What I’m grateful for is the chance for a do-over. I’m getting a fresh start, thanks to my new BFF Jessica Huntington. Brien owed her a lot, too. That included this deluxe honeymoon. Neither of us could have afforded anything close to a real honeymoon after paying for our small, Christmastime wedding. Jessica Huntington—as in the Huntington Beach Huntingtons—would gladly have paid for the wedding too. One thing I got back, though, when freed from indentured servitude to a scum bucket, was my pride. So, I set limits on Jessica’s largesse. That’s not always easy to do. She’s sneaky generous and her lawyer skills give her great persuasive power.
“Yo, Kim!” my sleepy guy called out from the bed. “Where are you?” His voice grew louder as he got up and walked closer. “Oh, wow, there you are!”
I looked up to see the buff, blond beach-boy I had married standing there wearing a grin and a towel. The man is built, that’s for sure. To be honest, physical attraction accounted for a lot of my initial interest in him. That attraction wasn’t strong enough to overcome what I considered to be immaturity and a lack of smarts—at first. Lots of people see Brien that way. Perhaps it’s all that unbridled brawn. Like I said, he’s built! Or it could be the surfer-dude-what-me-worry persona he often hides behind. I was wrong and so are they.
The real Brien, the man I married, is a sweet, guileless guy. A little immature, true, but what 25-year-old man isn’t? It could be my California dude is too laid back for most people. It’s also possible there’s something odd going on in the frontal lobe—a missing filter or switch that should keep him tuned in better to the world. Who knows? Who cares? Turns out, dumb he is not, and he’s a hard worker when he makes a commitment. Like working out the disciplined way he does to keep that body of his in such “righteous” shape, as he would say. There is a kind of simplicity about him I find appealing. I’m sure he’d be content to live in a shack on the beach, workout, surf, listen to music, take in the sunset with a “brewski,” and eat, of course. My surfer boy can put it away.
Now I’d have to add “hanging with me” to that list of the things that make the light shine in Brien’s eyes. Still, a lot comes out of his mouth he should think about first, or keep to himself altogether. I like him that way—I never have to worry about what he’s thinking. I always know where I stand. At least after I sort out what he means. He’s prone to malapropisms and uses tons of surfer lingo.
Me, I’m not so verbose and can go for long stretches without saying a word. Talk about yin and yang. I’m darkly moody. He’s pathologically optimistic and upbeat. I trust no one, he trusts everyone. He’s blond and has brown eyes with specks of gold in them. In contrast, my hair is black and my eyes are dark as coal. He’s big—not all that tall at about 5’8”, but muscled. Me, I’m petite. The differences go on and on. Opposites attract, so they say.
“Morning, Dude.”
“Morning, Gidget,” he said, holding onto the smile, but dropping the towel. Sometimes our moods match, I thought, as I let him pull me up out of the lounge chair and into his arms. I laughed as he swept me off the floor and carried me back to bed. Who knew what surprises the rest of the day would bring?
To be continued… Find the rest of the story on AMAZON in KINDLE & PAPERBACK editions at http://smarturl.it/cove1
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Okay, wait! Before we say goodbye. Here’s one more excerpt for you to read. Chapter 1 from the first book in the Jessica Huntington series I write. Meet Jessica. She’s a little spoiled, her life’s a mess, but she has a good heart. Can she get her life together before murder and mayhem take if from her?
A DEAD HUSBAND, CHAPTER 1
Jessica bolted upright in bed. Not a good thing to do. The light of day pierced like a knife. Her world spun. Her head throbbed, and a wave of nausea flowed through her. The force of her body’s revolt knocked her back onto the pillow. She closed her eyes to shut out the light and waited for the spinning sensation to subside. From somewhere in the depths of stupor she heard the sound that had startled her awake: a loud snort. She struggled to make sense of the fear and confusion while remaining motionless to avoid another assault to her senses. Where the hell was she? Risking a peek, she glimpsed up and recognized the vaulted ceiling and dramatic angles of the room in which she had grown up.
