Sweet Dreams

  He also didn’t pack for the three of us to be away for two weeks which I’d already done, mainly because there was a lot to do between now and leaving and I didn’t want to pack in a rush but also because I was excited to go home for Christmas.

  And lastly, he wasn’t helping to plan the wedding, which I’d already started doing. Sure, it was a small wedding but it was still a wedding which required planning and a lot of it.

  He went after a skip and was gone for two weeks. Sure, that skip was a high bond and the payoff was mammoth, so mammoth Tate didn’t really have to work for months if he didn’t want to (and it meant I could double the flower and catering budgets for the wedding which Holly, who was doing our flowers, and Shambles, who was doing the catering, were ecstatic about). But still!

  “The Christmas Beast?” I asked on a warning whisper.

  “Yeah, babe, seriously, half the shit you been doin’ you don’t need to do,” Tate answered.

  I felt pressure in my head indicating it was about to explode.

  “I’m sorry?” I was still whispering. “Which part would you leave out? Do you want the boys in Junior Football League to have tatty jerseys? Do you think we shouldn’t have decorated and given Jonas a festive house, especially this Christmas, his first one with us and without his Mom? Do you think I should bypass the opportunity to shove my smokin’ hot, badass biker fiancé down the throats of my ex-friends in Horizon Summit? Do you think Jonas shouldn’t give his teacher a present when all the other kids are going to do it which will make her think we’re bad parents or Jonas is a shit kid? Hunh? Which part would you leave out, Tate?”

  He studied me then deduced on a mutter, “I see the shit you been doin’ is shit you need to do.”

  “Damn straight,” I muttered back, straightening in my seat.

  “Next year, Laurie, we’re goin’ to a beach,” he told me and I twisted to him.

  “We can’t go to a beach!” I screeched. “My mother would have a stroke! Christmas is about family!”

  He again studied me and I was thinking that he was thinking much what I thought the night he asked me to marry him (or, more accurately, gave me a ring and told me we were getting married next April which I decided to think was the same thing). That was, there were many of my ways that had or would become clear to him. There were others that would remain a mystery.

  “So, you’re sayin’, every year you’re gonna go Christmas crazy?” he asked when Jonas hit the garage carrying the shiny red and green Christmas bag with a big gold, glitter star on it, satin ribbon handles and big tufts of gold, glittered tissue paper spiking out of it.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He grinned then murmured, “Good to know.” Jonas jumped into the cab, slammed the door and Tate announced, “Just had the talk with Laurie, Bub, she gets this way at Christmas. Get ready, every December we’re gonna be neck deep in Christmas until the day we die. But, good news is, next year we’ll know to brace.”

  Jonas chuckled then said, “Gotcha.”

  I jabbed a finger at Tate and snapped, “Scrooge One!” And then twisted in my seat and snapped, “Scrooge Two!”

  Jonas burst out laughing.

  Tate put the SUV in reverse and backed out of the garage. He was turned in his seat to look out the back window and his smile was wide.

  I crossed my arms on my chest, looked out the front window and harrumphed.

  * * * * *

  I walked out of the office at Bubba’s, turned and locked the door.

  I’d just finished the schedule for the next three weeks and finished payroll as well as wrote out the Christmas bonus checks that I’d talked Tate and Krys into giving the staff. They weren’t huge but anything at Christmas was welcome.

  A Christmas miracle had happened and Tate had talked Krys into letting Bubba take shifts while we were away. Krys had hired Izzy, a new bartender, and he was good but she also stayed open throughout Christmas, every day just like normal, and with Tate and me both gone, and ski season upon the mountains, she needed an extra pair of hands.

  Not to mention, for Tate’s peace of mind, he wanted that extra pair of hands to be the big, bad Bubba.

  Bubba had got a job working for Tate’s attorney, Nina Maxwell’s husband Holden Maxwell. It was construction, the job they were doing just finished and Maxwell was giving his crew until the New Year off.

  Bubba was already burning the candle at both ends, working construction during the day, sitting on his Harley at three thirty waiting to follow Krys home at night if it wasn’t snowing, that was. If it was snowing or the roads weren’t clear, Bubba sat in a pickup truck that was more beat up even than Jim-Billy’s, but he sat in it every night Krys was on. Still, taking shifts through Christmas would probably seem like a break after the schedule he was keeping.

