Chapter 4
Another text came through immediately.
MOM: I don’t think they’re all going to fit in the garage. Where will we park?
I took a deep breath before unlocking the phone to respond. It seemed the movers with the boxes from my apartment had arrived. I was not excited about moving back home, and my mother seemed even less excited to have me.
ME: If you want me to get a storage unit, I can have it arranged once I get home.
I originally planned to have everything delivered to storage, but my mother went on and on about “why waste the money” and how she had plenty of room. She hadn’t parked her car in the garage in at least five years—after once backing into the door during a late morning.
MOM: No, it’s fine. I’ll make it work somehow.
If I’d been there in person, I’d have the movers pack everything back up and find a storage area without a second thought, but I couldn’t do much while in Savannah.
ME: Just have them toss the boxes in and I’ll take care of everything next week.
It was hopeless, but I had to try. Her lack of response confirmed it. She was more than likely waist deep in a kitchen box, taking notes to scold me about the condition of my pans.
“Everything okay?” Reed asked as he walked out of the bathroom freshly showered and, sadly, clothed.
I pushed back my chair and stood. “Yeah, just dealing with my mother’s obsession with cookware. Do you want to grab an Uber to the restaurant?”
“I already scheduled,” he said, holding up his phone.
We met our Uber at the curb outside the Airbnb and spent the quick drive discussing my recent move to my mother’s home and the plethora of boxes to keep her prying hands busy while I was in Savannah.
“Why didn’t you get a storage unit rather than use her garage?” he asked as our Uber pulled to a stop at the curb in front of a restaurant with a black-and-white striped awning.
I threw my hands in the air after getting out of the car. “I tried. She said it was irresponsible to waste the money.”
But it would not have been a waste because mental health is important.
Reed laughed, exiting the Uber after me and closing the door.
I turned and stared at the sign. “Mellow Mushroom?”
“Yeah, have you ever been?” He passed me and held open the door.
“No, I don’t think so.” We stepped inside to… something. “Wow.”
The walls were painted bright shades of red and yellow. Large murals of famous paintings updated to include pizza covered the walls while wooden tables with metal chairs littered the large, open eating area.
“There’s Torin,” Reed said, raising his hand at a man seated alone at a back table.
I followed him in that direction, walking slowly to take in all the sights. “It’s like a stoner designed a restaurant while high.”
“That’s exactly what this place is,” Torin said as he stood up from the table to greet us. “It’s nice to meet you, Elenore.”
He had blond hair and icy blue eyes with just the start of laugh lines around the corners of his mouth.
Torin had a similar body build to Reed, but something about his persona gave off an air of lightheartedness.
He had that same hot guy appearance as Reed but didn’t do it for me in the same manner as my … whatever Reed was to me.
“You too,” I said as we shook hands, my gaze still hitting the different pictures on the walls. I couldn’t decide if I loved the place or absolutely hated it.
The two men joked about a coworker while we scanned our menus, but the walls continued to grab my attention, making it difficult to focus. “You two worked together?”
Torin snorted. “This guy saved my life once. How’s the shoulder? Healing well?”
Reed rubbed the same spot on his left shoulder. “It’s fine.”
The surfer SEAL raised his right eyebrow. “Last time I saw it, the thing had a hole in it. An IED outside our containment zone almost blew it off.”
I gave Reed’s shoulder a more in-depth look with widened eyes. He rolled his. “It’s clearly fine now.”
Our waitress approached, and I hurried to find something on the menu while the men ordered. “The veggie calzone, please.” I closed the menu and handed it to her while she ogled the guys at the table.
Honestly, I didn’t blame her.
“Lisa seems like she was Southern nice,” Torin said as I watched the waitress back away from the table without removing her gaze from him.
I turned my head away from her at his comment. “Excuse me?”
“Your murder victim. She’s nice in Southern. You know the type. Her face says generous to her core, but her eyes say, ‘Bless your heart’ and not in a good way.”
Reed laughed. “You always had a way with words.”
