Damage: (Lakefield Book 5)

by Jennifer Vester

  Mick stood up and seemed to balk at the accusation. “We told her not to leave the bar! If that wasn’t enough of an order, then I don’t know what was. We couldn’t break cover and drag her back inside. The driver was cleared prior to delivery. Don’t assume you know what happened or the conversations that we had with her after she did it the first time. We took every precaution and she decided that it wasn’t a risk.”

  “Tell it to her parents, Mick,” Cade muttered.

  Mick stepped forward and Cade’s muscles in his arm tensed, ready to launch at the man.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Both of you!”

  Cade tried shrugging my hand off. I held fast and started yanking on his arm to keep him back.

  Mick gave me a quick, non-emotional glance. “If you help us, Suzanne, we have a real chance of catching this guy. You’re far more experienced in this business and have good instincts from what Cade has told me.”

  Cade moved between Mick and me, blocking my view. “You don’t talk to her, you don’t look at her. She’s given you a statement, and that’s it. That’s all she’s required to do.”

  “You don’t have anything to say about it. Frankly, you need to get your head out of your ass, before you go into that bar in Dallas.”

  “I quit, asshole,” Cade growled. “I’m done with this shit.”

  “You signed an agreement.”

  “I’m done.”

  The situation was getting out of hand and escalating to the point where I felt like Cade might be on thin ice. I wasn’t sure what he’d signed, but quitting might land him in hot water.

  “I need to go to the bathroom. If either of you throws a punch in here, I’ll take a baseball bat to one or both of you. Then I’ll call the cops!” Stomping off, I turned before I left the room and gave both of them a steely glare. “I fucking mean it!”

  Shutting the door quickly when I got into the bathroom, I took the phone Cade had given me and turned it on. I didn’t know if it was the right move. Didn’t know what the fallout would be, but it had to be better than watching two idiot men face off in my living room. One of which might land himself in jail if he hit the other. Then where would I be?

  After pressing the button, I waited while the phone rang. Keeping one ear to the door, I hoped that Cade could keep a lid on his apparent temper long enough for me to reach Logan.

  “Dr. Matthews,” Logan answered.

  “Logan, it’s me, Suzanne.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

  “What’s happening? Why are you calling from this line?”

  I sighed. “Get Brock. We’re in Bakersville, and if I’m not mistaken Cade is about to kill Mick or go to jail, possibly both. I was told to ask for Brock.”

  “Okay. But why now?”

  “I got a note, and Mick is asking me to help catch his killer. Cade is about to lose it and he said he wanted to quit. Mick said he signed something. I don’t know. I was told to call you before this shit went down.”

  “I’m on it. Give us a few hours.”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah. We’re all coming. I don’t think this is going to go well. Brock isn’t going to keep it from Holden or Aiden. And he tells Andi everything which means that Kate, Liv and Julia are going to lose it.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Please tell me you aren’t bringing them. This sounds dangerous.”

  “Hell no. I’ll get Aiden to deal with Brock, so he doesn’t let the cat out of the bag before we have a plan.”

  I heard a crash in the living room and the sounds of shouting. The words were muffled behind the closed door.

  Rolling my eyes, I groaned. “Just get here soon. I’m about to take a baseball bat to both of them. I’m not joking.”

  “I’ll handle it. Just hang in there and remember that Cade is a good guy before you kill him. He’ll keep you safe.”

  “If I kill him, no one would know, would they? You might want to step on it, Doc.”

  I hung up and took several deep breaths before I turned the knob and stepped into the hallway. I detoured to my room, grabbed my baseball bat from a corner behind the bed and marched back toward the living room ready to knock some sense into one of them.

  Nice guys or not, no one broke my mom’s shit or started fighting in her house. Ever. I wouldn’t allow it.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d had to swing a baseball bat, working some really seedy bars had given me plenty of practice. The type of bars nice, suburbanite chicks and weekend warriors didn’t go to and never even knew existed.

