Nemesis (Southern Comfort) (9 page)

How much clearer did he have to get?

When it sounded again, the noise tinny and persistent in his ear, he realized he’d have to handle it.  So he set aside his plate and collapsed the footrest on the recliner before stalking toward the door.

The bell rang again when he was in the middle of the entry hall and he snarled “All right already!” before yanking open the door.  The sight that greeted him on the other side of the threshold made him wish he’d just kept his ass planted firmly in the recliner.

“Declan,” Sadie said, surprise registering on her little elfin face.  She fell back a step, wrung her hands together, and looked at him with dismay. 

There was a smudge of some kind of dirt on her cheekbone that he wanted to eradicate with his tongue. 

“I didn’t… I wasn’t expecting…” She glanced at him expectantly, but he wasn’t about to offer any encouragement, so she got that familiar mulish look on her face and managed to stop sputtering.  “Is your dad here?” she finally came out with, looking at him like something that grew under logs.

He crossed his arms over his chest.  Why the hell did she keep popping up right in his face?  That damn memory zap hadn’t worked, apparently, because he was real clear on her identity. 

Thong-wearing Sadie Rose Mayhew.  The new bane of his existence.

He looked her over from head to toe, noting the hair gone awry – one particular
platinum strand curling over her head like a halo – the oversized denim shirt that was now all wrinkled and filthy, and the plain canvas tennis shoes covering her pretty little feet.  No sparkles or goo-gaws or improbably high heels this time.  He wondered what the hell she’d been up to.

And why the hell he cared.

“No,” he finally answered, tone as far from cordial as he could make it.  “Why would he be?”

She took on air like a puffer fish.  “Because he lives here?” she suggested sweetly, but her body language gave her away.  She was practically vibrating with animosity. 

Better than vibrating with misplaced lust, as his own body seemed hell bent on doing.

“Actually, he lives in town, has a place a couple blocks over from the bar.”  Which was enough of an answer, as far as he was concerned, but his tongue decided to keep on wagging.  “His night vision started to get dicey a few years ago, made it hard for him to drive all the way over here after closing, so we swapped residences.  He’s got a swinging bachelor pad in the middle of the city and I’m now
John-Boy Walton.”  He gestured condescendingly at the large, comfortable family home which surrounded him.

Sadie peered past him, blue eyes narrowed, as if she wasn’t
quite sure she believed him.

“You want to come in here and see for yourself?”

“What?  Oh, no.” 

Of course, he hadn’t intended to let her in anyway.  Too many horizontal surfaces for that. 

As he watched, with way too much imagination trying to ruin him, disappointment tugged that mouth into a frown.  She had lips to make a grown man weep.  And because he could feel his mood indicator shifting from idle to interested beneath his zipper, he snapped at her in irritation. 

“What are you doing here?”

For a moment she looked taken aback.  Then her flaxen brows lowered over eyes as wide and sky-blue as he’d always remembered.  “If you must know, I was just doing some cleaning next door, and I thought since it was lunchtime and that your dad probably had the day off, that – ”

“Wait. Why were you cleaning next door?”

“I don’t know, because it was dirty?” 

Reality hit him, and it wasn’t pleasant.

“Shit.  You’re moving back in?”

“That’s right.”  She sent her pointy little chin skyward.  “Looks like we’re going to be neighbors
again.”  From her tone it seemed like that appealed to both of them equally.

Declan felt that like a blow to his solar plexus.  Of all the shit to rain down on him today, why did it have to be her moving next door?  She obviously had no concept of the privacy fence.  Maybe he should stake out some heads or something, like the ancient Romans, as a sort of warning for little blonde trespassers. 

“Don’t come looking to borrow a cup of sugar,” he growled, and she glared at him even harder.

“Trust me, Murphy, if I wanted something sweet, this would be the very last place that I’d come looking.”

CHAPTER NINE

SADIE
hit the big box stores, restoring her depleted cleaning supplies, picking up odds and ends for the house, and musing over the whims of fate. 

Fate, Sadie decided, was a bitch.

It seemed like a huge cosmic joke that her life had come so full circle.  Except the Declan of her youth had basically lived to torture her, and the hard-eyed man who’d answered the door yesterday seemed to regard
her
as the pest.  In fact, it seemed like he had an aversion to mankind in general.  Sadie couldn’t help but wonder at his absence the previous evening from Kathleen’s New Year’s dinner.  She had been there.  All the other Murphys had been there.  Even Kim, Rogan’s gorgeous FBI agent girlfriend had been there. 

It was like Declan was the Prodigal Son or something, except that Sadie had seen them all interacting at the bar. But there was still no question that he held himself apart.  Odd, considering how close-knit they all used to be.
Particularly him and Rogan.  They’d been almost creepy, at times, as kids, like two bodies with one brain. Kathleen had finally said something about Declan “not doing well” with New Year’s, and from the look on her friend’s face she considered it a subject best dropped.

Not that she needed to be wasting her time worrying over Declan Murphy, anyway.
  She had enough to keep her occupied just trying to put the pieces of her own life back together.

Depositing a final armload of bags on the passenger seat of the Beetle, Sadie fished her key from the front pocket of her purse and cranked it in the ignition.

Which elicited no response.

She turned the key back, cranked it again, with precisely the same result.

“You have got to be kidding me.” She let her head fall onto the steering wheel.  Unfortunately the horn was still alive and kicking, and the loud blare caused her to jump.

Right about the time she caught sight of the biggest,
scowliest, scariest looking man in history, peering in her driver’s side window.

He motioned for her to roll it down.

She hit the door lock, and kept it up.

Shaking his head in what looked like disappointment, he reached into his jacket.  Sadie calculated the odds of making it out the passenger door before he pulled a weapon.  Not good, she decided, just as he slapped something against the glass.

