A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  He showed her the tip of his finger, and sure enough there was a tiny little speck of pepper stuck to it. Stella picked up her napkin and dabbed daintily at her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She set her napkin back on her lap and Goat kept his gaze fixed on her face and damn if she didn’t find herself staring back, and then a few seconds or maybe it was a few hours went by, Stella couldn’t be sure, and he slowly reached for her hand again, right there on the smooth pine surface of the dining room table, and this time Stella let him, and she had time to remark to herself on just how big Goat’s hand was compared to hers as he ran his thumb slowly over the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist—and then the doorbell rang.

  Stella blinked.

  It rang again, three quick blasts, and Goat released her hand and she managed, barely, not to cuss out loud.

  “Excuse me,” he said softly, and pushed his chair back. At least the man had the decency to sound disappointed.

  He unfolded himself from the table, all six-foot-four of hard-muscled law enforcement pride of Sawyer County, and as he went to the door, Stella took the opportunity to scrape as much of the hot pepper off her chicken as she could, burying it in a little pool of sauce with her fork.

  The ringing had turned to pounding by the time Goat got the door opened, and the rush of the wind and rain splatting against the house drowned out whatever the visitor had to say, though Stella could make out a high and rather desperate-sounding voice.

  Stella turned in her chair just in time to see Goat stagger back and send the door banging against the wall.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Brandy?” he demanded.

  A generous five feet of womanly curves clattered into the house on ridiculously high heels and stood shaking a fuchsia umbrella out on the hardwood floor, touching bloodred-tipped fingers to a complicated platinum-blonde updo.

  “I declare, Goat Jones,” she said. “That’s a fine way to greet your wife.”

  TWO

  Your wife?” Stella demanded, pushing back her chair and standing in order to view the full measure of this disturbing turn of events.

  Goat’s gaze flicked from one woman to the other and back. He retreated from the front door, still holding a kitchen towel, which he waved in front of him like a matador confronting an angry bull.

  “Uh, Stella, this is my ex-wife, Brandy Truax—”

  “Not quite, babycakes,” the petite party-crasher said. She finished her hair-fluffing with a final pat or two and tugged at the bottom hem of her snug knit skirt. There wasn’t quite enough skirt to go around, and Brandy’s straightening efforts revealed a band of skin around her midriff. Her sweater was knit of thick pink yarn and might have kept her warm and toasty, except for the fact that it seemed to have been designed for a five-year-old and didn’t begin to cover the top half of a decidedly grown-up and almost certainly fake set of breasts. With her skyscraping platform shoes and her top-heavy mass of curls and her sparkly makeup and extra-long lashes, Brandy looked like she’d been hanging around Dolly Parton long enough to pick up some fashion tips. “You never quite got around to signing the documents, remember?”

  “Me?” Goat paused midshuffle. “It was you that wouldn’t sign, remember? I just paid that shyster Gordy Gates another six hundred bucks to drive the latest copy over to you back in January. He said you told him you needed to talk to your astrologer and figure out the right moon phase for signing, or some such load of crap.”

  Brandy sighed dramatically and set her purse, a large gold oblong clutch tricked out with studs and metal trim, down on the table with a thunk. She didn’t seem to notice or care that she had nearly knocked over the bottle of wine from which Stella had consumed a mere half glass—a show of temperance that now seemed like it might have been wasted.

  “You, me, does it really matter who it was?” Brandy asked no one in particular. “I swear, that’s what got us in trouble in the first place, Goat, all that finger-pointin’. Never does a bit of good, if you ask me.”

  Stella made tracks for her own purse, a considerably more subdued number that she’d stowed carefully next to the front door along with her umbrella, which had mostly dried in the hour that she’d been at Goat’s. “My, my, look at the time,” she murmured. “Just delightful to meet you, Brandy, but tomorrow’s a work day, and, well, you know how these things go.”

  “Oh, hell, Dusty—” Goat gave his own chair an angry shove, clacking it against the table. “No need to go off all half-cocked like this. Lemme just figure out what Brandy here needs and send her on her way and we can get back where we were.”

