Simone led them away. Leaving Brax alone with her mother.
Her gorgeous, not-a-day-over-thirty-nine, adored-by-millions, movie-queen mother. Next to her, Simone was a chunky frump.
It was like asking a connoisseur if he preferred chopped liver to pâté de foie gras.
* * * * *
“So, tell me, how long have you known my sweet little Simone?” She fluttered her eyelashes.
It looked as if she had a nervous tick in her eye.
Ariana Chandler. Didn’t that beat all. Simone had her polished, classic beauty, but Ariana’s was a poor imitation of Simone’s brilliant dazzle-smile. Too practiced. Brax figured she wiped it off at night the same way she’d remove her makeup.
She batted her extraordinary lashes once more, and leveled him with the sultry, come-hither look of Marilyn Monroe.
Not working. At least not on him. “Let me think. How long have I known her? Three days, six hours and”—he glanced at his watch—“thirty-six minutes.” He smiled. “And I’ve cherished every moment. You’ve got a wonderful daughter.” Though he couldn’t figure out where Simone had inherited her dazzle.
Instead of answering—probably working on a good comeback—Ariana flicked a white handkerchief across the sofa cushion, peered at it, then sat. Draping her arm across the couch back, she folded one knee beneath her and extended her leg, revealing toned thigh and calf encased in silk, and trim ankles strapped into dainty sandals. A practiced position designed to display shapely attributes. Ariana Chandler’s assets came off as a tad better than ordinary, when compared to her daughter Simone.
Pretty damn dexterous for a woman her age, she’d kept herself in reasonable shape. Her face wasn’t bad, either. Simone was close to the thirty mark, which put her mother near fifty, if she’d had Simone when she was a kid herself. Then again, she probably charged off a very good plastic surgeon on her taxes as a deductible salary expense.
Ariana patted the sofa. “Why don’t you sit beside me and tell me all about those three days, six hours, and thirty-six minutes? I’m dying to know. Simone’s so inhibited when it comes to”—she simpered and fluttered—“man talk.”
He wanted to laugh. In disbelief. The invitation resembled a come-on more than any request for a friendly chat. This woman was a piece of work. In the space of five minutes, she’d called her daughter fat, demoralized her for not wearing makeup on her fresh beautiful skin, trashed the trailer with a mere look, and now she wanted to know about her daughter’s sex life.
All right, he was biased. He already bore a strong dislike for Simone’s mother before he met her, and before he knew she was the Ariana Chandler.
Being a movie star was not a point in her favor.
If familial duty didn’t call him back to Maggie’s side, he would have plopped himself right down beside her on that couch, and told her the many ways in which she could not possibly hold a candle to her daughter.
He didn’t have time for a boxing match with Mommie Dearest. Even more importantly, he wouldn’t leave Simone alone with the aftermath of a verbal knockout.
“Sorry. Gotta run.”
“I suppose you’re anxious to leave this.” With a flourish, she indicated the trailer’s early-seventies decor. “You’ll be glad to know I’m here to help Simone get out of this awful place.”
“She’s quite happy here and doesn’t need your help.”
“Oh, come, Mr. Brax, nobody could want to live in a...trailer.” She wrinkled her nose. Extremely unattractive. Amazing she hadn’t checked the expression in a mirror and expunged it from her repertoire.
“You underestimate the joys of trailer life.” He now had a great appreciation for Simone’s sofa.
“Why, it could blow away in a heavy windstorm. I’ve been so worried about her.”
Right. She worried about her own image if it should get out to the press that her daughter lived in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere. Friday Night Fights or not, he couldn’t allow the woman to disparage the life Simone had chosen for herself. “Her home’s got a solid foundation. Believe me, nothing is ever going to blow it or her away.”
A small sound, maybe a gasp, caught his attention. In single file at the bedroom hallway, Simone, the waiflike Jacqueline, and the manager, a protective hand on the sister’s shoulder as she leaned lightly against him.
Simone stared at Brax, teeth worrying her bottom lip.
