* * *
Three hours later…
Driving into work with the window open for Duke, I had to admit that the song from The Witcher seriously was addictive and played it on repeat singing along with it. As I pulled into my normal parking space at the side of the garage, I pulled out my phone and sent a text to Maya.
Me: Spent the night at Jarrod’s and got to watch him and his brothers rolling around the floor together.
I was just letting Duke out when my phone beeped in my hand with a response.
Maya: You lucky bitch]
Yes, yes I was. Because of this, I limped into work with a huge grin on my face, waved at everyone and then lifted my leg to make my way up the stairs before I was swept off my feet. Obviously I had to hum the song, which turned out to be a good choice because Jarrod tipped his head back and burst out laughing when he heard it.
Best morning ever!
Six
Katy
Two hours later…
That high flying feeling plummeted only two hours later. One second I was riding the breeze over the happy clouds, the next I was caught in a storm.
I’d just completed two invoices and was about to send an email to one of our suppliers when I heard a voice I knew well in the garage.
“She’ll come down if she knows it’s me,” it said. “All’s I have to do is just call for her, so you don’t have to waste your energy going up those steps, son.”
I heard Jarrod say something back, and then the door opened and he was standing there looking like he was going to burst out laughing.
Sighing, I tipped my head back and looked up at the ceiling. “It’s ok, I know you want to. Just go ahead and let it all out.”
I was five words away from the end of the last sentence when his deep laughter started. By the time I’d finished it, he was fully engrossed in his laughter endeavors to the point it took him a good while to stop.
“Your grandma’s a hoot,” he wheezed. “Came in and started talking to Ren and Cole like she saw them every day of their lives.” Yup, sounds about right. The old biddy had never met a stranger. “When Ren asked if they were working on her vehicle, she told them her car was fifteen years old and hadn’t even had an oil change, it was that reliable. His face…” he broke off, gasping in a breath. “I was in the back room,” he nodded at the wall that separated my office from the small stationery supply room next door, “but I heard every word.”
I didn’t reply, mostly because at that exact moment she called up, “Katarianne Joslyn Crew, get your butt down here and let me see you.”
Knowing that if I didn’t she’d just keep shouting for me, I got up and moved slowly to the door. I’d only just opened it when Jarrod swept me off my feet and started carrying me toward the stairs. She looked confused when she saw that I wasn’t walking, but by the second step her eyes were like saucers in her head. There was very little in life that could shut my grandmother up, but apparently the hotness that was Jarrod carrying her granddaughter down some stairs to her was one of them – good to know.
We were halfway down them when I called out, “Hey, Maude!”
Her hand lifted and grabbed a fistful of the neck of her top. “Have mercy.”
Ignoring that, I continued, “Just so you know, I hurt my ankle over the weekend when Duke dragged me behind him when he was chasing a ball and I stepped in a hole. It’s only a sprain, so that’s good.”
Looking behind me she asked, “Are you Duke?”
Jarrod’s laughter rocked my world again, but this time it was mainly because the movement made the arms holding me shake. “No, ma’am.”
“This is Jarrod. He’s my neighbor, but he’s also my elevator as you can see.”
Her head nodded slowly, and she said, “That looks like some ride. Lord have mercy.”
When we were four feet away from her, he gently lowered me to the ground, and then moved forward to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you. I live next door to Katy, too, so I’m sure I’ll see you around a lot.”
I swear he had to tear his hand out of her grip, and when he did, she reached out like she was going to hold on tight. In case it wasn’t clear, my grandmother had no shame.
“I’m thinking my Katarianne left some things out when we last spoke,” she muttered, shooting me a glare before she turned back to him. That’s when I knew she’d seen his eyes because she gasped and started fanning herself. “Sweet Jesus, heard about it, but never believed in the big man in the sky loving someone enough to make them into all that’s you.”
Jarrod tipped his head down and awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck while I looked around me wondering if there was a hole I could fall into and stay in this time.
Cole chose that moment to break his silence (which had consisted of him standing with his mouth open while he listened to Maude talk, most probably thanking everything Holy that there was a grandparent worse than Hurst in the world). “He’s got three brothers who are identical to him, too.”
Hearing this news, her legs wobbled like her knees had given out and she walked over to pick up one of the clipboards with a worksheet attached to it from one of the counters. We all watched this, our heads moving at the same speed as she moved, confused as to why she was doing it. Welp, that lasted all of ten seconds because she started fanning herself in wide sweeps. I would say her hair moved with the big breeze those sweeps caused, but Maude Crew had been a hairdresser back in the day, and her brand of hair do was stuck back in the sixties. This meant that it was big – oh so fucking big – and not even a hurricane could make it move with the amount of hairspray she used.
“There’s four of them?” she asked Cole. When he nodded, her eyes rolled so she was looking at the ceiling of the building and she muttered, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Still feeling generous with information, Cole added, “They’ve got kick ass names, too. Bond, Canon and Reid.”
