Babushka smacked his shoulder. “You did not tell me of this voman.”
He rubbed the spot where her palm had met his shirt. “Some things don’t need to be shared.”
“Your heart is broken?” Shit. She didn’t look like she bought it. “You vill swear this on the image of your dedushka?” She rummaged through the oversized purse she dragged everywhere.
“I’m not swearing anything.” He crossed his arms, ready to stand firm against his overbearing grandmother.
“Jason Mikhail Dvornakov.” She yanked the eight-by-ten photo of her late husband from her purse. Holding it out faceup so Dedushka glowered at him.
She wasn’t going to let this go.
He glanced to the image of his dead grandfather.
Fuck.
“Hand on Dedushka’s face.” Her eyes turned serious, her expression firm—as it should’ve been when pimping the image of her dead husband to manipulate innocent grandchildren.
“My heart’s broken, there’s no need to swear anything.” No need to involve dead relatives.
“You vill swear on your grandfather’s image vhat you say is true. Lies vill haunt you for your days. Vhen I die, I vill haunt you for your days. You vill be haunted.”
He had a suspicion that, whether he swore or not, Babushka would haunt him. Still, one did not swear on a dead person’s image without being totally honest.
Babushka picked up his hand and set it on the glass.
A chill ran through him. It was not the first time he’d been forced to swear on his grandfather’s picture. The last time he’d been eighteen and had to swear he hadn’t stolen a bottle of vodka for a party at Brek’s house. He hadn’t. His sister, Anna, had.
“I swear I am not ready for a relationship. My heart can’t take it.” There, that worked. Not a lie.
“Because of the woman across the street,” Babushka said, nudging him to say it.
He lifted his hand from the glass just enough so he wouldn’t be haunted on a technicality. “Yeah, because of the woman across the street.”
Babushka gave him a soft look he knew to be total bullshit. “Time is precious. I have so little.”
“Speaking of, any birthday requests or should I just wing it?” The family always threw a big shindig for her birthday.
She harrumphed. “I vill be dead by then.”
“So no card?” he asked. She’d been saying she was dying for years. She couldn’t see for shit, but otherwise, she was healthier than the rest of them.
“For my birthday I vish you vould find a voman to make you happy.”
He gave her his sincerest look. The one he’d practiced to perfection in front a mirror at fifteen years old. The one he saved for important occasions. The one he used for getting his way. “A little time and then I’ll be ready to try again.”
Now they were both liars. He slid his arm around her for a side hug, the frail bones of her shoulder a lie to the iron-plated woman who was his grandmother. Then he snagged the vase of hyacinths for the jewelry shop up the street and headed out to deliver it.
Successful deflection. Next: evacuation.
The mountain air was crisp like it always was right before summer. Spring would hold on for a few more weeks. This type of weather used to make him antsy, make him wonder what else the world had to offer. But he’d traveled. He’d seen the world. He’d had his skin sandblasted off in the heat of the desert and he’d strapped an oxygen tank to his back to defuse bombs in the Atlantic. The mountain air didn’t make him antsy anymore; now, it made his muscles relax and his mind clear.
He tugged open the glass door to the jewelry store, and his heart stopped beating for a nanosecond.
Heather.
He was definitely a leg guy. She was blessed by the angels in that department. Her toned calves outlined by tight jeans curved up and up and up to her ass…assets.
The object of his intense observation cleared her throat. He jerked his gaze to Heather’s.
She was looking over her shoulder, frowning like she’d sucked on sour cherry candy, clearly catching him checking her out.
He jerked his chin her way and gave his best you-know-we’d-be-good-in-the-sack smile.
She rolled her eyes.
Chandra glanced up from the posters. “Hello, Jason.”
“Good to see you, Chandra.” He grinned at his mother’s best friend. “I brought your flowers.”
Chandra skirted the edge of the jewelry case and plucked the vase from his fingertips. “Thanks.” She arranged the vase on a mirrored table near the diamond engagement rings.
