Asking for Trouble

by Amy Andrews

  The erect line of Arlo’s shoulders gave a little as he exhaled on a loud sigh. “I wasn’t there for the first twenty-two years of her life. Is it so wrong to want to be there for her now?”

  “Only when you carry a gun and can throw people in jail,” Drew said pointedly.

  Arlo shrugged. “Says you.”

  Tucker sighed. “This isn’t the Wild West. Your sister does not need your permission to talk to a man or go on a date or join Tinder.”

  Arlo grumbled something under his breath about modern times—sounding suspiciously like Bob Downey. “What if she’s not as ready as she thinks? What if it…sets her back?” A deep crease of concern marred his forehead.

  “Then she has you and her shrink and me—” Tucker faltered a little, feeling suddenly conspicuous. “Us.” He pointed between him and Drew. “Hell, she’s got this whole damn town to turn to if she needs us.”

  Arlo chugged his beer in one long continuous swallow. “Hit me again,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he placed the empty bottle down.

  Tucker exchanged another look with Drew. They’d obviously given Arlo something to think about, but it was in his nature to be protective. It was what made him such a good cop. And how he’d lost his leg.

  Grabbing another Bud, he opened it and handed it over.

  “Just…try to be open and supportive when she tells you, is all,” Drew reasoned. “If you’re encouraging and positive, she’ll be more likely to talk to you about the guys she’s meeting online and ask you for your advice. Maybe you could even encourage her to find a less-toxic platform to meet someone? But she’s not going to listen to you if you go all bad cop on her. You need to…create a dialogue.”

  Arlo peered at Drew through slitted eyes. “Since when did you turn into Dr. Phil?”

  Drew gave a soft snort. “Please. I see dead people for a living. I can out-Phil Dr. Phil any day.”

  Tucker laughed, but Arlo barely raised a smile. “I just…didn’t expect this to happen. I thought I’d have to encourage her to start dating again at some point, like I had to encourage her to take the job at the old folks’ home. I’d have thought she’d be scared shitless of men forever.”

  Tucker’s sentiments exactly. But Della’s recovery and how she was fighting for a normal life were the bravest damn things Tucker had ever seen. It was tempting to still think of Della as the frightened little bird that Arlo had ushered into town, but today she’d made a stand, and, as much as he worried, he was also full of admiration.

  “She has needs,” Tucker said absently, that word still affecting him in ways he really wished it wouldn’t.

  Arlo’s eyebrows leaped on his forehead before they pulled down low on his brow again. “I beg your pardon?”

  Tucker realized he’d spoken out loud. “It’s what she said…when she was at the bar earlier. That she had needs.”

  Arlo winced, looking discomforted. Drew, he of the four sisters, did not. “She does know there are ways to…meet needs that don’t require the assistance of a man, right? Maybe you can stop in at Frieda’s Palace on your way to Denver next time.”

  Tucker could tell Arlo would rather be staked out on an anthill and covered in honey than take his sister to a sex shop. “Christ.” Arlo shook his head. “You Dr. Ruth now?”

  Drew just grinned, and, as another burst of female laughter rang through the air, Arlo drained his second beer. Tucker was half tempted to join him as thoughts of Della finding something at Frieda’s to meet her needs were way more disturbing than was good for his mental health.

  Chapter Two

  The following Monday, Della was working the early shift at The Credence Retirement Home For The Aged. Not that anybody called it by its proper name. It was just the old folks’ home. Or, if you were Bob Downey, Death View Manor, given its closeness to both the funeral home and the cemetery.

  Della worked in the villa section. Ultimately, she wanted to work in the high-dependency facility, where residents needed full nursing care. But she had to go to college to become an RN, which was something she’d realized in recent months she wanted to pursue.

  It was just a matter of plucking up the courage and taking that first step.

  Like she’d done with Tinder.

