Hold (Gentry Boys, #5)(15)
“I appreciate that,” I told him, “but I’m holding out hope that my head cracking days are over.”
Brick flashed me a grin and followed his girlfriend out into the honeyed light of a spring evening.
I stood there alone, staring at the numbers on the note. There was no reason to bother Deck over this. Whatever it was I could handle it myself. I flattened one hand on the smooth counter and with the other I dialed the number with slow precision, sighing while I waited for the connection to take me back to Emblem.
CHAPTER FIVE
CREED
No matter how early I woke up, Truly always beat me to the punch.
It was like the woman had some kind of paranormal talent that let her know what moment I’d be opening my eyes so she could plan ahead. Before I sat up I inhaled the aroma of cinnamon rolls and ruefully figured I’d be hitting the gym extra hard this afternoon to make up for it. I’d never turn down Truly’s cooking though. It might as well have been written into our vows that whatever she baked, fried, roasted or grilled would find its way into my stomach.
My boxers were somewhere unseen and I didn’t bother looking for them before I opened the bedroom door.
Two steps later I froze when I heard Truly’s bright voice in the living room. It was awfully early for company but she was evidently talking to someone and there I stood, about to enter the light with my junk swinging in plain view.
I relaxed when she paused and there were a few beats of silence before she spoke again. Obviously whoever she was talking to was on the phone and not in the living room.
“Well honey, you know I’d love for you to come visit but I don’t get why you can’t tell me exactly where you are or what’s going on.”
Truly was in a state of half dress and pacing around the tastefully decorated room. My eyes noted the full black skirt and pink lace bra and communicated the news to my dick. He woke up immediately.
But rather than creep behind my wife, rip the phone from her hand and demand my marital rights, I reached for a full mug of warm coffee that was sitting on the counter, draining half of it in two gulps.
Truly paced in the other direction without noticing me and let out a deep sigh. Whoever was on the other end of that phone had managed to get her flustered and Truly didn’t get flustered easily. Since the other party was obviously someone who didn’t live local, I discarded the usual suspects like Saylor and Stephanie. Truly had endured a nomadic childhood and didn’t keep in touch with anyone from her youth.
Anyone, that is, except for her sisters.
Apparently the caller had something urgent to do because Truly abruptly said, “Okay, well you call me back as soon as you can.” Then she held the phone away from her head and blinked at it with some bewilderment, like it was threatening to produce legs and walk right out of her palm.
“Which one is it?” I asked and she spun with a gasp.
“Shit, Creedence, you give a girl a heart attack.”
Truly flounced over to the couch and sat down hard while I tried to stop noticing the way her full tits bobbed briefly and threatened to bust out of the flimsy pink lace.
She watched me as I made my way over to the couch and sat beside her. If she was thinking straight she would have noticed my dick aiming for her like an arrow but she was too distracted, crossing her arms and pulling at her lower lip.
“Meridian,” she finally said.
My wife had three younger sisters; Augusta, Carolina and Meridian. None of them were anything like Truly or anything like each other. All were born of different fathers to Truly’s hapless train wreck of a mother. Augusta was in grad school in Oklahoma and engaged to a rough and tumble rancher while the youngest, Carolina, was doing all right on her own with a scholarship to NYU.
Meridian, or Mia as her sisters called her, was a question mark. She hadn’t come to our wedding and I’d only met her once, the year after Truly and I got together. She’d crept into town unannounced, showing up at our apartment looking like a chalk outline of a person who could be smudged away with the sole of a shoe. Not that she was high or banged up. But with one look I could tell I was staring at someone who got scraped up easily by life’s rough fabric, the kind of person who suffered her bruises on the inside.
None of these things needed to be said to Truly. She knew already and she merely sighed when her sister disappeared in the middle of the night after spending five days sleeping on our couch. Last we’d heard, Mia had returned to some farming commune she used to live on in the Pacific Northwest.
“So what’s the deal with the mystery sister?”
“She’s on a Greyhound bus and called from a rest stop outside Portland,” Truly explained, her southern accent emerging more strongly, as it always did when she was stressed, angry or impassioned. “I don’t know, honey, it seems like something’s wrong, like maybe she’s in some kind of trouble. I mean something’s always off with that girl but I got the shivers talking to her just now. She kept her voice in a whisper, saying she was on her way and only had a few days to get everything taken care of but then she wouldn’t tell me what kind of ‘everything’ she was talking about.”
My attention kicked up a notch. If Truly’s troubled sister was possibly heading in our direction and bringing some problems with her it was best to know what they were sooner rather than later. “She hinted that she was coming here but wouldn’t tell you why she only had a few days?”