Trouble Comes Knocking (Entangled Embrace) (8 page)

Girly, but still me.

I raced back down the stairs. “Aunt Dolores, what do I need to do?”

She waved her hand in my general direction but didn’t look up. “Chill, relax. Go sit. Be pretty and wait for him to get here.”

I rolled my eyes.

The door opened and my heart cracked against my ribs until I realized John would knock. Why did I have to be so infatuated with this guy? “Ana!”

“What?”

She walked in carrying two grocery bags. “What’d you get?”

“Strawberry-shortcake stuff and supplies for mixed drinks.” With the last part she raised an eyebrow at me.

“Hey.” I laughed. “I’m not a lush.” I just happened to relax a little more with a few Bellini Tinis in me.

She started walking toward the kitchen. “Ana.”

“What?”

Try not to be so sexy? Try not to be yourself? I kinda like this guy so could you please be a bitchy hag just for one night?
“Um, nothing.”

She laughed and tossed her head, hair cascading over her shoulders. “Nervous much?”

“Yes,” I said, watching the last strands fall into place.
I am a proud warrior woman
, I chanted in my head.
My beauty lies in my—
Oh, bull crap. I’m a typical woman, and like any typical woman I wanted to be the princess in someone’s eyes. Or at very least the prettiest girl in the room.

“Don’t be nervous. You’re fantastic. He’ll like you, or he’s not worth your awesomeness.”

Again, I rolled my eyes. Said by someone who never in her adult life bought her own drink. “You know what it’s like.” I sat on the arm of the sofa and watched Aunt Dolores and Ana bustle around the kitchen. “New guy, new feelings. I don’t even know what I think of him, but I’ve already told him about what I do.” That wasn’t true; I knew exactly what I thought of him. Only, I wished sometimes I could turn it off. It’s scary feeling so much for someone you barely know.

Aunt Dolores stopped chopping potatoes and turned to me. “Wait, what?”

“I don’t know what I think of him. That doesn’t make me less nervous, though.”

“No,” she said, eyes wide and mouth pulled tight. “The other part.”

“I told him.”

“No! You can’t just tell people. You don’t know him, Lucy, we’ve been over this. Why did you tell him?”

I felt a little like a Shrinky Dink under her hot stare. “I-I don’t know. I, he…” All the excitement I’d had about seeing John, about spending time with him kind of puddled away. “I’ve told other people, Aunt Dolores. Why is it such a big deal I told him?”

She removed her apron and walked toward me. “Because you don’t know him, not like you think you do. People can hurt you when you tell them your secrets.”

I knew that too well. Bobby had been living testimony of that. I looked to Ana and knew from the way she wouldn’t look at me she thought the same.

“John doesn’t want to hurt me. He still liked me after I told him. I’m an adult now. I understand having to hold back when I was a teenager, but now I have to base my decisions on the people I’m around, not on some wide-set rule. There are even people like me on TV, like on that one show, the guy in the FBI?”

Dee sat next to me on the couch and put her hand on my knee. “Still.” She said nothing else, only that definitive word. Like
because I said so
or some other nonargument meant to stop all communication dead in its tracks. I felt like a teenager again.

Ana sat next to us on the couch. “He’s probably fine,” she said. “We’re being dramatic.”

I liked that she said “we,” the royal we.

Aunt Dolores looked skeptical. “I wish you could understand.”

“Make me,” I said. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t tell? I mean, other than being treated differently?”

A knock sounded at the door. Ana stood. “He’s here,” she said, taking charge. “We’re going to have a good night. What’s done is done, and there is no reason for us to think anything bad about this guy we haven’t even met yet.”

“Aunt Dolores met him. She liked him.”

“See? It’s decided then. You”—she pointed to Dee—“go to the kitchen. Finish up.”

Aunt Dolores grumbled under her breath but obeyed like a stalwart soldier.

“And you,” she said, pulling down my top to show more cleavage and pinching my cheeks hard. “Stand here and look pretty while I go get the door.”

What was it with everyone telling me to look pretty tonight? If I didn’t know they loved me, I’d develop a complex.

Butterflies wiggled in my stomach as Ana walked from the living room to the front door. “You must be Lucy’s friend.”

“Nice to meet you,” I heard a familiar voice say.

“You have to be freakin’ kidding me,” I groaned not so quietly as they came into the room. Ana walked in first, giving me a thumbs-up. I shook my head and pursed my lips. “That’s not him,” I hissed as soon as she came close enough. Her eyebrows knitted in confusion as she turned back around.

“Eli,” I said by way of unwanted but formal introduction. “This is Ana. Ana, this is Eli. He’s one of the detectives I met the night Mr. Winters died.”

“Ohhh,” she said in what I’m sure she wanted to sound like a knowing voice but was totally unconvincing. “Nice to meet you finally. Lucy has told us so much.”

