He must have thought better toward being civil to her, because he dumped the next bomb right on her head. “Is that why you took his car? Because he doesn’t know about me? I’m the unknown?”
Her eyes darted to his. “He knows.”
She was feeling way too guilty to look him in the eye. Her gaze strayed to his mouth.
“And?”
“And . . . it’s why we are not speaking to each other at the moment. Why there is not likely to be a wedding in three weeks. And why my life has completely fallen apart.”
“It would not have fallen apart if you would’ve just stayed in Preacher’s Bend as you were supposed to,” he reminded her.
“I couldn’t stay here!” Liddy let out only a bit of the steam from the boiling kettle. Not much, only enough to prove her point.
“Why?”
Her returned gaze slammed him right in the chest. “Because seeing you with her would have physically killed me. There. Are you happy now? Happy you made my life so completely miserable?”
“No. Not really,” he admitted. “But you wouldn’t have seen her, Liddy. Eliza skipped town only two days later. Probably due to the fact I threatened her life if ever she showed her face in Preacher’s Bend again. And, if ever she willingly spread more lies that were not true.”
“You didn’t?”
Eliza Porter was one of Preacher’s Bends’ golden girls. Eliza Porter could do no wrong. And these backwoods hicks called her a hussy?
Jake shrugged his shoulders as answer.
Since there was a bit of a truce going on inside their shared cell, she crossed over to his bench and sat down next to him, on the same side as his altered tattoo. Taking a good long look at it, Liddy’s next words stunned even her. “Can I touch it?”
Jake snickered. “Only if I get to touch those?” He pointed at her newly vamped chest through her thin tank top.
Taking the dare he would not actually try touching what she considered as no longer his to touch, she raised her left hand and traced over a snake she remembered oh so well. She really did have a thing for tattoos, and the men wearing them. And anything at all to do with being wild, crazy and dangerous somehow set in the scheme of this.
Stopping the tip of her finger on the first letter of her name, Jake’s eyes moved swiftly to hers. His breathing ceased, as did hers. In one single moment, time simply stood still for both. It allowed each to remember things best left forgotten within their lives.
Time closed its eyes toward foolish human beings.
“My turn,” he rasped out unevenly. His head very slowly dipped toward hers.
Liddy waited with baited breath for his hand to brush lightly over the top of her shirt. That’s what she thought he’d meant. Tit for tat, touch for touch. But, no! Not Jake Giotti. The man liked to dive right in for the meat and potatoes of his meals, devouring without swallowing.
His mouth covered hers as his right hand found itself under her shirt, cupping her left breast. A callused thumb pad caressed the nub tip of what hadn’t been touched in a very long time, into a hard pulsating awareness of his being the total master; and her, the sub-servant to this master.
As if she wasn’t already aware of this fact.
Liddy was just about to pull away, but somehow forgot to. Her right hand drifted upward to encompass a massive left upper arm as he deepened their kiss. Her left hand skimmed up to the tiny stubble on his face—avoiding his right arm altogether.
They’d spent the better part of five long hours together. Jake’s five o’clock shadow was starting a little early. But she did not care. All Liddy knew, all she even aware of was they were exhibiting the moral standards of two horny teenagers on a Friday night down in the quarry. Neither was willing nor able to pull away; even remotely capable of stopping such an insane madness.
Liddy lowered her hand, placing it against the bared flesh of his chest. Jake’s deep groan was captured within her mouth. Daring to go lower still, as his whole hand encompassed her left breast Liddy grazed her knuckles over his manhood through the tailored suit pants.
Jake Giotti, Mr. All in Control, looked to be having difficulty kissing her, fondling her breast, and perhaps not exploding by her gentle touch altogether. He was the first to pull away, smiling into her eyes.
“Apology accepted, Mrs. Giotti.”
Liddy knew he was only masquerading as someone not in dire need of physical release at this point.
And she could barely think at all. Let alone, act normal, until both of them heard the door to the police station open and they physically yanked apart faster than a rubber band snapping in the middle.
