Got Your Number (40 page)
Authors: Stephanie Bond
"I could
kill
Deke for this," Penny Francisco said, peering through the mini-blinds covering a window of her health food store, The Charm Farm.
The normally sleepy two-lane Charm Street bustled with early traffic for the annual Voodoo Festival. But in between the passing cars, Penny had managed to get a good look at the Victorian house heavy with ornate wrought ironwork that she had bought, refurbished, and lived in with Deke Black, attorney-at-law, until their explosive breakup a few months ago. A painting crew was methodically covering the rich color of Vanilla Milk that she had lovingly chosen from thousands of paint chips with what looked to be Pink Nightmare.
She ground her teeth until her jaw ached. "Just look at what he's doing to my house!"
"Let me guess," Marie, her quirky employee of six months, said from behind the juice bar where she refilled canisters of vitamin additives. "He's painting it."
Penny looked at the woman suspiciously—many people in town had insinuated that eccentric Marie Gaston with the electric blue hair had a "third eye." "How did you know that?"
"I saw Lou Hall's painting van pull up as I was coming in this morning."
Penny frowned and looked back to the window. "Deke's not just painting my house—he's painting it puke pink."
"But it's his house now."
"Still. I can't believe the historical society would allow him to paint my house
pink
."
"It helps that his mother is mayor," Marie offered dryly. "And it's
his
house now, boss."
"But I have to look at it every day." Penny jammed her hand into her coarse auburn curls as frustration billowed in her chest. Moisture gathered in the corners of her eyes, but she quickly blinked it away—no more tears over Deke Black. "He did this just to annoy me."
"Probably." Marie cleared her throat. "Although, I heard down at the Hair Affair that, um, Sheena was planning to redecorate."
Penny stiffened, pain knifing between her shoulder blades. Deke's mistress. Girlfriend. Tart. Practically everyone in the town of Mojo, Louisiana knew about Deke's fooling around... the fact that he had moved litigious Sheena Linder into the home they had bought together was the ultimate humiliation. "I can't believe that I have to live over the doughnut shop, and that woman will be living in my house."
"You live over a
beignet
shop. And it's his house, boss."
"The bastard could have waited until the ink was dry on the divorce papers."
"Uh-huh. Well, maybe Sheena will fall in the shower and sue him. Lord knows she's sued almost everyone else in town."
"And Deke defended her the last few times she
allegedly
injured herself."
"If it's any consolation, I heard she slipped on a spilled Yoohoo in the Quickie Mart last week and is laid up again."
"As if the woman needed a reason to be on her back," Penny muttered, her blood boiling.
The soaring pin oak tree that had first drawn her to the Victorian on Charm Street was ablaze with deep red foliage typical for early October. The glorious ruby color clashed horrifically with the vicious pink hue the painters were rolling onto the wood siding—another insult. The last time the leaves had been red—this time last year—she had been happy... mostly.
Last summer had been fraught with stress as she had debated whether to clear the land they owned behind The Charm Farm to plant an organic vegetable garden. Deke had been vehemently opposed to the idea, saying he had other plans for the empty half-acre lot, but Penny had had the distinct feeling that her husband was trying to undermine her business that he had pooh-poohed from the beginning. When she'd first suggested that they convert the small rental house across the street inherited from his father into a retail business, Deke had made her feel foolish.
"A health-food store in Mojo?" He'd laughed until his eyes had run. "Maybe a fish and chips joint. In case you haven't noticed, honey, the deep south really means the deep
fried
south."
Hurt, but determined to put her rusty nutrition degree and homeopathic know-how to good use, Penny had persisted and, after a rocky start, her enterprise had taken off. As it turned out, the residents of Mojo preferred home remedies to fancy doctoring, and The Charm Farm's inventory of roots, herbs, and vitamins fit the bill nicely.
But while her business had grown steadily, the law practice that Deke had taken over from his father had started to slide. Two of his big manufacturing clients had jumped to more tony law firms in nearby New Orleans. Deke had begun to supplement his client list with personal injury cases, and supplement his diet with bourbon.
The downturn in his business had coincided perfectly with a midlife crisis. One day he had driven home a new fire-engine red two-seater Lotus Elise. That was about the same time she'd found brochures for hair transplants in his briefcase. Penny had tried to head off what seemed to be an inevitable affair with new lingerie and lots of TLC, but in the end, terminally tanned and ferociously feminine Sheena Linder had been too much for a simple man like Deke to resist.