  Della smiled to herself as she smoothed out the duvet and straightened the pillows on Mrs. Forbes’s bed. “Ah…I know that look,” said a warm voice from somewhere behind.

  Rosemary Forbes appeared in a pair of snug, burnt orange leggings, expensively fashionable hand-tooled boots, and an elegant cowl-necked sweater of muted browns and soft grays. She was a tall, handsome woman, and she crossed the room with her usual erectness of spine and sureness of gait.

  “You thinking about your young man?” There was a faint trace of New York in the older woman’s voice, although it had been blunted by Midwestern living. Posh Yankee, she called it.

  Della smiled at Rosemary’s meaningful eyebrow waggle and blushed a little. If it had been anyone else in the home, they’d have asked that question in hushed tones. Like she was some kind of skittish foal. They’d have been tentative, given her a gentle encouraging smile. Maybe even a hug.

  Owing to her relative newness to the home, Rosemary, as far as Della knew, wasn’t up on the whole sorry saga of Della’s pre-Credence life and, not being the type to indulge in gossip, hadn’t bothered to inquire. Although, she suspected, the older woman wouldn’t have treated her any differently anyway.

  Della smiled mysteriously as she plopped the pillow back on the bed. She didn’t have a young man, and she wasn’t doing this to settle for the first guy she met on this new journey of hers. She wasn’t interested in settling at all. She was doing it to get a life.

  But she was going on a date!

  “Here.” The older woman sat herself down on the newly made bed and patted the spot beside her. “Sit and tell me all about him.”

  Della had several things that needed doing, but she could spare ten minutes. She sat on the bed, pushing the tail of her braid over her shoulder as she turned slightly to look into an elegantly lined face. “What would you like to know?”

  “I bet you have a picture of him on your phone, don’t you? My grandkids carry their entire lives on those things.”

  “Sure.” Della pulled her cell phone from her pocket and navigated to Tinder. “This is Cody. He lives in Denver, and he’s twenty-six. He works for the city. Something to do with potholes.”

  “Oh my,” Rosemary said, the hand that had just pushed her glasses on her face fluttering over her chest. “He’s a looker.”

  Della nodded. Cody had a cheeky kind of charisma. It wasn’t the laid-back, lived-in sexiness of Tucker’s features, but Tucker was thirty-six and out of her league, so it was a pointless comparison. “He is.”

  Best of all, he was looking for a woman who didn’t just want to hook up, but who wanted to date a bit and have some fun.

  “He told me I have pretty eyes.”

  Rosemary glanced at her, peering into Della’s face. “You do.”

  A long time ago, Della had liked her eyes, too. They were a pale, crystalline blue, with jade flecks and a dark circle ringing the iris, enhancing the color. Now all she saw when she looked at her eyes were her life experiences reflecting back at her, so she tried not to look too hard. Other people saw it, too, she knew. Like Arlo.

  Her brother had taken the news of her joining Tinder much better than Della had expected. He’d been concerned about the kind of guy that she might find on the app and had given her the talk. The one she knew he always dreaded giving the local high school students about the perils and pitfalls of social media.

  He’d clearly been uncomfortable with the subject matter, but he’d soldiered on, which she’d found adorable. Underneath his stern cop facade, Arlo really was a sweet guy. And she was so lucky he’d come into her life. She’d never had a mal
e role model worth a damn until Arlo.

  She just hoped he’d be as reasonable on Friday, because Cody had asked her to dine with him at his favorite Italian restaurant, and Della hadn’t hesitated in accepting.

  Rosemary took the phone and swiped over the images, quite adept at the technology for someone in their eighties. “I like skiing, pasta, the Broncos, and the stars at night,” she read off his bio. She smiled at the screen, and then she frowned a little. “Is this Tinder?”

  Della’s cheeks heated again. She knew a lot of the older generation didn’t understand this modern approach to dating. Didn’t approve of it, either. “It is,” Della confirmed tentatively.

