Addicted to Love (2 page)

It wasn’t that he didn’t like football, but the last couple of years his life had been preoccupied with adjusting to losing his leg in Iraq, getting over a wife who’d left him for another man, helping his wayward sister raise her young daughter, and settling into his job as sheriff. He hadn’t had much time for leisurely pursuits.

“How’d you get up there?” Brody asked.

“With my white sequined magical jet pack.”

“You’ve got a lot of anger built up inside.”

“You think?”

“I know you’re heartbroken and all,” he drawled, “but I’m gonna have to ask you to stop painting the Valentine kisser.”

“This isn’t the first time, you know,” she said without breaking stride.
Swish, swish, swish
went the paintbrush.

“You’ve vandalized a sign before?”

“I’ve been stood up at the altar before.”

“No kidding?”

“Last year. The ratfink never showed up. Left me standing in the church for over an hour while my wilting orchid bouquet attracted bees.”

“And still, you were willing to try again.”

“I know. I’m an idiot. Or at least I was. But I’m turning over a new leaf. Joining the skeptics.”

“Well, if you don’t stop painting the sign, you’re going to be joining the ranks of the inmates at the Jeff Davis County Jail.”

“You’ve got prisoners?”

“Figure of speech.” How did she know the jail was empty fifty percent of the time? Brody squinted suspiciously. He didn’t recognize her, at least not from this distance. “You from Valentine?”

“I live in Houston now.”

That was as far as the conversation got because the mayor’s fat, honking Cadillac bumped to a stop behind Brody’s cruiser.

Kelvin P. Wentworth IV flung the car door open and wrestled his hefty frame from behind the wheel. Merle Haggard belted from the radio, wailing a thirty-year-old country-and-western song about boozing and chasing women.

“What the hell’s going on here,” Kelvin boomed and lumbered toward Brody.

The mayor tilted his head up, scowling darkly at the billboard bride. Kelvin prided himself on shopping only in Valentine. He refused to even order off the Internet. He was big and bald and on the back side of his forties. His seersucker suit clung to him like leeches on a water buffalo. Kelvin was under the mistaken impression he was still as good-looking as the day he’d scored the winning touchdown that took Valentine to state in 1977, the year Brody was born. It was the first and last time the town had been in the playoffs.

Brody suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. He knew what was coming. Kelvin was a true believer in the Church of Valentine and the jilted bride had just committed the highest form of blasphemy. “I’ve got it under control, Mayor.”

“My ass.” Kelvin waved an angry hand. “She’s up there defacin’ and disgracin’ our hometown heritage and you’re standing here with your thumb up your butt, Carlton.”

“She’s distraught. Her fiancé dumped her at the altar.”

“Rachael Renee Henderson,” Kelvin thundered up at her. “Is that you?”

“Go away, Mayor. This is something that’s gotta be done,” she called back.

“You get yourself down off that billboard right now, or I’m gonna call your daddy.”

Rachael Henderson.

The name brought an instant association into Brody’s mind. He saw an image of long blonde pigtails, gap-toothed grin, and freckles across the bridge of an upturned pixie nose. Rachael Henderson, the next-door neighbor who’d followed him around like a puppy dog until he’d moved to Midland with his mother and his sister after their father went to Kuwait when Brody was twelve. From what he recalled, Rachael was sweet as honeysuckle, certainly not the type to graffiti a beloved town landmark.

People change.

He thought of Belinda and shook his head to clear away thoughts of his ex-wife.

“My daddy is partly to blame for this,” she said. “Last time I saw him he was in Houston breaking my mother’s heart. Go ahead and call him. Would you like his cell phone number?”

“What’s she talking about?” Kelvin swung his gaze to Brody.

Brody shrugged. “Apparently she’s got some personal issues to work out.”

“Well, she can’t work them out on my billboard.”

“I’m getting the impression the billboard is a symbol of her personal issues.”

“I don’t give a damn. Get ’er down.”

“How do you propose I do that?”

Kelvin squinted at the billboard. “How’d she get up there?”

“Big mystery. But why don’t we just let her have at it? She’s bound to run out of steam soon enough in this heat.”