  I walked down the hall and into the bar to see Krys standing inside the bar, bent over it, head close to Jim-Billy who looked, even though it wasn’t even two in the afternoon, like he was drunk as a skunk. She was murmuring to him and Jim-Billy was staring into his beer. This was the third day in a row this had happened.

  This was also surprising. Jim-Billy liked his beer and he drank a lot of it but he was no drunk.

  The bar was pretty empty, too early for people to be off the slopes and looking for a different kind of fun. It was also a weekday prior to a Christmas where the bar would not close. This meant, to give them some kind of break, I scheduled lots of time off for our staff and only Tate, Krys and me were on and Tate, I suspected, was only there because I was.

  I walked around the bar to where Tate was standing, his hips against the back bar, his eyes on Krys and Jim-Billy.

  I stopped where he was, got close and put my forearms on the bar. Tate saw me, pushed away and came in close, putting his forearms on either side of mine.

  “What’s that all about?” I whispered with a barely there tilt of my head toward Krys and Jim-Billy.

  “Christmas,” Tate replied.

  “What?”

  Tate’s eyes got funny and not in a good way before he explained, “Jim-Billy used to be married to a woman named Elise. Pretty thing, reminded me of Betty. Lots of energy, fuckin’ sweet. They were tight, always tight. Jim-Billy was a trucker but, he was in town, you wouldn’t see them apart.”

  “And?” I prompted when he stopped and I did this even though I wasn’t certain, with the way his story had started, that I wanted to know.

  “Christmas, ‘bout seven years back, faulty lights on the tree, tree caught fire, house caught fire, smoke detector didn’t go off and Elise was burned alive.”

  Even though I wasn’t guessing Tate’s story was a jolly one full of Christmas cheer, this wasn’t what I expected to hear or wanted to hear. Not about anybody but especially not about Jim-Billy’s wife. Jim-Billy was a barfly but he was also a good guy straight to the core.

  I closed my eyes tight and whispered, “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, babe,” Tate whispered back and I opened my eyes.

  “Was Jim-Billy on the road?”

  “Yep, Billy was on the road. Billy was also the guy who didn’t change the batteries in his smoke detector.” Tate shook his head and glanced at Jim-Billy before his eyes came back to me. “Blamed himself and then unraveled. Remember it. It was difficult to witness.”

  Feeling my heart break, I peeked at Jim-Billy and Krys then looked back at Tate and said, “I bet.”

  “He went off the rails. Took him a few years to get it out of his system. A few more to clean up his shit. He never went back to work. Managed somehow to get Disability and lives off that and the insurance payout.”

  “Poor Jim-Billy,” I whispered and I did this with feeling.

  “For obvious reasons, he ain’t good at Christmas. Krys takes care of him and I’m thinkin’ she agreed to Bubba takin’ shifts because Bubba is good with him. They’ll see him through.”

  I looked at Jim-Billy and said, “Maybe I can, I don’t know…” My mind was shifting through all my fix
-it strategies and coming up with zilch when my eyes went back to Tate and I tossed out a long shot. “Captain, I think maybe Nadine’s sweet on him.”

  Tate shook his head. “Don’t go there.”

  “Well, I don’t know if she is but she comes in a lot and she almost always sits with him. I can talk to her first, feel her out, see if –”

  “Yeah, Ace, she’s into him. He ain’t much to look at but he’s a good guy and she saw his devotion to Elise. Her first husband was an asshole, her second one a drunk and an asshole and her third one a drunk asshole who beat her. She knows Jim-Billy likes his beer but he can also hold it and he’s so far from an asshole, it ain’t funny.”

  “So –” I started but stopped when Tate’s face changed, went from serious to deadly serious and he leaned in super close.

  And when he spoke, his voice was near to a growl. “A woman gets under your skin, the kind of woman that feeds the muscle, the bone, the soul, no replacing that. Jim-Billy knows it. Nadine’s a good woman but once you have that, there’s no replacing it.”

  I stared at him and he stared back.

  Then I whispered, “Tate –” but stopped speaking when his hand moved and his thumb tweaked the diamond he’d slid on my finger six weeks before.

