“You two are having sex, aren’t you?” Nina called again. “This is so like totally not the way to run a business.”
Jake nibbled my ear. “If you take them to the library and courthouse, I’ll check the florists.” I felt his hand trace the top button of my shirt, caught my breath as he slowly unbuttoned it and moved to the next button and then the next. As the last button gave way, I felt the warm, rough touch of his hand sliding across my skin.
I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the sensations as every nerve ending in my body cried out “More!” His hands answered, sliding up beneath my bra slowly exploring and exciting.
His fingers searched for and found the tender tips of my breasts, squeezing them gently, rubbing his work-roughened skin across the sensitive nipples. “Does that work for you?” he murmured.
I sighed, my head tilting back against the wall as he slowly, very slowly, teased and excited my neck with his tongue. I tugged his T-shirt free from his waistband and ran my fingers across his smooth chest.
“It works,” I whispered. “It works just fine.”
“Stella!”
At the sound of Aunt Lucy’s voice, I jumped away from Jake, hastily buttoning my shirt as I ran for the steps.
“I’m coming,” I yelled. “We were just discussing the case.”
I appeared at the top of the landing, breathless, and saw Spike conceal a giggle. I ran the rest of the way down the steps.
“I hate to do this to you, Nina,” I said. “But we’ve got to get moving on our missing person’s case and I really could use some help from you and Spike.”
Nina’s demeanor went from pissed off to excited in one second flat. “Will it be dangerous? I really like it dangerous.”
Spike walked up beside Nina and bent to whisper in my ear, “Your shirt’s buttoned wrong.”
I looked down, saw the cock-eyed buttons and winced.
“Uh-huh,” Aunt Lucy snorted. “Working, eh?”
“Really, we were. And we’ve got a plan.”
I outlined the afternoon’s research project, giving Spike the courthouse-record detail and Nina the library and newspaper archives.
“Jake and I are going to check out the local florists.”
With a start I remembered we hadn’t thought to cover Aunt Lucy. “And you can come with us,” I added.
Jake joined us just in time to hear my aunt say, “Absolutely not! I’ve got work to do. I’ll stay right here.”
I started to argue with her, but she cut me off. “Your uncle will be here with me. He won’t let anything happen. Besides, if anything does happen, I can always call your cell phone.”
Jake didn’t seem to be any more pleased than I was. “Take the girls and go on. I’ll call all the florists in the phone book while you’re gone. When you get back, we should have something to go on.”
When I didn’t move, he said, “Stella, that’s not an order, it’s my idea. If you want to do it differently…”
“Actually,” I said, “I was waiting for you to move. You’re standing in front of the coat closet.”
I smiled sweetly up at him, ignoring the way he double-checked my facial expression, trying to figure out if I was playing him. I couldn’t look at him for long without my knees going weak, but I couldn’t seem to stop staring, either.
“You were so having sex up there!” Nina hissed in my ear.
“So not!”
She rolled her eyes and shrugged into her coat and multicolored knit stocking cap. With a flounce she was out the door and down the steps to the car, Spike right behind her.
“I’ll be back as soon as I drop them off.”
Jake nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ve got calls to make.” His eyes lingered just a bit too long on my lips. My stomach fluttered and I couldn’t take another second of attention. I half ran out the door, heard him call my name and turned to see him standing with my coat in his hand.
“Need this?”
I snatched it and ran, knowing Aunt Lucy had witnessed everything and was making her own judgments about the two of us.
“Nothing.” I scolded myself under my breath. “He’s nothing to you, do you hear? Business and nothing more! You are such a weak-willed person!”
I opened the car door and Nina immediately pounced. “Okay, what’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing!”
“Stella, he’s got you walking around talking to yourself. You think we didn’t see you just then? Now, give. Every detail!”
Spike leaned forward from the back seat. “You don’t look like it’s nothing,” she said. “You really have been acting a little funny.”
