He was like a shadow, following tight on her heels.
And that was when Moose’s wife, Deandra, called her cell.
* * *
Anne didn’t get back home until five. Investigating Ripkin Development had left her with some backlog work, and then there was the report to file on the apartment fire.
Plus, her mother.
The idea of spending the entire Saturday with the woman had been enough to take her work ethic, already strong, to juicehead levels. It wasn’t that her mother was totally awful—and that was part of the problem. If the woman had been rude, cantankerous, angry; then Anne’s avoidance would be justified. Instead, she was stuck with the reality that she was being unfair, especially after she’d let loose on the woman, and she hated that . . . even as she couldn’t change her overwhelming need to get away from Nancy Janice.
“Come on, Soot,” she said as she hooked the lead on his collar. “Time to check out your own backyard.”
She’d crated him at her office for the three hours she’d been over at the apartment site, and then they’d enjoyed a nice long walk to a coffee shop for lunch. After all that exercise, he’d curled up at her feet for the rest of the afternoon.
Bracing herself, she let them both in. “Mom?”
When there was no answer, she went through and let Soot out. She found the note, written in her mother’s flowery flourish, on the kitchen table.
Okay, so she was due back at six after an afternoon of bridge. Which meant Anne had an hour to decompress.
After feeding Soot, she went upstairs and started the shower. It felt good to take her prosthesis off. Even better to get under the hot water.
She was squeezing shampoo on the top of her head, which was what you did when you only had one palm and had to use it for dispensing, when she looked down and focused on her stump. The taper from her elbow down to the blunt end was pronounced due to muscle atrophy and the flesh was still mottled and angry from the infection even after nine months had passed.
Ripkin’s smug voice wormed into her ear, taunting her even as she told herself it shouldn’t.
But the truth was, there might have been more than one reason she hadn’t wanted to get naked with Danny. And she hated that Ripkin, that shit, had tapped the nerve even as she’d denied it to his face. He’d been wrong about one aspect, though. It wasn’t a female thing to feel less than whole if you lost a limb. It was a human thing. She’d been in that rehab hospital with men who had been in motorcycle and farming accidents, even one guy who’d had some bad luck with a chain saw.
They had been just as scared as she’d been, not only about how to work through life and jobs, but with who they were. What they had become. And physical attractiveness was part of that.
Telling herself she was just fine, she finished her suds-and-rinse routine and stepped out. As she was drying off, she glanced at her naked body in the mirror—and couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked at herself.
It wasn’t going to start tonight, she knew that much.
Dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, she went downstairs and checked the clock on the microwave. Twenty-three minutes left of peace.
On that note, if she could get dinner organized, that would cut down the conversation. Opening the refrigerator door, she—
“Oh . . . God.”
Everything had been reorganized in there, the shelves moved up or down to accommodate a new arrangement of milk cartons and juice bottles and leftover containers. Shutting the thing, she went over to her cupboards on a hunch.
Yup. Her plates were—okay, all the way across the room now. Spices were in a different cupboard. Silverware had been put in plastic slides in a drawer that had previously been for hardware.
Great. How could she possibly have known that setting the don’t-touch-my-stuff boundary required an asterisk that included cupboards, closets, and drawers?
As her temper mounted up and got ready to ride the range, she knew she had to get out of the house. There was only one option.
Talk about the lesser of two evils.
After putting Soot in his crate, she scribbled a quick note on the other side of what her mom had written on, and then she set the security alarm and was out of the house like she’d stolen something.
The evening was going so well. Really.
Chapter 33
Moose and Deandra’s ranch was halfway to Danny’s farm, located in a not-quite-rural, but definitely not suburban, zip code that had the houses spaced on overgrown lots of ten and twelve acres. It went without saying that the couple was not going to last here. This was Moose’s dream, what with the privacy and the space for his car-restoration equipment—but a nightmare for Deandra’s urban, upwardly mobile streak.
Danny knew Moose had bought the place without telling her, a Surprise, honey! that had been meant to show her he could afford big things. When she’d lost her shit, his response had been to lease a closeout BMW 3 Series for her.
When the oh-goody glow wore off that car, Moose was going to have a tiger by the tail, but that was his problem, not anybody else’s. Bad timing, though. Almost all firemen supplemented their income with second jobs in things like roofing or construction, and with the bad winter weather coming on, Moose was going to be forced to take on security work around the holidays to pay for keeping his wife in a good mood.
The guy hated walking warehouses alone, not because he was scared but because he needed constant stimulation.
Again, not Danny’s problem.