Her shop wasn’t the typical jewelry shop with the clear cases and the soft carpets and the bright lights. Chandra’s shop was silver and white and pops of gold. Subdued lighting everywhere but over the cases. For those, she’d added sparkling chandeliers. No matter which way you looked, shit sparkled—in the cases, on the ceiling, even the walls had tiny mirrors edged tight together to give the appearance of bling. It was enough to make a man shiver just walking inside.
He sauntered toward Heather. “What’re we shopping for today?”
“Rings.” Chandra scooted around the counter once more, removing two boxes with rings. “Heather was thinking traditional gold, but I think rose gold goes better with her coloring.”
Heather slid her fingertip along the edge of the first small ring with little diamonds around the edge. “I like this one.”
“You should try it on.” Jase couldn’t take his gaze from where the tip of her fingernail traced the trinket.
“My niece is in town this weekend.” Chandra raised her I’m-in-cahoots-with-your-mother penciled eyebrows at Jase. “I told her all about you. She’d love to have a drink with you.”
“I’m off the market for a while. You know how it is when you get your heart broken.” In for a penny. In for a pound.
He lifted the little ring from the silk-lined box and held it out for Heather.
She took it, slipped it on her right hand. He couldn’t care less about rose gold and regular gold and skin tone, but that ring belonged on Heather.
“You were seeing someone?” Chandra asked, apparently perturbed she wasn’t in the loop.
“I was. Total whirlwind.” He played the innocent card—dash of heartbreak, sad eyes, big sigh. “We broke up this morning. Very sudden.”
He glanced to Heather. She looked up at him and rolled her eyes.
“You know what they say: when you fall off the horse it’s best to get right back on.” Chandra admired the ring on Heather’s hand.
“What do you think?” he asked Heather, his question having nothing to do with jewelry.
“I think when you fall off the horse, you should evaluate why you fell, so it doesn’t happen again. For example, did you say something to the horse that made it buck?” Heather fiddled with the ring, sliding it over her knuckle and back down.
“Maybe the horse is just sensitive with a bad temperament.” He shrugged, doing his best to keep his face neutral.
“Maybe the horse expects to be treated a certain way.” Heather pulled off the ring and ran her fingertip over the diamonds.
Chandra glanced between the two of them, eyes wide.
“Maybe the horse doesn’t know a good thing when she sees it.” He pressed his stance wider.
“Or maybe it has absolutely nothing to do with the horse.” Heather smiled the confident smile of an executive on Wall Street and tucked the ring back in the box. “I’m going to think about it,” she told Chandra.
“Sounds good.” Chandra put the box back under the glass. “I need to go help this lady with her repair for a moment. Holler if you need me.” She headed toward the other side of the room.
“Why’d you tell her we broke up?” Heather asked.
“Well, she’s friends with my mom, and Mom is on a tear for me to get serious with someone. My family gets a little nutty about that stuff. I figure our pretend breakup will buy me about three weeks of peace.” Four if he played it right.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “You know how crazy that sounds, right?”
He lifted a shoulder. “You clearly haven’t met my family. How goes the poster delivery?”
“Chandra’s going to help me with the dance. I think it’ll be fun,” Heather mused, eyeing the other rings. “You should join the committee.”
That was a negative. “I’m in for all the flower donations you need, but I don’t do committees.” He supported with cash and donations, but when it came to committees, he was no good. Too much talk, not enough action. Committees were his mother’s domain; she loved telling people what to do. Chairing a committee was the perfect pastime for her.
Jase leaned toward Heather, the scent of lavender and vanilla swirling in the air around them. “Second chance. Dinner. No tacos.”
“Saturday?” Heather asked, her voice breathy.
“Works for me.” And that’s how it’s done.
“I have plans.” Heather’s brown eyes sparkled.
“Fuck me,” Jase said under his breath, low enough so only he could hear it.