Penny and Sheena weren't complete strangers. The women had met once when Penny had visited Sheena's Forever Sun tanning salon and asked that she give her customers a flyer on the dangers of tanning so they could make a more informed decision before roasting themselves. Sheena had called her the "c" word and had thrown her out of Forever Sun, threatening to sue for trespassing and mental anguish. Penny found out later that her trip to the tanning salon had prompted Sheena to see Deke about possibly filing a lawsuit against some crazy woman named Penny Black. Apparently Deke had overlooked Sheena's inability to figure out that her new attorney and her intended defendant shared the same last name and might be related, or in this case, married. Thankfully, Deke hadn't filed a suit against Penny on Sheena's behalf. Instead he'd started porking Sheena, and Penny's last name was no longer Black.
Life was nothing if not ironic. Penny had secured a barracuda of a divorce attorney from the city and after much legal wrangling, Deke got the Victorian and the property it sat on, Penny got The Charm Farm and the property it sat on. When the final papers had been signed earlier in the week, Penny had staked out the premeditated garden with pink flags. Those flags symbolized her own growth and filled her with a sense of purpose.
And she also gained satisfaction in knowing that one day, Sheena Linder would crawl out of one of her tanning beds looking like a dried-apple-head doll. Penny's skin, on the other hand, would still be lily-white and unwrinkled... but lightly veined... and... freckled. She frowned suddenly, trying to remember why she had felt so victorious.
Across the street, a faded green sedan pulled into her former driveway behind Lou Hall's painting van. Probably another workman hired to do something else unconscionable to her beloved house. She started to turn away when the car door opened and a tall man she didn't recognize climbed out. Even from this distance, she could tell he was long-limbed and well-built. Unbidden, a spark of appreciation flared in her stomach. The man was dark-haired, dressed in boots, brown leather coat, and faded jeans that he tugged higher as he approached the steps leading to the front porch of the house.
Penny's tongue lodged firmly in her cheek. What was a handsome man doing at the house at an hour when Deke was at his office and Sheena was purportedly indisposed? Maybe Sheena was already bored with Deke's fumbling foreplay and dense back hair and had decided to call in reinforcements.
The fact that the thought cheered her immensely proved just how much the nasty divorce had changed her—before she wouldn't have wished evil on anyone, no matter what they had done to her, but now... well, now she had fantasies about Deke getting his comeuppance in a manner worthy of a regional headline. She glanced toward the phone and seriously toyed with the idea of calling Deke and inventing an emergency to bring him running home. How fitting if Deke walked in on Sheena doing the nasty with another guy in the same bed in which she had caught Deke and Sheena going at it like two greased pistons.
She would probably never be able to get that horrific image out of her head. Now, ten months later, the detail she remembered most vividly was that the bottoms of Sheena's feet (stuck up in the air) were dirty, and the fact that she was sullying Penny's organic cotton sheets in the process of shagging her husband was just... well, unforgivable, really.
Penny pressed her face closer to the window, her mind spinning gleeful scenarios, all of them ending with Deke crawling back to her—not that it would do any good, but oh, the sweet satisfaction.
The stranger's body language was definitely suspicious as he climbed the steps, stabbed the doorbell, and waited in the shadows of the covered porch. He looked from side to side, his gaze seeming to catch and linger on the antique metal glider that she had painstakingly stripped of countless layers of peeling paint and refurbished for the porch. His good taste in furniture apparently did not extend to women, Penny thought sourly. The door opened and Sheena stood there in a pale, voluminous peignoir, a la Zsa Zsa Gabor, her orange skin glowing like a jack-o-lantern, nary a back brace nor neck cast in sight.
Penny waited for the man to scoop Sheena into his arms, or for her to flash him some leg—or an orange boob. Instead, his posture went rigid and he appeared to say something she didn't like. Sheena's blond head tilted and her hip cocked saucily, her face contorted. Then she tried to close the door, but the man wedged his foot in the opening long enough to add something. When he withdrew his foot, the door closed and Penny imagined the
thwack
of the deadbolt turning as she had turned it many times herself.
The man retraced his steps to the car, every footfall exuding anger. She couldn't get a good look at his face as he swung into the driver's seat. Exhaust blasted out of the tailpipe when he started the car engine, then he backed out of the driveway onto Charm Street and sped away in the direction of downtown Mojo. For some reason, though, she doubted the man was in town for the Voodoo Festival.
Penny's pulse spiked—who was the mystery man to her ex-husband's shack-up honey? A relative? A debtor?
A lover?
Stephanie Bond was five years deep into a corporate career in computer programming and pursuing an MBA at night when an instructor remarked she had a flair for writing and suggested she submit material to academic journals. But Stephanie was more interested in writing fiction—more specifically, romance and mystery novels. After writing in her spare time for two years, she sold her first manuscript, a romantic comedy, to Harlequin Books. After selling ten additional projects to two publishers, she left her corporate job to write fiction full-time. To-date, Stephanie has more than fifty published novels to her name, including the popular BODY MOVERS humorous mystery series. For more information, visit
http://www.stephaniebond.com
.