Crystal Ball

by Laney Kay

  He immediately snapped to attention. “Oh really?” He took a big swipe of frosting on his finger and wiped it across my lips. Before I could get a taste of it, he held the rest of the cupcake up with the other hand so it wouldn’t get wet and pulled me forward so I was straddling his lap. He kissed me, nibbling and licking the frosting off my lips, and then finally thrusting his tongue inside my mouth. Wow. I guess he really did like the frosting. When I pulled back and started giggling at how silly he was, he got another fingerful of frosting and smeared it across my chest and put a blob of it on each nipple.

  I shook my finger at him. “Now look what you did.” I tried to look serious, and he tried to look sorry, but neither of us was very convincing.

  “So sorry. But I don’t want to waste any of this amazing cupcake, so let me take care of that for you.” He bent his head and took my nipple in his mouth and licked and sucked it until the frosting was gone, then he slowly moved across my chest to the other side. It took him a while, but he did a great job of removing every bit of frosting. When he finally got down to his last bite of cupcake, he offered it to me. I swallowed the bite of cake and then grabbed his hand and licked and sucked every bit of icing suggestively off his finger, until both of us were breathing hard and staring at each other.

  Luke kissed me until I was about to collapse, and then he lifted me off his lap and turned me around, pulling me so that I was actually lying with my back to his chest. I picked up a washcloth from the side of the tub, along with some body wash, and Luke held out his hands for me to give them to him. He soaped up the washcloth and lazily started running it across my chest and down my body while he kissed my neck.

  Next thing you know, water was all over the bathroom floor, my cupcake was an inedible, soggy mess, and once again, I needed a real shower after our bath was done. Eventually, we got out of the tub, took a quick shower and I laughed as we stepped out and both grabbed a towel. “My water bill is going to be insane this month.”

  He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Are you complaining?”

  I pretended to think about it, and finally let out a heavy sigh and admitted. “I guess not. I suppose the amazing sex is probably worth the extra water.”

  Once we were dried off, he threw me over his shoulder, went into the bedroom, and tossed me in the middle of the bed. “’Probably worth the extra money’, huh?” He leaned over with his hands on each side of my hips, trapping me under him on the bed. “Girl, I’m going to make you eat those words.”

  I looked at him primly and told him that it wouldn’t be easy to eat anything since my mouth was about to be full, if he would like to join me. He laughed and we spent the next few hours enjoying each other.

  He fell asleep first. He was spooned around my back with his arm anchoring me to the bed and his hand between my breasts. As we lay cuddled together, all of a sudden, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was head over heels in love with this man. It had happened so gradually over the past few months that it kind of snuck up on me, but there was no question. I was in love with Luke Mathis.

  Was I freaked out? Was I worried? I thought about it and then I realized that I totally fine. I just felt warm, happy, and content. Thanks to us taking so much time getting to know each other, I knew he was a good, kind man that I could trust completely, and bonus points, he was hilarious and incredibly hot, too. If this was how karma works, and Luke and my new life are payback for all the crap I had to go through, I was incredibly grateful.

  That night, I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  12

  A few days later, I had to go to the TV studio to do some final editing on Bella’s story, and Luke was going to the next door neighbor’s house to do some measurements for the screen porch she wanted him to build. He also planned to speak to the head of the department at Tech and tell them that he was done with teaching after this year so he could start working full time on his construction business before next summer.

  We went to the kitchen to grab some coffee to go, and as we fixed them, I reached into a drawer and got an extra key and held it out casually, like giving him a key was no big deal. “Here. Why don’t you take this in case you get back before I do?” I hoped he didn’t notice my hand was actually shaking a little and my voice kind of caught.

  He looked at the key and then looked at me like he wasn’t sure if I meant it. “Are you sure, Daisy?” He reached out and took the key and put it in his palm and looked at it and then smiled at me. “You don’t mind me having this?”

  I busied myself pouring coffee into the UGA Yeti cup that Mo had bought me for my birthday last year. “It’s just an extra key. Lola, Sara, and Mo all have one, and since you’re over here all the time and you live around the corner, I thought it would be a good idea if you had one, too.” I looked up to see him with a satisfied smile on his face as he placed the key on his key ring. “No biggie.” I put the top on my Yeti, reached up to give him a quick peck on the cheek. “Call me if you hear from your FBI buddy.” I petted the dogs and headed out.

  The weather was beautiful, warm, and sunny, but with no humidity for a change, so as I got in the car, I put the top down and headed for the studio. By the time I got there, Mandy had already done most of the editing of the interview itself, and I brought her the flash drive so we could use some of the photos and hurricane footage in the segment. I had already saved the flashdrive to my laptop and emailed the Belize pictures to Luke, but I wanted to use the studio’s high definition printer to print some photos of Glenda and Nick. I put those in my bag and then we spent the next few hours editing the story, which came out really fun. I sent it to Bella for her final approval before the story aired later in the week.

  When I got home, I changed into my usual work clothes of yoga pants and a t-shirt, made myself some lunch, and worked on my column for a few hours. I always try to stay way ahead so I’m never in a time crunch, and so if something happens like, oh I don’t know, I try to castrate someone with a VW, I always have at least three months of columns ready to roll. Right now, I have almost four months’ worth done, so I’m good to go.

