The Hookup (Moonlight and Motor Oil #1)(15)

My stomach still in my boots, my heart started beating really hard.

“Since then, again no big surprise, and it’s been years, there’s been no one for him. Every female in Matlock steers clear. Not like he goes out trying to bury his sorrow in every soft spot offered up to him. Just that, the first few who went there in hopes they could mend the broken heart, soothe the savaged soul, got seriously burned.”

Got seriously burned.

I’d just finished being seriously burned but not by a guy like Johnny. By a guy like my dad.

I hadn’t had the experience, but I suspected having it happen from a guy like Johnny would be worse.

By a lot.

“You said it’s been years?” I asked.

“Babe—”

“Maybe he’s—”

“Baby girl, listen to me,” she whispered fiercely. “After what happened with Kent, if you found a guy, I’d be at your back, rooting for you, glad you’re back in the saddle, hoping for the best because you deserve it. I’m not sure I know anyone who deserves it better. So this conversation is not easy to have.”

“Do you think he—?”

“I think you’re sweet as sugar, cute as a button and he’s a man. He gets a load of you, he’s not gonna think, ‘Best be careful I don’t mess with this one. She’s sweet, cute and sensitive as all get out and my ex burned me so bad I’ll never recover, so I should leave well enough alone.’ He’s not gonna know about that sensitive as all get out part. So he’s just gonna go forth to get him some.”

“He’s coming over for dinner tomorrow night,” I blurted.

“Say what?”

“He’s coming over for dinner tomorrow night. I’m making him Crock-Pot chicken enchiladas.”

“You’re pulling out the enchiladas, which means you dig him and he’s good in bed.”

He was very good in bed.

I also dug him.

“They’re easy to make, Deanna, they just taste like they aren’t.”

“They’re the kind of thing any normal girl, like you, would make any normal guy she likes so he’ll think, ‘Man, this woman can cook. I get all that sweetness in my bed and before that I get to eat like this? I better grab hold and do it tight.’ But just to say, Izzy, this guy is not a normal guy. This guy is a guy ruined for all other women by a knockout of a redhead with long legs and big boobs who was almost as sweet as your sugar, but I only say that because I know you and I didn’t know her except in passing. A redhead who he’ll be hung up on forever, even when nature calls and forces him to settle down in order to procreate. The next one will be numero dos. Runner up. Second best.”

Runner up.

Second best.

I did not have red hair.

I was blonde. Of a sort. It was dark blonde, like an amber-ish blonde-brown.

But I was not a redhead.

I did have relatively large breasts and long legs though.

“They were that in love?” I asked quietly, my voice tight.

“I love Charlie with all my heart and soul, you know it, baby girl, but any time I saw those two together, they were so happy, so close, so damned sweet, they gave me a toothache I wanted for myself. So yeah, they were that in love. The air turned hazy and pink around them, they were that in love,” she answered gently, her voice kind.

I looked to my boots.

“Izzy?” she called.

“I like him,” I told my boots.

“I only know him in passing too, but I still know he’s that guy. The kind you can’t help but like. He’s solid. Dependable. From good people. His brother took off before Charlie and I got to town and I heard he’s a bit of a wild one. But I knew the man, and Johnny Gamble’s dad was like that too. Those men are men who fix your car even if you can’t afford it and let you make payments that won’t bite too deep. They sponsor Little League and girls’ softball and Pop Warner teams, and even coach those Pop Warner kids. Heard somewhere there was this ex-con, local screwup who no one trusted, but he gave him a job and the man stayed on the straight and narrow, probably doing it just to give loyalty to a man who took a chance on him.”

She paused.

I waited.

And after she took an audible breath, she kept going.

“And he might like you too. It might be that time where he’s decided he needs to move on from the love of his life and find someone to settle down with. But I’m not Johnny Gamble’s friend. I’m your friend. And you deserve to be the love of someone’s life. Not the one who followed that first act, and you get it good because you got yourself a good man, but you don’t get it how you deserve it.”

I looked unseeing to the pasture. “He had bath salts in his bathroom.”

“He had what?”

“He’s really, you know, a guy. And he had this pretty glass jar with blue bath salts in his bathroom.”

Deanna said nothing.

“Do you think they’re hers?”

“I think this is . . . when you found out, and you’d find out, it just sucks that it’s me who has to tell you . . . the kind of question you’d be asking yourself a lot if things go far beyond this dinner tomorrow with Johnny Gamble.”

“Should I . . . do you think I should tell him I know about this and talk to him about it?”