Jarod's Heart (King Brothers Stories #2) (13 page)

THEIR NOSES LED
them back to the dining room, where scents of homemade chicken fingers and french fries permeated the air. Lauren loved family meals like this. It was so much better than her microwaved dinners alone.

She took her spot next to Jessica, who now possessed a new blue booster seat in the chair next to Jarod. A large, tattooed arm stretched between them, placing a new child’s plate with a cute blue dog pictured on it, full of chicken fingers and fries.

“Here you go, Princess.”

“Thank you, Hunkle Jase,” Jessica said quietly. Her concentration was on her plate of food, picking up a chicken finger and dipping it into some ranch sauce before taking a huge bite.

“I think my granddaughter has some catching up to do,” James observed from across the table. Jessica grinned with ranch in the corners of her mouth.

“That she does, Dad,” Jarod said, handing her a napkin.

Lauren thought of her blanket and noticed that Camille had strategically laid it across her chair underneath the booster seat.

Clever.

As usual, the dinner table was alive with discussion about everyone’s day and familial camaraderie. Brotherly jibes between the men were the most common. Since the big engagement, Charlie and Julie had been added to this awesome family and were treated as such.

Lauren sometimes let the demons in her head rule, and tonight they were making an unwelcome appearance. They told her that she wasn’t good enough for these people and that she didn’t belong. It was her own childish insecurity that played with her self-esteem, and, if she wasn’t careful, it would sink her into a black hole of depression.

She must have let her melancholy show because she immediately felt Jarod’s hand on her shoulder, his thumb moving in a small circle. He had to reach an arm across the back of Jessica’s chair in order to reach her. She looked over Jessica’s head into a pair of deep-blue eyes.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “You okay?”

“I’m great,” she smiled. “Julie’s chicken strips are one of my favorites.”

“Julie’s everything is one of my favorites,” James said, making everyone laugh in agreement.

Camille slugged him in the arm. “Geez, you’d think I starved you all your life.”

He kissed her cheek. “I didn’t say you were a lousy cook, my love. I’m just saying that Julie is better.” He flashed a big Cheshire cat grin. “Isn’t that why you teamed up with her?”

“Well, let’s just say it’s not the only reason I teamed up with her.”

Camille winked across the table at Lauren, who smiled back. There was no denying that Lauren’s best friend could cook.

AFTER DESSERT, THE
women headed off to the Room of Doom to work on their decorations, Jessica tagging along with them. Jarod missed her already. He’d missed her infancy and most of her toddler years, and he didn’t want to miss anything else.

But no self-respecting man with the last name of King would ever set foot in that room of his own free will. So he joined the men of his family, who were congregated in the family room.

James had the fireplace going, and the Giants, who were in the playoffs, were on the television with the sound muted. Charlie and Josh were sitting on the floor at the coffee table in a grudge match of Chinese checkers. Jason and their father were conversing quietly about the family business, King Construction, and going over plans for Jason’s new house. Jarod’s brother had decided to begin building it after Julie’s good-for-nothing ex-boyfriend burned his house down.

Jarod zoned out on the game while his family went about their evening. He was thinking about his daughter and how lucky he was to have her when his cell phone rang. Checking the number, he answered the call rather than sending it to voicemail.

“What do you have for me, Detective Cane?”

“I need to bring you up to speed on the deaths of your ex-wife and Michael Trapp.”

“I’m listening,” Jarod said.

“I told you that they were killed in a car wreck, but what I didn’t tell you was that there had been a fire. The bodies were badly burned, which was the main reason it took so long to identify your ex-wife. However, the coroner just sent the autopsy reports back, and they found bullet wounds to the skulls of both victims. They were shot at close range, execution style. No bullets were recovered. This case just became a murder investigation.”

Jarod wasn’t surprised. Miranda had been living a hard, dangerous lifestyle…
with his daughter.

Keeping his voice as quiet and unemotional as possible, he said, “Understood. Any leads?”

“No, none yet. But we’ll need an accounting of your whereabouts on the night they were killed.”

“Of course, you have my full cooperation. I’ll have my on-duty log sent to you. Let me know what else you need and it’s yours,” Jarod said without hesitation as he ended the call; he was a man of few words, and it was to be expected that he would be first on the list of suspects. He had records proving his whereabouts. But that damn nagging feeling was back, causing tension to coil up his neck and into his shoulders. He was missing something, and the good lord knew he was tenacious when it came to solving a puzzle.

“What’s happened?”

Jarod mentally rolled his eyes. His dad had always known when something was wrong with one of his sons.

“Miranda’s death has been ruled a homicide,” he said quietly.

“Care to explain that?” Jason asked.

Jarod swore he came from a family of genetic mutants with superhuman hearing.

He gave Jason a blank face while he worked out in his head what he wanted to say, and he needed to say it before the girls returned. He’d fill Lauren in on things later when he asked her for the attendance logs.

