“No?” Dave replied, getting up and walking over to the door. “Is she here?” A voice I didn’t think I’d hear again anytime soon shrieked.
“Who?”
“Josephine, that’s who,” she snapped, but then she must have taken a good look at him because we heard nothing for a couple of seconds, and normally she’d have continued hysterically screaming. “Mm, who are you?”
Both Ellis and Tabby turned to look at me at the same time, the realization of who it is hitting them at that moment. “You do not leave my side, Jose,” Ellis growled. “You stay right here.”
Leading her through to where we were all sitting, Dave did his best to block her view of me with his wide shoulders. “You have a visitor,” he told me unnecessarily, and in a way that sounded like it was being forced from him. “She said it was a case of life and death.”
“We wish,” Tabby muttered.
Moving to the side, he gave me the first glimpse of Wylda I’d had in almost two years, and what I saw shocked me. Her hair was a frizzy mess with at least two inches of white roots showing at the end of the black strands, she had bags under her eyes, and wasn’t wearing the thick makeup she normally favored. Going to push past him, she paused and squeezed one of his biceps, and I caught the other occupants of the room flinching at the same time I did out of the corner of my eye. “Thank you… uh, what did you say your name was?”
Carefully removing his arm from her grasp, he replied, “Dave Bell,” and then added, “Sheriff Dave Bell.”
Her expression went from shocked to disappointed, and then she looked back at where I was sitting. “Josephine, do you have it?”
Ellis growled and tightened his arm around me, refusing to let me move from the couch – not that I would have. “Hello, lovely to see you. I hope you’re doing well,” I said sarcastically. “Do I have what?”
Eyes flickering amongst the people in the room and pausing on Burt and Ellis, she clicked her fingers and pointed at the kitchen, completely ignoring Tabby and Liv. “In there now.”
Dave straightened from where he’d been leaning against the wall at the same time that both Ellis and Tabby stood up from their seats, but it was Tabby’s mouth that got there before anyone else's. “Are you fucking kidding me? You haven’t even said hello and asked her how she is, let alone acknowledged her daughter sleeping right in front of you, but you’re demanding her time and money?”
“This is your mother?” Burt asked, scowling at her.
“Who the fuck are you?” she snapped, obviously not finding him worth putting on one of her fake personalities for. “Josephine, now.”
Standing up from his seat and joining the wall that Tabby and Ellis had made in front of me and Liv, Burt faced her. “I’m her father.”
Ducking down so that I could see her face through the gap between Ellis’s legs, I saw the sneer on her face as she looked him up and down. “I don’t remember you.”
Oh, alcohol. We have you to thank for so much, including the conception of multiple children every year.
“Apparently you went through a phase of drowning your sorrows, too,” Tabby snickered, looking over at him and winking.
“Yeah, tried new things as soon as I turned legal,” he shrugged. “Obviously this is a good example of why you shouldn’t drink more than you can handle.”
Then a conversation broke out like she wasn’t even there, with them all discussing the wisdom of not drinking cheap alcohol. I could have added to it, but right now I didn’t want to deal with her and doing that would get her focus back on me. All I wanted was to go back and continue the conversation we were having before. I also had something darker brewing inside me – the worry over whether or not the DNA results between us were correct now, seeing as how neither of them remembered each other. But then I thought about the overwhelming similarities between us and I couldn’t see how the results could be wrong. “Excuse me,” Wylda shrieked, waking Liv up from where she’d been napping.
And that’s when Ellis lost his patience. “Would you get a clue? If Jose wanted to speak to you, she’d have asked us to move when we first stood in front of her. Hell, she could even crawl through the gap between my legs that she’s peeking through.”
Sitting up straight, I glanced up expecting him to be looking over his shoulder at me, but he was still facing forward. “Hey!”
That’s when he gave me a quick look as he raised an eyebrow, getting a sheepish shrug back from me in return. Before my life changed, I’d have given her the money just to get her to go away, and I’d have listened to her bullshit because it meant her leaving me alone. Now, I had other people taking my back with her so she couldn’t intimidate me into giving in… and it might make me sound like a pussy, but I was relieved. So, with Liv sitting quietly watching all of this, too, I sat back and let my man fight this war for me.