Waking Hearts (18 page)

“What are they going to say?” he asked, curious to see what would bother her most.

“You know exactly what they’re going to say.”

“That we’re shacking up?” he said with a grin. “Or that we’re fooling around so much in the mornings we’re forgetting to feed the children?”

“Ollie!”

He chuckled at her bright pink cheeks. “They can say what they want to say. And frankly, I’d rather the kids hear rumors about you and me than have kids gossiping about their dad.”

She grew quiet, and Ollie wished he hadn’t brought it up.

“Hey,” he said. “Know one of the great things about living in a small town?”

“What?”

“Everyone at that school knows about Joe by now. All the teachers. All the secretaries. You don’t have to repeat the story over and over. They got it. And while they might gossip behind their hands, they also care about your kids. So no sorry little snot is going to say anything mean to Mark or Chris or Loralie without a teacher or someone else smacking them for it.”

She nodded. “Good point.”

“And if they feel the need to gossip about me finally succumbing to your feminine wiles, that makes a much more interesting story, doesn’t it?”

“Ha!” She barked out a laugh and clapped a hand over her mouth when she snorted. “Feminine wiles. Right.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself.” He dropped his voice, reached behind her, and grabbed the lunches off the counter. “You’ve got plenty of wiles.”

Chapter Eleven

ALLIE STOOD IN THE WRECK of her living room with Jena at her back and decided she’d had quite enough. Enough heartache. Enough grief. And enough with the damn toilet in the kids bathroom that never seemed to flush.

Seeing two rolls of toilet paper carelessly tossed into the bowl by the intruders had been the last straw.

Allie turned to Jena. “Fuck Joe and all the criminals he hung out with.”

Jena bit her lip and put a hand over Becca’s ear. “Don’t make me get the swear jar.”

Allie threw her head back and yelled at the ceiling. “Have we hit the limit yet? Does it start to get better now? I’m ready
anytime
!”

“Allie—”

“Seriously?” She kicked a pile of papers that had been pulled off her desk in the living room. “I’m done. Done. These guys were probably looking for something Joe stole or… who knows? That man hadn’t been back to the house in a year. He hasn’t even been slinking around. I’d have smelled him.”

“Do you want to look on the bright side?”

“Not really. I always look on the bright side, and it doesn’t seem to get me anywhere.”

“You guys were gone,” Jena said quietly. “Allie, I don’t even want to think of what could have happened if—”

“No.” She held up a hand. “No no no. Okay. Bright side. You’re right. It could have been worse. And…” She kicked at the old couch which had been completely torn apart. “I hated that couch. Joe wanted to get it because it was on sale, but blue and yellow flowers? I mean, honestly. It was so ugly.”

“See? Another bright side.”

A memory tugged at the back of her mind. “I missed something last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

With a quick shiver, Allie shifted. She crawled out of the sundress that had piled on the floor and darted out the door.

“Allie, what…?”

She didn’t pause to explain. There had been something she sensed the night before. Something before she’d had to rush after the bear who’d charged in to rescue her.

Trotting around the edge of her property, she scented the humans again but got nothing more than she had the night before. Bad cologne, sweat, urine, and gunpowder.

She paused and listened to the wind. She could hear Jena setting up the portable play yard she’d brought for the baby before she started sorting through the trashed house. Allie scampered back, running along the foundation of the house.

There
.

That cold, foreign scent ran under the porch. Allie followed it. She could hear Jena’s footsteps above her, hear the batting of Becca’s toys on the old hardwood floor.

The smell curled in one corner, just like the shifter had. Allie sniffed all around, then let out a low growl.

Snake.

Why wasn’t she surprised?

ALLIE’S old minivan protested as she made the sharp left that would take her up to Old Quinn’s place. She was furious, and the old man wasn’t going to brush her off this time, woman or not.

She pulled into his driveway, not caring how much dust she kicked up. Sean was sitting on the front porch when she marched up to it, covered in a fine layer of sand.

“Hey, Allie,” he sputtered out.

“Where is he?”

Sean raised an eyebrow but said nothing else. Just nodded toward the door.

Allie didn’t knock. She marched in and went straight to the television, which was tuned to CNN. She stood in front of it and glared at Old Quinn.

Quinn calmly picked up the remote and turned off the TV.

“Miss Allie, I heard about the kids’ daddy. Very sorry to hear about that.”

“You knew it was him.”

Old Quinn said nothing.

“What did you talk to Ollie about?”

“That’s between me and the bear.”

“No, it’s not. Not when my house was trashed last night and I found the scent of one of your clan lurking under it.”

His eyes narrowed. “How old was the scent?”

It was a fair question. On moon nights, the snakes hid everywhere. They would crawl anywhere they could get comfortable; it wasn’t the first time she’d smelled a snake under her house.

“New. She might have been there last night, but I was chasing humans away.”

“Species?”

She heard the screen door open and Sean walk in. Allie paused when she heard him.

“Who was it, Allie?” Sean asked in a low voice.

“Boa,” she said.

With a muttered curse, Sean slammed out of the house. A few minutes later, she heard his truck peel out.

“What did Maggie have to do with Joe?” she asked. “And why did she lead those men to my house?”

“How do you know she did?”

“Seems a little too much of a coincidence. What did you tell Ollie?”

Old Quinn sighed. “Maggie wasn’t fooling around with Joe. Not like that.”

“I don’t care if she was. What was she doing at my house?”

“Don’t rightly know. Expect Sean will figure that one out.”

“But you do know something.”

Old Quinn paused, his mouth turned down at the corners. “There was a poker game,” he finally said. “Humans in Palm Springs. High stakes. Maggie set it up for Joe to go.”