  When I reached the living room, everything was quiet. More noticeably, no one was there. A chair was out of place and the remains of a broken flower pot sat in a dustpan on the coffee table.

  Then I heard them. In the garage, speaking in muted tones. Pleasant even. As I walked closer, I caught the middle of their conversation.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cade said. “I’ll make sure to get the one from the hardware store.”

  Then I heard my mom. “I’m sorry I gave you such a scare that you backed into it. I think you shaved ten years off my life. Two grown men in the middle of my living room arguing over Suzanne. Now you said she’s not in trouble, right?”

  Mick spoke up. “No, ma’am, she’s not in trouble. We were just arguing about whether she needed to stay at the bar or not. The shifts are really late.”

  “Oh,” my mom replied almost airily. “Well, she can handle herself you know. She’s a fighter, always has been.”

  I walked through the room and stood at the door to the garage for a moment, taking in the sight of two brawny men unloading more than a dozen grocery bags from my mom’s car. Apparently, she was over her food fast. A good sign that things were going to get better with her.

  As I stared at Mick and Cade, it was clear that their fight hadn’t come to a clean end yet. Both wore the same scowl when they looked at each other, with threats of unnamed violence in their eyes.

  My mom saw me at the door and smiled. “Well there she is. Hey, look who I found. Your friends, Mark, and Mick. Are they staying for dinner?”

  I smiled at her and turned my gaze to the two men in question. Both of them gave me a quick glance as I rested the baseball bat on my shoulder. Cade smirked. Mick looked annoyed.

  “Sure, Mom, up to them. They just have to use their manners at the dinner table.”

  Chapter Ten

  “It’s too bad Mick had to leave early, he was very nice,” my mom said, after reaching for a piece of sourdough bread on the kitchen table.

  Cade stopped chewing on the spaghetti he’d just shoved in his mouth. A smear of sauce, was still clinging to the beard on his chin, and it almost made me laugh. For someone that was normally so neat and tidy, he certainly didn’t eat with as much care. It made me wonder how long he’d had his beard. Did he start growing it as soon as he “died”, or was it something new in recent months?

  He eyed me with some discomfort and shifted in his chair, which made me smirk. He deserved it right now, for telling Mick to fuck off earlier. After the groceries had been hauled into the kitchen, the two of them had apparently taken their argument to the front lawn, and we were now minus one for dinner.

  “He’s a busy man, Mom. I think he said he had to go back to work.”

  She absently chewed on her bread. It was a small piece, but at least she was eating again. Her eyes wandered to Cade, then back to me, narrowing slightly, like she was trying to figure out the situation. She wasn’t stupid, she knew something was happening.

  “Hmm,” she said, and took a small bite of her spaghetti.

  Cade cleared his throat. “He’s very nice, just stubborn as hell. Thank you for dinner, I can’t remember the last time anyone cooked for me.”

  My mother’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Well, you’re welcome anytime then. If you rely on Suzanne’s cooking, you might be dead in a week.”

  I coughed and wiped my mouth. “Mom! That’s a terrible thing to say. I’m not that bad.�
��

  Cade chuckled and leaned toward my mom conspiratorially. “How bad is it, before I get in a relationship with her?”

  My mother’s face lit up a little with that question, and she smiled. “She burns pudding.”

  Cade clutched his chest and shook his head. “The horror.”

  I chuckled, as my mother let out a small giggle of her own, one that I hadn’t heard in a very long time. It felt good to hear her laugh again. If nothing ever came of this strange relationship that we were already developing, I would always thank Cade for this moment. That small giggle meant a lot to me.

  “Okay, you two. No ganging up on me,” I ordered, and gave my mother a wink. “Pudding just happens to be the most difficult thing on the planet to get right on a stovetop. It’s not my fault.”

  My mom swallowed quickly. “There’s forgiveness for burning it once, but not ten times in a row.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It was maybe twice, and that was a long time ago.”

