by Lena North
There was a brief silence, and when she spoke she did it quietly and a lot slower than before. Her voice had lost its happiness too.
“I’m investigating that creep you broke up with.”
“I’ve tried to get rid of him for years,” I said, not sure why it suddenly was important for me to explain I wasn’t the kind of woman who stayed in an abusive relationship.
“Totally,” she said calmly. “I used to have a stalkery guy too, you know.”
There was a pause, and I didn’t know because I had no clue who she was, but it seemed appropriate to say something, so I murmured, “Okay.”
“Shot at me fourteen times and killed my brother. Total assclown.”
“What?”
I turned to look at Joao who for some reason was laughing silently.
“Yeah, although he’s dead now, so I don’t have to worry anymore which is good.”
It would be.
“Okay,” I said because there really wasn’t anything else to say.
“I also went with the others to that place where you grew up, Charlie. This is us paying you back for not finding out about it and handling it.”
I didn’t understand why they felt the need to get involved, but before I could ask, I heard a deep voice shouting for her to come and clean the pink gunk out of the oven immediately. The man sounded less than happy but there were people laughing too, and I raised my brows in surprise.
“Oopsie,” she chirped. “Gotta go, but we’re planning a visit so I might see you in a few weeks or so. It’ll be fun.”
“Ok –”
The call was closed before I got a word out, and I stared at the phone. After a while, Joao picked it out of my hand, put it in his pocket and pushed my chin up until our eyes met.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“That was Annie. She’s a little bit… different.”
“You don’t say,” I breathed, although not sarcastically.
I was too stunned to apply any kind of emotion to my voice and tried frantically to figure out what to say next.
“They’re friends,” Joao said calmly. “Annie’s engaged to Snow’s cousin.”
“There’s an awful lot of cousins all over your life,” I told him.
He started laughing but I hadn’t meant it as a joke, so I didn’t.
“They’re cool people, most of the time,” he said.
People who were breaking into my small apartment, forging legal documents, hacking into banks, and whatever else they’d done for me seemed like people a policeman should think were uncool, but I decided not to question him.
“I need to find a cash machine, and then I guess I have some shopping to do,” I said instead.
“Let’s go.”
“You’re not coming.”
“I don’t mind shopping.”
“I need underwear,” I blurted out.
His eyes lit up, and he started laughing. A group of people passing us turned to look, but they were grinning and didn’t stop. Then Joao slung an arm around my shoulders, and the way his dreads slid over my neck when he pulled me close to his side sent shivers up my spine. We started moving, and he didn’t let go of me, so I slid my arm around his back and put two fingers in one of the belt loops.
“Oh, I could totally go with you for that kind of shopping,” he murmured in my ear, causing another set of shivers which I tried to ignore. “Though the town might actually implode from the explosion of gossip, so I won’t.”
I exhaled and tilted my head back.
“If you’re a good boy, I might show them to you later,” I said.
His eyes darkened, and I saw a small muscle move on his jaw. Holy cow, I thought. I’d never really flirted with anyone before, but if it were this easy, I’d totally do it again.
“Hello, Joao,” a soft voice said in front of us, and we stopped abruptly.
A small, pretty woman with soft curves and silky brown hair in big waves around her face stood in front of us. She looked tense, and I felt Joao move uncomfortably.
“Mimi,” he murmured.
Ah. The ex-girlfriend. The one he’d broken up with not very long ago. It would be awkward meeting her under any circumstances, and on the street in front of everyone, with Joao’s arm around my shoulders was not a situation I would have picked.
“Hello,” I said politely.
“This is Charlie,” Joao said, and added stiffly, “Charlie, this is Mimi.”
I tried to move away from him but his hand on my shoulder tightened, and I didn’t want to look ridiculous, so I stayed pressed to his side.
“Oh. You’re Dupree’s… daughter,” Mimi said, again in that soft voice.
I didn’t like how she’d made a small pause before the word daughter, and I sensed she’d wanted to use a completely different term for what I was. Joao caught it too, and his arm tightened around my shoulders.
“I am,” I said sweetly. “Found me a whole set of cousins too and we’re having so much fun with them. They’re all so sweet, aren’t they?”
That hadn’t been nice of me. Tina had shared that most of the cousins liked Mimi, but none of them had liked her for Joao so it couldn’t have been easy for her. Their loyalty to Tina and Mimi’s inclination to gossip hadn’t made things better, but I still shouldn’t have rubbed it in.
“Are you enjoying your visit to Croxier?” she asked instead of answering my question, which I thought was wise of her.
“Enormously, although it isn’t exactly a visit. I’ll be staying here for a while,” I said.
“You’re staying?”
“My father lives here,” I told her, which she knew but apparently hadn’t processed.
“Yes, of course. I just thought you had other family and a job to go back to. Where do you come from?”
Her voice was again full of sweetness, and I wondered how on earth Joao could have gone from dating her to spending time with me. We were clearly very different.
“The mainland,” Joao interrupted. “I’m sorry, but we need to go. Charlie has a few errands to run.”