  “No replacing it,” he repeated on his own whisper.

  He was right. I knew it because he was under my skin too. He was feeding the muscle, the bone but mostly my soul. And if I ever lost him, there’d be no replacing him. I didn’t know if I’d give up and drink beer in a biker bar for the rest of my days. What I did know was a life without Tate didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I want to make out with you right now,” I blurted but I did it quietly.

  His head jerked almost imperceptibly at my words and he asked, “Come again?”

  “You’re being sweet and when you’re being sweet, I always want to make out with you. So, I want to make out with you.”

  He grinned then he said, “Have at it, Ace.”

  “Not in front of Jim-Billy,” I whispered.

  His grin became a smile.

  Then he said, “Office, in five.”

  I smiled back and said, “Gotcha.”

  I peeled away, checked on my very few customers, none of whom needed drinks and, after five minutes, I met Tate in the office where I participated in a heated and highly enjoyable make out session on the couch with my boss.

  * * * * *

  I had Christmas music playing softly (something Tate and Jonas could take, in small measures, then they couldn’t take anymore so I was enjoying it while I could) and was standing in the opened door of the fridge, staring at its contents, determined to make a good dinner out of whatever was in there in order to eat up all the food prior to us going off for two weeks when I heard a knock on the sliding glass door.

  Tate and Jonas were in town running an errand the purpose of which they did not share. I didn’t pry. It was Christmas and when someone ran an unexplained errand at Christmas you didn’t ask questions.

  Tate had been right that night six weeks ago, we were more than comfortable. We were good. I knew this because I’d taken over dealing with our bank accounts. Mine was still hefty because Tate didn’t let me pay for anything but food, clothing and the variety of household items I’d been buying to make his house a home. Tate’s was hefty because the bar was doing an excellent turnover and the skips he brought in earned him a whack and he (or, now, me as I prepared, sent and processed his invoices) charged expenses.

  Considering the fact that Tate seemed dedicated to the cause of making certain I never regretted my move from a life of martinis and manicures in the gated community of Horizon Summit to a family life in a house on a hill in Colorado, I suspected that my Christmas was going to be good that year. I didn’t want him to worry about this because it didn’t matter to me. It also didn’t penetrate the many times I shared this fact with him. Therefore, I’d come to terms with the fact that it was something he was driven to do so I was going to let him do it. Really, who was I to complain?

  I turned to the door and walked to it, seeing Dalton standing outside. This was a surprise and a worry. Outside of coming to get me or taking me home when he’d been called into Lauren Duty by Tate, Dalton didn’t hang out at my house and he’d never stopped by unannounced. He wasn’t on that night at Bubba’s but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t popped by for a drink, something he did, if not regularly then regularly enough. That meant he might be there about Jim-Billy.

  I smiled at him tentatively through the glass and flipped down the door to the security panel on the wall, tapping in the code (Tate was adamant about the alarm being set when he was away, even if he was away for an errand). I left the door down to the panel, unlocked the sliding glass door and slid it open for Dalton.

  “Hey, Dalton, what are you…?”

  For some reason, Tate’s long ago words sifted into my head.

  “Profilers think he’s able to assimilate. He’s one of us.”

  Tonia. Neeta. The girl in Chantelle.

  “He either knew them or he doesn’t pose a threat. He comes off as friendly. He might even be attractive. A good flirt. Turn a woman’s eye. Thinks she’s gonna get her some, not havin’ any clue.”

  “Laurie,” Dalton said, coming into the house, the look on his face funny, tortured, his eyes shining with a light I’d never seen in my life, an unnatural light, a light lit from a deep inner madness and I knew.

  I jumped forward and to the side, my finger extended to hit the red panic button on the alarm panel.

  I had no idea if I touched it before the jolt hit me and everything went black.

  * * * * *

  Tate

  Tate Jackson’s cell rang and, driving home to Lauren with his son in the seat at his side, he leaned forward and pulled it from the back pocket of his jeans.

  He flipped it open, put it to his ear and said, “Jackson.”

  “Tate,” Frank replied, “you at your house?”

  Those four words coming from a cop hit him like a sucker punch to the gut.

  “No, on my way home with Jonas, why?”