“Are you nuts? Hell, man, she’s already blacked out the top lip.” Kelvin anxiously shifted his weight, bunched his hands into fists. “I won’t stand for this. Find a way to get her down. Now!”

“What do you want me to do? Shoot her?”

“It’s a thought,” Kelvin muttered.

“Commanding the sheriff to shoot a jilted bride won’t help you get reelected.”

“It ain’t gonna help my reelection bid if she falls off that billboard and breaks her fool neck because I didn’t stop her.”

“Granted.”

Kelvin cursed up a blue streak and swiped a meaty hand across his sweaty forehead. “I was supposed to be getting doughnuts so me and Marianne could have a nice, quiet breakfast before church, but hell no, I gotta deal with this stupid crap.” Kelvin, a self-proclaimed playboy, had never married. Marianne was his one hundred and twenty pound bullmastiff.

“Go get your doughnuts, Mayor,” Brody said. “I’ve got this under control.”

Kelvin shot him a withering look and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. Brody listened to the one-sided conversation, his eyes on Rachael, who showed no signs of slowing her assault on the vampish pout.

“Rex,” Kelvin barked to his personal assistant. “Go over to Audie’s, have him open the hardware store up for you, get a twenty-five-foot ladder, and bring it out to the Valentine billboard.”

There was a pause from Kelvin as Rex responded.

“I don’t care if you stayed up ’til three a.m. playing video games with your geeky online buddies. Just do it.”

With a savage slash of his thumb on the keypad, Kelvin hung up and muttered under his breath, “I’m surrounded by morons.”

Brody tried not to take offense at the comment. Kelvin liked his drama as much as he liked ordering people around.

Fifteen minutes later, Rex showed up with a collapsible yellow ladder roped to his pickup truck. He was barely twenty-five, redheaded as rhubarb, and had a voice deep as Barry White’s, with an Adam’s apple that protruded like a submarine ready to break the surface. Brody often wondered if the prominent Adam’s apple had anything to do with the kid’s smooth, dark, ebony voice.

Up on the billboard, Rachael was almost finished with the mouth. She had slashes of angry black paint smeared across the front of her wedding gown. While waiting on Rex to show up with the ladder, Kelvin had spent the time trying to convince her to come down, but she was a zealot on a mission and she wouldn’t even talk to him.

“I want her arrested,” Kelvin snapped. “I’m pressing charges.”

“You might want to reconsider that,” Brody advised. “Since the election is just a little more than three months away and Giada Vito is gaining favor in the polls.”

The polls being the gossip at Higgy’s Diner. He knew the mayor was grandstanding. For the first time in Kelvin’s three-term stint, he was running opposed. Giada Vito had moved to Valentine from Italy and she’d gotten her American citizenship as soon as the law allowed. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, the principal of Valentine High, drove a vintage Fiat, and didn’t mince her words. Especially when it came to the topic of Valentine’s favored son, Kelvin P. Wentworth IV.

“Hey, you leave the legal and political machinations to me. You just do your job,” said Kelvin.

Brody blew out his breath and went to help Rex untie the ladder. What he wanted to do was tell Kelvin to shove it. But the truth was the woman needed to come down before she got hurt. More than likely, the wooden billboard decking was riddled with termites.

He and Rex got the ladder loose and carried it over to prop it against the back of the billboard. It extended just long enough to reach the ladder rungs that were attached to the billboard itself.

Kelvin gave Brody a pointed look. “Up you go.”

Brody ignored him. “Rachael, we’ve got a ladder in place. You need to come down now.”

“Don’t ask her, tell her,” Kelvin hissed to Brody, then said to Rachael, “Missy, get your ass down here this instant.”

“Get bent,” Rachael sang out.

“That was effective,” Brody muttered.

Rex snorted back a laugh. Kelvin shot him a withering glance and then raised his eyebrows at Brody and jerked his head toward the billboard. “You’re the sheriff. Do your job.”

Brody looked up at the ladder and then tried his best not to glance down at his leg. He didn’t want to show the slightest sign of weakness, especially in front of Kelvin. But while his Power Knee was pretty well the most awesome thing that had happened to him since his rehabilitation, he’d never tested it by climbing a ladder, particularly a thin, wobbly, collapsible one.