“Of course,” she crooned. “It was so nice meeting you, Charlie. And you Joao.”
She walked away without another word, and I had to admire her dignity. That couldn’t have been easy for her, and I probably should have handled it better. Joao felt the same, apparently.
“I’m sorry, I should have –” he said, but I cut him off because it was sweet but unnecessary to make excuses for both Mimi’s and my behavior.
“No way you could have prepared for that. She didn’t like me, which she wouldn’t, of course. I didn’t like her either, which is partially because you used to sleep with her, but mostly it’s because of what she did to Tina. We’ve met. We’ve communicated our mutual dislike. Now we’ll move on to ignoring each other, and you need to take me to a cash machine.”
His brows went up but there was surprised humor written all over his face, so I smiled up at him.
“Sunshine,” he murmured and bent to give me a soft kiss. Then he put a hand under my chin and turned my face to the side. “Look what I found,” he murmured into my ear, and I burst out laughing when I saw the ATM two feet away.
That laughter stopped when the machine spat out a receipt of my withdrawal which also included the total remaining on my account.
“What did she do?” I squealed.
“What?”
“I have more than ten times more than I expected in my account. She said she’d used my money to buy and sell some stocks, but this can’t be right.”
“Yeah, well, Annie is a genius. She probably did what she told you, made a ton of cash and put your share in your account.”
I blinked slowly a few times.
“I have a nest egg,” I breathed. “I always wanted a nest egg.”
Joao pulled the receipt out of my hand, looked at it and grinned.
“It’s not a very big nest egg, Charlie.”
/>
It wasn’t, but it also was. I could probably live off that money without working for six months. Maybe even eight if I stretched it. So, it wasn’t a huge amount, but it was to me.
“I know,” I said. “But I don’t have to rely on anyone for a good long while, so it might be the nest egg of a kingfisher, but that’s good enough for me. It’ll also get me undies that’s a whole lot nicer than I expected.”
I hadn’t meant it to come out flirty, and I was mostly stunned, so I didn’t think about what I was saying. Joao pulled me into his arms anyway, and the kiss I got in full display of every gossiping citizen of Croxier was neither brief nor gentle.
Chapter Ten
Carrie
Charlie
I heard her and had already started moving so when the door to my room was thrown open we suddenly stood just a couple of feet apart.
“Carrie,” I whispered, took a step forward and wrapped my arms around her.
We’d never hugged before, and she always seemed taller than me. As we stood there and she leaned her head into my neck, I realized she wasn’t.
“Lottie,” she said quietly.
“Not anymore,” I countered. “I’m Charlie again.”
Her shoulders shook a little, and I moved back.
“Don’t cry,” I said. “Please.”
“He hurt you. Benito told me what you looked like when he brought you over.”
“Yeah.”
There really wasn’t anything else to say because Sebastian had hurt me.
“I’ll kill him,” she said, wiped her cheeks and tried to smile. “See if I don’t.”
“No,” I protested.
What was it with these people and killing my godawful former boyfriend?
“Okay, no,” she conceded. “I probably won’t. Dupree will, or Papi. Or…” There was suddenly a sly look in her eyes, and I knew what she’d say. “I hear you have… connections to our chief of police.”
“Joao isn’t going to kill Sebastian,” I declared, and tried to change the topic. “Let’s go find your parents.”
“Charlie?”
“Yes?”
“You look really good.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying hard to sound casual.
It would be ridiculous to start crying because of a sweet comment from a friend, but she’d seen me the way I had been in Prosper, and it felt good to hear I wasn’t that girl anymore.
“Heard it from all the cousins, but I didn’t get it. You were always pretty, but in an understated way, and the hottie they described didn’t sound like you.” Her wobbly smile widened and became so bright I had to smile back. “I get it now.”
The cousins thought I was hot? Nice.
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I murmured another, “Thanks,” and started moving across the courtyard toward the kitchen door where I expected to find Pauline. “Is it safe for you to come here, Carrie?” I asked quietly.
“Sure. I talked to Joao, and he said it would be more suspicious if I stayed away. You know I usually go home more or less every month, and if I suddenly didn’t, people would start asking questions.”
Oh. I’d refused to talk to her on the phone, worried that Sebastian monitored the calls somehow, but I hadn’t thought about her frequent visits to her parents, so I hadn’t expected her to suddenly be there.
“Okay,” I said. “Makes sense.”
“He always does,” she said and walked into the kitchen to wrap an arm around her mother’s shoulders.
“Huh,” I muttered noncommittally, not entirely sure I agreed with that statement.
They both started laughing.
“What?” I asked.
“There are a lot of firsts for Josie these days, I hear,” Carrie said. “Guess that’s why he’s smitten.”
