She Drives Me Crazy (25 page)

"Emma, maybe I could show you around the courthouse tomorrow," he said, never taking his gaze off his brother.

She nodded, obviously sensing he and Nick had some talking to do. "All right. I need to go to the land development office, anyway."

He raised a questioning brow.

"I won't go see Jimbo. But I'm not going to sit back and do nothing while you investigate." Then she added. "As a matter of fact, some of the women at the hair salon told me there's an antinudity rally planned for this weekend. You'll never believe who's helping arrange it."

"Who?"

"Hannah Boyd, aided by Cora Dillon."

That startled him. "You're kidding! Even though Hannah's own husband handled the deal for the owners?"

Emma nodded. "Yep. Rumor has it the mayor's wife was very unhappy with him when she found out what the site was being used for. I guess her family has been in this town forever."

"You know what they say about those rumors…"

She laughed, but tossed her head in disinterest. "I know. But this seems reliable. She's coming here to get a permit for the protest and everything. I hope her husband finds out and chokes."

She sounded bloodthirsty. That kinda turned him on.

"Now, I have to go," Emma continued. "And don't you even try to stop me from looking into the records."

Knowing she didn't need his permission, and would do whatever she wanted anyway, Johnny nodded. "Okay, but
just
look through the paperwork. Promise."

She lifted her right hand into the air. "Scout's honor."

"
Were
you a Girl Scout?" he asked.

Emma shrugged. "Details, details."

Before she left, she stood up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. He turned his face and caught her mouth, instead, needing a real kiss in spite of their audience.

Wrapping her arms around his neck, she curled into him, kissing him back. She sighed a little, then, when they pulled apart, blushed a little, before walking out on wobbly legs.

He and Nick both watched her leave. Only after she was gone did his brother admit, "She grew into one beautiful woman."

"Yes, she did." Johnny heard the edge in his own voice.

Nick appeared amused. "Back off, big man, I know I blew things with her years ago. I don't hold a grudge."

"I do," Johnny shot back.

"For?"

"Let's start with your son."

Nick's body tensed, almost imperceptibly, but Johnny recognized the reaction. A muscle in his brother's cheek began to tick, and some of the sparkle left his eyes.

Johnny pushed harder. "And your ex-wife."

Nick nodded. "You're right. It's about time this all gets out in the open. I already told Mama the truth on Saturday afternoon, so you oughta hear it, too."

Johnny leaned against his desk, almost subconsciously going into prosecutor mode by crossing his arms and looking down from above, as if about to question a witness.

"I'm a cop, Johnny. That shit doesn't work on me. And besides, I came here to clear the air. Not to hide anything."

"Came here to the office, you mean? Or here to Joyful?"

Nick rose from his chair and walked across the room, glancing out the window overlooking the downtown street below. "Here to town. To the reunion." Then he turned and faced Johnny. "I came here because I got sick and tired of Mama living a lie."

"What lie?"

Nick didn't flinch as he delivered a completely unexpected answer. "Daneen's boy is not my son, Johnny."

He wasn't sure he'd heard right at first. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Nick didn't flinch at his angry tone. "I figured it out pretty fast after we got married. I confronted her when she was about eight months pregnant. She admitted it." He rubbed a weary hand through his hair. "There was no way she could deny it unless she was gonna have the biggest preemie baby ever born."

Johnny put a hand on the back of his chair, his fingers curling reflexively as his head began to pound. "Mama and I have been treating Jack like our own since the day Da-neen brought him back to town. You let us…let
her
.. .fall in love with him…"

"I didn't know Daneen had continued her lie after I split," Nick admitted. "I was too humiliated, too
furious
over what she'd done—over what I'd lost—to want to talk to anyone after I found out. In case you've forgotten, I pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for the next year."

He hadn't forgotten a moment of that long, worry-filled time.

"How'd Daneen convince you to marry her, anyway?"

Nick ran a weary hand through his hair. "She told me she was pregnant and that her dad was looking for me, out for blood. I thought we'd had sex, but I wasn't totally sure. I just woke up with her on top of me after a senior party that year."

Johnny kept quiet, not about to interrupt Nick, though he wanted to shake him for being so careless.

"I had no idea there could have been anyone else. When I found out the truth, I left and we filed for divorce," Nick continued. "I joined the Marines and went away to basic for a couple of months. Then straight overseas."