There was most likely the look of guilt on her face. Jake, however, was grinning from ear to ear.
It was Rachel. Again the witch was ruining an aspect of Liddy’s life. But at least she was bearing gifts.
Chapter Thirteen
“Ceril told me I was to bring you food. So I have.” Rachael handed the bag threw the bars to Jake; who’d moved quickly to the cell door and took it from her fingers.
Liddy was still glued to her spot, simply by what she’d let happen, quite unable to stand up at all.
“Smells really good,” he said.
Rachel smiled through the bars. “It had better, Jake Giotti. I made it just for you.” She purposely added under her breath, “She ever cooked food smelling like this for you?”
Liddy started laughing at the rather catty, easily overheard comment, biting down on her lower lip to keep from saying something nasty right back to the bitch. What Rachel wanted to say, had to be said. If not for her, then said to clear the air.
Jake, nice man she knew him to be did the nasty comment for her. “Only when in bed, and then, while cooking my goose. Liddy could heat up in the kitchen pretty fast . . . if you know what I mean.”
Rachel looked appalled, handing Jake the other bag she’d brought, almost as if she’d been thinking briefly of not feeding Liddy anything at all. The witch!
“Oh, and by the way . . . Theo is, at this very moment, on her way over here. Once she heard you were thrown in jail, she moved heaven and earth to get someone to tell her all about your, um, visitor.”
“My visitor?” Jake chuckled at.
“What else was I to say to her?”
Rachel covered her mouth with her hand the moment she realized she let the cat out of the bag and dug her own grave right in front of them.
“You could have tried saying nothing at all for a change, Rach,” he warned; a dangerous lilt set to his voice.
He turned back to Liddy to hand over her portion of food. Post haste, she dove into the bag without any care as to what they may have thought of her, shoving as much food as she could into her mouth while the two quarreling lovebirds hashed out their differences by the steel bars.
She was about to bite into a thick, juicy hamburger when in waltzed none other than one very bitchy Ms. Theodora Rosebud. The old hag was clicking her tongue woefully at all three.
“Get back to the diner, Rachel. Lollygagging don’t feed the customers.” Theodora moved toward their co-inhabited cell by shuffled gait.
Rachel, quite unexpectedly, did as she was told, closing the door to the police station behind her back and high-tailing it across the street.
Liddy’s mind refused to wonder how the two of them had even got inside the police station without using a key; seeing as how Debra had locked the door when she’d left. But there were a lot of things her mind suddenly refused to wonder about today. And it was always best never to question what happens in Preacher’s Bend without a bottle of aspirin in hand.
“That granddaughter of mine! She’ll be the death of me yet,” Theo sputtered; while most of those thoughts had come their way as she pulled up a chair to sit down, placing the chair right next to the holding cell.
“Granddaughter?”
The word just flew right out of Liddy’s mouth. Honest to God! Along with a bit of hamburger, she feared.
Theodora Rosebud was ac
utely aware that she did not know Rachel was her granddaughter. How could she? And Jake was fully aware that she did not know this, as well. Was this part of his things better left unknown?
She suddenly gave her husband the evil eye; getting, in return, a nasty smirk.
“Now, Jake,” Theo started. “You do know today is Sunday, right?”
“Yes, Theo. I do know today is Sunday,” he acknowledged.
“Then why am I here, on a Sunday no less . . . if you know that today is Sunday?”
An old school Marm had nothing on this woman.
Jake sat down next to Liddy, holding off with eating his meal. He wasn’t about to get off the hook so easily on that one. But Liddy was not about to stop mid-stride at consuming food. It was simply too good. She was hungry, damnit! Their argument was none of her concern.
“I don’t know Theo. What are you doing here on a Sunday?”
Jake being . . . well, Jake.
Theodora Rosebud cleared her throat. She looked him dead in the eyes, and said, “A little lip will get you nowhere, Jacob Curtis Giotti.”
He turned quickly toward Liddy, his grin held back with tremendous effort. But knowing him as well as she did, Liddy knew what was coming out of him next. Jacob Curtis Giotti was holding back from being flippant.
