A Bad Day for Romance (2 page)

“I said I would never, ever settle for anything less than my dream gown. And then I made you promise to be my maid of honor and I promised to be yours.”

“And you were. I wore my mom’s gown and I made you wear that horrible green dress with the mutton sleeves and the choker collar, so I guess you’re getting your payback now.”

“Stella!” Dotty rebuked her. “You will wear that dress over and over again! Why, it’s three season and you could dress it up or down easy as can be.”

“Mmm,” Stella said, thinking that the shimmery full-skirted pink gown would be versatile indeed, if she were in the habit of frequenting high school proms and Russian supper clubs.

There was a knock at the door, and Chrissy took her time unfolding herself from the bed to answer it while Stella and Dotty got the bridal gown bundled back into the garment bag.

“Well, Irene, what a nice surprise!” Chrissy chimed. “You want to come on in and wet your whistle before the party starts?”

“Oh, dear, I might should have a drink,” Irene Dorsey said, zipping past Chrissy with the aid of her crystal-studded cane. For a seventy-something-year-old, Irene moved with surprising speed, which came in handy at her job as the sheriff’s department assistant.

“I’m so glad you could come to my shower,” Dotty beamed.

“Wouldn’t miss it. Why, I practically raised you myself.”

“My mom might take issue with that, bless her soul.” Dotty laughed. “But you
were
always my favorite babysitter. You were the only one who ever did my nails and cut my bangs.”

“And I still got the gift,” Irene said, touching her jet-black bouffant hairdo, which had been freshly dyed, judging from the inky smudges along her hairline. She’d had a mascara mishap, if the rings beneath her eyes were any indicator, and she hadn’t felt especially compelled to color in the lines with her bright coral lipstick. “Listen, pour me a strong one, I got some bad news to deliver. Pour you a strong one, too, Stella. Don’t get excited—everyone’s fine. I mean, sort of. Gonna be, anyway. Aw, hell.”

“Who?” Stella demanded, her heart in her throat, a thousand terrible scenarios racing through her mind. Many of her loved ones were accounted for right here in the room, but her daughter, Noelle, wasn’t due to arrive until Saturday, and the Groffes were back in Prosper along with Jelloman and—

“Well, it’s those fool men, of course,” Irene said, shaking her head in disgust. “Can’t leave ’em alone for a minute.”

“Which men?”

“We leave town for one day and what happens? Nothing to stop those damn fools from knocking each other stupid, that’s what. It was your boyfriend, Stella—BJ got into it with the sheriff.”

CHAPTER TWO

DRINKS WERE SERVED ALL AROUND. CHRISSY
had mixed a pitcher of a pale golden libation that smelled like nail polish remover and tasted only a little better, with a fruity aftertaste and a kick like a mule.

“So tell me everything,” Stella sighed, pushing at her temples in a vain attempt to banish the headache that was taking root there.

“Well, now,” Irene said, picking delicately at a bit of lemon twist that had gotten caught in her teeth. “I wasn’t there, mind you, but I was on the scanner.”

“Someone called it in?” Stella asked in horror.

“No, no, when Goat’s pager fell off his belt it hit the switch so we heard just about everything.”

“Start at the beginning,” Chrissy demanded. “Where were they, anyway?”

“Why, over at the bar.”

BJ’s Bar was housed in a squat, ugly brick building at the edge of town, but he had managed to spiff it up a little during his tenure as proprietor: the curtains were crisp and new, he’d recently upgraded to a six-tap dispenser, and he’d added a second seat to the ladies’ room, an improvement hailed by the entire female half of his clientele.

But BJ’s best asset, the thing that kept his modest bar packed seven nights a week, 363 nights a year—he took a day off during both the Christmas and Easter seasons to throw his staff a private party—was his unflappable tolerance and love of his customers. Everyone was worthy at BJ’s. Every customer was as cherished as the next, no matter how much you earned, how often you made it through the doors at church, how much time you’d served up at the county jail.