I jabbed my elbow into her arm. “No, I haven’t,” I said to him. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you I’d see you later. We need to talk about your”—his eyes darted from mine to Ana’s before he finished in a pencil-tip sharp way—“
friend
from earlier.”

“That
friend
is not a problem tonight. My other
friend
,” I said, trying to be as blunt as an eraser, “the one you met in person, is due here any minute.” Grabbing Eli by the arm, I guided him back toward the door. In a voice sounding more like the hiss of a sprinkler head than my own, I said, “And since he already thinks we’re together, it would be very, very helpful if you could adios yourself for now. I promise I’ll call you later. Or we can talk tomorrow.”

Aunt Dee came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel. “John, so good to see you again… Wait, you ain’t John.” To me her eyes spoke volumes. They said,
I know you have a penchant for causing trouble. I get that you can’t help that, but please, for the love of
Santa Vino
or whichever saint blesses the sanity of aunts who know no better than to take in crazy nieces, please tell me you haven’t started exchanging men the same way you exchange jobs?
For everyone else her voice simply said, “Lucy, who is this young man?”

This was not happening again.

“Aunt Dolores, this is Eli, the detective I’ve been working with. John is due here any minute.”

She frowned in my direction. “Did I raise you to be rude? Invite your friend in for dinner. We have plenty.”

“No, he has to go,” I said, really not wanting to deal with these two together in a room. Not when I lusted after John like a teenager in puppy love and when being around Eli left me feeling unbalanced and disoriented.

Eli stepped past me. “Actually, I’d love to stay. Dolores, so nice to meet you,” he said, shaking her hand.

“Likewise.” She blushed and smoothed her hair. Oh Lord!

I looked to Ana for help, but she only shrugged.

“Actually, don’t you have to be somewhere tonight, Eli?” I asked again, hoping he would take the hint and run with it.

“Nope, not at all.”

So much for my hopes.

Dolores hooked her arm around his and led him into the kitchen.

“Ana! Help me!”

“I don’t know what to tell you!”

Another knock sounded at the door.

Chapter Seven

“Well, I can see why Detective Reyes was on your bad side,” Officer Len said, holding back a grin. “That doesn’t seem very professional of him.”

“Not at all,” I said, feeling disgusted all over again. “But things only got worse from there.”

Had there been a skinny, naked clown wearing combat boots and handing out Grey Poupon-slathered cookies, dinner could have been more awkward, but that would have been about the only instance that could make things any worse than having Eli and John together at the same table.

John still didn’t trust my “friendship” with Eli, as spoken by the frown plastered to his face, and Eli looked more than happy to make things as uncomfortable as possible for John. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have just one simple night? It was as if I had two men fighting over me, which absolutely wasn’t the case, so I didn’t know what their problems were.

Ana and Aunt Dolores set the table to reflect upcoming Halloween, and with the two men on either side of me and Ana and Dee across, I was a bug squished onto a slide under a very hot microscope. I was living my own reality show.

Between Aunt Dolores asking Eli and John very personal and inappropriate questions, and both of the men fighting to hand me rolls as if my life depended on them, not to mention the horrible delight about my predicament on Ana’s face, I wanted nothing more than the night to end. I liked John, a lot, but this kind of display did not come across as sexy.

Drinks after dinner couldn’t come fast enough.

“So, Eli. You were recently promoted to detective?” Dee asked, handing him a pink cocktail.

He looked at the drink, sniffing it before taking a cautious sip. My sip was not so cautious, and I downed my entire drink, ready for the next, before he had time to answer her question.

“I’ve been a detective for about a year,” he said, setting aside the drink. “John,” he asked. “How is the security business working out for you?”

John sat slouched and brooding in the chair. I swallowed the second cocktail Ana handed me.
Please just let this end soon
.

“I’m doing all right,” he said. “I’m more into my music and other hobbies than anything. And I’m glad I met Lucy. She is an amazing girl, especially with what she can do.”

I motioned for Ana to send another drink my way. She frowned at me.

Eli glared. “What do you mean what she can do?”

Great. He missed my earlier Dee lecture. This felt like round two.

John looked between them and sat up. “You know, like she kinda reads your mind but doesn’t. It’s cool. It makes her different, special.”
Crap. Worst. Answer. Ever.

Dee frowned. I would have known what she was thinking even without any special ability.

On my first day of high school Aunt Dolores warned me not to tell anyone about what I do. “They won’t understand and they’ll make life difficult for you,” she said.

I couldn’t imagine how. The way I saw it people would accept me or they wouldn’t.

That day I stood up in every single classroom and introduced myself to the other students. Each teacher wanted the same thing: my name, where I came from, and something interesting about me. By fourth period, after lunch, I’d run out of interesting things. Plus, not one of the kids acted all that interested in the few things I’d said, so that left me in a strange predicament. What do I say now?

