No Perfect Hero(7)
Even if we both started giggling when she proclaimed him a doody-head.
Maybe that’ll be his name until we leave.
When he returns, he just hands me a new key without a word – then turns around, walks through his back patio door, slams it, and firmly locks it without looking back. Not even a proper apology, and that sorry earlier didn’t count.
Well. Let him sulk and grump alone if he wants.
I, on the other hand, have the best company in the world, and I think we’ve earned ourselves a movie marathon.
Key in hand, I marshal us both inside what's going to be home, sweet home for the next few days. We spend a little time getting settled into our rooms, putting our things away before I poke at the hotel phone directory.
Looks like Heart’s Edge isn’t so small that it doesn’t have a pizza joint.
Within half an hour, Tara and I are curled up on the couch, sharing a pepperoni and pineapple while browsing for anything that might have Hugh Grant in it.
She’s a little girl, but she’s got good taste.
Still, as we flick through the pay-per-view offerings on TV...I can’t help thinking back to that brooding, blue-eyed beast who hasn’t made a sound from his side since the door slammed shut.
Who the hell is he?
What's his deal?
And why does he have me doubting not just the wisdom of staying here in Heart’s Edge...but the entire massive upset I’ve just made of my life?
Am I really looking for a new beginning? I turn the question over in my head, literally chewing my thoughts in the pizza crust.
Or am I just running away from one problem and into another?
2
Those Flames Keep Rising (Warren)
Haley West.
That was the name Flynn gave me when I’d cornered him over the room fuckups and stared him down.
He started stammering, flinching like my glare could actually hurt him. Nothing new.
Flynn’s got no backbone, just a hollowed-out tube for a spine full of Jack or whatever else he’s guzzling today. It's amazing why the hell Grandma keeps him on payroll. The boy rolled over pretty fast after I said I wanted her out.
I should’ve known there was more to the story than he was telling me.
There always is with girls like her.
There's always trouble, too.
Damn if I could let that hotheaded little spitfire go wandering around Heart’s Edge with nowhere to stay and not even a working car.
But I’ve got to get her out of here.
She almost blew my cover. As long as everyone thinks I’m the reclusive small town boy returning home for a hello, nobody blinks my way. Or even thinks twice about me staying at Grandma’s inn.
Naturally, I picked one of the cottages rather than the basement in Grandma's house. A grown man needs his privacy, after all, and rumor has it I’m just staying here till I buy my own place in town.
Sometimes rumors are useful.
Say as little as possible, and usually people will invent the most plausible cover story without you having to speak a word.
The truth is, I can’t let my dirty business touch my grandmother or all the hard work she’s done keeping Charming up and running.
So I’ve got my business squirreled away behind lock and key – but leave it to that green-eyed little vixen to almost walk right into my war room.
Fuck.
If she’d seen my whiteboards, my newspaper clippings, my pin maps tracking movement...there's no telling what she’d have thought. I'd probably be in handcuffs right now, answering Sheriff Langley's questions.
I know what I thought about her.
That she’d been sent by Dennis Bress.
That he’d figured out I was hot on his trail and figured I wouldn’t react ugly to a beautiful woman casually strolling in to find out what I know. I’m still not totally convinced.
But the broken-down Ford Mustang just outside the fence is pretty plausible.
Still. I’ve got to get her gone.
She’s a liability and a distraction. The worst kind, when she’s petite, curvy, tight-bodied, and from what I saw last night, far too fond of tight jeans and short, loose shirts that bare the tanned, toned curve of her waist every time she so much as breathes.
And the way that tumble of dark brown hair falls down, framing her face, lashing and swaying with her sharp, high-energy gestures...a man couldn't ask for a better way to make his dick like diamond.
Not something I need to be focusing on right now.
Not something I need at all.
She’s hardly the only problem. Fuck, that poor kid with her came about a foot away from stumbling into my weapons cache.
Cases of guns, and I haven’t had a chance to unpack everything and separate the ammo from the firearms yet. That could’ve been disastrous.
Ms. Haley may be annoying as hell, but I couldn’t live with myself if I let her or the kid get hurt.
I knew setting up shop back home wouldn’t be easy. Cornering Bress, even harder.
I just didn’t expect this kind of complication.
But there’s one way to get rid of her. And that’s why I’m out here in the dead of night, on the cement floor of Flynn’s dirty garage in the barn he lives in on the edge of the property, after we hooked up the old man’s truck hitch and dragged Haley's Mustang inside.