Too Bad So Sad

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  “Where do you put it all?” she asked, letting her eyes roam up and down my body.

  I grinned.

  My sister, however, answered for me.

  “Tyler is a health nut ninety-eight percent of the time. The other two percent he reserves for Texas Roadhouse and Mom’s lasagna. Good luck trying to get him to eat like this with you any other time,” Henley said as she stood up.

  I handed the waitress my card and she took it.

  By the time Henley and Alana had all their children ready to go, the waitress was back with my card and the bill. I signed it and left a huge tip.

  “Wow,” Reagan said when she saw the fifty-dollar tip. “Big spender,” she teased.

  I shrugged. “She’s pregnant.”

  “And Tyler is a sucker for pregnant women. Any other time, he would’ve left a normal tip, but he sees someone pregnant? He’s going to go out of his way to help her,” Alana butted in.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Why?” she asked. “Pregnant women are just as capable as regular women and even some men. What’s the difference?”

  Henley handed the baby over to me again and I cradled her in my arms.

  “Mainly because our mom was pregnant with Tyler when she was in nursing school, alone and struggling. She was pregnant when Alana’s father left her. She had to do it all on her own while she was pregnant and that left a big impression on a young Tyler’s mind,” Henley said as she hefted the car seat.

  Alana took the car seat from her hands and then reached for Autumn’s hand. Autumn took it from where she was standing next to her mother’s side and started to walk as Alana spoke over her shoulder.

  “Tyler’s not as bad as he seems,” Alana explained as she weaved her way through the tables. “But…you have to get past the crusty outer shell to get to the nice guy underneath.”

  Reagan gave me a look that clearly said she didn’t think there was a nice guy underneath my layers.

  She was right. There wasn’t.

  It was just that sometimes my conscience got the better of me and I stepped over the line of mean and into nice territory.

  Needless to say, I tried not to do that very often.

  Being nice led you to doing things for people who didn’t appreciate it.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” Reagan said dryly. “Y’all have a good day.”

  With that, she left, not once looking back.

  “Oh, I like her,” Henley said.

  “Me, too,” Alana concurred.

  I snorted. “As long as you don’t expect me and her to be together, I don’t care what you think.”

  Both of my sisters snorted.

  Apparently, they thought they knew something that I didn’t.

  But they were wrong.

  There was not one single thing that I’d do with that girl.

  No. Nope. Nuh-uh.

  Chapter 4

  I’m not a backup plan and I’m definitely not a second choice.

  -Reagan to her ex-boyfriend

  Reagan

  I gasped when I saw the moss had been completely stripped off of Tyler’s tree.

  “You bastard!” I cried out, not caring if I was quiet any longer or not.

  In fact, I wanted to cry.

  I was so upset.

  As a result, I was so upset that when my phone rang, I didn’t even consider answering it. Not until it rang all the way through, went to voicemail and then started ringing again.

  When it went to voicemail again, I started to move around the rest of the trees to see if it was gone from them, too and luckily, it wasn’t.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t take any of the moss because he’d just do the same to the next tree.

  My phone rang again and I answered it, knowing something was wrong if whoever had called me three times in a row.

  “Don’t you dare touch my moss,” the male voice snapped.

  I glared at the brown, muddy water and bared my teeth. “You’ll scrape it off like you did the other tree?”

  “Yes,” he answered instantly, not caring that I didn’t want him to do that and he knew it.

  He had zero regrets.

  Then another thought occurred to me. “How’d you get my number? Nobody has my number.”

  He laughed, then hung up.

  I growled and pocketed the phone, then decided to see what I could salvage from the tree that had been scraped clean and I got lucky enough to find a little bit of moss on the backside of the tree near the water line.

  Pulling that piece off and putting it in the dish, I hoped it wasn’t too waterlogged to work.

  Then I started walking, sweeping my flashlight in wide arcs as I moved back down the shoreline to the boat ramp.

  I’d gotten to a break in the trees, almost to the curve that led to the last turn of the shoreline to where the boat ramp came into view when my flashlight flickered once and then went out.

  Dammit.

  I wasn’t too concerned.

  Luckily it was a full moon and I could see pretty well, thanks to the clearing in the trees. If it had happened a couple minutes back, I would’ve been fighting the darkness.

  I’d just made it to the concrete culvert that fed off the boat road when I heard two men talking.

  “…don’t know why you’re such a pussy. Latch that boat down so we can go,” came one man’s voice.

  I rolled my eyes at their use of the word pussy and kept walking, thankful that the boat ramp was illuminated by two large outdoor lights.

  The entire damn thing was lit up like a Walmart parking lot, allowing me to navigate my way up the boat ramp while neither man was the wiser.

  I kept my mouth shut and had gotten up to the bathrooms at the top of the ramp when the men pulled their boat off the boat ramp.

  Their windows were down, allowing me to hear what they were saying.

  “…gotta get home before it gets too late because I start that new job at the plant outside of town tomorrow,” the same man said.

  The other man’s reply wasn’t what I expected. “Shit, I forgot to pull the plug on the boat.”

