by Lucy Score
I glared at him.
Naomi shook her head. “No.”
“Maybe a girlfriend or wife?” he tried again.
“I’m single,” she said, sounding just unsure enough that my curiosity piqued.
“Imagine that. So’s our chief,” Grave said, as innocent as a six-foot-tall biker with a rap sheet could sound.
“Can we get back to the part where you tell Naomi you’ll be in touch if you find her car, which we all know you won’t,” I snapped.
“Well, not with that attitude, we won’t,” she chided.
This was the last fucking time I was riding to the rescue of anyone. It wasn’t my job. Wasn’t my responsibility. And now it was costing me sleep.
“How long are you in town?” he asked as Naomi scrawled her information on the paper.
“Only as long as it takes to find and murder my sister,” she said, capping the pen and sliding the paper back. “Thank you so much for your help, Sergeant.”
“My pleasure.”
She turned to look up at me. Our gazes held for a beat. “Knox.”
“Naomi.”
With that, she swept right on out of the station.
“How can two sisters look that much alike and have nothing else in common?” Grave wondered.
“I don’t want to know,” I said honestly and headed outside after her.
I found her pacing and muttering to herself in front of the wheelchair ramp.
“What’s your plan?” I asked in resignation.
She looked at me and her lips puckered. “Plan?” she repeated, her voice cracking.
My fight or flight instincts kicked in. I fucking hated tears. Especially tears of the female persuasion. A crying woman made me feel like I was being ripped to shreds from the inside out, a weapon I’d never make public knowledge.
“Do not cry,” I ordered.
Her eyes were damp. “Cry? I’m not going to cry.”
She was a shit liar.
“Don’t fucking cry. It’s just a car, and she’s just a piece of shit. Neither’s worth crying over.”
She blinked rapidly, and I couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or yell at me again. But she surprised me by doing neither. She straightened her shoulders and nodded. “You’re right. It’s just a car. I can get replacement credit cards, a new purse, and another stash of honey mustard dipping sauces.”
“Tell me where you need to go, and I’ll drop you. You can get a rental and be on your way.” I jerked my thumb toward my truck.
She looked up and down the street again, probably hoping for some suit-and-tie-wearing hero to appear. When none did, she sighed. “I got a room at the motel.”
There was only one motel in town. A single-story, one-star shithole that didn’t warrant an official name. I was impressed she’d actually checked in.
We walked back to my truck in silence. Her shoulder brushed my arm, making my skin feel like it was heating up. I opened her door again for her. Not because I was a gentleman but because some perverse part of me liked being close.
I waited until she’d belted in before shutting the door and rounding the truck. “Honey mustard dipping sauces?”
She glanced at me as I slid in behind the wheel. “You hear about that guy who drove through a guardrail in the winter a few years back?”
It sounded vaguely familiar.
“He ate nothing but ketchup packets for three days.”
“You plan on driving through a guardrail?”
“No. But I like to be prepared. And I don’t like ketchup.”
THREE
A PINT-SIZED CRIMINAL
Naomi
“What room are you in?” Knox asked. I realized we were already back at the motel.
“Why?” I asked with suspicion.
He exhaled slowly as if I were on his last nerve. “So I can drop you at your door.”
Oh. “Nine.”
“You leave your door open?” he asked a second later, his mouth tight.
“Yeah. That’s the way it’s done on Long Island,” I deadpanned. “It’s how we show our neighbors we trust them.”
He gave me another one of those long, frowny looks.
“No. Of course I didn’t leave it open. I closed and locked it.”
He pointed toward number nine.
My door was ajar.
“Oh.”
He put the truck in park where it sat in the middle of the lot with more force than necessary. “Stay here.”
I blinked as he climbed out and stalked toward my room.
My weary eyes were drawn to the view of those worn jeans clinging to a spectacular butt as he stalked toward my door. Hypnotized for a few of his long strides, it took me a hot minute to remember exactly what I’d left in that room and how very much I didn’t want Knox, of all people, to see it.
“Wait!” I jumped out of the truck and ran after him, but he didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down.
I turned on the speed in a last-ditch effort and jumped in front of him. He walked right into the hand I held up.
“Get your ass out of my way, Naomi,” he ordered.
When I didn’t comply, he brought a hand to my stomach and walked me backward until I was standing in front of Room 8.
I didn’t know what it said about me that I really liked his hand there. “You don’t have to go in there,” I insisted. “I’m sure it’s just housekeeping.”
“This place look like it has housekeeping?”
He had a point. The motel looked like it should give out tetanus shots instead of mini bottles of shampoo.
“Stay,” he said again, then stalked back to my open door.
“Shit,” I whispered when he shoved it open. I lasted all of two seconds before following him inside.
The room had been unappealing, to say the least, when I’d checked in less than an hour ago.
The orange and brown wallpaper was peeling in long strips. The carpet was a dark green that felt like it was made out of the scrubby side of a dish sponge. The bathroom fixtures were Pepto Bismol pink, and the shower was missing several tiles.
But it was the only option within twenty miles, and I’d figured I could rough it for a night or two. Besides, I’d thought at the time, how bad could it be?