The road in was gravel, which had to be another negative in Deandra’s eyes, and as the curve rounded and the house was revealed, Danny laughed. A townie who was determined to elevate her status was going to see the otherwise perfectly nice ranch as a noose around her throat.
No Subaru parked off to the side on the mowed grass with the other trucks. But he hadn’t expected Anne to change her mind and come.
Parking himself next to Duff, he got out and tucked his shirt in. It was a brand-new button-down flannel, the kind of thing his boys wouldn’t notice and smack his ass about, but that he’d chosen in case Anne showed. And anyway, his mother had always said he should wear blues and grays because they brought out the color in his eyes.
Too bad the thing was green and black. But it did have a pinstripe of gray in between the—
Okay, he needed to quit the pathetic shit.
Walking over to the front door, he found things were open, a screen keeping out what few bugs were left from the hard frost the week before. He banged on the loose jamb and let himself in.
Holy. . . wow.
Even he, a confirmed bachelor with no fashion or decorating sense, knew the black and white furniture wasn’t appropriate—and not just because it was oversized, the bulky forms conceived for rooms that were three, four, five times the size of the single-story’s eight-by-twelves. The other problem was that everything was a cheap imitation: plastic made to look like leather, Plexiglas that didn’t fool the eye, and stretches of almost-chrome, like Deandra was trying to convince people that she was living in a Manhattan penthouse and working for a modern art gallery—instead of cooling her jets out here in the country and answering phones and taking messages at a second-tier spa and salon in New Brunie.
The knockoffs were striving rather than achievement. Which, on the theory that people’s houses reflected their identities, put paid to the couple.
And then there was the “art.” Christ, if he had to look at one more saccharine picture of her at their wedding from hell in a fake silver frame, he was going to hurl. The things were hung all over the walls and propped up on side tables, a shrine to the seven hours in Deandra’s life when she had been the princess, the winner of the beauty crown, the head of the line.
Did Moose ever notice that he had been cropped out of 90 percent of the photographs?
“Is that you, Danny?” the bride called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah. Hey, Deandra.”
He walked through to the back. The lady of the house was at the stove, a pair of pink hot pants upholstering her ass and legs, her silver lamé blouse so tight the only more revealing option was body paint.
As she turned around, he realized she’d gotten breast implants. And from the way she arched her back and pushed those bags of saline out at him, it was clear she wanted him to notice.
And that was when Moose’s wife, Deandra, called her cell.
* * *
Anne didn’t get back home until five. Investigating Ripkin Development had left her with some backlog work, and then there was the report to file on the apartment fire.
Plus, her mother.
The idea of spending the entire Saturday with the woman had been enough to take her work ethic, already strong, to juicehead levels. It wasn’t that her mother was totally awful—and that was part of the problem. If the woman had been rude, cantankerous, angry; then Anne’s avoidance would be justified. Instead, she was stuck with the reality that she was being unfair, especially after she’d let loose on the woman, and she hated that . . . even as she couldn’t change her overwhelming need to get away from Nancy Janice.
“Come on, Soot,” she said as she hooked the lead on his collar. “Time to check out your own backyard.”
She’d crated him at her office for the three hours she’d been over at the apartment site, and then they’d enjoyed a nice long walk to a coffee shop for lunch. After all that exercise, he’d curled up at her feet for the rest of the afternoon.
Bracing herself, she let them both in. “Mom?”
When there was no answer, she went through and let Soot out. She found the note, written in her mother’s flowery flourish, on the kitchen table.
Okay, so she was due back at six after an afternoon of bridge. Which meant Anne had an hour to decompress.
After feeding Soot, she went upstairs and started the shower. It felt good to take her prosthesis off. Even better to get under the hot water.
She was squeezing shampoo on the top of her head, which was what you did when you only had one palm and had to use it for dispensing, when she looked down and focused on her stump. The taper from her elbow down to the blunt end was pronounced due to muscle atrophy and the flesh was still mottled and angry from the infection even after nine months had passed.
Ripkin’s smug voice wormed into her ear, taunting her even as she told herself it shouldn’t.
But the truth was, there might have been more than one reason she hadn’t wanted to get naked with Danny. And she hated that Ripkin, that shit, had tapped the nerve even as she’d denied it to his face. He’d been wrong about one aspect, though. It wasn’t a female thing to feel less than whole if you lost a limb. It was a human thing. She’d been in that rehab hospital with men who had been in motorcycle and farming accidents, even one guy who’d had some bad luck with a chain saw.
They had been just as scared as she’d been, not only about how to work through life and jobs, but with who they were. What they had become. And physical attractiveness was part of that.