  When I was finished, I checked my phone and my email. I sent my boss my columns for this week and next week, and took care of some administrative stuff, which I hate. I was sitting there debating whether I should do some bookkeeping, which I also hate, when my dogs ran to the front door, barking like morons, so I figured Luke had gotten home. I heard the door open. “Luke? I’m back here.”

  He came in, looking tired and irritated and threw himself in my big overstuffed chair across from my desk, while the dogs jumped all around him. Uh oh. “Did you finally hear from Agent Prince?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I just hung up with him. He apologized for not getting back sooner, but he’s not sure what we can do about this.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Prince was very happy to know where they were, and he loves the idea of throwing their asses in jail, but he doesn’t see any way to do it right now.”

  I was pissed. “So you did their job, you found them, and the damn FBI can’t be bothered to do the freaking paperwork to get them back here?”

  He shook his head and frowned as he raked both of his hands through his hair. “It was exactly what Lola said. It’s a paperwork nightmare down there on a good day, and after a hurricane destroyed courthouses and everything else, there’s just no way to get something like that done anytime soon.”

  I couldn’t believe someone could steal $13 million from the U.S. government and no one thought that was worth pursuing. “So there’s nothing we can do?”

  “Not any time soon.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head against the back of the chair. “He also said that Lola was right and that if we made a move, that there’s a good chance the local authorities will tip them off and they could disappear before we could make anything happen. And that leaves us right back where we started.”

  I came around my desk and climbed on his lap to hug him. He put his arms around me, squeezing tight, a
nd buried his face in my hair. “This is so damn frustrating, Daisy. It sucks that we know where they are but can’t do a thing about it.”

  I pulled back and kissed him on his nose and brushed his hair back. “Let’s go take the dogs to walk. It’s beautiful out, and I think you could use a little fresh air. Then, I’ll make you a drink and we’ll sit on the porch. Maybe we can figure out a way around all this.”

  We took the dogs to walk and then came back to the house. I made a pitcher of bourbon punch and added some mint. It grows along my neighbor’s fence, but it stuck through my side of the fence so I figured that part of the mint was mine. Luke was already on the glider, out on the porch, surrounded by dogs. I poked Cletus so he’d move over, sat down, and handed Luke his drink. “You okay?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Obviously, he wasn’t fine, so I figured I’d change the subject. “Hey, so how’d it go today over at Tech? Can you finish after this semester or do you have to wait till the end of the school year?”

  He took a sip of his drink. “It actually went great. It turns out they’re going to reorganize the department anyway, and they gave me the choice. I told him I’d like to leave at the end of the semester and the department head said that was fine and that I was always welcome if I wanted to come back.”

  I bumped my shoulder against his. “That sounds great.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, it is. I want to get going with my new business after the first of the year, and now I won’t have to wait.”

  “Did you finish getting the measurements on the porch next door?”

  He nodded. “Yep. I’m going to dig up some of my old forms tonight and reconfigure them for my new business.”

  “What kind of forms?”

  “Cost projections, estimates, completion checklists, punch lists, stuff like that.” He took a drink. “Is this green stuff mint?” I nodded. “It’s really good.” He continued. “I can use the old originals and make them work for smaller projects like what I’m doing now. That way, I don’t have to start over with the forms.”

  That made sense, no reason to reinvent the wheel. “You did a lot of residential renovation before, didn’t you?”

  “Oh yeah. We did everything from small renovations to building subdivisions, so I can do anything I want.”

  “But you don’t want a big company with a bunch of employees again, do you?”

  He shook his head. “Oh hell, no. I don’t want to do huge projects. My goal is to hire a couple of talented carpenters I can depend on, and then I’m using subs for everything else. My goal is to only do projects that interest me. And I want to work with people I like.”

  “So your goal is fun work only, no assholes allowed?”

  He took another sip of his punch and started slowly rocking us. “Exactly. How was your day? Anything exciting?”

  I snorted and shook my head. “Not unless you think reading syndication agreements is exciting, which I don’t.” He agreed that didn’t sound fun at all.

  “I’m done drinking. You want some tea?” When he nodded yes, I moved Cletus and Diego off my lap and stood up and grabbed both of our glasses. When I came back out he was almost asleep and covered in dogs who were all on their backs, paws in the air, while Luke lazily scratched them.

  As soon as he heard me come back on the porch, he half smiled at me, and asked me if I wanted to go inside and lie down for a while. I looked at him with my eyes narrowed, trying to decide whether he meant he wanted to take a nap, or “take a nap,” as Sara would say with air quotes and a nasty wink. Before I could answer I heard a knock. The dogs flew off the porch and I heard Lola’s voice. “Hey, where y’all at? Are you decent?”

  Lola’s head popped into view around the corner. She looked disappointed. “Awww, y’all are decent. That is just a shame.”

  I laughed at her goofiness. I told her to grab some tea, or there was some punch in the fridge and some mint on the counter, so get whatever she preferred. She disappeared down the hall, hollering over her shoulder, “Hey, I might have some interesting news. Save my place.”

