Dreamspinner Press Year Eight Greatest Hits

by Brandon Witt

  Carrie and Davey were both taking AP classes in high school. Tommy was so proud of them it hurt.

  Collin was doing just as well in junior high. He stayed after school two days a week to help tutor kids with learning disabilities. Who knew?

  With Max and Zoe starting preschool in the fall, Tommy was trying to decide what to do with himself. Gene had told him if he took a few business classes, he’d offer Tommy the manager job, maybe take him on as a partner. Gene said he was getting old and he had no one to pass his baby to. Tommy didn’t know if he wanted to work at Smarty’s the rest of his life, but he knew part of him would always belong to that place, just like part of him would always belong to the kids and Bobby. When he thought about it, he kind of liked the idea of being there, maybe doing for someone what Gene had done for him. He’d talk it over with Bobby sometime soon and see what he thought.

  Their lives weren’t perfect. Their family wasn’t perfect. Just like Max and Zoe’s winter clothes, not so long ago, their family was a tapestry of patches and cheap thread. Parts of the pattern were too ugly to look at, and some parts were so beautiful they could bring tears to your eyes. They were all wading through the rocky waters of life and forgiveness and hope together, with only a few bumps and scrapes along the way.

  Tommy figured that was exactly how it should be.

  J.H. KNIGHT has been writing love stories since the second grade. When she’s not catering to the whims of her imaginary friends (whom she sometimes refers to as “characters”), she’s usually found driving her four children all over the planet, working on a school project, or saying things like “Not until your homework is done!”

  A Pacific Northwest native, she loves the outdoors in every season whether she’s in the city, in the mountains, or building sloppy sandcastles with her kids on the beach. On her best days, she’s cuddled up with a good book, and on her worst days she’s tearing her hair out as she tries to decide if her sentence needs a comma or a semicolon. She gratefully bows down in awe of editors, since she usually gets it wrong.

  Blog: http://knightwylde.blogspot.com

  Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6474818.J_H_Knight

  Twitter @Knightwylde

  By J. H. KNIGHT

  A Simple Romance

  The Last Thing He Needs

  Published By DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  In memory of my mother, Sylvia Ann.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Sam, my most stalwart champion.

  You are my sister because of genetics, but my best friend by choice.

  I would choose you again and again.

  I couldn’t have done it without you, so… thank you.

  Chapter 1

  A GOOD PI would never spend stakeout time to play Tap Tap Revenge on his iPhone. But I like to consider myself an adept PI, one that can multitask. So I felt no guilt as my fingers flew dexterously over the screen. It was either that or watch the guy one house over, who either seemed to be fixing an old beater of a car or going for some sort of beer drinking record.

  Damn. I could go for something cold right now. “Drew, why didn’t we bring beer?”

  Always the patient sentinel, my partner sat relaxed, as if we hadn’t been sitting here for three hours. His fingers drummed lightly on the wheel. He ignored me, as he was wont to do. I was well aware that beer on a stakeout was probably irresponsible. But dammit, I could operate a camcorder whether I was sober as a judge or loose and relaxed. I didn’t bother to explain to his cold profile.

  You didn’t need to see his “Army for Life” tattoo to know he was ex-military. Drew was a real hoorah motherfucker who’d been honorably discharged after an injury in the field. If that convoy ambush hadn’t left him slightly deaf in his left ear, he’d probably be wearing combat boots and fatigues right now. His more anal military tendencies made him an amazing PI. He could probably sit in this car in his slacks and French-cuffed shirt, straight and pressed, for a decade or more.

  I glanced down at my tan cargo pants and Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. We couldn’t be more different, and not just in mode of dress. His by-the-book approach was a good foil to my wild-card personality and made us good partners. If Drew was searching for a crafty way to enter a house, I probably already had my elbow through the back door glass.

  “I need a smoke,” I said.

  “Like you need a gun to your head,” Drew finished my already finished statement, and that was that.

  I scored a not-too-shabby 96 percent on my game and briefly hit the sleep button.

