“No-good, shiftless piece of garbage,” Peachy snarled.
“Yes’m, I know,” Bree sighed. “Huge mistake marrying him. But spilt milk and all that. Anyway, far as I knew, getting child support from Sonny would be like getting blood from a turnip. Probably would have cost me more to find him and sue him than I ever would have got out of the deal. And I had a baby girl to raise all on my own. I didn’t have the money to spend hunting down that sleazeball.”
“Is it too late?” Finn asked.
“Nope,” Bree said. “Alice is still a minor, won’t be eighteen until next February.”
Finn frowned and I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. I was just about to ask him what was on his mind when Peachy spat—loudly—on the ground at my feet.
“Speak of the devil and he shall appear,” she growled.
In unison, Bree, Finn, and I turned to follow Peachy’s slit-eyed stare. There, leaning over the counter with a big ol’ grin on his face, stood Sonny Anders.
chapter 2
S
onny’d aged a fair piece, and he’d definitely changed his look. When Bree and Sonny were an item, he’d been channeling his inner Elvis with a rockabilly pompadour, tight T-shirts, and a permanent sneer. That afternoon at the fair, he looked like a business tycoon of the old-school Texas variety: short, slicked hair, threepiece suit, and a bolo tie.
Still, Bree lied when she said she almost didn’t recognize him. I’d have known him anywhere. He’d always been whip thin and sinewy, as tough and spare as the west Texas desert he called home. If he’d put on a paunch, I couldn’t see it beneath his snazzy suit vest. A bit of silver threaded through his coal black hair, but it hadn’t thinned or receded a bit. Sleepy lids fringed with ridiculously long lashes hooded his near-black eyes, making him look as if he’d just roused after a night of wickedness. He had a few more lines on his face—the mark of a man who’d spent his youth in the unforgiving Texas sun—but otherwise, he just looked like Sonny.
In other words, like the devil himself.
“Hey, y’all,” he said, honey dripping from every syllable, “I heard this is the place to get something cool and creamy.”
Bree shot out of her seat and lunged across the counter. Finn and I both grabbed for her, struggling to pull her away, while Sonny danced back, his hands raised in surrender.
“Sabrina Marie,” Peachy barked, “cool your jets.”
Bree relaxed in my grasp, but her eyes still burned with pure hate.
Sonny eyed the neatly printed sign propped next to the samples of our signature salted caramel sauce: CARAMEL KNOWLEDGE: TRY SOME!
“Don’t mind if I do,” he murmured. He picked up a tiny clear plastic cup with a lime green tasting spoon propped in a puddle of gooey amber deliciousness. He managed to get the spoon to his mouth before a drip of caramel escaped, closed his lips around the treat, and moaned. “Oh my. Sin on a spoon.”
“Have a little more, Sonny,” Bree growled. “Maybe we can send you straight to hell.”
Sonny’s eyes narrowed and he chuckled softly. “I missed you, too, kitten,” he purred.
“Jackass,” Bree snapped.
He
tsk
ed. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”
“You are no friend of mine, Sonny Anders. Friends don’t take off in the middle of the night without so much as a note.”
Sonny cocked an eyebrow. “Technically it was the middle of the afternoon. But I see your point.”
“Uh-huh. You’ll be seeing my point in court, mister,” Bree said. As zingers went, it fell a little flat, but she was way too p.o.’d to come up with a snappy retort. “I hear you finally stopped mooching off of women and got yourself a job. Maybe it’s about time you took care of your child, don’t you think?”
A shadow flickered over Sonny’s face. For a second I thought I’d witnessed a miracle: real human emotion from Sonny Anders, some warmth beneath the facade of reptilian charm. But then the shadow passed and he grinned.
“I’m one step ahead of you, kitten, and I couldn’t agree more.” He rocked back on his heels and tucked the tips of his fingers in his pants pockets. “I’ve enjoyed a certain material success in the last few years, and I would be honored to share that bounty with the fruit of my loins.”
Bree frowned, and I felt a twinge of unease in the pit of my gut. This seemed too easy.
Way too easy.
“Yessir,” Sonny continued, his voice rich and well modulated, like an old-time Dixiecrat making a stump speech on election day, “I will support my child. Assuming she is my child.”
Bree snapped to attention, and I tightened my hold on her arm. “What are you implying?” she growled.