It was one of the things Stella liked about the man. They’d carried on a mild flirtation during many working evenings when Stella was following the trails of some low-down woman-smackers, many of whom frequented the bar. In recent months, she and BJ had begun dating. The problem was that there was one other twinkling star in the constellation of Stella’s affections: none other than the sheriff of Prosper, Missouri. The man who—if he should ever take a professional interest in the dealings and doings that occupied Stella in her sideline business—would find himself facing a professional quandary so momentous it would take a backhoe just to dig through the top layer.

Not to put too delicate a point on matters, the methods that Stella used in her quest to put a stop to the abusive ways of the ne’er-do-wells of Sawyer County were often above, below, behind, or in another dimension entirely from the law, and while it was all very well for Goat Jones to look the other way when they were casual acquaintances, several times in the last year their relationship had skittered awfully close to the point of no return. Stella had kissed the sheriff once in the hospital, once in her front parlor, and once—brazenly—on the street in front of her house, but here it was September again and she wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or devastated that there had been no further kissing in nearly five months.

Of course, that was one of the reasons Stella had taken up with BJ: to get the blasted sheriff out of her head once and for all. Which was one of the better ideas she’d ever had, seeing as it not only kept the sheriff at a glowering, smoldering distance—where he was far less likely to stumble on anything unlawful that Stella might be up to—but also got her a regular supply of Friday night action.

And if, now and then, BJ’s kissing and caressing left a little to be desired, and if it was becoming increasingly clear that BJ’s timidity about rounding that last base was an indicator of continuing bedroom shyness, well, that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? After all, Stella was fifty-one years old, an age when many ladies were preparing to retire from the ring, so to speak. At least, that was the conclusion she had drawn from some of the more mature customers who came to her for help in dealing with their abusive partners.

“I wish I’d a put a lock on my drawers as soon as I had Lance Junior,” Patrice Hartnell lamented.

“I’ll be pleased if I never have to go toe to toe with a man’s wiener again,” Suzanne Lee vowed, bringing a certain confusing visual to mind.

“Guess he’ll just have to pleasure his own damn self from now on,” chortled Susan Kolka after a session with Stella’s leather hog crop left her philandering husband pissing crooked but otherwise unmarked.

On the other hand, Stella had a nagging feeling that there might be a difference between the sexual appetite of a woman who was still smarting from years of pain and humiliation, and one whose self-confidence and tolerance of the male gender had been nurtured back to health.

After suffering several decades of abuse at the hands of her husband Ollie, Stella had gone a little nuts a few years back and killed him in an unplanned but effective fashion with a wrench. As he bled out all over her kitchen floor, the seeds of a new, independent, and unexpectedly zesty lady were sown. Stella felt better in both body and mind than she ever had—and about a thousand times sexier, too. Wasn’t it possible that she had years of good times in the sack ahead of her?

If her sensual nature was to enjoy a nice long horizon, was Stella really willing to settle for a man who left her pot simmering gently when there was another fellow waiting in the wings who could blow the lid off and make her whistle blow to boot?

Stella blushed at the thought, one which had become disturbingly frequent lately. There were just so many dangers to that kind of thinking.

For one, she’d read the statistics and seen the gals on the talk shows—she knew she was lucky to have any man at all interested in her, since the ratio of available men to women over the age of fifty was something like one to twelve thousand and you were more likely to be carried off by an army of giant centipedes than to marry again.

For another, it wasn’t like the sheriff was beating down a path to her door. No, he ran decidedly hot and cold on her. Every time he got her all heated up, there would follow a disappearing act, and she wouldn’t hear from him for weeks, even months. Sure, he always had a reason—the department was short staffed, or there was mandatory training at the county seat, or there was a summer spike in traffic crime—but Stella did not care to be toyed with.

Wouldn’t the smart move be to settle down with the man who actually kept consistent hours, called regularly, showed up on time for dates, brought her flowers and chocolate and, once, a new float for her guest bath toilet when he noticed it was running? Wasn’t there something to be said for
considerate
?

All of these thoughts ran through her mind in the time it took Chrissy to give her a look that was half concerned and half intrigued.

“Okay, so we got a brawl,” Dotty said. “Who started it? Did the sheriff go over to BJ’s in a jealous rage?”

