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“Lucas, Mia turns fifteen at the end of the summer.”
“She does?”
“Yes, she does. The good news is that she’s a late bloomer. Small for her age and has yet to fully develop.” She laughed, “For once in my life, God threw me a bone.”
Lucas’s dick twitched in response, and as if realizing her ill-chosen word, she instinctively glanced at his shorts while biting her lip.
Just as quickly, she jerked her head to the side and crossed her arms over her chest. “I guess that’s all I wanted to say. I mean, to let you know that she’s interested in him, and I’m not sure how happy either of his parents will be about that.”
“Why?” Lucas asked, doing a one-eighty. “Mia’s a fantastic kid. Any parent would be lucky to have her as their son’s girlfriend. Which, by the way, is never going to fucking happen.”
“Calm down, papa bear. All I’m saying is I’m not highly regarded by either one of them. I wanted you to know in case… I don’t know. Just in case.”
“Okay. But I can’t promise not to body check him if I pass him on the street or have Grant pull him over for speeding.”
“Fair enough,” she said, playfully punching him in the arm. “Oh, wow.” She poked his arm with her finger. “That’s quite the bicep.”
He promised he wasn’t going to touch her again. But she looked so damned cute. So fucking adorable. Just as he remembered.
It didn’t help seeing her flustered by him. Which was a huge confidence booster, not to mention a turn-on.
“Oh, one more thing,” she said, shoving her hands in her back pockets like she had at Folsom’s, making her tits strain against the thin cloth of her T-shirt. So much so, he could make out the outline of her nipples. Jesus, it was like he was back in high school with his books strategically placed in front of his crotch whenever Birdie so much as came into his peripheral vision.
She was still talking, so he did his best to focus. Something about Angus driving to her parents’ house with Mia…
“Mia and Angus went through the old house today. Said there was caution tape on my parents’ bedroom door, which I thought was weird. Angus asked me what type of accident they were in when they passed, and I told him I had always assumed it was a car accident.”
Lucas instantly sobered.
“You don’t know how they died?”
She shrugged, “I thought I did, but I guess not. They refused all of my attempts to contact them. Which honestly wasn’t a lot. Marshall was the one who told me they died. Said it was an accident. I guess I should have asked more questions.”
Lucas couldn’t believe she didn’t know. Her parents’ deaths were in the papers and talked about for years. Although the town still harbored ill-will toward the sisters for skipping town the way they did, and how that affected Lucas, they were no longer as quick to judge. Realizing there was some heavy shit going down inside of that house and Birdie and Maisie may have been desperate to get out.
Of course, that still didn’t justify what Birdie did to him. But it made the town pause before vilifying Maisie, and Birdie to a smaller degree, but admittedly, not much.
Birdie began to chew on her thumbnail. “Why? What kind of accident were they in?”
Lucas stretched his head to the right and then the left, trying to figure out how to break the news to her. Would she even care, given the way they treated her? He decided being straightforward was the best approach.
“Birdie, they were poisoned.”
She jerked her head back and chuckled as if that were impossible. “Poisoned?”
“It’s true.” He nodded solemnly. “Cyanide-laced punch.”
Her voice rose along with her eyebrows. “They were murdered?”
He wasn’t sure how to explain something he himself didn’t fully understand. Again, he rationalized it was better to be direct.
“According to the investigation, they poisoned themselves. Wrote a suicide note, drank the punch, and died while holding hands.”
Lucas watched Birdie shake her head back and forth in disbelief and begin to sway. As if dizzy, she reached out for the end of the bench to catch herself but missed, miscalculating how far it was.
He caught her by the shoulders to steady her.
She continued to shake her head as if trying to make sense of what he told her. “I can’t believe they would do something like that. What kind of crazy, religious fanatics drink cyanide-laced punch and climb into bed to take a fucking dirt nap?”