  She looked down at her plate, with a fork hovering over her noodles. “It was two weeks ago, Suzanne Elaine, don’t lie to the man. And it was ten packages not two.”

  “Better back off, Suz-E. She used both names.”

  I eyed Cade and stuck my tongue out. He’d been calling me Suzie, or more specifically, Suz-E, since the day I started working for him at Muse. It was annoying at first, like something a high school boy with nothing better to do than tease girls would do. But having your crush tease you, even a little in such a harmless way, had grown on me. Especially since he never bestowed a nickname on any of his other female employees. Maybe it should have given me a clue that he was a lot more interested than he let on back then. But it'd seemed silly and not especially significant at the time. Now I knew.

  Cade smirked at me and went back to eating his spaghetti. The jerk. I knew he cooked. I’d seen him in the kitchen at Muse, and he was a champ. I would have burned not only the dishes, but half the people around me if it had been my job.

  “Hey, Mom? We might have to meet some people tonight with Mick. I think he said there was something he needed to do. But I wanted to let you know that there are a couple of Mark’s friends who might also come by here this week.”

  Cade put a hand on the back of my mother’s chair and looked at her gently. “I’d like to be up front with you, too. I plan on seeing both of you a lot from now on. They’re going to call me Cade. My name is Caden Marcus Shepard. You can call me whatever name you want, but I don’t want you to be confused by it.”

  She nodded and smiled. “My name is Laura and you can call me Laura. Pretty simple on my end.”

  Cade chuckled. “Very. Got it, Laura.”

  “Oh,” she said suddenly, giving me an odd look. “Is this the same Cade, that you always kept telling me about on the phone?”

  I cleared my throat, and stood up so suddenly, that my chair hit the kitchen wall. “Uhm, no, maybe. Let me get your plate, Mom, and I’ll wash it.”

  She pursed her lips and glanced back at Cade. “I swear, she was always going on about Cade this, and Cade that. And there was a Liv, and Julia. I want to meet those girls one day. They sound so nice. Oh, Liv called here after you left today.”

  “Mom. Plate. She did?” Strange that she called the house. I couldn’t remember giving her the number. Leave it to Liv, to avoid my calls, but find a way to talk to my mother. She probably had some help.

  “In a minute,” she said, as she held up a finger. “She said that you should call her next week. We had a really nice conversation afterward.”

  Cade gave me a teasing smile. “She’s still eating, and I want to hear all about this.”

  The glare I gave him over my mother’s shoulder, as I moved toward the sink, was scathing, and he caught the meaning.

  Chuckling, he turned back to my mother. “So, she constantly talked about me?”

  “Cade,” I growled.

  “Oh, yes, she used to tell me that she'd watch you cook. Or sometimes, she relayed a funny story about teasing you. I never quite understood everything, but she talked about you.”

  I was glaring at Cade as I cleaned my plate and put it in the rack to dry. He was either fully aware that I was going to strangle him for digging, or he was oblivious and just ignoring me.

  “Strange though,” my mother said softly. “She hasn’t talked about you in months, and she hasn’t been half as happy lately.”

  Cade’s shoulders shifted slightly like he was uncomfortable. Good. He deserved it for letting me think he was dead.

  “I went away for a while. A few months actually. But now I’m back. Some of my friends don’t know I’m back yet either, so if you wouldn’t mind—”

  Her hand went out and patted him on his shoulder. “My lips are sealed! I was really hoping Mick would tell us something top secret, so I could be sworn in or whatever they do.”

  Cade laughed long and hard at her eagerness. I had a chuckle myself. But knowing my mother was a sucker for cop shows and mysteries, it really didn’t surprise me.

  “He’s a cutie too. Suzanne?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you have some single friends that could date Mick?”

  I rolled my eyes, and Cade finally glanced over at me with amusement. I glared at him, but it just made him laugh harder.

  “No, they’re all married,” I responded.

