Hosed

by Pippa Grant

  “Sketchy. And not someone I’m inclined to believe. If they’re so righteous and concerned, why not come out of the shadows?”

  Before Jessie can answer, the wailing of sirens echoes through the square. We turn in time to see a fire truck rush by and we hurry out of the alley.

  “I’ll call dispatch, see what’s up,” Jessie says, but I already know what’s up.

  Or what’s been lit up.

  The smoke rising from the end of Main Street could be coming from the post office or the taxidermy shop, but I instinctively know it’s not. It’s Sunshine Toys.

  On fire.

  Again.

  Twenty-Seven

  Cassie

  * * *

  I’m an idiot.

  I noticed the back door felt warm to the touch, but I went in anyway. I pushed inside, got doused with a rush of foul-smelling liquid someone must have propped above the door, and now I’m trapped in a smoke-filled room. Something’s on fire in the staff locker room and the door I came in through is stuck tight.

  I haul on the handle, throwing my full weight into it, but it doesn’t budge and soon I’m coughing too hard to stand up straight.

  I fall to my knees, sucking in deep breaths. The air is cleaner down here.

  After a few moments my head clears, and I start toward the staff bathrooms on my hands and knees. There’s a window in the women’s bathroom. It’s high and tight, but there’s a chance I can get through it. Even if I can’t, I can at least soak my clothes with water and huddle in the far stall until the cavalry arrives.

  The fire department will be here soon, before this fire has the chance to become too dangerous.

  I’m sure that’s what whoever started it was counting on.

  Someone started this fire, I realize in a burst of clarity. Someone started this fire and then summoned me here so I’d be right in the middle of it when Happy Cat’s finest showed up to put it out.

  I’m getting angry—really angry—and then I push through the door to the bathroom and look up to see a pair of shoes disappearing through the open window.

  They’re Italian loafers.

  Italian fucking loafers.

  I know those loafers. Savannah bought those loafers the last time she came to see me in San Francisco.

  As a present.

  For the sheep-fucker.

  “Steve!” His name emerges as a croak from my smoke-raw throat and my demands for him to get his ass back here and confess to what he’s done end in a coughing fit. I shut the bathroom door behind me, but the smoke is still getting in somehow.

  A vent? The ceiling?

  I have no idea, but by the time I crawl-cough down the aisle of toilets to the window, I’m dizzy and my lungs feel like they’ve been clawed at from the inside. I stand, reaching for the window ledge, but I’m too short. I can barely curl my fingers around it and there’s no way I’m going to have the strength to pull myself up. Even a rock-climbing badass my height would struggle with this one, and I am no kind of badass.

  I’m an idiot. A fool covered in foul-smelling funk, coughing her head off on the floor of a bathroom, reduced to praying that someone will come save her before it’s too late.

  My gut says Steve didn’t intend to kill me—just frame me good and proper—but that might not matter.

  I could die here, I realize, head spinning as I sag against the wall, tears rising in my eyes. I could die and Ryan will never know why I left his bed or how I came to be here. He might even assume I really am behind all this and that…

  Well, that is maybe the saddest thing ever.

  My chest goes tight, so tight, and raw. And then my head is spinning and I’m sliding onto the white tile for a nap, visions of Steve being stabbed with a hundred tiny pitchforks while demon sheep tap dance on his spine spinning through my head.

  Then there’s nothing.

  It’s all smoke and fog and a buzzing sound, high and insistent in my ears.

  And then suddenly I’m waking up on a gurney outside under a pale blue morning sky with an oxygen mask covering my nose and mouth and Ryan staring down at me with a mixture of worry, pain, and disgust that breaks my heart.

  Broken—crash, bam.

  Right in two.

  Twenty-Eight

  Ryan

  * * *

  I hunch over the Wild Hog’s bar, head pounding, heart aching, gut roiling.

  Dual images keep flashing in my head.

  One of Cassie, dousing lighter fluid all over the factory.

