The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(36)

“You didn’t know how to open the door, did you?”

“I was trying to roll down the window. I know how to open a damn door.”

My conscience gives me a swift kick in the balls. Don’t antagonize a lady who’s trying. “You know you sit in the back seat of a car long enough, it’ll get hot enough to fry you, and then the Tickled Pink Papers will be the least of your worries?”

She grimaces, then lifts her purse—a small black number today—to cover her face. “Oh God, are the cameras out again?”

“What cameras?” I whip my head around. We’ve had a small uptick in tourists, mostly semilocals coming out to gawk at the Lightly School of Hard Knocks, as Shiloh, Ridhi, and I have started calling it, but I haven’t seen reporters or cameras.

“Whatever cameras got that shot of me with my ass in the air when I tripped trying to carry that bookshelf off the moving truck yesterday. I’ll fund Bridget’s entire college career if you tell me who prints that damn gossip page, and I don’t care if she switches majors seventeen times and takes twenty-five years to graduate.”

I stroke my beard and pretend to contemplate the offer as I realize she’s talking about Tickled Pink’s homegrown gossip page, which I should’ve known, but that’s not where my brain goes. “Sell my daughter’s future for the pride of a socialite . . . nope. No can do.”

“Is my grandmother already funding every kid’s college career in this town? Is her million-dollar scholarship bribe over keeping us off the Wi-Fi enough to do that?”

Huh. Phoebe’s stink eye is weirdly adorable.

Must be her makeup.

Or else someone spiked my breakfast.

“Not quite,” I drawl. “I’ll ask her to add a couple zeroes to that figure next time she needs help thinking of things she can do to inspire you and your family to become better people. She was out at the park last night bemoaning the fact that you all still irritate her.”

“Clearly you didn’t take advantage of the fact to suggest all the reasons she should give up this ridiculous plan of hers.”

“Oh, I did. I laid out why you’re all hopeless causes and how she’ll get to heaven faster if she feeds you to the wolves, then moves to Tibet to join a monastery.”

She briefly closes her eyes like she wants to roll them but doesn’t want me to witness such a juvenile move on her part, and I can almost smell her desperate need to know if I’m telling the truth.

I am, in case you’re wondering.

The part about telling Estelle what she should do, anyway. She’s too haughty to admit her family was bothering her, but it’s clear she’s displeased that things aren’t going according to her plan.

“Do you need something, Mr. Miller?” Phoebe asks.

“Nope. Mostly just to make sure you didn’t die. It’d be about the most excitement the Tickled Pink Fire Department has seen in a while, after your grandmother trying to explode a vat of frying oil with water balloons the other day, that is, but Shiloh gets pretty mad at me if I don’t stop bad ideas before they get off the ground. Prevent forest fires and all that.” I pause. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for my driver.”

I look up at the school.

Then back to the Pilot.

Then fully back at Phoebe.

“Oh, fuck,” she whispers. “There’s not a driver.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the images flashing next in my brain.

Not Phoebe dying in the back of a car because she overheated. It’s a sunny seventy degrees, so the car could get hot, but I don’t think she would’ve sat here much longer without going in search of her driver.

Or at least popping the door open.

No, it’s the image of Phoebe wrapping the car around a pine tree between here and Deer Drop that has me concerned.

I know where she’s going. It was all over the Tickled Pink Papers yesterday.

School.

She’s going back to school because she cheated her way through the first time.

The designer backpack beside her doesn’t exactly confirm it, but it doesn’t contradict my theory either.

I growl softly to myself as she shifts to get out of the back seat.

Yeah.

This is apparently what I’m doing with the rest of my morning.

“Sit,” I order.

She peers at me, her lower lip caught in her upper teeth.

“Sit,” I repeat.

“I can drive.”

“But do you know where you’re going?”

Her lips part.

And then they tremble.

Dammit.

I dive for the front seat, lean across the wheel, and—thank fuck—the key fob is in the cup holder.

Means I don’t need to go have a heart-to-heart with Estelle Lightly this early in the morning.

“Sit,” I mutter one last time.

I pop back out of the car long enough to pat my back pocket—no sense getting pulled over without my own license on me, and there’s a reasonable chance that would happen if any of the county deputies spotted Phoebe in the back seat, just because they’re almost as big of gossips as Shiloh and her buddies at the fire station. Then I shut Phoebe in the back seat again and hop in to play driver for the day.

“Sparrow County Community College?” I ask after adjusting the seat.