He ignored the mother in favor of her daughter. Closing the short distance, Brax kneaded Simone’s nape, pulling her forward to murmur against her hair. “I wouldn’t leave you alone for a moment with the dragon lady if I didn’t have to.”
There, in front of her mother, her sister, and whoever the hell the big older guy really was, Brax leaned down for an openmouthed taste of her, savoring her sweetness for several seconds longer than a goodnight kiss necessitated.
* * * * *
Her home’s got a solid foundation.
Her trailer? Her life? Simone felt sure Brax meant both. He actually understood. He knew what Goldstone meant to her, the underlying significance. He appreciated where she’d been, and why she’d never leave. He grasped the meaning of home.
In that moment, Simone fell hopelessly in love with Tyler Braxton.
Chapter Sixteen
Chloe and Della jumped him the moment he opened the trailer door. Going automatically for the weapon he wasn’t carrying, Brax nevertheless crouched into a defensive posture.
“She’s gone.”
“What do we do?”
“We haven’t a clue where.”
“It’s been half an hour of hell.”
“You should have left your cell phone number.”
He tried to make sense of who was saying what and what it all meant. “Maggie’s been gone to God knows where for half an hour but you didn’t have my cell number, yet you didn’t call Simone or get in your car and drive less than a mile to her house?”
“It wasn’t our fault.” Della put a hand over her mouth.
Chloe pointed. “Della panicked. I couldn’t leave.”
Della snorted. “I did not panic.”
“You threatened to stick your head in the Jacuzzi motor and turn it on if I left. I’d call that panicking.”
“You’re exaggerating, Chloe.”
“Ladies. Excuse the expression, but please shut up. Now.” In his experience, ladies didn’t usually do what you told them to, but in this case, these two did. “Only one of you answer. Did Maggie sneak past you?”
Chloe did the honors. “She pried the window screen off in the bedroom.”
“You noticed half an hour ago. But when was the last time you checked if she was there?”
“We didn’t check,” Della said, staring at the floor. “You said she was asleep, and we didn’t want to risk waking her.”
Dammit, he’d been gone an hour and a half. Shit. Shit. Shit. Giving in to his desire for Simone had been the worst mistake in a long line of stupid mistakes he’d made lately. Not the act itself—that was beautiful—but the timing sucked.
He’d told Simone not to sully what they’d done.
Maggie’s disappearance did it for them.
“Did you call the sheriff?”
The two looked at each other, then the floor, and both answered simultaneously. “No.”
“Shit.” His vocabulary suddenly seemed limited.
He pulled his cell from its holder on his hip just as an electronic excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”—minus the canons—shrieked from somewhere deep in the family room.
With the agility of a high-dive champion, Chloe lunged for her bag on the coffee table before Brax had a chance to hit 911.
Chloe looked to Brax. “The chickens have Maggie.”
What the hell was Maggie doing at The Chicken Coop? He knew in the next split second. She was doing her own investigation, starting at the source, the witnesses who found Carl’s body. Damn those detective shows.
“They don’t know how long they
can hold her off,” Chloe relayed. “It’s a terrible mess. She’s gonna kill Whitey any second now. Holy hell, I hear her screaming like a crazy person.”
“Tell them we’ll be there in two minutes.” Brax pointed at Della. “You stay in case she somehow gets away before we arrive and comes back here.”
Della groaned mournfully. “But I’m the last person she’ll want to see. I can’t handle it.”
Chloe shook her by the shoulders. “Della. You’re the mayor and the judge of this town. Start acting like it.”
Shit. Someone had to regain control. Because Brax had certainly lost it.
* * * * *
“That man was incredibly rude.” Ariana paced the short length of Simone’s living room, her brilliant blue sandals blending with the orange shag like a cheerleader’s pom-poms.
“Ah, Ariana honey, you’re miffed because Brax didn’t fall worshipping at your feet. I think the boy’s smitten with our Simone.” Kingston put his arm around Simone’s shoulder and hugged her off her feet.
