Twirled Bond (Holly Woods Files, #5) (10 page)

“Shit,” he mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Wrong fucking answer.”

“Never mind.” I leave the glass on the table as I get up. “I need to get changed for dinner.”

“Noelle.” He follows me into the hall and grabs me before I can go upstairs. His hands, cold from his almost-full beer bottle, frame my face, and his eyes bore into mine. “You’re incapable of not getting involved. Believe me, I wish you wouldn’t, but it’s a part of who you are. I don’t know many people who would get up at stupid times of the night just to think things through in the silence, and nobody gets as excited as you do when you figure something out. I love every crazy part of you,
bella
.”

“I hate it when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Call me
bella.
You know I can’t stay mad at you when you say that.”

Slowly, he grins. “I know.”

“You’re a shit, Drake Nash.” I halfheartedly shove at his chest, but he doesn’t move back at all. He simply pulls my face toward his and lowers his lips to mine.

They’re cold too. Cold and soft as he draws me into a kiss that makes my heart skip a beat. I wrap my arms around his waist and lean into him, the heat from his body seeping through my shirt a marked difference to the chill of his mouth. Tingles dance across my skin, and as he nips at my bottom lip, I can’t believe one little kiss can still make me feel as alive as the first one we ever shared did.

Better, even.

There’s nothing like the slow, easy kisses he’s giving me right now.

I’m breathless as I pull away. “We’re gonna be late for dinner.”

“So?” he murmurs against my jaw, kissing up to my ear.

My heart thunders in my chest as lust coils in my tummy, but I swallow, flatten my hands against his chest, and step back. “Drake. The last time we ended up having sex before dinner, Nonna called us out. I do not need another dang lecture about us living in sin!”

His lips twitch. “Let’s go. Right now. I’m not listening to her regale me with threats of how my soul is going to burn in Satan’s personal Hell pit.”

“It’s funny that she thinks she isn’t Satan and I don’t burn in Hell every Friday.” I snort and quickly run upstairs to get changed. I throw my blouse and my skirt into the laundry basket, pausing to sigh when I see Drake’s work pants on the floor. Right next to the basket.

I swear to God I’m gonna kill him.

I quickly get changed and throw his pants in the basket on my way out of the bedroom. For a guy with a killer gunshot aim, you’d think he could get them at least half inside the basket. I force myself not to roll my eyes at the flash of laziness from him and grab some lace-covered flats from the spare room.

“Let’s go,” I say, slipping my feet into them when I get downstairs. “Trent isn’t going to be there, right?”

Drake shakes his head and grabs the keys to his truck. I guess two rides in my Audi TT is enough for his monstrous frame. “He’s waiting for something from Tim. Brody and Dev should be there.”

I wrinkle my nose, and he raises an eyebrow in question. I sigh and follow him to the truck, explaining about Bek’s rant this morning at the office. It stands to reason that Brody’s gonna be in a bad mood, and Dev is gonna wind him up. Thirties and a married man or not—he’s still gonna pick on his brother. Such is the Bond family way.

“What does she expect you to do?” Drake asks after a couple of minutes of driving. “Talk to him?”

“I’m not talking to him. I’m not getting involved with it.”

“Even if it means your best friend and brother being together?”

“Yes.” I defiantly nod. “Because that’s what I want to happen, but what I want doesn’t matter. It’s what she wants that matters, even if she doesn’t know what she wants. I don’t want to get involved and convince her to be with Brodes if it’s not the right thing.”

He grunts noncommittally. “Well, I’m gonna talk to him.”

“You can’t.”

“Really, babe? I can’t?” He shoots me a dark look. “There’s clearly something serious in this triangle Bek is in. Regardless of whether this skeleton is Daniela’s, we still have to work with Jason on the missing persons case to find her. Brody too. They don’t get along and that’s fine, but their fuckin’ soap opera drama isn’t going to happen on my watch.”

I think about it for a moment. That might not be a bad thing... “Only if you tell him to get his ass in gear and decide what he wants.”

