Private Dicks

by Samantha M. Derr

  "It's too early, Daddy. Why did I have to come?" Shahara dropped down heavily into the newest chair in my office—a mere seven year old. She huffed out a big sigh, crossing her arms over her barely-concealed cleavage. She rolled her eyes then faced me with a glare.

  "Do you want to find this man, sweetheart? Then we have to do what Mr. Cason says."

  "I think he's a fake."

  It took everything I had not to tell them to fuck the fuck off. I didn't need their business, not really, and if Jade's reputation and his self-respect weren't on the line, I'd do just that. "I have a license that says I'm an official private investigator. I've been in business almost ten years and I have a stack of recommendations for my services. Would you like to see them?"

  Durango almost looked embarrassed. "We're fine with you, Cason. Elizabeth's a little emotional in her current condition. Is there something you wanted to show us?"

  I motioned the man to a chair and sat down behind my desk, shuffling papers around to waste a little time while I willed the nerves in my body to calm the fuck down. "I did some surveillance and I need to show you both some photos."

  "Found the bastard, did ya? I'm still trying to convince Elizabeth …"

  "Shahara!"

  "... to just let me sue the fucker and forget about all this love crap she's been spewing."

  "Daddy! Jade is my one true love. We're meant to be together. He's gonna be the best daddy."

  I struggled to contain my own eye-rolling, swallowing down a slither of bile that had crept up my esophagus. Clearing my throat, I fingered the picture I intended to reveal, feeling more than a tad guilty for showing a father a half-naked photo of his own daughter. But with the guilt also came the responsibility of defending what was right and even more so, defending the man I loved.

  "This iron man ..."

  "Iron Balls, Daddy!"

  "... must not have been too far away if you've already got something on him."

  You have no idea.

  "That's not exactly what I have to tell you, Mr. Durango, or show you. I'm wondering if Shahara might like to explain where she was yesterday. It might cushion the blow of the evidence I have to show you."

  "What do you mean? Where were you, Elizabeth?"

  "Nowhere, Daddy, except going to Tiffany's in the afternoon. We had a project to work on." She fluttered her lashes and put on her best innocent display while I threw up a little in my mouth.

  Durango shrugged, eyes squinting when he looked at me. "I still don't see what's going on."

  "Elizabeth ..." I began.

  "Shahara."

  "Sorry. Shahara, do you have a boyfriend?"

  "Just Jade, but he's not here right now." Her face fell in what appeared to be real sadness.

  "Are you, um, having intercourse with anyone else?"

  Durango reared up out of his chair, his face the color of freshly cooked beets when he slammed his hand down on my desk. "What kind of question is that to ask a sixteen-year-old girl? I have half a mind to punch you in your smug private investigator face."

  Obviously he did have half a mind since he seemed to be ignoring the fact his sweet-as-pie sixteen-year-old was preggers.

  "You hired me to give you answers. Do you want them or not?"

  I'd seriously had enough of Durango and Shahara's holier-than-thou attitude. I'm sure I could find another way to make sure Jade's name wasn't slung through the mud without using this over-the-top dysfunctional family, but …

  Shahara suddenly tilted her head and pouted her mouth, making actual eye contact with me for the first time since we'd met. "No. We hired you to get me Jade Jonathan Lee. It has nothing to do with finding answers."

  Durango turned to face Shahara, her sullen face turning a blotchy shade of pink as her eyes widened and her pouty lips formed an "O" of realization. "Elizabeth, is there something you're not telling me and Mr. Cason?"

  She squeaked out a "no," and her sneakers seemed to become very interesting at that moment.

  There was really no better time. And since I was running out of time anyhow, I opened the file in front of me and plucked out the one thing that could make Miss Shahara eat her very own words. "What about something like this?" I flipped the picture around so they could both see it. "Anything you want to tell us about this?"

  I felt ten feet tall and two feet short all at the same time—ego versus humility, I suppose.

  Durango gasped, grabbed the picture and flipped it over with an angry grunt. "What in the hell do you think you're doing? Taking pornographic photos of my daughter? You're a goddamn pervert just like this iron bastard! When was this taken? And why haven't you hauled the pervert into your office with us! I have half a mind to call the goddamn cops on your ass ..."