By which point Daneen had been back in Joyful, playing the poor, dumped divorcee with the needy, fatherless baby.

"Honest to God, Johnny, I figured Daneen would have come back to Joyful and confronted one of the other suckers she thought could be the father. I
never
thought she'd go introducing her son to Mama as her one and only grand-baby."

Johnny began to see. It infuriated him, but he began to understand what had happened. "I wrote to you, once we heard where you were."

Nick frowned. "Yeah, and I had every intention of coming back and making you eat every word of that letter."

Johnny suddenly remembered the circumstances of Nick's one previous return to Joyful. "But the time you came back…"

"It was for the funeral." Nick's flat, unemotional tone said he hadn't ever completely gotten past their childhood, either. "Mama seemed crushed." He looked away and muttered, "Though for the life of me I'll never understand why."

Johnny didn't understand any better than Nick. He could only imagine their mother had found something to love in their father back when he'd been young and sober, and that was the person she mourned after he died.

Nick had continued speaking. "The only thing that seemed to make her happy in her life was Daneen's little boy."

Johnny shook his head. "So you let it go on. For
years
."

"You think I didn't hate it? But I didn't want to be responsible for breaking her heart."

"It wouldn't have made any difference to how we felt about him, you know," Johnny admitted. "It still doesn't."

Nick gave one brief nod. "I know."

"Maybe you could have, too, if you'd—"

"Don't." Nick threw a hand into the air, palm out, and his mouth pulled tight. "Don't even say it. I was nowhere near reasonable or mature enough to think that way when I made the choices I made. Maybe a better man would have stayed with Daneen and raised Jack, but not me. Not then."

Johnny slowly felt the anger recede from his brain as he acknowledged the kind of sacrifice his brother had made, and the kind of man he'd become if he could admit his mistakes. "You let all of us think you were a scumbag."

Nick shrugged. "Maybe I was."

"You were eighteen." Then Johnny added something he knew to be true. "You never loved Daneen. And you must have downright hated her for costing you the girl you did love."

Nick's jaw tightened more, but he said nothing. He turned to again look outside, finally murmuring, "I was a kid. That boat has long since sailed. I've moved on and life's okay."

Yeah, apparently it was. From what his mother had told Mm, Nick had done all right for himself in the Savannah police department. His kid brother—first a Marine hero, now a cop. Well, he supposed it wasn't any more bizarre than Johnny being a prosecutor. He got a perverse sense of amusement, wondering what the old man would have had to say about such a turn of events.

He'd probably be horrified.

"So," he asked, suddenly feeling weary, "what now?"

"One more person to hash this out with."

"Daneen."

"Uh-huh."

"You really think she'll admit the truth to the world?"

Nick shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe it's best she doesn't, until her son's older. It won't be easy on a boy to find out his mama's lied to him all his life, when he might well have a daddy living here in Joyful who would've been proud to claim him."

"Really?"

Nick nodded. "If Daneen wasn't so scared of what her fa-ther'd say or do, she might've been honest from the get-go."

Johnny, who'd only ever seen Dan Brady dote on his

"little girl," questioned that. But Nick seemed pretty sure. "Why?"

A look of disgust crossed his brother's face. "Well, because of Dan Brady's renowned temper…and because of who a couple of the possible fathers are."

"Do I even want to know?"

"Probably not."

But Nick told him anyway, first naming one guy Johnny remembered from high school.

"He's still in town," he said, wondering how it would feel to have a woman knock on your door and introduce you to your ten-year-old son.

"That's not the only one," Nick said. Then he added two names, both of which made Johnny's jaw drop.

"You're not serious."

"Oh, yeah, I am. So you can see why Daneen would be a little concerned about our gun-happy sheriff finding out."

Yeah, he could see that. Bad enough for the sheriff to find out his grandson's father could be one of his own deputies, but the other option was even worse.

His very best friend. The
mayor
.

Johnny absorbed the shock for a moment, thinking of the implications. Jimbo Boyd was Chief Brady's age and had been married to Hannah for over two decades. Daneen had gotten pregnant with Jack when she was a seventeen-year-old girl.

He felt sick. "You're sure about Daneen and Jimbo?"

Nick nodded. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's why she's working for him now. The way she told it, he had her pretty well wrapped around his finger from the time she was a kid. Sick son of a bitch."

