Young Buck: A Slow Burn Small Town Romance (Green Valley Heroes Book 5)

Chapter 14

Loretta thinks I’m good-looking.

Here I was congratulating myself, even though I should’ve been focused on our mission. We’d been on the road for over an hour. Loretta had tried to warn me off from coming, and it had taken convincing for her to let me. Like any unsmitten and unaffected passenger, my eyes should have been fixed forward instead of stealing sidelong glances at her as she drove.

But I was neither unsmitten, nor unaffected, a fact I’d discovered too late. By the time I put together that I had more than a neighborly interest, I’d already strong-armed the poor woman into taking the job. I chalk the pushy part up to my initial state of shock. The days right after I’d overheard my parents’ conversation hadn’t been my finest time.

Back to my good senses, I took sublime pleasure in having her near. She smelled even better than I remembered. I’d already put together that her sweet fragrance had something to do with all the time she spent in the garden. There was a freshness about her that reminded me of a cool morning breeze, and the mountain I’d grown up on back home.

“The most important thing is, we stay in the car.” My brain re-engaged just in time to hear her command.

“Wouldn’t we find out more if you masqueraded as a shopper?”

We were en route to Hinckley’s only antiques store. If I got out of the car, my mother would spot me from a mile away. But she didn’t know Loretta.

“This is a long game,” Loretta argued. “The more time passes that no one sees our faces, the more we can let the investigation take its course. Once our cover is blown, it’s blown.”

“It is a pretty good cover,” I admitted.

“It’s a damned good cover,” Loretta scoffed. Her research had revealed that the antiques shop was across the street from a hardware store. That was where Loretta had gotten the idea for us to pose as contractors.

“I checked out the antique store,” Loretta reported. “Asked what kinds of items they carry. Sounded more like collectibles than antiques.”

Loretta produced a manila folder and handed it to me. The items I encountered on a printout from the shop’s eBay store were nothing like the kind my mother bought. They were vintage ashtrays, and seventies kitsch, and tiny ceramic figurines.

“Not what I expected from a woman whose house has been featured in Southern Estates Magazine.” Loretta’s remarks echoed my thoughts.

I looked up just in time for me to catch sight of a Welcome to Hinckley sign. Hinckley was an old factory town in one of the poorer counties in the state. Judging from the outskirts, I’d expected it to be a little run-down. But this looked a lot run-down. We were quiet as we passed an abandoned factory, a convenience store with metal security grates, an open-door bar with its parking lot full at 10 a.m.

Loretta took the road slowly. My spirits lifted as we entered downtown, which had several square blocks of open businesses. There was a bank and a post office, an ice cream parlor, a five-and-dime, and other shops. The architecture wasn’t old enough to be considered classic, quaint, or charming; it seemed rather stuck in the seventies. I tried to imagine a young version of my mother walking these streets.

“Why would she drive for hours to pick up something she could buy online?” I asked the question once we were parked in the hardware store lot. The truck windows were tinted and we had a clear view of the antiques shop across the street.

Just when I thought Loretta wouldn’t answer, she nudged me lightly with her elbow, then jutted her chin toward the shop. “Looks like we’re about to find out.”

My heart kicked into gear the second I laid eyes upon my mother. I’d looked up just in time to see her parking her Escalade. She was even shorter than Loretta, which made getting out of her car look like a kind of dismount. As she walked into the store, I leaned forward in my seat, not at all liking this feeling. I prided myself on knowing things and it rattled me to be in the dark.

My mind was halfway to asking Loretta what we’d do next if my mother really was there for antiques when a man stopped and leaned against her Escalade. Casual, like he owned the damned thing.

I guesstimated how long it would take me to tell him to get on up off of my momma’s car, then calculated the likelihood of her coming out at an inopportune time. It all became a moot point the second my mother walked back out of the store, holding a package. The tall man pushed up to his feet, but instead of moving along, he relieved her of her key remote.

What. The. Fuck?

With more egregious familiarity, the man placed the package in her trunk. It was the size of a supermarket bag, wrapped in butcher paper and twine. He closed the back hatch and pocketed her keys, then smiled down at her and engulfed her in his arms for a hug.