  "He did haul me in," a soft voice from the doorway declared. "Just not in the way you think he did."

  Shahara's reactions must have been heard right down the street as she spun and covered her mouth with both hands—too late to stop the ear-piercing scream though. "Oh. My. God. You're really you. I mean you're really him ... he's really you ... you're really here." Her babbling stopped when she finally took a breath, hands doing their own version of jazz hands in front of her face.

  "You must be Shahara? I've heard a lot about you."

  Have I mentioned Jade could charm the rattle off a rattlesnake's tail? Of course, he hadn't had to deal with a pissed-as-fuck daddy in the room before. And Durango had been unusually quiet since Jade's appearance.

  "You've heard of me? From, like, my emails or friends or something? Or maybe Griz?" She clapped her hand over her mouth as Durango finally opened his.

  "Just a goddamn minute here. This is your Iron Balls? This little bit of a Chinese man?"

  "One-third Japanese actually, and I prefer Jade to Iron Balls." He grinned his killer smile and it was suddenly hard to believe he'd been so nervous only minutes before. Jade was accustomed to grinning and faking it.

  "But the photo ... you're not the guy in the photo ..." Durango paused and flipped it back over, studying it more carefully before turning it over again. "That's definitely not you. Elizabeth! Who the hell is that?" Shahara had slunk back in front of her chair, eyes still glued to Jade. She didn't even glance at Durango when he yelled her name again then grabbed her shoulder. "Speak up, young lady!"

  His whole demeanor had changed: stance and body language angry and fed up, his face hard when he looked at her, his eyes boring holes in her head. "Now," he said simply and she finally turned to him.

  "Well, he's not my boyfriend or anything. We just had, like, an arrangement."

  "An arrangement? An arrangement! You're half-naked in that picture! How could you be so stup—"

  Jade stepped between father and daughter. "If I may, Mr. Durango? Mason and I think the man in the photo manipulated Shahara. Maybe he offered her some sort of bribe to have ... to do things with him? Perhaps I was the bribe?" His smile was warm and encouraging as he looked at her. He reached out to stroke her hand then took it tenderly in his. "It's okay, Shahara, you can tell us the truth now."

  She licked at her lips, swallowing noticeably before she spoke. "He said he knew you and if I'd, you know, do it with him, he'd make sure I met you. He said you were shy, but looking for a younger girl to be with."

  "Oh, good Lord," I groaned purely unintentionally.

  "And are you pregnant?" Jade asked.

  She shook her head. "He said if I told my daddy I was, you'd have to marry me and we'd be together forever. Even got some real doctor to write me a note and everything. He was kinda creepy—not the doctor, Griz—but I just, you know, wanted to meet you. Daddy's right: I'm so stupid." She burst into tears and Jade gathered her shaking body into his arms, mouthing the word "water" over her head.

  "It's gonna be okay, Shahara..."

  "Elizabeth," she snuffled into Jade's chest while I turned and grabbed a bottle of water from the small fridge behind my desk.

  "It's gonna be okay, Elizabeth. Truth is, I already have the
love of my life so I'm not looking for that, but we can still be friends, right?"

  She snorted back some tears then lifted her head to peer up at him. "Really? We could be friends and I could, like, call you and come backstage and stuff? My friends will be so jealous. Is the love of your life young like me?"

  Jade snuck a smile at me. "Not at all. Pretty old actually, but I love him anyhow."

  Section Six

  It took a moment for his words to sink in. I had to get past the old part before the "him" part registered. I gnawed on my bottom lip, the bottle of water all but forgotten in my hand. Jade had just outed himself, outed us both—but more importantly outed himself. I could only hope Elizabeth was too firmly entrenched in Jade's spell to realize.

  She screwed up her face at him, her little pink tongue sliding across her whiter-than-white teeth as she peered suspiciously at him. Fuck, my hope was dead. "You love a guy?"

  Jade looked at me again, an obvious question in his sparkling eyes. I nodded my agreement and handed him the bottle. He took it, twisted off the cap, and handed it to Elizabeth.

