Looking for Trouble (7 page)

CHAPTER SIX

A
LEX TURNED HIS
phone on, confirmed that only his brother had called—four times—then switched it off. The only calls he was interested in taking were about work or a certain naughty librarian. But she hadn’t called. Not that he was surprised. He’d seen that in the stubborn way she’d said “Good evening,” when she’d gotten off his bike. He’d watched until she got inside her house. She hadn’t looked back once.

Fuck, she was hot.

He knew he’d have to see his family today. He’d considered meeting them for dinner the night before, but then he’d seen Sophie, and he’d decided not to screw up a good evening. He’d see them on his terms, on his time, and first he wanted another glimpse of Sophie.

She only lived a few doors down from his mother, so he parked his bike in front of his mom’s and walked toward Sophie’s little place. She might not be home. She might not want to see him. But Alex still felt a smile try to tug at his mouth as he approached.

The smile finally won out when he spotted Sophie before he even got to her house. She was working in the flower beds along the front of her house, and looked even more prim than she usually did. Instead of a dress, today she wore khaki capris and little white sneakers and a flowered button-down shirt that almost hid her slim curves. But he knew them now. There was no hiding them. Especially when she bent over and he caught sight of the perfect rounds of her ass.

Damn. He wanted to see her just like that, except naked and begging.

But for now he stepped onto her front walk, avoiding her carefully tended lawn because he thought she wouldn’t like him grinding it down with his big boots. Even in September, her grass was just starting to lose its green.

Her head rose when his boot caught a rock and kicked it toward the front stairs.

“Oh!” The trowel dropped from her hands as she stood. “Alex.”

He liked the pink that rushed to her cheeks. “Sophie,” he said softly, and her cheeks turned crimson, as if her name was something intimate.

“Um, hi,” she stammered. Her eyes darted toward his mother’s house, then back to him. “Did you come to talk?”

He leaned against the front porch banister and looked her up and down from behind his sunglasses. No one would guess in a million years that this innocent-looking woman had come like an animal last night.

She swallowed hard. “You’re intimidating with those glasses on.”

“Am I?” he asked.

“Yes. I can’t see your eyes, and your mouth always looks so serious.”

He liked making her nervous, but he still slipped off his glasses. “Better?”

“Yes,” she said, but she still licked her lips and glanced down the street again. “Alex, I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize. Unless you’re about to pretend you can’t see me again.”

“I can’t.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun.” He lowered his voice and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you think it’ll be fun, Sophie?”

The color had begun to fade from her cheeks, but they blazed red again. Alex let his gaze sweep down her body and let her see him do it. Her pretty mouth parted as she drew in a quick breath. But she still shook her head.

“I really can’t. There’s something I didn’t tell you.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “This is a little early for ‘We need to talk,’ isn’t it?”

But the way she worried her bottom lip let him know she was serious. And just like that, he knew what it was. Why she played so coy. Why she’d met him in secret. Why she didn’t want to go out again.

She was seeing someone else. She was taken.

Alex didn’t particularly care.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”

“I don’t think you do.”

He shrugged. “Fine. We’ll talk. Go out with me, or invite me in, or I’ll take you for a ride. I’ll let you choose.”

That snapped her eyes up to his. “Oh, you’ll
let
me?”

He laughed. “Definitely. Whatever you want. You want things, don’t you?”

She shrugged and slipped off her gardening gloves. “You’re handsome when you smile,” she grumbled.

“But not when I don’t?”

“No.
Handsome
isn’t the word I’d use then.”

He tipped his head a little closer as if she were revealing a secret. “What word would you use?”

He’d expected a flip answer, but she seemed to take his question seriously. Her brow furrowed as she looked up at him, and a dozen heartbeats passed before she answered. “I’d say you’re...”

During her pause, he watched closely, studying her eyes, waiting for her answer. But it never came.

“Get away from her!”
a woman yelled from a distance.

A strangled gasp tore from Sophie’s throat as she straightened and took two steps away from Alex. He was a little slower, checking idly over his shoulder to see what neighborhood drama was going down. An old woman was storming up the street. It took him several seconds to realize that old woman was his mom. He still wasn’t used to the change in her.