  The other of her ashen face when Jojo pulled her out of the building.

  “Pour me another,” I order Jace.

  He scowls at me, slams both hands on the bar, and leans across it until he’s right in my face. “I cannot serve you liquor until eleven. I told you that.”

  He also filled my first glass with our grandmother’s lemonade, which would probably get him shut down if anyone knew what was in it.

  I don’t give two shits right now.

  “She set the fire, Jace.” The words are hollow, and they taste like burnt black licorice and raccoon shit. “She set the fucking fire.”

  I still can’t believe it, but between that phone call recording, everything that’s gone wrong for Sunshine the last two weeks, and then finding her there, when she was supposed to be at my house, what am I supposed to think?

  Something smacks the back of my head, and I realize it was my brother’s hand. “If you believe that,” Jace growls, low and tight, “then you don’t deserve her.”

  “Whatever he’s having, I want something different.” Blake slides onto the stool next to me. “And can I order a shower for him? He smells like smoky ass.”

  Jace hooks a thumb toward the john. “If you can get him in there, you can give him a shower in the sink.”

  The Wild Hog’s pretty much deserted this early in the day, with just one small group of farmers back at the arcade games. Most of the town’s gawking at the carnage over at the Sunshine factory—happy name for a miserable place—or they’re busy telling the sheriff all the ways they knew Cassie wasn’t right in the head from the moment she got back.

  Those Sunderwell girls were never really one of us. So stuck up, with all the Hollywood attitude. We should’ve known they were deviants—not too far a stretch from selling perverted toys to setting fires.

  I thought they were wrong, that it was small-town pettiness. But then, never in a million lifetimes would I have suspected Cassie would set fire to anything.

  But maybe Jessie was right about the lengths family will go to for each other.

  What wouldn’t I do for one of my brothers?

  I’d like to think I wouldn’t push too far. But I also know Jace and Ginger. My brother will be a damn good father, and if Ginger does anything to put my niece or nephew in danger, or to keep the child from Jace, the line between right and wrong might get blurry.

  Maybe it got blurry for Cassie too.

  But setting a fire, putting innocent people and her own life in danger? It’s a line I cannot stomach seeing crossed, not after everything I’ve been through in my life. Not after swearing to protect the people of this town, to give my life for them if necessary.

  It’s too fucking much.

  Jace pushes a Coke across the bar to Blake. “You want to talk some sense into him, or should we take him out back and do it the old-fashioned way?”

  “I got him.”

  “Good, because I can’t afford to get arrested again.” Jace jerks his head toward the kitchen. “I’ll be in back. Holler if you need me.”

  “Nobody’s gonna arrest you,” I grumble. “They’re too busy arresting an arsonist.”

  Jace flips me off before he disappears.

  “Hey, man, how about we take a break from being a dick for two minutes.” Blake’s perpetual cheer is grating on my nerves, and Jace didn’t refill my lemonade.

  “I’m not being a dick. I’m being broken.” Apparently one lemonade was enough on an empty stomach.

&n
bsp; “No, you’re not. You’re being a chickenshit.”

  I try to shove his shoulder, and fall off my stool.

  But Blake catches me.

  He’s my brother. That’s what brothers do. But usually I’m the one doing the catching.

  How much vodka was in that lemonade?

  “I’m not a chickenshit,” I protest while he puts me back into my seat.

  “Then you’re an asshole,” Blake replies happily. Always happy, that’s Blake. He could bottle it and sell it as Moonshine. Happyshine. Sunshine.

  Fuck.

  “Not a hucking assfole either,” I slur. When did the bar move onto a boat, and why is it rocking?

  “Jesus, Ry. When’s the last time you slept?”

  I squint at the two Blakes. “Thursday? Had a shizzy bift. A biffy shitz. A—hell.”

  “A busy shift?” he suggests.

  I point a finger at him and cock it. “Thassit.”

  “Gimme your keys, you idiot. We’re going home.”