  “Weird,” Frank muttered.

  “Why?” Tate bit out.

  “Laurie with you?” Frank asked.

  “No, Frank, damn it, why?”

  “Somethin’s up with your alarm, buddy. Dispatch got the alert that your panic button’s been hit.”

  Tate’s gut dropped and his foot pressed down on the accelerator.

  “Get units to the house,” he ordered.

  “What?”

  “Get units to the house!” Tate barked.

  “Fuck, Laurie there on her own?”

  “Frank –” Tate growled and Frank interrupted him.

  “On it,” he stated and disconnected.

  Tate flipped his phone closed, then opened, then he went to favorites to find Laurie’s number, accelerating faster.

  “Dad,” Jonas whispered, hearing his father’s words, feeling his father’s vibe.

  “It’ll be okay, Bub,” Tate told his son.

  “Is something –?”

  Tate glanced at his son to see his face pale in the lights of the dash and his eyes glued to his father.

  “Everything’ll be okay,” he assured Jonas but Tate’s chest was tight, so fucking tight he was finding it hard to breathe. He hit the button for Laurie, looked to the road, put the phone to his ear and repeated, “Everything’ll be okay.”

  * * * * *

  “Stand right there, Jonas, don’t move, yeah?” Tate ordered his son, Jonas nodded and Tate turned away and stood a moment, taking in every nuance of the house.

  Lights on in the kitchen, the living room, on the Christmas tree, the Christmas lights lit outside. Candles burning, the scent of pine. Christmas music playing. Laurie had loads of Christmas CDs, some compilations she’d burned. Now it was Bing Crosby and David Bowie, Peace on Earth. One of Laurie’s favorites, he’d noted she always teared up when that song played. She loved
it. When he’d asked, she said it reminded her of home. It was her sister and mother’s favorite Christmas song too.

  The kitchen was empty. Laurie was almost always in the kitchen. Making herself a drink, getting one for him or Jonas. Cooking. Baking. Sitting at the island and scratching out a grocery list; tapping on her laptop e-mails to friends and family or checking her Facebook page; talking with her mother, sister, Betty, Sunny, Wendy, Amber, Twyla, Krys even though she spent hours with them working she could talk for hours with them on the phone, a cup of peppermint tea in front of her, cackling like a lunatic (even with Krys). It was her zone and not only because she used it to take care of her family but it was the center of the house. She used it as her vantage point to keep her finger on her boys. No matter where they were, from the kitchen, she could hear them or see them. That was why he spent a fucking fortune fixing it up for her. If she was going to spend that amount of time in it, she was going to have the best fucking kitchen money could buy. So he’d made that so.

  But she wasn’t there now and her cell phone sat on the island. She never went anywhere without her cell.

  He moved through the house. The rest of it was dark and he didn’t light any lights, just looked for her even though he knew she wasn’t there. She’d call a greeting if she heard them come in, no matter where she was in the house. She always did.

  He knew she wasn’t in any of those rooms because she also always turned the lights out when she left a room. Said it was because she was an environmentalist but admitted later it was because her Dad had a rule when she was growing up, lights out if you weren’t in a room. They were farmers, not rolling in it. They needed to keep the electricity bill down and, even though she’d moved onto a life where that wasn’t a worry, she’d kept doing it. Habit.

  He stood in their darkened bedroom. The blinds down but opened. The Christmas lights outside illuminating the room and the picture she’d bought him hanging over the bed. The walls painted in paint she’d chosen. The bed made, the floor tidy and recently vacuumed. New framed photos on his chest of drawers. One of him and her at her birthday party, she was drunk and plastered to his side, her arms around his middle, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, his arm around her waist. He was smiling down at her, she was smiling at the camera. Another one of him and Jonas captured after one of Jonas’s football games. It was a candid. Tate had his hand on Jonas’s shoulder pad, he was looking down at him, Jonas had his helmet dangling by the faceguard from his fingertips, he was looking up at his Dad. They were both smiling. And another frame, on Tate’s nightstand, the three of them at Thanksgiving, Pop took it, Laurie in his lap, Jonas tucked to his side, Tate smiling at the camera but Jonas and Laurie were looking at each other, their faces awash with laughter.