AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do you know what it was?” she asked.
“I do not,” he lied again. “But if I track it down, I’ll tell you whatever I learn.”
Her cell phone rang somewhere inside the house. “You stay right there.” She marched off to her kitchen. From the view in the living room, he noted she hadn’t been keeping up with dishes either.
“Hello?” he heard her say from the other room. “What? Is he okay?” Pause. “No, she’s out of town on business, and his dad is…well, he’s not in the picture.” Pause. “Okay, I’ll be right there. Bye.”
Sky appeared in the doorway, her face flushed. “Look, I’d like to help you, but I don’t know how to find that thing, and I gotta go. My nephew’s in the hospital.” Her big eyes got all glossy.
“Are you all right?”
“No.” She covered her sweet face and started crying. “Why can’t anything go right?”
Because life is a ball of shit rolled in shit sprinkles with an occasional good scotch.“You are in no condition to drive. Allow me to take you.”
“I don’t know you.”
“Yet I have the feeling you were about to call an Uber to have another stranger drive.”
“How did you know that?” she sniffled, using her sleeve as a tissue.
That is no way to treat your clothes. “The driveway has a very large pile of decaying newspapers, meaning you haven’t used it in a while. Also, there is no car parked out front.”
“I crashed it and can’t afford the deductible to have it fixed.”
“I am very sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Well, I’m the genius who quit her day job teaching at the community college to focus on her investigations—a big mistake because now everyone thinks I’m nuts.”
“Not everyone. I’ve done my research. You have quite the following online.” Some people considered her a hero for thwarting the sex-trafficking ring. Others were really into fairies.
“Are you sure you’re not a detective?” she asked.
I am much more than that.“Just a tailor. You can look up my business if you like. Plenty of photos on the internet.” He stared, offering her his most reassuring smile. “Let me save you twenty dollars on the fare. You can pay me by telling me your story—what you are comfortable with sharing—along the way. Then you’ll never see me again. Deal?” He added, “We can leave now, and you wouldn’t have to wait for a ride.”
He could see she was breaking.
“Just give me a sec to change.” She disappeared into the other room for a minute and returned with her dark hair in a high ponytail, wearing a tight gray sweater and jeans.
Very sexy.
No. Not sexy. Completely unremarkable, he reminded himself.
She grabbed her purse from under a pizza box on the couch. The zipper had a hideous unicorn charm.
Finally.Something he could focus on to turn him off of Sky. He hated unicorns. They always paid their tabs late at his store.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He followed her outside, his eyes gravitating toward her plump ass as he caught a whiff of her hair. Vanilla.
Fuck. That unicorn charm is not going to do the job.He really shouldn’t have offered her that ride. Keeping his mind clean around such a “plain” and “unattractive” woman was not going to be easy. The sooner he got what he needed and on his way, the better for her.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So you hit the creature?” Damien asked, keeping one eye on the road and the other on his GPS to guide him to the hospital twenty minutes away.
“Yes.”
