She Drives Me Crazy

by Leslie Kelly

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard right at first. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Nick didn’t flinch at his angry tone. “I figured it out pretty fast after we got married. I confronted her when she was about eight months pregnant. She admitted it.” He rubbed a weary hand through his hair. “There was no way she could deny it unless she was gonna have the biggest preemie baby ever born.”

  Johnny put a hand on the back of his chair, his fingers curling reflexively as his head began to pound. “Mama and I have been treating Jack like our own since the day Daneen brought him back to town. You let us…let her…fall in love with him….”

  “I didn’t know Daneen had continued her lie after I split,” Nick admitted. “I was too humiliated, too furious over what she’d done—over what I’d lost—to want to talk to anyone after I found out. In case you’ve forgotten, I pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for the next year.”

  He hadn’t forgotten a moment of that long, worry-filled time.

  “How’d Daneen convince you to marry her, anyway?”

  Nick ran a weary hand through his hair. “She told me she was pregnant and that her dad was looking for me, out for blood. I thought we’d had sex, but I wasn’t totally sure. I just woke up with her on top of me after a senior party that year.”

  Johnny kept quiet, not about to interrupt Nick, though he wanted to shake him for being so careless.

  “I had no idea there could have been anyone else. When I found out the truth, I left and we filed for divorce,” Nick continued. “I joined the Marines and went away to basic for a couple of months. Then straight overseas.”

  By which point Daneen had been back in Joyful, playing the poor, dumped divorcée with the needy, fatherless baby.

  “Honest to God, Johnny, I figured Daneen would have come back to Joyful and confronted one of the other suckers she thought could be the father. I never thought she’d go introducing her son to Mama as her one and only grandbaby.”

  Johnny began to see. It infuriated him, but he began to understand what had happened. “I wrote to you, once we heard where you were.”

  Nick frowned. “Yeah, and I had every intention of coming back and making you eat every word of that letter.”

  Johnny suddenly remembered the circumstances of Nick’s one previous return to Joyful. “But the time you came back…”

  “It was for the funeral.” Nick’s flat, unemotional tone said he hadn’t ever completely gotten past their childhood, either. “Mama seemed crushed.” He looked away and muttered, “Though for the life of me I’ll never understand why.”

  Johnny didn’t understand any better than Nick. He could only imagine their mother had found something to love in their father back when he’d been young and sober, and that was the person she mourned after he died.

  Nick had continued speaking. “The only thing that seemed to make her happy in her life was Daneen’s little boy.”

  Johnny shook his head. “So you let it go on. For years.”

  “You think I didn’t hate it? But I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking her heart.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference to how we felt about him, you know,” Johnny admitted. “It still doesn’t.”

  Nick gave one brief nod. “I know.”

  “Maybe you could have, too, if you’d—”

  “Don’t.” Nick threw a hand into the air, palm out, and his mouth pulled tight. “Don’t even say it. I was nowhere near reasonable or mature enough to think that way when I made the choices I made. Maybe a better man would have stayed with Daneen and raised Jack, but not me. Not then.”

  Johnny slowly felt the anger recede from his brain as he acknowledged the kind of sacrifice his brother had made, and the kind of man he’d become if he could admit his mistakes. “You let all of us think you were a scumbag.”

  Nick shrugged. “Maybe I was.”

  “You were eighteen.” Then Johnny added something he knew to be true. “You never loved Daneen. And you must have downright hated her for costing you the girl you did love.”

  Nick’s jaw tightened more, but he said nothing. He turned to again look outside, finally murmuring, “I was a kid. That boat has long since sailed. I’ve moved on and life’s okay.”

  Yeah, apparently it was. From what his mother had told him, Nick had done all right for himself in the Savannah police department. His kid brother—first a Marine hero, now a cop. Well, he supposed it wasn’t any more bizarre than Johnny being a prosecutor. He got a perverse sense of amusement, wondering what the old man would have had to say about such a turn of events.

  He’d probably be horrified.

  “So,” he asked, suddenly feeling weary, “what now?”

  “One more person to hash this out with.”

  “Daneen.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You really think she’ll admit the truth to the world?”

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s best she doesn’t, until her son’s older. It won’t be easy on a boy to find out his mama’s lied to him all his life, when he might well have a daddy living here in Joyful who would’ve been proud to claim him.”

  “Really?”

  Nick nodded. “If Daneen wasn’t so scared of what her father’d say or do, she might’ve been honest from the get-go.”

  Johnny, who’d only ever seen Dan Brady dote on his “little girl,” questioned that. But Nick seemed pretty sure. “Why?”

  A look of disgust crossed his brother’s face. “Well, because of Dan Brady’s renowned temper…and because of who a couple of the possible fathers are.”

  “Do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not.”

  But Nick told him anyway, first naming one guy Johnny remembered from high school.

  “He’s still in town,” he said, wondering how it would feel to have a woman knock on your door and introduce you to your ten-year-old son.

  “That’s not the only one,” Nick said. Then he added two names, both of which made Johnny’s jaw drop.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, yeah, I am. So you can see why Daneen would be a little concerned about our gun-happy sheriff finding out.”

