Complete Mia Kazmaroff Romantic Suspense Series, 1-4

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “I give up,” Mia said.

  The instructor released her. “That’s fine. But you just got raped.”

  As she walked back to her place in line, she felt his hand pat her bottom. She whirled on him, her face aflame with indignation. He looked at her with surprise.

  “What is it, honey? Did you think of something you could’ve done besides roll over on your back?”

  No one had seen it. It was her word against his.

  “Actually, I did,” she said. “I should’ve asked my rapist for a twenty. Isn’t that what your mother charges?”

  Mia sat in her car outside the community center and waited for the rest of the class to let out. The instructor had not really expelled her, but Mia was wise enough to know an exit line when she uttered it. It didn’t matter. Another instructor would be teaching the same class in an hour. Worked better for her schedule anyway.

  Autumn was coming slowly to Atlanta this year. Early October and the leaves were still firmly attached to the trees, the air still warm. Mia watched the canopy of green wave overhead from the sweet gums that studded the community center’s landscaping. She wondered if the instructor hadn’t been such a tool, would her gift still have gotten in the way? The last thing she needed was some sociopath’s complete dossier flying through her head while she was trying to break his death hold on her throat.

  Her phone vibrated and she snatched it up, thinking, hoping…

  But it was only Jessie.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said as she watched the class file out of the building. “What’s up?”

  Her mother’s voice was calm and cheerful. “Just checking to see how your self-defense class went today.”

  “Apparently they don’t call it that,” Mia said. “It’s a modification of the same moves police candidates get in officer training school.”

  “I should think your gift would make it difficult to handle being…handled.”

  “I imagine being handled when you don’t want to be is tricky no matter.”

  “So you didn’t feel any special challenges when you had to put your hands on your partner?”

  “We don’t have partners yet, but I’ll keep you updated when that happens.”

  “You sound tense. Did something happen?”

  “Let me ask you a question, Mom. Have you ever not had a person’s whole life history pass through you when they touched you? I mean, is there ever a time where you don’t get all the flashes?”

  “If I understand you correctly, then no, you’ll feel whatever story is behind whatever you’re touching. Which is why it’s important to learn to filter and control what you feel.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “It’s a lifelong effort. I still struggle with it myself.”

  “While I have you on the subject,” Mia said, watching the instructor strut out of the building and hop on his motorcycle in the parking lot, “can I ask you about how the gift works with…sex.”

  Jessie Kazmaroff sighed on the other end of the line. “Darling, if you’re with a good man, it doesn’t matter.”

  “So it is something to overcome. It’s not an enhancement…at all?”

  “I have to admit to not being comfortable talking about this with you.”

  “Yeah, okay. Nothing like being twenty-eight years old and talking to your mom about losing your virginity. You know I’ve had only one phone conversation with Jack since he laid his bombshell on me earlier this week.”

  “About the child?”

  “I don’t really know that it is a child, Mom. The kid could be eighteen years old. All I know is Jack is stonewalling me.”

  “Is he refusing to answer your questions?”

  “He says he wants to do it in person.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Didn’t you say he was coming home tomorrow?”

  Mia watched the instructor scoot down the street on his motorcycle. There are so many people out there with really debilitating emotional problems. And they’re all going through life—interacting with the rest of us…

  “Mia?”

  “Sorry. What?”

  “Come to dinner, darling. It won’t be haute cuisine like you’re used to with Jack, but it will be good down-home Southern cooking like you were raised on. Besides, you sound like you could use a little family time.”

  In addition to being a partner with Mia in their private investigation agency, Jack had a thriving personal chef business Mia was sure was single-handedly responsible for the five extra pounds she had gained over the summer.

  But like her mother she also believed there was something about basic Southern food that could ease any woe, soften any blow. Just the thought of her mother’s collard greens with chicken and dumplings and biscuits dripping in lavender honey gave Mia a feeling of warmth that spread through her chest.

  Screw the class.

  “I’m on my way,” she said, starting up her car.

  *****

  Marvella Burton’s ranch, located in a tired neighborhood in an outer suburb of Valdosta, was tidy but old. She’d raised both her boys there after their dad died. Jack had long gotten used to the chores and maintenance an older house demanded. He mused it was probably the reason he’d bought his own post-war ranch in Garden Hills.

  The one that burned to the ground last spring.

  “Is that you, Jack?” his mother called through the screen door. She hurried to open it for him, although he only carried one bag of groceries. He remembered someone once telling him that after an adult child left home, every time you came back you saw your parents age a little bit each visit.

  After Steven died, his mother had sped up the process considerably.

  “Yep,” he said, walking into the kitchen. His mother returned to her seat at the dinette table, a steaming cup of coffee in front of her.

  He’d bought her an espresso machine a few days after the funeral and was frankly surprised to see how quickly she’d made it a new habit. He looked around the kitchen. It was clean but pieces of sidewall were flaking off the ceiling and the walls. Steven had never been much of a handyman, and that was before he’d decided to spend the rest of his pathetic life wasted on drugs and alcohol.