Smitten? What kind of word was that? I also wasn’t entirely sure how smitten he actually was. Several weeks had passed since we kissed outside Nicholas and Pauline’s door that first time, and I loved the time we spent together. I was also confused. Everyone treated us as a couple, and I heard people refer to me as his girlfriend, but he’d never called me that. We’d kissed more than a little, and probably more than a lot too when I thought about it, but he never took it any further. I wouldn’t have minded at all if he did, although I hadn’t shared this with Joao. I wasn’t sure if I should do something and mostly felt stupid for not being very experienced. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just flat out tell him to put his hands up my tee, could I?
I decided to not discuss Carrie’s choice of word and smiled blandly instead.
“A lot of firsts?” I asked.
“From what I hear, you’re not like any other girl he’s ever dated.”
“Carrie,” Pauline said warningly.
“Well, she isn’t.”
“I’m not?”
I’d met Mimi a couple more times, so I knew we were very different. She was clearly not one of my biggest fans, which I could understand, but she still spoke in a soft voice, saying all the right things and smiling sweetly in a way I struggled to do. I had no clue who else he might have dated and hadn’t thought much about it. He was a few years older than me, though, and I saw how other women looked at him, so I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought he was gorgeous. And since he was, there would have been other girls.
“You argue with him.”
Well, yeah. He was stubborn and bossy so of course, I would.
“I heard that you bring him food when he has to cancel dates with you.”
I did, but he needed to eat. He worked a lot and seemed to be on call around the clock, so he canceled our plans or changed them sometimes. It always upset him a lot more than me, and I started to understand that his previous dates and girlfriends had minded, and a lot, which I thought was strange. He’d worked with Croxier PD since he turned twenty, which meant they dated him knowing this fact, so to be upset about it was just plain rude. And stupid.
For me, it was more than knowing what he did, and how a lot of people depended on him. I’d lived large parts of my life alone, and if he’d been in my face all the time, it would have freaked me out a lot more than a few changes to our plans. Besides, we always rescheduled, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t see him for days.
He still needed to eat, though, so I got lunch for him or made sure there was something in his fridge if he had to work late. And he always tracked me down to say thank you, or called if it was too late.
“I have plenty of time, so it’s not really a big deal,” I mumbled.
“Heard some other things which we’ll talk about when Mom isn’t around.”
I felt how I blushed and bit my lip.
“I’m on my way to the store,” Pauline said calmly. “Nico will want to fire up the grill tonight, so I need to pick something up for that. Shellfish, I think.”
“Yay,” Carrie squealed. “It’s so good to be home.”
I wondered why she stayed in Prosper when she could find a job on the Islands and never leave.
“I’ll call Joao. We had plans but –”
“I’ll give him a call and tell him you’ll eat here. We can all walk down to the bar later. I’m sure Carrie will want to meet the cousins.”
It still surprised me how everything always was so easy with Nicholas and Pauline. They simply adjusted to whatever happened without making a huge deal out of it. Carrie had been the same when we worked together, which was part of why we’d become such good friends in spite of only spending time together in the office break room, or at our desks.
“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe Dupree would like to come too?” Then I remembered that it was Friday and the bar would be packed with people, so I added, “I’m not sure if he can get away, though.”
Her face softened, and she smiled.
“If I tell him you asked, he’ll be here. Either Tina or Thea will help Lippy at the bar for a few hours.”
“Okay,” I repea
ted.
Easy, again.
Pauline walked off, waving her hand at us and I looked at Carrie.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“Just about everything?” I asked back. “Helping me get away mostly, which led to a lot of good things for me.”
“Good for me too since it turned out you’re my cousin.”
“Did you know?”
They’d told me she hadn’t known, but I still wondered if she’d seen the resemblance to her uncle. My eye color was pretty unique, even on the Islands, so it seemed strange that she hadn’t made the connection.
“I suspected you might be from the Islands and wondered who your father might be. Don’t know why I didn’t make the connection to Dupree, but I should have seen it.”
“Lippy almost fell over when he laid eyes on me. I look a lot like Dupree, Carrie.”
“Not that much,” she protested. “You have his eyes, mostly. And he’s… You were always very serious.”
“Boring.”
“No. Not boring at all, Charlie. It’s just, Uncle Dupree… I was thinking more about his way with the ladies.”
She grinned when I made a face.
“I’ve heard about that,” I said. “Haven’t seen him with anyone, which I’m kind of grateful for. It isn’t any of my business, and I shouldn’t care, but it would feel pretty bizarre.”
“There’s a lot of celibacy going on in Croxier these days, I hear,” she said with a cheeky grin, and I knew we were back to the topic of Joao and me. “Let’s go to Maddie’s place and talk,” she added quietly.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
The sculpture cleared my head and had a way of making everything seem possible, so it was my favorite place when I needed to think about things. We sat down, but I wasn’t sure where to begin, and she must have seen it because she started sharing news from the office. The girl who had replaced me in the accounting department had started her career in the company by engaging in an affair with the head of the warehouse. His wife worked in accounting too, and she had objected rather vehemently to the whole sordid thing. Since the affair had mostly taken place in the actual warehouse, my position was vacant again, and they were looking for a new manager. Then Carrie started sharing some of her memories of Dupree, and I told her about the strangeness of unexpectedly finding a father.
