Looking for Trouble (Jackson: Girls' Night Out 1)

Sophie sneaked behind Lauren’s back and grabbed a cart. She hadn’t planned on weeding books today, but she needed to hide in the stacks, for a little while at least.

She made it halfway through one shelf, feeling a surge of satisfaction when she found an obsolete children’s book about the future of the space race and dropped it onto the cart. That book was definitely heading for the trash. There’d been a lot of progress in the space program since 1976. She hoped nobody had checked it out for research in the past two decades.

But Sophie’s brief interlude of peace was over when Lauren sneaked around a corner and grabbed her in a hug. “What did you find out?”

“Nothing,” she said into Lauren’s shoulder. “He didn’t answer.”

“Crap. So you didn’t have a clue?”

“No, and I doubt my dad did either.” She pulled back. “Neither of us would’ve supported this. It’s outrageous.”

Lauren grimaced. “Maybe it’s not that bad. You haven’t seen the suit yet.”

“It’s a wrongful death suit over a car accident that happened twenty-five years ago! There’s nothing reasonable about that! They’re both long dead. No one even knows what happened.”

Lauren put a finger up to her mouth to shush her, and Sophie realized she’d been speaking well above a whisper. “I’m sorry. I just can’t...” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she tried to blink them away.

“Sophie, you need to figure this out. Take a personal day.”

“I can’t! I’m going to need all the personal days I can get when I go to trial for murdering my little brother.”

“Ha. Don’t murder him. Just rough him up a little. Either way, you can’t do that from here.”

“No. I may as well stay. At least I’m slightly distracted here, and unfortunately this whole mess will be waiting for me whenever I get off work.”

Lauren glanced at the clock. “Are you here until six?”

Sophie nodded.

“I’ve only got a half shift until two. We’ll switch. You leave at two, and I’ll stay until six. You need to talk to your brother.”

“No. I need to talk to my dad. He’s going to be so...” She waved a frantic hand. “But I can’t do that to you.”

“Of course you can. I owe you. If it weren’t for you, I’d never have hooked up with Jake.”

That actually cheered Sophie up enough to snort. “You’re joking, right? With the way you stared longingly at the fire station all the time? He was bound to notice.”

“I wasn’t staring longingly at the station. I was staring longingly at his body every time he jogged to work.”

“Regardless, it was only a matter of time before you two fell on each other like hungry beasts.”

Lauren blushed and nudged her. “I still owe you. So get out of here at two if you won’t leave now. Okay?”

Sophie thought of her dad. And then of Alex and what he would think about all of this. “Okay.”

She got back to work weeding and somehow managed to keep distracted until the busy lunch hours. Those went quickly at least. And thank God for that, because she caught several people studying her as if they wanted to ask a question about the long-ago scandal. None of them did, though, and after a very long half hour of reading to preschoolers for story time, it was finally two o’clock. Lauren waved her out the door.

Sophie glared out the windshield as she drove. She’d tried her brother two more times, but he wasn’t answering. Of course he wasn’t. He knew exactly how pissed she was going to be.

Well, he thought he knew. He couldn’t have any idea that her day had started off so sweet and perfect, and that she’d been looking forward to an even sweeter evening with a man who probably wouldn’t be too keen on her anymore. Did the lawsuit involve him? It must. He would have inherited part of his grandfather’s estate.

“David, you little shit,” Sophie muttered to herself as she took the highway south toward her dad’s ranch. It was supposed to have been a perfect day and now she was driving to her family’s house wearing no panties and a scowl on her face. She passed by the pull-off from the other night and growled, “Unbelievable.”

At least she still had some clothes at the ranch. She wasn’t going to argue with her brother while the mountain breeze caressed her naked ass. “God,” she groaned out loud. She’d never be free of these stupid family nightmares. It was like her family was

living out a Wyoming version of The Thorn Birds. At least there wasn’t a wayward priest involved. Yet.

She tried her brother one more time and then threw the phone onto the passenger seat hard enough to make it bounce. It was possible he wasn’t at home, but she doubted it. He never went anywhere except to weekly karaoke with the same people he’d hung out with since high school. Though he’d apparently added “trips to the county recorder’s office” to his habits.