  “No. Not home. She was home. Not going home. Can’t make me.”

  “Can and will. C’mon, big bro. You can thank me tomorrow.”

  “Ain’t thank you for nothin’.”

  “You’ll be thanking me for not recording this. Hey, Jace! Come get the door.”

  Are my lips numb? I think my lips are numb.

  The world spins again, and I’m suddenly upside down with a shoulder in my gut. “Wha tha fuuuu…?”

  “You might not be recording,” Jace says, “but I sure as hell am.”

  “No more lemonade after a double shift,” Blake grunts. “You know what sugar does to him.”

  I must be dying, because I swear Jace just laughed.

  Jace doesn’t laugh.

  Now I get why.

  I’ll never laugh again either.

  I close my eyes. There’s Cassie.

  Lighting the fire.

  Pale and limp on Jojo’s back.

  Lighting the fire.

  Lying seemingly lifeless outside the building.

  Lighting the fire.

  Coming to on the stretcher, those bewitching eyes lying to me.

  “Oh my goddess, what are you doing?” Olivia’s voice shrieks into the floaty area around my ears. “Are you going to drop him on his head?”

  “Might be more effective than taking him home,” Blake muses.

  “You can’t drop him on his head! We need him to help Cassie!”

  “He’s not in good enough shape to help George Cooney right now, let alone a human being.”

  “Put. Him. Down.”

  Is that really Olivia?

  Whoever she is, she’s persuasive. I’m suddenly back on the ground with my ass in a chair, mist spraying into my face. “Ow! Hey! What the hell?”

  “It’s an aromatherapy spritzer.” Olivia gives the perfume bottle one more squirt in my direction. “It cures dumbness. And hangovers.”

  “It smells like burnt tar and cat spray.” But the fog in my head is clearing. Whatever’s in that shit is potent.

  And effective.

  “You need your chakras realigned,” she declares.

  “He needs to get over being scared,” Blake replies.

  I shoot him a what the hell? look.

  He shrugs. “Love’s a big fucking deal. And scary as hell. You want to go slow, go slow. But don’t sabotage the one thing you’ve always wanted. You can’t protect the world, Ry. Sometimes people get hurt. And that includes the people you care about. You can be afraid of it, but don’t let fear stop you.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I grunt.

  “Dude, Jace is less terrified of being a father than you are of admitting seeing Cassie on that stretcher almost killed you.”

  “A f-father?” Olivia’s brows crinkle.

  Jace grunts and gives a short nod, not looking at her.

  Her lips part, and if I wasn’t sleep-deprived and tipsy on more than just an adrenaline crash, I’d say she was hurt.

  “Blake’s right,” Jace tells me. “You’re being a chickenshit.”

  “I’m not scared,” I insist.

  “Then why didn’t you stick around to listen to what she had to say?” Blake asks.

  I offer him a middle finger. “I read people pretty damn well.”

  He snorts. “You shut the cover on that book before you got to Chapter One. C’mon. You can crash at my place for a few hours. And then we’re calling Clint, and all three of us are going to kick your ass together.”

  “I’m protecting you,” I tell them all. “Protecting you from an arsonist getting too close to this family.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Jace says.

  Blake shakes his head. “You ever stop to think about why you’ve never had a steady girlfriend more than a few months? I used to think it was because you didn’t want the responsibility of a relationship after all you did for us. But I don’t think that’s it anymore. Know what I think?”

  “That you think too much?”

  “That you’re afraid you’ll get a wife and kids and you won’t be able to keep them safe. That you won’t be able to be the hero every second of the day.” He pauses, arching a brow. “Or maybe you’re worried you’ll have a kid who’s just like you, who feels like he has to pick up your slack and worry all the time and he’ll never give himself a moment’s peace.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  The low-lit interior of the bar is in sharp focus now.

  So’s the clenching in my chest.

  And the twist in my gut that says my brother has a fucking point.