He should have known there were things even he couldn’t control, and one of those things was Theodora Rosebud calling him Jacob, his given name.
“I don’t know. Lip sort of got me exactly where I’d wanted to be a little while ago,” the man so damn smugly offered an old woman.
Choking without water in sight was not a good thing to do, especially with food in one’s mouth. Choking seconds after a comment like that? Regrettably, insanity had its perks.
Theo quickly came to Liddy’s rescue and handed Jake a full paper cup of water through the bars. Liddy grabbed it from his hand, swallowed the contents within seconds, but the large chunk of hamburger still stuck in the back of her throat had her eyes filling with unshed tears.
“See what you did!” Theo snapped. “You about made her choke to death on a single bite of hamburger.”
Her darling husband faced her again. “It will take a lot more than just a little lip to end this woman’s life, Theodora.”
“Jake!” Liddy blurted out, brushing the moisture from her eyes.
Theo cut her off with the wave of her withered hand. “Pooh, pah. You shouldn’t pay any mind to him today. The man’s just being who, and what, he is. A man. Don’t let him get to you, honey.”
Liddy’s eyes widened. Pooh pah? Who the bloody devil says Pooh pah, other than an old hag?
“I have better things to do with my time than sit here listening to a couple of lovebirds argue about petty things,” Theodora added.
“Lovebirds!” both she and Jake blurted, looking quickly at the other.
“That is what you are. Ain’t it?”
Jake offered up, before Liddy could, “Not exactly.”
“Then why did Lidia come back looking for you, if not to rekindle the romance between you? It certainly looks that way to me.”
Cripes sake! Was the woman an actual Alzheimer victim gone amuck? She already told Theo why she was here! To get an annulment signed from a man she didn’t want to be married to anymore. And Mrs. Rosebud just about flipped her lid the very minute she’d said it. “Blah! Blah! Blah! Yadda, yadda, yadda. Preacher’s Bend’s occupants do not get annulments”, was what she’d quibbled back, or something to that affect.
But Liddy was no longer one of Preacher’s Bend’s occupants, now was she? So, on a technicality, she should be able to get an annulment from Jake and get away with it, without being judged too harshly for the crime. Right?
“Liddy wants a divorce, Theodora. So she can marry some other guy. A lawyer.”
“No, I don’t,” she said, standing up for herself. Someone had to around her. Why not it as being her this time?
“Yes. You do,” he snapped back.
“No, I don’t,” she warned him, shaking her head. “You’re the one who wants a divorce. I want a . . .”
Jake’s hand clamped over her mouth to shut her off. Whereas, gut-wrenching as it was, she bit down on it rather hard.
The hand was quickly removed from her lips post haste.
“—an annulment!”
Her final thrust of sword was to glare at his face.
There. Eat crow, you arrogant sonofabitch!
She’d wanted to add, “Piss off!” for throwing his hand over her mouth, but he didn’t quite look ready for any more out of her.
He glanced at his hand instead, then at her. And quite pointedly told her she was going to pay for the disrespectfulness of biting him through a heated glare. In fact, she was going to pay dearly. And this debt collected soon.
Theo, on the other hand, was glaring at both of them. “Over my cold dead body will the two of you get an annulment.” She slammed the foot of her cane on the floor of the police station. “No one, and I mean no one who lives in Preacher’s Bend, gets one of those ugly things. They wouldn’t dare. Not on my watch. And now, with dear Petty gone, it is my watch. So, no! Not now. Not ever.”
Unfortunately, the old hag wasn’t done. “I have always said, if you made a bed in the first place, you must take the consequences of lying under its sheets. There will not be an annulment of this marriage. It will have to be dissolution of marriage by way of divorce. A long, dragged out dissolution, or nothing at all.”
Both she and Jake had been paying very close attention to Theodora because neither said another word. Theo rose. The old bat headed slowly to the door, and once there, turned their way.
