The Big Heat

The Big Heat

Jennifer Labrecque

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Rhonda Nelson. You’ll get the dead body call.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

1

“SUNNY TEMPLETON needs a decent man,” Marlene announced as Cade Stone stepped through the door of AA Atco Bail Bond.

The office manager pinned him with a speculative look, causing Cade to consider turning around and walking right back out. He had no interest in being slotted into the decent man role, even if it was Sunny Templeton. His brother, Linc, had fallen into that trap and he’d wound up engaged. Not just no, but hell no.

Cade tracked down FTAs—failures to appear—those folks who decided, for whatever reason, to skip their court dates. Once he found them, he hauled them back to jail. They weren’t always nice and they were never glad to see him. But if he could handle them, he could certainly handle Marlene…even if she was in matchmaking mode. The glass door finally swung shut behind him, muffling the noise of Memphis traffic along Poplar Street.

“Perfect timing,” Linc said with a smirk from where he stood propped in his office doorway.

“Don’t look at me,” Cade said. “I don’t have a decent bone in my body.”

“Ha! You’ve got more decency in your little finger than some people have in their entire body,” Marlene said. “Have you seen this?” She waved a flyer at him.

“It’s Cecil. He’s playing dirty.” Linc nodded toward the flyer, looking uncharacteristically sheepish. He held up his hand. “I know. I got us into it and it was a bad idea.”

The hair on the back of Cade’s neck stood up at the mention of Cecil Meeks, incumbent city council member. Cade possessed excellent people instincts and those instincts had not been happy when he met Cecil. Unfortunately, he hadn’t met the man until after Linc had cut a deal to endorse the city councilman in his reelection campaign.

When competition in the form of True Blue American Bail Bonds had moved in down the street, AAAtco’s business had taken a sizeable hit. Linc’s fiancée, Georgia, had suggested billboard ads featuring Linc and Cade. According to Georgia, they were hot, good-looking guys, and it didn’t hurt that they’d brought in top dollar at a bachelor charity auction they’d been roped into the year before last.

Since it was mostly women bailing men out of jail, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to follow her reasoning. Unfortunately, with business down, they didn’t have the money to buy the billboard space…and that was where Meeks came in.

Cecil Meeks was a media whore whose face was everywhere. And while AA Atco wasn’t looking at the political side of it, they definitely needed the exposure. A couple of cable-TV ads and four huge billboards that caught commuter traffic later, they’d gotten it. There had definitely been a change in their bottom line thanks to the publicity. But Cade hadn’t liked Cecil from the minute he’d met him. There hadn’t been anything specific, just a general dislike and mistrust.

So, Linc’s announcement that Cecil was playing dirty didn’t surprise Cade in the least.

Unlike Cecil, though, Marlene was good people. She’d been a classy addition to AA Atco when she’d taken on the job of office manager six months prior, following her husband’s midlife crisis with a Vegas showgirl and their subsequent divorce.

“Just take a look at this,” Marlene said, bristling with outrage.

Cade took the offered sheet of paper. Ever since they’d done the ads with Cecil, Cade had followed the city council race and the candidates. Sunny Templeton had an impressive record. She’d brought a lot of energy and good ideas to the various committees she’d served on in the past couple of years and was campaigning on the same. As of yesterday she’d pulled slightly ahead of Cecil in the polls.

A red banner across the top of the flyer shouted, “Do you want this party girl for city council?” The rest was obviously a page lifted directly from a singles’ Web site. A quarter-page picture of a blonde in a bikini holding what appeared to be a mixed drink in her hand smiled at the camera with the most startling, amazing eyes.

At that moment, Cade felt as if he’d just been jolted with a stun gun, the impact ricocheting through him all the way to the soles of his feet in his black flak boots. It was as if she stared straight into him, through him. And every protective instinct he possessed—and that was more than a few—was roused.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked, putting the flyer back on Marlene’s desk.

Linc pushed away from the doorjamb. “I met Georgia at the mall during her lunch hour to look at china patterns—”

“China patterns? You were looking at dishes?” Cade stared at Linc. A month ago, the man would’ve gouged out his eyes before he went to look at china patterns.