Apparently pretty freaking bad. Between the time I’d checked in, stowed my suitcase, plugged in my laptop, and left to meet Tina, someone had broken in and ransacked the room.
My suitcase was upended on the floor, some of its contents strewn all over the carpet.
The dresser drawers were pulled out, closet doors left open.
My laptop was missing. So was the zippered pouch of cash I’d hidden in my suitcase.
“Sucker” was scrawled across the bathroom vanity mirror in my favorite lipstick. Ironically, the thing I didn’t want my grumpy Viking to see, the thing that was worth more than whatever else had been stolen, was still there in a crumpled heap in the corner.
Worst of all, the perpetrator was sitting on the bed, dirty sneakers tangled in a clump of sheets. She was watching a natural disaster movie. I wasn’t good at guessing ages, but I put her solidly in the Child/Pre-Teen category.
“Hey, Way,” Knox said grimly.
The girl’s blue eyes flitted away from the screen to land on him before returning to the TV. “Hey, Knox.”
It was a small town. Of course the town grump and the child felon knew each other.
“Okay, look,” I said, side-stepping Knox to stand in front of the thing in the corner that I really didn’t want to explain. “I don’t know if child labor laws are different in Virginia. But I asked for an extra pillow, not to be robbed by a pint-sized criminal.”
The girl spared me a glance.
“Where’s your mom?” Knox asked, ignoring me.
Another shrug. “Gone,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”
“That’d be your Aunt Naomi.”
She didn’t look impressed. I, on the other hand, probably looked like I’d just been sho
t out of a cannon toward a brick wall.
“Aunt?” I repeated, shaking my head in hopes that it would fix my hearing. Another wilted flower petal fell out of what was left of my updo and flitted to the floor.
“Thought you were dead,” the girl said, studying me with vague interest. “Nice hair.”
“Aunt?” I said again.
Knox turned to me. “Waylay is Tina’s kid,” Knox explained slowly.
“Tina?” I parroted on a croak.
“Looks like your sister helped herself to your stuff,” he observed.
“Said most of it was shit,” the girl said.
I blinked rapidly. Not only had my sister stolen my car, she’d also broken into my hotel room, ransacked it, and left behind the niece I didn’t know existed.
“She okay?” Waylay asked, not taking her eyes off the tornado that returned to the screen.
“She” was probably me. And I was most definitely not okay.
I grabbed a pillow off the bed. “Will you two please excuse me?” I squeaked.
Without waiting for an answer, I hauled ass out the door into the hot Virginia sunshine. Birds were chirping. Two motorcycles drove by, their engines a deafening roar. Across the street, an older couple climbed out of a pickup truck and headed into the diner for breakfast.
How could things have the audacity to look so normal when my entire life had just imploded?
I held the pillow to my face and let loose the scream that had been building.
Thoughts flew through my brain like a turbo-charged spin cycle. Warner was right. People didn’t change. My sister was still a terrible human being, and I was still naïve enough to fall for her lies. My car was gone along with my purse and my laptop. Not to mention the money I’d brought for Tina. As of last night, I had no job. I wasn’t on my way to Paris, which had been the plan a mere twenty-four hours ago. My family and friends thought I’d lost my damn mind. My favorite lipstick had been ruined on a bathroom mirror. And I had a niece whose entire childhood I’d missed out on.
I sucked in another breath and let out one final scream for good measure before lowering the pillow.
“Okay. You can figure this out. You can fix this.”
“About done with your pep talk?”
I whirled around and found Knox leaning against the door frame, tattooed arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Yep,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “How old is she?”
“Eleven.”
Nodding, I shoved the pillow at him and marched back into the room.
“So, Waylay,” I began.
There was a family resemblance in the upturned nose, the dimple in the chin. She had the same colt-like legs her mother and I had at that age.
“So, Aunt Naomi.”
“Did your mom say when she’d be back?”
“Nope.”
“Where do you and your mom live, honey?” I asked.
Maybe Tina was there now, going through her haul, figuring out what was worth keeping and what she wanted to ruin just for the fun of it.
“Over in Hillside Acres,” she answered, looking around me to get a better view of the tornado tossing up cows on the screen.
“Need a minute,” Knox announced and nodded toward the door.
I had all the damn time in the world apparently. All the time and not a single clue what to do. No next step. No to-do list quantifying and organizing my world into nice, neat line items. Just a crisis on top of a hot mess on top of a dumpster fire.
“Sure,” I said, sounding only mildly hysterical.
He waited until I passed him before stepping out after me. When I stopped, he kept walking toward the faded soda machine outside the front office.
“You seriously want me to buy you a soda right now?” I asked, flummoxed.
“No. I’m trying to get out of earshot of the kid who doesn’t realize she’s been abandoned,” he snapped.
I followed him. “Maybe Tina’s coming back,” I said.
He stopped and turned to face me. “Way says Tina didn’t tell her anything. Just that she had something to take care of and she’d be gone a long time.”
A long time? What the hell was a long time in Tina time? A weekend? A week? A month?