“And don’t you dare make me come back here on a Sunday, Jacob Curtis.”
Jake looked too stunned to answer Theodora; too stunned to have made a Rosebud do anything a Rosebud didn’t want to.
Once the old hag was out the door Liddy boldly dove into shark-infested waters with both eyes closed. “She can’t do that can she?”
Mr. Giotti simply uttered out words poorly said, in her opinion. “The judge is her grandson. Theodora Rosebud can do just about anything she likes around here.”
Like getting Jake to tend to her bees as part of his parole condition, getting what was once a wild man to live in a one room shack located under old peach trees, and getting him to mend his ways—turn the other cheek, time and time again.
If memory served her correctly, Jacob Curtis Giotti had gotten his ass kicked—time and time again—because he was too stubborn to keep his big mouth shut. Turning the other cheek wasn’t in his vocabulary.
If Theodora Rosebud said ‘No annulment!’ there wasn’t going to be an annulment. Period.
“Has a whole town gone completely insane? Or just the people who still live in it?” She dropped the rest of her hamburger onto the paper sack lying on a hard metal bench, no longer hungry.
“Just the people who live at the far end of Roundabout Road, I fear,” Jake offered up, digging into his food.
Chapter Fourteen
Six hours later Deputy Wesley found her and Jake playing tic-tac-toe with a packet of ketchup and a pressed down brown paper sack placed between their hips. They were completely bored out of their ever-loving minds. There wasn’t much else to do except beat their heads against the walls. Or, beat each other up. And as far as she could tell, Jake had no desire to punch out her lights, at least not yet.
“Rachel brought you food?”
Jake answered, “Yep,” watching her finger make a circle in the top left corner. His sudden grin to her move was very evil, if anyone asked.
“And you have not killed each other while I’ve been away?” Debra prodded.
“Apparently not,” he responded, making an X in the middle square.
Jake won for the eleventh time in a row.
“Should I wait a few more minutes? Just in case,” she questioned.
Liddy’s gaze rose to her sister-in-law. Christ! It had almost sounded as there’d
been hope in her voice. Jake raised his eyes to Debra, as well.
“No. Nobody is killing anybody today.”
Debra clearly looked disappointed at this news.
“If I have nothing to clean up, nothing to make a report over, I’m going home. I’m going to put up my feet up, watch a little TV, and forget the two of you even exist for a few lousy hours.”
Liddy shoved the make-shift tic-tac-toe board unto the floor to move hurriedly to the cell door. “What about us?”
Debra raised her brow. “What about you?”
“You have to let me have my one phone call!”
“Says who?” Debra put her beefy hands on her equally beefy hips to state firmly Liddy had better speak now or suffer the fated consequences.
“Says the United States of America!”
Debra actually growled this time. Then, in the blink of an eye, she stormed over to the cell door, slipped in the key, hauled Liddy out by the arm; shoved her body toward one of the station’s desks with little care if she’d get hurt, and smart-mouthed, “Fine, you get to make your one phone call. And you had better make it worth the trouble, Hussy.”
Liddy didn’t dare verbally retaliate, now that she was out of the cell. She moved to the old rotary phone, picked up the receiver, and turned to Jake. He was trying hard not to laugh. But he knew what she wanted out of him and eventually the man sighed out the numbers. Her fingers dialed them as he spoke. By then, Debra had moved over the cell door.
“You gave her your phone number?” Words Liddy never heard.
On the fifteenth ring, Liddy regretfully acknowledged no one was home. No one was going to save her from all of this. No one in Preacher’s Bend even cared. She hung up. With her head hung low, she let Debra shove her, quite roughly, back into the holding cell, stumbling with little to no care toward Jake.
“You gave her your phone number?” Debra repeated, waiting for Jake’s answer as she relocked the cell door.
But he completely ignored the question, eating another fry.
“Well, little Hussy, you just wasted a very precious phone call to a man who is not home. And I am surely putting it down that you did, the time you made it, who you made it to, and why. I wouldn’t want to upset the entire United States of America, now would I?”
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