Linc shrugged nonchalantly. “Hey, if it makes Georgia happy…”

That his brother had been reduced to this was just…sad. Cade was at a loss. His siblings were obviously losing their respective minds. In the span of three months both his sister, Gracie, and Linc had gotten engaged. The office had become damn wedding central.

Lately, too, he’d caught Gracie and Marlene looking at him like his single status was a problem to be solved. No, thanks. He’d stick with the dating rule they’d picked up from their father. Keep it light, keep it simple and never date a woman for more than four weeks.

It wasn’t the wedding part that was so bad, but the falling in love business. Gracie he could almost understand, she’d only been eight when their mother died. But he didn’t know what the hell had happened to Linc. Linc knew better. He’d been twelve, old enough. He’d seen the way their father had been crushed when their mother died in a car accident. If Cade hadn’t stepped up to the plate, God knows what would’ve happened to them while Martin spent three months buried in a bottle. It’d been a harsh lesson that love could damn near destroy you and Cade had tried his best to watch out for Gracie and Linc over the years. All he could do now was shake his head over Linc doing something as stupid as falling in love. He worried about both of them leaving themselves so vulnerable.

“So, you were picking out china at the mall?”

“Yeah. When we finished we found the flyer shoved under the windshield wiper. It was on every car in the parking lot.”

“I hope she’s got someone in her corner to back her up,” Marlene said with a pointed look in Cade’s direction.

Despite the fact that Marlene’s comment was manipulative, Cade did feel protective. It was his nature. Even though it was damned inconvenient at times, he couldn’t even pass a stranded motorist without stopping to help. Plus, he never should’ve ignored his gut with Meeks. He felt damn guilty that they’d campaigned against Sunny by endorsing Meeks.

“I wish we’d never endorsed him,” Marlene said, uncannily echoing his thoughts. “You boys are better than that.” At thirty-four and thirty-two, Cade and Linc weren’t exactly boys but Marlene liked to refer to them that way and they let her. She pursed her lips. “Do you think he made it up?”

Cade shook his head. “I’m not a Meeks fan but I don’t think he wrote it. It’d be too easy for him to get caught.”

“How embarrassing for poor Sunny,” Marlene said, slanting a look at Cade. “Like I said, she needs a decent man.”

The phone rang and Marlene took the call, sparing Cade the need to reply.

He picked up the flyer again and studied it. Shoulder-length blond hair, nice smile, okay figure but nice legs, average height. Not knock-you-down gorgeous but those eyes…And why’d he have a gut-clenching sense of recognition deep inside him?

He shifted from one foot to the other and deliberately looked away from her picture. According to the flyer, her interests were running—that explained the nice legs—stained-glass design and urban revitalization.

Linc looked over his shoulder. “Looks like a nice woman.”

“Yep.” Attraction—intense, irrational, unwelcome—stabbed at him. “Not my type,” Cade added, just to set the record straight. He liked his women laid-back, easy-going. Marlene had used the word shallow, which he considered a bit harsh. This woman, despite her easy smile, struck him as intense. No, thanks. Instinct told him she’d be trouble with a capital T. “I’m just looking.”

“You and every other guy in Memphis,” Linc said.

A totally alien, proprietary feeling swamped Cade. What a piss-him-off idea that every other guy in Memphis was looking at her picture and feeling the same feeling of…he didn’t even know how to describe it. He just knew he didn’t like it.

Linc canted his head to the side. “Those are some nice legs. Not that I’m actually looking, ’cause Georgia would have my ass.”

“Yeah? Then maybe you shouldn’t look. She might drag you out to pick china patterns again.”

“Easy, bro.”

“We all have to vote for her,” Marlene said, jumping back into the conversation after hanging up the phone. “I, for one, don’t appreciate and am not taken in by a smear campaign. Boys?”

Linc threw up his hands. “Hey, I’m there. Count me in.”

Cade put the flyer back on Marlene’s desk. “Sure. But we might as well piss in the wind. She’s screwed.”

And in the meantime, he’d make a phone call. He didn’t want to get involved and he sure as hell didn’t want to meet her, but maybe he could help from behind the scenes.