“No, no, he went over there to bust up a to-do between Hess and Cricket again,” Irene said.

“Oh, Lordy,” Stella said with feeling. Cricket Catalano was one of those rare clients who Stella regretted taking on, a woman who was looking more for attention than help when she hired Stella to talk some sense into her husband of thirty years. The trouble was—and luckily Stella figured it out before she got to twisting down the stainless steel clamp she’d managed to get Hess’s more vulnerable parts maneuvered into—the public fights the couple regularly staged were actually their peculiar way of revving the engine for naughty love play. Cricket had been trying to up the ante by enlisting Stella to breathe some magic into their romance—without letting Stella in on the plan. When Stella flatly refused to be a party to their erotic pot stirring, the couple had moved their public displays to rougher realms. Just last month they’d turned over a few chairs at the HighTimer. “I sure hope he managed to get them in the paddy wagon before they started breaking bottles.”

“Well, Hess took a swing at some poor man who was just trying to get out of Cricket’s way, but by the time the sheriff got there, they were making out in their car. But then I guess Goat made some crack to BJ and it was, well, you know how tempers get all worked up in that sort of setting. Adrenaline leaking all over the place and the testosterone flying around”—Irene sighed dramatically before taking a fortifying sip from her drink—“well, that was that.”

“That was what?” Dotty asked. “The sheriff insulted BJ and then BJ hit him?”

“Not exactly. Now, mind, I don’t have all the details, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, the sheriff said something and BJ said something, and then the sheriff said what all and BJ came around the bar fixing to tell him what he thought, right to his face, and everybody backed up ’cause I guess folks have been waiting to see this one play out for quite a little while now and—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Stella felt her face flush, the prickling sensation continuing down her neck, and then she realized it was the pins she’d stuck in her shirt collar for safekeeping when she was taking up the hem earlier. “See
what
play out?”

“Oh, don’t be playing all coy with us,” Chrissy scolded. “You got that sheriff jumping around like a water bug in a dry ditch. And then you got BJ so worked up he don’t know if he’s coming or going. I’m surprised you weren’t there with a front-row seat, fanning your bad self and taking bets.”

“Chrissy!”

“Well, I guess if y’all don’t want to know how it ended,” Irene said, licking the sugar crust off the rim of her glass. “Whatevs.”

“What
evs
?” demanded Chrissy. “Where on earth did you learn to talk like that, Miz Dorsey?”

“I do spend my time with a cross section of society. I hear all kinds of things. You got any more of this punch, young lady?”

“
I’d
like to know what happened,” Dotty said hurriedly. “How did it end? Who won?”

That was exactly what Stella wanted to know, and she couldn’t help noticing a strange buzzing current in her head, almost like an unwanted opinion about who the victor ought to be. Surely it was a trick of the subconscious mind, because Stella was well aware that the man on her weekend dance card, the man who had insisted on putting the hotel room on his credit card when she invited him to the wedding, the man who’d promised he’d be there Friday evening just as soon as he made sure Jorge was set for the bar rush—the man who had purchased a new shirt-and-tie ensemble in a daring shade of plum with silver accents to go with his navy suit—
that
man was BJ Brodersen. So the fact that she imagined
Goat
with his handsome face hardened in possessive rage, Goat with his large hands clenched in take-no-prisoners fists, Goat—rather inexplicably—bare-chested with only a loosened tie around his neck—that was most inappropriate. Fearing someone would notice her blush, Stella focused on taking the pins out of her neckline one by one and dropping them onto the magnetic holder.

“Well, I don’t know’s I’d say anybody
won
,” Irene said. The gleam was back in her kohl-rimmed eyes now that she knew she had her audience well in hand. “I mean, don’t know how you could pick a winner when one fella gets carried off to County Regional with lights and sirens going, and the other one gets arrested by his own deputy.”

“What!” This time there was a chorus of exclamations.

“Is BJ okay?” Stella managed, hand to her throat.

“Sure, sure, he tripped over a lady’s purse she’d left on the floor and went down on that little platform under the bar stools.”

“Ouch!” Chrissy exclaimed. “That’s a mighty hard edge.”