Shit. If he fell off, it was going to hurt. He might even break something.

Kelvin was staring expectantly, arms crossed over his bearish chest, the sleeves of his seersucker suit straining against his bulky forearms. The door to the Cadillac was still hanging open and from the radio Merle Haggard had given it up to Tammy Wynette, who was beseeching women to stand by their man.

Brody was the sheriff. This was his job. And he never shirked his duty, even when it was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. Gritting his teeth, he gathered his courage, wrapped both hands around the ladder just above his head, and planted his prosthetic leg on the bottom rung.

His gut squeezed.

Come on, you can do this.

He attacked the project the same way he’d attacked physical therapy, going at it with dogged determination to walk again, to come home, if not whole, at least proud to be a man. Of course Belinda had shattered all that.

Don’t think about Belinda. Get up the ladder. Get the girl down.

He placed his good leg on the second rung.

The ladder trembled under his weight.

Brody swallowed back the fear and pulled his prosthesis up the next step. Hands clinging tightly to the ladder above him, he raised his head and counted the steps.

Twenty-five of them on the ladder and seventeen on the back of the billboard.

Three down, thirty-nine left to go.

He remembered an old movie called
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Suddenly, those three words held a weighted significance. It wasn’t just thirty-nine more steps. It was also forty-two more back down with Rachael Henderson in tow.

Better get climbing.

Thirty-eight steps.

Thirty-seven.

Thirty-six.

The higher he went, the more the ladder quivered.

Halfway up vertigo took solid hold of him. He’d never had a fear of heights before, but now, staring down at Kelvin and Rex, who were staring up at him, Brody’s head swam and his stomach pitched. He bit his bottom lip, closed his eyes, and took another step up.

In the quiet of the higher air, he could hear the soft whispery sound of his computerized leg working as he took another step. Kelvin’s country music sounded tinny and far away. With his eyes closed and his hands skimming over the cool aluminum ladder, he could also hear the sound of brushstrokes growing faster and more frantic the closer he came to the bottom of the billboard.

Rachael was still furiously painting, trying to get in as many licks as she could.

When Brody finally reached the top of the first ladder, he opened his eyes.

“You’re doing great,” Kelvin called up to him. “Keep going. You’re almost there.”

Yeah, almost there. This was the hardest part of all, covering the gap between the ladder from Audie’s Hardware and the thin metal footholds welded to the back of the billboard.

He took a deep breath. He had to stretch to reach the bottom step. He grabbed hold of it with both hands, and took his Power Knee off the aluminum ladder.

For a moment, he hung there, twenty-five feet off the ground, fighting gravity and the bile rising in his throat, wondering why he hadn’t told Kelvin to go straight to hell. Wondering why he hadn’t just called the volunteer fire department to come and get Rachael down.

It was a matter of pride and he knew it. Stupid, egotistical pride. He’d wanted to prove he could handle anything that came with the job. Wanted to show the town he’d earned their vote. That he hadn’t just stumbled into the office because he was an injured war hero.

Pride goes before a fall
, his Gramma Carlton used to say. Now, for the first time, he fully understood what she meant.

Arms trembling with the effort, he dragged himself up with his biceps, his real leg tiptoed on the collapsible ladder, his bionic leg searching blindly for the rung.

Just when he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on a second longer, he found the toehold and then brought his good leg up against the billboard ladder to join the bionic one.

He’d made it.

Brody clung there, breathing hard, thanking God for letting him get this far and wondering just how in the hell he was going to get back down without killing them both, when he heard the soft sounds of muffled female sobs.

Rachael was crying.

The hero in him forgot that his limbs were quivering, forgot that he was forty feet in the air, forgot that somehow he was going to have to get back down. The only thing in his mind was the woman.

Was she all right?

As quickly as he could, Brody scaled the remaining rungs and then gingerly settled his legs on the billboard decking. He ducked under the bottom of the sign and peered around it.

She sat, knees drawn to her chest, head down, looking completely incongruous in that wedding dress smeared with black paint and the butterfly wedding veil floating around her head. Miraculously, the veil seemed to have escaped the paint.

“You okay?”

She raised her head. “Of course I’m not okay.”