  Jack hadn’t been surprised to get the call two weeks ago that Steven had finally overdosed. The only surprise was the lack of relief he felt when it finally happened. And the grief at losing a brother he never really knew.

  “Oh my, you’ve got so many goodies. I will not know what to do when you go back to Atlanta.”

  “You could always come with me,” Jack said as he began unpacking the bag on the counter.

  “Can you imagine me in Atlanta?”

  “You make it sound like it’s Paris.”

  “Might as well be. Everyone in my parish would think I’d lost my mind.”

  “Or maybe they’d think you have a son who lives in Atlanta.”

  His mother folded her hands around her cup of coffee and smiled into it. He knew she was craving a cigarette. He could smell the smoke in the air from the one she’d just had.

  “You know, I don’t mind if you smoke, Mom. This is your house.”

  “Well, I’m just being hospitable is all, dear. I’m not hooked, you know.”

  The idea of addiction hung between them like an unwanted guest. Jack glanced at his mother. He knew for a fact Steven never came to see her. It wouldn’t be Steven she’d miss. It’d be the idea of him. The fact she couldn’t say “my boys” ever again.

  “I hate to leave you down here alone,” he said, digging out a pot and placing it on the gas stove. He adjusted the flame under it.

  “I’m not alone and your life is in Atlanta,” she said, smiling. She was seriously overweight and that worried him. A lifetime of chicken and okra fried in bacon fat with a side order of buttered biscuits had padded the face he loved with two extra chins. Her heavy arms sagged on the table in front of her. “That is as it should be,” she said. “Do you ever see Diane?”

  “Not really.” He chopped up
an onion and peeled a clove of garlic. “The divorce was final last fall.”

  “I always liked her.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I don’t suppose you ever see Sandy Gilstrap?”

  Jack cut a wedge of butter and tossed it into the pot, where it sputtered and skidded across the bottom. “Didn’t she move to Atlanta?”

  “I know I told you that, dear. She won the Georgia Powerball two years back. She and her mama and the little girl all moved to Atlanta.”

  I’m pretty sure the “little girl” is in high school now.

  “I bumped into her husband at the store.”

  “Eugene Gilstrap? His mama told me he took it hard when Sandy divorced him last year.”

  “Yeah, he looked really cut up,” Jack said drily, scraping the chopped onion into the pot and following with a handful of peeled and deveined shrimp.

  “I know she would love to hear from you, Jack. Didn’t you two used to date?”

  “You know the answer to that, Mom,” he said, wagging a spatula at her.

  “That child is a serious problem for her.”

  “How so?”

  “Drinking, mostly. Maybe drugs, too.”

  “That’s too bad.” He poured two cups of chicken broth and a cup of long grain rice into the pot and put a lid on it before turning down the heat. He turned to her. “Are you good? Because I think I could use a drink.”

  Twenty minutes later, Jack stood in his brother’s bedroom with a vodka tonic. He heard the television set on in the other room and was glad his mother was returning to her normal routines. He’d delayed his return to Atlanta longer than he wanted to because he was worried about her.

  In the two weeks since he’d been home, he’d spent a good deal of time in Steven’s room looking at pictures of his brother, younger by two years, in high school, on prom night, on vacation with the family just before their dad died. He picked up a framed photo of Steven at Hilton Head. The person in that picture—smiling and holding up the wriggling bass he’d just caught—showed nothing of the man his brother would become. The smiling face on the kid posing for the school yearbook, working on the school paper, opening up presents on Christmas morning…nothing warned of the hopeless degenerate Steven would become.

  Married twice, no kids, thank God. Unemployed after he was fired from his last position as assistant manager at the neighborhood convenience store. And then ten years of uninterrupted mayhem—drug busts, domestic batteries—before giving them all a break with a long blissful period of no communication at all.

  He sat on his brother’s bed and looked at the flag football trophy, the framed and hung elementary school artwork, all the detritus of a normal boyhood. Jack’s own bedroom was equally preserved. Over the years, Jack had spent no more time in the carefully maintained shrine his mother called his bedroom than had Steven.

  Jack went over to Steven’s desk wedged up under the window that overlooked the backyard and their tree house—unused now for thirty years. He’d found the snapshot tucked under the desktop blotter the first time he’d come in here—just before the funeral when he was looking for something to show or say about his brother that didn’t sound like Jack thought the guy got what was coming to him.

  I don’t think that, do I?

  That was when he’d found the picture—a pretty young girl with a big orange heart drawn in a thick marker around her face. Unmistakable. The spitting image of Sandy at that age, it had to be the little girl, Twyla. The unfortunate result of a drunken and misguided night of passion between Sandy and Jack sixteen years ago—a rocky period in her marriage colliding with a moment of boredom for Jack during a weekend visit home after he graduated from the police academy and before he started at the Atlanta Police Department.

  Were you her supplier? He looked around Steven’s room. Did you get her hooked? Or did you just keep her coming back for more? He tossed the photo on the desk.