“Alex!” she screamed.

Jesus. Alex shook his head. “Whatever’s about to go down, I apologize for it.”

“Alex, I’m sorry. I meant to tell you. I swear.”

“Tell me what?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he looked away from his charging mother to see Sophie twisting her hands together, her face tight with something like fear. “Hey. Don’t let her scare you. She’s just—”

“You get away from that whore!”

“Hey!” Alex barked, swinging toward his mother as she stormed across the lawn. “Watch your mouth.”

“I should say the same to you,” she sneered, skidding to a stop only a few feet away. Her slippers were damp and muddy around the edges. “Watch your mouth and every other part of yourself around her.”

“Jesus.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”

His mom snorted. “Don’t apologize to her.”

“I will and so will you.”

Sophie’s whisper broke through his building anger. “No. I’ll go inside. It’s fine. Just...”

“It’s not fine,” he insisted. His mom’s insanity was spilling out all over her neighbors now. “She can’t try to pull innocent people into her deranged world.”

“Innocent?” his mother scoffed. “Oh, my God.
Innocent?
” She barked out a laugh as Alex stepped forward, herding her toward the street. He was sick of this shit. He’d been sick of it his whole life.

“Let’s go,” he ordered.

She shook off the hand he put on her elbow. “She’s not innocent. She’s just like her mother!”

“For God’s sake, if you think I give a damn about your neighborhood gossip, you’re even crazier than I thought.” When she froze, Alex got a grip on her arm.

Her crazed gaze tore free from Sophie and rose to him. Her mouth gaped. “You don’t know,” she breathed.

“No, I don’t, and I don’t care to.”

“Ha!” She shot a grim smile at Sophie. “You’re even more devious than I thought.”

“Mrs. Bishop...” Sophie said, but then seemed at a loss for how to address the manic senior citizen in her yard.

“She’s Dorothy Heyer’s daughter,” his mom said, the words thrown out with the same tone one would declare a man guilty of murder.
She’s a murderer. She’s a child abuser. She’s the daughter of...

Whoa.

His mom pointed at Sophie. “Don’t you recognize her? She looks just like her slut of a mother.”

Alex shook his head in shock. Sophie was the daughter of Dorothy Heyer. His dad’s mistress. The woman who’d disappeared with him twenty-five years ago.

Shit.

But he kept his mouth shut and his surprise to himself and tightened his hold on his mom’s elbow. “I don’t give a damn who her mother is, and who I talk to is none of your business. Let’s go.”

This time when he tugged her toward the street, his mom actually came along with him.

He glanced back toward Sophie to find her watching them, but her gaze fell before he could think what to say. The situation was way too fucked up for any kind of intelligent response, so he just led his mother down the sidewalk to her house.

“You think you can manage not to embarrass yourself for a few more feet?” he growled. When she nodded, he let her go and stalked toward her house. Shane stood in the doorway, looking nearly as unhappy as Alex felt.

“Where the hell were you last night?” Shane asked.

“Somewhere sane,” Alex snapped back. “I came for the dedication, not to be on the planning committee. By the way, Mom just called one of her neighbors a whore.”

Shane winced. “Who? Sophie?”

Alex was apparently the only one not in on this joke. “Yes, Sophie. You know who she is?”

“Sure. Everyone knows. I mean...most people don’t care, but you know how it is here. Small town. Long memories.”

“Yeah. I’m sure it doesn’t help anything that the woman down the street treats Sophie like crap.”

His mom brushed past him and Shane. “She should know better than to show her face around me.”

He followed her inside, his surprise and outrage hardening into true anger. “Are you kidding me? She was standing in her own yard! And she seems like a perfectly nice woman.”

“Ha. Until you find out who she really is.”

Alex couldn’t believe this. “This can’t be all about her mother. Sophie was a kid when that happened. Even younger than Shane and I were. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“She’s the one who moved onto
my
street and threw the past in my face like the hussy she is. Do you know how much it hurts to see her every day? With that red hair just like her mama? And now she’s putting the moves on my son? No, sir. I won’t stand for it.”