  Yeah, he could see that. Bad enough for the sheriff to find out his grandson’s father could be one of his own deputies, but the other option was even worse.

  His very best friend. The mayor.

  Johnny absorbed the shock for a moment, thinking of the implications. Jimbo Boyd was Chief Brady’s age and had been married to Hannah for over two decades. Daneen had gotten pregnant with Jack when she was a seventeen-year-old girl.

  He felt sick. “You’re sure about Daneen and Jimbo?”

  Nick nodded. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s why she’s working for him now. The way she told it, he had her pretty well wrapped around his finger from the time she was a kid. Sick son of a bitch.”

  Before he could express his dismay to his brother, they both heard the sound of something falling out in the reception area. The door, which Emma had closed on the way out, had swung open again, as it often did. Curious as to whether Emma had come back, he walked over and looked at the secretary’s desk. Nobody was there. But a pile of files that had been on the edge of the desk was now scattered on the floor. He suddenly had a bad feeling.

  “This isn’t good,” Nick murmured from behind him.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Please tell me there’s no way Sheriff Brady was standing here listening to us talking about his little angel.”

  Johnny shook his head. “Can’t be. He’s speaking at the state police headquarters today. He’s been bragging about it for days.”

  Nick breathed a visible sigh of relief.

  “It still doesn’t matter,” Johnny said with a frown. “Because, here in Joyful, any overheard information can very quickly become public knowledge.”

  As he knew only too well.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I HAT
E TO TELL YOU this honeybun, but I’m gonna have to let you go.”

  Daneen had barely been paying attention when she answered the phone Wednesday evening, since she’d been yelling to Jack to wash up for supper. She immediately assumed the person calling had dialed the wrong number.

  “Did you hear me? I have to let you go. I’ve got no choice.”

  Yes, the words the man spoke meant it had to be the wrong number, no matter how familiar the voice sounded. Because it couldn’t be…he wouldn’t…

  “Daneen? You there?”

  Her heart leaped into her throat. “Jimbo?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. I’m sorrier’n hell about this, sugarbaby, but I gotta do it.”

  Let her go. As in…“You’re firing me?” Her voice rose in disbelief. She quickly lowered it since Jack was right in the kitchen. “You can’t be serious.”

  Jimbo’s long, drawn out sigh told her he was. “I’m sorry, I have no choice. Something’s going on with Hannah.”

  Hannah? What did she have to do with the business? She never bothered coming down to the office and had no idea how much work Daneen did to keep things running smoothly. Then she realized…“Oh, my God, she found out about us, didn’t she?”

  Another sigh. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure she did.”

  Part of her reacted with dismay to the news that her lover’s wife had finally learned the truth about them. The part of her who’d worshipped her own good and proper mother was struck hard with a deep sense of shame. Another part, the harder part that had taken over when she’d been forced to grow up all too soon because of her mother’s death, was glad. “So you think she knows. Maybe it’s time to make sure it’s all out in the open.” She took a deep breath, assessing everything. “We could finally stop hiding.”

  “Well…”

  Hearing hesitation in Jimbo’s voice, she instantly stiffened. “Well what? You’ve always said you couldn’t leave her because it would hurt her too much to find out. Now, if she already has, there’s no point waiting.” Feeling her pulse pound wildly, and knowing her voice was getting loud again, Daneen walked out the back door, tugging the phone cord after her. “You know what this means. We can be a family. You, me…and Jack.”

  She didn’t press any harder. Knowing Jimbo the way she did, she wondered if she’d already said too much. Jimbo didn’t like kids, didn’t want them, though he always treated Jack well enough. But surely, if his marriage was over, he could see how perfect things could be.

  Particularly now. Because after a very heated conversation with her ex-husband the night before, Daneen had realized that Nick’s family knew the truth of Jack’s parentage. Meaning others would soon find out, too. She just had to figure out what to tell her son, who was completely innocent in all of this.

  Thankfully, Nick had agreed to let her do it on her own timetable. He might have turned into a hard man, but he wasn’t an unkind one. He wouldn’t force her to tell Jack the truth until she was ready. And until she thought her son was, too.

  Lucky for her, Jack had always been a breezy, carefree kid who’d taken his one-parent upbringing in stride, since so many of his friends were the products of divorced homes. He’d never really asked about his absent father, seeming content to know he had a grandmother, and his Uncle Johnny, to care for him.

  God, please, let them still. Knowing them the way she did, she suspected her son would still have that feeling of extended family, for the rest of his life.

  And maybe now, with Jimbo there to step into their lives permanently, he could have more.

  “I’m sorry, Daneen,” he said, sounding like he meant it. “I love you darlin’, but Hannah doesn’t want you working for me anymore. So I’m gonna have to let you go.” Then, in a magnanimous voice, he added, “I won’t fight your unemployment claim.”

  Her jaw dropped open in shock. The man who’d seduced her during a multifamily camping trip when she was sixteen years old was telling her to hit the unemployment line. With his own son.

  “You’re not serious.”

  Then he hammered home the spike that felt like it was splitting her skull in two. “I can’t lose Hannah. I’m afraid you and I are finished, Daneen. I can’t see you anymore at all.”

