Romancing the Rival

by Kris Fletcher

  “Understood.”

  “But I don’t exactly want him—or anyone—to face that kind of public frenzy. I mean, if tarring and feathering were still legal, I think some of those people would have been out there firing up the barbecue and dumping the down out of their pillows.”

  “Not all of us are that bad.”

  Damn. Did he think she was talking about him? “No. I know you’re not . . .” She knotted her hands in her lap. “Here’s the thing. You have cause to be angry with Rob. I don’t blame you. But as far as I can tell, unless there’s other things I don’t know about, which is always very possible, you and I were the only ones in that room who had been personally hurt by him. The others were just . . . I don’t know.” She shook her head. “That’s the thing. I don’t know what was driving them. Do they think their property values will go down?”

  “Nope.” He stopped for a red light. “It’s all about reputation.”

  “What do you mean? How did Rob do anything to impact their reputations?”

  “Not theirs individually. The town’s.”

  Oh.

  “You mean, they don’t want it to look like Calypso Falls is the kind of place where ex-cons can come in and set up programs at will?”

  “Don’t laugh. This is a place that prides itself on being all about good schools and low crime and trees on the streets. They don’t want that picture to be tarnished. And if someone like your father, who is nothing if not good at getting publicity, decides to set up shop here and makes it look like he’s been welcomed with open arms . . . they’re not going to like that.”

  “Okay. I get that. But I mean, that one woman, Doreen—she was practically crying.”

  “Doreen’s mom just died a month ago. She’s still dealing.”

  Oh. That helped a bit. Not that she wanted poor Doreen to have lost her mother, but still.

  “It’s kind of like . . .” Spence turned onto her street. “Remember, about ten years ago, when those kids hacked the high school records office and changed their grades?”

  “Oh my God. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to knowing what it was like when Pontius Pilate was sentencing Jesus to crucifixion.”

  “Right. Total outrage. Not because of what the kids did, though obviously it was wrong and they had to be disciplined. But because it might damage the school’s reputation. And all of a sudden, little Samantha’s chances of getting into that Ivy League school might not be as high if the school’s reputation has been tainted.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Neither did I, until Livvy explained how it felt from a parent’s perspective.” He shot her a grin. “To quote my gentle sister, ‘Why the hell should I pony up for those gawdawful taxes if my kid is going to graduate from a school where you have to hold the diploma up to the light to see if it’s real?’”

  The laughter that Bree couldn’t hold back felt good. It made her realize that the words she’d held in during the meeting had settled in a tight knot of tension in her shoulders and neck. She wriggled her shoulders and did a couple of neck rolls, which helped, but not enough.

  He reached across the seat and gripped the back of her neck, his palm warming and kneading the tightness away.

  “Mmmmm. That feels good.”

  Take charge of your own story, Bree.

  “Do you have any pressing need to go home tonight?” she asked.

  He glanced sideways and raised his eyebrows in her direction. “Is that an invitation?”

  “Slumber party at my place. Bring your clothes. Preferably in a bag instead of on you.”

  “Tempting, but I can’t.”

  Disappointment arced through her.

  “I have to get home to Furgus. But,” he added, reaching for her hand, “if you want to come over, I can show you the things I learned in that massage class I took.”

  “You? You, Mr. Tough Badass, took a massage class?”

  “If you must know the truth, it wasn’t really a class. More like, I used to date a massage therapist.” He sighed. “But she was a great teacher.”

  “Really.” Bree refused to be jealous. Just because psychology suddenly didn’t seem like as valuable a skill to share as massage techniques.

  Maybe Spence was ready to be the teacher instead of the student. Ms. Therapist couldn’t have given him that, could she?

  “Come back to my place and I’ll let you be the judge yourself.”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It might be kind of weird. I’ll be thinking of her the whole time.”

  He stopped for a red light, reached across the seat, and slid his hand between her legs. She shrieked. He laughed.

  “Trust me, Bree. You won’t be thinking of anybody else. Guaranteed.”

  “Well, if you’re offering a guarantee . . .”

  “Damn straight. Double your pleasure or your money back.”

  “I guess that’s a pretty safe offer.” She waved toward the windshield. “Home, Jeeves.”

  He laughed and took the turn toward his place. She sat back and ordered herself to think of the hours ahead, of the delights that lay in store and the deep sleep she was going to need. Because after hearing the people spout this evening, she knew what she had to do.

  She had to talk to her father.

  * * *

  Spence was at his desk, checking his e-mail to see if a potential customer had finally made a decision whether to accept his bid, when a message came in from Fred Gettman. He assumed it was task force or committee work and would have saved it for later if he hadn’t caught the subject line: Two Birds, One Stone.

  He opened the e-mail and scanned the message.

  Then he downloaded the attachment.

  Then he double-checked Fred’s message.

