wildly, kicking soccer balls in every direction without any sort of organization or cooperation. It was the spirit that counted at that age, Carter guessed. Beyond them, the sun flirted with the tree line, brilliant as a fresh orange, too fierce to look at for long, though the trailing gold and pink froths of cloud tempted the eye.
“Hey,” Elijah said, and his voice had gone serious. “You know how you asked me about everybody hating the Lean Dogs at school?”
Carter turned toward him, careful not to look too eager. “Yeah.”
“Jimmy Connors was running his mouth in the cafeteria today.”
“About what?”
Elijah shrugged and looked away, hands knotting together around his water bottle. He looked uncomfortable. “Just talking shit about how the Dogs tried to scare him at work. Said y’all roughed up his dad.”
Carter snorted. “My president spoke to his dad. He didn’t rough him up.”
“I know,” Elijah said, surprising him. “He was all worked up. Saying y’all took Allie off and chained her up in the clubhouse. Lotta real nasty shit.”
Carter took a slow breath in through his mouth, startled by the surge of fury that swept through him. And after they’d gone to the effort of setting up that little show on Main Street. After people saw Carter step in. And now Jimmy was out saying they’d turned Allie into some kinda club sex slave. That little shit. “Do you believe what he said?”
“No.” Right away, no hesitation. His gaze slid over, cautious – but not like it had been at first. “It’s like I said before: I don’t really give a shit about Jimmy. And now he’s being super fucking annoying. He’s got it out for y’all. Bad. And I don’t know why. Everybody knew he liked Allie–”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He was kinda stalkery about it, actually. She was real sweet, but there was no way in hell she was gonna go out with him.”
“Did he harass her?”
“Nah. But he was following her around at the party.” His gaze narrowed. “Why do you care?”
“Well, for starters, I care about the fact that some dumbass is trying to blame us for something awful that we didn’t do.”
Elijah nodded, and Carter thought he looked sheepish.
“And one of my brothers – his old lady’s a PI. A really good one. The police haven’t found anything, and she was supposed to do some poking around today and see if she could find anything useful out about what happened to Allie.” He caught his gaze and held it. “But I promise you: we had nothing to do with Allie disappearing.”
Elijah stared back a long moment, then nodded and turned away. “I tried to tell him that you guys wouldn’t need to do something like that: lots of hot chicks hang out with y’all anyway. Not like you’d need to kidnap somebody.”
Carter smiled, wryly.
“And there’s something my dad says,” Elijah continued, tone shifting, growing more serious. “If somebody’s spending all their time pointing fingers at someone, it’s the guy with the finger who actually did it.”
Seventeen
“I keep telling myself I’m gonna go to the store, buy real food, and cook myself dinner,” Leah swore as her dad set a plate in front of her. It was nothing fancy, just a club sandwich and a small bag of chips, but it beat going home and turning on the stove.
“What’s the point in having a restaurant if you can’t feed your own kid out of it?” he asked with a wink, and rested a hand on the chair opposite her own. “What about your coworkers? Are they nice, or are they assholes?” He’d been grilling her about her first day for ten solid minutes, from the moment she’d walked into the door, and all through making her sandwich and decaf.
“They’re all very nice,” she said. “There’s Gabe, and Rochelle, and Isobel, and all of them are lovely.”
“Lovely could mean anything,” he griped.
“Yeah, but in this case, it means they respect breakroom fridge etiquette, and they don’t talk obnoxiously loud on their phones. They’d ordered a cake, Dad, with my name on it and everything, to welcome me on my first day.”
“That’s overkill.”
“And you’re a sourpuss,” she proclaimed, and took a bite of sandwich to lay the point to rest.
He snorted. “Did you see the boss man today? Mr. Fancy Pants?”
“No.” She dabbed her mouth with a napkin and reached for her coffee. “Rochelle said he hardly ever stops on our floor.”
“Not fancy enough, probably.”
“Dad, you’ve never even seen him. How can you have an opinion about his