Last of the Red-Hot Riders (22 page)

Judy, bigger than life and more full of energy than ever, glared at Saint.

“What the hell, Mayor?”

“And well you might ask.” Judy stood stretched to her full six feet, clearly cross and ready to yell his ears off. “What have you done to my team?”

“I didn't do anything.” He toweled off with an old rag, looked to see if his beer was ruined. “You've been gone two months. The team disintegrated. But you're looking really good, Mayor,” he said, pleased that Judy's blonde hair was towering in its usual meringue pouf and that she looked rested—and healthy. He was so glad to see her looking hearty, he was no longer upset about the cruel, watery interruption to his retreat.

“Why wouldn't I look good?” Judy demanded suspiciously.

He sighed. Somebody in Hell had to tell her. She was going to have to explain some things to Steel, and a lot of other people. “Sit, Mayor. I'll get you a drink. Water or beer?”

She perched, not very happily, on a wooden stool. “Both. But I'm not here for a social call. I'm here to kick your butt for killing my team.”

“You can't blame this on me, Judy.”

“I left you in charge.”

“Someone was in charge, but it wasn't me. Cameron needed to go home to her family, and Harper, hell, I don't know where she is.”

“Apparently, Harper and Michael went back home.” Judy took the beer and water from him, displeased.

“You hadn't left any instructions for your team to be paid, Judy,” he said gently. “Anyway, none of this matters. You can build a new team. How are you feeling?”

“Feeling?” She stared at him. “I feel fine. Why would you ask such a silly question?”

“Ivy told us you went to Austin to get cancer treatments,” he said, not about to let her bully him. Either Ivy had been telling the truth or she wasn't, but Judy wouldn't have been gone two months if Ivy hadn't been on to something.

Judy scoffed. “Ivy has a big mouth.”

“So do you, except when you want to keep secrets. Out with it, Mayor.”

“I don't care to discuss it.” She sipped her beer, her big eyes glaring at him over the can.

“What did you tell Steel? The sheriff moped around here for quite a while claiming you no longer loved him.”

Judy set the can down. “Don't make this about me. Let's figure out what you're going to do to get my team back.” She pointed a finger at him. “You were never keen on my team, and as soon as I was gone, you turned into…this.”

He supposed she had something of a point. “Judy, I'm just doing a little mental wipe, that's all. I promise you I didn't do anything to hurt the team. In fact, I did everything I could to be supportive.”

She waited for him to say more, petting Lucky, who had glued himself to her leg for attention. Saint cleared his throat. He didn't know what else to say.

“Judy, you didn't pay them. They had to go. No one's independently wealthy in Hell, and they weren't, either.”

“So you didn't fall in love with Cameron and refuse to commit to a relationship with her?”

“What? No!” He shook his head. “Who told you that?”

“Declan. He told me all about it.”

Rat fink
. “No. Cameron and I were not in love.” He was in love, but she wasn't.

Wait—I'm in love?

Of course he was. That's why he was moping around like a sad dog. Hell, Lucky was in better spirits than he was.

“When's the last time you bathed?” Judy demanded.

“I swim every morning in the creek. As does Lucky.” He felt a little defensive about the cleanliness issue, especially given the looks he got in the next town over when he'd gone in for supplies. “Excuse me if I wasn't expecting to hold a tea party.”

“You look rather disreputable. In fact, you look like one of the Horsemen.”

Saint thought there was probably no greater insult he could have suffered, but he let it go. “Welcome home, Mayor,” he said, getting up to hug Judy as she held court on the stool. “We missed the hell out of you.”

“If you'd missed me, you would have taken care of my girls while I was gone.”

“Did it ever occur to you that Steel suffered terribly when you flaked out on him like that?”

She glared at him. “Don't you dare!”

“All right, all right. I'm just saying, life hasn't been perfect for anyone lately. How do you intend to make it up to him?”

“I don't know,” she said, her voice drifting away. “I don't know if I can.”

He rubbed her back. “So, all bullshit and drama aside, do you have cancer?”

