She started wagging a finger in his face, saying something we couldn’t hear.
She ended this smacking him again.
I choked back a laugh.
On a giggle, Celeste asked, “Why don’t the police stop her smacking him?”
They got down to doing that, hauling him toward the cruiser in the front drive.
“And maybe you might wanna love your son when he’s NOT in intensive care, asshole!” Kimmy shouted after them.
“Take it to Castro!” Ashbrook shouted back.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten and DON’T YOU THINK CADE BOHANNAN CAN’T BRING JOHN KENNEDY’S KILLER TO JUSTICE. If anyone can do it, HE CAN!”
“Oh my God, is that really a thing with her?” I whispered.
“Dad thinks she’s just happy she’s got an ex-FBI guy around whose ear she can bend. And I guess my grandma was really nice to her when she was growing up. Dad says she didn’t have it too good, and Grandma was some good in all that bad. He says she might just want a connection with a part of Grandma. They don’t have anything in common, so she’s making up a connection.”
This further explained Bohannan’s patience with her.
And Jess’s care.
“Well, he’d be able to figure that out,” I replied.
Ashbrook was being folded into the cruiser and Kimmy was stomping back to the house.
We pulled away from the window and watched her walk in.
“What’re you fools doin’ at the window?” she demanded.
“Watching the Kimmy Show,” I told her. “The crowd was surprised when a woman wearing a Rudolf face sweater complete with stitched-on red poof for a nose smacked the bad guy three times.”
“He’s a jackass,” she said, shuffled aside for Will to get in, then looked him up and down. “Done good, kid.”
“Thanks, Ms. Milford,” he replied.
Next in came Deputy Dickerson, though he only swung his torso around the door.
“Sorry, folks. He jumped the gate,” he explained.
“Shoulda shot him in the back, Wade,” Kimmy decreed.
“I prefer handcuffs and conversations with judges,” I put in my vote.
Celeste laughed softly.
Dickerson dipped his chin and disappeared behind the door.
Will locked it.
“Right then, anyone want fudge?” I asked.
And Celeste laughed softly again.
I was sitting on the floor wrapping Christmas presents when Bohannan walked into the bedroom that night.
My gaze slid to the clock.
It was nearly midnight.
By the way, I’d woken up just after six.
He stopped dead and stared down at me.
“What the fuck’s going on?” he asked.
I glanced around, then up at him, stating the obvious, “I’m wrapping Christmas presents.”
“For the entire town of Misted Pines?”
I smiled at him.
“I’m sensing we should have talked budgets,” he said to the mess, as well as the stack of wrapped boxes scattered just beyond the mess.
Which, I had to admit, was large.
(Okay, it was possibly embarrassingly massive.)
“I’ve never had boys to buy for,” I explained.
His attention came to me.
“And it’s been a few years since I’ve had a teenage girl to spoil.”
He said nothing.
“How committed are you to the lumberjack biker look?” I queried, because I’d rolled with that on some of his presents, and I wanted to make sure he wasn’t feeling a switch up.
“The lumberjack biker look?”
I flipped a hand, indicating his long body, which was full-on lumberjack biker with sturdy boots, faded jeans and a gray thermal under a thick black flannel shirt.
“I hate to shave, and I don’t have time for regular haircuts, but mostly, unless I’m fucking her, I don’t like anyone touching my hair. I picked two careers where I had to be on top of both. When I was done with those, that was done.”
“Are you certain about the ‘unless I’m fucking her’ part?”
“You pull my hair, baby, anytime you want.”
He was sure, I knew, because my nipples were tingling.
“Grace hated the beard,” he shared. Pause, “And the hair.”
“Further evidence she’s insane.”
His beard twitched.
“The medallion?” I asked after the irregular disk of something, I didn’t know, maybe iron, which had zero designs on it but did have a hole stamped into it and a piece of leather string threaded through that Bohannan nearly unfailingly took off every night and put on every morning.
“Flattened bullet taken out of my great granddad after a man who didn’t like him shot him.”
One could say, if I had a million guesses, I would not have come close to that.
“Why didn’t that man like him?”
“Because my great granddad was a US Marshal and there were folks still around who weren’t fond of his law-abiding ways.”
Righty ho.
Irrespective of how fascinating, I was done with that story for the time being.
“We had some excitement today, of the entertaining kind,” I told him.
“I heard.”
“Kimmy is life. I want to be her when I grow up.”
“I’ll take back the present I got for you and buy you fifty Christmas sweaters.”
My heart grew light. “You got me a present?”
He gave me a look.
He didn’t get me a present.
He got me a good present.
“I wasn’t referring to her wardrobe,” I clarified. “I was referring to her ability to get away with a justifiable assault in front of two officers of the law.”
His beard twitched again.
I hated to do it.
But I had to do it.
“You didn’t catch him,” I whispered.
He shook his head. Once.
“You okay?”
He nodded his head. Once.
“Want me to pull your hair?”
He lunged, plucked me out from the mess of paper scraps and ribbons.
And took me to bed.
Fifty-Two
He Agreed with Me
The boys came home early the next night.
If you call 8:45 early.
Jace and Jess bolted down Megan’s Mexican casserole glumly, and I watched closely, lest I need to save them from falling face first into cheesy-chili-chicken-tortilla deliciousness.
They were dead on their stools.
They dragged themselves to the basement where they were, for the time being, sleeping.
The Bohannan clan.
Circling the wagons.
Bohannan didn’t linger either. He went upstairs minutes after the boys went the other direction.
I gave him some time, and then Celeste wandered up with me.
At the top landing, we hugged, said goodnight, she hit her room, and I went to ours.
I was sitting cross-legged facing the bathroom in the closed-off-from-the-outside space when he got out of the shower.
He had wet hair and was in his pajama pants that he kept on the hook behind the door.
“I know you probably want to hit it,” I said softly, and I did know this because his eyes carried fatigue and his face was drawn. “But something occurred to me today, and I wanted to talk to you about it.”