She’d hoped that little keepsake might be followed up by some vigorous hay-rolling, or at least a night at the movies, but Goat had been keeping his distance. Stella supposed she could understand: After all, the man had broken his most solemn oath by handing over evidence. Still, she was getting a little restless waiting for his conscience to settle itself down enough for him to indulge his inner bad boy in her direction.
“Say,” she said, aiming for an offhand tone. “The tourney play don’t start until later in the evening, isn’t that right?”
BJ blinked at her from under long fringy lashes. “That’s so.”
“Well, I was just thinking, I mean I understand you might have dinner plans already, but I could fix us a little something, I mean nothing special but—”
“Yes,” BJ said quickly.
Stella smiled, deciding she wouldn’t point out that she hadn’t got around to actually laying out the terms of her invitation. A gentleman’s enthusiasm in the face of one’s flat-out womanly mysteries was a powerful thing.
BJ’s blush deepened. “Lemme do a U-ie and come around so you can hop on in.”
“Don’t be silly,” Stella said, as she crossed daringly in front of the truck, not even trying to dislodge the tight Lycra fabric from her ass and adding a little sway to her step.
Chapter Two
Half an hour later the taquitos were in the oven, the onion dip upended in a pretty Fiestaware dish, the chips mounded in a salad bowl, and Stella was fresh out of the shower and subtly spritzed with White Diamonds. She emerged from her bedroom to find BJ peering at the latest
Redbook,
a pair of half-moon specs perched on his nose. The gin and tonic Stella’d mixed sat nearly untouched on the coffee table.
When BJ noticed Stella he hastily snatched the glasses off his nose and stuffed them into his embroidered shirt pocket.
“Those glasses look nice on you,” Stella said, plucking her own drink—a neat slug of Johnnie in a tumbler—off the counter and joining him on the couch. She chose a spot that left a foot of chintz between them. Far enough apart for decorum … but close enough, she hoped, to signal a world of potential.
“Oh, now, Stella, don’t be mean,” BJ mumbled, ducking his chin down practically to his pearly pink collar.
Stella reached out before she had a chance to think and hooked a finger under his strong, bristly chin. She tipped his face up so his wide brown eyes were aimed directly at her and caught her breath to note the equal parts longing and uncertainty all mixed up in their depths.
“But I meant it,” she whispered. “Just about anything looks nice on you, BJ.”
After that followed one of those moments that you wish you could dip into acrylic and plate with gold and mount on a stand with a gilded plaque with the date and a thousand exclamation points—the kind of moment that even when you’re in it you know will be playing on the pull-down screen in your mind on your dying day. Here was a man who wanted her, who—unlike Goat—offered nothing more complicated than a sweet lusty romp, with maybe the potential for something even more sweet and uncomplicated to follow.
BJ’s hand traveled all slo-mo like up to Stella’s, and he wrapped his warm fingers around hers and drew her hand around his neck. She closed the distance with a happy little sigh, and when her lips landed squarely on his she was only a little surprised at the rather generous and fleshy nature of his tongue, the funny way he patted at her waist as though he were shaping dough into a loaf—so unlike Goat—before a wave of pure animal lust came crashing from sources unknown and Stella figured she’d just throw caution to the wind and go with it.
Stella was very familiar with the contours and curves of her pink chintz sofa, having fluffed its pillows and vacuumed its crevices about a thousand times in the past decade, so she was able to drag BJ down on top of her with no fear of smacking her head on a sofa arm or dislodging a stray throw pillow. For his part, BJ seemed fine with the whole animal attraction approach and swiftly maneuvered a knee between her willing and pliant thighs. A nagging little voice in the back of Stella’s mind whispered reminders of the way Goat’s hands—callused and wind-weathered and strong as steel—felt when they tugged her hair or grazed a nipple, but even that voice dimmed as BJ’s sweet doughy lips trailed a path across her cheeks, under her ears, down her neck, settling with a happy sigh between her breasts.
“Erm bermferm,” he muttered, giving her soft little kisses while his hands stole shyly to her hips, where they settled tentatively, almost reverently.
“Come again?” Stella said contentedly, letting her eyes flutter shut and throwing her head back so her shoulder-length hair, recently colored a shade somewhere on the red side of auburn by Noelle, could spill luxuriously over the edge of the sofa.