“I have a personal situation that I'm working on,” Judy said. “That's all I'm willing to voice out loud.”

“So you'll be needing a support group.”

She sighed. “You'll be a sorry support group, but you're better than nothing. However, you have to kill that bush that's grown on your face. My God, that's bound to frighten children.”

He smiled. “Where do we go from here?”

“We don't go anywhere. You go get my team back.” She gave him a sour look.

“No can do.” He shook his head. “Judy, I know that for obvious reasons you weren't thinking straight when you left, but those girls needed paying jobs. Harper had even taken a job at Redfeather's, and though she improved the cuisine, it's not what she came here for. You never had a real team to start with. They had to move on.” Frankly, he didn't want to think about Hell without the Hell's Belles. It was definitely going to be a whole lot quieter around town now—and a whole lot less pretty.

She got up. “I have to go. I promised Steel I'd be all his tonight. Dinner, the works. He wants to squire me around the town, show me off a bit, he said.”

“Big night at Redfeather's, then.”

Judy tucked her pink shirt into her jeans, which had pink and red roses painted delicately on them. Fringe bounced from her long sleeves as she eyed him. “When you've been gone a while, Redfeather's feels like coming home.”

“I remember.” He stood with her. “When we were overseas, all we could think about was coming home to Hell and sitting in our cracked leather booth.”

“And that's what you do best,” Judy said crisply. “I'll help you pack up.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” he protested, knowing full well his sabbatical had just crashed to a halt. She raised a brow at him, a force to be reckoned with, and it was great, really great, to see her back to her old self. “Oh, hell, unhook the hammock.”

Once Saint plugged his cell phone into the charger, it pretty much exploded with messages, quite a few of them from his mother and sisters. Apparently, his mother had managed to catch the kitchen on fire—just a smoke fire, they said, nothing to worry about—but they wanted him to learn it from them rather than through the grapevine.

He showered and shaved off the offending beard—Judy was right, it was pretty
scraggly—washed
the hound, and headed out to his mother's house. It wasn't much, as houses went, parked way out in the county, but as the brown bricks of the sprawling ranch house squatting on open land used for hay and cows revealed itself, he thought it hadn't been a bad place to grow up. Just lonely as hell for lack of male companionship, other boys his age to play with. The nearest friends had been five miles away.

He turned into the driveway, parking a good bit from the house so the chickens wouldn't be startled. One thing about living this far from anyone else—walking five miles to visit friends had seemed like a piece of cake. Early training for becoming a SEAL. He'd been fit when he'd decided to go in, and the distance stuff hadn't bothered him one bit.

“Mom!” he yelled, letting the screen door slam behind him. He smelled the harshness of smoke and the residue of mildew mingling together. When he got no answer, he and Lucky strolled into the kitchen. “Oh,
shit.
”

His sisters hadn't quite been honest. This had been no small frying pan that had smoked and given everyone a scare. The kitchen was completely gone.

“Saint!” Rose came in behind him, threw her arms around his neck, hugging him tight. “It's so good to see you!”

“Mom, what the hell?” he said, hugging her back. “What the hell happened?”

“Language, son.” Rose shook her silvery head. “I just let a pan get too hot.”

“No you didn't. This didn't happen because of a pan.”

She cleared her throat. “I left a candle burning. And who is this little fellow?” she asked, picking Lucky up. Lucky was thrilled by this event, repaying Rose with plenty of kisses on her chin.

Saint looked around. Everything was gone. The kitchen was pretty much knocked back to the studs; what wall was left was ebony with smoke. He could still smell the tang of fire haunting the room. “Mom, my God. Thank heaven you're all right.” He hugged her again, and Lucky tried to get a lick in on his face, too.

“Well, it was stupid, son,” she said as he guided her into the living room to get away from the smell and the sorry results of the fire. “I put something in the microwave I shouldn't have.”

He hesitated. “Okay. Go on.”

“I've been so absentminded! There's so much going on around here all the time. You know?”

