“Is he always this full of shit?” she asked Colt, folding her hands over her chest.
“Yes,” Colt clipped out.
“My name is Zanna,” she said after a moment. “I would say it’s nice to meet you, but I just can’t muster it at the moment. I hope you don’t mind.”
Levi chuckled. “I’m going to bed, kids. You two have fun.” He tossed the gun back to Colt and walked into his childhood bedroom.
None of them may have wanted to come home, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be a boring trip.
Chapter 2
Shelly,
Dead-body freezers are obviously for those red, white, and blue ice pops and shit ton of ice cream. Bunch of weirdos.
RIP Bruce-Bruce.
Levi lay awake for hours that night, just staring at the ceiling that needed to be painted. There was too much rolling around in his mind for sleep to come. Plus it just felt weird being back in his childhood bedroom again. Not a single thing had changed in the thirteen years he had been gone. The same blue-and-white quilt was on his bed. The same poster of some nameless model draped over a car hung on his wall. Even the clothes he hadn’t taken with him to California still hung in the closet. Lolly had kept every bit of their lives that they had here. Which surprised him. She was apparently a lot more sentimental than she’d let on.
He heard Duke’s heavy booted footsteps walk up the hall and jumped out of bed, eager to find out Lolly’s status.
“How is she?” he asked his older brother, who looked a little more haunted than he had when he’d left them earlier.
“Fine,” Duke said absently before he shook his head. “I think you had better see for yourself.”
“What does that mean? What’s wrong with her?”
“Levi …” He stopped speaking, as if he was holding something back. “You’ll see her tomorrow. Just get some sleep.” Duke squeezed his shoulder, which was Duke’s equivalent of a hug—and that spoke more words than Duke ever could. “You’re going to need it. Hell, we’re all going to need it.”
Levi had tried to go back to bed but sleep wouldn’t come, so he got up early the next morning, the need to see Shelly stronger than it was last night. But a trip to her house confirmed that she still wasn’t home. Apparently her father wasn’t, either. She hadn’t mentioned going away in her letters.
Where the hell is she?
He set out on foot into town, thinking the walk would clear his head. But it did little more than bring back an onslaught of memories, and most of them contained Shelly. Of them walking through town to get slushies from the gas station, of them sitting in the library for hours, she studying, he distracting her.
He had never planned to become a racer. The thought had never even crossed his mind, even though he had always been a bit of a daredevil. But when he moved to California he got heavy into karting and a bunch of other things he shouldn’t have, simply because there was no Shelly there to keep him occupied, to keep him calm. There had always been a bit of a restless itch in him, but when he felt it he went to her and the feeling disappeared altogether. Now it was creeping up on him again, and he knew that racing would bring back the rush, the adrenaline that made his heart pump. It might also bring the trouble that he had been trying so hard to avoid since the crash.
As he was walking through town he realized that it wasn’t just his brothers who needed to know that he was considering going back. He had to tell Lolly and Shelly, who had sobbed into the phone with relief when she found out he was alive after his accident.
That was no small task.
A few minutes later he walked into a small coffee shop at the end of Main Street, which was one of the town’s new additions. He didn’t recognize too many people there, but one stood out. Ace Costa. He was Duke’s age and incredibly smart. The first one in their small town to get accepted to MIT, but his father’s stroke kept him from going, and instead Ace took over his contracting company. The manual labor had turned him from a skinny bookish kid to a hard-muscled man in the years since Levi had left.
“Hey!” Ace smiled, looking genuinely happy to see him. They had kept in touch, Ace even coming to see him whenever he visited Vegas. He was one of the few people who had always been kind to the King boys. He was essentially an outsider, too. Their town hadn’t seen many Portuguese immigrants. “I didn’t know you were back in town. Hell, I never thought I would see you back in town. ”
“Lolly is in the hospital. We’re all back to see her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He shook his head. “All of you?” Ace paused and shook his head again. “All the King brothers are back in town?” The disbelief in his voice was clear, and Levi knew being back was going to be big news in the small town.
“Yeah. All of us.”
“Well, shit. And just when I thought things were starting to get dull around here. How is Lolly?” Ace asked with concern on his face. “I just patched up a window in her salon last week. She looked fine. Told me my T-shirt was too small and I needed to stop mumbling when I talked.”
Levi laughed. A sweet old lady Lolly would never be. “That sounds like her normal self. Did you know she had a tenant living there?”
“Zanna? She runs the salon. You didn’t know about her?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Lolly never mentioned her to me.”
“She’s been living with Lolly for a long time now. Almost a year.”
Immediately he knew his aunt was up to something. He called Lolly every week without fail, even videochatted with her on the phone he had gotten for her. She had never said a word about the woman. And he’d chatted with her last week, and she looked fine. Maybe she wasn’t as sick as she was leading them to believe. He knew he would find out before the end of the day what her game was.
He caught a ride back to the house with Ace, only to grab the keys from Colt and head to the hospital to see Lolly for himself. Colt, too, was tight-lipped about her condition, but he sure as hell didn’t seem any happier than he had last night.