BJ lifted his head from her breasts and gave her a heavy-lidded gaze, his cheeks flushed dark with exertion and, Stella fervently hoped, lust. “You’re beautiful,” he clarified, before diving back into his happy task, and that gave Stella the extra assurance she was looking for. She put her hands on his and gave them a little push, willing BJ to surge past tentative to, say, willful and unstoppable, or at least untamed and demanding, or even needful and greedy. For one wild and headstrong moment he slid his hands under her rear and squeezed, but then he retreated, his hands coming to rest once more in the no-combat zone of her general waist area while he continued his gentle exploration of the valley between her breasts.
Stella tried once more, giving his hands a less subtle shove in a downward direction, but he resisted, adding a polite little moan—and a memory came unbidden into Stella’s mind: Goat, here, on this couch, during a makeout session a few months ago. He had not been tentative. He had not been polite. He had been all wanting and taking and insisting, and the thought of the way he’d nearly thrown her down and grabbed great handfuls of her soft and willing flesh caused a moan of her own to escape her lips.
BJ froze.
Stella’s eyes flew open and she found herself staring at BJ’s chin, and she had time to note that he’d missed a little patch with the razor before he was scrambling off her as fast and furiously as though he had discovered he’d accidentally mounted a prize boar. Before Stella had a chance to protest or demand an explanation, she looked past BJ and saw the source of his consternation, and suddenly she was racing BJ in an effort to look as though they hadn’t just been doing precisely what they had been doing.
“Is that—Mr. Brodersen, is that
you
?” Todd Groffe asked with unprecedented awe, his fourteen-year-old jaw dropping impressively.
“Hello, Todd,” Stella said briskly, standing and dusting off the front of her capri pants as though she’d been doing nothing more exciting than pulling a few stray weeds from the flower bed. “Say hello as though you were not brought up in a barn.”
“Does the sheriff know he’s here?” Todd stage-whispered, never taking his eyes off BJ, who was making furtive adjustments to his trousers while crossing his legs and sliding as far away on the couch as he could.
“He’s not—I don’t—what are you doing here, anyway?” Stella managed to get out. “Don’t you and your hoodlum pals have a date to smoke crack behind the Arco or something?”
“We done smoked it,” Todd said, his voice settling back to his too-bored-to-be-bothered register now that the excitement had waned, along with BJ’s ardor. “And we also knocked over Dumfree Liquors and all got blow jobs and burned us up a flag, so you can just hold on to your lecture, Stella. It’s too late for savin’ me.”
“Is that right,” Stella said, getting her composure back. She picked up a throw pillow that had fallen victim to the recent lust storm, fluffed it, and placed it primly between herself and BJ while Todd sprawled in the easy chair. “What did Chanel think of that business?”
She noted with satisfaction that Todd’s smart-ass smirk disappeared in a flash of sweet and tender adolescent self-doubt. Todd tugged at the collar of his T-shirt, which inexplicably bore an image of a duck with a human skull and a cigarette hanging out of its beak.
“I said, how is your young lady friend?” Stella repeated smugly.
“She’s fine, I guess,” he mumbled.
“And her mother?”
“Fine, prob’ly.” Todd slid further down in the chair until his bony butt hovered off the edge.
“And old Mrs. Tanaka? Out at Crestview Care?”
Todd scowled. “How’m I s’posed to know, Stella?”
Stella beamed with triumph. Winning a round with her young neighbor gave her all manner of satisfaction, especially now that he was getting older and cagier. His romance with the hottest girl in eighth grade had been given a boost not long ago when Noelle gave him a makeover, which he had assiduously kept up with gallons of goopy hair product. Noelle, who apparently had decided that Todd was a perfect substitute for the little brother she never had, bought him ridiculous T-shirts and baggy plaid shorts and overpriced jeans at the mall over in Coffey, thirty miles away, where she lived. When she came for her weekend visits, the two of them talked music and movies and school while they did Noelle’s laundry.
Todd was family, even if they didn’t have a box for that particular relationship on the U.S. Census Bureau form.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “only I’m thinkin’ that little mark on your neck didn’t exactly get there all by itself, see what I’m sayin’?”
