A Bad Day for Sunshine (Sunshine Vicram #1)(43)

“They’ve lived here ever since,” Sun added. “I guess they couldn’t go back.”

“I wouldn’t think so. You have any problems with them?” he asked.

Sun shrugged. “Not as much as you might think. Not anymore, anyway. But it’s only my first day on the job.”

“No kidding?” The man smiled in surprise.

“No kidding.”

“And that would be thanks to Ravinder,” Quince said. “The drop in complaints. He’d been trying to get them to go legit for years. To break all ties with organized crime. It took him a while, but he may have finally succeeded.”

“Ravinder? I thought they were all Ravinders.”

“They are, but oddly enough, the title has gone to the youngest male in the family, Levi. All the others just go by their first names. It’s a status thing, I believe.”

Butterflies decided to come out of hiding in her stomach and shift into attack mode when Quince said Levi’s name. Also, it hit her that she was going to have to deal with the Ravinders as a whole. The entire lot of them, and there were many. None with whom she had a great history.

“You okay with this?” Quince asked, knowing she’d suffered through the same punishment from the Ravinder cousins as he had growing up.

“I’m just praying Hailey isn’t home.”

Fields leaned in. “Hailey?”

“Hailey Ravinder,” Quince said. “They don’t get along. She tried to stab Sunshine in the face with a stick.”

“Only once,” she said defensively. “Though it did make an impression.”

“When was this?” the agent asked.

“We were still drinking from sippy cups.”

“Ah.” He laughed softly and sat back.

“But she’s bullied her ever since.”

“Just be careful around her,” Sun said, hoping to steer both of them away from the woman. “She’s basically harmless. Like a mountain lion. Or a rattlesnake. Or a drug lord. You leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone.”

“Yeah,” Quince said. “You don’t and she’ll slice through your jugular.”

“She’s never had the best impulse control, but I like to think she’s grown both as a mother and a human being.”

The snort from Quincy cast a substantial amount of doubt on her theory.

Hailey was Levi’s little sister by a couple of years, even though she’d always bossed him around like she was older. She’d had the man wrapped around her little finger since she was in pull-ups.

And she’d been Sun’s mortal enemy since preschool, when Hailey broke all of Sun’s crayons on the first day of school.

She could still smell them. Forty-eight crayons stacked to exquisite perfection in a bright cardboard box. The uniformity a thing of beauty. The tapered ends cut with laser precision. And all of them destroyed by a three-foot monster with blond hair and a demon’s soul.

Ever since then, the chick had gone out of her way to make Sun’s life miserable, and Sun went out of her way to make sure Hailey knew how happy she was despite the girl’s pitiful attempts to ruin her existence.

Of course, a lot had changed since preschool.

“Strange thing is,” Quince said, turning around to Fields, “no one knows how the Ravinders got this land. There’s no record of sale. It was just suddenly in their name one day and that was that.”

“Interesting,” he said, and Sun could almost see the gears in his mind working overtime.

They pulled up in front of the main house, a stunning ranch with a massive log porch that wrapped around the entire building.

Fields whistled when they stepped out. “At least crime paid for someone. Where’s the distillery?”

Quince gestured past the house. “It’s farther down the road.”

He nodded, and they started for the front door when a truck, a huge black truck with a wrap that read Dark River Shine, slid to a halt beside them.

Sun froze. Well, they all froze as they waited for the aggressive driver to get out, but Sun froze for a different reason. The bones in her legs had once again vanished as the epitome of male perfection climbed down from the truck and stabbed each and every one of them with an expression that would liquefy a lesser law enforcement officer.

She tried not to stare at him, but she couldn’t help a few quick glances at his spectacular frame. Wide shoulders. Lean waist. Dark hair with an auburn glint in the sun and an even darker red five-o’clock shadow framing his full mouth.

Her mind rocketed back to the first real encounter she’d had with the Ravinder gang. With Levi in particular.

In hindsight, she realized she’d simply made an easy target, but at the time, she’d wondered what she’d done to upset the entire clan. Why they hated her so very, very much. A theme that would continue throughout middle school and into high school until she put the town, and everyone in it, in her rearview.

She was twelve when she got her first taste of the Ravinders as a unified whole. Not just the trite tribulations of her tormentor, Hailey, but the entire lot of cousins and second cousins that made up Del Sol’s public menace number one.

She’d been riding her bike home from the lake like she did almost every day in the summer, an ice cream cone in her left hand. She saw them riding their own bikes to the lake, a gang of seven Ravinders with only one girl in the bunch.