“Isn’t that you getting involved?” His lips twitch on one side as the red light turns green.

“No. That’s you getting involved. That’s different.”

“So, your plan is to get involved via me?”

We turn onto Mom and Dad’s road.

“Well,” I say, “I plan to push along the resolution of it via you.”

“That’s the fuckiest way I’ve ever heard you admit to getting involved in something you shouldn’t be.” He pulls up at the very end of the driveway, and thank god my parents live rural, even for Holly Woods, because I think he’s technically parking illegally.

“Spoilsport,” I mutter, opening the truck door and swinging my legs out.

“Hey—I’m still gonna tell him. I want him to do the same thing.” Drake laughs as he follows me toward the house.

The high-pitched shrieking of Nonna’s bright-green parrot, Gio, cuts through the air immediately, followed by the bark of “
Cazzo! Cazzo!
” I still. I don’t like being around that parrot at the best of times—not least because of his creepy bird crush on me—so when he’s in a bad mood, it’s even worse. He’s like Nonna’s permanent Patronus or something.

“Gio’s frisky tonight,” Drake remarks, pushing the door open.

The volume of the squawking increases. I clap my hands over my ears as I walk in. Aside from not seeing Alison’s car in the drive, I know she’s working because, if she were here with the kids, Silvio would be kicking the cage to shut up the “stupid idiot animal” and Nonna would be yelling about wayward children harming her baby. In Italian, of course. Peppered with cussing.

Actually, probably mostly cussing.

I shuffle into the front room. As I knew it would, the wolf whistle from Gio cuts through the air. Who needs to announce their own arrival when they have a lovesick parrot to do it for them?

“Hi, Gio, you creepy little freak.”

“Hot wench!” he squawks back at me, flapping his large wings.

I’ll hot wench him in a minute. With a damn rock to his tiny little pea head.

“I’m going to kill it,” Brody says, staring at the TV. Not that you can hear it. Hell, I can barely hear him.

“Why is it so loud?” Drake asks. Yells, really. One has to in order to be heard over Gio the foghorn. “Goddamn, Gio! Shut up!” He knocks his fist against the cage, and Gio silences immediately.

And then he yells a very loud, very, very bad word that starts with C, ends with T, and has UN in the middle.

We all freeze.

Except Mom.

Mom storms into the living room without a word, a smaller cage rattling when it hits the back of the sofa. Deceptively calmly, she opens both Gio’s huge cage and the small one and holds the openings together. “In. Now.”

Gio blinks his beady eyes at her before hopping into the small cage.

Mom still doesn’t speak as she secures both cages and carries Gio out of the room, into the kitchen. I step forward and watch as she opens the back door and goes through it, out of my view.

Dad’s voice softly carries through the now much quieter room. “Ah. Gio’s in time-out again.”

Gio’s in what?
“Mom just put the parrot in time-out?” I turn and blink harshly at him. What—why? I’m so confused right now.

“Yes,” he says, crossing the room and snatching the controller out of Brody’s hand. He sits in his chair. “He’s picked up a real bad habit of using the C-word, so every time he says it, your mother puts him in the small cage we use to take him to the vet and puts him in the shed for ten minutes.”

“Where did he pick up the C-word?” Brody asks, barely disguising his groan when Dad changes the TV channel.

The opening credits of
Wheel of Fortune
trickle out of the speakers and flash across the screen.

“Your grandmother,” Dad replies dryly. “We think she’s been teaching him when we’re out.”

Honestly, I think I’m a little impressed. That’s some salty language for a parrot, even if he is an Italian pirate parrot half the time.

“Where’s Dev?” I don’t want to discuss the bad-mouthed bird any longer. “And Amelia?”

Brody glances at me. “Date night. He’s been on late shifts all week. She’s been on early. Today is the only day they’re both off, so they’ve been excused. Alison’s working, and her mom has the kids.”

“Damn it.” I drop onto the sofa and look up at Drake. “I might marry you and schedule our shifts like that to avoid this crap once a month.”