  Spence—sorry I couldn’t make it to the committee the other night. I’ve been working on that possible idea to include both a playground and a wedding pavilion in the food forest, and after talking to some folks and checking on some legalities, I think we can make it work. It does mean expanding the forest. But if we go across Butternut Creek and the bluff to the area where Fire House #2 is sitting empty, we could knock the building down, use that area for parking, build a bridge over the creek, and have a forest with everything we both want and need. I’m having some official plans drawn up. Will let you know when I have them.

  Spence checked the attachment again: a rough drawing of the proposed new boundaries that included Fire House #2.

  The building where Rob Elias wanted to set up his organization.

  Spence sat back and let out a whoop of laughter.

  Two birds, one stone, indeed.

  * * *

  It took Bree a couple of days to connect with Rob. It would have been faster if she had saved the card he’d given her with his phone number, but since she had tossed that—and since she didn’t want her sisters or her mother to know what she was doing—she had to be stealthy. It took a manufactured excuse to drop into the day care at the end of the day, a sudden craving for pizza, and a lie about leaving her phone in the car, but she finally got her hands on Annie’s phone. From there it took only a couple of minutes of hunting before she found Rob in the contact list.

  “Got ya, you bastard,” she said, but even she had to admit that her words lacked their usual venom. The truth was that something had shifted for her when she sat in that meeting and heard those people say the things they had said. Never mind that she and her sisters had said far worse over the years, or that Margie had once threatened to turn him inside out and shove him through a pig’s anus. Her family had cause. Spence had cause. Those other people, though . . . well, as much as she hated to admit it, the most she could see from them was a serious case of misplaced priorities. That, and possibly too much time on their hands.

  Bree didn’t want Rob in town. But she wanted him to
leave because it was best for the rest of the Elias family, not because some so-called community activists had seized on him as their latest focus.

  Once she and Annie had polished off the pizza and Bree had said her farewells, she forced herself to pull into a parking lot as soon as she was out of the sight of the day care, kill the engine, and place the call. Nothing would be served by waiting. Well, nothing other than an attack of nerves and anxiety. And since Spence wasn’t around to help her fall asleep, and she had to proctor an exam in the morning, she couldn’t afford to spend the night tossing and turning.

  Still, as soon as the phone started ringing, she started praying that it would go to voice mail. Because, hey. Once she had done her part, she knew she would be able to sleep.

  So of course, Rob picked up on the second ring.

  “Elias,” he barked, and she sat back blinking at the phone. It took her a second to remember that he would have no way of knowing it was her number.

  Somehow, the thought of her own father not knowing her phone number struck her as weirdly wrong.

  “Hi.” She cleared her throat. “It’s Bree.”

  Now it was his turn to be silent.

  “Sabrina.” His voice was gentler but still wary. “Should I be glad for this call?”

  She had no idea how to answer that, so she jumped straight to the point. “I need to talk to you.”

  “All right. I’m home now.”

  What, now? Really?

  Somewhere up on a cloud, some malevolent being was rubbing its hands together and laughing maniacally while whispering, Be careful what you wish for.

  “Okay. Um . . . I would rather not come to your place. How about if you meet me at—”

  “Bree, I can’t leave. I’m waiting on a delivery that I have to sign for. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Well, that changed everything, didn’t it? He said he wanted to talk to them again. Claimed he would drop anything to meet with them. But now here she was, offering, and he had to stay home to sign for something.

  She should seriously just tell the committee to go for it.

  Instead, she pulled out a pen. “Fine. What’s the address?”

  He rattled off a number. She scribbled it on the back of the pizza receipt.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  She ended the call, slumped back in the seat, and eyed the convenience store where she was parked. Jenna would run inside, buy a six pack, and chug one before she went over. Well, maybe not anymore. But Bree vividly recalled her pulling just such a stunt once. When Bree had gone all Oldest Sister and shrieked about driving drunk, Jenna had said that it takes twenty minutes for food to make it to the stomach, so she would be at their destination before anything was processed. In fact, Jenna had said, if she hit the lights right, the beer would start to take effect just about the time the night got interesting.

  By the time Bree finished looking it up and saw that Jenna had been totally lying, they were safely at their destination.

  But that didn’t mean Bree wouldn’t deserve some sort of reward. Quickly, she ran into the store, purchased a king-size Hershey’s bar with almonds, and tossed it onto the passenger seat. It would be waiting for her when she came out of Rob’s place. No matter how badly things went—and she wasn’t holding out any hopes—there would at least be the joy of sweet milk chocolate at the end.

  Who said behavior-modification techniques didn’t have some merit?

  She plugged Rob’s address into her maps app and set out. Calypso Falls wasn’t that big. She could have made it without the canned voice warning her of her turns. But her focus wasn’t what it should be.

  Purely because she was distracted by the chocolate, of course.

  Precisely eleven minutes after hanging up, she pulled up in front of the house where Rob lived. He had told her he was in a little addition at the back of the house. She walked around the corner and through the chain link fence as instructed. A light was on over the door. Before she could knock, the door opened.

  If he tried to hug her she was going to deck him.

  “Bree. Good to see you.” He stepped back and let her in.

  She followed him into an apartment that was almost as tiny as hers. More sparsely furnished, though, so it felt roomier.

