Date Next Door

by Gina Wilkins

  “Still, you could do something with your time off that would be more fun than bailing me out of a jam.”

  “Dude, we’ve had this conversation a dozen times in the past two weeks. Now get in the car before you talk me into changing my mind.”

  Chuckling ruefully at her tone, Joel opened the passenger door for her, then walked around to slide behind the wheel. “I really do appreciate this, Nic.”

  “Look,” she said, snapping her seat belt. “let’s just agree that you’ve already thanked me enough, okay? There’s no need to keep doing so all weekend.”

  “Okay. But I am grateful,” he added in a mutter.

  She sighed heavily, making him chuckle again.

  They left his car in the parking deck at the Little Rock Regional Airport and went through the lengthy process of checking in and going through security. Joel had insisted on buying Nic’s ticket, though she had offered to pay her own way.

  This trip was on him, he had informed her. It wasn’t as if it would have been her first choice of a long-weekend destination.

  It wasn’t a long flight from Little Rock to Birmingham, Alabama, and the time passed quickly. Too quickly, as far as Nic was concerned. As determined as she was to do everything she could to help Joel out this weekend, she was in no real hurry to get started.

  A man with clear hazel eyes exactly like Joel’s met them at the airport in Birmingham. As he and Joel greeted each other with warm smiles and hearty slaps on the shoulder, Nic studied Ethan Brannon curiously. Not so much the Matt Damon resemblance here, she decided. Ethan’s face was more sharply planed than Joel’s, a bit harder, even when he smiled.

  He was smiling when he turned to her, taking the hand she offered when Joel introduced her casually as his friend and neighbor. But this smile was different from the one he’d shared with his younger brother, she saw immediately. This was the polite, rather cool smile he might offer a stranger he didn’t quite know whether to trust.

  Still, his tone was friendly enough when he said, “Nicole, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Joel’s told me about you. You’re the police officer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am. And please call me Nic. Everyone does.”

  He nodded and turned back to Joel. “Let’s get your bags.”

  “We’ve got them.” Both Joel and Nic had packed light for the weekend, stuffing everything they needed into wheeled carry-on bags. Joel had teased her about bringing so much less than he’d expect from a woman, but she’d gotten the impression he wasn’t particularly surprised. “Let’s go.”

  Nic sat in the backseat of Ethan’s SUV, giving the brothers a chance to catch up during the hour-long drive to their parents’ house in small-town Danston, Alabama. She watched the interaction between them during the trip, making several private observations.

  Ethan was very much the older brother, she decided. A little bossy. A bit too concerned about Joel’s well-being, as if it were his responsibility to make sure younger brother was okay.

  Nic knew that dynamic all too well, having an older brother of her own. Paul had displayed a tendency to go overboard with advice about her life, too, until she had rebelled at twenty and informed him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t need his guidance, even if it meant she had to make a few mistakes along the way.

  She wondered if Joel had ever had that talk with Ethan. After all, Joel was thirty-three, long past the stage when Nic had asserted her independence.

  Maybe the difference was that Ethan was a bit more subtle about it than Paul had been. He wasn’t openly snooping or issuing advice, just asking questions and wondering aloud why Joel had made certain decisions—such as moving to Arkansas when he could have had a thriving practice in Birmingham or Atlanta.

  “If you’d wanted a small-town practice, you could have stayed in Danston,” he added, letting his voice rise just enough to turn the statement into an implied question.

  “I needed to get away from Danston,” Joel replied with a shrug, and though his tone was unemotional, his simple words expressed a great deal.

  Ethan must have picked up on that implied message. He let the subject drop. “So, Nic,” he said, “what bribe did my brother use to talk you into coming to his reunion with him?”

  She laughed. “No bribe. Just lots of manipulation. And he does owe me a favor after this.”

  “No kidding. I still live here in town and I don’t go to my reunions.”

  “The difference is that no one expects you to,” Joel muttered.

