Chapter 10
Black Knights Inc.
Graham Coleburn stood at the kitchen island, a jar of Duke’s mayo in one hand, a bottle of French’s mustard in the other, and a head full of thoughts that didn’t have a lick to do with condiments.
Lura Dougherty.
It’s a damned small world.
What were the odds someone from his past—his hometown, no less—would show up at BKI with the answer to their prayers?
Considering he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anyone from Clayton, Georgia, in nearly twenty years, they had to be as slim as a sliver.
And yet here I am. And there she is, all grown up and filled out and remindin’ me of home in a way I haven’t been reminded in a long, long while.
Hell if he knew how to feel about this blast from the past.
On the one hand, she was easy on the eyes, and he was never one to complain when a pretty woman entered his orbit.
On the other hand, he'd spent his adult life putting distance between himself and the tragedy he left behind the day he signed enlistment papers in that hot little booth at his high school career fair.
Having Lura Dougherty walk through BKI’s front door brought back all that old shame. That old guilt and sorrow.
Home is where the heart is. That’s what folks said. But for him…it was where the hurt lived.
“Which is it?” He wiggled the containers in his hands.
She wrinkled her nose from her spot atop a barstool on the other side of the island. He didn’t notice how cute the expression was.
Or maybe he did. Just a little.
“Mustard, please. Mayonnaise is oil, vinegar, and egg whites whipped into a white fury. Disgusting.” She shivered theatrically.
He made a face like she’d just insulted his granny’s cornbread. “How very un-Southern of you.”
He set the jars aside and reached for the loaf of homemade bread Eliza kept in wax paper in the wooden breadbox beside the fridge.
“I haven’t lived in Georgia in fifteen years,” she said, winding a strand of that deep red hair around her finger.
It was nearly auburn but not quite. The kind of color women paid good money to fake, but Lura had had naturally since she’d run around in pigtails at Sunday socials.
“Pretty sure everyone back home would say I’ve turned traitor and become the worst thing someone can become. A Yankee,” she added with a dramatic widening of her cobalt-blue eyes.
“Ya know what they say about Yankees.” He grinned. “They’re like hemorrhoids.”
She finished the saying with a smirk. “A pain in the ass when they come down and a relief when they go back up.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Noticed ya lost your accent. Most of it, leastways.”
That earned him a wide grin, and his hand tightened around the counter's edge because something weird happened to his kneecaps.
Lord have mercy. She was as sweet as peach pie, sure. But that smile? That smile could make a man forget his own name.
“You haven’t lost yours,” she countered. “It’s still as thick as a bowl of cheesy grits.”
“Ya can take the boy outta the north Georgia woods, but ya can’t take the north Georgia woods outta the boy, I reckon.”
He braced for another smile and was mildly relieved when she got distracted by Peanut.
All the womenfolk who lived and worked at the shop had reformed the former alley cat of his wicked ways. Instead of chasing mice and sifting through dumpsters, the tom now spent his days hunting up sunny patches to sunbathe in and haunting the kitchen in hopes someone would toss him a treat.
The cat twined around her barstool’s legs, earning himself a cheek rub that had him purring loud enough to drown out the fridge’s humming compressor.
The shop was oddly quiet for the tail end of a workday. No whine of metal grinders. No boom of Ozzie’s eighties hair bands from the speakers in the War Room. No good-natured insults bandied about as folks went about their various tasks.
Half the group had gone off to support Grace and Julia on their mission to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The other half was helping Ozzie follow a lead he’d pinpointed on the recording of the ransom call.
Normally, Graham would be right there with the second half, doing what he could to contribute to the endeavor. But as Lura had been tapping away on her phone, looking for flights back to D.C., he’d heard her stomach growl.
The first time, he’d ignored it.
The second time, he’d lifted an inquisitive eyebrow.
The third time, he’d said, “Your belly’s makin’ noises like it thinks your throat’s been cut.”
After some coaxing and a promise to build her the best roast beef sandwich east of the Mississippi, he’d escorted her down to the kitchen.
His nerves had been strung as tight as a fiddle string all day. Abductions of friends and colleagues and ten-million-dollar ransom demands would do that to a man. But Lura’s presence for the last handful of hours had brought about another kind of tension.
It wasn’t homesickness. Although it sort of felt the same. It wasn’t wistfulness. Although it kind of felt like that, too.
