to mind for me to respond with. But I’d fucking known it! He had been in the military, long enough to retire. How old was he? Before I could stop my big mouth, I asked, “Is he married?”
She didn’t look at me as she answered, “I remember someone saying he’s separated from his wife, but that’s all I know. I’ve hardly seen him in the last twenty years. I’ve definitely never seen her around.”
Separated. I knew it. That explained everything. The ring. The woman in the car he’d gotten into a screaming match with. Maybe that explained him being weird. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to think we were flirting with each other? One of my clients that I’d had for years had gone through a rough divorce. After she’d told me all the shit she and her husband were fighting over, she had pretty much convinced me that everyone should get a prenup.
“I met his brother.” I’d more than “met” his brother, but that wasn’t my business to share. “He’s kind of a jerk. No offense.”
Ginny turned her entire body to look at me. “Jackson is here?”
Why the hell did she say his name like she was saying Candy Man? It was my phone ringing that had me snapping straight up with a jolt, immediately forgetting her question. Too lazy to get up, I reached forward as far as I could to grab my purse. I strained and then strained a little more, snatching the edge of it and pulling it toward me with a huff. Sure enough, my phone was in the pocket I always left it in, and I only had to take a quick
glance at the screen before I hit the ignore button at the “restricted call.”
I had just set my phone back into my bag without a word when it started ringing once more. With a sigh, I glanced at the screen and groaned, torn between being relieved I’d decided to look again and dreading the caller. “Fuck.”
“Who is it?” Ginny asked that time, all nosey.
I let my finger float over the screen for a second, knowing I needed to answer it but not really wanting to. “The boys’ school.”
The look on her face said enough. She had two sons. Getting a phone call from the school was never a good thing. Ever.
“Shit,” I cursed one more time before making myself tap the screen. “Hello?” I answered, praying for a miracle I knew wasn’t going to happen. I already had one hand in my purse, searching for the keys.
“Mrs. Casillas?”
I frowned a little at the title but didn’t correct the woman on the other line who knew she was about to ruin my day. “Yes?”
“This is Irene at Taft Elementary. There’s been an incident—”
* * *
Nothing before the age of twenty-six could have prepared me for raising two boys. Really. There wasn’t a single thing.
None of the four boyfriends I’d had over the course of my life had prepped me for how to deal with two small people who would eventually grow into men. Men who would eventually have responsibilities and maybe even families—decades and decades from now. The thought was terrifying. I’d dated boys and I’d dated idiots who were still boys no matter how much facial hair they had. And I was responsible for raising a pair to not become like them. I was about as far away from being an expert as you could get. Looking back on them now, my exes were like pieces of gum you’d find beneath a table at a restaurant.
While Rodrigo and I had always been close, at five years older than me, I had been too young to pay attention to those careful years between five and fifteen, to see how he’d survived them. All I could remember was this bigger-than-life personality who had been popular, athletic, and likable. If there had been growing pains, I couldn’t remember. And I definitely couldn’t ask my parents about it. I also couldn’t call the Larsens for advice; they’d raised two girls, not two boys, and in the span of no time, I’d figured out that for a lot of things, boys were a lot different than girls. Josh and Lou had done some shit that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, and I had no doubt five-year-old me would have thought the same thing.
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