  “No. The difference is that I don’t particularly care what anyone else expects of me,” Ethan returned smoothly.

  Joel let that pass.

  “We’re almost to my parents’ house, Nic,” Ethan said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to stretch and freshen up.”

  “I’ll be staying at a motel, won’t I?”

  “Are you kidding? Mom’s got the guest room all ready for you. She’s been fussing over it for days.”

  “Oh, I didn’t want her to go to that much trouble.” Nic frowned at the back of Joel’s head, knowing he had deliberately withheld that bit of information from her. “I told you I would be perfectly comfortable in a motel or at the resort where the rest of your out-of-town classmates are staying.”

  “Stay by yourself at a motel? Mother would have a fit. She’s pretty old-fashioned that way. And we’ll be spending enough time at the resort as it is. You wouldn’t want to be stuck there with my old friends while I’m visiting with my family. This way we can leave together when things get boring—as I’m sure they will.”

  Nic twined her fingers more tightly in her lap, regretting—not for the first time—that she had ever let herself get talked into coming along.

  Chapter Three

  Nic was not a particularly tall woman. Five feet six inches in her sensible work shoes, she was usually several inches shorter than the men she confronted daily on the job. She stayed slim and muscular through a combination of regular exercise and overactive metabolism. Yet still she felt as though she towered over Joel’s mother, Elaine Brannon.

  Elaine reminded her vividly of the delicate porcelain figurines her grandmother had collected, and which Nic had been sternly forbidden to touch. Elaine might have stood five feet two on her tallest days and was hardly large enough to cast a shadow. Though neither of her sons topped six feet, she was dwarfed between them, her impeccably made-up face glowing with pride as she gazed up at them.

  As Ethan’s had earlier, Elaine’s smile changed when she turned to greet Nic. If a smile could be gracious and suspicious at the same time, this one was.

  Nic was almost amused. Apparently this family worried that Joel would be the target of unscrupulous gold diggers or doctor groupies, even though she knew he had told them that she and Joel were just friends. Even if they incorrectly suspected there was more to their relationship, did they honestly think she looked like either of those types? She wore just enough makeup to satisfy her mother. There was no expensive “product” in her casual, easy-to-maintain hairstyle. She couldn’t show cleavage if she tried, since she didn’t particularly have any.

  Joel saw her as a pal, not a potential romantic partner—and that was exactly the way she wanted things to remain. Much less messy all around.

  The woman’s tiny hand was icy-cold in Nic’s. “Welcome to our home, Nicole,” Elaine said with practiced Southern charm. “My husband hasn’t returned from work yet, but he’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Brannon. It really wasn’t necessary for you to put me up, you know. I could have stayed in a motel.”

  Elaine shook her ash-blond head. “What kind of hosts would we be if we sent you off to a motel? I’ve prepared the guest room for you and I hope you’ll be comfortable in it.”

  “I’m sure I will be,” Nic lied politely, though the privacy of an anonymous motel room sounded very nice at the moment.

  “Come on, Nic, I’ll show you to your room so you can fresh
en up,” Joel offered, motioning toward the stairway that curved upward behind them.

  She followed him gratefully, aware that both his mother and brother were watching as she and Joel climbed the stairs.

  The average-size four-bedroom house was fashioned in a vaguely Colonial style with gleaming wood floors, wainscoted walls and reproduction light fixtures. It was warm and welcoming, not too formal for Nic’s tastes and yet attractively decorated. Framed family photographs adorned almost every inch of the walls of the upstairs hallway.

  She stopped at a large family portrait, recognizing a much younger Elaine immediately. Elaine had aged very well, looking barely different now. A man stood beside her, and it was obvious where Ethan and Joel had gotten their similar features. “Is this your father?”

  “Yes. That’s Dad—Lou Brannon. He should be home soon. I think you’ll like him.”

  “I’m sure I will.” But her attention had turned to the children in the photo.