  “Good God, Drew, can we turn on the AC? The leather is sticking to my ass like glue.”

  “We look too conspicuous if the car is running,” he said, giving me the shut-up-I-know-what-I’m-doing look. “People pay attention to an idling car. You can’t even tell we’re in here.”

  “They’ll be able to tell when they box up our well-done skeletons,” I whined.

  I rolled down the window a quarter inch, just a crack, hoping for relief. I met only hot, sticky air. Florida weather in July gave no quarter, not even for sun worshippers like myself.

  I fanned myself for a bit, looking around the street for the hundredth time. Alton Street was wide and treelined, with the same type of homes dominating both sides of the street—large ranch houses. The street was the picture of normalcy. Mr. Fix-It next door scratched his head with a wrench as I checked the front of the sprawling white ranch house yet again. No activity. Two ponytailed young girls giggled in the driveway of our target house—they’d been giggling now for two hours. Only the Lord above knew why.

  As a few kids tumbled past, yelling for no reason I could discern other than the fact that they had mouths and lungs, I rolled the window back up. I was grateful the windows of Drew’s low-slung black Mazda were darkly (illegally) tinted. Kids were a decidedly nosy bunch and made excellent tattletales to suspicious mothers and fathers.

  “Is that CLS550 still there?”

  Drew snorted. “You’d think someone would know not to do surveillance in a Mercedes.”

  I eyed the flashy silver car parked neatly on the curb, only four doors down. Drew was right. You needed a car that was at least neighborhood appropriate, so that it would blend in. It was a nice neighborhood, but no one here drove that kind of car. He was a bogey. Out of place.

  “You think Blake hired a second team to watch us?” I asked.

  “If he did, they are definitely on the wrong track, seeing as how we’re behind them.”

  Looking back at the neatly manicured lawn with the crazy rooster lawn ornament (and picket fence, for God’s sake), it was hard to believe we were there to bust the lovely Mrs. Blake for something seedy. She had, however, been in the backyard for over an hour.

  “Maybe she gardens,” Drew murmured, his timing making me jump a little.

  “I wish we could have eyes on her,” I said. “There are a lot of things you could be doing in an enclosed backyard.”

  “Swimming. Gardening. Barbecuing.”

  “Screwing someone in a lawn chair?”

  “I’ll take a little of option four. And three.”

  I checked the photo in the file again, looking down at her smiling, round visage. Wispy bangs fell into her sweet brown eyes as she charmed the photographer with her smile—front two teeth slightly spaced apart, as if she didn’t have enough charm. She looked exactly what she was—a forty-one-year-old mother of three who lived in the hell that was suburbia. Okay, I was ad-libbing there. She probably thought it was the joy of suburbia.

  “Probably drives a minivan even,” I guessed.

  “Dodge Durango,” Drew said casually, not even asking where my thought pattern originated.

  Well, that still fit the profile, then. Moms were driving SUVs now. Big sport utility monsters that carted their kids around in the lap of luxury, replete with DVD players and headphone sets. When I was a kid, I either played the license plate game, listened to my Walkman
until the batteries died, or played gin rummy until cards were thrown and someone was called a “damned dirty cheater.” Or we tried to see who could get the other kid in the most trouble without actually making my dad pull over to beat us both. I couldn’t help but think that if we’d gotten to watch The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (had it existed back then) while drinking Capri Suns, we’d probably have been more pleasant kids.

  “I’ve got two more of these today,” Drew said, rolling his shoulders. “Let’s hope they’re as uneventful.”

  Cheating spouses was our number one requested service. It was not only a reflection of the current state of marriage but also damned depressing. If I had to hear one more husband or wife, married since the beginning of time with 2.5 kids and a mortgage, tell me about his or her suspicious inkling about a spouse’s new cologne, I was going to lose it. Really.