I gave myself a huge mental bitch slap and reminded myself that this was exactly why you shouldn’t work with family members. They’d known you since childhood. Pulling the wool over their eyes was impossible. Of course, Spike wasn’t family exactly, but her connection to Nina made it just as bad.
“All right, I’ll just tell you,” I said, backing the car out into the street. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that it isn’t safe for me to be in a room alone with Jake. It’s like we have this chemistry…”
“Ohh, I love chemistry,” Nina breathed.
“Yeah, well, I don’t. Jake Carpenter and I do not have a future. We tried it before and it ended in disaster. And look how things ended with Pete. He ran off with my partner and I wound up quitting the force because of it.”
Spike clucked her tongue softly. “But weren’t you and Jake together back in high school? Of course your relationship wouldn’t work out back then—you were too young. Nobody knows what they want when they’re young. You’ve both grown up since then.”
Nina sighed and reached back across the seat to touch Spike’s arm. “I certainly wouldn’t have known what to do about you back then,” she said softly. “And I was a Girl Scout, too.”
Spike and I exchanged puzzled glances in the rearview mirror.
“Why would that matter, Nina?” I asked.
“Well, silly, I mean our motto was ‘Always Be Prepared.’ I wasn’t prepared for this. I mean, in case you hadn’t noticed, Spike’s a girl. I liked boys back then. How can you prepare to like a girl when you like boys? Liking someone you’re not supposed to like is scary. Me and Spike are just like you and Jake. I wasn’t supposed to like a girl, and you’re not supposed to like Jake because he hurt you, remember?”
I wanted to say, “How could I not remember that? He was my first love and he broke my heart.” Instead, I kept my mouth shut and drove.
When I spotted the library I said a silent thank-you to the great Girl Scout leader in the sky and drove a little faster. I pulled up in front of the small, serpentine building and promised I’d be back to collect Nina by four o’clock.
“There’s a nice diner about two blocks down,” I told her. “But I doubt they have tofu.”
Nina rolled her eyes and looked back at Spike. “Meet me there at one?”
Spike nodded and pointed to a brick building in the next block. “That’s the courthouse,” she said. “If I finish before one, I’ll come up here and help you.”
Nina squinted into the late-morning sunlight, peering off in the direction of the courthouse.
“That’s the courthouse, really? I thought you hadn’t been here before.”
Spike smiled. “I haven’t.”
“Then how do you know that’s it?”
I looked at her and pointed. “I think the sign over there was a clue. It says Ocean County Courthouse.”
Nina bristled. “Well, just totally excuse me.” she said, sniffing. “I can’t help it if I have allergies.”
I didn’t even ask.
I let Nina and Spike out, waved goodbye and waited until I’d rounded the corner to pick up the cell phone and dial. Pete answered on the third ring, his voice thick with sleep.
“It’s me,” I said, suddenly at a loss.
After all, what did you say to the old boyfriend you’d caught boinking your partner? True, it had been
almost three months since I’d walked in on the two of them, and yes, a lot had happened in that time. We’d done some work to bury the hatchet, but the awkwardness would always be there between the two of us. He wanted me back, I knew that, but I wasn’t going to return and he knew that. It was just weird, and had I not needed a favor, I probably wouldn’t have called, we both knew that.
“Stella, baby. How are you?”
I swallowed as the mental image of him and Lou Ann having sex suddenly popped into my head. I shuddered and asked him anyway.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Sure, baby, anything!”
“I need you to run a check on someone.”
“I knew that guy was no good, Stella.”
I turned Aunt Lucy’s Buick onto a side street, drove to the end and pulled into a slot in the public parking area.
“Who—Jake?”
Pete had run into Jake on his failed mission to bring me back home to Florida. Pete was a dog with women, but he had impeccable cop instincts. He smelled danger on Jake and I knew it.
“Is that his name?”
I rolled my eyes. Pete knew Jake’s name as well as he knew mine.
