Velvet, Leather & Lace

by Suzanne Forster, Donna Kauffman

  Four kiddie fights, three missing shoes and two hours later, I’m finally alone. I sit in the big leather chair in the living room and pull my laptop on my lap. Hit the on button. Open Word.

  Stare at a blank screen.

  Come on, I think. I need to get going on this sexy novella about one of three partners who have a successful lingerie catalog. My heroine is the designer of the catalog. She knows firsthand how the lingerie feels and looks. Hmm, maybe that’s the problem—I can’t remember what sexy feels like. I get up and pull out my pajama drawer. Big T-shirts, flannels and lots of cotton.

  No silk or satin or lace in sight.

  I dig deeper. Surely at one time I had something sexy, before kids, before ten years of sleep deprivation…. Ah, there it is. A black teddy. It looks as if maybe it’ll fit on my big toe. Somehow I suck it up and get the thing on, but if I move it’s going to split in half.

  Note to self: Don’t move.

  I page my husband with “Help, can’t start my car,” thinking he’ll come home and I’ll surprise him with the black lace. Sexiness will follow suit.

  Then I sit back down at the computer to wait. The screen is still blank. How is that possible? Surely I typed something the last time I sat here… The doorbells rings. Oh, boy. Grab robe. It’s my neighbor, whom my husband has called for me because he can’t get home. I stammer some excuse and shut the door. Go back to computer, trying with all my might to get into this heroine’s head. I’m going to feel sexy, damn it, if it’s the last thing I do.

  I put my fingers on the keys, dip into the imagination and…nothing. Nada. Zip. Damn. Turn on Sex and the City for inspiration. When did single men get so cute? They weren’t that cute when I was single….

  The dog chases away the FedEx man. I’m not feeling too bad about that; it was probably just some work I didn’t want to do anyway.

  Try again. Look at my blank screen. Come on, surely I have something sexy to add to this story!

  The phone rings. Thank God. I leap at it for the distraction. Only, it’s my ten-year-old who has fallen on the ice at school and needs an emergency-room visit. Her third this year. Heart clutching, I tear off the robe and jump into jeans and a sweater. Spend the next two hours discussing a broken elbow. Pick up the other kids. Feed everyone, get one daughter to jazz class and the other to a basketball game. Feed everyone some more. Supervise the homework. Referee more fights. At nine o’clock, silence finally reigns. I jump into the shower, and then grab one of my husband’s T-shirts. Feel like a physical and emotional wreck. Didn’t get any pages done!

  “Hey,” my husband says, perking up when I fall onto the couch in exhaustion, “like the look.”

  I open my mouth to get defensive but see a real warmth and genuine affection in his eyes. Hmm. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with a little cotton. Maybe sexiness isn’t in the material at all, but in the heart. “Hold that thought,” I tell him, and reach for the laptop as he groans and reaches for the remote.

  SAVING ALLEGHENY GREEN

  by

  Lori Wilde

  Nothing solves an identity crisis like a nice murder….

  CHAPTER 1

  AT TEN MINUTES after midnight on a muggy Saturday morning in late July, my kid sister, Sistine, shot her rat bastard boyfriend, Rockerfeller Hughes, with a .22-caliber pistol.

  Rocky and Sissy had been drinking, which was not an unusual occurrence. Particularly in Rocky’s case. His favorite beverage of choice being a shot of Jack Daniel’s dropped into a mug of A&W root beer.

  Sistine didn’t hurt him. Well, not much. There was blood, sure, and he was howling loud enough to rouse corpses, but in truth she shot him in the foot, and he was wearing steel-toed Doc Marten boots so it wasn’t quite as awful as it sounds.

  Still, it was a mess, and some neighbor ended up calling the sheriff.

  That’s one bad thing about living in a rural river community like Clover Leaf, Texas. Everyone’s got their nose in your business 24/7.

  Like any sensible person with a day job, I was in bed. Sleeping. Or rather, trying to sleep. Between Rocky and his ragtag band of wannabe musicians playing a miserable riff of “My Mama Didn’t Raise No Ho” in the garage and Sissy screaming at a decibel far above top-of-the-lungs, I was finding it difficult to achieve theta state.

