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“What?” I asked when I reached for the phone that’d fallen in between the couch cushion and the arm of the couch. “What are you talking about?”
“What are you son of a bitching if you’re not son of a bitching at that?” Wyett countered.
I placed the phone onto the coffee table and pulled the paper from the protective plastic sleeve, then spread it out onto the table in front of me.
Sure enough, taking up half the front page was the man I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Lynnwood Thatcher Windsor.
He was standing in a suit and staring at something with hard eyes. It took me a while to peel my eyes away from Lynn’s photo to realize that there was another photo underneath his of someone being led away in handcuffs.
“What’s this?” I asked, knowing she’d read the article.
“You remember telling me about that guy that Lynn was beating the crap out of?” she whispered.
“Yes,” I replied hesitantly.
“That’s the guy he gave up,” she said. “I did some digging. That’s him.”
“Oh, boy,” I whispered.
When I’d delivered Wyett her hamburger, I’d told her everything that happened.
I didn’t keep secrets from Wyett, not ever. And although Lynn hadn’t told me not to share anything about what had happened that day, I knew the unspoken rule was there.
But this was my Wyett. My best friend. My go-to girl since Bruno had locked me out.
I’d tended to tell her everything.
“That’s the Tant guy that you told me about,” she said. “Him and some other guy were busted right outside of town meeting up. The guy had a whole list of names and addresses of children that were marked as ‘problem’ children.” She spoke quickly. “Children that wouldn’t be noticed missing because they were either uncared for by their parents, or they were in the system. They would’ve counted them as runaways and gone about their business.”
I felt bile creep up the back of my throat.
“Shit,” I said softly. “I knew that this was bad.”
“Very bad,” Wyett agreed. “I wasn’t expecting to actually see anything happen from this. This was at one of the mayor’s dinner parties that he attended. That guy was actually a lawyer for Mayes County.”
My stomach boiled. “That’s how he got the names,” I said quietly. “He probably had access to all kinds of information being at the county prosecutor’s office.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too,” she said. “They arrested that guy right in the middle of the dinner. That photo of the mayor is from him standing up and walking out right along with the police.”
I shivered as I once again looked at the mayor’s photo.
God, he did it for me.
I had no clue how old he was—likely way older than he looked because men aged really well—but seriously. There was just something about the man’s sharp facial features, his salt and pepper hair, and the way he looked so dangerous that made me weak in the knees.
“Are you still going to that community outreach dinner tonight that your dad wants you to attend?” she asked. “The mayor may be there.”
I snorted. “He’s not going to be there. This is in Dallas. There’s no way a mayor from Kilgore will go to a dinner party for impoverished kids in Dallas.”
“Never say never,” she said. “What are you wearing?”
I thought about all the options that I had to wear and grimaced.
“I don’t know. I’ve worn all of my usuals lately and been photographed in them. I’ll have to come up with something else,” I admitted.
“You can borrow my strapless black dress,” she said.
I thought about the dress she was speaking of.
She’d bought it to wear to her graduation dinner as a big ‘fuck you’ to her aunt.
“That’s a little sexier than I was going to go for,” I admitted.
More accurately—a lot.
I didn’t do that kind of sexy.
Generally, neither did Wyett.
But, in order to really annoy her aunt, who was a super prude and hated it when Wyett wore anything that was overtly sexy, Wyett had picked it up at one of the best boutique’s in town that was owned by Rune Harlequin. The boutique, known as Harlequin’s Boutique, was expensive. But it was also worth it. When you bought shit at Harlequin’s, you knew that it would last.
Some of my sexiest underwear had come from there.
Then again, so had some of my most bland and normal.
“Well, it’s what I have on hand, and it’s free. You can’t complain with those two options,” she said.
I agreed with her, unfortunately.
“Fine,” I said, looking down at my unpainted toes. “I guess that I need to go visit the foot chick today and get my claws taken care of.”
“They’re not claws,” she laughed. “Though, if you paint them to look like claws, it’s not someone’s fault for asking if they’re claws.”
That was true.
Last time I’d gone to a function my father had wanted me to go to, I’d gone, but I’d also made sure that my toenails were painted a bright green fungus color. I couldn’t even begin to count how many women had cringed at the color, and how many men had looked at them and curled a lip up.