  "Yeah, and you know him," he teased as she slurped from the bottle.

  Elizabeth looked confused, nose crinkled up and eyebrows knitted together again. "Is it Gerard Way?" she asked, wide-eyed while I suppressed a snort. "No! Adam Levine, right! He's old."

  "He is old, but do you know him?" Jade asked as I thought up ways to repay his comment since Adam was two years younger than me—not that I knew every detail of Adam's life and had a massive crush on him or anything so juvenile as that.

  She shook her head and tossed her half-empty bottle to her father who had quietly faded into the background, seemingly taking everything in. I'd say it was a good move on his part. Jade tilted his head in my direction and Elizabeth's eyes got saucer-huge.

  "Him? You love him?" I didn't really appreciate the squeaky sound of disbelief, but I'd let it pass—this time. "But he's not even famous and he works in a depressing, boring office. And he's so not cool."

  I opened my mouth to defend my honor, but luckily Jade beat me to it, moving around the desk to give me a smooch on the side of the head. "He has other qualities that make up for those things."

  I frowned and gave him a swift elbow to the ribs. That wasn't exactly the defending I'm been expecting.

  Elizabeth wasn't fazed, and I noticed Durango had slunk even further back from the conversation, the matter unbelievably less comfortable than a thirty-something-year-old man taking advantage of his teenaged daughter.

  "Like what?" She wasn't going to let it go.

  Jade tilted his head and turned to me, raking his eyes up and down my body. He actually made me feel dirty in front of a sixteen-year-old girl. When I was done with him, he'd be lucky if he had balls at all, let alone iron ones.

  "Come on. He's cute, right?" he teased. "And he's not really that old. I'm pretty old compared to you, too."

  Elizabeth sighed, managing to roll her eyes at the same time. Didn't she get a headache from all that rolling? "It's different because you're you and he's, well, him. How old are you, anyhow?"

  "Twenty-six."

  She frowned at him. "Yeah. that's a little old, but you're cool and he's … not."

  "He's totally cool, too."

  "As if," she snorted. I really wanted to smack her or have the floor suddenly open up and swallow me down. Or both and I think Durango was hoping for the same thing. It was an awkward conversation to say the least.

  Jade slipped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me snug to his side and giving me a quick wink. "No, really. Listen. We have a cat, right?"

  She smiled and rested one hand on the desk between us, shining eyes never straying to anything but Jade's face. I felt completely invisible and I was okay with that. "What's its name?"

  "Calliope. She's a beauty, but one time she thought it would be fun to get into the garbage then got really sick. I was tired from being on tour so guess who looked after her all night? Cleaned up her puke and her poop?"

  That's way too much information, Jade.

  Elizabeth looked disgusted but eventually gestured toward me. "Yep, Mason did, and he even brought her to work with him to make sure she was okay. And when I got the chicken pox two years ago, guess who took care of me?"

  "Isn't the chicken pox for kids?"

  Jade squeezed my shoulder while I remembered that scary time of doctors and scratching and fevers. "Usually and it can get really bad for adults. Mason never left me alone even when I got so bitchy I didn't wanna talk to me."

  That drew a snicker from her.

  "But do you wanna know what the best part of Mason is?" I prayed he wasn't going to get graphic. "His heart. He lets me be me. You know what I mean?" Elizabeth shook her head, giving me a side-eye sweep for the first time. "He doesn't treat me like Jade the rockstar or Jade the celebrity. He makes me cook and clean..."

  "I don't make you do that!" I objected. I struggled to get out of his tight hold, but he didn't let up. Dominant bastard.

  "That doesn't sound too fun or exciting to me." Shahara shook her head and looked bored.

  Jade grinned at her. "Maybe not exciting but normal, and that's all I want be when I'm at home."

  Elizabeth tilted her head, snuck a quick glare at me, then focused back on Jade. "You live together in your mansion?"

  We both chuckled at that. "Definitely not a mansion, but yeah, we live together. Almost four years, right?" He directed that question to me, even though he damn well knew the exact date and time we moved in together. Jade was like that.

  "Wanna know something else?" He moved us so we leaned over the desk as Shahara did the same.