  “I really don’t—,” Stella began. All the lovely shivery feelings from earlier in the evening were gone, as though the heavy cloud of perfume that Brandy brought in the door with her had doused the sparks that had been sparkling between Stella and the sheriff for months. Years, even.

  Stella had become a bit of an expert in relationships, seeing as she was a member of the marital counseling profession, loosely speaking. At least, she did a lot of listening when women showed up at her door, looking to become members of the not-going-to-take-it-anymore club. Working with her clients took compassion and reasoning skills and coaching and encouraging and a heap of intuition and enough optimism for two, since generally the ladies didn’t bring much of that with them.

  Over the years, Stella had learned a thing or two about what could go wrong in the marital union—and she’d never seen a lingering-spouse situation that turned out anything but messy. She’d assumed, along with everyone else in Prosper, that Goat’s marriage was a clean kill. Learning that it had popped up from the grave was not encouraging. Men whose baggage contained undead relationships were to be avoided.

  There was the player, the man who’d tell you his marriage had been over for years, even while his wedding ring was cooling in his wallet. Well, Goat wasn’t one of those, Stella was sure, since she’d seen for herself that he’d been decidedly single for the three years since he moved to Prosper to head up the sheriff’s department. So single, in fact, that he’d felt free to show a number of the local ladies a nice time—or so the gossip went.

  Then there were the never-quite-split ones. That’s what this situation looked like it might turn out to be.

  Last January, Nora Romero had hired Stella to do some heavy-duty explaining to her boyfriend, Nick, that it was not okay to use her credit card to pay for long-distance conversations with special ladies on the other end of 900 numbers, but while Stella was doing her due diligence, she discovered that there was another mad-as-hell gal over in Brisbane, Ohio, who just happened to still be married to Nick and wondered if Stella could get him to pay back the $2,300 he’d run up on her credit card, making long-distance friends before he skipped town.

  Not that she expected Goat was spending his public servant’s salary on heavy breathers whose pictures appeared in the back of men’s magazines. For one thing, he wouldn’t have to. She wasn’t the only filly in town who’d taken a shine to the man; it seemed that tall, sexy, righteous men in uniform were in short supply.

  But that little crush, or whatever it was, needed to be laid to rest. Stella had entirely too much drama in her life already without getting dragged into a tug-of-war with a damp sexpot with questionable fashion sense and very poor timing.

  “I need to run by the shop,” she said. Besides her unofficial side business, Stella ran the sewing machine repair and supply shop she’d inherited from Ollie. “Make sure everything’s okay.”

  “You already checked,” Goat protested. He had called and offered to help her nail plywood over the windows before the tornado went through, but Stella turned him down, since they were predicting the storm would stay south of Prosper. Later, when darkness arrived earlier than usual and Ted Krass over at the Live Super Doppler One Thousand Weather Center got on the radio to announce that the funnel cloud had traced a route through the fairgrounds and skipped across Broadway before heading out the west side o
f town, she made a couple of calls to make sure the shop was still standing.

  But she knew from experience that once her luck turned, it tended to stay turned. “I need to check again,” she said, adding a little ice to her voice. “Sometimes trouble comes along when you’re least expecting it.”

  Goat followed her to the door and reached out like he was going to grab her arm. Stella stepped neatly out of the way; her physical therapist had recently added some tai chi moves to her daily workouts, which really boosted her agility.

  “At least let me follow you over,” Goat said. “It could be dangerous out there.”

  “Hey!” Brandy hollered. She set her fists on her curvy hips and pushed out her glossy bottom lip in an impressive pout. “Hello! What am I, chopped liver?”

  “No, you’re not,” Goat said impatiently, “but far as I can tell, you’re warm and nearly dry and fixing to plant your butt in my house, and that makes you accounted for in my book, while Stella here seems hell-bent on going looking for trouble.”

  “Is she your girlfriend?”

  Stella felt her face flush even as Goat stammered out several rounds of we’re-not-this-isn’t-I-don’t equivocating. At least he didn’t say no, exactly. But he sure wasn’t saying yes either.