For a moment she felt comforted because she was, at least, in her own bed. The plush bed cradled her body, lulling her back toward oblivion. Then it all came rushing in on her, crushing her chest with an anvil of rage and regret.
My own bed all right, she thought. In her mother’s house that is, not her adult, married-woman bed now occupied by her feckless, soon-to-be ex-husband, and the blond. Jessica’s breathing quickened; her heart fluttered, and then palpitated wildly. Her heart now beat out a vicious dirge to match the pounding in her head.
“Oh no,” she muttered, as she spiraled toward a full blown panic attack. She rolled over and scooted toward the edge of the bed, hoping to dig out the paper bag she kept in the bedside table. She needed to breathe. To regain control of her mind and body that had betrayed her so often.
As Jessica reached into the drawer, she heard it again. A snorting sound, but this time much louder. Without thinking she jumped out of bed and stumbled, almost head first, into a luxurious upholstered club chair in the tasteful neutral tones of the Kreiss furnishings her mother adored. The room spun again as Jessica’s knees hit the floor. Her upper body landed on something hard in the chair. She pulled out an empty bottle, Cristal champagne, vintage 2004.
A decent year, at least, she thought.
A party, there had been a party. She set the bottle on the floor and pulled herself up into the comfort of the bedside chair. Holding her head in both hands she scanned the floor around her feet and spotted two more empty Cristal bottles. That helped explain her current state. Discarded take-out food containers and candy bar wrappers were strewn about as were articles of clothing.
The slinky little Dolce & Gabbana dress she had worn last night lay in a twisted heap on the floor not wearable ever again. A couple grand down the drain. It must have come off in a hurry. One red Alexa pump peeped out from beneath the bed, silk stockings nearby, and a pair of men’s jeans. Jessica’s scanning came to a dead stop. She raised her eyes to gaze on higher ground.
A scantily-clad man lay sprawled on the far side of her super-sized bed, face down. Something about him was familiar, but in her addled condition she could not make out who he was. Nor could she remember how he, or she, got there. Looking down as quickly as she dared, she noted she was still wearing her Spanx. Jessica let out a little sigh of relief. Things couldn’t have gone too far with the guy in her bed since she was still wearing her Spanx. She struggled to get into the body shaper stone cold sober. If she had done her share polishing off the contents of the bottles in her room she would have needed help.
The guy on the bed looked like he could have given her that help. Unless he drank as much Cristal as she had. Jessica squelched a bout of shame as she lingered on his well-muscled body, clad in nothing but a pair of boxers. It felt voyeuristic. Not to mention, that even if her life depended on it, she couldn’t say who he was. Besides, she was still a married woman. She hadn’t signed the divorce papers yet.
Why isn’t he moving? Jessica wondered. From where she sat, it didn’t even look like he was breathing. It must have been his snorting that brought her back so abruptly from the edge of insensibility. But he was dead to the world now, not a sound or a twitch in any of the bronzed body parts she could see.
Lifting herself from the chair, Jessica leaned over to get a better look at his face. A shock of peroxided blond hair covered much of it. Jessica hiked one knee up onto the bed. Edging closer she reached out to move the hair so she could see his face. She had hardly touched him when he grabbed her hand and smiled at her. Jessica let out a loud whoop and struggled to break free.
“Whoa,” he said, still dull with sleep.
“Let go!” Jessica barked, pulling away from him. Startled, he let go of
her hand and the momentum propelled her back off the bed. As her feet hit the floor she continued moving backwards. She tripped over the discarded Cristal bottle, and landed flat on her butt on the floor, with a loud “ouch!”
Her shrieks evoked an even louder male response. Not from the buff, blond man-boy in her bed who couldn’t have been more than 20 or 22—23 tops. The sound came from the floor on the other side of the bed. Another male head popped up and Jessica could not stop another yelp. Her heart started to rev up again.
“What the hell, Jessica?” her friend Tommy said. “I’m going to take a Technicolor yawn all over this fine Italian duvet you scored at Between the Sheets last week if you don’t stop screaming. I don’t want to ruin it,” he said caressing the silky cinnamon-colored duvet as though it were alive and needed soothing. He rested his head on the edge of the bed then looked up.