  "Like a secret?"

  "Yeah, a big one. You're the only person outside our family that knows."

  Her eyes went wide again. "Really? But why? Why don't you want anyone to know how lucky you are?" She looked at me that time, and though I knew I was the "you" in question. I let Jade answer for me.

  "He doesn't tell anyone because of me, because we don't know how my fans will react. That kind of makes me the lucky one, right?"

  Elizabeth shrugged. "Kinda. But why wouldn't you tell your fans? You think they wouldn't like him?"

  I watched as Jade hesitated then tangled my fingers with his on my shoulder. "I don't want to do anything that might harm Jade's career, and if people know he loves a man, it might cause him some problems."

  "Ohhh, the gay thing? That's no big deal. I know a lot of gay people and they're nice."

  Jade cocked his head at her, his fingers squeezing mine. "So you'd still come to the band's shows and buy our music?"

  "Of course. Daddy always says it don't matter if people are gay, straight, black, white, or purple. As long as they're nice and don't hurt anyone else, it's all good."

  I saw Durango smirk out of the corner of my eye. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all—simply a father trying to protect and love his daughter.

  Elizabeth wasn't fazed by what she'd said. "You want me to keep the secret?"

  Jade looked up at me, a silent question on his lips. I kissed his cheek and answered against his soft skin. "Up to you, love."

  "Ohhh, that's so cute. He called you 'love,'" Elizabeth gushed, pressing her hands to her chest.

  "Told you he was cool," Jade said. "And you know what? I think it's high time everyone knew how cool and special he is, so how about we consider the secret not a secret anymore."

  "Awesome! Tiffany is gonna be so jealous that I know something before her. Can you drop me off at her house, Daddy?"

  Durango finally separated himself from the wall. I'd never noticed how dingy my office actually looked until that very moment. "No, ma'am. I think we have some other business to take care of. You know what you tried to do to Mr. Lee was wrong, don't you?"

  Elizabeth nodded and dipped her head. "Yeah, and I never liked Griz anyhow. He smelled and had really bad teeth." From all his drug use, I presumed.

  "That's not the point, Elizabeth. Any kind of se
x at your age is not acceptable and certainly not with someone so much older." He turned to Jade and me. "I'd appreciate some advice on this situation, gentlemen. If you don't think I've been too much of an ass, that is."

  I stepped back into my professional role. "I think you need to call the police, Mr. Durango. Elizabeth, do you have a phone number for Griz?" I didn't even like saying his name.

  She nodded. "I was supposed to go to his gross hotel again tonight." She looked up at her father. "I never ... did it all the way with him, Daddy. Just, you know … stuff with my mouth, and it was gross."

  Durango pulled his daughter into his arms, a look of distress shadowing his face. "We're gonna go talk to someone about it, sweetheart. We'll get through it together, and I'll make damn sure that man goes to jail." He held out his hand to Jade and Jade enclosed it in his. "I'm truly sorry for all this, Mr. Lee, and I swear your name will not be dragged into it."

  "You just do what you have to do for your daughter, sir. Mason and I can handle ourselves."

  My turn was next and I accepted his handshake with pride. "I'd like to return your deposit, Mr. Durango."

  "Nonsense," he scoffed. "You earned it, and I'm going to ask you a favor as well, one that I probably have no right to ask, but will anyhow for the sake of my daughter."

  I had already anticipated the request. "The pictures will be destroyed," I said. "Except I suggest you hang onto a couple as proof for the police."

  "Yeah, that's a good idea."

  We said our goodbyes, Elizabeth giving Jade no less than three hugs. She even seemed to suck up her jealousy to hug me. Jade told her that anytime she wanted to get in touch with him, to just call me at the office, but that part of the arrangement was definitely a secret. The two people who walked out of my office barely resembled the pair I'd met only days ago. It felt really good to have helped.

  "I think you should start cutting me a paycheck since I'm so influential in solving your cases and all." I turned to see Jade sprawled out in my big comfy chair, feet swinging over the armrest and a big, honest-to-goodness grin on his face.

  I snorted in his general direction. "You can't solve the case if you are the case. Besides, you have more money than God."