Oh, he knew. Here in this house it was always a carnival and tornado at once. Which was why he craved Hell. It was usually pretty quiet there, except for the Honky-tonk, which he didn't frequent often. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, I'd rolled some money up in tinfoil. A few hundred dollars, that's all. My chicken money and a little extra from some sewing.” She gazed at him, her eyes bright behind her blue glasses. “And I hid it in the microwave accidentally. I meant to put the money in the freezer, but I was in a hurry that day.” She sighed. “We had a lot going on. Your sisters—”

“I know, Mom. Back to the money.” He knew all about the daily amusement park the family home was—it was both a curse and a blessing.

“I just forgot, is all.” She shrugged. “I'd meant to put my soup in the microwave and the money in the freezer, but I did it backwards. And I blew the microwave.”

He started to laugh, realized that would hurt his mother's feelings. She was truly devastated by what she perceived as an inexcusably stupid error. “Mom, it's okay. It happens.”

“It was actually pretty scary,” she said, and he hugged her again.

“It's okay. I thought we talked about keeping money in the bank in Hawk.”

“I know,” Rose said, “but it's a pain to drive over there.”

“How much do you have in the freezer? I can take some of it and put it in your account if you don't want to drive over.”

“Just a little bit. Fifty thousand dollars,” she said, and he sighed.

Which meant she probably had very little in the bank. She wasn't using her account at all, just stashing her earnings from selling chickens and eggs into the freezer. Monthly social security payments, he'd managed to convince her, were going into her account at the bank, so that money was
secure—although
she was convinced that neither the government nor the banks could be trusted. In her previous life, before marriage and five kids, Rose had been a highly respected PhD teaching anatomy at a community college. Anatomy and sometimes the classics. There was nothing Rose loved better than reading the classics, and books on anatomy and other subjects relating to science, which gave her a slightly rumpled, bookish, and absentminded air.

Saint smiled at her. “Don't cry, Mom.”

She wiped at her eyes, leaned on his shoulder. “It's just that Thanksgiving and Christmas are only a couple of months away. My kitchen won't be repaired by then. Where will we have our holiday traditions?”

Damn. He should have seen this coming. “We'll use my house. It'll be fine.” The insanity would just come to
his
turf, that was all. It hit him that between his family craziness and Cameron's obvious family wrinkles, they might have been in for some interesting genetic history—had he and she worked out. The thought didn't scare him as much as he figured it should have. “In fact, you should think about coming to stay with me. I'm not sure this is safe for you.”

She shook her head. “No, I couldn't. I want to be here to make sure no one loots my house.”

There was nothing to loot. “Where are my sisters?”

“Gone to town to get food. Buy a refrigerator, a few cleaning supplies.”

Saint hoped a microwave wasn't on the list. He shook his head. “How can I help you?”

“You can take that fifty grand into town. Exploding two hundred dollars has really annoyed me.” She looked at him. “Do you think I'm getting simple?”

“Oh, God, Mom, no. Jesus. There's nothing wrong with you.” He sighed. “You made a mistake. We all make them. Don't beat yourself up about it.”

She sat quietly, and Saint glanced around the small living room of the small house. It was lucky the whole house hadn't gone up; he was surprised it hadn't.

“Steel was out here today,” Rose said. “He said he can have a crew out to start on this next week.”

Saint grunted. “Steel didn't tell me about the fire, or I would have been here sooner. I'm sorry as hell, Mom.” He couldn't understand why Steel or Declan or someone hadn't come out to the creek to give him the news.

“I told Steel not to tell you. I don't like to bother anyone.” Rose got up. “It was just a little smoke thing, Saint. Nothing to trouble anyone over.”

The kitchen was a burned-out shell. Rose didn't want to admit it to herself because she was afraid she was slipping mentally. Yet Steel's not telling him about the fire was a problem, even if Rose had asked him not to.

The sheriff was peeved because he knew that Saint knew what was going on with Judy and had gone along with her wishes and not broadcast her personal business—even to Steel, who figured he had a right to know. His not telling Saint about the fire had been a silent message.