If he were forced to put a label on it, he’d say it was equal parts nostalgia and regret. The kind of feeling that fisted in his gut and twisted in his heart, because every glance her way pulled up memories he’d shoved down deep.
He thought he’d buried the boy he’d been back when he knew her. Thought he’d healed from the hurt that had driven him away.
But with her close, breathing the same air, all those old feelings clawed right back to the surface and proved some things don’t stay in the ground. Some things are always right there, waiting to rear their ugly heads.
Lord, what he wouldn’t give to go back to the day his mother had her accident. He’d fake an illness so she’d stay home instead of going to work. He’d slice her tires so she couldn’t drive. He’d tackle her before she could set one foot inside that textile factory.
What would his life look like now if that fateful day had never happened?
Would he have stayed in Rayburn County? Married a sweet Southern girl who made sun tea and wore daisy-print dresses? Would he have coached football? Taught his kids how to bait a hook and change a tire?
Would his life have been simple? Clean?
Would he still know how to cry at funerals?
He flicked a covert glance across the island as Lura continued to love on the cat, trying to reconcile the girl he’d known, the skinny one with the braces and the knee socks, with the tall, curvy woman who reminded him of Lynda Carter back in her Wonder Woman days.
Only this version has red hair, expensive clothes, and flew halfway across the country to tell us how we can “borrow” ten million dollars from the United States’ central bank, he thought with a reluctant grin.
His grin faded when an image of Lura dressed in a red Lycra bustier and solid gold cuffs bloomed to life in his mind’s eye and riled up a part of his body that had no business being riled up.
Peanut yowled his affront when Lura stopped petting him and straightened to turn back to Graham.
Afraid he might get caught staring at her like a starving man stares at a buffet, Graham busied himself by peeling off a slice of roast beef and tossing it into the corner. The old tom scampered after the meat as fast as his furry, fat legs would take him.
When Graham turned back to Lura, he found her expression thoughtful. Searching.
Searchin’ for what? he wondered.
For the cocky jock he’d been back when she knew him? For the boy who’d gone from homecoming hero to self-imposed isolation once his mother died? For the changes all the years since had wrought?
In the end, she didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask him the question sparkling in her eyes. She simply went back to playing with the ends of her hair and silently watching him finish the sandwich preparations.
He plated her sandwich and slid it her way before wrapping his fingers around his own.
“Thanks.” She nodded. Then, she added in a voice as soft as cotton, “I’m sorry about what happened to your mom. I wanted to tell you that then. But you were you, and I was…well…me, and I didn’t have the courage.”
He stopped with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. It would taste like cardboard now. So he set it back on his plate.
“Happened to a lot of folks,” he rasped through a tight throat. “Too many folks ’round those parts, especially back then.”
“The commonality of it doesn’t make your loss any less.”
He didn’t want to talk about his loss. He didn’t want to think about it, even all these years later. He swerved onto the off-ramp she’d offered. “What do ya mean ’cause I was me and you were you?”
She gave him a look like the answer was obvious and he was just fishing for compliments.
“You were the big-deal senior football star. I was the derpy freshman cheerleader who hadn’t figured out how to use her mile-long legs.
Jenna Albright used to say I looked like a giraffe trying to sip from a pond whenever I did a toe-touch. ”
He remembered the girl who’d been chased by the boys on the football team, but who’d seemed to him, even back then, to be small-minded and mean-spirited. “Jenna Albright was a chinless snob with a bad bleach job.”
Lura bit the inside of her cheek. “Still has the bad bleach job. But now she has weak chins. Plural.”
He chuckled. “Got big, did she?”
“If she were an inch taller, she’d be round.” Lura’s eyes twinkled with vengeful delight before she caught herself and shook her head. “Wow. That was mean. I take it back.”
“She called you a giraffe,” he countered with an indifferent shrug.
“I think ya got a right to return fire. And just so ya know, you were never derpy. I may have been the senior football star, but you were the mayor’s daughter.
If you’d talked to me back then, I would’ve tripped all over my tongue ’cause you’d deigned to lower yourself to the likes of little ol’ me. ”
He expected her reply to be light and flippant. It was neither.
“You were never little, Graham. Not in stature. Not in spirit. What happened to your mother didn’t diminish you in anyone’s eyes.”