C's Comeuppance: A Bone Cold--Alive novel (2 page)

But that was another thought. Jemma heard the voices in the outer office—Carolyn’s soft, C’s harsh, almost bitter. Well, that did fit with the town’s general recollection of his post-matrimonial visit to Jinks. His and the band’s. Bone Cold—Alive had made an indelible impression once again as they’d come to congratulate the newlyweds. It was a pitiful picture that had been shot around the world via the Internet of Eddie T bailing out the band from the county jail after the debacle at the Quik-Lee. She’d heard that C had come back alone last weekend.

Jemma glanced at the phone and thought about dialing Lyla for a quick confirmation. Had she thrown him out? But though her fingers itched to tap the numbers, she tiptoed to the mini-blinds instead and peeked out into the main office. She barely caught Eddie’s C movement toward her door in time to pitch herself back behind her desk.

The door blinds clattered as he pushed through. He filled the doorway and Jemma was surprised at how large he appeared. She’d stood next to his brother out at the construction site for their new house, and he hadn’t seemed so large, but perhaps it was the difference between open space and closed. This man filled her doorway, and when he jerked a chair from the end of her desk to the center and sat to face her directly, he filled that area too. He put the piccolo on her desk.

But perhaps it was all attitude. Lyla had said that, that attitude was part of all the band did. It was important. Jemma concluded it was working.

But Lake Country Realty hadn’t held on through thick and thin because they skirted a client’s attitude. He had come to her.

“I’m busy right now. Could Ms. Cartwright not help you?”

“I want the owner.”

“The owner doesn’t—”

“I know, I know. He doesn’t come in any more. Kind of a half-ass way to run an office, don’t you think?” He crossed his legs, bare left calf arrogantly hoisted atop right knee. In slacks, he’d have had to pinch the fabric to accomplish this, but he wore surprisingly little fabric and pinching was impossible.

Jemma tore her eyes away from his body and concentrated on his eyes. Lyla had confided in the kitchen at the church supper last week that she hoped the baby had Sam’s blue eyes. Well, these were the same eyes, and there was no way Lyla ever wanted to see this emptiness in her child’s face.

“Thank you for your concern about our business practices, Mr. Samuels.” She leaned forward at the desk and steepled her hands. “How may Lake Country Realty serve you?”

“Now there’s a right attitude. Service!” He smacked a hand on the chair arm and Jemma involuntarily jumped. He reached up and pulled his hair out from where it was caught between himself and the chair back. “You got a rubber band?”

Jemma opened a side drawer and pulled out several, puddling them on the desk in front of him. He selected one and pulled his hair into a ponytail. He glared at her as she stared at him. “You seen my brother?”

She nodded.

“What do you think of his hair?”

“The color, the style—”

“He keeps it all cut off. Do you like that?”

Jemma thought for a minute. T had let his hair grow out a little from the shaven pate he’d sported when he’d first come to Jinks. She remembered reading that he kept it short as a reminder of past sins. “I think it looks very nice. Very masculine.”

C humphed. “Real women like long hair on a man.”

“Then I suppose you’ve mistaken me for a real woman, Mr. Samuels. Let me repeat my question, how may Lake Country Realty serve you?”

“I need a house. And I need it now.”

“Well, that’s a mighty tall order.”

The woman across the desk from him pursed her lips together and typed something into the laptop. C watched her dark eyebrows draw together over her hazel eyes as she scrolled from screen to screen. She looked down and her eyelashes splayed on her high cheekbones, almost touching the sprinkling of freckles that ran there. She subconsciously pushed at a strand of auburn hair that slipped out from behind her ear. Jemma Lovelace was ten pounds overweight by C’s exceptional scale of female-weight-evaluation, yet he found himself having lustful thoughts in an air-conditioned room made colder by her attitude.

It was time to go back to California. He’d been without a real woman too long. He’d have to kiss a little ass to get back in Abby Sander’s good graces, but, hell, he was an expert ass-kisser. He’d even had them begging for that particular part of his repertoire.