  I looked over as the second man got out after the truck stopped.

  He looked over at me, startled to see a person standing there when he hadn’t expected one and narrowed his eyes.

  I followed his progress to the back of the boat and narrowed my own eyes right along with him.

  “Y’all are going to clean that hydrilla off, right?” I asked.

  The man snorted. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that, honey.”

  I eyed the boat and then the man. “Failure to remove could result in a fine between twenty-five-dollars and five hundred. Trust me when I say, you can’t afford it.”

  The man stood up to his full height.

  “And who are you? You can’t enforce shit from where I’m standin’,” he drawled, walking a bit forward in an attempt to intimidate me with his size.

  And he was big.

  Bigger than me.

  But he wasn’t that big.

  However, there were two of them and there was no way in hell I was going to confront them any further.

  Instead, I shrugged and started walking again. “Whatever.”

  Any man should’ve known the signs.

  Would’ve, if they weren’t so goddamn stubborn and read between the lines when a woman spoke to them.

  Had they listened and taken the five minutes of their life to make sure that all aquatic life was removed from their boat, they would’ve saved themselves a boatload—literally—of trouble.

  Instead, the guy chose to be a dick.

  Guys like them were exactly the reason that hydrilla had taken over waterways all over Texas. Their refusal to clean off their vessels when they moved to a different area of the lake to fish—or even a different lake itself—transported it to places where it hadn’t previously been.

  Once the two men had passed by i
n their shitty truck with their even shittier boat, I pulled out my phone and placed a call.

  ***

  Tyler

  I shook hands with the game warden for our small town. “Nice to see you again, Theo. How’s life treating you?”

  Theo, also known as Theodore Oliver IV, was the game warden for about four surrounding counties. I’d known him since we’d started shooting at the same range in Longview right around the time that I’d graduated from police academy.

  He’d been air force, I’d been marines.

  He’d been a game warden, I’d been a police officer.

  He’d been shooting a Glock, I’d been shooting a 1911.

  We were like fire and water, but we got along just fine.

  It was funny, but Theo reminded me of the male version of Reagan. Prickly, quiet, slow to warm to you and uncaring of your feelings or whether he was trespassing on your property or not.

  Kind of like now, he was sitting in my seat at my desk, feet propped up, eating what I suspected was one of my donuts.

  And they weren’t the crap donuts you got from a donut shop, either. They were the healthy ones that I kept in my desk—my locked desk.

  Let’s not forget that my office door had also been locked, so there was that.

  “It’s treating me pretty good,” Theo said, answering my question. “Did you know these donuts taste like shit?”

  I grinned. “They’re gluten-free keto-friendly donuts with so much protein in them your farts will stink for a week.”

  Theo took another bite, scrutinizing it more carefully this time. “How many carbs do they have?”

  “About five per donut,” I answered, remembering the label that I’d examined just yesterday. “What are you doing here?”

  I set my lunch down on the desk—I’d gone to retrieve it from the break room and had only been gone for a whole five minutes at most—and looked at Theo.

  He looked tired.

  “I’m here because I have about an hour break before I’m supposed to be at the lake in Clinton and I want to sit down and eat and feel like a normal person instead of eating on the fuckin’ run,” he answered. “I’m so fuckin’ tired.”

  I grinned. “You did sign up for this…”

  He flipped me off.

  I grinned and took a seat. “Why are you working so late, anyway?”

  He sighed. “I’ve been working with the game warden that’s stationed in Uncertain. Apple Drew. He’s covering about twice his normal workload, too, because we’re short-staffed. The two men that were doing other sections next to us up and left after an incident. We got a couple coming from the academy, but until they’ve finished there, which isn’t for about another month, it’s just us two covering way too much land. Lucky we’re not in the middle of a season.”

  That was true.

  It could be a lot worse.

  “That doesn’t explain why you’re sitting at my desk, eating my donut,” I pointed out as I took a seat opposite of where he was currently warming my chair. “After also taking my parking spot outside.”

  Theo grinned, then let his feet drop off the corner of my desk, narrowly missing knocking off the cup of pencils and pens. “I have a few things I wanted to go over with you and I knew that goody-two-shoes little girl that sits outside would call you the moment she saw me pull into your spot.”

  I grinned. “Katy. She’s new.”

  “Katy?” he asked, sounding like he was letting the name roll around on his tongue. “Sounds delicious.”

  “Katy, also known as Katerina. She’s a ball buster, though. Oh, and she has a man—I think. He’s in the navy. A SEAL, I believe. She’s new, though. So, don’t fuck that up. I want to keep her. She’s terribly efficient,” I admonished Theo.

  He held up his hands as if he was going to acquiesce. Fat chance.

  I knew Theo.

  He wasn’t Rome to me or anything, but I felt like I had a fairly good grasp on the man. I knew when his interest was piqued and Katy had done that.

  I wonder what she’d said to him.

  “Well, let’s just say that…” his voice fell off as he sighed and reached for the phone. “Hey, darlin’. What’s shakin’, Reagan?”