  His wife, or ex, or whatever the hell she was, was plenty short on manners, talking about Stella like she wasn’t even in the room. But she had Goat’s ticket: the question stopped him in his tracks and reduced him to a gibbering idiot.

  While Brandy drilled him with a gaze that could light fires, Stella made it to the door and twisted the knob. Immediately the force of the wind and rain blasted it practically out of her hand; it was as though the storm wanted to come on in and witness Stella’s humiliation for itself. An icy draft of rainwater hit Stella sidelong in the face and sluiced down her neck, ruining, no doubt, her only 100 percent silk top.

  “All righty then,” she called, and slipped out into the storm, yanking the door shut behind her with a mighty effort.

  Then she waited on the porch, not even bothering to open her umbrella, since it would have immediately been blown inside out in the wind, and gave Goat a count of ten to come after her.

  Make that a count of fifteen … twenty.

  Hell.

  She bolted for her trusty green Jeep Liberty and practically threw herself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut behind her. She shook the water off her head, splatting droplets all over the car’s interior, and jammed the key in the ignition. Without bothering to check what she might run over, she hit the gas hard and backed around in a tight arc before reversing and aiming the wheel toward the lane. In the pitch-black night, with rain slamming down in sheets, it was more of a guess than a certainty, her headlights picking out an undistinguished stretch of mud ahead. Her tires spun for a few seconds in the flooded gravel drive before finally catching with a vengeance.

  Hurtling over the uneven road, bouncing around in the Jeep gave Stella a small measure of calm.

  Once she was back on the main road, she eased up on the gas a little. Grudgingly, she snapped on her seat belt—no sense giving Goat’s ex the satisfaction of a gory death if she got in an accident tonight—and hit the CD play button. Emmylou’s voice blasted into the car, in the middle of the song Stella’d been playing at a high volume as she drove over earlier.

  I want a high-powered love

  got to have intensity

  Well, that was when she’d thought the evening might end up with her getting a little something more than a friendly handshake. Stella snapped the sound system off with a sharp jab.

  Damn.

  It was one thing to carry a torch for a man you couldn’t—shouldn’t—ever have. It was quite another to accept his dinner invitation and let all those wouldn’t-it-be-nices start turning into hopes and plans and, when you got it especially bad, a future. Start believing in your own luck, and soon you were having high-minded ideas about how you might tickle fate with a whispered suggestion and a lucky roll of the dice.

  Stella had shaved her legs … and not just the calves and knees, but her thighs, too, an extra effort she hadn’t made in ages. Yesterday she’d suffered the indignity of a bikini wax down at Hair Lines, which entailed not just memorable pain but also Pearl, the aesthetician, whistling through her teeth and remarking, “Guess it’s been a while since you got the lawnmower out of the shed, ain’t it, Stella?”

  Stella had recently patched things up with her daughter Noelle after being estranged for a few years. Noelle just happened to be in the beauty business herself, and agreed to make the half-hour drive over from her house this afternoon to touch up Stella’s color and tame her brows. It helped that Noelle didn’t have a washing machine at her house; Stella got to see her daughter at least once a week these days, when Noelle brought her brimming laundry baskets over.

  Stella ran a hand through her rain-ruined hairdo, which Noelle had fussed over for what seemed like hours, dyeing it back to what the two of them remembered her natural shade to be before all that unwelcome gray showed up, and then adding a crazy halo of tinfoil highlights and lowlights. While they sat around waiting for all that beauty to take effect, Noelle painted Stella’s nails a shade called Tokyo Rose and came at the Goat question from every direction she could think of.

  Stella was proud of her girl—relentless and nosy, just like her mama. But Stella didn’t give up much, nonetheless.

  Which was a good thing, considering how it turned out. Next week, when Noelle came in the door with her laundry, Stella would breezily claim that she and Goat had a perfectly nice time, but the romantic attraction fizzled out and they decided to just be friends. Maybe Noelle would let it drop without a big third degree.

  Yeah. Right.