Levi suspected Lolly was blackmailing both of his brothers. Of course, she would never call it blackmail. That wasn’t her style. But she knew they all owed her. If not for her, they would have been in the care of the state, spread out in three separate foster homes, because no one in their right minds wanted to take on all three of them.
Levi walked up the ICU floor and felt a little queasy. Memories of the last time he had been in one entered his mind. But it wasn’t the eye-watering pain he remembered. It was Colt’s face. Pale and tight, relieved when Levi opened his eyes again. It was one of the few times he had seen clear emotion on his brother’s face.
He walked into Lolly’s room a few moments later to see her sitting up in bed, sipping a huge cup of coffee that he was sure was not allowed for patients in ICU. Her hair was all done up. Teased high to the gods, as she liked to say. And he noticed that her pink lipstick was perfectly applied as well as her black-winged eyeliner. She looked older, more wrinkles around her eyes, her smile lines extra deep. She looked a little more tired than he was used to seeing her, but that was to be expected. He’d noticed her starting to age when Duke got locked up. The long year before the trial had really taken its toll on her.
So, yes, she looked old, maybe even a little worn-down, but she didn’t really look sick.
“Lolly,” he called and she looked up at him.
“Old slicker than shit is here.” She grinned at him. “Come here, baby boy.”
He went over to her, took her hand, and rested his head in her lap. Her fingers were thin, bony even, and up close he could see that she had lost some weight. But he wasn’t buying that she was sick.
Or maybe he was in denial.
“I’ve been better,” she said sounding slightly pathetic.
“I spoke to your doctor. There’s no need to bring in a specialist. I guess we’re going to have to put you out to pasture and start talking about funeral plans. Duke will probably want to deck your casket out with flames and
paint it green, while Colt will want something quiet and understated. They’ll fight about it. I just came to see what you want. We’re rich now. We can make sure you go out in style.”
“What the hell is wrong with you, boy? I’m not ready to die!” She smacked the back of his head with the force of a much younger woman. “You just don’t come up in here talking about plans for my service.”
He sat up, crossed his arms, and looked at her. “I knew you weren’t sick. What the hell are you trying to pull here, old woman?”
She sighed. “You were always just a little too smart for your own good. I’m sick. But I’m not dying sick. Just a kidney infection that went untreated for a little too long. But don’t tell your brothers.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s not right what you’re doing. I was up all night worrying about you.”
She had the good sense to look guilty. “Well, you should come to see me more often. So this is really on you.”
“I asked you to come live with me. I even showed you the house I was thinking about getting if you did.”
“I don’t want to live with you,” she said as if it were the world’s worst thing. “I needed your brothers to come home.”
“Does this have anything to do with the woman living in your house?”
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” She looked proud of herself. “Fiery temper. Can do a three-step color like nobody’s business.”
So she was matchmaking.
“She’s Colt’s type,” Levi admitted. “The type of woman he secretly wants, but is too much of an uptight pain in the ass to actually date.”
“Zanna can handle him, too.” She nodded. “If she don’t kill him first.”
Levi agreed. If Colt hadn’t been so quick, he might have a couple of bullet holes in him right now. “What do you want with Duke?”
“Grace moved back to town. She works here in the hospital when she’s not working at her other job.”
“Wait.” Levi shook his head. “What? Grace is back and she has two jobs?”
Grace was the woman Duke had gone to prison for. The daughter of the judge who’d grown up with everything. She was the same woman who’d disappeared from town as soon as he got arrested.
“I need for Duke to see how she’s living. I asked them to stay, Levi. I asked them both to stay for thirty days. But I’m not going to ask you to stay. I’m telling you that you have to keep your pretty behind here. Your brothers are good boys, but leave ’em alone for too long and they’ll try to kill each other.”
“You want me to keep them from killing each other? I can hold my own, Lolly, but if fists start flying, I’m not trying to die breaking them two up.”
Lolly smiled fondly. “Good fighters, we Kings are. There’s not a bar fight that we haven’t won in the last century.”
“I’ll make sure I write that down when I record the family history. What do you expect me to do here for a month?”
“Do what you always do. Have a good time. Make new friends. Reconnect with old ones. Come visit me.”
“I can do that,” he said, sensing she was lonely.
“Good, and bring me some more cash. I’m running out of money to bribe the orderly with.”
He looked at her nightstand, which was littered with junk food.
“Is that how you’re getting the cheese puffs, Big Gulps, and large coffees?”
“The doctor sure as hell ain’t bringing them to me, dummy.”
Levi laughed. “I’ll make sure you have enough money to get you through your stay. Just tell me one thing.”
“Anything. You’re my favorite, you know.”
“I know,” he said, fairly sure that she didn’t have one. “Where is Shelly?”
“She’s not at home?” She looked shocked.
“Not last night or this morning.”
“Hmm,” Lolly said thoughtfully. “I wonder what she’s up to now.”
Levi wondered the same thing.
Chapter 3
Dear Levi,
I stumbled across you on television the other night. The woman who interviewed you had some very impressive … assets.
