Past tense.
He’d paid for the wedding, which turned out to be a huge party for Darla’s friends and family. Flynn’s mother and step-dad came, but Ryker had been on assignment in Africa at the time and chose not to come. The right decision, in hindsight.
He and Darla had some good times, of course. The sex was amazing. Darla was a great cook, but she made sure he knew how second-rate the kitchen in their rental house was.
She started looking for a “place of their own.” He foolishly paid cash for the cute little bungalow she called “the perfect starter home.” The house she took in their divorce settlement in lieu of alimony.
What a chump!
Flynn eased off the accelerator when the whine of the engine caught his attention. One glance in the rear view mirror told him Tucker had dozed off.
He drove slowly, purposefully, still thinking about Darla. The day she told him she and her new husband were expecting a baby, he’d wanted to hurt somebody. Instead, he walked into Headquarters and requested an immediate posting. “Any fire. Anywhere.”
He’d wound up in the High Sierra trying to save an old woman and her horses.
Nothing had been quite the same since. But, for the first time in a long time, Flynn was starting to think change was a good thing.
That didn’t mean he was the same gullible fool he used to be. No way. Thanks to Darla, Flynn took nothing and no one at face value. He questioned everyone’s motivation.
Even Kat Robinson. Who moves a kid mid-school year on a whim? What was the real story between her and her ex? Why’d she pick Marietta, of all places? He planned to find out…before she got any deeper under his skin.
*
Brady stared at his slightly distorted reflection in the glass partition separating the principal’s inner office from the “holding cell,” as the other bad kids called it. His fat lip throbbed worse than his middle finger, which another kid bent all the way back after Brady flipped him off. The jerk had deserved it, but his mother wouldn’t be happy. The last time this happened, she’d made him promise never to use impolite gestures again.
“Write down your feelings, son. Paint your anger with big red magic markers. Create a song and dance it away,” she’d said in that tense, serious tone she used when she thought he was going to snap.
Mom was weird.
He didn’t know how she kept smiling, going to work every day, helping him with his homework, worrying about him instead of thinking about the death sentence hanging over her head.
“Everyone dies, honey,” she’d told him when she sat him down to explain about his grandmother’s disease. “Grandma’s sickness affects her brain, specifically, her memory. Doctors don’t know how to fix it.”
“Will I get it, too?” Brady had asked. He knew how germs were passed, which was why he washed his hands a hundred times more than other people in his class.
“More than likely not, but I can’t say for certain.”
“Will you get it?” Sometimes people inherited stuff from their parents, he knew. Like skin color and tongues that could curl.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Someday. The odds are I will, which means I have to make the absolute most of my time while I have all my senses. I plan to fill my days with fabulous memories and try to do something meaningful…on a smaller level. Grandiose is so not my style.”
She’d always talked to him like that. Big words. Complete sentences. Complex theories that made him think. He’d been tested often enough to know he had a very high IQ. Smarts weren’t the problem. Everything else was. The people stuff. The be-nice-to-idiots part really got to him.
He’d heard the other kids talking about him. “Brady is smart, but he’s not very nice.”
Even though he didn’t care about what most of the people in his classroom thought, there was one whose opinion mattered. A girl named Chloe Zabrinski.
*
Kat felt every set of curious eyes burning into the navy blue
He’d paid for the wedding, which turned out to be a huge party for Darla’s friends and family. Flynn’s mother and step-dad came, but Ryker had been on assignment in Africa at the time and chose not to come. The right decision, in hindsight.
He and Darla had some good times, of course. The sex was amazing. Darla was a great cook, but she made sure he knew how second-rate the kitchen in their rental house was.
She started looking for a “place of their own.” He foolishly paid cash for the cute little bungalow she called “the perfect starter home.” The house she took in their divorce settlement in lieu of alimony.
What a chump!
Flynn eased off the accelerator when the whine of the engine caught his attention. One glance in the rear view mirror told him Tucker had dozed off.
He drove slowly, purposefully, still thinking about Darla. The day she told him she and her new husband were expecting a baby, he’d wanted to hurt somebody. Instead, he walked into Headquarters and requested an immediate posting. “Any fire. Anywhere.”
He’d wound up in the High Sierra trying to save an old woman and her horses.
Nothing had been quite the same since. But, for the first time in a long time, Flynn was starting to think change was a good thing.
That didn’t mean he was the same gullible fool he used to be. No way. Thanks to Darla, Flynn took nothing and no one at face value. He questioned everyone’s motivation.
Even Kat Robinson. Who moves a kid mid-school year on a whim? What was the real story between her and her ex? Why’d she pick Marietta, of all places? He planned to find out…before she got any deeper under his skin.
*
Brady stared at his slightly distorted reflection in the glass partition separating the principal’s inner office from the “holding cell,” as the other bad kids called it. His fat lip throbbed worse than his middle finger, which another kid bent all the way back after Brady flipped him off. The jerk had deserved it, but his mother wouldn’t be happy. The last time this happened, she’d made him promise never to use impolite gestures again.
“Write down your feelings, son. Paint your anger with big red magic markers. Create a song and dance it away,” she’d said in that tense, serious tone she used when she thought he was going to snap.
Mom was weird.
He didn’t know how she kept smiling, going to work every day, helping him with his homework, worrying about him instead of thinking about the death sentence hanging over her head.
“Everyone dies, honey,” she’d told him when she sat him down to explain about his grandmother’s disease. “Grandma’s sickness affects her brain, specifically, her memory. Doctors don’t know how to fix it.”
“Will I get it, too?” Brady had asked. He knew how germs were passed, which was why he washed his hands a hundred times more than other people in his class.
“More than likely not, but I can’t say for certain.”
“Will you get it?” Sometimes people inherited stuff from their parents, he knew. Like skin color and tongues that could curl.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Someday. The odds are I will, which means I have to make the absolute most of my time while I have all my senses. I plan to fill my days with fabulous memories and try to do something meaningful…on a smaller level. Grandiose is so not my style.”
She’d always talked to him like that. Big words. Complete sentences. Complex theories that made him think. He’d been tested often enough to know he had a very high IQ. Smarts weren’t the problem. Everything else was. The people stuff. The be-nice-to-idiots part really got to him.
He’d heard the other kids talking about him. “Brady is smart, but he’s not very nice.”
Even though he didn’t care about what most of the people in his classroom thought, there was one whose opinion mattered. A girl named Chloe Zabrinski.
*
Kat felt every set of curious eyes burning into the navy blue
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