  Tonight’s contestant on Let’s Catch a Cheating Bastard fit neatly in that profile. Mr. Blake, with the large glasses, as lean and sparse as his spouse was round, had earnestly told me his tale of woe. And wonder of wonders, I’d barely managed not to roll my eyes clear out of my head. It was just that typical. “But that’s so cold, Mac,” you might say. And I would say that once you enter the private investigator phase of your relationship, it’s pretty much over anyway, isn’t it?

  They made our jobs easy—most women already knew. They just wanted the proof. They wanted the pictures to rub in his face. They wanted the bitch’s name. Nine times out of ten, their suspicions came to fruition, usually spurred by a behavior change. He’s eating right nowadays. He’s wearing contacts now. I’d even had one strange woman give me the mistress’s phone number and name. I just want to know what he’s leaving his family for, she’d lied to me (and herself), her eyes burning with fervor. Is that weird?

  Yes. Yes, it was.

  The men were a different bag of chips altogether. They were wrong most of the time. I just want to know who she’s banging, our last enlightened caveman had groused about his wife—the mother to his lovely twins. Turns out she was banging the Oprah Winfrey Show before slamming the dry cleaners, and then finally getting hammered by a BerryBlast Coolatta on the way home. In other words, a big fat nothing. But what did I care? I got paid either way. I only wished I could let Mrs. Caveman know that he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her.

  I stuck Mrs. Blake’s picture back in the folder and pulled out my digital camcorder. Since we were working on Mr. Blake’s dime, at some point I knew we were destined to follow this woman to the bookstore, a Starbucks, maybe even cool our heels while she browsed a SuperTarget, before finally following her to pick up her 2.5 kids at daycare. All right, it was three—Emily, Taggert, and Taylor. Our only break was that the huge blue Dodge Durango would be hella easy to tail.

  “Time is 1:15 p.m.,” I murmured in the general direction of the mike before recording four time-stamped seconds of the stationary Dodge Durango.

  For my own purposes, I panned out to get the tags of the CLS550 still kissing the curb. I was pretty sure he was a PI by this point, and I was getting annoyed. “Amateur.” I clicked off the camcorder. “This will make scintillating footage for Mr. Blake later on.”

  “You always hope they’re right,” Drew said, popping the tab on a Red Bull.

  I stared at him for a moment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ever since you dumped Trevor. Love lost, and all that nonsense. Or maybe it’s just that misery loves company.”

  “That’s a miserable thing to say,” I said, glaring at the camcorder in my lap.

  Drew shrugged.

  Just because I decided Trevor and I were better off enemies than lovers didn’t make me bitter. The fact that he then decided he was more into breasts than he’d formerly thought? Yeah, that made me a little tart, I won’t lie.

  “Or maybe it started before Trevor even. Maybe it was—”

  “Don’t.” I knew exactly who he thought it was, and I didn’t want his name mentioned. Nick was a failure I kept close to my heart, even more of a failure than the Trevor thing. Which said quite a bit.

  The green micronumbers on Drew’s dashboard clock ticked past three. My mind was itching with being still. I wanted to walk around the block. Sleep. Eat something.

  “Toss me the Cheetos,” I demanded.

  Drew aimed the bag at my head, and I caught it just in time. I opened the bag violently, and Cheetos flew into the console, making Drew holler at me. I threatened to rub Cheetos dust on his slacks, which settled him down quickly enough. I slowly picked the artificially orange pieces off the dash, eating them one by one, knowing it would annoy him.

  He managed to ignore me for three minutes before I heard a low, measured growl. He turned slightly in his seat, giving me more back than profile. The stress alone sent him running an unnerved hand through his black hair, messing up his low pony, and when he released his hair from the tie, I briefly wondered why we had decided messing around was such a bad idea. He kept his hair slightly long, long enough for a pony that hit mid–shoulder blade. His time in the military made him determined to never get a buzz cut again, and he was, quite simply, a hair whore.

  “You should leave it down.”

  “You should finish eating those Cheetos out of my cup holder before I go insane.”