And it wasn’t a “hey, friend, good to see you” kind of hug. This hug said “I missed you,” and “you mean something to me.” Only, I was supposed to know about all the people who she meant something to. It didn’t matter that this had been the whole point of our fishing expedition. Seeing this man so intimate with her...it hurt.

“Who the fuck is this guy?” My voice had a growling quality all of a sudden. As a general rule, I did not growl. My face was numb and my head felt soupy with emotion. The man fed her parking meter, then slung an arm over her shoulder and walked her leftways down the street.

Loretta waited until longer than I thought was wise to begin trailing my mother and the stranger. By the time she turned the truck out of the lot, they were out of plain sight. The next ten seconds were excruciating. Loretta’s odd triangulation seemed more intuitive than methodical, and I was certain we would lose them. But she tracked them to a diner called The Golden Biscuit.

The diner was long, with windows that started at table level and stretched to the ceiling. Inside, only a few of the tables were full. The man behind the counter waved to the stranger who accompanied my mother and motioned for them to sit.

“You have to go in.” I hadn’t intended to speak it as a command.

“It’s too soon for me to show my face,” she repeated.

“How are we going to hear what they’re saying?”

“We’re not,” Loretta said calmly, parking far down the street and out of sight. “We’re going to build a narrative based on what we can pick up from body language.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.” My every instinct told me to act.

“Buck.” It wasn’t until she put her hand over mine that I realized I’d been tapping my fingers nervously against my leg. She handed me a pair of binoculars. “Now tell me what you see.”

It was hard for me to speak my first observation. I’d seen my mother around countless men. Ever the gracious politician’s wife, smiling was essential. But there was something about the way she smiled at this man and the fact that this wasn’t a political function. She wasn’t performing for my father’s benefit. She was smiling on her own behalf.

“They’re happy to see each other,” I said simply, instead of telling Loretta all of that.

“And eating together is familiar to them,” she observed. “They didn’t even look at the menu.”

The stranger leaned forward on his forearms and my mother did the same. When the waiter returned with coffee and the stranger poured two sugar packets into my mother’s mug, my hackles rose. They reached maximum peak when the waiter set down a single piece of pie between them.

Then, there seemed to be a lull in the conversation. Something on my mother’s face changed. She spoke slowly now, distress in eyes that suddenly shone with tears. Her hands became restless, and when she began to wring her napkin with her fingers, he stilled them with his own large hands.

“What is this?” It was a question I hadn’t meant to speak out loud.

“This is the reason why I don’t take clients on jobs,” Loretta said quietly. “It’s better when you don’t have to see it yourself.”

Something told me she wasn’t talking about my momma. But I was too lost in my own thoughts to pry into Loretta’s.

“They’re leaving,” Loretta said aloud some twenty minutes later. Through my binoculars, I’d observed the same. But instead of moving, she raised her camera to eye level and took shots of their retreat.

“Why aren’t you starting the car?”

“Because we’re done for the day,” she said as the shutter kept clicking.

“So what? We just go back to Green Valley without knowing what all of this was about?”

“We learned a lot today,” she reasoned.

“But what if he’s—” I couldn’t say it. It seemed too scandalous to be true, but too obvious at the same time. This guy had to be an old flame. Add in questions about my paternity and how young my mother had me and it seemed like a no-brainer. “What if he’s the guy?”

I shot Loretta a pleading look, unsure as to whether it would sway her. I’d been led to believe some women had a weakness for my eyes. Not that I was exaggerating my distress. All of this had me in a bad way.

She set her camera on her thigh and sighed. “There’s only one option, and it’s risky.”

“I run into buildings that are on fire.”

“Buck, I’m serious. Once our cover is blown, it’s blown.”

“Tell me the plan,” I insisted.

She gave a final shake of her head, as if to drive home that this was a bad idea. Then, she drove us back to the hardware store.

Twisting to reach into the back seat, she pulled something out of her bag—a metallic disk the color of brushed nickel and the size of four quarters stacked. Then, she popped open the center console to retrieve a bag of some sort of putty.

“This…”—she pinched off a corner of the putty as she spoke—“is a listening device. I’m going to stick it to the parking meter next to your mother’s car. Then, I’m going to stand in the door of an abandoned storefront around the corner and listen to their conversation.”

