My sister might be a child, but she knew something was wrong. Mom held out her arm and Maizy walked forward until Mom hugged her tightly and kissed her on the cheek. In fact, she started kissing Maizy all over her face and it switched on her gigglebox.
“Go in the other room, Maze,” I told her. “I’ll be in there in a minute and we can watch the best part together.” I knew which part was coming up because I could hear the song playing and practically had that movie memorized. Maizy skipped out of the room and I rubbed my eyes.
“I need to get a hold of Dad. Do you know where he is?”
She shook her head adamantly. “I have no idea, honey. A friend of mine even tried searching for him on the Internet. He just… disappeared.”
“Then I’m going to find a way to make him reappear, because he has the missing piece to my puzzle.”
Chapter 10
“Alexia Knight, is that you?”
These are the curses of living in the same town you grew up in. Either your old classmates still lived there, or they eventually returned to visit family. I was always running into someone from my past and it felt weird, like you weren’t supposed to know what happened to everyone when they grew up.
I recalled some of the most turbulent times of childhood. I got in a fight at school with a girl who called me Flatass, my brother and Austin took me to prom because no guy had asked me, and a couple of my besties either slept with my boyfriends or ended up going to college and never called me again. While I’d been avoiding class reunions, they didn’t seem to be avoiding me.
I turned around and laid eyes on Josh Holden. He now worked as a manager at a gas station. I’d run into him a few times when I lived with Beckett because the station was on my way home. Usually I just paid at the pump, but a couple of times Beckett wanted me to go in and pick up some lottery tickets.
When I was fifteen, Josh had tried to get me a little more experienced with older boys than I was ready for, but chalk it up to teenage hormones. Up to that point, my version of dating was handholding and a few French kisses. I’d never had a real boyfriend or done anything sexual. Then Josh took me out on a date and couldn’t keep his hands off me.
“Haven’t seen you in a few months,” he said. “Your hair looks different.”
“So does your face. What happened?” It was bruised up and his left cheek was green.
“Uh, got jumped by some psycho,” he said, scratching the side of his nose. Josh was once a buff guy on the football team, but time had worn away all that brawn. Now he stood around five feet ten inches and had a potbelly. His reddish-blond hair was shaved close to his head, and his once golden skin was now mottled and freckled in places.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “Robbery at the gas station?”
“Nah. I was driving around and, I don’t know. So how you been? You still seeing that big dude with the pythons?”
By pythons, he meant Beckett’s arms.
“No, we split up.”
“That’s too bad. I just broke up with some chick I met online. Stay away from those dating services.”
“Why’s that?”
He nodded at the man behind the counter. “Ham and cheese to go. And a pickle.” Josh put his hand on the counter and scoped out a blonde who walked inside carrying a small dog under her right arm. “Most of them use pictures they took ten years and two babies ago.”
“Hell no. At least, none that I know about.”
I impatiently glared at the manager. He was putting the last toppings on the salad and I suddenly wished I had ordered my lunch to go.
“I love kids,” I declared in a bright voice. “Can’t wait to have a bunch of them.”
His brows popped up.
“Miss, here’s your salad.”
The man behind the counter slid my tray forward and I grabbed the ends, looking back at Josh. “Well, take care, and good luck with everything.” What else could I say? It’s not as if he was an old friend, and the conversation was just weird and a little sad.
I walked to the back of the quaint little deli and set my tray on a small wooden table beside the soda fountain machine. When the heavy legs of the chair scraped back, Josh sidled up beside me. “Can I join you? I’ve got the afternoon off and we can catch up on old times.”
Old times of him pawing me in the front seat of his dad’s Pontiac? No, thanks.
“Sorry, Josh. I have a lot on my mind and I’d rather be alone,” I said, sitting in the wooden chair.
“Maybe we can talk about it,” he suggested, leaning forward with his hand on the table, obscuring my view.
I poked my plastic fork in a boiled egg and sat back. “No offense. I really need to be by myself right now.”
“Problem?” a deep, scary voice rumbled from behind him.
Josh stiffened and looked over his shoulder. Austin stood with his arms folded and the most volcanic gaze I’d ever seen. He looked wolfish, like a predator stalking his prey. His dark brows sank over his bright eyes, and the way he looked at Josh gave me the chills.
Apparently, it gave Josh the chills too.
“See ya, Lexi,” Josh mumbled, walking swiftly to the door without waiting for his sandwich.
“You seem to always show up at the most convenient times,” I noted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following me.” My statement was a question in disguise.
Austin pulled out the chair across from me and slowly sat down, resting his forearms on the table. He was wearing a sleeveless black shirt and my eyes stole a glimpse of his remarkable tattoos.
“How did it go with your mom?”
“Are you following me?” I repeated.
Austin rubbed his jaw and gave himself away. “What did that asshole say to you?”
I tapped my finger on the table and something clicked. “Are you the one who put those bruises on Josh’s face?”
“I heard everything you said at the cemetery and that’s all I needed to know. I didn’t like hearing about the way he treated you.”
“I was fifteen, Austin. He was just doing what boys do.”
That pissed Austin off something fierce as his expression tightened and he scorched me with his eyes. “Time doesn’t erase stupidity. You should have told us back then and we would have taken care of it. Do you think I treated girls like that? Do you think Wes did?”
I snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure you rolled out the red carpet and showered them with rose petals and poetry before popping their cherries. Don’t play knight, because boys are boys and all boys think about is s-e-x.” I stabbed a tomato with my fork.
His voice became smooth like molasses as he leaned forward. “I’m not a boy anymore, Lexi. Are you going to sit there and tell me you never think about sex?”
Damn if that didn’t make my toes curl.
“If I had known all this was going on when we were younger, you might have wound up seeing a darker side of me, Lexi. I didn’t have sex until I was nineteen, and fuck it if that makes me a big pussy because I waited so long, but having sex with a girl who wasn’t even a woman never seemed right, even then. That’s the difference