He repeated what the detective had told them, finishing with, “I’ve asked Lauren not to say anything about Jessica to my staff.”

Josh frowned, “Dude. Mom’s had her all over town today. People are going to find out about her, and if they don’t already know by now, the horse will be out of the barn at the Halloween dinner at St. Anthony’s.”

“You’re right. Of course you’re right,” he sighed, closing his eyes as he pinched the bridge of his nose. It was the curse of living in a small community; everyone knew everything about everybody. There were no secrets.

Unless you’re a drug-dealing murderer.
But he couldn’t connect the two crimes yet; it was just a gut feeling. He rubbed his temples to ease the ache that had set up house in his head.

From down the hall he could hear small feet running for all they were worth and Lauren’s laughing voice saying, “Slow down before you fall and hurt yourself, silly!”

Jessica took the corner into the family room at full speed, sneakers blinking like a red strobe light. “Look!” she laughed. She climbed onto the couch and held up an orange and green cloth pumpkin in front of his face.

“Did you make that by yourself, Darlin’?” He took it from her and felt that it was soft and cushiony.

“Guess what’s inside?” She was giggling and clutching her fingers together under her chin.

He smiled at her and turned the item around in his hands. Her giggles were infectious. “I give up. What’s in it?”

“TOILET PAPER!”

She was so worked up that she didn’t realize that she was standing on the couch next to him. She laughed so hard that she was holding his shoulder with one hand to keep herself steady and bending over holding her tummy with the other.

Jarod started laughing. “Who gave you that idea?”

“I read it in a magazine,” Lauren answered as she sat down next to him on the couch just as Jessica jumped down.

They laughed as she presented her toilet paper pumpkin to everyone in the room, each person pretending that they hadn’t just heard her squeal what was inside. Pretty soon the room was filled with warm smiles and laughter.

“Where’s Mom and Julie?” Jason asked in between chuckles.

“They’re cleaning up our mess. Jessie was too excited to show you all her project to stay and help, so we left them to do the dirty work,” Lauren explained in a conspiratorial whisper.

“How many of those are you making?” Charlie asked.

Camille strolled in at that moment and answered, “I think what we’ll do is take the supplies to the dinner and make this a craft activity for the kids. So I would guess that we’ll need enough supplies for fifty children.”

“What do you mean?” James chuckled.

“I’ll show ya,” Jessica said proudly. She wriggled out of her grandfather’s arms. Once on the ground, she put the pumpkin on the coffee table. There were green felt strips sticking out of the top end of the roll. She pulled out the strips and set them aside. Next, she carefully pulled out the four corners of the orange cloth, which had also been pulled up from around the bottom of the roll and tucked into the hole in the top, where the stems had been removed. The whole roll of toilet paper was now sitting in the middle of a square of orange cloth.

She looked up and smiled. Then she pushed all four corners back into the top hole of the roll, followed by the green felt strips that Jarod could now see were shaped like vine leaves.

“Ta-dah!” She threw her hands in the air and grinned from ear to ear.

Camille explained, “There’s a volunteer committee that’s ready to go at a moment’s notice. We can have them cut the orange cloth squares and the green felt leaves and then load them into individual brown paper sacks. When the kids are gathered, we will hand each child a sack, explaining that it’s a surprise Halloween craft inside that we are all putting together at the same time. Each child will open up the sack to find the orange and green material, plus a roll of toilet paper. When they are instructed to put it all together, it will be a hoot. And because there’s no glue involved, it won’t be messy. We’ll also add a felt marker so they can draw a jack o’lantern face on their pumpkins if they wish. Kids of all ages can participate.”

“It’s good, wholesome family fun,” Julie said as she wrapped her arms around Jason’s middle.

Josh said, “You’re going to have to soothe them with some candy in those bags, Mom. If I opened a bag that was supposed to contain a surprise but got nothing but a roll of toilet paper, I’d feel like I got gypped.”

“Or tricked instead of treated,” Charlie said. “Gotta fill those bags with candy, Camille. It’s Halloween, after all.”

THE EVENING WOUND
down, the baseball game was over, and Charlie had creamed Josh at Chinese checkers. Their taunting had quieted down somewhat with another challenge issued for the following evening, if Charlie didn’t have too much homework.

Jessica had crawled up onto the couch between Jarod and Lauren, taking apart her toilet paper pumpkin and reassembling it over and over again until finally her head had dropped into Lauren’s lap. It was then that Jarod realized that he had put his arm on the back of the couch and his hand was idly twirling a curl in Lauren’s pretty blonde hair.

Her face was turned down toward Jessica, her own hand petting Jessica’s long black locks.

Suddenly, she looked up and met his eyes. Heat flared in his blood. With his child in her lap, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. His desirous thoughts must have shown because her lips parted as she took an involuntary gasp of air. The pulse of her heart beating in her neck inflamed him further. Finally, she soughed out the air from her lungs and gave him a shy smile.