  Reagan.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  There was no way in hell that this was a coincidence.

  “Is it now?” he asked, his eyes lighting up with something that Reagan had said on the phone to him. “What’s the make of the truck?” He paused. “Okay. I’ll go do that now. I have a little help, anyway. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”

  Moments later, he hung up and looked at me. “You want to join me for a few minutes?”

  I shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t take more than an hour. I have to relieve someone at eight.”

  Theo stood up. “I hope it doesn’t take that long.”

  He was wrong.

  It took much longer and I owed yet another officer dinner from the Taco Shop.

  It was worth it, though.

  ***

  Four minutes later, we finally arrived at the truck Reagan—my Reagan—had described.

  “Ready to rock and roll?” Theo questioned, reaching for the lights.

  I nodded my head.

  Theo flipped the lights on and the truck pulling the boat in front of us started to swerve erratically before finally pulling over to the side.

  I grinned and got out, meeting Theo alongside the back of the truck.

  “Hello, boys,” Theo drawled. “I noticed y’all have some hydrilla on the back of your boat. Did you know that you had any there?”

  I watched the passenger’s face as Theo asked this and saw the look of chagrin flash across his face.

  “No, sir,” the driver lied. “We didn’t.”

  Theo’s eyes momentarily met mine over the hood of the truck and he rolled them before returning his gaze back to the driver. “Can you step out of the truck for me?”

  Luckily Theo’s truck had a massive light bar on it, so when we got to the back of the truck, we could clearly see the very obvious and unmistakable hydrilla that was on the boat trailer, the motor and the boat itself.

  I rolled my eyes. This one was a slam dunk.

  “What were y’all doing out on the lake?” Theo asked.

  I leaned against the grill of Theo’s truck and watched him work, amused when I saw the two men squirm.

  “Bow fishing,” the driver explained reluctantly.

  “Bow fishing? Let me see what you caught,” Theo continued.

  And that was when we found that not only did he have fish that were legal to kill with a bow, but he also had quite a few illegal ones that weren’t keepers, too.

  Not to mention he had a firearm in the boat, as well as marijuana.

  A lot of it.

  Not even just a small amount, but packages of it that made it quite clear that these two men weren’t just dabblers, they were dealers.

  There was no way in hell that they weren’t aware that it was in there, either. It’d been with the goddamn life jackets, after all.

  Theo made eye contact with me. “You’ll have to arrest these fine gentlemen.” Theo grinned.

  I reached for my first set of handcuffs.

  “Should’ve told the truth. He might’ve just let you off with a warning,” I pointed out as I handcuffed the passenger. “Especially when there’s a woman who saw you doing it, warned you that you were doing it and then you blew her off.”

  The man’s glare turned toward me. “Knew that bitch was trouble.”

  It was then that I saw my error.

  I shouldn’t have said anything to him about Reagan’s involvement.

  I should’ve just let him think some bad luck was the reason why he had been pulled over.

  But I didn’t…and I really should have.

  Chapter 5

  Some people confuse crazy and passionate. Let’s be clear, I am batshit passionate.


  -Reagan to Tyler

  Reagan

  I gave my dad a hug. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”

  I mean, honestly, if he’d stay, that’d make me super happy.

  Especially since Janie had set me up on yet another date—a real one this time, she’d promised.

  Of course, I had no legitimate reason to tell her no because, let’s face it, Janie was a dog with a bone when she wanted something.

  “No, Rea. I’m sorry.” He dropped a kiss on my forehead. “You have dirt on your cheek right…there.” He touched the spot.

  I grinned.

  “That’s not unusual now, is it?” I walked over to a mirror that I had hanging up in the entryway of my rental cabin and asked, “How long have you been staring at it?”

  My father’s deep laugh sounded from behind me. “A while. I wasn’t sure if you were going to go out again or take a shower. What would be the point in telling you it was there if you were just going to go back out and play in the dirt?”

  I turned and looked at my father, ignoring the dirt. I wouldn’t bother wiping it off. I was going back out…just not anywhere off the property. I was going through the research that I had and then collating everything into relevant sections so that it’d be easier to find.

  I was thinking alphabetically, but I might just…

  “You’re going to get yourself in trouble one day.” My father laughed.

  I rolled my eyes. “We already know that I can get myself into trouble just fine. One day has already happened.”

  My dad’s face dropped.

  “I hate him with the power of a thousand burning suns,” Dad said bluntly.

  I patted him on the shoulder and turned away from him.

  “Let’s face it. I would’ve only gotten the one chance. It sucks…but, I was scared shitless about leaving y’all. I may have wanted to move out on my own, but I sure didn’t want to leave y’all entirely. You know that I don’t talk to anyone but y’all,” I said.

  “You talk to me.”

  I screeched and whirled, finding my dad at the door with it open wide and Tyler on the other side of it, his arms crossed, looking amused.

  “I don’t talk to you,” I shot back instinctively. “I snarl at you. Or you snarl at me and I can’t let it go at that, so I have to counter back your asinine comments.”