“You will have wasted all that revenge shopping, the time, the energy, the focus. You only have so many divorce tantrums in you, you know?”
Jessica blinked several times. Her eyes moved from the disgruntled Tommy, still only partly visible from his perch on the floor, to the sandy haired Adonis. Smiling, he was now propped up in her bed. His arms were folded across a well-developed chest, washboard abs exposed above the waistband of his boxer shorts.
Not my usual type, she mused to herself, if I have a type. Her eyes lingered a moment longer focusing more on his face, then widened in horror and recognition.
“Ppppool boy!” she gasped loudly. Remembering how little she had on, a new wave of embarrassment worked its way through her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. Without warning, the bedroom door flew open. All three of them wailed and shrank away from the door.
“Dios mìo, Jessica, que te pasa? Are you okay? Esta bien?” Bernadette asked with a mix of fear and reproach in her voice and on her face. Reproach won out as she took in the scene.
The woman who stood in the doorway was not five feet tall. Her short-cropped black hair had begun to grey and her face to wear beyond her 60-something years. Jessica knew, without a doubt, she had contributed to that wear and tear.
Bernadette, whom Jessica sometimes referred to as St. Bernadette when she thought she could get away with it, had been hired as the family’s housekeeper before Jessica’s birth. She had become much more than that over the years. A confidant when Jessica was at odds with her parents and her most formidable opponent in her teen years. Bernadette possessed an eerie sixth sense for when Jessica was up to no good and had caught her many times doing something she shouldn’t have been doing.
Bernadette stayed on as manager of the Rancho Mirage estate even after Jessica and her family moved out, one by one. First, Jessica’s father, who, by the time she was 8 or 9 spent less time in the desert and more in L.A. near his real estate development firm headquartered there. When Jessica was in 7th grade, he divorced her mother and moved to their Brentwood house full-time. Then Jessica went off to college at UC Irvine, on to law school at Stanford, and to married life in Cupertino. Her jet-setting mother received the desert estate as part of the divorce settlement. After Jessica left for College, her mother took off too, returning only when she was not with, or in pursuit of, yet another husband. She was with number four somewhere in the Mediterranean. Her mother’s absence was the main reason Jessica had allowed the family home to become a place of refuge as her adult life collapsed around her. She loved her mother a lot more from a distance than when they were in the same room together.
Bernadette put her hands on her hips. That was a bad sign.
“What’s going on in here, Jessica?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Jessica replied feeling like a 15-year-old again.
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me.” Spreading her elbows out, like a mother eagle’s wings, Bernadette puffed herself up so she looked twice her size. Her black eyes blazed; her nose beaklike. “You going to ‘splain it?”
“It, it... it’s okay Mrs. B,” Tommy said, trying to sound reassuring in the midst of a terrified stutter. He’d known Bernadette almost as long as Jessica had.
“Oh, it is definitely not okay,” she said shaking her head. As she continued to speak, she pointed at each one in the room. “Not for you, Tommy, or for you, Jessica, or for you, Brien Anthony Williams.”
“Uh oh,” Jessica muttered. When she used all three names, you were in big trouble.
“Hey, be cool, Mrs. B, please. I can explain. It’s not what you think, honest. I need this job. I’m saving for a surf safari to the north shore.” Brien looked even younger than Jessica first thought as he pleaded his case. “Honest, nothing really happened. She’s not even my type, Mrs. B. No offense, Jess.”
Jessica shot him a dirty look, not his type, huh? “Nobody calls me Jess, Brien.”
“Uh, sorry, Jessica,” he said with emphasis on the “ca.”
“He’s right, Bernadette,” Tommy interjected. “Jessica had a lot to drink at her divorce party last night. We all got carried away celebrating her, uh, liberation. We ran into Brien at Costa’s and he joined the party. When it was time to go, he helped me get Jessica back into the limo and home. We didn’t want to wake you up.” He shrank back a little farther from the door under the pressure of Bernadette’s gaze.