“WHAT A SPINELESS TOAD,” Sunny Templeton fumed.

“If you think you’re going to faint, put your head between your knees,” Sheila, her mentor, friend and campaign manager instructed.

Sunny stared at the flyer. “I’m not going to faint but my head may very well explode.” She sucked in a deep breath, trying to control the temper that occasionally got her in trouble.

“Exploding heads aren’t good,” Sheila said.

“Nope. And exploding heads don’t figure out where to go from here.” She rested her head against the steering wheel of her ’67 ragtop Mustang and calmed herself. “Actually, I’m not sure whether I’m more angry with him or with me for not anticipating he’d do something like this when I pulled ahead of him.”

Well, there was no use sitting in the parking lot of the community center where she’d just made a campaign speech. The stupid flyer had been on every windshield in the parking lot when she and Sheila had left the building.

She cranked the car. It turned over the first time. The body and interior might desperately need restoration but it ran like a dream. The early November sun slanted through the windshield like a soothing balm.

She felt calmer, more rational once again. “We need a plan. Something more constructive than me suggesting Cecil do something anatomically impossible.” Okay, maybe she wasn’t totally rational just yet.

“I think the best way to handle it is to ignore it,” Sheila said. “Meeks is looking for a reaction and I say we don’t give him one.”

“Good idea.” Sunny nodded her agreement. “This—” she nodded toward the flyer crumpled next to the gearshift “—has nothing to do with the campaign or my qualifications.” Her temper escalated all over again. “Can you believe he called me a girl?”

“Of course he did. You’re a thirty-year-old successful entrepreneur with a strong civic track record. He’s desperate to invalidate you and party girls don’t run for city council. He knows people have responded to your sincerity. They know you genuinely care about this city.”

Sunny knew that was true. Granted there were some really dirty parts and nobody was naming it the most beautiful city in the U.S., but she loved Memphis with its rich history and diversity. Running for city council wasn’t about the power or ego gratification—she sincerely believed she could make a difference. If she thought Cecil would do a better job for the district and the community she never would’ve stepped up to the plate. “Well, we’ve run a clean campaign based on the issues. Let’s hope voters are turned off by his stunt.”

“Sunny?”

“Yeah?”

“Um, I’m not being critical, just curious.” Sheila was always so careful not to offend whereas Sunny tended to be much more blunt and plain-spoken. “Why’d you do a singles’ ad on the Internet?”

“I guess for the same reasons everyone else does. It offers a much broader base of men to choose from. You can sort of get to know them and if they’re creeps, you just don’t write back anymore. Plus, since I design Web sites, it just seemed like the natural technology fit for me.” It was mostly the truth. Sunny offered a rueful laugh. “It never occurred to me that it could come back to bite me in the butt.”

“Have you met anyone?”

“Not yet.” It was a dismal state romantically—well, sexually, to be more accurate—that she was in.

Speaking of which, she made a right onto Tolliver and caught the red light directly across from the looming billboard.

There he was, Cecil Meeks, unfortunately larger than life, plastered on the billboard for the city, or at least the portion driving by on busy, congested Tolliver Boulevard, to see. Even more unfortunate, he was flanked by The Bounty-hunting Brothers, as she’d mentally tagged them. Cade and Linc Stone. The caption proclaimed, “We’ve Got Your Man.”

Sheila sighed. “He may be a toad, but he’s a smart toad. Those billboards were a good move.”

“Yep. Very smart.” She thought it was big of her to give credit where credit was due, even if she did despise Cecil Meeks. She hadn’t liked Cecil when she’d joined the race. She knew by the end he’d either earn a grudging respect from her or she’d despise him. She was ready to be signed up for the latter.

“Those two looked fully capable of hunting down and hauling back pretty much anyone. Probably over half the female population in the city would do the crime and skip a court date just to have one of those two haul them back,” Sheila said, with a semidreamy look on her face. Sunny knew the feeling.

“I’m counting on Memphis women voting with their brains instead of their hormones.”

