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“Mr. Renford at the pet shop can meet us before school.” Reid had his phone out and texted madly.
“Colton, I know you don’t—”
“It’s already done. But we’ll need to get moving or we will all be late.”
“You don’t need to go with,” Lara protested, but she already had three sheets of foil in hand to wrap up their sandwiches.
“Ah, yes, I do. You might kill the new turtle without a police escort on the way to school.” He called for Tyler, and moments later, food wrapped to go, they left, Lara and the sheriff bickering over Tyler’s head.
“What was that?” I looked to Cameron, who leaned against the counter, sipping her coffee and watching the drama like it was a TV soap opera.
“That is ten years of mixed signals playing out in a slow-motion train wreck.”
Chapter 10
Cameron
Isettledintomyregular chair across from Wilson with a sandwich and my third cup of coffee. Staying out late on a school night had been poor planning. I’d be dragging all day. How Wilson could function, I didn’t know. My last over forty hangover had kept me in bed whining about my imminent death for two days.
The awkward silence from before thankfully didn’t reappear. He was too busy chewing and moaning in delight. I guessed Colton’s sausage, Grandma’s biscuits, and my eggs were the prescription to cure a jalapeño martini hangover. If things didn’t work out with this real estate deal, I’d sell the recipe to Jude for top dollar. He was the only other person in Elmer nuts enough to drink those vile things.
I took a bite of my breakfast right when Grandma came sailing through the side door.
“Well, I’m not that late. Where is everyone?” She looked around the kitchen, her eyes bulging when they landed on Wilson—in that chair. Her expression was a good facsimile of Colton’s when he realized where my overnight guest had sat. My family was many things, but subtle was not one of those things.
Wilson had no idea, but he’d sat in someone’s place: Brian’s. It was an unspoken rule that no one used that chair unless there were no others—the seat of last resort. But Wilson chose it when the table had been empty.
Seeing him there did not make me feel weird or uncomfortable. In the past, I’d felt both. Mostly because of the look of apologetic sorrow that whoever took Brian’s chair wore. Today, the universe put Wilson in the right spot at the right time. And he was blessedly clueless about the whole thing.
He wasn’t filling Brian’s place. That wasn’t something I needed or wanted. Hell, I hadn’t even owned this kitchen set until two years ago, so there were no lingering Brian vibes in this furniture. Nevertheless, the chair had remained stubbornly empty. Wilson taking that seat filled a pothole that we should have tended to long ago. An obstacle we all learned to figuratively drive around.
I liked the good memories of my late husband. But the empty chair had become an unwelcome ghost. Wilson’s presence filled that uncomfortable and persistent void. It worked because he had no idea what he’d done for me.
“Who do we have here?” In a flurry of plastic bangle bracelets, Grandma settled into the seat on Wilson’s other side. The Google searches insufficient to satisfy her curiosity, she plucked her reading glasses from where they hung on a gold chain around her neck and perched them on her nose to inspect him. Closely.
The poor man blushed and ran a hand through his disheveled hair. He was adorable with bedhead. But bedhead and a blush had my ovaries melting and my temperature rising. Nope, I’m blaming the time I spent over the hot frying pan tending the sausage.
“Grandma, this is Wilson Phillips, my real estate client from the TV show.” I tried to overemphasize every important word, hoping to caution my grandma to be on good behavior. “Wilson, this is my grandma, Amaryllis Graves.” I waved a hand up and down, from my grandma’s ruthlessly dyed inky black helmet of waves to her Birkenstocks and chunky hand-knitted socks. She was one of a kind. A Hill Country free spirit, an artist, and a Texan to her bones.
“Mayor Graves.” He stood and offered her a hand to shake.
She transformed it into a fist bump.
“Mayor is pretty formal from a man who looks like he took my granddaughter to the bedroom rodeo last night. Call me Amaryllis. Depending on how things pan out, you might get upgraded to Grandma after the wedding.”
“Grandmother.” Choking on a crumb of biscuit, I protested. My family found a man in my kitchen first thing in the morning, and the only assumption any of them made was sex—the pack of degenerates.
“It’s not like that, Mayor—er, Amaryllis.” Wilson chuckled good-naturedly. He had miscalculated, thinking Grandma was a sweet and harmless lady. He’d underestimated her cunning.
She looked between us, unconvinced. “Suit yourself, but I call ‘em as I see ‘em. Now, what has Colton done to our lovely Lara this morning? I’m missing breakfast with my surrogate grandson.”
Wilson and I gave Grandma a play-by-play of the turtle incident and its fallout. She declared Mr. Renford at the pet shop her new favorite downtown merchant and decreed that he’d receive a plaque of gratitude from the mayor’s office today for his timely assistance.
“So, Wilson, how’s the house hunt going so far?” Grandma turned to Wilson, picking at the last crumbs of her breakfast on the plate.
“We only looked at one property, and it wasn’t for me.”
“And you two are sitting here jawing with me. Good lord, Cami, daylight is burning. Show this man some houses.” She pounded a fist on the table, and Wilson winced at the noise.