  “Cozy.” She waved around the room.

  “It serves the purpose. What can I do for you?”

  Where to begin?

  “I went to the meeting the other night. The one with the people who—”

  “The rabble-rousers. Yeah.” He dropped into a sofa only slightly more battered than her love seat and waved toward a wooden rocking chair. “Sit. You want some coffee or a beer or anything?”

  She would practically sell her soul for a shot of Margie’s whiskey but decided it was better to hold out for the Hershey’s bar.

  “No.” It came out sounding rude. Neenee would be ashamed. “I mean, no, thank you.”

  She took the rocking chair, sitting on the edge, willing it to stay stable. “I’m not going to give you any inside information, okay? So don’t think that I’m here to tip you off about their plans.” Mostly because they had nothing concrete thus far, but she wasn’t about to let that slip. “But I have a question. Why do they hate you so much?”

  If she needed any proof that Rob hadn’t forgotten his years in politics, it was there in the way he showed absolutely no reaction to her question. No surprise, no distress, nothing. She might as well have asked him if he still liked pineapple on his pizza.

  And why the hell had she remembered that?

  “I think you’d have to ask them that question.”

  Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

  “You can’t play dumb,” she said. “You grew up here. You knew a lot of these people before you and Mom moved away, you stayed in touch with a bunch of them, and as far as I know, you never screwed over the town of Calypso Falls.” Spence’s family was a totally different issue. “From what I can see, people have the right to be disgusted with what you did, but not personally outraged.”

  “And yet that’s how it stands, isn’t it?”

  She knotted and unknotted her fingers in her lap.

  Rob stretched out his legs and leaned into the corner of the sofa. “Bree, I can’t give you a good answer. I know that a lot of people who knew me when I was growing up, who knew my family, felt betrayed when I messed up. I can’t say I blame them.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “On the other hand, I know damned well that some of them aren’t as lily-white as they like to pretend they are, either. So where they get off acting holier than thou is beyond me.”

  “Someone said that it’s because you’re ruining the town’s reputation. That if you set up your organization here, it will be like saying Calypso Falls is a place where criminals are welcomed with open arms.”

  “Could be.”

  She studied him, searching for clues in his body posture. “That doesn’t seem to bother you.”

  “Do you have any idea how many programs I put into place when I was mayor that would never have got off the ground if I’d let myself be stopped by any person who was worried about what I was doing to their neighborhood or their property values? There’s always opposition. There’s always people who think that anything the government does, at any level, is the worst mistake ever made. And the truth is that there will always be people who are going to be negatively impacted by any decision that gets made, and that’s unfortunate; and if I could have waved a magic wand so things could happen with no one being hurt, then yeah. I would have done that.” He shrugged. “But it doesn’t work that way.”

  Oh, he was good. He almost got her sidetracked into talking about public policy.

  Almost.

  “But that doesn’t really have anything to do with you and Calypso Falls and why peopl
e see you as such a pariah.”

  “All I can tell you is that I think they’re pissed because I’m not behaving the way they think I should.”

  That sounded possible. “Go on.”

  “When someone screws up, we all know what they’re supposed to do. Apologize. Act ashamed. Keep their head down. Spend the rest of their days living in a way that makes it clear that they are never to be trusted or really accepted again, and any scraps of forgiveness they get should be received with humbleness and gratitude. Maybe even some slobbering.”

  Despite herself, she smiled.

  “I’m not doing that, Bree. I can’t and I won’t. Do I know I messed up? Hell yeah. Do I regret what I did to you girls and your mother? With every goddamned breath I take.”

  For a second, his casual air slipped and she glimpsed the raw pain in his bleak eyes, in the tight lines around his mouth, in the way he seemed to collapse in on himself. In that moment, she knew that no matter what else she might think of him, she could never again doubt that he regretted losing them.

  “But we have rights in this country. Even those of us who screw up. I paid for what I did, in ways none of those smug bastards will even know. Now I have the right to be here. And I have the right—no, I have the duty—to make amends in the best way I know how. I can’t undo everything I did, but I can damned well use what I have to help other people. It’s what I’ve done all my life. And if I were to spend the rest of my days hiding away, refusing to use my knowledge and experience to try to make things better for other people, then that would be almost as criminal as the things they charged me with.”

  He meant it. Either that, or he was the world’s best actor.

  “I’m not doing what people want me to do, Bree. I’m making them face up to their own hypocrisy, and don’t give me that look, because you know it’s true. People are quick to say, yeah, everyone deserves a second chance, everyone has the right to maintain family ties, but you know damned well they don’t mean it. Deep down, most people think that folks like me deserve to be stripped of everything that makes life worth living. So when I blow into town and say, hey, we can make things better for criminals by making sure they don’t lose the one thing that might give them the strength to stay on the straight and narrow when they get out—well, most of those people who claim to be all about understanding and moving on, they’re going to sit back and say, nope. Bad people over there. The rest of us over here. And all the goodies belong to the good.”