She supposed there were enough women who would find Cade’s tawny-eyed, piercing, I’ll-kick-your-ass-and-enjoy-doing-it stare sexy, or swoon over Linc’s longer hair and devil-may-care smile. Sunny sniffed and wrapped her fingers tighter around the steering wheel. If you liked those kinds of looks in a man, that was.

She never had. She’d always preferred more intellect than brawn. And those muscle-bound types tended to have control issues and since she liked being in control it was pretty much an oil and water situation. Plus, not long after the billboards went up she’d overheard two campaign volunteers discussing the Stone brothers. Both of them had a reputation for changing women almost as regularly as their underwear.

Which was why it was confounding that she’d developed a thing for Cade Stone. Tall and dark with those golden eyes, that sensual, unsmiling mouth and an element of the untamed about him, he’d been a shock to her system from the first time she’d laid eyes on that offensive billboard.

Even now, driving past the image, with Cecil launching his dirty offensive in the campaign’s eleventh hour and Sheila riding shotgun in her car, she tingled from head to toe. Heat coursed through her and left her wriggling in her car seat.

It was nutty that she felt such an intense physical, mental, emotional response to a he-man photo…and it was every dang time she drove past. And lately she’d become so…entangled that he’d shown up, brimming with muscle and testosterone, in her dreams. She’d imagined his kisses in exquisite detail—his mouth on hers, the scrape of his sexy scruff as he slid his lips down her neck and across her collarbone, the bunching of his muscles beneath her fingertips as she grasped his broad shoulders, the feel of his hands mapping her body. And then she’d wake up, gripped by restlessness, her body humming with arousal. It was just so damn weird to be sexually fixated on someone she’d never met and most likely wouldn’t like anyway.

It had been sheer desperation then, that drove her to take out that singles’ Web ad. If a man on a billboard could leave her hot and bothered, why not a guy on the Internet?

Unfortunately, none of her Internet dating responses had bumped Cade Stone out of the fantasy hot seat…yet. And that was the part of the truth she’d left out for Sheila. No one else had an inkling that a simple drive-by sighting left her nipples hard and her hoo-ha wet.

She turned right off Tolliver and half a block later bypassed the alley that housed the garage behind her house. She always opted for the on-street parking in the front.

Rats were fond of the back alley and her rodent aversion bordered on phobic. And if the rats gnawed through the Mustang’s wiring, she’d be hard-pressed to cough up the bucks to fix it after sinking her savings into her campaign fund. She’d rather jockey for on-street parking any day.

“You know, Sunny, I think this flyer’s not going to be a big deal,” Sheila said. “People will get it and toss it. I don’t think anyone’s going to pay a bit of attention.”

Sunny turned left onto her street and immediately braked.

She looked at Sheila. “I hope it’s true that there’s no such thing as bad press—” news vans sat double-parked in front of her row house, midway down the block, which also doubled as her campaign headquarters “—because they’ve definitely paid attention.”

She squared her shoulders. She’d talk to them for a few minutes and then it would be over.

How bad could it be?

2

One month later…

“HOW ARE YOU?” Sheila asked as Sunny settled opposite her onto the familiar hard laminate seat at Melvina’s Soul Food.

“I’m starving. How about you?” Sunny inhaled the aroma of collard greens, corn bread and candied yams, ignoring the deeper implication of whether or not she had fully recovered from the debacle following her election loss.

Melvina’s soothed her with its juxtaposition of stark but clean concrete floors, laminate seats, bars over the windows and rich comfort food. After the last four weeks of hell—and without being a whiner, it had truly been hellacious—she was getting back on her feet, but her soul could use a healthy dose of culinary comfort.

“I didn’t think I was hungry until I smelled the food and now…yeah,” Sheila said, leaning across the table a bit to be heard. “And I’ll let you slide now, but we’re going to talk before lunch is over.”

Melvina’s was always noisy and today was no exception, with conversation vying with a blues Christmas CD playing over the loudspeaker—Sunny was pretty sure that was Memphis’s own Koko Taylor belting out “Have You Heard the News.” A thirty-year collection of baby Jesus ornaments adorned a Christmas tree in the middle of the small restaurant. According to Melvina, Jesus was the reason for the season and there wasn’t room on her tree for anything else except the star on top.