And this woman seemed determined to help him make the trip. For all he knew she was over there playing solitaire instead of finding him a suitable property. She hadn’t asked for a single preference. C let his eyes rove over the painted paneling, let them skim over what appeared to be realtor awards and certificates, let them rest at the end of the desk on photos in a double frame. One side looked to be multi-generational female, women all closely related since they just blended into one another, no matter their age. Ms. Frigid Country Realty was smiling in it;
that
must have been a rare day. The youngest member of the group was a teenage girl whose single portrait occupied the other half of the frame. The hair was different, blonde, long the way girls her age wore it, but the face was the same as the woman’s across from him.

“Your daughter?”

“Niece.” Her tone was as clipped as the close of the laptop as she stood. “We have nothing you’d be interested in.” Extending her hand, she dismissed him. “Why don’t you try DamSite in the next block?”

“What?” He couldn’t believe her response. He uncrossed his legs but didn’t rise. “One, you don’t have a house and two, you’re sending me where?”

“DamSite Realty. Bunch of good ol’ boys started it as a joke about thirty years ago. I think you’d get along well with them.” She extended her hand even farther. “Good day.”

“I don’t think so.” Whereas a minute ago he’d been willing, even anxious to leave, now he was challenged. “You don’t know what I want in a house.”

“Currently we have only small properties.”

“And I want something large?”

“Don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Certainly as large—or at least as fine—as T’s.”

“Well, that most assuredly doesn’t exist.” She glared at him and leaned forward, balancing herself on her palms. “I don’t believe we can be of any help, Mr. Samuels.”

He straightened in the chair. “Can’t be or don’t want to be?” He leaned forward. “My money not good enough for you? What would daddy say?”

“He’d say, do only what you can live with.”

“Good thing I don’t want to deal with daddy.” He rose and sat on the desk, cocking his right leg onto the top and invading her space where she leaned over. He could smell her perfume, and it was an expensive one, favored by at least half the women he’d had sex with in the last year. Good experiences, all. Good and brief. Must go with the type of woman. Perfect.

He took a deep breath and his unexpected arousal only made a bold personality bolder. Lifting his right hand, C skimmed curled fingers down her left arm. He kept his voice husky, his eyes heavy-lidded as he raised them to hers. “I want to deal with you.”

Chapter Two

H
e was worse than she had been told, Jemma thought as she watched the front door slam in C’s wake. “Lock up and go home,” she told Carolyn. “And, yes, I know it’s only 3:30,” she replied to the dumbstruck look. Lake Country Realty never closed before six. You didn’t stay in the race if you kept bankers’ hours.

But bankers’ hours were just what she was going to keep today. Without another word to Carolyn, she turned and whisked into her office, sat down so hard in her chair she almost turned it over backward.

Truthfully, she was ashamed of her behavior. Her hand had actually lifted off the desk and made it as far as her waist before she’d reined in her temper. She’d been within a breath of slapping the tar out of the man, of showing an appalling lack of manners, of doing the most politically incorrect thing she’d ever done. But she’d stopped herself.

And of course that smiling SOB had known what she was about. She could tell by the lift of his mouth, the barely perceptible turn of his head. He would have welcomed the display, she was sure. Would have caught her hand, would have—

What would he have done? A man as jaded as Eddie C, a man who, if he hadn’t seen it all and done it all, certainly wanted the public to believe he had, what would he have done to a woman who slapped him over an innuendo?

Jemma closed her eyes. He would have laughed. Of course. Laughed at her. At her naiveté, at her small-town values. At her.

Or… slap her back? Well, that was a possibility, but somehow she didn’t think so. Catch her wrist with one large hand just as it closed on his cheek, twist it, bring her palm to his lips, trace a hot line with his tongue on her life line, suckle her fingers, bring her hand back to his cheek, let it rest there while he proceeded to lean in even closer—

The chair tilted back dangerously and Jemma barely caught herself from tumbling over again. Daydreaming about Eddie C, the heathen who had disrupted Jinks not once but twice in the last year—damn! She was going crazy. She stared at the portrait of the girl on her desk. Dear, sweet Manda-bear, I’ve just about lost it!