“I’m not implying anything, kitten. Just doing my due diligence, like any good businessman would.”
Peachy shouldered her way past me, Finn, and Bree, to square off against Sonny over the counter of our booth.
“Listen up, young man. You deny that precious grandchild of mine and I will personally see to it that you get a sneak peek at hell before you die. You got that?”
Sonny laughed. “Jeez, kitten, I see where you get your claws.” He tutted softly, as if he were calming an ornery animal. “I’m not denying nothin’,” he said. “I’m just gonna let science make the call.”
He glanced to his left and his smile brightened. “I’ll just let the counselor here explain.”
We all followed his line of sight. Kristen Ver Steeg headed our way. The blistering sun washed the color from her pale lemon suit and her champagne-colored upswept hair. With her face devoid of expression, she looked as if she were carved out of butter.
A big man all in black—jeans, T-shirt, leather vest, biker boots, and wraparound shades—followed close behind her. He looked vaguely familiar, but it took a moment for me to place him.
Nick DeWinter, better known as “Neck,” graduated a year behind me in high school. He was a star defensive lineman until he got caught boosting car stereos in the teacher parking lot. I’d heard he did a little time after school, but that might have just been gossip. Still, he looked as if he could go toe-to-toe with the baddest felon in the yard.
His dark massiveness made slim, pale Kristen look even more fey by comparison.
The unlikely duo marched up to the booth.
Kristen offered us a bland smile and extended her hand toward Bree. Bree glanced at the proffered hand but did not take it. Kristen’s smile tightened, but never wavered as she let her hand drop to her side.
“Ms. Michaels, my name is Kristen Ver Steeg. Mr. Anders has retained me to represent him in regards to his paternity suit.”
Bree, Finn, Peachy, and I all spoke at once. “Paternity suit?”
Kristen cleared her throat. Her eyes darted briefly in Sonny’s direction. “Yes. I would urge you to retain a lawyer, but I think you’ll find the complaint selfexplanatory.”
She looked at Neck and jerked her head toward Bree. Neck stepped forward and reached a hand around his back to pull something from his waistband. I was halfway into a crouch, expecting a gun, before I realized he held nothing more deadly than an envelope.
He stretched his arm across the counter and waved the envelope. “Bree Michaels?” he asked in a voice that sounded like gravel at the bottom of a well.
“Uh-huh,” Bree choked, a trembling hand taking the envelope from his fingers.
“You’ve been served.”
chapter 3
I
n the end, it might have been easier for Bree if Neck had pulled a gun out of his pants. At least doctors can remove bullets.
Kristen, Neck, and Sonny took off right after serving Bree with the papers claiming Sonny wasn’t Alice’s father. We were left to clean up the mess.
Bree sagged into the folding chair, her hands trembling as she unfolded the paper, her eyes haunted as they scanned the words written there.
“Son of a . . .” She threw the packet of papers across the booth. “He’s claiming I was a tramp.”
Finn bent down to scoop them up. “I’m sure it doesn’t say that,” he muttered, handing the papers back to Bree.
“Not in so many words, but that’s the gist. This paragraph right here”—she stabbed at the paper as if she were squashing the life out of the printed words—“says ‘Plaintiff is informed and believes and based thereon alleges the Defendant engaged in an ongoing and public course of sexually promiscuous behavior during the months prior and subsequent to June of 1992, including but not limited to the evening of June twenty-second, 1992.’” She made a choking sound. “And, of course, he points out that Alice was born less than nine months after he and I met.”
Finn cocked his head, his eyebrows wrinkling into a look of shock. “What?”
Bree speared him with a hard stare. “It’s not what you think,” she said, each word a tight little packet of pain. “Alice was premature. Her due date was nine months to the day after Sonny and I first . . . met.” She sniffed and lifted her chin. “We hooked up at a party to mark the start of summer.” A hard laugh escaped her. She waved the papers in her hand, and scrunched up her face in mock seriousness. “‘On or about June twenty-second,’” she intoned. Then the starch went out of her spine. “Alice was due on March fifteenth, but she was born on Valentine’s Day.”
She dropped her chin and stared at her hands, resting limp in her lap. “She was so tiny. My little peanut.”
“Hey, Mom! Aunt Tally!”
