Meg's Moment (26 page)

What a motley group. If she could take a little from each of them and stuff it all in one man, she'd be set.

They’d spent the rest of the day- after getting rid of Ted- working on finding the ‘popular boys’ on her list. When she’d asked Jack how long this would take he’d said, “You only get me for a week.” Good. A week was all she could stand.

What pissed her off was that she thought she was getting played. When she’d formulated hiring Jack in her mind she thought she would give him a list of names and he would sit behind a computer and find out if they were married and if they still lived in Parker Point. That should narrow the list down, then all he had to do is find out where they hung out or worked and she would handle the rest.

Like, say
,
Chase was handsome and single and working in an auto body shop. She could just rear end a stop sign and take her car in for an estimate, then to get it fixed, then go back to pick it up, maybe build up some sexual rapport and then bada bing. But no, Jack said it wasn’t that easy. They had to locate them, scout them out, and perform surveillance. It sounded absurd but what did she know, he was the private detective.

But why would he be playing her? The only motive she could come up with was that he was making her participate so she’d realize how stupid the whole thing was and call it off. He’d mentioned Tom several times telling her that the smart thing to do would be to go to dinner with him and see where it went. Then if they ended up under the sheets she could just follow Tom’s lead and experiment until she got it right.

She’d said, “In theory that might work, but what if I’m really bad.”

“The worst piece of ass I had was still good,” he’d told her. “Men don’t worry about things like that. There’s no such thing as bad sex.” Yeah that’s because men always get to finish with a touchdown. Their contribution was simple.

She glanced over at Jack to see him still looking dark and handsome and incredibly hot in a criminal kind of way and she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of contribution he’d make. Then she quashed that thought because Jack obviously wasn’t interested in contributing anything. Aside from this morning when he’d held her during her mini-breakdown he’d kept his distance from her and made very little conversation. When she’d asked him about his past he’d dodged every question
,
only revealing that he’d been married once but was now divorced and that he’d served his time in the Navy. She didn’t know where he was from, how old he was, if he had children, nothing. Jack was the mystery man and apparently he liked it that way.

He glanced over and caught her staring at him and she snapped her head in the other direction. That’s all she needed
,
to give him ideas. She had enough of those on her own. They pulled up to her driveway and he turned to face her, his eyes dark in the moonlight.

“So,” she said, “I’ll see you Monday.”

“Right. Be ready about eight o’clock. We’ll scout out Chase, then later that night we’ll go after Bronco Billy.”

“Who?” she asked and he said, “Travis. The rodeo strip tease guy.”

“Oh.” She wanted to invite him in but couldn’t come up with a good reason. She sat staring at her house. Her empty, dark house. Her lonely house.

“So, I guess I’ll go on in then,” she managed, trying to work up the nerve to tell him she was afraid of the boogie man.

“Have a good night,” he said
,
and he leaned across to open her door from the inside. His hand brushed against her breast and she felt that hot skin all the way through her tee shirt.

“So,” she said, trying to dilute the silence until she could figure out something else to say. She settled for, “It was fun.”

“Sure was,” he said and Megan thought, Oh hell I’m just going to have to come right out with it and ask him to walk me in. If he’d been a damn gentleman to begin with he would have thought of it first. She stared at her house and made no attempt to move.

She was driving Jack crazy. All day he’d done his best to lead with his head and keep his distance. It was hard as hell especially given the fact that she was wearing those snug jeans, that tight red tank top
,
and that ridiculous red ball cap. Top that off with a couple black eyes and she was irresistible. She looked like a blonde raccoon in a Santa Suit and he wanted to tell her he’d been a naughty boy all year so she could spank him.

He’d caught her staring at him several times and when he’d look her way she’d advert her eyes and her cheeks would flush with color. Her mother was right! She had it for him. Problem was she just didn’t know it. Yet. Now watching her sit there with that weary look on her face he saw her take a large sigh, her chest rising and falling with the
breath
and he found himself staring at her neck, admiring the curve and angles. He wanted to plant tender kisses there and move up to her mouth and take it and…No, that was no good. He knew from experience that one kiss wouldn’t be enough and he’d just be torturing himself when she sent him home or started talking about that damn list again.

That list. What the hell had she been thinking when she came up with that brilliant plan.

Come on Jack take the hint. “Well, I’m beat
.
I guess I’ll…”

“Megan,” he said and she thought Thank God. “Unless you’re going home with me, you need to get out of my truck,” he said, because he was thinking with his head but his heart was saying walk her in and comfort her
,
and his hormones were saying take her now in the truck.

She was scowling at him. Asshole! Couldn’t he figure out that she was scared to enter her big empty house alone? Maybe she could call Mickey and ask him to stay over, he had no life. He’d be happy to do it. But first she had to go into that empty house.

“O
K
Jack, see ya
.
” She pushed the door open and took her time getting out of the truck. She shut the door and he waved and she stood there staring at her house. This was ridiculous, she told herself. This was a good neighborhood
.
S
he’d lived here ten years and she’d never been scared before. But before she had Ted to protect her. And before Ted was her father. Oh
,
the hell with it. She’d been praying for a disaster for days and nothing had happened. Probably nothing would. Plus
,
if anything did the old hag next door would be all over it. She didn’t miss much. She started up the sidewalk, leaves crunching underneath her when she felt something touch her arm and she screamed at the top of her lungs and swung her elbow around catching Jack square in the ribs.