“It’s not him. I took on a missing person’s case. I want you to run my client.”
“So your new boyfriend doesn’t have connections? He can’t get you what you need?” Pete sounded smug, as if he thought I was crawling back to him.
“He worked for the feds, Pete. He’s not a cop.”
There was no way I was going to tell Pete I didn’t want to ask Jake because I wanted to be one up on my new partner.
There was a momentary silence. In the background I thought I heard the faintest murmur of a female voice. Lou Ann. Pete was still boffing my old squad partner.
“All right,” he said. “Let me get something to write with. I’ll run her when I go in tonight.”
“You still seeing Lou Ann?” I asked.
Pete choked. “No, baby. Whatever gave you that idea? Now, what’s that name?”
I gave him Mia’s name, spelled it out for him and then said, “That’s all I have on her for now. I don’t have a social, birth date or tag.”
“I’ll do what I can, honey.”
I heard the woman’s voice again and Pete quickly muffled the phone.
“Just call my cell when you know something,” I said, and pressed my lips together hard in order not to say something. Pete was the only cop contact I could rely on to look up something without a lengthy explanation. He was too busy digging himself out of the doghouse to ask questions.
“Oh, and tell Lou Ann I said hey.”
I broke the connection before he could say anything and sat for a moment with my head resting against the steering wheel. My head was spinning with random thoughts. I didn’t want Jake to know I was checking Mia out. Something about that woman didn’t ring right and I couldn’t explain it to Jake as anything other than a feeling, an instinct.
Jake would probably think I was jealous because she was attractive and obviously attracted to him. I also didn’t want Jake to know I’d called Pete, and I didn’t know why. I found myself thinking about Joey Smack and wondered why he couldn’t accept that we’d only been doing our jobs.
I raised my head and stared at the steps leading up to the boardwalk and then down onto the beach. Maybe a walk would clear my head. I climbed out of the car, locked it and pocketed the keys. A walk was just what I needed. What better way to generate a plan?
I walked to the edge of the water and stood staring out to sea, lost in thought again. This time I slipped far away from today’s problems, choosing instead to think about the long-ago past. I could never spend time by the ocean without missing my mom and dad. When I was thirteen, my parents had taken a second honeymoon. They’d boarded a huge jumbo jet and left for Ireland, never to return. On the return trip, their plane developed some kind of sudden problem and was lost over the Atlantic Ocean.
For years I blamed myself, thinking I’d driven them away with my teenage rebelliousness. My uncle Benny was the one to see through that. Ever so gently he picked away at the layers of guilt and remorse, until at last he found my secret core.
We were fishing, the way we did almost every afternoon the summer after I lost my parents. Uncle Benny was baiting his hook with a plastic worm, smiling to himself as if he had some secret knowledge.
“Stella Luna,” he said at last, “did I ever tell you about the time your aunt Lucy, your mother and I got arrested?”
I had been reading A Tale of Two Cities, part of my do-good-be-good penance program. I remember lowering the book to my lap and staring at him, silently waiting for the story and too proud to urge him on.
“Yes, your mother and your aunt snuck out one night, right around Halloween it was.”
My mother? My mother had been a saint. She’d never done anything wrong in her life.
Uncle Benny nodded. “Yep, the two of them McClannahan girls were wild as coot owls, always into the trouble, they were. Preachers’ daughters, you know. Anyway, that particular night we were mad at the mayor. Now, they were always mad at the powers that be for one reason or another. Your mother, you know, was quite the rebel.”
I couldn’t help myself. “She was?”
Uncle Benny smiled at me, eyes twinkling. “Ah, so she didn’t tell you, eh? Well, I think she saw so much of herself in you it scared her. I think she realized that some of her little stunts were dangerous and she didn’t want her precious daughter getting hurt.”
“How did she get arrested?”