“A high-stakes game? Joe was good, but he didn’t have any money.”

Or had he? Had Joe been hiding money while she was forced to beg? The thought made her sick to her stomach.

Old Quinn shook his head. “Maggie and a couple of her cousins staked Joe because he owed them money.”

“How much was it?”

“Fifty-thousand-dollar buy-in.”

Allie’s eyes bugged out. “Are you kidding me?”

“Nope.”

Her knees gave out and she collapsed into the old recliner. “Joe owed Maggie that much?”

Where the hell had Maggie Quinn gotten fifty grand? Allie decided she probably didn’t want to know.

“Joe didn’t owe her that much, but that was the buy-in, so that’s what she staked him. If he’d won, he could have paid her back the stake, the money he owed her, and he’d still have a lot left over. Maggie said he wanted to give some of it to the kids, then he wanted to go to the East Coast. Start over.”

Allie’s heart sank again. So he
had
been planning to abandon the kids. “How much do I owe Maggie?”

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” Old Quinn said with a glare. “You don’t owe her a damn thing. She’s done enough, and she won’t be bothering you for the money, you have my word on that.”

She could feel the headache threatening. “If Joe owed her—”

“Allison Smith, stop being a damn martyr.”

She blinked and stopped rubbing her forehead. “It’s not being a martyr to pay what you owe.”

“You didn’t create that debt, and you don’t owe her a damn thing.”

“I’m his widow.”

Old Quinn laughed. “You think Maggie was going to put that money on her taxes? Maybe take Joe to small-claims court if he didn’t pay up? She’d have done no such thing. I don’t know why she was at your house, but Maggie knows she did something stupid and Joe got killed because of it. I don’t think my niece is dumb enough to approach the men who might have killed him.”

“You’re sure it was because of that game?” Allie tapped her nails together.

“I’m sure it’s related. The problem is, not one of us”—Old Quinn leaned forward—“saw Joe again after that night. Not one of us knows what happened at that game. And no one, human or shifter, is talking.”

SHE didn’t see Sean before she left, and she wondered what special kind of torture his sister was putting him through. They weren’t full-blooded siblings, but they had the same father, even if he was a piece of shit. Sean had felt responsible for Maggie until he’d had to finish her fights one too many times.

He’d bugged out. Taken off in the night and gotten as far from Cambio Springs as he could. And now he was back. For how long, nobody—including Sean, she suspected—knew.

She drove to the bar, curious what Ollie would have to say about the game. She’d been mad at first but then realized the day that he’d learned about the poker game from Old Quinn was the very same day they’d learned that Joe was dead. It seemed so much longer, but really, it had only been five days.

Five gut-wrenching, horrifying, emotionally draining days.

Ollie’s truck was in the parking lot, along with a bike she didn’t recognize. She thought it might have been Jim’s, but she couldn’t be sure. She only knew she had limited time before she needed to get back to her wreck of a house if she was going to salvage enough of the kids’ clothes to make things livable at Ollie’s house.

Allie walked in the back door and heard voices, but they didn’t belong to Ollie and Jim.

“—know for sure.”

“I don’t want to hear maybes, Razio.” Ollie’s voice was so cold he sounded like a stranger.

“Well, maybes are all I got right now. The guy wasn’t a big player. No one gossips about the little fish.”

Ollie paused, and Allie suspected he’d heard her coming down the hall.

“Hey, babe.”

Babe
?

She emerged from the dark hallway to see Ollie sitting at a table with a burly biker slumped across from him. Ollie’s face was blank, and he had a notebook in front of him that he was scribbling in, but he held a hand out to her.

“Hey,” she said, walking toward the table. “I don’t want to interrupt. I just—”

Without warning, Ollie pulled her onto his lap and perched her there, wrapping an arm around her waist and laying a hand possessively over one thigh. She tried not to gasp.

The man Ollie had called Razio smirked. “Didn’t you know you had an old lady, Campbell.”

“Apparently there’s a lot you don’t know.”

The smirk fell. “Give me another week. We’re riding down to Palm Desert to meet with some guys on Tuesday. I’ll see what they’ve heard.”

“Call me.” Ollie never looked up, still making scratches in that notebook. He didn’t look at Razio as he left the bar. Didn’t look at Allie when she tried to wriggle free. He only relaxed the grip on her thigh when the sound of the motorcycle faded away.

“Who was that?”

“I didn’t know you were coming by,” he growled.

“I didn’t know I was coming by until I talked to Old Quinn today.”

He dropped the pencil and tried to turn her, but Allie took the opportunity to slide off his lap.

“And what was that about? ‘Babe?’ Your old lady?”

Ollie glared at her. “That guy doesn’t need to know who you are. I’d rather he thought you were my girl than anyone he was allowed to pay attention to. Why did you go talk to Old Quinn?”

“Because there was a rosy boa curled up under my house last night. Quinn told me everything. You were going to tell me about that game, right?”

A cheek muscle jumping under his beard told Allie that no, Oliver Campbell probably had no plans to share what her ex-husband was getting into. He’d planned on sheltering her and softening things like everything else.

“You
were
going to tell me, right, Ollie? I asked you to look into things, not hide them from me. This was my ex-husband, and you don’t get to shield me from his shit.”

He stood up. “I get to shield you from whatever the hell I want. You’re a mom, Allie, but you’re not
my
mom. Stop trying to boss me around.”

“Stop trying to keep me in the dark.”

“Stop trying to take on every damn thing in the world, then!” Ollie threw out his hand. “You’ve got the kids, two jobs, dealing with all of Joe’s shit, which I know has been stressing you out. You asked me to look into this, so let me look into it.”