  I had been struggling to restrain myself from intervening in their argument, having learned from experience meddling in Sissy and Rocky’s battles was a fool’s mission. But Aunt Tessa, dressed in a gauzy white flowing robe, à la Aimee McPherson, came running into my bedroom, her healing crystal charm bracelet jangling as she moved.

  “Ally,” she cried, “get up. We need you. Rocky’s been shot.”

  “Huh?” Pushing hair from my face, I sat up. The room was dark save for a shaft of moonlight spilling through the Home Depot miniblinds I had installed myself.

  “Sissy shot Rocky. With your granddaddy’s pistol. You better come quick. Someone must have called the cops. Probably that sanctimonious televangelist next door, because I can feel the sirens.”

  Reverend Ray Don Swiggly, the latest Sunday-morning television huckster to make millions off spreading the supposed gospel, had recently built a palatial summer home on the edge of the Brazos River right next door to our house. Being of the New-Age persuasion, Aunt Tessa had vast theological differences of opinion with the good reverend and expounded on her convictions whenever anyone would listen.

  I cocked my head, not wanting to get into a long-winded discussion about the Reverend Swiggly when there were more urgent matters at hand. “I don’t hear any sirens.”

  “You will.”

  I let it go. With Aunt Tessa sometimes you just had to trust. It was easier than trying to figure her out. I threw back the covers, hopped out of bed and grabbed my practical terry-cloth robe with the frayed hem. Okay, so I looked like a neglected housewife. Not everyone could pull off flaky chic like Aunt Tessa.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked. “And Denny?”

  “Your mother’s in the pottery shack. I don’t think she knows what’s going on.”

  “Good. Keep her there. You know how she gets in a crisis.” I gave Aunt Tessa the assignment not only to keep Mama from freaking out, but to give my aunt something to do. Tessa had as much of a tendency to slip into theatrics as Mama did. “What about Denny?”

  “He’s still sleeping.”

  “Are you sure?” Sissy’s eight-year-old son had witnessed far too many of his mother’s escapades.

  “I’m certain. Come on.” Aunt Tessa hustled me down the hallway.

  We took the stairs two at a time then flew through the back door and out onto the stone walkway leading to the freestanding garage built years after the house was constructed. A million lights blazed and a knot of Sissy and Rocky’s drunken friends, scraggly-haired young men and scantily clad women, clotted around the garage door.

  I recognized Tim Kehaul. He was one of Sissy’s many ex-boyfriends and the only guy to ever dump her. Tim had discovered rather late in life he preferred strong, hard masculine muscles wrapped around him in the night to soft, feminine limbs.

  Tim possessed a cherubic face, sensational cheekbones and thick bronze hair that curled tightly against his head like a cap.

  “Ally.” Tim shyly smiled. “Strange doings.”

  “Hey, Tim,” I said, too distracted to really notice him or wonder what he was doing there.

  Tim rarely came around, since he didn’t like Rocky, and Sissy hadn’t forgiven him for taking up with his own sex. The fact that Tim and Rocky lived right next door to each other in the same trailer park two miles upriver must have caused friction between the three of them. But I gave up asking questions about Sissy’s tangled sexual history. Sometimes it’s best not to know.

  I elbowed my way through the crowd and hollered at Aunt Tessa over my shoulder to take care of Mama before I plunged inside the garage.

  Rocky lay on the floor, baying like a hound caught in a bear trap. His too-tight, blood-flecked Gra
teful Dead T-shirt had the neck slashed out in a deep V, exposing more of his chest and an old scar crisscrossing his throat than I cared to see. For reasons that escaped me, Rocky cut the neck out of his shirts.

  Sissy sat with his head cradled in her lap, tears pouring down her face. “I’m sorry, Rocky. I didn’t mean to shoot you,” she wailed.

  “Yes, you did. I’m having you arrested,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Thank God. Maybe she’ll break up with him.

  I flicked my gaze over his body, searching for the wound, and stopped at his feet. Blood oozed from the toe of his boot and pooled on the cement. Or rather, what was left of his boot. Bits of leather had gone flying and were stuck to guitars and drums. What a mess.