“Well, there was a slight miscalculation when we released the brakes on the mayor’s car. Instead of it rolling harmlessly into a field, it landed in the millpond and we were in it at the time.”
I frowned. “Why didn’t you run away?”
Uncle Benny smiled. “Well, we were going to, but it didn’t seem anybody noticed, so we, um, decided to go for a little swim first. That’s how the police found us.”
“You didn’t see them coming?”
Uncle Benny blushed furiously. “Your aunt’ll have my ass if I tell you,” he said.
“Please, Uncle Benny, tell me what happened.”
“Well, we’d sort of written our policy position on whatever it was, segregation I suppose, across his front door in red paint, and were celebrating with, um, well…”
“You were drinking?”
“Oh, yes, I’m afraid we were. Slowed us down quite a bit, that and your mother and her sister couldn’t quite find all of their clothes.”
“Uncle Benny!”
He laughed. “Ah, kids. They all do something crazy and rebellious now and then. Your mother and her sister were just feeling their oats.”
“I don’t believe it!”
Uncle Benny crossed his heart and looked suddenly serious. “All kids have to rebel, otherwise how can they grow up and be their own person? Your mother told me she saw herself in you. She said it was the most amazing thing, to be on the other side looking back at herself. You know, I think it made her proud.”
“No, it didn’t.” I felt tears welling up and spilling over to run down my cheeks. “I was awful.”
“Stella Luna, the week before your mother left she was over at the house, sitting at the kitchen table telling us how you sassed her and she was laughing. ‘I’ll never worry about that one falling in with a bad lot,’ she said. ‘She’s too strong-willed to let herself be led around by the nose.’”
Uncle Benny leaned over to hand me the bandanna he always kept handy in his back pocket.
“They were so proud of you, Stella. They died knowing you’d be fine. Don’t let them down by punishing yourself for the very thing they loved in you.”
I looked out at the ocean and felt my chest tightening. Sometimes, despite my aunt and uncle’s love, I felt so alone without my parents. Now Uncle Benny was gone. A wave of grief swamped me when I thought about him and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes life was just so unfair.
&n
bsp; I turned away from the ocean and started back toward the boardwalk. Enough self-pity, I told myself. I stiffened my shoulders and raised my head. That’s when I saw the two men walking toward me.
Chapter 7
At the same moment my cell phone rang. I reached into my pocket, watching as the men continued to approach, praying Jake was on the other end of the line and could reach me if I needed him. I tried to convince myself that they were harmless, guys heading toward the surf to fish. I took in the black business shoes and sighed. Nope. They didn’t even carry rods or tackle boxes.
Maybe they were tourists, or in town on business and hoping to take in a quick walk along the shoreline. I studied the cauliflower ear on the big guy to the left and ruled nature lover out of the program. The gun prominently displayed in the waistband of the guy on the right seemed to rule out tourist. The way both of them zeroed in on me left no doubt in my mind that this was a business call and I was the intended victim.
I fished harder for the cell phone, digging deep into my jacket pocket, and finally succeeded in pulling it out.
“Hello?”
Someone gave a short impatient sigh on the other end of the line. “Is Jake there?” Mia asked. “I really need to talk to him.”
Please, I thought looking at my two visitors, you only think you need to talk to Jake.
“This isn’t a good time, Mia,” I said. “And he’s not here anyway.”
The two men stopped momentarily, conferring. Maybe they thought I was calling the police. Right now, calling the police sounded like a good idea, only what would I say? Two men are staring at me and one has a gun? Most of the male population in Jersey carried guns. They carried guns like women carried purses. What if I was wrong about them? What if they were police working the case from the night before? Maybe I should keep Mia on the line and just pretend she was the police.
“Can I do something for you?” I asked.
“Well, I was really hoping…”
“I know, I know. You were hoping to talk to Jake, but that’s impossible, so what is it?”
“I was talking to my sister and she remembered a few more things about my brother,” she said.
Stella, Get Your Man Page 10