Telling herself she was just fine, she finished her suds-and-rinse routine and stepped out. As she was drying off, she glanced at her naked body in the mirror—and couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked at herself.
It wasn’t going to start tonight, she knew that much.
Dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, she went downstairs and checked the clock on the microwave. Twenty-three minutes left of peace.
On that note, if she could get dinner organized, that would cut down the conversation. Opening the refrigerator door, she—
“Oh . . . God.”
Everything had been reorganized in there, the shelves moved up or down to accommodate a new arrangement of milk cartons and juice bottles and leftover containers. Shutting the thing, she went over to her cupboards on a hunch.
Yup. Her plates were—okay, all the way across the room now. Spices were in a different cupboard. Silverware had been put in plastic slides in a drawer that had previously been for hardware.
Great. How could she possibly have known that setting the don’t-touch-my-stuff boundary required an asterisk that included cupboards, closets, and drawers?
As her temper mounted up and got ready to ride the range, she knew she had to get out of the house. There was only one option.
Talk about the lesser of two evils.
After putting Soot in his crate, she scribbled a quick note on the other side of what her mom had written on, and then she set the security alarm and was out of the house like she’d stolen something.
The evening was going so well. Really.
Chapter 33
Moose and Deandra’s ranch was halfway to Danny’s farm, located in a not-quite-rural, but definitely not suburban, zip code that had the houses spaced on overgrown lots of ten and twelve acres. It went without saying that the couple was not going to last here. This was Moose’s dream, what with the privacy and the space for his car-restoration equipment—but a nightmare for Deandra’s urban, upwardly mobile streak.
Danny knew Moose had bought the place without telling her, a Surprise, honey! that had been meant to show her he could afford big things. When she’d lost her shit, his response had been to lease a closeout BMW 3 Series for her.
When the oh-goody glow wore off that car, Moose was going to have a tiger by the tail, but that was his problem, not anybody else’s. Bad timing, though. Almost all firemen supplemented their income with second jobs in things like roofing or construction, and with the bad winter weather coming on, Moose was going to be forced to take on security work around the holidays to pay for keeping his wife in a good mood.
The guy hated walking warehouses alone, not because he was scared but because he needed constant stimulation.
Again, not Danny’s problem.
The road in was gravel, which had to be another negative in Deandra’s eyes, and as the curve rounded and the house was revealed, Danny laughed. A townie who was determined to elevate her status was going to see the otherwise perfectly nice ranch as a noose around her throat.
No Subaru parked off to the side on the mowed grass with the other trucks. But he hadn’t expected Anne to change her mind and come.
Parking himself next to Duff, he got out and tucked his shirt in. It was a brand-new button-down flannel, the kind of thing his boys wouldn’t notice and smack his ass about, but that he’d chosen in case Anne showed. And anyway, his mother had always said he should wear blues and grays because they brought out the color in his eyes.
Too bad the thing was green and black. But it did have a pinstripe of gray in between the—
Okay, he needed to quit the pathetic shit.
Walking over to the front door, he found things were open, a screen keeping out what few bugs were left from the hard frost the week before. He banged on the loose jamb and let himself in.
Holy. . . wow.
Even he, a confirmed bachelor with no fashion or decorating sense, knew the black and white furniture wasn’t appropriate—and not just because it was oversized, the bulky forms conceived for rooms that were three, four, five times the size of the single-story’s eight-by-twelves. The other problem was that everything was a cheap imitation: plastic made to look like leather, Plexiglas that didn’t fool the eye, and stretches of almost-chrome, like Deandra was trying to convince people that she was living in a Manhattan penthouse and working for a modern art gallery—instead of cooling her jets out here in the country and answering phones and taking messages at a second-tier spa and salon in New Brunie.
The knockoffs were striving rather than achievement. Which, on the theory that people’s houses reflected their identities, put paid to the couple.
And then there was the “art.” Christ, if he had to look at one more saccharine picture of her at their wedding from hell in a fake silver frame, he was going to hurl. The things were hung all over the walls and propped up on side tables, a shrine to the seven hours in Deandra’s life when she had been the princess, the winner of the beauty crown, the head of the line.
Did Moose ever notice that he had been cropped out of 90 percent of the photographs?
“Is that you, Danny?” the bride called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah. Hey, Deandra.”
He walked through to the back. The lady of the house was at the stove, a pair of pink hot pants upholstering her ass and legs, her silver lamé blouse so tight the only more revealing option was body paint.
As she turned around, he realized she’d gotten breast implants. And from the way she arched her back and pushed those bags of saline out at him, it was clear she wanted him to notice.
