Dream Keeper (Dream Team 4)

The key is, get them done, so you can get to the things you do want to do, she’d say.

“Okay,” Juno agreed.

The doorbell rang.

“That’s Flossy,” Mom said, bent in, kissed Juno’s forehead, and sat back. “I’ll go let her in and come up and kiss you goodnight.”

“I’ll come down with you.”

“You keep coloring until you need to shut those eyes. Flossy’ll get set up downstairs and come up and say hi.”

“All right, Momma.”

She smiled at Juno and Juno smiled back.

Then her mom hustled out of the room.

Juno looked down at the coloring book she was trying to color in like Mom colored, with shading of different hues in the petals and on the leaves.

It didn’t look near as good as her mom’s did.

Things come with time, practice and patience, kiddo, Mom had said. If you don’t think something is right, just work at it until you get it right. Maybe you’ll find along the way that it isn’t about it being right, it’s about how good you feel that you worked at something. I promise you, something you worked for feels way better than having something that didn’t take any work at all.

Yeah.

Her mom had said that.

And sitting there in her bed in her awesome room, Juno thought about the way she saw Auggie look at her mom sometimes, and how she saw her mom look at Auggie sometimes, and how they never looked at each other that way when they were both actually looking at each other.

And she really, really, really hoped her mom was right.

Chapter Five

The Dark

Auggie

When his phone rang, Auggie was in his SUV taking a short ride to attend to some business at a high-rise downtown, and he was trying to keep his shit while he was doing it.

Looking at his dash, he saw who was calling.

Considering his mood, and his current mission, he would not normally answer it.

That day had not been good, him acting like an enormous asshole to Pepper being top of that heap, dealing with what he was on his way to deal with now and the possible reasons for that a close second, he didn’t need more bad news.

But it didn’t help to delay it. That just spread bad shit out longer.

And considering the long lingering case they were working on, not only his team but also others, including the caller, this couldn’t be anything but bad news.

He took it anyway.

“Yo, Lee,” he greeted Lee Nightingale, the man behind Nightingale Investigations, the premier private investigation agency in Denver.

“Hey, Aug,” Lee replied. “Do you have a sec?”

“Sure.”

Lee didn’t bother with pleasantries, and Auggie wasn’t surprised he didn’t.

It wasn’t that the man was rude. It was that it was late evening, and if Lee wasn’t home with his wife and two kids, he’d want to get done what had to be done to get home. If he was home, he’d want to be with his wife and kids, not talking work on the phone.

A handful of years ago, the idea of Lee Nightingale, Family Man, would have had most of the men of Denver chuckling.

But there it was.

“Right,” Lee began. “Shirleen just spoke with me. She told me your woman called.”

This wasn’t what he was expecting, and hearing what it was, Auggie nearly tried to find a place to pull over so he could fully concentrate on the call.

Because he didn’t have a woman.

But he knew who Lee was talking about.

Shirleen was Lee’s office manager.

And that meant Pepper was calling Lee Nightingale.

No one ever called Lee for good reasons.

Why was Pepper calling Lee?

“Not my business,” Lee went on. “Not my place to ask, figure things have hit a rough patch with you two.”

Not so much a rough patch as they hadn’t ever been on a smooth one.

Except that night they’d been out for drinks with Boone and Ryn. Just friends together, one couple, one should-be-a-couple, but weren’t.

At the bar, Pepper had not taken things out of where she firmly kept them, the Friend Zone.

Or as Auggie knew it, the Torture Zone.

She hadn’t had too much to drink.

She still asked him to drive her home.

He’d agreed, not doing it thinking he was going to get himself some. Instead, thinking she was a mom and overly careful about drinking and driving, considering she had someone who counted on her getting home safe.

And he’d walked her up to her door because he was his father’s son.

What happened after that was all on her.

Lee broke into his trip down memory lane.

“But I figure you’d wanna know she’s looking for an investigation service to find her brother,” Lee finished. “Shirleen said she balked at our rates and told her she’d have to call some other firms. So, to save her the time and money, you might wanna get on that for her, or if you two are going through some shit, punt it to one of your brothers.”