  “Oh goody,” she proclaimed with a little bounce on the mattress. “I’ve been dying to know how it works. Do you think you could show me? You have to swipe right, isn’t that it?”

  Della blinked, and then she laughed. She should have known nothing would faze Rosemary Forbes. She’d apparently grown up in enormous wealth and privilege in New York but had been cut off from all of it when she’d had the audacity to fall in love with a strapping young ranch hand from Kansas. He’d been prepared to let her go, Rosemary said, but she’d been adamant he was the one and refused to give up her man.

  It seemed Trace Adkins was right—ladies did indeed love country boys.

  “Only if you want to make a match. Here.” She reached for the phone. “Let me show you.”

  Navigating back to the main page, Della showed Rosemary the potential matches that came up on the screen. She showed her how to check out their profile and other pics they’d posted and how to either swipe left or right or use the cross or heart buttons on the bottom of the screen.

  They swiped through seven half-naked bathroom selfies in a row, which had the older woman scrunching her brow a little. “Why are all these young men taking pictures of themselves in front of the mirror with hardly any clothes on? Do women these days actually find that kind of vanity attractive?”

  Della didn’t particularly get it, but she could only talk for herself. Molly and Marley were all about the bathroom selfie. She tried to imagine Tucker taking a picture of himself in the bathroom mirror and just…couldn’t. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who spent an awful lot of time looking at himself.

  “I mean, it seems so…narcissistic.”

  A laugh escaped Della’s throat. “Yes.” It did rather. But then, there were plenty of young women obsessed with bathroom selfies, too, and she didn’t know what to think about that, either.

  Sometimes she felt like an alien in this uncloistered world in which she now lived.

  “Although, that one…” Rosemary pointed to the screen, at a beautifully bronzed guy with greeny-gold eyes who was pouting at the camera. She fluttered her hand again. “He’s very pretty, isn’t he? What does he have to say about himself?”

  Della smothered a smile as she tapped on the screen and swiped up to read Ricky’s bio. “I’d like to smother you in peanut butter and lick it off.”

  Rosemary sat back, her fluttering hand grounding against her breast. “Oh dear.” And then she barked out a laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. “What a hoot. Are they all so…scandalous?”

  “Not all, no.” Della also laughed.

  “Ooh.” Rosemary pressed close to Della’s shoulder. “Can we find some more like that?”

  Della grinned. “Sure.”

  They spent the next ten minutes chuckling about some of the more out-there bios. Rosemary’s favorite was I’m really into pizzas and anal. In fact, Della was worried Rosemary was going to choke on her own spit, she’d snort-laughed so hard.

  “So, what do you do if you make a match?”

  “You message each other, see if you want to take it any further.”

  “That seems nice.”

  “It…can be.”

  “But not always?”

  “I’ve had a couple of guys volunteer their unwanted observations about the size of their penis. Including pictures.”

  Rosemary gasped, her hand clapping back over her mouth again. “Men send you pictures of their penis?” she said from behind her hand.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Well.” She dropped her hand. “I’ll be…” She shook her head, obviously struggling to find a word to adequately describe her reaction. “I’m grateful I grew up in an age when some things were left to the imagination.” Her gaze drifted to somewhere over Della’s shoulder. “If my husband had ever sent me such a personal picture, I might have been too frightened to marry him. Winston had the most wonderful penis.”

  Della blinked at the older woman’s candor. Some things came under too much information and couldn’t be unheard. Rosemary, however, was firmly stuck down memory lane. Or down her late husband’s boxers, anyway.

  Winston had been gone for a year and a half when Rosemary had made the decision to move just over the border to Credence’s old folks’ home. Her sons, who ran the family ranch now, hadn’t wanted her to go, but Rosemary had been adamant. She missed company her own age, and she didn’t want to be a burden. Plus, it had made sense to be somewhere that would give her support to live independently as well as options for more structured care should it ever be required.

