Need You for Keeps (Heroes of St. Helena, #1)(9)
Which was ridiculous.
Jonah preferred his women sweet, easy-natured, and straightforward. Nothing about Shay was easy. Oh, she was all woman, with the sweetest ass he’d ever seen, but she was also the most complicated and irritating do-gooder on the planet. Her go-green world was like a nonstop Category 5—spinning out of control and leaving behind a trail of destruction that he usually had to clean up.
Good intentions or not, the woman was a magnet for trouble—something he’d long ago given up chasing.
“Even after you let the cute neighbor off with a warning, she still wouldn’t go out with you.”
Jonah didn’t think Shay would go out with anyone, let alone him. She was beautiful, sexy, and had a distinct f*ck-off attitude that sent most men scurrying. Too bad he wasn’t most men—it would have made things so much easier.
“You want to talk about it? Maybe I can give you some pointers.”
“Call Warren.” Jonah smacked his brother on the shoulder and headed back to his steak.
“Hold up,” Adam said, catching up to him, his normal humor fading. His brother might play it fast and loose in his personal life, but he was dead serious when it came to his job. “Nikki found Giles’s meds on his nightstand.”
“Ah, hell,” Jonah said, staring at the fading sun. Four hours was a long time for a man with a walker to be out alone. Especially one with a breathing condition.
For once Jonah wished that Warren would man up and do his job. Following up on a known wanderer who didn’t want to be found could be boring as shit, but it fell to the sheriff’s department to protect and serve all of the residents of Napa County, not just the ones Warren thought could help his career.
Which was why Jonah had decided to run for sheriff. It wasn’t that he wanted, or needed, any more responsibility—keeping his adrenaline-junkie siblings out of trouble and making sure his stepmom didn’t donate herself right into bankruptcy was a full-time job—but when Warren stepped up unopposed, Jonah knew he had to do something.
He loved this town, loved the people. They’d rallied around his family when his dad died, so to repay the favor he was going to have their backs—and that meant making sure Warren stayed a deputy.
Kissing a night of manning the grill and sipping cold beer good-bye, he popped another Tic Tac in his mouth and said, “Let me radio dispatch and call out Search and Rescue.”
An hour later, Jonah stood on the steps to the senior center, patiently waiting for Adam to finish his quick medical eval of their missing Houdini so he could ask his uncle what the hell he’d been thinking. Although, looking at the window full of ladies in flower-covered swim caps, Jonah already had a pretty good idea.
He had been about to lead his team of volunteers on a canvass of the Vine Street neighborhood when a call came in from dispatch. A suspicious-looking gray-haired man was cornered by the entire water aerobics class for snooping around the pool with a camera in hand. Jonah had arrived right as the first water noodle went airborne. It had taken three firefighters, a handful of Search and Rescue volunteers, and Adam’s promise to stay after for autographs, to get Giles away from the angry mob of biddies.
“You’re all good,” Adam said, closing up his first aid kit. “But next time you might want to rethink peeping on a bunch of ladies with weapons. Or at least bring your walker so you have a fighting chance.”
“That Clovis has some bony feet, got me in the shin real good,” Giles said, rubbing the red area on his leg and frowning as though he were the victim. “And I wasn’t peeping. I get enough of the saggy breasts back at the home.”
“Then what is this?” Jonah held up Giles’s camera and scrolled to a photo of enough wrinkled cleavage to make Adam look away in horror.
“That,” Giles said, flipping to the next picture of a very beautiful, very stacked blonde in a bikini leading the class, “is a gift from God.”
“Those aren’t from God,” Adam, the resident boob expert, said after a long and thorough investigation of St. Helena’s newest swimming teacher. “Those, my friend, can be purchased for about ten grand.”
“Too old to know the difference or to care,” Giles said, taking his camera back and zooming in on the screen. “Wanted to snap a picture to show the guys back at the home, give them some motivation. Celeste does private in-house lessons. Says so on her website. So we’re pooling our social security checks to bring her out, and I needed my investors to see what they’d be getting.”
“I saw you swim the length of Lake Donner,” Jonah said, remembering the summer after his mother’s death, when Jonah had turned seven and his dad had been too overcome with grief to function, let alone celebrate life, and Uncle Giles had taken Jonah and his brothers camping. It had been one of the few bright spots in that period of his life, between losing one mother and gaining another in his stepmom, Phoebe, and his half sister Frankie being born.
“I could forget how to swim for a day or two if it meant seeing Celeste up close in the thing you kids are calling swimming suits.”
Jonah couldn’t blame the guy. Just last week he’d chosen, for the first time since leaving San Francisco PD, to forget about the law for just a moment and look the other way.
He knew better. Knew all too well just how dangerous relaxing on the job could be. But he’d done it anyway and that didn’t sit well. Hell, nothing about Shay sat well. She made him want to strangle her and rescue her at the same time—a bad combo for a guy who liked things cut-and-dried.