“Ouch,” he growled.

“Sorry, I thought you were the boogie man,” she said, not sorry because he should have walked her in anyway. “What are you doing out of your truck?”

“Making sure you get inside in one piece. Making sure you don’t knock yourself out.” He smiled then and she elbowed him in the ribs again.

“You can go now,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” She didn’t look fine in the truck staring at that house. She’d looked scared, of what he didn’t know.

“I better be getting hazard pay if you keep hitting me like that,” he said
,
rubbing the spot she just hit. Megan ignored him, furious with men in general.

“Keep it up and you’ll need Workers Comp,” she snapped, not sure why she was so angry with him. He hadn’t really done anything. Maybe that was the problem.

She was fumbling with her keys in the dark when he said, “Give them to me,” and she kept fumbling trying to guide the key in the hole by feel when he took them out of her hand. “I work well in the dark,” he said
,
and Megan decided not to think about just how well. He opened the door and stepped aside for her to go in first. She flipped on the light and he followed her in
,
shutting the door behind him.

Megan immediately went to let the pups in to feed them and out of habit she hit the play message on the answering machine on her way to the backdoor.

She had seven messages: Two from her mother
—
probably calling to confirm Jack’s size, a dinner invitation from Tom- which made Jack scowl at the machine, one from Josie saying she was spending the night with Jon
—
call if she needed her, one from Ted
—
call me Meg,
(
fat chance she said to herself
)
, and the last two were from unknown callers
—
Malone we want our money and we’re getting impatient, and the second was the same person
—
“You have a pretty little wife, we’d hate to have to hurt her.”

What? What money? Pretty little wife? Hurt her?

Megan replayed the messages as Jack loomed over her in the kitchen.

Danger? Jack had told her that day he’d come by and ended up punching Tom, that she might be in danger. And now she was here alone. She swallowed, wide eyed and scared
,
and Jack felt like hell. He should have told her. He should have come clean about the trouble Ted had gotten into.

She played the messages again
,
her blood running cold.

“You know
anything
about that?” Jack asked her and she shook her head nervously.

“What did you mean when you said before that I might be in danger? What’s going on?” She was staring at the machine as if it were ticking time bomb.

“Megan, Ted has done some shady dealings with some very bad people. From what I’ve been able to tell, he owes quite a bit of money to these guys and he wasn’t planning on paying.”

“What kind of people?”
s
he asked
,
recalling the expensive new watch Ted had come home with and the restoration of the Jaguar in the garage. “The studio is booming,” he told her when she asked how they could afford those things. “Business is great.” She felt like an idiot now for believing him.

Jack crossed the short distance separating them and although the hunger to touch her was overwhelming he crossed his arms over his chest to keep from it. “Do you know the name Madrino?” She nodded. She knew of them. They were a couple years ahead of her in high school but everybody knew them. They used to wear these cheap knock offs of brand name Italian suits, pinky rings
,
and slicked back hair dos. They told everyone that they were related to these big mob guys in New York but everyone knew it was a crock. They were a bunch of loser wanna-be's with big talk and nothing to back it up. They claimed to be in this gang called the ‘The Junior Mafia’ but they looked more like The Mario Brothers. Everyone would laugh at them and they’d threaten to call their infamous Uncle Vito. They got picked on more than the nerds and geeks. Megan laughed remembering the Madrino brothers and Jack frowned.

“I know the name,” she said. “We used to laugh at them all the time.”

“Well
,
people don’t laugh at them anymore. They’re dangerous. And stupid
,
” Jack said and Megan’s laugh faded.

“So what does that have to do with Ted?”

“The Madrino's run a lot of drugs. Pot and Ecstasy mainly, although they’ve been known to dabble with cocaine on occasion.” Jack’s eyes were intense and serious but Megan still found the whole thing ridiculous. These guys were losers
.
T
hey probably couldn’t deal a deck of cards
,
much less drugs.

“So Ted bought drugs from them? That could be. I found a bag of pot in his darkroom. How much money could he owe them? Isn’t pot pretty cheap?” So Ted owed the chumps for a bag of dope. Big whoop. Let them sic Uncle Vito on him for a dime bag. She laughed again as she imagined some fictitious mob guy dressed to the nines with an assault rifle and a couple of muscle guys showing up at her door step looking for Ted and the twenty bucks he owed them for a bag of dope. It sounded like a corny movie, comical and outrageous.

“From what I can tell, he owes them close to a hundred
,
” Jack said, his expression still grim and serious. Megan laughed and pulled her checkbook from her purse.

“A hundred bucks?” They’d threatened to hurt her over a hundred bucks. Sounds like the Madrino boys hadn’t changed. Idle, outrageous threats over basically nothing. She wrote the dollar amount on the check. She’d pay them just so they’d quit calling. She signed her name to the check laughing as Jack stared at her with disbelief.

“A hundred bucks,” she said again
,
sighing at the absurdity.

“Grand,” Jack said. “He owes about a hundred grand.” Megan’s pen stopped still poised and she met Jack’s eyes, her expression a mix of confusion and shock.

“A hundred grand?” she shouted. “Like, as in five zeros?”

“Yep,” Jack said
,
relieved she was finally getting it. “And that’s not the worst part,” he said and Megan closed her checkbook and stepped away from the counter. Uncle Vito suddenly seemed more of a real threat, maybe even with a real Italian suit and real guns.