It looked like some sort of… badge.

Yep, the behemoth was a cop.

This time when he made the hand rolling motion, she reached down and cranked the handle, cursing her lack of power windows.  “Could be the starter,” he said gruffly, while she stared at him in alarm.  “Pop the hood and I’ll take a look.”

Sadie hesitated a moment, until he made a noise of impatience, to which she quickly responded with hood-popping. 

Leaning her head out the window, she watched his massive head and shoulders disappear beneath the hood, and wondered what exactly she was supposed to say to him.  You see a lot of action here in the Home Depot parking lot? Know anything about cars?  Please don’t kill me and eat my liver for breakfast?

She was just contemplating making a break for the lumber yard when the passenger door opened beside her.  She screamed so loud and jumped so high that her head nearly hit the roof.

“You okay?” Kathleen quizzed, shoving aside bags to lower herself into the seat.

Sadie blinked and waited for her heart to start pumping, as she was in danger of blacking out.  “You scared me to death!”

“Sorry.”  A tiny smile tugged at her lips.  “I take it Mac neglected to introduce himself.  He’s not real big on chit-chat.”

“That must be the only thing he’s not big on.”  She eyeballed his legs, which could be mistaken for old growth timber. 

Kathleen laughed and ran her fingers through her hair, tucking the chin-length waterfall of red behind her ear.  “He can be scary if you don’t know him, but he’s really just a teddy bear.”  At Sadie’s dubious look she nodded her head.  “Really.  And he’s very good with cars.  And if he can’t fix it he has a brother that owns a garage.”

Sadie cast another cautious glance toward the so-called teddy bear and turned back to Kathleen.  She wondered what, exactly, she was doing here.  “So… are things so dead – ha, ha – on the homicide squad that you have time to tail your friends around?”

“I wish,” Kathleen snorted.  “We were over here chasing down a lead on that case we landed New Year’s Eve.  I just happened to see you walking through the parking lot as we were going by and asked Mac to pull in.” 

“Ah,” Sadie responded, fascinated by the sight of her friend wearing a gun.  The last time they’d lived near each other Kathleen had accessorized with things like belts. 

“It’s dead,” came a deep voice from behind her.  “You need a tow.”

“Uh, thanks,” Sadie smiled awkwardly, leaning back to what seemed a safe distance.   

“I’ll call,” Kathleen offered, already taking out her phone.

Sadie sighed and cast another wary glance at Kathleen’s partner, who’d gone back around to lower the hood, then plucked the keys from the defunct ignition.  The tow truck arrived, Mac directed the driver to his brother’s shop, and Kathleen insisted they give Sadie a ride. 

Following her first – and hopefully last – trip in the back of a police car, Sadie waved off her saviors.  She’d spent most of the previous day cleaning the kitchen and it was with heavy heart and weak stomach that she now contemplated the upstairs bathroom.  Who knew what various body fluids a single man might have left in the shower?

She decided to finish cleaning the downstairs rooms first, maybe tackle the bath after dinner.

Floors were mopped, cushions aired, baseboards wiped and dusted.  Dead palmetto bugs big enough to carry off small children swept up and deposited in the trash, along with the desiccated carcasses of several rodents.  Sadie shivered in revulsion.

New paint was certainly called for,
inside and out, but that was a project she could tackle when she wasn’t in need of a year’s worth of sleep.  Between the stress of leaving Rick, the long trip back east, and the heavy cleaning she’d put in, Sadie was so utterly exhausted by the time she worked her way to the bathroom that she almost didn’t bother. But the thought of a nice hot shower before diving between her newly laundered sheets was enough motivation to keep her moving.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered, emptying various sundries from the vanity.  It looked like a drug-store time warp, some products dating back at least fifteen years.  She came across a giant can of Aqua-net and smiled, thinking of Rogan.  The poor kid had been such a good sport.

Unlike his pain-in-the-ass brother.

Banishing thoughts of “Don’t ask to borrow sugar” Declan, the resident Grinch of Mount Pleasant, Sadie sat the bright blue can of hairspray aside and continued to fill her trash bag.  Old canisters of shaving cream went in,
along with half-filled shampoo bottles and a gym sock that had somehow found its way beneath the sink instead of into the hamper.  Sadie shook her head over the accumulated flotsam, crawling half inside the deep-set cabinet to reach into the far corners.  Her hand stilled when it encountered a fairly new-looking box of condoms, labeled Trojans Magnum XL.

Huh.

Sadie had always wondered at the implied meaning behind that particular brand name, given the fact that the Trojan Horse was a ruse designed by Odysseus to sneak his troops into Troy.  The image of hundreds of tiny sperm hiding out in the reservoir tip, biding their time until they could launch an attack against unsuspecting ovaries made her suspect she’d inhaled one too many cleaning fumes that day.

And pathetic as the admission was, considering that she’d just turned thirty, Sadie also had no idea that condoms were produced in a variety of sizes.  She’d always thought that they were a one size fits all sort of product, like a muumuu or those plastic rain ponchos.

Fingers itching with curiosity, Sadie carefully examined the box.

All the usual caveats and warnings, nothing specific explaining the designation Extra Large. No… size chart or anything, like on packages of socks.

She wondered exactly how much difference there could be between these and the ones that Rick used, which were just regular, lubricated condoms.  Were they talking an inch or two here?  Three?

The thought was weirdly… intriguing.

She peered into the open flaps of cardboard, noting with some disappointment that the little foil packages looked the same.  Sadie tapped her fingers in consternation.

She guessed she could… open one.

She glanced guiltily over her shoulder. Just because she was sitting in her childhood home, on the tile that her grandma had scrubbed religiously with an old toothbrush, didn’t mean that…