  “Ally! Thank heavens!” Sissy exclaimed when she realized I was in the room.

  “Your crazy sister shot me,” Rocky whined. “Can you believe that?”

  “Shut up. Both of you.” I sank to my knees beside Rocky.

  “Don’t touch it.” He howled, even though my fingers were nowhere near his blasted foot.

  “You know I’m a nurse,” I soothed. “Hold still so I can examine you.”

  “You might be a nurse, but you’re her sister and you hate my guts.” He jabbed a finger at Sissy. “For all I know, you’ll make it worse on purpose.”

  “I admit it’s a tempting thought,” I said dryly. “If you’d rather bleed to death.” I shrugged and started to get up.

  His face paled. “No. Wait. Don’t go. Is it really bleeding that bad?”

  “I can’t tell until I take your boot off.”

  “It’s going to hurt, isn’t it?”

  “Like a son of a bitch,” I said cheerfully, and loosened his boot laces.

  “The cops are comin’!” Tim yelled from the yard, and the next thing I knew engines were revving and the police sirens Aunt Tessa had predicted several minutes earlier screamed in the distance.

  “Oh, jeez, Sissy.” Rocky gazed balefully at my sister. “Run your hand in my back pocket and get out those joints. I can’t get busted for possession again. They’ll revoke my parole.”

  “You brought marijuana into my house after I distinctly told you not to?” I shouted.

  “It’s not your house—it’s your garage,” Rocky quibbled.

  I jostled his foot. On purpose.

  “Yow!”

  “Sorry. My hand slipped.”

  Rocky glared then turned his attention back to Sissy. “Come on, babe, get the joints.”

  “Not if you’re going to have me arrested. You know I had every right to shoot you,” my sister told him.

  “Sissy.” I frowned at her. “No one has the right to shoot anyone, no matter what that person might have done.”

  “He’s got a wife,” Sissy muttered.

  “What?” I glared at Rocky.

  He looked sheepish. “It’s no big deal. I haven’t seen her in a year.”

  “He’s lucky,” Sissy said. “I was aiming somewhere a bit higher but I missed and the bullet ricocheted off the clothes dryer and got him in the boot.”

  Rocky rested a protective hand over his genitals. “Okay, sweetie, baby. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I shoulda told you I was married when we started dating.”

  “Damn straight.”

  She’s gonna dump him, once and for all. Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

  The sirens were getting louder. The crowd once assembled in my yard had vaporized.

  “So get the joints out of my pocket, please.” Rocky rolled calf eyes at Sistine and I knew she was falling for it. “I’ll tell the cops it was an accident. I promise.”

  “Do you want me to flush ’em?” Sissy asked, rooting around behind him, frisking his bony butt. She came up with a crumpled plastic bag containing six fat hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes.

  “Hell, no. Hide them in here somewhere.”

  My gaze caught Sissy’s. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Sheriff’s Department.” A commanding voice spoke from the open doorway. “Nobody move.”

  Law-enforcement officials poured into my garage, guns drawn. They surrounded the three of us, locking us into some surreal, redneck militia melodrama.

  We were screwed.

  I caught my breath and glanced toward the door.

  A tall, muscular, mustachioed man trod across the garage toward us. He looked like a Rambo/Terminator cross—hard gray eyes, jarhead haircut, service revolver strapped to him more snugly than a spare body part. The twinkling star on his chest revealed his identity.

  Sheriff.

  The famed former U.S. Marine MP, Sheriff Samuel J. Conahegg so highly lauded in the Clover Leaf Gazette.

  He’d been elected on the strength of his promise to scour the local government of corruption. His predecessor had run off with the county clerk, buck-toothed, knock-kneed Mavis Higgins—who was reportedly a real hottie in bed despite her uncanny resemblance to Olive Oyl—and two hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer funds.

  Conahegg was known not only for his tendency to go for ride-alongs with his deputies at any time without notice, but for his utter lack of mercy. Zero Tolerance was his middle name, and from his ramrod straight stance, I could believe it.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, his voice a strange mixture of barbed wire and honey.

  My heart did a crazy, swoony dance.

