Sophie Oak - Sirens in Bliss

“Oh, I totally want to shoot you. And if you ever come near my family again, I will. And you should be glad I’m the one delivering this message and not Julian Lodge. I have no doubt in my mind that Julian knows more about you than my husbands do, and he won’t hesitate to take you out if you threaten any member of his family. And trust me, he considers my husbands family.”

“Hey.” One of the twin cowboys from the truck came walking up. He pointed to Robert. “You’re that motherfucker from Trio this morning. I thought for sure the shrink and I had scared you away.”

Rachel stared at her husband, one hand on her hip. “What the hell were you doing at Trio? I thought I smelled Zane’s wing sauce on you!”

The big cowboy shook his head, going a little pale. “No, baby. I was getting myself shrunk. I was talking to that Leo guy about all the things that are wrong with me. I know I have mental problems.”

“You liar.” Rachel held her hand out. “I’m going to need that gun back, Shelley.”

But she hadn’t made her point yet. “In a minute.”

She planted her feet the way Wolf had taught her, took careful aim at a place to his left, and fired.

There was a loud scream and Robert Meyer covered his faced and dropped to his knees, though not before Shelley saw the front of his pants suddenly stain and turn wet.

Yes, she’d made her point.

“You told me you had oatmeal at Stella’s.” The other twin didn’t seem at all bothered that she’d nearly killed a man. He was only concerned with yelling at his brother. “Goddamn it, Max.”

Max held his ground. “Well, it’s not fair that you get to eat fried foods and I don’t. I don’t understand why I got the bad cholesterol DNA. It should have been you.”

“Please don’t kill me.” For a man who had apparently spent a lot of time committing crimes, Robert Meyer seemed really scared of guns.

“That’s up to you.” Shelley took a couple of steps his way, standing over him. “If you come near me or mine again, I’ll shoot you and I won’t miss next time. Am I understood? The next time you threaten my life, I’ll take yours. And if you think you can go to the papers, think again. Julian will just buy them and shut the fuckers down. Now get out of here.”

He got shakily to his feet and managed to run down the stairs and across the yard.

“And I hate oatmeal, Rye. It tastes like cardboard even when I put a cup of sugar in it,” Max was yelling.

“And I hate the thought of you having a heart attack.” Rachel was getting right up in her husband’s face. “So I’ll just shoot you now and put myself out of my misery.”

She sounded really serious. Shelley watched as her nemesis ran into the woods and disappeared. Maybe he would get eaten by a bear and all her troubles would be solved.

That man had hurt her mother-in-law. She didn’t need to hear the story to know. It was plain that this was a man who enjoyed hurting others. He would have loved hurting his wife. He was a man who likely would have enjoyed hurting his kids.

They would have been vulnerable, small and easy to hurt. A man like Robert Meyer would have felt powerful having small kids to torture.

Unless someone had fought back. Unless someone had loved her children so much, she found the strength to break out of her cycle.

She was so going to eat that beet. She would eat it down and thank her mother-in-law for the chance to enjoy it.

“Shelley, I need my gun. My dumbass husband wants to die,” Rachel said.

“I don’t want to die,” Max shot back. “I just wanted to eat something tasty. You’ve fed me salad for two weeks. I’m wasting away. A man needs meat.”

The door to the house flew open and most of the garden party was suddenly on the porch.

“We thought we heard gunfire.” Callie looked down at the revolver in Shelley’s hand.

“No one’s dead,” Shelley explained. “Though I think Rachel might kill one of her husbands.” It was time to help out her new friend. She walked up to Rachel, handing her back her gun. She was pretty sure the blonde wouldn’t actually kill her wing-loving hubby. “I have a great cookbook. It’s low-salt and low-cholesterol versions of comfort foods. Wolf used to eat like a five-year-old. It gave him high blood pressure. Trust me. After not being able to eat anything but salad and fruit for a couple of weeks, those recipes seemed heavenly to him. He never even realized that his new mashed potatoes were cauliflower.”

Rachel turned back to her. “Really?”

She pulled the last ace in her deck. “And I lost five pounds.”

A smile hit the blonde’s face. “That’s sounds perfect. And if you ever decide to kill your son of a bitch, we’ll help you hide the body.”