Well, maybe Heather caught it, too.
Heather nudged his shoulder with her own. “What good is a breakup if you keep asking me out?”
He laid his hand on her arm, the warmth of it settling in his palm. “We can always try for round two.”
“Nah. Why ruin a perfectly good breakup?” The laughter in her tone hit him straight in the gut. She’d won this round, but he’d make sure there was another.
3
Chapter Three
The delivery van pulled up right behind Jase’s shop door in the alley behind his building. The alley was tight, only room for one vehicle at a time, and bordered by a metal chain separating it from the parking lot where the business owners parked so the street spots stayed open for customers.
He stepped up to the back of the van, opened the double doors, and did a quick check that everything was ready for the rest of the morning deliveries to be loaded.
Jase held a clipboard and scribbled the delivery instructions for the funeral flowers before passing it to his driver, Ethan. “Funeral starts early, so those need to be there before nine thirty. Hit the mortuary first.”
“Sure thing.” Ethan set the clipboard on the bumper of the delivery van, hopping inside to adjust arrangements so they wouldn’t topple over.
Jase glanced across the parking lot. Along the opposite side, Heather had parked her hot-pink delivery van with a giant, plastic chocolate chip cookie perched on top. The thing was loud, obnoxious, and it made him crave cookies whenever he saw it. Her marketing worked, he’d give her that.
He focused on the van, just as his grandmother’s black Buick crept across the lot. Slowly. Too slowly.
He squinted. She was driving.
His gut dropped to the floor of the alley. What the hell?
She couldn’t fucking see well enough to drive. That’s why the family had hired her a professional driver. That’s why they’d taken her keys away. Last time she’d driven, she’d taken out three cars and one of those big blue mailboxes outside of the post office. They were lucky no one had gotten hurt. It’d taken some tricky legal work for the family attorney to get her off the hook with only a fine, restitution, and the loss of her license.
And now she was behind the wheel again.
Son of a bitch.
She edged toward Heather’s cookie van like a slow-motion replay on Monday night football, with Al and Frank and Dan…
“No. No. No. No. No.” Jase hit the side of his delivery van with the palm of his hand and sprinted toward his grandmother. He jumped over the cable chain midrun, skirting the cars in his beeline for the Buick.
“What?” he heard Ethan say behind him. Followed by a loud, “Shit.”
The bumper of the Buick made contact with the side of the van. The soles of Jase’s tennis shoes pushed against the asphalt, propelling him toward the accident.
Breaths came ragged, not because he was winded from the run but because his grandmother was going to hurt herself. And get her ass arrested.
He ran straight to the driver’s side window of the Buick and banged against the glass. His grandmother ignored him, put the damn tank in reverse, and backed up.
His lungs released a huge gulp of oxygen.
Okay, this was all right. There was only a small scratch on Heather’s van. He could buff that right out. No one ever had to know.
His grandmother hit the gas, the bumper of her car crunching against the side of pink paint and vinyl cookie decals.
Shit.
The Buick? It was fine.
The van. Not so much.
The metal crumpled like it’d been hit with twenty pounds of bang.
That would not buff out.
“What the hell is she doing?” Ethan huffed as he jogged up beside him.
He had to yell, because Babushka hadn’t let off the gas. The rubber of the Buick’s tires burned against the asphalt as the wheels spun, the van skidded and tilted, and, holy fuck…
Jase’s heart thudded, but he couldn’t figure out what it was doing because it obviously wasn’t pumping blood, given that his entire body had turned to ice. He couldn’t get himself to move. “I think she’s getting revenge.”
“What the hell did the van do to her?” Ethan asked, dumbfounded.
Jase got his feet unstuck. He fell against his grandmother’s window and pounded with his fists. She had a one-track mind, or she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t acknowledge he was there. Hands at ten and two, she stared straight ahead at the vinyl cookies attached to the crumpled metal of what had been Heather’s delivery van.
