What the Heart Wants (What the Heart Wants, #1)(87)

“I don’t mean you’ll just take me there. I mean will you go inside the house with me and stay with me the whole time I’m in the room with her?”

“Yes.”

She turned to Laurel. “And you’ll go too?”

“If it’s all right with your father.”

Jase gave her a look that could have jump-started a three-day corpse. “I’d like to have you there.”

Lolly continued to stroke Hugo. “And if she starts saying ugly things to me again, I can leave, right?”

Jase nodded. “If she starts saying ugly things to you, we’ll all leave.”

Lolly took a deep breath and stood up. “Okay. I’ll go, then.”

*



Ten minutes later, Jase had them all in the car and they were on the road.

God only knew what awaited them, but he wanted Lolly to have closure—as his shrink would have said—so here he was, driving hell for leather down I-35 again, taking Lolly to the very person he’d tried to protect her from her whole life. And he’d thought he was through with Marguerite Shelton once and for all sixteen years ago, when they got caught. The scene had played out like an X-rated soap opera.

He’d finished up his job at the car wash Wednesday night and driven over to her neighborhood, parking his car in an alley a block away from the little stone house.

He usually came in about eight and left around midnight, but Wednesdays were difficult to manage because of school the day before and the day after. So instead of enjoying a light doze before leaving, he fell heavily asleep.

The bulldozer roar of a familiar voice had cut through his dreams. Had he conked out in American history again? Struggling to consciousness, he realized the overhead light had been turned on and he was lying in bed bare-ass naked with his English teacher while his high school principal was standing in the doorway, jabbing his finger at him and yelling himself red-faced.

“You son of a bitch! You’ll pay for this!”

Gloriously nude, Marguerite, her full, buoyant breasts swaying, rose from her side of the bed and walked nonchalantly to the chair to reclaim her negligee. “Keep your voice down, Bert. Let’s not give the neighbors any more to talk about than they already do. Remember your position.”

“Damn my position! What’s that snot-nose kid doing here?”

Marguerite smiled. “What’s he doing here?” she repeated in her husky, sexy voice. “The same thing you do, Bert, but he does it better.”

Nyquist stopped dead, his mouth flapping, his angry eyes popping fire.

Jase swung to the side of the bed and Marguerite looked over at him. “I think you’d better go now, Jase. I’ll take care of this.”

He’d stumbled out of bed, grabbed his jeans and jerked them on, Mr. Nyquist glaring at him the whole time. His shirt and shoes were somewhere around the room, and there was no telling what had happened to his underwear and socks. He’d pushed his feet into his sneakers without tying them and poked his arms through the sleeves of his T-shirt as he headed out the back door, feeling like a kid who’d been kicked out of the house once the adults came home.

To top it off, his f*cking truck wouldn’t start. Some jerkface had stolen his distributor cap, and he’d had to leave the pickup in the alley and hike home in the dark.





Chapter Twenty



Laurel watched the familiar scenery roll by. They’d passed the San Marcos outlet malls already. Next would come Wonder World, then on to New Braunfels—Schlitterbahn and Landa Park, where she and her college friends would go tubing during spring break.

Soon the gravel pits lined up against the Balcones Escarpment were in sight. Not much longer.

Jase glanced at her in his rearview mirror. “Laurel, you okay back there?”

“Just fine.” Not really. When she was a child, the drive to Alamo City seemed interminable. Today it was taking no time at all. Of course, back then, the zoo was their goal—lions and tigers and bears. This time, there was no telling what awaited them at the end of the line. Marguerite could lash out at Lolly again, and Jase’s reunion with her wasn’t going to be any picnic either.

Jase swerved off the highway toward Broadway Street, then turned onto a residential street south of Brackenridge Park, near the old stable at the west gate of Fort Sam Houston.

Lolly played nervously with a loose curl. “Dad, do you know how to get there? Do you know the address?”

“Nyquist gave me directions.”

Laurel looked around as he turned onto a cross street. As long as she remembered, this neighborhood had been a mixture of grand old homes interspersed with more modest ones, but the last time she’d visited San Antonio, most of the mansions had been cut up into apartments, and the smaller houses were going downhill. Now the area seemed to be on an upward trajectory. Several of the larger homes had been refitted as single-family homes and were sporting fresh paint, new roofs, and well-tended lawns.

Jase turned again, and Lolly pointed to a small stucco house with a browned-out lawn centered by a dead palm tree. “That’s it.”

Laurel’s eyebrows went up. She would have expected the glamorous Marguerite Shelton to have ended up in one of the mansions. This house, with its railed porch, reminded her of Jase’s house from sixteen years ago. A rusty old glider sat to the left of the door, and a dead plant in a black plastic nursery pot was on the right. No dog, though.