“You read the case file?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting a working meal, but I guess we were here to investigate the case and I’d take all the inputs available. “What do you think of her son? I’d love to interview him, but Delaney doesn’t think she can talk him into it.”
Reed sipped on his glass of water in thought. He didn’t speak until after he placed it on the table. “If you really want a chance to talk with Lisa’s son, I might have a way.”
“Here are your breadsticks,” the waitress said, placing a plate of thick bread covered in white cheese in the middle of the table. The move interrupted my chance to ask Reed how he planned to get me an interview.
The conversation turned from murder to the history of the two men during their time in the military and now working at the same security firm.
Currently, Torin lacked an assignment—hence his quick vacation—but knew something fun would happen soon.
After a slew of questions, we concluded his idea of fun and mine had major differences.
I’d never yearned to play with dynamite.
Two hours later, Reed and I returned to the Airbnb. The stack of case files laid out over the small table stared at me as I closed the front door. I needed to figure out my next move.
“Ready for that interview?” Reed asked, peeking his head out of the kitchen.
I dropped the papers from the reporter. “What?”
He dipped back into the kitchen, and I strolled over to investigate, almost tripping again on the lip where the two different levels of floor met. When I turned the corner, Reed had the door to the fridge open and his head stuck inside it.
“Are we going to lock her son Casey in the freezer?” I asked, stopping a few feet from him.
“That’s plan B,” he said, giving a hard yank against something in the fridge.
My eyes widened and my heart gave an extra thump as he pulled a long white tube from the top of the refrigerator.
He waved it between us. “Relax, it’s only the water filter.”
Did he have something against clean water? How would this get me an interview with Lisa’s son? “Okay?”
Reed wiggled the canister over the sink and then reached above him and stored it in the empty cabinet above. He had to stretch to reach it. “Now I use the app to complain about their lackluster water service.”
My eyes narrowed as he took a suspiciously long time to write out his complaint in the app. “I’m adding a bit about how this might ruin our honeymoon.”
“Our honeymoon?” I asked, my heart almost completely giving out. What was he thinking? No one would believe the hot guy married someone like me. How badly did I want this interview? Could we put the filter back?
He nodded with a giant smile as he turned off the screen of his phone. “Yeah, we need to make it important, so they don’t ignore it. No one wants to upset a new bride.”
“Why do I have to be the one obsessed with water quality?”
He shrugged. “Everyone knows it’s Bridezilla, Elenore. I don’t make the rules.” His phone buzzed, and he checked the screen. “Oh, it worked. He’s coming right over.”
“Now?” Casey lived on the property in another unit. It would take less than a minute to reach us. “Shit, we have to act fast.”
I grabbed Reed’s arm, not giving myself time to marvel at the muscle in his forearm. That couldn’t be normal. He jerked forward, letting me lead him through the rental. What did newlyweds do?
“We’ll come out of the bedroom together!” That’s what they did. Sex. Oh, god. I couldn’t think about sex while holding the arm of a hot guy. “No, not your room.”
We turned course from his bedroom and headed for mine. Obviously, two married people would sleep together in the big room. I let his arm go as we crossed the threshold and ripped the comforter off the bed, messing up the sheets and tossing a pillow on the floor.
“I don’t think he’s going to come in here,” Reed said, watching me destroy my sleeping area.
“Shhh.” I yanked the fitted sheet from one corner of the bed right as someone knocked at the back door. “We don’t have rings. Reed, we don’t have rings!”
He laughed as I held up my naked hand in front of him. “If anyone asks, we didn’t wear them because who wants to lose new rings on vacation?”
I paused. That was actually a good lie, but we had another issue. “Your hair!”
He looked too put together to be a newlywed husband who had just destroyed a bedroom. I stretched out on my tiptoes and ruffled up his hair, causing the strands to shoot out in every which way. There, that was better.
I skidded past Reed as he surveyed the damage in the room and headed for the kitchen. A tall blonde woman peeked in through the glass window at the top of the door and smiled as she saw me enter the room. She gave me a quick wave as Reed came in behind me.
This wasn’t Casey at all. Who sent a woman for my interview?