“What does he do for a living in this godforsaken place? Sell used hubcaps?”
“He’s visiting.” Of course, she’d already told her mother that, along with the fact that Brax was Maggie’s brother, but Ariana never could resist a good dig. “He’s a sheriff in Cottonmouth.”
Her mother made a face. “Cottonmouth? That’s a disgusting name for a town.” She sniffed condescendingly. “Trust a gambling and prostitution state like Nevada to allow such a thing.”
“Cottonmouth’s in Northern California.”
“Hmmph. Northern California. Well, that says it all.” Anything north of Hollywood counted as the backwoods to her mother, even if it was part of the great state.
“Don’t mind her, honey, she’s jealous,” Kingston said loud enough for her mother to hear. Kingston never seemed to care what her mother thought. Maybe that’s why her mother took his blasphemies without throwing him out on his ear. Actually, Simone never had understood why her mother tolerated it. Another of life’s great unsolved mysteries.
“Jealous, Kingston? Oh please. Of what? She lives in a trailer, for God’s sake. And did you see this town? Why it doesn’t even have a decent spa.”
Goldstone didn’t have a spa at all, and her mother’s skin would shrivel in the dry desert air. But her daughter thrived. Maybe Jackie needed some good desert air, too. She seemed so pale.
“Simone is standing right here, Ariana. You don’t have to talk like she’s in the next room. I think her trailer is”—even Kingston had to search for a kind word—“special.”
And it had a foundation. Brax said so. Simone’s heart beat a little faster, and she couldn’t help a tiny smile.
“Any trailer is an abomination,” her mother said, as if a trailer was the next-worst thing to an outhouse. “How could you do this to me, Simone? How could you? If the press ever gets wind of this...” She threw herself on the sofa, covering her eyes with her arm.
Simone opened her mouth, but Kingston fought her battle for her. “She didn’t do it to you, Ariana. This is her home, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with you. I’d venture that she didn’t even consider you when she bought it.”
Anathema to her mother, the idea that the world didn’t revolve around her. “You’re coming home, Simone. I won’t hear another word about it. You can have your old suite at the house. But don’t even think about redecorating in orange.”
“She’s not coming home, Ariana.”
“Kingston, will you please stop talking for her. The girl’s old enough to talk for herself.”
Talk for herself? Ariana didn’t think Simone was old enough to even think for herself.
They looked at her. Expecting something. It was so much easier to tell her mother what she wanted to hear when all Simone had to do was hang up the phone afterward. She took the coward’s way out. “You can sleep in the master bedroom, MOTHER.” Of course, her whole trailer would fit in her mother’s bedroom suite, and there wasn’t a speck of marble or brass to be found anywhere. “Jackie and I can take the guest room.” Which had a queen bed, where they could giggle and tell stories all night long as they had when they were children. “The couch isn’t very long, Kingston, but it’s better than the floor.”
Kingston laughed. “Maybe your mother should take the couch. She looks so at home there, doesn’t she?”
Ariana rose, smoothing imagined wrinkles from her silk pantsuit. “Thank goodness, I brought spare sheets. I like my own with the proper thread count. Jackie, sweetheart, would you mind taking care of it? And don’t forget to get the atomizer out of my overnight case to spray the bed.”
“Yes, MOTHER.” Yes, Jackie minded, or yes, she’d do it? Simone thought she detected capital letters in her sister’s voice. Jackie had hung back in the hallway, out of sight, out of mind, out of the storm, during the entire exchange.
Simone almost laughed. The thought of Oscar-winning Jacqueline Chandler changing sheets bordered on the absurd. Just as it was easier to tell Ariana what she wanted to hear, it was always easier to do what she said. Especially if she was close enough to throw eye daggers at you. Suddenly it was getting hard to say her mother meant well.
“I’ll help, Jackie,” Simone said.
Jackie turned back along the hall. Simone followed, hoping her mother’s voice would do a fade-out.
“Kingston, I need a drink. See what she’s got.”