***

C skidded the car to a halt at the closed gate that guarded Lyla and T’s property. With some hesitation, he reached out to punch in the code that would open the electric gate. He was so unwelcome he could feel the invisible no
trespassing—that means you, C” sign that he was sure Lyla would like to install. He wouldn’t put it past her to change the code, but the gate swung open. His smart-ass sister-in-law had neglected to pack his cell phone, an oversight he’d found as soon as he’d jerked the car into gear at the second realtor and decided to book a flight out tonight.

As if the experience with Jemma from Frigid Country Realty wasn’t enough, he’d taken her suggestion and gone next door to DamSite. How that clever name ever became associated with that bunch of rednecks he’d never know. Seems they had at least a dozen properties they could show him in the morning, each one bigger and fancier than the last. He could actually feel the zeroes being tacked onto the prices. He’d finally figured out half the people in there were neither employees nor clients, just refugees from the poker game his appearance had broken up in the back room. It was a sad day when a rock music star of his caliber and notoriety could no longer cause a riot, but at least there was somewhere in this hick town Eddie C could still command an audience. He’d played into the celebrity for a while but couldn’t get into the unfair battle of wits. He’d made an appointment for ten the next morning which he had no intention of keeping.

Getting back in the car, he’d glanced over to Lake Country. The lights were off and the cars gone. Some work ethic these people had. And that woman! What a piece of work! Under “frigid” in the dictionary—that’s where he’d next see her! She was going to slap him—hell, he could read it in her eyes. Over what? A touch on the arm and a husky voice? A hint that someone, even desperate, might find her attractive? Hell, that old maid had better take what she could get!

She’d made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want his business, and she certainly wasn’t getting any more of his company. He needed to get laid and the fastest source of that was in California and that meant a flight. That meant his cell phone.

But… women didn’t turn down Eddie C. He needed more than his cell phone from Lyla, he needed information. He’d adjust his attitude between the gate and the house. A new game—just what he needed to take the edge off before flying.

He slammed the car into gear and delighted in the cloud of sand kicked up behind him.

***

Jemma cast a sidelong glance at the computer keyboard. She’d sat in her office for close to twenty minutes, all the time berating herself for being on the brink of embarrassing herself beyond redemption. Slowly she put her feet squarely on the floor and scooted up to the desk.

Something was niggling at the back of her mind. An abandoned property had just popped into her stream of consciousness. Five years ago, the Bradys had been more than halfway through the construction of a house to rival what Lyla and Sam were now building. When his business had gone under federal investigation for tax fraud, she’d divorced him quicker than the judge could sentence him to the pen. So construction had stopped—Jemma’s fingers were racing to scroll through all the necessary screens—and the builder had taken a hit that almost put him under.

Yes! There it was. Square footage, acreage, terms, taxes, all the details that made real estate so interesting to her. No telling what it looked like now, sitting as it did in the middle of a pasture at the end of a half-mile long drive that veered off the highway just past the Red-i-Lee. She rarely showed it to anyone. Most people wanted to start fresh, although Lyla had looked at it before beginning theirs. However the location, among other things, was wrong for them. It should certainly be grand enough for one Mr. Eddie C. He had the money to finish it. Why not?

Well, for starters, she’d not see him again. He surely had more pride than to show back up on her doorstep. No doubt DamSite had thought about it, too.

Jemma sighed as she straightened the papers on her desk. She deserved the lonely life she’d carved out for herself. Was she so desperate that she was finding one of the most unrepentant reprobates in America attractive?

It was time to go home, get her mom, take her to the junior varsity football game where Mandy was cheering. Be supportive. Support her parents, support her niece, support everyone but herself.

***

“So, Lyla,” C began as he pushed the salad around on the small side plate, “that, that all you having for dinner?”

The tines of Lyla’s fork tapped against the dinner plate where she’d dumped an unseemly amount of greenery and raw veggies. The rest of the table was enjoying lasagna. “Since when—”

“C, we can’t stand it.” T looked over at his brother and lowered his fork to his plate. “What do you want?”