Joke’s on You by Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,25

the man when he was always around. Even now. “What about him?”

“You told me last night that your last memory was of Kerrie handing you a beer, remember?” she said softly.

I blinked and nodded. I had said that.

“That’s Delanie’s last thought, too,” she whispered.

Then she went into what she’d learned from him yesterday at her donut shop.

“I kind of knew that he had a thing for you. It was obvious,” I said. “I didn’t realize that he was that obsessed over you, though.”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t have any clue, either,” she admitted, walking into the bathroom to splash water onto her face. “I mean, after I told my dad I wasn’t interested, and he saw the lengths I was willing to go to avoid it, Kerrie and I kind of had a falling out. And I was busy with Delanie. Then there was Asa. Then I started my business. And Kerrie was always put on the back burner. Until last year or so when he started to show his impatience with it. Not to mention the fact that I told him I wasn’t interested in him in that way when he brought it up a few times.”

“So you’re thinking that he drugged us?” I asked, following her. “That’s why neither one of us can remember?”

She sighed and stood up, pacing the short confines of my bathroom.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted, turning to go the other way. “I just… what else am I to think? He didn’t out and out say it, but why else would neither one of you remember? Delanie had one beer, and one beer only. And I’d seen you at parties. Not to mention I watched you that entire night. You didn’t have any more than you usually drank. And now that I think about it, Kerrie was the one to pull me away. Tried to convince me to watch Bourne battling it out with those college boys. Do you remember that?”

Vaguely.

“The fight?” I asked. “I know that there was supposed to be one… but yeah. I don’t remember there actually being one.”

Bourne had scheduled a fight with some rich prick college kid that fancied himself a badass. From what I understood, he’d put his pink slip to his car up, and so had Bourne.

Bourne, at the time, had a 1967 Camaro that was not very restored. But what it did have was a badass engine. An engine in a piece of shit that had beat that kid’s car, and he wanted a rematch, only Bourne hadn’t been willing to give it to him.

What Bourne had been willing to give him was a fight, because Bourne was a fuckin’ ninja, and knew that he could win against the college prick.

I’d known that he fought because the next morning when I’d finally dragged myself home from the party, I’d found the car in the driveway and Bourne had explained.

Only, I hadn’t been there to witness the fight.

“Kerrie knows that I don’t like watching fights,” she said. “I hate them. They’re boring. Yet, every time there’s a fight, he wants me there to watch it with him. As if that kind of thing is something I enjoy. When I pitched a fit, he’d begged me to stay because he didn’t know anybody.” She stopped directly in front of me and poked me in the chest with her finger. I didn’t bother to tell her that it hurt, because I didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought. And I didn’t want her to feel bad. “He did it for a reason. There’s no other explanation. He made sure that I wasn’t around you and Delanie. Because he knew that something was going to happen. The only thing is, how would he have managed it? He had to have help.”

I sighed.

As much as I didn’t like how it’d all gone down, there was nothing I could do about it now.

Except confront Kerrie about it, and for some reason, I almost felt that it was divine justice that in the end, despite his meddling and scheming, I’d still ended up with the girl.

Before she could take a full step away from me, I caught her by the finger and tugged her until I was pressed up against her.

“I’ll look into it,” I told her. “Or, actually, I’ll have Bourne look into it. He’s better at creeping in the shadows than I am. I’m more of a bull in a china shop. He’s that sleuthing panther that can