  Why? I had no explanation. I’m not given to instant attraction to strangers. And most certainly not to domineering, uncompromising types.

  His gaze took in Rocky with the shot toe and Sissy holding the bag of illicit weed. Then he looked at me. I shrugged and lifted my eyebrows.

  Nobody said a word.

  The sheriff turned to one of his men. “Call for an ambulance, please, Jefferson.”

  “Will do, sir.” Jefferson sprinted from the garage.

  “The rest of you can put away your weapons.” Conahegg waved at the four remaining deputies. They obeyed his command, sliding their guns into their holsters while sending us malevolent stares.

  “You.” The sheriff flicked a finger at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Al…er…” My throat was dry as a crusty gym sock. I tried to swallow. Twice. And finally got out “Allegheny Allison Green.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Don’t blame me. I didn’t pick it.” I might be attracted to him, but damn if I’d let him know it.

  “What happened here?” He jerked his dimpled chin in the direction of Rocky’s toe.

  How to explain?

  Rocky and Sissy were no help. Rocky had closed his eyes, feigning unconsciousness. Sissy peered assiduously at the floor, as if, if she stared long enough, it would open up and suck her right down.

  “He got shot,” I finally answered.

  “So it appears.” Conahegg squatted beside Rocky. “Hurts pretty badly, does it?”

  Rocky didn’t move.

  “Hmm,” Conahegg mused, stroking his chin with two fingers and a thumb.

  None of the stalwart deputies had spoken, nor even moved. They stayed positioned at the ready, their faces expressionless.

  “What I don’t know,” the sheriff continued in his oddly engaging tone, “is how he came to find himself toeless.”

  “A gun went off?” I ventured.

  The sheriff jerked his head around and drilled me with eyes gone deadly sharp. “You’re not that stupid.”

  Ulp!

  He both complimented me and scared me in one breath. I had to give him high marks for perceptiveness but low scores on charm. Still, something about him magnetized me in a way no man had in a very long time. Just my luck. I finally get the hots for someone and it’s the kind of guy I could never get along with.

  The sheriff shifted his body away from Rocky and toward me. Instant sweat popped out on my skin. I could feel it trickling down my neck.

  “Let’s start again, shall we?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “All right.” He paused to glance at his watc
h. “At exactly ten minutes after zero hundred hours we received a report that someone was shooting off a gun at this residence.”

  He’d brought his military precision with him to his job as sheriff. You could see it in his posture, read it in his face. He was probably not an easy man to work for. He would demand perfection from his employees, and mete out just punishment if his orders weren’t followed to the letter. He possessed an enigmatic power gleaned from years of hard self-discipline.

  I shivered.

  “We’re outside the city limits,” I pointed out, forcing myself to stop thinking about the strange pull I felt toward him. “It’s not illegal to shoot a gun here.”

  “To discharge a weapon, no. But to shoot a person, yes.”

  “It was an accident,” Rocky said.

  Conahegg and I stared at each other again, our eyes striking like two flint rocks sparking off each other, before we glanced over at Rocky.

  “Sh…sh…she didn’t mean to do it,” Rocky stammered.

  “You shot him?” the sheriff asked me, a bemused smile flitting over his lips. It almost looked as if he admired me, and for one short second I wished I had shot Rocky.

  “No.” Rocky shook his head. “Her.” He pointed at Sissy. “She was showing me her granddaddy’s gun when she dropped it and the thing went off.”

  The sheriff reached over and gently pried the bag of marijuana from Sistine’s fingers. His gentleness with her surprised me. He touched her chin, lifted her face. “Is that true?”

  Tears glistened in my sister’s eyes. She shook like a kitten abandoned on the roadside.

  “It’s all right,” he said softly. “You can tell me anything.”

  Oh, he was good. Too good. Sissy loved male attention and she’d go to the ends of the earth to get it. Although how he had sensed that about her I had no idea.

  “Uh-huh,” Sissy whispered. “It was an accident.”

  “What about this?” Sheriff Conahegg crushed the bag of joints in his fist. “How did a nice girl like you get possession of a nasty weed like this?”

  Sissy’s gaze flicked from the sheriff to Rocky.