I knew what Dee had told me, and to an extent I believed her. But I also believed my mother: if people were to like me, it would be as myself. Plus, I had two more periods to go. “My name is Lucy Carver. I moved here from Shady Grove, Arkansas.” I paused and looked around at the bored faces of my new classmates. “And I’m psychic.”

A few of them tittered, and my teacher hushed them. “Okay, Lucy,” she said. “I meant for you to tell us something like if you had any pets.”

“No, I am,” I insisted, knowing it wasn’t true but remembering someone pulling it off in a movie once. One of the boys in the front row rolled his eyes and tapped his pencil on his notebook. He slouched in his chair and leaned back to whisper something to his friend. “You,” I said, pointing right at him. “You pretend not to pay attention but you actually do. You spend a lot of time thinking about the answers and you rewrite them a lot.”

I’d been able to tell because of his pencil. It had bite marks all over it. And his eraser was worn to a nub. He spent a lot of time thinking about what he wrote and rethinking it. Anyone could tell that if they paid attention, I imagined.

He sat up straighter. A girl two desks over crossed her legs and closed her book as she watched me. “And you,” I said, “do a lot of walking. You walk to school, you have a job and you walk there. Your parents work a lot and you help by paying for your own things.”

She was as easy as the first kid. Her tennis shoes looked brand new on top but the soles were already wearing down. They were also a lot more expensive than any parent would buy for their kid. I’d gone clothes shopping with my aunt Dolores that weekend and seen the same exact pair in the mall. Dee said no parent in their right mind would spend that much.

Plus, the girl looked tired, like she did more than just go to school. And she wore the same khaki pants and navy polo shirt as the workers at one of the local grocery stores. I figured she went right after school.

“That’s enough,” the teacher said. “Why don’t you go have a seat?”

“I can show you more,” I said.

“No, Miss Carver, that is quite enough.”

I didn’t understand at the time, but it only took until the end of the day for word to get out. It wasn’t that I’d become some cool kid because I could read people; I became the freak who knew things I shouldn’t.

Luckily, within three weeks one of the seniors found out she was pregnant, and the school’s collective attention shifted from the freaky new kid to the mom to be.

Eli spoke before Dee. “She is special outside of what she can do. She’s funny and aggravating, completely unique. She doesn’t compare herself to other women. I may not know Lucy as well as the rest of you”—he looked right at John—“but I imagine most people would find her pretty likeable when it comes down to it.”

Great, right sense of chivalry, wrong guy.
“I don’t think he meant—”

“I didn’t mean that’s the only thing I like about her,” John said, standing up. “It’s unique, that’s for sure, but Lucy is awesome, and I’m glad she chose me.”

“I haven’t chosen anyone—” I tried to say, but then Eli stood.

“She only recently started seeing you, isn’t that right, Mr. Poole? And correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you the one who told her to go talk to Mr. Winters?”

“I was, but—”

“Weren’t you also the one who was with her the night he was found dead, providing yourself with an alibi?”

The two stood nose to nose.

“Yes, alibi. The operative word there,” John said, stabbing Eli with his words. “So what exactly are you saying, Detective?”

“I’m saying it seems awfully strange to me how much you’ve been involved with this case for someone who isn’t at all involved in this case,” Eli parried back.

Dolores stood and placed herself between the two men. “You both need to stop right there,” she said in a voice that broached no argument. She looked at me. “So the detective knows, too?”

I nodded and reached over for Eli’s cocktail, but Ana smacked my hand. “Look, Aunt Dolores. This is messy, but it’s my mess. I told John because I like him and I thought he could handle it. I told Eli because he’s the detective involved in this whole thing and I needed to explain how I knew what I knew.”

John spoke next. “Oh, so you’re involved then.”

“You,” I said back to him, “have nothing to be jealous of. And jealousy is
not
attractive to me, so if you want to be anything with me, you need to tuck that testosterone-fueled, I’m-the-better-man attitude away and trust that I’m into you.”

If he’d have been a dog, his tail would have been stuck between his legs.

“And you,” I said to Eli, “came here tonight to cause trouble. Maybe not originally, but for some reason you’ve decided it is your mission to make my life complicated, and I want it to stop. I will keep helping you, but I do not need you to help me. Do you understand that?”

His brow furrowed. “You need more help than anyone I have ever met,” he answered back. “You have little to no sense of what the world is like, you have people out there looking for you, who may or may not be dangerous, and you think you don’t need help?”

“What does he mean?” Aunt Dolores asked. She took a step closer, hovering by my side.

Eli’s phone rang, and he stepped from the room.