  Ethan and Joel were easy enough to spot; neither of them had changed significantly since toddlerhood, apparently. Yet it was the other child whose image held her riveted, another boy, this one little more than a baby, perhaps a couple of years younger than Joel. “This little boy…”

  “My younger brother. Kyle.”

  Sadness filled her as she realized the significance of his never mentioning Kyle to her before. Studying the happy, innocent face in the photo, she bit her lower lip.

  “He died in a flash flood twenty-eight years ago. He was almost two.”

  Though Joel had spoken without emotion, Nic knew him well enough to understand that his rather flat, even tone was an attempt to hide exactly how strongly he did feel about the loss of his younger brother. “I’m sorry.”

  “I barely remember him,” Joel replied with a slight shrug. “I was just four myself. He was with his nanny when her car was swept into a flooded river. The car was eventually found, but neither the nanny’s nor my brother’s bodies were inside. They were never recovered.”

  Nic thought of the woman she had met downstairs, and her gaze turned back to Elaine’s face in the portrait. She looked so young, so proud of her attractive family. Nic couldn’t imagine what she had gone through when she’d lost her youngest child.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said again.

  He nodded and motioned down the hallway. “The guest room is at the end of the hall—next door to the room where I’ll be sleeping.”

  She couldn’t resist pausing to look at several more of the family photographs, amused by the images of Joel as a gap-toothed, towheaded little boy, self-conscious in front of the camera. Oddly enough, Ethan looked almost as somber and responsible as a child as he did now. Had he been born an old soul? The mental question made her smile, as it sounded more like something Aislinn would ponder than herself.

  Her amusement faded when she studied the photographs of a more mature Joel. Eagle Scout, high school graduate, college graduate, medical school graduate—all of his accomplishments had been recorded and displayed in this family hall of fame. It was during high school that he began to be accompanied in many of the photos by a strikingly lovely redhead. Tall, curvy, intelligent-looking, the woman seemed to be as at home within those frames as Joel and his brother and parents.

  “This is Heather,” she murmured.

  “Yes.” He glanced at a wedding photo of himself and his late bride. “This was taken six months before she died.”

  It was a good thing, Nic mused, that she didn’t have any romantic designs on Joel. It would be hard to compete with the memory of this supermodel-beautiful woman.

  The Brannons had certainly known their share of tragedy, yet the general impression she received from this neatly crowded photo gallery was of a close, generally happy clan. Her own family had also suffered loss, she thought with a fleeting memory of her father’s last cancer-racked days. And they, too, had been able to put the pain behind them and move on with their lives, though of course it had been difficult for her mother.

  That life could be hard and often unfair was something Nic had learned a long time ago. She had decided to concentrate as much as possible on the positives, a philosophy she knew she shared with Joel. So why did his old friends seem determined to focus on his tragedies rather than his accomplishments? Or was that situation mostly in his own imagination?

  She supposed she would be finding out soon enough. They would be meeting his old classmates in less than three hours. Swallowing hard, she looked away from the photograph of beautiful Heather Brannon and followed Joel into the guest room.

  “Joel told us you’re a police officer, Nicole. That must be a challenging career for a petite young woman like yourself.”

  It was one of the first comments orthodontist Lou Brannon made after being introduced to Nic. She recognized his tone. He was one of those people who was equally fascinated and dismayed by her career choice. His only knowledge of the job probably came from television and crime novels, and he couldn’t imagine why anyone, especially a woman, would want to spend every day pursuing criminals and other lowlife.

  “I enjoy it,” she said, as she always did to such comments. “And it pays my bills.”

  They were standing in the den, chatting for a few minutes with Lou and Elaine before Joel and Nic had to leave for the pregame gathering of his classmates.

  “It’s such a dangerous and unsavory job,” Elaine fretted. “I can’t imagine why any young woman would want to do it.”

  An awkward moment of silence followed that comment. Nic finally responded with a simple, “I like it.”

  “And she does it very well,” Joel said in an attempt to smooth over the slight tension his mother’s remarks had left between them. “She’s received several commendations just in the relatively short time she’s been on the force.”