Todd’s hand flew to the hickey that peeped up over his collar like a smudge of ketchup and blushed a furious purple. Good. They were even, and she could count on the boy’s silence—for now, at least.
“Mr. Brodersen was just about to—” Stella began. Then she was interrupted by the phone again. She pulled it out and squinted at the display. Gracellen. She didn’t much feel like listening to the static, so she returned it to her pocket. “Mr. Brodersen was about to go to his bowling night. And I imagine you were on your way someplace important, too, right, Todd?”
“Bowling don’t start until seven thirty,” BJ said helpfully. “I might could stay a bit longer.”
Stella gave him a thin-lipped smile. Now that that first wave of lustful feelings had been forced off the road by Todd’s untimely arrival, a measure of uncertainty had crept into her mind. Things had been moving awful fast—after all, she and BJ had never even been on a proper date—and also too slow, if that made any sense. She needed some time, some solitary time, to review in her mind the dance of passion that BJ had been performing on her and figure out if they were hearing the same tune, so to speak.
His tongue had been … just so darn
fleshy.
Stella felt her face warm at the thought and fixed a glare on Todd, who was sifting through the bowl of mixed nuts that Stella had set out, picking out all the cashews and tossing them into his mouth.
“Let me say it plain, Todd,” she said. “Time for you to go on home. Your mama’s gonna be home with the girls by now.”
Todd had adorable seven-year-old twin sisters and a mother who attempted to keep up with three kids and a job and a house and a stack of bills that would make a weaker woman weep, as well as an ex-husband whose life had recently become a bit more interesting, though Sherilee didn’t know it. Alongside the sewing machine shop Stella had inherited from her dead son-of-a-bitch husband, she had her second, secret business that involved straightening out all manner of abusers and deadbeats and worthless husbands and boyfriends. Ordinarily a fee was involved, a sum tailored to a woman’s means, but in Sherilee’s case Stella was doing a little pro bono work.
After all, Royal Groffe was hardly the worst offender Stella had ever encountered. He’d just let late payment of his child support become a habit since moving from up near the northeast corner of Missouri to Kansas City, where there was more call for experienced pipe fitters—as well as a lot more nightlife to spend his paycheck on. Sherilee was not the complaining sort, so it had taken several months of late payments—months in which she lay awake nights trying to figure out how to stretch a paycheck to cover food for her children while still keeping the lights on—before she’d let slip to Stella how worried she was.
Stella had driven up to Kansas City, where she visited the job site where Royal was employed. From what she could tell, sitting in her Jeep Liberty and nibbling Junior Mints to pass the time while she observed him through her Zhumell short-barrel waterproof binoculars, a pair she favored because they fit easily in her purse, he was a skilled and dedicated worker. That was a check in the plus column, the way Stella saw it, since that meant he was likely to stay steadily employed. Still, Stella met him in the parking lot after work and gave him a manicure with a 30-watt woodburning tool plugged into the power converter she kept in the Jeep and ran off its cigarette lighter, to explain that his lax attitude about sending support payments constituted a check in the minus column.
Since then his checks had arrived early.
Todd’s scowl deepened, and he tossed the last of the nuts into his mouth and chewed glumly. “Mom said stay outta the house while she fixes dinner.”
Stella’s ears pricked up at that. Sherilee never sent Todd out of the house, with the exception of Sunday nights, when he came over to watch TV with Stella while Sherilee took her girls out for ice cream or a movie or to feed the ducks at Nickel Pond. Until recently she’d had a standing date with her son on Saturday nights, but now that Todd was weighted down with a girlfriend as well as a flock of equally hormonal and sullen friends, he generally made his own weekend plans, which made Sherilee all the more determined to spend as much time with her boy as she could after work. As for Todd, as much as he complained about his pesky little sisters and his mother’s draconian discipline, he took his man-of-the-house role seriously enough to make Stella’s heart ache.
So whenever Todd seemed determined to stay away from home, Stella had learned to be suspicious. She reached for the backpack Todd had tossed on the rug and dragged it close before Todd could stop her.
“Hey!” he protested. “Ain’t no call to be goin’ through my stuff, Stella!”