  When she came back, she had changed into her shorts and t-shirt from my guest room. She held a glass of tea with a sprig of mint and dropped into a wicker rocker with a sigh of relief. “Shit, I had a long day.”

  She looked at Luke. “Did you hear from your FBI buddy?”

  Luke nodded. “Yep. And it was exactly like you said it would be. No one can touch them any time soon because of the hurricane flattening the courthouse and if we went ahead and filed the paperwork, odds are they’d be warned and would disappear.” He shook his head. “It pretty much sucks.”

  Lola nodded. “I totally agree, but I did hear something kind of interesting today. Daisy, I ran into your dad at the courthouse, and I knew he’d dealt with extradition with some pedophile that he was trying to get back here from Mexico a couple of years back. I told him what was going on with Luke and he gave me an idea. He said that when they were looking at the options to get that, quote ‘baby-raping asshole’ back here, one of his captains suggested that they should take up a collection to get enough money to hire a professional kidnapper. Your dad laughed it off, but he said if he could have found a way to kidnap him back to U.S. soil without breaking a million different laws, he’d have done it in a heartbeat.”

  Oh shit. Lola was pissed, and I know from experience that nothing good comes from that. I hope that didn’t mean she wanted to have them kidnapped, but I wasn’t really sure, and she certainly had enough money to make it happen. Luke apparently had the same concern. “Uh, Lola, I appreciate the thought, but I’m thinking that kidnapping them is not the way to go.”

  She laughed and rolled her eyes. “No, you jackasses, I’m not saying kidnap them. I’m saying we need to get them back on U.S. soil. Voluntarily.”

  Luke shook his head. “They’ve been out of the country for years. I can’t imagine they’d come back here willingly.”

  Lola smiled at him. “But what if they didn’t know they were in the States?”

  We both looked at her blankly. “What?”

  She smiled at us. “Okay. Hear me out. While I was trapped like a rat in court today, I kind of came up with an idea. It’s not ready yet, but I think we can make it work if we can figure out some of the details.” She took a big gulp of her tea and put it down on the side table. “Okay, y’all follow me here.”

  Lola leaned forward and began to outline her plan. “First, let me recap to make sure I’m not missing anything. They committed fraud on the U.S. government to the tune of about $13 million. They left the country and ended up in Belize. Prince can arrest them if they’re on American soil but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Belize has an extradition treaty with the U.S., but there have been many cases that show that Belize is kind of an asshole about sending people back on a good day, and now they’ve been nailed by a hurricane, they have no federal courthouse, no infrastructure, and the people we’re dealing with have a lot of money to bribe officials with, so getting them back through normal channels probably isn’t going to work.”

  We were nodding as she spoke, agreeing with everything she said. She continued. “If they return to American soil, they can be arrested and because they’ve already proven they are a flight risk, they’ll probably stay in custody until they can be tried. “

  We were still nodding, but I still saw the same roadblock. “But how, without kidnapping them, are we going to get them back on American soil?” Then I thought about who I was talking to and covered all my bases. “And Lola, I mean without us, or anyone related to us, dealing with us, hired by us, peripherally involved with us, or anyone who ever met us, kidnapping them and returning them back to American soil.”

  Lola tried to look hurt. She put her hand on her chest and looked at me with big eyes. “What…Me? As if I would be involved with something illegal like that!”

  I snorted. “You would do whatever you thought was necessary to take care of an injustice, and you would
n’t think twice. And this is one hell of an injustice.”

  She smiled. “You’re right. But I don’t think we have to kidnap anyone.” She looked at Luke. “Luke would you say that Glenda and Nick are smart?”

  Luke snorted. “Well, apparently they are smarter than I am. I mean, I had no idea of what they were doing right under my nose.”

  She patted his knee comfortingly. “You just assumed that everyone is honorable like you. What I mean is, are they generally smart people?”

  Luke thought about it for a minute. “Glenda was extremely manipulative, and she was very good at getting men to do what she wanted, but no, she’s not generally smart. Nick is great with construction, but I don’t think he’s particularly smart, either. Neither of them are book-smart at all, and I know for a fact that Glenda never read anything more complicated than People magazine.”

  Lola looked satisfied. “Okay, this might work. Daisy, didn’t you say that Bella said that Glenda is only into charitable events if she gets something out of it? She likes the personal recognition?”

  I nodded, and Lola continued. “So here’s what I’m thinking. What if there was a banquet or an awards ceremony dedicated to recognizing individuals who perform extraordinary charitable acts? And Glenda was one of the people recognized? And the ceremony was held on U.S. soil?”

  Luke looked skeptical. “You think she’d come back to the States to receive an award? Agent Prince said they were monitoring events like her parents’ fiftieth anniversary party, and as far as they know, they’ve never set foot back in the States.”

  Lola smiled. “But we wouldn’t have it in the States. We’d have it in the Caribbean, specifically Puerto Rico. Do you think they’d come to a Caribbean country? Lots of people don’t realize that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and is legally American soil, even though it’s not a state.”