“Should we call someone?” he heard Ethan ask.
Someone would be great right now. They should do that.
But a vortex of what-the-fuckage had sucked him in. He yanked on his grandmother’s locked driver’s side door as she put the car in reverse again. It moved back. Jase jumped away. He preferred his toes on his feet and not crushed under the rubber tires of his grandmother’s cookie-van-destroying machine.
The Buick slammed against the already crumpled metal of the van, and the whole vehicle tilted. The giant plastic cookie on top of the van creaked, broke loose, and crashed to the pavement.
“Stop,” he shouted. His desperation wasn’t lost on him. He threw his body against the side of the car, banging on the roof.
His grandmother finally glanced to him, his entire body plastered against the side of her door, his fingertips gripping into the roof of her tank-of-a-Buick.
The wheels stopped spinning. She tossed the car in park, grabbed her purse from the passenger seat, and pushed open the door.
Jase stumbled back, right into Ethan.
Babushka stepped from her tank as though nothing had happened. “I think I tapped it.”
Jase pressed his hands against his temples as he took in the damage. “What were you doing?”
Babushka inspected the crumpled pink metal. “Moving my car. I probably should’ve vaited for my driver.”
“Yeah, probably.” If he had to guess, his eyes were likely bugging out right about now. “How the hell did you get the keys?”
“I asked for them.” Babushka licked at her thumb and buffed at a scrape on her bumper. “My driver, he says okay.”
And that driver was officially fired.
Jase blew a breath between his lips. “Why were you moving your car, anyway?”
“I didn’t like the spot it vas in.” Babushka shuffled around the damage. “This belongs to the horrible voman who broke your heart?”
He did some heavy nose breathing. “Yeah.” And Heather was gonna kill him.
“It is… Vat do they say? Karma,” Babushka grumped.
He never should’ve told her Heather broke his heart, but the damage was done and now he needed to keep his grandmother from getting arrested. She had no business driving anything.
“Someone should probably go notify Heather,” Ethan piped up. “
You want to go, or do you want me to?”
Jase took in the damage once again. This wasn’t the kind of thing they could just leave a note about.
“I’ll go get her. Can you keep an eye on Lead Foot here?” He gestured to his grandmother, who at the moment was inspecting the front of her bumper.
Ethan sighed. “Sure thing.”
Jase started his walk of shame to the cookie shop. He punched his buddy Brek’s number into his cell. Brek knew car repair. He’d know what to do about the van.
“You’ve got Brek.”
“I need a favor.” Jase’s breath huffed against the mouthpiece. “Babushka just rammed Heather’s delivery van with her Buick. Everyone’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. But the van doesn’t look so good. I’m going to tell Heather right now, but I could use a second opinion on bodywork.”
There was a long pause.
“The pink van?” Brek asked.
“Yeah.” Would there be any other van?
“Shit,” Brek replied. “That’s her baby. She sold her car to buy that thing.”
“Brek, what’s going on?” Jase could hear Brek’s wife, Velma, asking in the background. There were some muffled sounds while Brek relayed something to her.
Velma and Heather were tight. Once Velma knew, she’d call Heather. He picked up his pace to a jog.
“I’m on my way,” Brek said before the line went dead.
Phone shoved in his pocket, Jase rounded the corner to Heather’s shop. The outside was as pink as her van. She’d added cookie decals on the windows with polka dots all around. It looked like the happiest business on the block. At least, it would be until he told her what his grandmother had done. He pulled on the door, the jingle bells attached to a Come In! We’re Open & Awesome sign bouncing against the polka dots on the glass.
“I need to talk to Heather,” he said to the lady running the cash register.
“She’s in the kitchen. Just one sec.” Cash-register lady raised her just-one-sec finger and continued helping a customer.
No time for this. He practically jumped over the counter and pushed the swinging door to the kitchen open.
Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Mile High Matched Books 1-3 Page 29