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“And what about you, really? You’re only forty-nine. You should make some friends. Maybe get a boyfriend or something.”
To her shock, her mom’s cheeks turned bright red.
“Mom? Something you need to tell me?”
“Not a thing. Just, there was a man at work. He asked me to share his table on my lunch break.”
“Well, did you?”
Her mom shook her head. “I did not. I am too old for romance. Especially with a man like him. We are from two different worlds. And I’m going to keep it that way. He was a good ten or twelve years older than me, too.”
“So? Age is just a number.” Well, maybe it was a bit hard for her mom to fit in here in their new town, too. Crispin was going to have to find a way to help her mom somehow. Maybe she’d get her aunts and her sisters and cousins—her sisters of the heart—involved.
They were very smart women, after all. The Coleson women always were. And they had each other’s backs. That was what mattered most. She had her family. And they would always love her.
Even if they didn’t always “get” her either. Well, they did come close. They were all just about as weird as she was, after all.
29
Vaughn watchedthe one girl they’d been following as she got into a little white economy car, trying to tune out Hector evaluating the girl’s assets. That skinny kid didn’t have any assets at all. Just bones, long legs and arms, and stick-straight dark-brown hair. That was about it. Vaughn just didn’t get Hector’s fascination.
Hector switched; it was about the other girls they were supposed to be watching now. Hector liked the two darker haired girls best.
Said they looked like girls he used to know growing up.
Vaughn didn’t see it, except their hair was dark. That was about it. They didn’t have to watch these girls all the time. Just enough to get a feel for where they were all going to be at.
Most of the time that was at FCU, anyway. Those girls spent a lot of time there, being all smart and shit.
He was driving the old van they’d borrowed from Hector’s cousin’s barn, there in Garrity. No one paid much attention to an exterminator’s van. Vaughn liked it that way.
He could blend in just about anywhere. From the fancy dinners at the Barratt-Finley Creek, where he went when Gregory needed him to go with him, to the lowest dredges of Boethe Street. He’d made a damned lot of money doing favors for people in this part of Texas.
Some he’d met at those fancy dinners through the years. People with money were no better or worse than those without. But the bad ones with money—the money just made it easier for them to be even worse.
Vaughn understood where he fell on the food chain.
Hector? Well, Hector was a special case. Vaughn had long known there was somethingoffabout Hector. When they were kids Hector just didn’t get how to behave in various situations. And when Hector was old enough to start noticing girls, that hadn’t changed. He’d noticed girls and had never looked away.
Girls.Not grown women.
If anything there was a twisted side of Hector were girls were concerned. Especially girls who were like just eighteen or nineteen or so. Too old to be little girls, but not really fully women yet.
At least not in Vaughn’s opinion, anyway.
Hector was enjoying this little assignment of watching those precious girls of Gregory’s.
Far too much.
For all the wrong reasons.
Hector was especially fond of the really skinny, taller ones. That was something Vaughn definitely did not understand.
That girl right there with her friends didn’t even have any tits at all. She looked like a boy with long hair. And baggy jeans and long-sleeved shirts didn’t help. Yes, she had a very pretty face—Vaughn had seen her up close and personal in an evening gown not all that long ago, so he knew she was very pretty, at least, but there had been practically nothing under that dress.
He’d never been into skeletons.
But her older, redheaded friend—Vaughn had no trouble watching that bitch at all. She had the tits and ass men dreamed of at night. A mouth made for dark fantasies.