  “Hmm, I think Karen is still single.”

  I nearly choked on a laugh. “She’s at least twenty years older than he is too. I’m not sure he needs help anyway. I hear he has a girlfriend.”

  Poor Mick. If I hadn’t just lied to her, he would probably have half the seniors in Bakersville following him around. That half being the older, single women that knew my mother.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she replied, sounding disappointed.

  Cade’s laughter had faded into a few chuckles as he finished his last few bites. He leaned over to my mother and said, “I heard they broke up. Might want to get those phone numbers ready.”

  “Cade!” I snapped. “Clean your plate, you’re done! And grab Mom’s too.”

  He gave me a devilish grin as he got up from the table and picked up their dishes. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Turning back to the sink with a sigh, I tackled a pan with a scrubber. He said the other guys were pranksters, and yet here he was plotting to harass Mick. It was great to see my mother so involved in it, but poor Mick might need a new identity if Cade took it up a notch. Which he likely would, given their somewhat heated disagreement.

  Cade reached around me and set their plates in the soapy water. I scrubbed one of them for a moment until I felt his chest come in contact with my back. His hands reached around me to brace against the sink.

  “Not around my mom,” I whispered.

  “She went to bed,” he whispered. “You were too busy being irritated to hear her.”

  “You’re going to confuse her with all of this.”

  “Hmm,” he mumbled as his lips found my shoulder. “I think she gets it. She obviously knows something is up, otherwise she wouldn’t have asked us so many questions while we were in the garage.”

  “About what?”

  His lips slowly traveled along my shoulder getting closer to my neck. His hips moved behind me slightly, and a shiver went through me.

  “About why an FBI agent was at your house.”

  “How did she even know that? Mick, looks like a boy scout in jeans and a t-shirt.”

  Cade’s teeth nipped at my skin, and I jerked in surprise. I nearly dropped the plate I hadn’t even remembered was in my hand, since he started kissing me.

  “He’s not a boy scout. Don’t let him fool you. He’s just Mick. Which is why he showed her his credentials when she asked for our ID's. And as for you and me, I told her that we were dating when you went to the bathroom earlier. I wanted to make sure she was alright with it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s just kind of out of it sometimes. I
didn’t want to make things too complicated for her to deal with.”

  “I noticed,” he mumbled. His breath at the edge of my shirt where it met my skin was hot and heavy. “She spaces out sometimes. I think she’s told me her name about three times now. She’s sweet, though, I like her. This is going to sound fucking stupid, but I like that she’s a package deal with you.”

  I let the plate slide back into the water and turned my head to look at him. He gave me a quick smile, before he playfully bit my shoulder and moved back. Drying my hands on a towel, I leaned against the cabinet as he cleared the rest of the table. He didn’t say anything else about it, but as I watched his facial expressions change, I knew there was something on his mind.

  “So, if we dated—”

  “We’re already dating, pretty girl. Better wrap your head around it really quick,” he suggested, as he gathered the cups and walked toward me.

  “You don’t mind that she’s a priority then?” I asked, ignoring his statement.

  Until he was done with this job, and not disappearing as a part of the requirement, we weren’t really anything. Okay, we were something. But what that was right now was a little undefined for me. It wasn’t that I was brushing off what he was saying, but given my eternally bad judgement with men, I probably needed to take things slow, even with him.

  He shook his head and set the cups in the sink. “Not at all. Look, I don’t know much about parents and how they’re supposed to act, but she seems like a nice lady. And she means something to you if you moved all the way back here to be with her.”

  I frowned and stared at the floor a moment. “Do you see your parents much?”

  “Not since the day I shipped out. I cut them out of my life. Completely.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  He leaned up against the counter. “Yeah, a brother. They weren’t cut out for the parenting thing with me, but they were really young. I was the oldest, so I got most of their shit. He was the smart one and stayed out of the way.”

  Giving him a quick glance, I said, “Have you talked to him?”