  One thing was sure, if Steven was responsible for Twyla’s substance abuse problems—whether he started them or just contributed to them—Jack could no longer feel okay sitting on the sidelines. He wasn’t sure what he could do to fix the downward spiral everyone claimed the girl was in the midst of, but he knew he owed it to her to at least try.

  But first, somehow, he was going to have to explain all this shit to Mia.

  Chapter TWO

  Valdosta to Atlanta was a straight shot up I-75, but Jack always tended to envision it as a set of bed sheets tied together and tossed out a high-rise window.

  Nothing felt more like an escape to him than the moment he watched the Valdosta skyline disappear in his rearview mirror. Probably most people felt that way about their hometown. An image of Eugene came to mind, bloodied, humiliated and furious as he stumbled his way out of Piggly Wiggly.

  Well, maybe not most people.

  He’d barely cleared the outer loop of Valdosta before he called Mia. He knew he’d been holding her at arm’s length these last few days, and he didn’t want anything more right now except to tell her he was finally on the way. Plenty of time to tell her what he had to—when she was trapped in his arms and couldn’t run away from what he had to say.

  “Hey,” she said, picking up immediately. “You on your way?”

  “Just now. Probably be at least five by the time I get there.”

  “You’ll hit traffic on the south side.”

  “Probably.”

  “I’m making dinner.”

  He bit back his first response of is that wise? He wasn’t sure teasing was the right foot to start out with.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “But don’t go to any trouble.”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  A moment of silence rose up between them, awkward and unwieldy.

  “Listen, I got another call coming in,” he said, lying. “It’s my mother.”

  “Of course, take it. I’ll see you when you get here.”

  Well, that sucked. He’d make it up to her though. As soon as he walked through the door, and explained this whole I got a kid thing, if she was still talking to him he intended on picking her up and not letting her go until they both crawled out of bed tomorrow morning starving and too sore to walk.

  His phone rang again and he glanced at the screen but didn’t recognize the number.

  “Burton,” he said into it.

  “Hello, Jack,” a familiar voice purred into his ear. “You’re a hard man to get a hold of.”

  “Sandy?”

  *****

  Mia tossed the phone in her car and slammed the door, making both horses shy. Ned was mounted, with his feet out of the stirrups, attempting to adjust his stirrup leather. Mia watched Banshee wheel in a tight circle while Ned got her under control.

  “Sorry,” she said as she ran after her own mount, who’d pull the reins out of her hand and trotted twenty yards away to the fence line.

  “Was that Jack? Stupid question,” Ned said, walking his horse over to her, his feet still dangling on either side.

  She and Ned had gotten in the habit of riding together at least once a week, even though Mia no longer had a horse at the barn. Ned was friendly with everyone who boarded there and always found her a horse to ride. It was just until she was able to cobble together enough money to buy another of her own.

  Mia led her horse to the gate and unlatched it, waiting for Ned to walk through before she closed it behind them. Not bothering with the mounting stump on the other side of the fence, she found the low-hanging stirrup with the toe of her boot and hopped around on one foot until she got enough momentum to launch herself into the saddle. The horse was a mixed breed and only a little over fourteen hands—just the size Mia liked.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Mia said sharply. “He won’t talk to me. Says he wants to tell me face-to-face, and please do not tell me that sounds reasonable. It’s been agony. You tell someone a bombshell like you have a kid that you forgot to mention and
then you go incommunicado for four days afterward?”

  “If only men could be like women,” Ned said, sighing dramatically.

  “Shut up.” She pointed over his head toward the far set of pine trees that lined the horizon, the Chattahoochee just beyond. “Want to walk by the river?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get a load of this. I tell him I’m making dinner tonight. You know, for his big homecoming?”

  She watched Ned nod encouragingly. A big, handsome man with ginger-blond hair and pale almost nonexistent eyelashes, Ned looked like someone who could take care of business—but who was also a little off-road. After everything they’d been through together, he was definitely on the fast track to being her best friend in the world.

  “You know what he says to me?”

  Ned dutifully shook his head.

  “He says, ‘Don’t go to any trouble.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “I know, right? Is that what you say when someone says they’re making dinner for you?”

  “You know, Mia, men are different in the way we—”

  “No, Ned, no. ‘Don’t go to any trouble’ is what you say when you’re going to break up with someone and you feel guilty enough as it is without them making dinner for you. Am I right?”

  Ned winced. “Maybe, it’s just that when Jack left Atlanta a couple of weeks ago the two of you were on the brink of bada bing bada bang, weren’t you? What could possibly have happened in two weeks in Valdosta for crying out loud? I mean, have you ever been there? Did he fall in love with a stripper? Did he remember how much fun it was to make meth in his own living room?”

  “Well, something happened. Did I tell you I offered to go down there last week and he said, ‘That’s all I need’?”

  Ned didn’t answer.

  “So should I assume he’s coming back to break up with me? I mean, my instincts are that he is.”

  “I don’t know, Mia,” Ned said, taking off the cowboy hat he always wore and running a hand through his hair before clapping it back on. “My own instincts are usually one hundred percent wrong every time I try to figure out what a guy’s thinking. You know, unless it’s…obvious.”