He raises his eyebrows, his eyes dancing with laughter and his lips turning upward. He opens his mouth to speak, but he can’t, because the M-word’s appearance via my mouth has summoned the demon grandmother.

“Marry? Who is-a getting-a married?” Nonna sweeps into the room. Her cane loudly bangs against the floor three times as she demands an answer to her question.

“Nobody is getting married,” I tell her as Drake sits on the arm of my chair. “Especially not me.”

She sniffs, rapping the cane against the floor twice more. “You-a should. You-a are thirty this-a year. You should-a be-a married and thinking about-a babies! You-a can-a-not keep living in-a sin!”

Here we go...

D
rake’s phone rings shrilly, and I roll over and prod him hard in the shoulder. If it’s waking me up, I’m sure as hell waking him up.

“What?” he groans, batting at my hand.

“Your. Phone. Is. Ringing.” I punctuate each word with a poke.

“Fuck me.”

“Did last night.”

“Mature.” He glances back at me, and I grin. He can’t fight his smile as he props himself up on his elbow and answers his phone. “Detective Nash. And you better have a damn good reason for calling me at six a.m.”

It’s gonna have to be better than damn good for waking me up. It’s gonna have to be up there on par with discovering aliens.

“Right,” Drake says, his tone somber. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be there within the hour. You know I’m gonna have a tagalong, right?”

I narrow my eyes at him. Not that he can see me with his back to me, but still. Tagalong my ass.

“Yeah. No doubt about it. All right. See you soon.” He hangs up and puts his phone back on the nightstand before dropping onto his back. He covers his face with his hands and takes a deep breath.

I already know what he’s going to say.

He lets his hands fall down onto his stomach and turns his face toward me. His eyes, shadowed with sadness, meet mine. “Tim’s identifying the body as a female in her early to mid teens.”

My heart beats painfully, and I tuck the covers up to my chin. “So it is Daniela.”

Drake shrugs a shoulder. “The teeth have been sent to Austin to check against her dental records. It could be several days before we know for sure, but internally, yeah. It’s Daniela. That’s what we’ve been doing—checking local records for missing people it could be. We’ve gone back fifty years of missing people. There’s nobody other than her it could be, realistically.”

I run my tongue along my lower lip and look down. Sure, I knew it, but it doesn’t make it any easier. It never does.

“How long has her body been under the theater?” I ask.

“Between ten and fifteen years. Tim’s finding it hard to narrow it down, but given that her disappearance was almost fifteen years ago...” He shrugs again and gets out of the bed.

My heart is too heavy to even appreciate his fine, naked body as he walks away from me. “What are you going to tell her family?”

He sighs heavily, pulling some underwear from the drawer. “I don’t know.” He slams the drawer shut, and the harsh, sharp sound echoes through the thick air between us. “We can’t tell them it’s definitely Daniela, but we can tell them to be prepared. The hardest part is going to be keeping the media away.” The waistband of his boxer briefs snaps after he pulls them up over his butt and lets go. “The mayor has done a good enough job, but that’s for his own selfish reasons.”

Unsurprising.

“What reasons?” I get up and go to my dresser to get my underwear.

“Jessica is restarting the Holly Woods News.”

“The paper?” I slam my drawer shut so quickly that I only just miss trapping my fingers in it. “Why? That’s why we have the bingo group. They
are
the Holly Woods News.” I would know. Nonna’s the freakin’ president.

“Beats me.” He disappears into the closet, his voice becoming muffled. “He hired a second, temporary assistant to help her with it. She’s gonna be a pain in my fuckin’ ass.”

Because you just know the mayor is going to demand that she gets first bite of the information apple. I wonder how well that’s gonna go down with Sheriff Bates. He releases statements in his own time, when he’s ready to. Giving information to the mayor’s two-bit bitch isn’t going to be popular.

“She’s already a pain in the ass,” I say, following him into the closet and pulling a black dress off a hanger. Simple, with three-quarter-length sleeves and a deep V-neck, it falls to my knees and feels appropriate considering the news we’ve been woken with.