  Blake’s green gaze doesn’t waver as he shrugs. “Maybe I don’t. But I also know it’s not like you to abandon someone you care about who needs you. You should think about what’s really going on here, brother.”

  What’s really going on is that Cassie Sunderwell played me. Hard and ugly.

  But…she was so excited about that gaming app she wanted to write.

  Seemingly sincerely excited. Was that really just a ploy to ensure she’d have a strong defense when she lit up her sister’s factory? And the way she blushed her face off, but kept trying to get comfortable with sex toys. And the way she brought a dildo to bed and trusted me to help her to figure out how to use it.

  And the way she made my heart jolt fully awake for the first time in my life and how she nearly stopped it cold while she was lying unconscious on that stretcher and there was nothing I could do.

  I’d been too late. Helpless.

  In that second, I got a glimpse of what it would be like to live in a world without her, and it was…terrifying. A flat-out fucking nightmare.

  Blake pinches his lips together and nods, as if he’s reading my mind. And knowing he was right…the bastard.

  “I know what else is going on,” Olivia suddenly interjects with a frustrated huff. “Steve set the fire and nearly killed one of my favorite people in the process, that’s what’s going on.”

  I suck in a breath through my nose, and the acrid scent still lingering on my clothes taunts me. “What?”

  “Steve set the fire,” Olivia repeats slowly. “And if you don’t listen to me and get on Team Cassie right now, I’m going to dunk your head in a toilet and call you terrible names that I have never called anyone in my entire life.”

  There’s a giant, gaping hole opening in my heart, widening with every word. “Steve set the fire.”

  “Shocker,” Blake says pleasantly.

  “Cassie saw his shoes going out the window,” Olivia insists. “But he’s poker buddies with the sheriff. Savannah says that’s why he didn’t get charged with assault of a farm animal. Also, Cassie got a phone call from a creepy voice threatening to frame her and Savannah for all the bad stuff at the factory if she didn’t meet him there. So that’s what she did. She went to the factory, and she saw Steve’s shoes going out the window. She was framed. And she needs you. And if you don’t help her, I’ll create an aromatherapy spritzer that will lea
ve you impotent for life, O’Dell. And if you think I won’t use my goddess-given powers for revenge, then you have another think coming, mister!”

  Everything in my brain is buzzing. Everything in my chest is buzzing.

  And none of it in a good way.

  Because every last cell in my body recognizes the truth.

  Blake’s right. I never should’ve doubted Cassie.

  And if Olivia’s right—if Steve did this, then I have fucked up so badly I might never know true sunshine in my life. Not ever again.

  “I’m a dumbass,” I mutter.

  Blake winks at me. “Happens to the best of us. You just took a long time getting around to your turn.”

  Cassie’s never going to forgive me.

  Hell, I wouldn’t forgive me if I were her. But I have a more pressing matter to take care of than begging for her forgiveness.

  I need to make sure she’s safe. “Do you know where she is?” I ask Olivia.

  “At the bakery. Maud’s the only person in town the sheriff’s afraid of.”

  I leap up off my seat on a new adrenaline high.

  I’ve let her down too many times already.

  This time, I’m going to get something right.

  Her life might depend on it.

  Twenty-Nine

  Cassie

  * * *

  “Here, honey.” Maud Hutchins sets another fresh blueberry cupcake with extra cream cheese icing on the table in front of me. “It’s okay to have two on days like today.”

  “Or three,” Gerald grumbles from the other side of the bakery’s cheery—and abandoned—counter. Everyone’s too busy milling around the farmers’ market in the square, gossiping about my “latest” arson attempt to have time for cinnamon rolls and sugar cookies.

  But Maud and Gerald have made it clear that I’m welcome here. Even Gerald, Sunshine Toy’s most passionate detractor, believes I’ve been framed. Even Gerald, who thinks I’m part of a deviant conspiracy to steal decent women away from their husbands with battery-powered orgasms, is on my side.