Melvina herself delivered two sweet teas to the table. “Look at what the cat done drug in,” she said with a wide smile. “We sure have missed you.”

“Not nearly as much as I’ve missed y’all.” Melvina, her son, TJ, and his wife, Charity, were old friends. She’d known them all since she’d “discovered” Melvina’s when she was a University of Memphis student along with TJ and Charity ten years ago.

The older woman gave Sunny a bone-crushing hug—who’d have thought such a small, seemingly frail woman could hug so hard—and Sunny squeezed back.

Melvina and Sheila exchanged greetings and Melvina crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth settling into a disapproving frown. “That was just wrong what that man did to you and wrong what them news folk did after that.”

Sunny smiled and shrugged, determined to put it behind her. “It seems to be over now.” It wasn’t good when the flyers had been spread around town but she’d never dreamed it would explode the way it had. In one of those weird, totally unwelcome quirks of fate, the election and flyer had been picked up by the AP and Reuters and mushroomed into a gargantuan tabloid/Internet nightmare of humiliation. Sunny clad in a bikini had become the election flyer seen around the world. And she’d learned an important lesson. No one ever actually died from humiliation or harassment. She was still-living proof.

Melvina’s lips thinned to a hard line. “TJ saw your picture on a late-night TV show.” Who in the world hadn’t would be a shorter list. Sunny, or rather her attendant flyer, had made number three on the Top Ten Stupid Things To Do When You’re Running for Public Office list. “And Charity saw some stuff on the Internet.”

Not hard to imagine since Sunny had been the butt of innumerable jokes circulating on the blogo-sphere. She’d tried to avoid them, but couldn’t help reading each and every one. It was like watching a train wreck—the train wreck that had become her life. She’d thought after a few days of infamy it would die down. That was the way those things worked, right? Wrong. Just when it looked as if things were dying down, it flared back up. But now…four weeks and counting, it finally seemed over. Sunny considered it a minor miracle she’d managed to maintain her dignity and her temper through it all.

“I think it’s finally over.” No one had pointed or stared at her in at least two days since she’d ventured out of her house once again. No one cheered, jeered or tried to take her picture. No more Web design contracts had cancelled on her except the one. And since she’d disconnected her home phone after changing the number three times in as many weeks, the harassing phone calls had ceased. Her cell number was only available to a select few.

“That Meeks ought to be horse-whipped for starting all this,” Melvina declared.

“Too good for him,” Sheila opined.

“He’ll get his one day,” Sunny said. She wasn’t sure how or when, but he would. She was ready to get on with her life, but that included settling with Meeks. Revenge would be hers.

Melvina glanced around and lowered her voice. “Me and TJ, we know people. You want Meeks taken care of, whatever you want, we know people.”

“You’re a good friend, Melvina. I’ll keep that in mind.” Having him beat up wasn’t what she intended but it was good to know your friends had your back. In a darker, less lucid, PMS moment she had fantasized that Meeks’s penis would fall off in a very public place and then a group of rogue rabid squirrels would attack him and gnaw his nuts off. However, chocolate had helped and she’d moved on. Now she just wanted the dirt on him she knew was somewhere to be found. She’d been working some contacts, asking around. Patience and perseverance would yield results in the end.

“You just say the word,” Melvina said, nodding. “I better get back to the kitchen.” She turned, wiping her hands on the ever-present apron knotted around her waist. “I’ll send TJ out with corn bread and two vegetable plates.”

Melvina hurried off, yelling for her son along the way.

Sunny took a long swallow of the sweet tea. Sheila scraped her nail down the condensation gathered on the outside of her glass. “So things are back to normal?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it normal, but it’s not what it has been for the past few weeks.”

TJ dropped off a plate of Melvina’s corn bread, which was actually fried like a big corn bread pancake, and two pale-aqua melamine plates piled high with collards, candied yams and fried okra. “Enjoy, ladies,” he said. “This is on the house.”

“But—” Sunny protested.

TJ cut her off. “Hey, I’m the finance whiz with the college degree, remember?” He winked at her. “I say Melvina’s can afford to comp a couple of friends now and then.”