  “SO HOW WAS your first day at work?”

  Emma looked up from where she stood chopping vegetables for a salad in the kitchen of Johnny’s house on Wednesday evening. He’d invited her to his place for the first time, and she’d enjoyed getting a snapshot of his life as an eligible bachelor.

  He lived in a small house in an older neighborhood a few blocks from downtown. His quiet street was the kind that probably housed retired couples or else young families just starting out. Though his fenced yard was neatly cut, it didn’t have so much as a single flower bed, so she assumed he didn’t get to work outside much.

  The inside was just as sparse. It had the comforts, at least in terms of furniture and big-boy toys like the huge TV in the living room. But not much else. She’d bet a lot of women in Joyful would probably have liked to help him hang curtains over the blind-covered windows, or pick out some pictures for the empty walls.

  Or test out the springs on that massive king-size bed of his. Yum.

  The fact that the house was so decidedly male and undecorated gave her an inordinate amount of pleasure. As if she was the first woman he’d ever invited over.

  “Em?”

  “Oh, my day. Uh, good,” she admitted, surprised to realize it was true. “Though, not for the reasons you might suspect.”

  He stopped beating the life out of a couple of sirloins and looked up at her. “How so?”

  “Well, I spent less time washing hair than I did explaining the differences between an IRA and an SEP to Doris. And helping one woman decide between a Roth and a conventional, and another determine what to do with her husband’s rollover.”

  He grinned as he went to the sink to wash his hands. “And you thought nobody would trust you with their money.”

  “They’re probably better off trusting me with their money than with their hair. Speaking of money, do you know Mrs. Harding?”

  “Sixtyish redhead? Kinda flamboyant?”

  She nodded. “She must have some big bucks squirreled away. She cornered me leaving the salon and bought me a cup of coffee while we talked about some cap stocks. She knows her stuff.”

  “I think her late husband had a lot of money,” he replied. “She moved to town a couple of years ago and bought one of those old estates out on Tanner Mill Road.”

  “She’s sharp. I liked her. She told me I should open up a pie shop,” Emma said. Then, remembering the other reason her first day on the job had been a big hit, she added, “Word got out about the pies, you see. Several people came in and asked me if they could place orders.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a regular little business going.”

  Yeah, it did sound like that. Six months ago she would probably have laughed at the picture of her dispensing financial advice and pecan pie while bent over the wash sink of a Joyful beauty parlor. Today, though, she’d actually enjoyed herself. It beat sitting at a desk all day.

  She didn’t tell him who one of her financial “clients” had been today: his mother, who apparently had a small sum of money tucked away—proceeds from a life insurance policy.

  “So you brought the papers I left at your house Friday?”

  “Yes. I haven’t had a chance to look at them. Maybe we could go over them after dinner?”

  He stepped close, crowding her against the counter. “I’d rather go over you. Before dinner. After dinner.”

  “Before dessert? After dessert?”

  “During dessert,” he said with a wolfish chuckle, the husky sound sending shivers up and down her body. As did his closeness. He put his hands on either side of her, flat on the countertop. Johnny pressed against her, his breath hot on her neck, his chest touching her back, his groin tucked against her bottom.

  Emma couldn’t contain a small moan as she leane
d into him. “You hungry man, what is it with you and kitchens?”

  “Just don’t go lobbing that cucumber at me,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the cutting board. “I don’t think it’d have the same effect as pie.”

  “Speaking of which…”

  He grinned. “Lemon meringue.”

  “Mmm. I’ve become a pie addict. You won’t ever tell anyone why I’m becoming as big as a house, will you?”

  “Darlin’, you’ve got nothin to worry about,” he said, nuzzling her neck. “You work off every bit of pie the minute after you…lick it all up….”

  “Suck it all down,” she whispered, just as suggestively.

  Dropping the cucumber she’d been slicing, she turned around in his arms and leaned up to catch his mouth in a hot and hungry kiss. When their lips finally parted, she had to gasp in a few deep breaths to try to calm her raging pulse.

  “Think I’ll go outside and cook the steaks,” he said, sounding as out of breath as she felt. “Unless you want to start with dessert.”

  “Then we’ll never get to dinner.” She patted his chest. “You need the protein.”

  “Planning on working me hard, huh?”

  She nodded and almost purred, “Very, very hard.” Then she pushed him away, patting his awesome butt as he walked away. “Now, go cook us dinner.”

  JOHNNY HATED for Emma to leave late that night, but knew she should. She’d just gotten herself out of the limelight of Joyful’s gossipmongerers. Her red convertible parked in his driveway early tomorrow morning would thrust them both right back into it. That was the way it went in small towns.

  Pulling on a pair of gym shorts, he watched her dress. “I’m sorry you can’t stay. Next time I’ll pick you up.”

  “Better yet, stay at my place,” she whispered as she leaned up to kiss his lips. “I have a garage.”

  Chuckling, he slid his arm around her waist and walked her to the front door.

  “Wait. We didn’t go over the papers.” She glanced toward the manila envelope she’d deposited on his dining room table as soon as she’d arrived. “Maybe I should take them with me?”