She stopped fanning herself with the clipboard and looked at Jarrod. “I’m writing to the President to get him to make a medal and honor just for your parents. After that, I’m going to church and I’m telling them about the proof I’ve just seen that God loves some people more than others, and that’s ok because we end up with people who look like you in the world, which is far from being a hardship. After that, I’m making posters and taking out ads across the country with your photo on them so that any non-believers start believing in Him,” she paused and thought about something. “Wait, his brothers look just like him?” she asked Cole who was her source of information, apparently. When he nodded, she started fanning again, her hand now moving in jerky sweeps. “In that case, I’m putting all four of them on it because that’s even more proof of all of that. Lord have mercy.”
Taking pity on Jarrod, who was now rubbing his face with his hands, I moved toward Maude and gave her a hug. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but what are you doing here?”
“Well, my beautiful grandbaby hasn’t called me in over two weeks, so I figured I’d go to her to check on her with my own two eyes,” she muttered, her eyes skimming my face as she held me away from her and checked me over. “Mind, I didn’t expect the reason for her silence to be down to the perfection that just carried her down the stairs to me.”
Both Ren and Cole made choking noises behind me, but Maude wasn’t finished. Leaning in, she whispered loudly, “Good choice. Now I get to brag at the ladies' luncheon about the hotness in my beautiful Katarianne’s life. Jane Priestly was all about her grandson’s photo going viral on the interweb and the girls calling him gorgeous. That boy’s nowhere near what my Katy’s got.”
I was about to tell her that it wasn’t like that between us, when Ren told her, “You want him to take you to that luncheon, Mizz Maude, you tell me when and Jarrod can have the time off paid. I’ll even throw in his brothers.”
Shooting him a glare, I then looked over at Jarrod to make sure he was ok, only to see him biting his lip and looking up at the ceiling. Almost like he felt me looking at
him, he lowered his head and I was relieved to see he was trying not to laugh instead of trying not to cry – which was how I felt.
Maude started discussing plans and dates with Ren, but cut off when she saw something behind me. “What the hell is that?”
Turning around, I saw Duke sitting watching us all with his head tilted slightly. “That’s my dog Duke.”
Bursting out laughing like I’d told the best joke in the world, she gave my shoulder a shove – which for a woman in her early eighties had some force behind it.
“That’s what dragged her behind it when he went chasing after a ball,” Ren told her and pointed at my ankle.
That stopped her laughing. “You’re serious? That’s your dog?”
Like he knew we were talking about him, he padded down the stairs and walked up behind me. I thought maybe he’d lie down or even head outside to go potty, but instead he shoved his head between my legs, moved forward so that I was balanced on his shoulders, and then he stood up to full height meaning that my toes were only just skimming the floor.
“He feels bad about her ankle,” Cole snickered.
On the outside I made a face like this whole thing was dumb, but on the inside I’m not gonna lie – I was doing cartwheels over the fact I could ride my dog. How cool was that?
And then Maude said something that made my mood plummet. “Uh, not sure if you know, but another reason for me coming to visit was to tell you that Effie took off again, and your Uncle Leo needs help with Elodie. Not sure how that’s all gonna work out with your dog, honey.”
I felt all the happiness leach out of me at hearing that. My fucking, fucking cousin. She got caught up in bad shit, did bad shit, got knocked up, did more bad shit, had a precious baby girl who was the definition of beauty, did more shit, took off, came back, and it was up to the rest of us to make sure Elodie was kept safe until it suited Effie to come home to her again.
No one knew how messy that part of my family was because we kept it quiet, but anyone who knew of Effie had to see that she was hardly ever around. My other cousin Neo, her brother, was the total opposite, and he adored his niece, but he lived two hours away so he couldn’t take her all that much. My uncle was an awesome guy, but he already provided for Elodie financially and he couldn’t take her to work with him. This all meant that the rest fell on my family, and because I had such a great bond with the baby, it was no hardship at all to take her. In fact, that’s why I had more bedrooms than I needed in my new house – so that she had one of her own to stay in whenever she wanted to.
What was pissing me off was that the last time Effie had come back, she’d gone into rehab and had sworn that it would be the last time. It wasn’t the first time she’d said that, but even her counselors had told us they thought she meant it this time. What a big, fat stinking lie.
“Duke will be fine,” I muttered, knowing that I was right on that. “What time do you need me to come and get her?”
With a smile that looked like it was forced out of her because Maude was definitely feeling the same way that I was, she told me my uncle would drop Elodie over tonight. That gave me an hour after work to go to the store to get what I needed for her, get home and put together the bed I hadn’t built for her yet, make the bed, tidy her room, make sure that everything else was out of the way of tiny curious hands, and do some more organizing. It also gave me only an hour to figure out who was going to look after her while I was at work every day.
As my brother used to say when he was little and didn’t want to get into trouble for cussing: Sofa. King. Great. Say it all at the same time and you had that right. As an aside, we still said it around her now so that we didn’t get into trouble and made other versions up, too.
Now, with what felt like a suffocating amount of weight on my shoulders, I walked back to the stairs so that I could get into the safety of my office and either panic, breakdown, or get my shit together and create miracles.