“Yes, Ariana. Whatever your little heart desires.” Kingston Hightower took her mother’s orders as though they were a source of great amusement. He always had. Simone had often wondered what her mother would have to say or do to breach his equanimity.
“And if there are any mice lurking in the cupboards, you are driving me to a decent hotel, even if we have to go all the way back to Vegas.”
“Of course, Ariana. You know your every wish is my command.” Laughter lurked in his voice.
“And when is she going to write darling Ambrose? If she’d just do herself up and wear a little makeup. I don’t know how to help her anymore when she won’t even...” Fade out.
* * * * *
The drive took five minutes. The longest five minutes of Brax’s life.
Two flood lamps spotlighted pandemonium in The Chicken Coop’s lot as he wheeled in. His tires spewed gravel in all directions, the ping of it hitting damn near every parked car and spraying the two combatants and four referees.
Dressed in varied length shorts and crop tops and without their distinguishing lingerie, Brax couldn’t tell which chicken was which, but two held Maggie back by her arms.
Yanking his car door open, Brax caught her words. Hell, she was shouting so loudly all of Goldstone must have heard her.
“I know you killed him, Waldo Whitehead. You thought he was going to dig up those damn outhouses of yours in the middle of the night and stiff you out of a cut of whatever he found.”
Then she threw herself at Whitey, hands outstretched, fingers curled into claws.
With a mighty effort, the chickens held her back just before she’d have scratched his eyes out. The bearded man jumped, stumbled, then fell on his ass.
“Maggie, stop it.” Brax didn’t know her. She was a wild thing, her hair flying in all directions, spittle at the corners of her mouth. Psycho time. It would have been cliché if it hadn’t been his sister.
For a moment, one small part of his mind stepped back to assess the situation with an unbiased cop’s eye. At the end of a self-proclaimed knock-down, drag-out fight with her husband, Maggie Felman had threatened to cut off his family jewels. She’d disappeared for most of the next morning during which, at some point, her husband had fallen to his death. The autopsy report might very well come back determining time of death to be within the window of her opportunity. She now threw accusations of murder around like a crazy woman. Or a crazy-acting woman desperate to throw suspicion onto someone else.
Shit. Damn. Brax was closer to losing his lunch than when he’d been tasked with cleaning up after
a ten-car pileup on the highway involving a semi’s lost brakes.
Please God, don’t let my sister be an out-of-control Mack truck.
Whitey garbled something, the only recognizable part being his utter terror.
Brax seized the distraction like a lifeline.
A chicken, Peppermint by the scent of her, grabbed Brax’s arm, and whispered in his ear. “It’s a game they played, that’s what he said, that he would have let Carl have the outhouses in the end.”
Brax closed in on Maggie and the two chickens with death grips on her upper arms. Their muscles flexed and rippled with effort. He didn’t know how much longer they could hold her, but he couldn’t gauge the transfer of power at this point. If he tried to take Maggie too soon, she could bolt. Either for Whitey’s throat or into the night where Brax would never find her. The desert was too damn dark and too damn easy to hide in.
“Maggie, honey, let’s calm down. Let’s talk.” He held up both hands in a peace gesture.
“He killed him, he killed him.”
With more unrecognizable rhetoric from Whitey, Peppermint murmured once again, like a UN interpreter deciphering a foreign language for Brax. “He’d never kill Carl over an outhouse. The first edition of Death Game Carl found at Goodwill, maybe, but not the outhouses.”
“Why the hell is he saying he had a reason? He’ll set her off again. Shit.” Then louder, so his sister could hear, he brought out the big guns. “Maggie, Mom’ll be here soon. You don’t want her seeing you like this. You know what she’ll do.”
Suffer heart failure, that’s what she’d do. Maybe he shouldn’t have called Mom. Seeing Maggie like this would break her heart.
“Come on, sweetie, let’s go home so Mom doesn’t worry.”
Maggie stared at him, her face a garish collage of harsh lines and hollows in the flood lights. “Mom’s going to be mad, isn’t she?”
Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) Page 22