I wonder if the television station hired on based on her GPA or her T&A?
“I think it’s time we start thinking about the future,” Shelly Walker’s father said to her that morning as they waited for her uncle in the parking lot of the pharmacy he owned.
“I don’t think about the future much.” She looked over to her father, who was still quite handsome even though he had turned sixty-two this year. “When I was a kid I thought we would have flying cars and jet packs by now. But all we have are cars that run on vegetable oil and hoverboards that don’t even hover. Although I am enjoying my new iPhone. Do you want one, too? I think you should upgrade. Nobody carries a flip phone anymore.”
“No, honey.” He shook his head slightly, looking at her with a mixture of love and sadness that she had seen creep into his eye from time to time. “Your future. Not the future in general. I was looking in your mother’s journal and …” He trailed off.
That’s where the sadness came in. Her mother, Orlena, had passed away almost twenty years ago when Shelly was nine. It had just been Shelly and her father since then. Her father was a prison guard, a conservative man’s man. He had no idea how to raise a little girl, so he relied on his wife’s journals, which she’d started to keep the moment Shelly was born. It was sort of a guide for her father to go by. Orlena had a heart condition and knew she wasn’t going to live long enough to see Shelly grow up. Only Shelly hadn’t known that until recently.
Her birth had substantially shortened her mother’s life, and if that didn’t make her feel guilty, nothing on the planet would.
“What do you mean, Daddy?” Shelly had gone to college, and then gone on to earn her master’s degree. She’d been teaching fifth grade for the past six years in the school she went to as a child. “Do you want me to get my own place? I told I would move out back when I got hired. You told me paying rent was a waste of money. You asked me to stay. Did that come out accusatory? I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I was just pointing out why I didn’t move out. But I will. They built some new developments on the outskirts of town. I can look at them this month and make plans.”
A slow smile crept across his face. “Sometimes you remind me so much of your mother it hurts.”
“Because I talk a lot?”
“Yes. Sometimes your mother talked so much I thought she would suck all the air out of the atmosphere. But she had that accent and that made me hang on every single word she said even after twelve years of knowing her.”
“I’m missing the Colombian accent. So it’s probably not as charming.”
“Your plain old American accent will be charming to your husband. I brought up your future not because I want you to move out. You can stay forever and I would be happy. I want you to get married.”
She was twenty-eight, soon to be twenty-nine. Most of the girls she’d gone to school with had been married for years. Some of them with multiple kids, but she’d never thought in a million years that her father would say that.
“But-but … There’s so many things I want to do first.”
“What do you want to do, honey?”
“I don’t know. Travel the world. Throw myself out of a plane. Eat something wild and exotic.”
“You’re twenty-eight and you’ve never done any of those things.”
“But I told you that I wanted to go to Cartagena. That I wanted to see Mommy’s homeland.”
“Colombia is dangerous and far too dangerous for a single girl.”
“But Cartagena isn’t dangerous. I could have studied abroad in college. You didn’t want me to.”
“You’re all I have left. Did you really think I was going to allow you to spend six months abroad in a foreign country?”
Allow you.
The phrase landed in Shelly’s chest and just stuck there. Her father had treated her like a little girl
no matter how old she was. He’d had a hand in every big major life decision she’d made. Where she went to school. Who her friends were. What career path she was going to take. She wanted to rebel, to ignore his overprotective high-handedness and do the exact opposite of what he wanted. She was a grown woman, after all. But then she thought about her mother, who’d risked her life to bring her into this world, her mother who wanted Shelly to have the perfect life. The life she had dreamed of when she was a little girl in Colombia.
Even if she ignored everything her father said, she couldn’t ignore her mother’s wishes, because for Shelly it would seem like the loss of her life would have been in vain.
“Don’t be mad at me, pumpkin.” Her father touched her cheek. “Especially when I’m about to go away for a month.”
He was heading to Florida with her uncle. They had rented a place on a golf course. The news had come as a surprise to Shelly, because as far as she knew her father hadn’t left the state her entire life, except for the times he went across the border to Oregon to take her to and from college. She had never known him to even take a vacation. He must have years of time saved up. He barely took a sick day. She should have known something was going on when he announced he was leaving her alone for a month. “Why are you bringing this up now? I’m not going to drive the ten hours home only to find a mail-order husband at the door waiting for me to cook him dinner, am I?”
“Of course not. I don’t even think they have mail-order husbands.” He shook his head. “I’m telling you this because I think I’m going to retire soon and I would like to see you happy and settled. I want to see you have children. I want to see you loved. Is that wrong? And I would like to be a grandfather one day. I never regret having just you for one moment, but it would be nice to have a bigger family. You would be happier with more people to love.”
Well, damn. The way he put it … It was almost lovely. She did want those things. The husband and baby and white picket fence. And she had been feeling like there was something missing in her life lately. Maybe that was it. Maybe what she needed was to start a family of her own. But … but … something was holding her back.
Heart of a Bad Boy (Bad Boys of Destiny #3) Page 3