My heart leaped into my throat at Alice’s excited shout. She tumbled into the tiny booth with Kyle Mason, my employee and Alice’s boyfriend, practically on top of her. She looked around at the crowd of solemn faces and giggled. “Look, Kyle, it’s everybody!”
Kyle folded his lanky body around my little slip of a niece, his arms encircling her. If he could have cradled her in bubble wrap, he would have.
They were an unlikely pair. Kyle had finally won a war of attrition with his high school teachers and graduated in June, while my precocious seventeen-year-old niece already had a year of college under her belt. Kyle dressed in shades of black and mumbled on those rare occasions he opened his mouth, while everything about Alice was as bright and crisp as line-dried linens. Still, the physics of romance could not be denied. Kyle and Alice had pined for each other for over a year before she finally surrendered to the hormonal gravity between them, and now they were inseparable.
Alice wiggled a little in Kyle’s grasp, more settling in than struggling. “Hey, Mr. Harper. I finished that biography of Virginia Wolfe you recommended. Pretty cool.”
For a heartbeat, Finn stared at Alice as if she’d sprouted a second head. Then he muttered something about a deadline and, with a perfunctory wave in my direction, slipped around the teenagers and disappeared. I guess the fact that he wasn’t technically family had suddenly hit home. Lord knows, a part of me wanted to run off with him. But the stricken look on Bree’s face held me back.
“Jeez. What’s everyone so glum about?” Alice asked.
During the moment of silence that followed, I watched the play of emotions on her elfin face. Her mischievous smile faded into puzzlement and then her cloudless eyes widened with dawning alarm.
“Mom?”
Peachy gave Bree a nudge. “It’s gonna be all over town, Bree. No sense playing coy.”
Bree caught my gaze, her eyes pleading with me to save her from this. It about broke my heart.
I couldn’t spare her the talk with Alice, but I could provide her with a little privacy.
“Kyle,” I said, “I know you’re not on the schedule, but why don’t we head back to the A-la-mode and spell Beth for a bit?”
Kyle looked down at the top of Alice’s strawberry blond head. The lines of his lanky body drew taut. He wasn’t a dumb kid. He had to know something was really wrong, and I loved him for wanting to protect Alice. But Finn had the right idea: this conversation was no place for anyone but family.
“Kyle?” I prodded. “Let’s go.”
Alice’s lashes fluttered as she looked up at him. “It’s okay,” she whispered.
I took him by the arm, prying him away from his girl, and ushered him out of the booth. Without a word, we cut across the stretch of prairie grass behind the food stalls heading toward the asphalt pad where fair vendors could park. My beat-up GMC van held a prime spot on the near edge of that lot, and I smothered a sigh at giving it up.
Kyle hung back, dawdling, casting nervous glances back over his shoulder. Finally I heard the scuff of his Chuck Taylors in the sunbaked dirt as he stopped in his tracks.
I halted, too, and faced him.
“Miz Tally, do we really need to go to the A-la-mode?”
Like I said, the kid wasn’t stupid.
“No,” I conceded. “Actually, Beth needs the hours.” As my business had picked up, I’d finally hired another employee, a wifty woman with a young son to support and no friends or family in town. With school starting in just a few weeks, she was scrambling to scrape together money for new clothes and supplies so her eight-year-old would blend with the wealthier kids.
Kyle glowered.
“We don’t need to spell Beth, but we need to give Alice and Bree some space.”
He shrugged. “I’m just gonna wait for her here. She might need me.”
I sent up a silent prayer of thanks that Alice had someone to lean on right now. Rightly or wrongly, I knew Sonny’s return to Dalliance—not to mention his denial of paternity—would put a strain on Alice’s relationship with her mama. That’s how mother-daughter relationships work, at least the ones in our family. No matter who’s at fault, mom gets the blame. Until Alice had a chance to untangle her hurt and confusion, Bree would be public enemy number one.
“All right. But you wait outside. If you bust in there, I’ll have your hide. And as long as you’re waiting around, you can work the booth for a bit after they’re done in there. I don’t think Bree’s gonna be in any kind of mood to scoop sundaes. So no tearing off with Alice in your hoopty old Bonneville.” Kyle had recently inherited his big brother’s ’97 Pontiac Bonneville, which possessed an unsettlingly spacious backseat. “Bree’s got enough to worry about,” I muttered.