“Divorce party, bah! Dios dame paciencia! What about all this mess? And why don’t you have any clothes on?”
“We were hungry, so we brought food home, and then we had a little more to drink when we got here. Who could let chilled Cristal go to waste? We cleaned out the limo and came in here to finish it. Jessica tore her own clothes off, honest. That’s all that happened, I swear, Bernadette. I’m not Brien’s type either.” Tommy’s head slumped back down on the edge of the bed.
“That’s totally the truth, Mrs. B,” Brien added with great sincerity. “Not that Jessica isn’t bangin’, I mean, for an older babe. I’m not denying I had some feelings when I saw her in that black dress, but she was doke, you know, whacked? She was out of it by the time we got her home. I don’t take advantage, and I don’t mix business with pleasure.” He shook his head emphatically with that last remark, reaching up to push back the lock of blond hair that had fallen in his face.
Bernadette still looked skeptical but let it go. She took another look around the room and asked, “Who do you think will clean this up? Me? Not me, I’m finishing my coffee. The maid? Uh-uh. Jessica you’ll fix this, right? Go home Tommy. Go home Brien.”
Jessica nodded in agreement. Nodding her head reminded her that the world had not yet receded from spin mode.
Bernadette stepped out of the room mumbling in both English and Spanish. Jessica could make out the words “Sodom and Gomorrah” but little else as Bernadette crossed herself and closed the door behind her. She didn’t slam it, but shut the door with enough force to make the three of them pay. They all winced. Once Bernadette left it was as if the oxygen had returned to the room. Released from her grip, they all moved, although not too fast. Tommy pulled himself up off his knees. Like Brien, he too was wearing only his boxer shorts. Unlike Brien, Tommy’s shorts sported colorful firework patterns set against a navy background.
You have to love a guy like that, Jessica thought. She did.
Tommy was the younger brother of Jessica’s closest childhood friend, Kelly Fontana. During high school he was always around, doing all the things younger brothers do to be annoying. Not too long after Jessica went off to college in the OC she learned that Kelly died in a hit-and-run accident. Her death left Tommy and his parents devastated. He stayed on to care for his parents and still lived in their casita, a tiny but nice guest house. At some point, during her visits to the desert and his visits to the OC, she and Tommy had sort of adopted each other. He became the little brother she never had, and she stepped in for Kelly. It wasn’t always clear who looked out for whom, but they had forged a strong bond.
While the guys searched for missing articles of clothing and dressed, Jessica pulled on a robe. Then she pi
cked up the garbage and straightened the room. She still wobbled on her feet, and those food containers brought on a new wave of nausea, but she kept moving. Jessica wanted to be alone and get out of the frigging Spanx that were riding up her ass every time she bent over. She needed a shower and coffee. Or, maybe she should just crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over her head for at least a week.
Jessica knew better. First, she had to set things right in the room or there would be hell to pay from Bernadette. Who was she kidding? There would be hell to pay no matter what. What else could you expect when you move back home and act like a delinquent?
The “older babe” comment still stung because it was true. At thirty-three Jessica was no kid. It wasn’t like she had one foot in the grave, either. As if on cue, a stabbing pain shot up her spine and rattled her brain as she bent over to pick up her ripped dress. Jessica stood up, stretched her back, and stuffed the dress in the trash can she had retrieved from a corner of the bedroom.
She needed to change her ways. No more bar hopping. It was time to get serious about swimming and working out. Her shrink in Cupertino assured her exercise would help with the panic attacks. She’d look better the next time she got caught in nothing but her Spanx. Not that such a thing was likely to happen again. In fact, she still wasn’t sure how it had happened this time.
“Hey, how did we all end up with so few clothes on?” Jessica asked.
Tommy looked up as he pulled on his t-shirt. “At first we were all sitting on the floor, stuffing our faces with nachos and downing the Cristal. We each had our own bottle.”
All Hallows' Eve Heist, Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #2 (Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) Page 9