  Stella turned onto the old ranch road and was headed back toward town when her cell phone rang, scaring her half to death. Todd Groffe, her thirteen-year-old neighbor, had updated her ringtone again, and it sounded like a man being castrated while someone played the White Album backwards at 66 rpm.

  “What, what, what?” she demanded as she fumbled for the answer button and nearly hit a cat bolting across the street in the downpour despite having reduced her speed to a mere fifteen miles per hour, the little Jeep buffeted about in the near-horizontal rain and shrieking wind.

  “Phones are out.”

  “Well, speak of the devil, you little monster,” Stella grumbled. “I was just thinking about how dang much I hate that—that thing you put on my phone.”

  “What—The Thermals?” Todd’s adolescent voice cracked with incredulity. “Stella, they’re fuckin’ genius, man!”

  “Watch your mouth. And I want my old ring tone back, hear?”

  Todd’s snort of disgust came across loud and clear. “Mom says tell you the power’s out over on Hickory and they say it’ll prob’ly go out here too and do you got candles and shit or are you staying over at your friend’s. What friend’s house are you at, anyway?”

  Stella could hear Todd’s mother, Sherilee, in the background, hollering at Todd to watch his mouth, but with less conviction than Stella, probably because his six-year-old sisters were screaming at the tops of their lungs. Damn. Stella had forgotten she told Sherilee about the date. Or dinner, or whatever the hell it was.

  For a woman whose business relied on a level of discretion matched only in the bowels of the Pentagon, Stella had sure managed to shoot her mouth off enough to guarantee herself a whole mess of regret.

  “Tell your mother,” she said icily, “that dinner was fine, but I am looking forward to spending the rest of the evening alone.”

  “Whatever—why don’t you tell her yourself. I ain’t your goddamn message service.”

  “Fine. I will. Put her on. I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear about that math test you left at my house the other day.”

  Silence.

  Stella regularly called the boy’s bluff, but he never seemed to tire of trying to sneak one past her. “What I thought,” she said. “Okay, so wh
ose message service are you now?”

  Todd hung up before Stella could mess with him any further, and she added a note to her mental to-do list—thrash that boy within an inch of his life—before tapping the brakes and bringing her speed down barely above a crawl.

  She switched on the radio and fiddled with it until she managed to get KKRN News Radio, home of the Live Super Doppler One Thousand, in addition to being the hotbed of everything newsworthy in Korn Kountry.

  “…tracked west of Sedalia, winds at two hundred—”

  So the second twister had materialized after all. Two hundred miles an hour—that was no autumn rain shower. This was turning out to be a hell of a weather event, to quote one of Ted Krass’s most favored turns of phrase.

  “Several sightings have been reported along the border of Sawyer and Latham counties. The storm is moving north-northwest at speeds approaching thirty-three miles per hour and has taken a route south of Fairfax and through north central Prosper. Damage estimates are not known at this time.…”

  Stella’s heart did a little stop-start.

  The north end of town was where Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales was located. More important, it was where Chrissy Shaw and her two-year-old son, Tucker, lived.

  Stella veered into the turn lane and took a sharp right onto Broadway, the fastest route to the middle of town. She was more than a little worried about Chrissy. Tucker had been kidnapped a few months back by his worse-than-deadbeat stepfather, who’d hoped to trade him for favors from the Kansas City organized crime cartel, but got himself shot dead and stuffed into a Rubbermaid storage bin instead.

  Chrissy hadn’t wasted too much time mourning her dead ex, but helping Stella get the boy back had gotten her shot, too, more seriously than Stella, who’d suffered a hit to the stomach that miraculously managed to avoid destroying anything critical, and a mostly superficial shoulder wound. Chrissy, still recovering from the bullet that tore up a lung and damaged her heart, was helping out part-time in the sewing machine shop while she followed the program of rest and therapy that would restore her to full health. While the sessions were coming along well, and the doctors had declared the girl stronger and more determined than any patient in their collective memory, Stella didn’t want Chrissy to have to worry about blown-in windows or trees falling down on the house.