“Putting the
moves
on me? Are you kidding me? We were having a conversation in her garden.”

“You can’t fool me. I saw the way you were looking at her. She’s just like her mother and apparently you’re no different than your father!”

Alex laughed instead of yelling what he really wanted to yell. “Am I supposed to be sorry about that? You’re the one who made him into a saint.”

“He was a saint compared to that home wrecker who lured him away!”

He ground his teeth together. He fisted his hands. The old familiar fury flooded his veins. The wish that she would disappear as thoroughly as his dad had just so they could have some damn peace.

“Nobody needed to lure Dad,” he ground out. “Anyone with a thought in his head would run as far and fast from you as possible.”

She gasped, her hand flying up to cover her mouth in horror. “Don’t say that,” she cried past her fingers. “You were always so cruel to me. Always.”

“Alex,” Shane said quietly. “Come on. Let’s get outside for a few minutes.”

Shane. Always the peacemaker. Always trying to calm them both down. He was her accomplice just as he’d been all those years ago.

“I don’t need to get outside. I need to get out of town. She’s abusing the neighbors! This is insanity and you’ve been living in it so long you can’t see it anymore.”

Shane ignored that and walked toward the back door. “Come on.”

He almost didn’t follow. He almost spun on his heel and walked out the front door. He knew he’d keep on walking forever. This was it. Whether he left now or stayed for a few more days, this was the end.

He was right back where he’d been as a kid. Frustrated, furious, helpless. And now even more resentful that he’d been forced to deal with her irrational delusions for ten years of his childhood. Even adults couldn’t deal with her, and he’d had to live with her every single day.

It was the end of his family. So he figured he could humor Shane one more time. Then Alex could at least say he’d tried.

“Alex,” his mom started, tears thick in her voice. “You don’t understand. She looks just like her. And she’s a whore just like her. Everyone knows it.”

“Everyone knows because you tell them!” he shouted.

“If I have to!” She broke down into sobs.

Alex shook his head and headed toward the kitchen and the back door. He tried to ignore the piles of boxes leaking papers everywhere. Printouts of every half-assed lead she’d ever pursued. Newspaper articles. Police reports. Scraps with her familiar, frantic handwriting scrawled in different colors. Her life’s work was a swamp of meaningless words and pictures and she was going to drown in it someday.

He stepped out onto the back deck and took a deep breath. The backyard was overgrown and unkempt, but it was relatively clutter-free. Shane leaned against the deck rail and crossed his arms.

“Better?” he asked.

“No.”

Shane blew out a long breath and looked up at the blue sky. “Okay. Everything you said in there was true. This is insanity. She’s out of control. All that. But it’s not true that I can’t see it. Not anymore. That hasn’t been true for a long time.”

Alex walked to the far side of the deck and looked out at the lodgepole pines that towered over the neighbor’s house.

“I know you don’t believe me,” Shane said, stating the obvious. “You don’t have any reason to, but the minute you left, I saw how bad it had gotten. I saw what
I’d
done, Alex. Not just her, but me. I just...” He blew out another long breath. “Jesus. I wanted it all to be true. That Dad was still around. That he’d come back. That we could find him. I
needed
it to be true.”

“Yeah. I know.” He did know. Even as a kid, he’d seen it, but that had only made him feel more enraged.

“What I wanted blinded me to what you needed. I should’ve taken care of you, and I didn’t. If I—”

“I get it,” Alex snapped.

“No, you don’t. You think I’ve been playing this game with Mom the whole time, but I haven’t. I distanced myself. I changed my name. I moved on.”

Alex finally met his eyes. “Why’d you do that?” he asked, even though he told himself he didn’t care.

“I was done with it. The fantasy of Dad coming back. Mom’s obsession. Dad’s whole damn family and how they treated us after Dad disappeared. As soon as you left, I saw what really mattered. But it was too late to get you back, so my only option was to cut them off.”

Alex nodded, shocked that his brother had changed so dramatically that long ago.

“Alex,” he sighed, “I swear I wouldn’t have brought you back for this if she hadn’t improved. I wouldn’t have gone along with this dedication at all. But now...I think we just have to get through it. Fuck, I don’t know.”