“We’ll stand in the door and listen to the conversation,” I corrected.

“Buck, I told you—” she began to protest, but I cut her off.

“Folks can’t see around corners, Loretta.”

She swung her gaze to look out the window, then came back to pin me with a hard glare.

“I’m not bringing you on any more stakeouts.”

Thirty seconds later, we were out of the truck. There was still no sight of the stranger and my mother. I put my hand on the small of Loretta’s back to usher her across the street, but she was in control. Her putting the listening device on the parking meter in one fluid motion was the slickest move I ever saw. From there, we took the short walk around the corner.

She’d given me a clipboard and a tape measure, presumably our props. The glass of the abandoned storefront had been painted over. Once we stood beneath its recessed doorway, she slipped one wireless bud into her own ear, then reached up and slipped a second into mine. Her fingertips brushing my neck when she did gave me goosebumps.

“Our cover is, we’ve been sent out by a general contractor to take measurements. I’ll do the talking if someone asks. But nobody will ask as long as we play our parts.”

I kept my eyes on her, maybe for a moment too long.

“You need to measure,” she scolded lightly.

“Measure what?” I was lost.

“Fake measure,” she whisper-hissed. “We’re glass contractors, remember? You pretend to use the tape measure, I’ll pretend to write the numbers down.”

She plucked the clipboard out of my hand.

“When the hell did you think all this up?”

She threw me a quasi-exasperated look. “I’ve done this once or twice. And you need to go much slower,” she instructed. “If you measure slowly, it won’t look odd if we need to be here awhile.”

We worked our act for minutes, me measuring and her scribbling. Street noise from around the corner proved the microphone was on. The more the minutes ticked by, the more nervous I got. Where had they gone and what were they doing? What if they weren’t even on their way back? What if they took the long way back and were closing in on us from the opposite direction?

“Thanks for coming down, Lis.”

For the first time, I heard the stranger’s voice. Though the street noise hummed, his words were clear. My father called her Annie sometimes, but I’d never heard anyone call her the other possible diminutive of her name.

“We have decisions to make.” My mother’s voice was sad.

“No, you have decisions,” he said. “I know you’re up against some things, but you know where I stand.”

It was hard to know what happened next. Were they hugging, or worse, kissing? Had he already walked away? The last thing they said to one another was muffled. The next distinctive noise I heard was the thud of her car door. Her engine turned on and her tires crunched as she pulled away.

Loretta and I looked at each other. She pulled the bud out of her ear and began to slip out of character. The small notebook she’d been writing in went into her pocket.

“I was hoping they’d mention their next meeting, or at least say something that would be a clue.” She took a step away from the recessed doorway, as if to walk back out onto the main part of the street. At the exact same moment, the tall man turned the corner.

Shit.

He didn’t know me personally, but he might know me by sight. If he was my father, he would have seen pictures. Just like Loretta had warned, we could be found out.

Instinctively, I acted. Turning my back to the stranger, I pulled Loretta in and circled an arm around her waist, stepping her backward as I stepped myself forward, pushing us back into the recess of the door. Then, to be absolutely certain that the tall man wouldn’t see our faces, I pulled her in to me and pressed my lips to hers.

I’d guessed correctly in my imaginings. Loretta’s lips were soft. Close like this, she was as fragrant as a flower. She tasted warm and sweet, like summer honeysuckle. I got all of that from just one brush of her lips.

I pulled back slightly, but not by much, still aware we couldn’t show our faces. I should have been busy figuring out whether he’d passed, but I could only find it in me to study Loretta’s face. I expected her to be upset, but she only looked dazed. Her eyes were bright with surprise and beautiful, as if lit from within.

I started to move, to release her from my arms, not because I wanted to, because it seemed the right thing to do. But Loretta held me in place.

“Did you really just do that?”

And there it was.

“You told me we had to maintain our cover.”

“Why would two glass contractor work colleagues kiss on the job?”

As usual, she had a point.

But she got one thing wrong. “That wasn’t a kiss. That was me creating a diversion. You’ll know when I kiss you, Loretta.”