“Oh my God. My parents.” This was going to devastate them. As if what I’d done yesterday wasn’t upsetting enough. I’d managed to assure them last night on a highway in Pennsylvania that I was fine and definitely not going through some kind of mid-life crisis. And I’d made them promise not to change their plans for me. They’d left for their three-week Mediterranean cruise this morning. The first big, international vacation they’d ever taken together.
I didn’t want my problems or Tina’s disaster ruining it.
“What do you intend to do with that kid in there?” Knox nodded toward the open door.
“What do you mean?”
“Naomi, when the cops find out Tina’s gone and left Waylay behind, it’s straight into foster care.”
I shook my head. “I’m her closest living relative who isn’t a criminal. I’m responsible for her.” Just like all of Tina’s other messes until we’d turned eighteen.
He gave me a long, hard look. “Just like that?”
“She’s family.” Besides. It wasn’t like I had a whole lot going on at the moment. I was basically adrift. For the first time in my entire life, I didn’t have a plan.
And that scared the crap out of me.
“Family,” he snorted as if my reasoning wasn’t sound.
“Listen. Thank you, Knox, for all of the shouting and the rides and the coffee. But as you can see, I’ve got a situation to handle. So it’s probably best for you to go on back to whatever cave you crawled out of this morning.”
“I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
We were back to glaring at each other, the silence charged. This time he broke first.
“Quit stallin’, Daisy. What are you gonna do?”
“Daisy?”
He reached up and plucked a flower petal out of my hair with two fingers.
I batted his hand away and took a step back so I could think. “Okay. First I need to…” Definitely not call my parents. And I didn’t really want to get the police involved—again—if I didn’t have to. What if Tina showed up in an hour? Maybe the first thing I needed to do was get more coffee.
“Call the damn cops and report the break-in and the child abandonment,” Knox said.
“She’s my sister. Besides, what if she shows up in an hour?”
“She stole your car and abandoned her kid. That doesn’t earn a fucking pass.”
The tattooed, grouchy bear of a man was right. I really didn’t like that about him.
“Argh! Fine. Okay. Let me think. Can I borrow your phone?”
He stood there staring at me, unmoving.
“For Pete’s sake. I’m not going to steal it. I just need to make a quick call.”
On a long-suffering sigh, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“Thank you,” I said pointedly, then stomped back into my motel room. Waylay was still watching her movie, now with her hands stacked behind her head.
I dug through my suitcase to find a notebook and went back outside.
“You keep a notebook of phone numbers with you?”
Knox was peering over my shoulder.
I shushed him and dialed.
“The hell do you want?”
My sister’s voice always managed to make me cringe inwardly.
“An explanation for starters,” I snapped. “Where are you?”
“Where are you?” she mimicked me in a high-pitched Muppet voice that I’d always hated.
I heard a prolonged exhale.
“Are you smoking in my car?”
“Looks like it’s my car now.”
“You know what? Forget the car. We have bigger things to discuss. You have a daughter! A daughter you abandoned in a motel room.”
“Got shit to do. Can’t have a
kid holding me back for the next while. Got something big in the works. Why ya think I named her Waylay? Figured she could hang out with her Aunt Goody Two-Shoes till I get back.”
I was so mad I could only sputter.
Knox snatched the phone from my ear. “You listen and you listen good, Tina. You’ve got exactly thirty minutes to get back here, or I’m callin’ the damn cops.”
I watched as his face got harder, his jaw tighter, showing off little hollows under his cheekbones. His eyes went so cold I shivered.
“As always, you’re a real fuckin’ idiot,” he said. “Just remember, next time you get picked up by the cops, you’ll have warrants. That means your stupid ass will be sittin’ behind bars, and I don’t see anyone rushin’ to bail you out.”
He paused for a moment and then said, “Yeah. Fuck you too.”
He swore again and lowered his phone.
“How exactly do you and my sister know each other?” I wondered out loud.
“Tina’s been a pain in everyone’s ass since she blew into town a year ago. Always lookin’ for an easy buck. Tried a couple of slip and fall schemes on some of the local businesses, including your pal Justice. Every time she gets a little money in her pocket, she’s rip-roarin’ drunk and wreaking havoc all over town. Petty shit. Vandalism.”
Yeah, that sounded like my sister.
“What did she say?” I asked, not really wanting the answer.
“Said she doesn’t give a shit if we call the cops. She’s not comin’ back.”
“Did she say that?” I’d always wanted kids. But not like this. Not jumping in one step shy of puberty when the formative years were already gone.
“Said she’d be back when she felt like it,” he said, thumbing through his phone.
Some things never changed. My sister had always made her own rules. As an infant, she’d slept all day and stayed up all night. As a toddler, she was kicked out of three daycares for biting. And once we hit school age, well, it was a whole new ballgame of rebellion.
“What are you doing?” I asked Knox as he brought the phone back up to his ear.
“Last thing I want to,” he drawled.
“Buying tickets to the ballet?” I hypothesized.
He didn’t answer, just strode into the parking lot with rigid shoulders. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but there were a lot of fuck yous and kiss my asses.