Before he could express his dismay to his brother, they both heard the sound of something falling out in the recep-tion area. The door, which Emma had closed on the way out, had swung open again, as it often did. Curious as to whether Emma had come back, he walked over and looked at the secretary's desk. Nobody was there. But a pile of files that had been on the edge of the desk was now scattered on the floor. He suddenly had a bad feeling.

"This isn't good," Nick murmured from behind him.

"No, it's not."

"Please tell me there's no way Sheriff Brady was standing here listening to us talking about his little angel."

Johnny shook his head. "Can't be. He's speaking at the state police headquarters today. He's been bragging about it for days."

Nick breathed a visible sigh of relief.

"It still doesn't matter," Johnny said with a frown. "Because, here in Joyful, any overheard information can very quickly become public knowledge."

As he knew only too well.

"I hate to tell you this honeybun, but I'm gonna have to let you go."

Daneen had barely been paying attention when she answered the phone Wednesday evening, since she'd been yelling to Jack to wash up for supper. She immediately assumed the person calling had dialed the wrong number.

"Did you hear me? I have to let you go. I've got no choice."

Yes, the words the man spoke meant it had to be the wrong number, no matter how familiar the voice sounded. Because it couldn't be…he wouldn't…

"Daneen? You there?"

Her heart leaped into her throat. "Jimbo?"

"Yeah, it's me. I'm sorrier'n hell about this, sugarbaby, but I gotta do it."

Let her go. As in… "You're
firing
me?" Her voice rose in disbelief. She quickly lowered it since Jack was right in the kitchen. "You can't be serious."

Jimbo's long, drawn out sigh told her he was. "I'm sorry, I have no choice. Something's going on with Hannah."

Hannah? What did she have to do with the business? She never bothered coming down to the office and had no idea how much work Daneen did to keep things running smoothly. Then she realized… "Oh, my God, she found out about us, didn't she?"

Another sigh. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure she did."

Part of her reacted with dismay to the news that her lover's wife had finally learned the truth about them. The part of her who'd worshipped her own good and proper mother was struck hard with a deep sense of shame. Another part, the harder part that had taken over when she'd been forced to grow up all too soon because of her mother's death, was glad. "So you
think
she knows. Maybe it's time to make sure it's all out in the open." She took a deep breath, assessing everything. "We could finally stop hiding."

"Well…"

Hearing hesitation in Jimbo's voice, she instantly stiffened. "Well what? You've always said you couldn't leave her because it would hurt her too much to find out. Now, if she already has, there's no point waiting." Feeling her pulse pound wildly, and knowing her voice was getting loud again, Daneen walked out the back door, tugging the phone cord after her. "You know what this means. We can be a family. You, me…and Jack."

She didn't press any harder. Knowing Jimbo the way she did, she wondered if she'd already said too much. Jimbo didn't like kids, didn't want them, though he always treated Jack well enough. But surely, if his marriage was over, he could see how perfect things could be.

Particularly now. Because after a very heated conversation with her ex-husband the night before, Daneen had realized that Nick's family knew the truth of Jack's parentage. Meaning others would soon find out, too. She just had to figure out what to tell her son, who was completely innocent in all of this.

Thankfully, Nick had agreed to let her do it on her own timetable. He might have turned into a hard man, but he wasn't an unkind one. He wouldn't force her to tell Jack the truth until she was ready. And until she thought her son was, too.

Lucky for her, Jack had always been a breezy, carefree kid who'd taken his one-parent upbringing in stride, since so many of his friends were the products of divorced homes. He'd never really asked about his absent father, seeming content to know he had a grandmother, and his Uncle Johnny, to care for him.

God, please, let them still
. Knowing them the way she did, she suspected her son would still have that feeling of extended family, for the rest of his life.

And maybe now, with Jimbo there to step into their lives permanently, he could have more.

"I'm sorry, Daneen," he said, sounding like he meant it. "I love you darlin', but Hannah doesn't want you working for me anymore. So I'm gonna have to let you go." Then, in a magnanimous voice, he added, "I won't fight your unemployment claim."

Her jaw dropped open in shock. The man who'd seduced her during a multifamily camping trip when she was sixteen years old was telling her to hit the unemployment line. With his own son.

"You're
not
serious."

Then he hammered home the spike that felt like it was splitting her skull in two. "I can't lose Hannah. I'm afraid you and I are finished, Daneen. I can't see you anymore at all."