  Being no more comfortable with Joel’s compliments than his mother’s criticisms, Nic abruptly changed the subject. “What time are we supposed to leave for the reception?”

  He checked his watch. “Pretty soon. We’re meeting at Chucky’s Bar and Grill at six for drinks before the seven-thirty kickoff. Chucky’s is less than a mile from the football field, so everyone’s going to caravan over after drinks.”

  “How many were in your class?”

  “Just under a hundred. Not exactly a big school, so we all pretty much knew each other.”

  Elaine smiled mistily—something which must have taken quite a bit of practice, Nic decided with a dose of cynicism. “Joel and Heather were so popular and outgoing that their classmates all knew them and loved them. Especially Heather. I don’t believe she ever said an unkind word about anyone in her entire life.”

  Nic could hardly make the same claim. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the black twill slacks she wore with a black-and-purple color-block turtleneck sweater and waited silently for Joel to announce that it was time to leave. She was greatly relieved when he did so almost immediately.

  “Sorry about my mother,” Joel said as he guided his father’s borrowed car away from his parents’ home. “Sometimes she speaks without really thinking about how it sounds.”

  “Your mother has been perfectly nice to me,” Nic assured him blandly.

  He shot a skeptical glance her way. “I saw the way you looked when she talked about your job. You were biting your tongue until it almost bled when she said she couldn’t imagine why you’d want to do it.”

  “Why any ‘young woman’ would want to do it,” Nic corrected him, giving up the pretense that it hadn’t bothered her. “Insert well-bred in front of young, of course, because that’s what she really meant.”

  “Mom’s just kind of traditional, that’s all. She’s modern enough to defend your right to pursue any career you want and your capability to perform the job well—but she’s old-fashioned enough to think of being a cop as a man’s work. She would probably have reacted the same way if you’d said you were a firefighter.”

  Gazing out the side window at the small-t
own scenery passing by, Nic twisted her fingers in her lap. “You said your wife went to graduate school. What did she do?”

  “She earned a Ph.D. in psychology. She was a family counselor.”

  “I suppose your mother approved of that career for a woman.”

  “You really did take offense, didn’t you? I’m sorry, Nic, but I hope you don’t believe she meant to insult you.”

  Nic shook her head and forced a smile. “Forget it. I wasn’t really offended. It isn’t the first time anyone’s suggested I was crazy for wanting to be a cop.”

  Which was the truth, of course. Her own parents hadn’t exactly cheered when she’d announced her intention to enter the police academy. Her overprotective big brother had been even less enthusiastic, worrying aloud that her small size would put her at risk.

  She had long since convinced her family that she was doing exactly what she wanted to do—and doing it well. Other people had mocked or criticized her job, and she rarely took offense. So why had it been different with Joel’s parents?

  “My mom doesn’t think you’re crazy, okay? She just doesn’t know you yet.”

  And wasn’t sure she wanted to, Nic added silently. Elaine had obviously been trying to decide just how far Joel’s friendship with Nic went. And she hadn’t been at all certain she wanted her son the doctor to be involved with a cop.

  It was clear that Nic and Joel were going to have to remind his family, especially his mother, that they were only friends.

  Chucky’s Bar and Grill might have sounded like a dark, smoky dive, but the place was well lit, decorated in cheery, bright colors and openly welcoming when Joel escorted Nic inside. Country music played in the background, almost drowned out by the sounds of laughter and conversation, and beer foamed in thick glass mugs being distributed by black-aproned waitresses of assorted ages.

  Approximately forty people had gathered for the reunion, mostly in their early thirties, of course. Nic saw at once that this was no highbrow country-club crowd, for the most part, at least. Most of them looked working-class, a few sporting the mullets and tattoos one might expect in a small Southern town. Almost everyone wore red, an observation that made her realize abruptly that Joel wore a bright red long-sleeve polo shirt with khaki slacks.