I’d only just grabbed onto the handrail when Jarrod picked me up and started up the stairs. This sadly didn’t give me the feeling of ecstasy that it normally did because I was so deep in my emotional crash zone that it would take more than that to pull me out of it.
Placing me gently on my desk, he squatted down in front of me. “I need you to explain so that I can help you, Katy.”
If it had been anyone other than Jarrod or the two men who were still downstairs quizzing me about it just now at work, I’d have said it was all great and there were no problems, but the three men I worked with most of the time had something different about them. They genuinely cared, they were genuinely good guys, and I trusted them.
So, I started at the beginning. “That was my grandma Maude. She didn’t want to be called grandma because she said that was her mother’s title, and no way in hell could she ever live up to that level of greatness. There were other variations available, obviously, but she hated them all including the Italian versions seeing as how she’s of Italian descent. Her real name is Marianne, but her family all called her by her nickname, which is Maude. My Uncle Leo is so fricking awesome it hurts and his wife died of cancer two years ago. He has a son, Neo, who’s three years older than me and one of the best men I know. My Uncle Leo is also the reason my parents and Maude moved here four years ago, to be closer to him. Then there’s his daughter Effie who even before her mom died was an off the rails delinquent. She was born with a brain set on mayhem, causing people hell, grand theft auto, being known to the police, and testing the boundaries of her father’s sanity.”
Drawing as much oxygen in as I could, I forged on. “Thirteen months ago, Effie gave birth to Elodie. We didn’t know she was pregnant and, from the way she tells it, she didn’t know she was pregnant. She just felt some cramping and apparently out the baby came – even though she had enough time and concern to get to hospital, so at least she was born in a sterile place and not somewhere littered with needles and heroine spoons.”
“Jesus,” Jarrod growled, looking almost sick at the thought.
Newsflash, that shit happened, and those poor precious babies suffered for it.
“Yeah. The hospital rang Leo and told him he had a granddaughter and that her mom had disappeared, so he went and got her. Two months later Effie came back claiming that she wanted to be a mom, and that things were different this time. For the last year, that’s happened eight times.”
Picking me up, Jarrod carried me across the room to one of the chairs and sat down with me on his lap. “Where does she go when she disappears?”
Shrugging, I kept my focus on the windows where I could see the tops of some trees moving slightly with the breeze. “No one knows because she never calls while she’s away, but it most definitely involves drugs.”
“Who has custody of Elodie?”
“That was the one thing Effie did for her daughter that was good – she awarded custody to her dad. But that means that Leo needs a break, he can’t always find someone to look after her when he’s busy at work, and it also means he’s got dreams of his retirement and he’s looking after a baby. Neo helps out as much as he can, but his job has him living two hours away so it makes it difficult.”
“So your family helps out?”
All the stiffness I’d had that had been holding my body upright and like I was carved from stone left me. “Yeah. That little girl is the world that my family lives for, Jarrod. She’s the most beautiful baby ever made, and I’m not just saying that because she’s related to me. The first time I held her, she opened her eyes, and I felt like someone had inflated my heart. She can be teething or feeling like shit, but the second someone holds her she settles and uses the love to erase her pain. Looking after her isn’t a hardship, every second sticks with me, but what cuts me is that her own mother can’t see what she’s created and use the pure innocent beauty of Elodie Crew as an incentive to get clean and stick around. I just don’t understand it.”
His arms tightened for a second, and then he bent his neck so that his chin
was on my shoulder, meaning his mouth was roughly an inch away from my ear. “Sometimes, Katy, people are so caught up in whatever their brains are telling them to do that they miss the beauty around them. I’m not that informed on drug addiction and the reasons why it happens, but it’s a disease that’s so hard to kick. Lots of people get a hold of it once they have a baby, some don’t. The thing is, that little girl is not going without love, and she’s going to grow up knowing that she has a lot of people around her who care, which will make her feel safe and precious. She’ll also know that she has an aunt who thinks she hung the moon, because I don’t doubt for one fucking’ second that you’re ever going to think or act otherwise. So, now what we do is figure out how to make this work for the time that you’ve got Elodie, which leads me to ask, what do you need help with, honey?”
Everything.
“I need to get to the store to stock up for her, I need to build the bed I bought her for her room in my house, I need to make sure her toys are put away and her books are next to her bed so I can read them to her. I also need to make sure there’s nothing around that’ll hurt her, figure out how I’m going to work with a baby every day…” I trailed off and thought about something else. “She’s also at the age where she can cogitate now, Jarrod. That means that she knows who her mom is and more than likely understands when she disappears. How do I protect her from the pain that’s causing her?”
His reply might have sounded dismissive if he hadn’t said it with the emotion that he used. It was an emotion that said he understood, he hurt for a little girl he’d never met, and that he was determined to make sure she was ok. “I don’t know the answer to the last bit, baby, but I do know how to get the first done. Do you trust me?”
Talk Flirty To Me: Cheap Thrills Series Book 4 Page 6