  I glared at the clock, stuffing more orangey goodness into my mouth. Not from the cup holder. This was pretty much it. Mr. Blake got off at four and home at five, like clockwork. So if Mrs. Blake wanted to get her groove on, she had a small window to get it done.

  At 4:46 p.m., our patience was finally rewarded, as a woman in a blue sweat suit and a high ponytail moseyed out the door. I pressed record on my digital cam and watched her on the tiny screen as she checked the mail, threw away a few circulars, and pulled the trash can in from the curb. She waved the handful of mail at Mr. Fix-It. Then she waved the ponytailed girls in and shut the door behind them.

  “Well, that was certainly worth it.” I saved my sarcastic aside for when I clicked the camera off.

  Drew shrugged. “See? Looking for dirt.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, annoyed. “We get paid either way. And just for the record, we still have a few more days of reconnaissance to do.”

  The CLS550 hadn’t moved an inch, and suddenly I was incensed enough to do something about it. I jammed a baseball cap on my head and crammed on my aviators.

  “Blake has a lot of nerve, hiring two PIs to watch this nonexistent show.”

  Drew snorted. “We’re not entirely sure that’s another PI.”

  “Don’t you want to know for sure?”

  “We’ll run the tags,” Drew said, pressing the ignition start button. “Don’t do anything crazy.”

  My right leg was already half out the door. “I have a better idea.”

  “I hope that better idea doesn’t involve walking up to the car of a complete stranger,” Drew called out the window as I shut the door. “Mac—”

  “Just keep the car idling, okay? Be back in five.”

  He muttered something I didn’t care to catch and rolled up the window. Disapproval was written all over his face before the tinted glass sealed the interior of the car, but I couldn’t care less. After four hours of being cooped up in the front seat with Drew, it was too nice to finally stretch my legs. I meandered—not slowly enough or quickly enough to attract attention. Pearls of sweat were rolling down the back of my neck before I even reached the bogey.

  I leaned over and tapped on the tinted glass. The window rolled down, and I was surprised by the clean-cut guy that eyed me suspiciously. He had a typical corporate image, even sitting in his car, suit jacket discarded and tie loosened. He was ridiculously good-looking, something I realized I had no business noticing. Black hair, thick and silky, a little overlong. Smooth, creamy skin looked as if it would be soft as butter.

  I leaned back and forced myself to focus. Who cared how hot he was? He was on our turf. “Blake gets home at five, you know. No need to s
it here all night.”

  “Blake?” He looked at me blankly, blinking those big sky-blue eyes. Even his glasses made him look good. “Who is Blake?”

  “Is that the way you’re going to play it?”

  “I’m not Blake.” He started to sound annoyed. “My name is Jordan Channing, actually.”

  Uh-huh. Sounded about right. Last time I checked, they weren’t giving away Benzes on the street corner. He probably had the perfect corporate Barbie girlfriend with matching accessories and a sweet Barbie Dreamhouse. Even if I was wondering where a suit like him acquired a body like that, I knew it was only the daydreams of the deluded. I could smell straight a mile away. Actually I could smell him a mile away, and not because his cologne was overpowering. A light whiff of something clean and refreshing, like Irish Spring or fresh soap.

  “Mackenzie Williams,” I offered, without being asked.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said, his eyes going squinty. “Somewhere… I’m sure of it.” Then his expression cleared. “Do you know Trevor Smith?”

  I held back my groan, but barely. Would the roach never die? “Yes, I know Trevor.”

  “We work at the same law firm,” he said. “I think I’ve seen you in his office a few times. I think he said you were his brother, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said, noncommittal.

  That hurt, but I wouldn’t let it get to me. Trevor hadn’t been the first man I’d dated who was firmly stuck in the closet, but hopefully, he would be the last. In my card catalogue, the Dewey Decimal System had placed him firmly under Ancient History.

  “So if you’re not looking for Blake, who are you looking for?”

  His expression closed, and I felt silly feeling a loss. “What makes you think I’m looking for someone? I could live in the area.”

  “You could, but this car lives somewhere else,” I said. “Try again.”