Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)

Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)

Tymber Dalton



Chapter One


Vanessa Riddick found his diary under his bed, tucked away in one of those cloth-covered box organizer drawers, like what you’d find stashed in an IKEA cube shelf. She wouldn’t show it to anyone, especially their parents.

They were in enough pain.

She made the discovery late Tuesday, one day after her brother’s funeral on Monday, and four days following his death late Friday night. She finally opened his bedroom door and stepped inside, determined to start the long and emotional process of going through his things. Leaving the room a dormant shrine to her older brother wouldn’t be healthy for anyone.

Especially her.

She also didn’t want to share the task, not even with her parents. She’d gently rebuffed them, and friends, who’d offered to come over and do things like sort through his clothes for her.

It was a task she wanted to do—needed to do. By herself.

When she was ready.

Besides, she knew he wouldn’t want anyone else in his room, anyway. He was very private. She’d respected that privacy during his life, and would do her best to honor it in death as well.

After her parents had left to fly back to Seattle, where they lived, and on her way home from driving them up to Tampa International, she’d stopped by a grocery store. There, she’d bought herself several bottles of moscato wine—Tony’s favorite—and decided to spend most of the next three days of her personal leave from work, and the weekend following it, tanked to the gills.

No, not the healthiest way to spend it, sure, but it wasn’t like she was driving now that her pear-shaped butt was safely home and she had a freezer full of food brought by friends and distant family.

Her parents had gently hinted that maybe they should stay longer, for her, but in all honesty she didn’t want that, as cold as it sounded.

She wanted—needed—to be alone and start to process things. Since Saturday, her life had been a non-stop blur of activity during which she didn’t even have a chance to catch her breath. Both her parents worked for a software company out in Seattle, had tons of friends, an active social life. Yes, they were grieving. And yes, she was planning on traveling out to stay with them at some point, but she also knew they weren’t exactly flush with cash and couldn’t afford to spend weeks in Florida coddling their adult daughter.

Not to mention for now…for right now, she needed to be alone. If nothing else, to finally begin accepting how alone she really was. Having her parents hanging around and delaying her inevitable good-bye with them would only prolong the agony for her. She knew they needed her, and yes, she felt more than a little like a horrible daughter for it, but for the sake of her sanity she needed them to get on with their lives. She also desperately needed her remaining time off spent getting her game face firmly back in place for work.

With the first large drinking glass full of wine and ice cubes in her hand, she sat on the floor next to his bed. His dog, Carlo, laid down next to her with his head resting on her leg. The cocker spaniel mixed-breed mutt looked as morose as she felt.

She stroked his head. “Guess it’s just you and me now, buddy.”

His tail thumped once, unenthusiastically.

She sighed. “Yeah, I know. I miss him, too.”

Tony had easily gained custody of the dog because the dog had hated Tony’s ex-wife, Kelly. When Carlo immediately fell in love with Vanessa, it had pissed Kelly off to no end at the time, much to Vanessa’s secret pleasure.

She stared down at the dog, her last remaining breathing tie to her brother. Since Tony’s death, Carlo had barely let her out of his sight while she was home, and he’d slept on her bed every night, much as he had Tony’s bed.

Guess I need to get this done.

After taking a deep breath to steel herself, and setting her glass aside, she reached under the bed.

Starting there felt safest to her. She didn’t want to face his dresser drawers full of neatly folded shirts and briefs. She didn’t want to stare into the gaping maw of his closet, arranged far more neatly than any retail store display.

It’d been all she could do not to break down sobbing that morning when she’d gone to fish clean underwear out of the dryer and realized that some of his clothes had gotten mixed in with the load her mom had done for her the night before.

He kept several plastic storage bins under the bed, and three of the square cloth bins. She thought the shelving unit the cloth bins went into was either disassembled in the garage or residing in his storage unit.

Another chore that could wait until another day.

It was in the second cloth bin that she’d discovered the journal.

When she opened it and realized what it was, she froze, hesitating.

Should she even read it?

It took her a while to make that decision. A long while, and draining the glass of wine.

Vanessa’s older brother, Tony, had been thirty-nine when he passed suddenly from pneumonia. Only five years older than her, and while not quite the center of the universe, his position in her life had pretty much cemented him as the center of her world. Her big brother had been her best friend growing up. He’d moved in with her at her insistence over four years earlier, after a nasty divorce that took pretty much everything from him except Carlo and some furniture.

He’d insisted it would only be temporary.