“This morning,” I said, realizing it would be better to fess up than face further questioning, “a guy stopped his car and asked if I was Lucy Carver.” Telling them the whole truth would only make things worse, so I decided to keep the car that tried to run me down to myself for now.

Ana came to my other side. “Did you know him? Who was he?”

“Did he say anything else?” John asked, joining in.

“Guys, I’m fine. It was probably nothing. Probably someone’s dad from high school that I don’t remember, or maybe someone I’ve worked with. There is no reason to get upset over some person who thought they knew me.” Aunt Dolores might think I blab too much, but if she knew just how much I actually hold back, her heart would probably give out.

Eli came back into the room. “That was my captain. They’ve picked up Bonnie Kent, and he wants me to go in to question her.”

So I hadn’t originally planned to go anywhere with John after dinner, but since I only had two cocktails and he was driving anyway, we decided to get a late-night frozen mocha. Luckily, the daytime Jumping Bean barista didn’t seem to work nights. Which left me with no one to glare at, and my belly full of cocktail and icy coffee.

I mellowed as I leaned across the table to John. “You know I’m only into you, right?”

He took my hand and squeezed it. “I get that. I do. But you seem like you’re around Eli a lot, and he’s definitely more Brad Pitt than DJ Qualls.”

“Who’s DJ Qualls?”

“You know, that nerdy-looking goofy guy in all those movies.”

“Still don’t know him.”

“Kinda weird looking, but super-funny. Scrawny. Big nose.”

“Oh, so more like you.”

He grinned and leaned closer to me. “I’m a hot nerd,” he said in a husky voice that made my insides melt like jelly on Texas toast.

I got a whiff of his cologne only moments before his lips settled on my neck.

Not Acqua di Gio but definitely my new favorite. I sighed slightly as he pulled away.

“Hot nerd,” he said again.

“You are quite the little tart,” Ana said as we readied ourselves for bed that night.

I groaned and covered my face. I might be twenty-two, but I slept in the same room from when I was sixteen, only with a few less ponies and pictures of boy bands. I still had my twin double beds, and currently I occupied one of them while Ana perched upon the other, slathering lotion on her legs.

“I thought you said I was the only girl outside of the movies who could have two guys fighting over her?” she joked with me.

“They weren’t fighting over me,” I muttered from beneath the crook of my arm.

“Sure looked that way to me,” she answered a little too cheerfully.

I turned onto my side and propped my head on my hand. “Eli is just someone I’m working with. Part of the investigation. Once that’s over, he’s gone. John is who I’m into. I don’t know what their deals were tonight other than pure male dominance. And I have no idea why they acted like that.”

“Oh, I know why, Lucy Goosy. You’re one hot little package, and you don’t even know it.”

God, she could be annoying. I grinned. “I’m just me. The same ol’ me I’ve always been.”

“Only now you’re you but with huge ta-tas.”

I looked down. It was true. I had developed a few more feminine curves over the past year or two. It was as if puberty hit me late and Mother Nature made up for her oversight. “You think it’s because of these?” I asked, motioning to the girls.

“Not only those. You’ve also figured out who you are. You know how Dee feels about you telling people what you can do, yet you stood up for yourself tonight when you could have easily backed down again.”

“She’s probably right, though,” I defended for no explainable reason.

“Right or wrong, it’s your decision to make. And always should be. Tonight you made it.” Ana wore a smug, I-know-best smile on her face as she capped the lotion and set it on the table next to the bed. She pulled out the covers and scooted under. Turning to face me, she reached for my hand.

I grabbed it, just like every time she spent the night since I met her. “Sweet dreams, Lucy Love.”

“Sweet dreams, Ana Angel.”

She turned out the light and the bed squeaked as she rolled onto her other side.

Eyes refusing to close and unable to let go of everything that happened at dinner, I stared at the shadows moving across the ceiling. Did Eli have feelings for me?

Outside the wind blew stronger. We were supposed to have a cold front coming in tonight, and the gusts blew tree branches against the window, making scraping noises.

It didn’t seem possible that he did. I saw how he flirted with the coffee slut. If he liked me, too, he had a very strange way of showing it.

My phone vibrated with a text. I looked at it under the covers. Eli. Wanting to meet for coffee in the morning. Hopefully he wanted to apologize for acting the way he had tonight. Yeah, that would be nice. Not likely, but nice.

I smiled, thinking about John kissing my neck, before responding. “KK.”

Pulling my head out from under the covers, I saw a new shadow on the wall. At first I dismissed it as a tree branch, but then it moved differently. Looked more like Ana sneaking in when we were teens. My breathing hitched. I squeezed the blanket tight. It moved again, this time definitely human-shaped. I turned my head to the window and saw a flicker of light. Small, but definitely man-made. For a moment I froze, my belly tightening. Fear and adrenalin mixed as they coursed through my veins. Another flicker of light spurred me into action.