  Della respected the grand old lady immensely. She had strength and guts and conviction. Her shrink had talked about her modeling herself on people she admired, and Rosemary was the perfect candidate.

  “He was big, you know?” She turned questioning eyes on Della, who nodded.

  She did now. Prior to Tinder, she hadn’t known that such a size variety existed; she’d just assumed that all men were about equal in that department.

  “And—” Rosemary made a fist and looked down at her forearm. “Thick. And always so hard.” She glanced at Della. “He never suffered from age-related droop, like so many of my friends’ husbands. He was…rampant right till the end. Best of all…” She smiled and nudged Della’s shoulder. “That man liked to eat, if you know what I mean.”

  Okaaaay. Nope. Della stood abruptly. She was very happy that Rosemary and Winston had indulged regularly, but she did not want to know the details. Not to mention how depressing it was to know an octogenarian boasted a better sex life.

  Rosemary looked up at Della, clearly surprised at her sudden move. “I really should get going,” she said by way of explanation, finding it hard to meet the older woman’s eye.

  “Sure.” Rosemary gave her a knowing smile. “You’ll understand one day. When you meet the one, everything else falls into place.”

  Della returned the smile. She wished she had the older woman’s confidence. Unfortunately, her confidence was a work in progress that came with a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollars-per-hour price tag. She’d thought Todd was the one, and that had been a total disaster. She’d since learned, thanks to therapy, he’d been her escape route from a repressed home life, not the one.

  She’d definitely gone out of the frying pan and into the fire with Todd, and the truth was, Della didn’t trust her instincts for one second. And she wasn’t sure she ever would again. Which was why she wasn’t looking for the one. Just a bunch of different ones to remind her she was a woman, damn it.

  “If Cody doesn’t work, just say the word. I have a grandson about your age. He’s a bit of a daredevil. More looks than brains, but I think you two would make a nice couple.”

  Della gave a short laugh. The thought of one date was about all she could handle at the moment. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. Now…is there anything else I can do for you before I leave?”

  “Oh yes, could you grab my flashlight out of my top bedside drawer? My grandson put it right in the back yesterday when he visited with the great grandkids because they like to play with it, which drains the batteries. I think it’s stuck on something, and I can’t seem to jiggle it loose. The arthritis in my shoulders makes my arms weak as a
kitten, and I can’t really kneel much these days without the old knees protesting.”

  “Of course.” Della was pleased to be doing something else, talking about something else, other than Winston Forbes’s penis and future date potentials.

  She skirted around the bed and opened the top drawer, leaning over and shoving her hand in, groping around the back, feeling for the thick cylindrical shape. Her fingers nudged the object in question, which didn’t appear to be obstructed. Grabbing it, Della pulled it out of the drawer without really looking. “Got it.”

  Rosemary gasped, her hand covering her mouth, and Della glanced at the object, thinking maybe the flashlight had a tarantula riding shotgun. If only…

  She wasn’t holding a flashlight. She was holding some kind of dildo.

  Della’s first instinct to drop it was tempered by her utter fascination with the machine. It was a decent size and covered in a hot pink silicone. Some kind of protrusion sprouted from about an inch north of the base, and it had two smaller protrusions sprouting from the top of it that looked like…bunny ears?

  “Oh, I am sorry, sweetie, I usually put my rabbit in the bottom drawer.”

  Rabbit? Della turned stunned eyes to Rosemary, who looked more surprised than embarrassed. And not that Della had found her vibrator, but that she’d brandished it like a freaking sword!

  “You…use this?” she asked, staring at it, in awe that a woman in her eighties wasn’t letting age and the death of her partner stop her from enjoying pleasure.

  “Oh yes, sweetie. I used it last night.”

  Della dropped the substitute penis on the bed as if it had suddenly become electrified, much to Rosemary’s delight.

  “It’s okay.” She chuckled. “I washed it.”

  Della flicked a glance at the bemused old woman. “Where did you get it?”