“Rachel, I’ve already had one body in the back of my truck today because Max had to do a favor for Jen. I just got it detailed,” Rye complained.

The Harpers were an interesting family.

But she needed to focus on her own. As the Harpers started to argue about whether or not Rye’s precious truck should be used in criminal activity, Shelley turned back to Callie Hollister-Wright. She seemed like a woman in the know.

“Hey, can we talk about Cassidy?”

Callie’s eyes widened. “Sure. You’re not going to shoot her, right?”

“Not at all, but I would like to understand her better. After all, she’s going to be my momma after I prove to her I’m not using her boys to propagate an alien race.”

Callie smiled and led her back to the bar. A good stiff drink was definitely called for.

Rafe

Rafe moved through the door with only the slightest trepidation. He’d left the crazy crew behind with his daughter, but the insanity of the day wasn’t anywhere close to being over. After all, it was his first real foray into breaking and entering, but, then, he had the law on his side—or rather at his back. Cam was right behind him.

“Where do you think he would have left it?” Cam asked.

“I suspect it should be somewhere on his desk.” Rafe looked around the small cabin. The walls were covered in fishing equipment and photographs, each lovingly framed.

“I’ll take a look through his desk.” Laura pushed her way in. She had vigorously protested the whole breaking and entering idea. “I don’t see why we can’t just print out another form.”

He’d been over this. Zane had been explicit about why they needed the original letter of intent Hiram had signed a few months back. Unfortunately he’d also been called back to Trio. After a long argument in which the group had explained that the world would end if he didn’t get that letter, Rafe had given in. “It’s because the town seal is on the document.”

“All right, we can get a new seal,” Laura suggested.

“Stef is the only one with a seal stamper. Hiram claims a moose ate his so Stef, as the county’s chief engineer, has the only one left,” Rafe explained. They were a very small government. Hell, before 1993, there hadn’t even been a mayor’s office. Hiram had just taken care of things. It hadn’t been until the nineties that they gave in and actually formed a city government.

God, he knew way too much about Bliss politics already.

“What a cluster fuck. So Hiram named a successor and we have to find the paperwork?” Cam had been a little slow on the uptake since he’d been called home from work. He’d hung up before Rafe could explain why they needed him, so he’d come charging in expecting something was wrong with Sierra. He’d actually had his lights and siren going.

Cam needed to chill.

“No, Hiram was supposed to appoint a deputy mayor, but he left the name off. They were all in discussion about who it would be. Apparently Hi never made decisions without taking everything into account.”

Cam picked up on the conversation. “And we’re going to find the document and forge your name, thereby stealing all the political power in the town and setting ourselves up as the first family of Bliss. Does the mayor get a mansion?”

Laura rolled her eyes. “Look around you, babe. This is it.”

Hiram’s cabin was small, but well built. There was absolutely nothing about the place that screamed political power. It was kind of a temple devoted to fishing and hunting.

“And we’re only going to find the document,” Rafe insisted. “I’m not going to be the mayor.”

Cam turned. “Why not? It seems like a pretty sweet gig if you ask me.”

“It seems like a pain in my ass.” He’d been to more than one town hall meeting. And despite what Zane thought, there would eventually be elections.

Although Hiram never faced one. No one ever ran against him. He was utterly beloved.

Rafe looked around the cozy little cabin and wondered if Hiram ever regretted his decision to not leave Bliss.

“I’m just saying that it would be helpful to have someone a little more friendly to law enforcement in the mayor’s office. Hiram was a total radical.”

“Hiram was not a radical,” Laura argued. “He just felt like Nate shouldn’t write tickets every time he wanted to upgrade something at the station house. He was scaring off the tourists.”

“Well, then he should open up the town’s pocketbook. We needed that fridge. The old one was from the sixties. Hiram tried to tell Nate that the sixties was the height of refrigeration technology. Though at least he wasn’t a hypocrite.” Cam put a hand on Hiram’s white, had-to-be-fifty-years-old Frigidaire. “If Rafe was the mayor, we could upgrade the bed in the overnight room. I swear that mattress is so lumpy my back aches for days.”

“I wouldn’t write you a blank check, Cam.” He would be careful with the town funds. He would more likely spend the money on training the citizens in fire containment and prevention. Bliss was surrounded by national forest land and the threat of wildfires was always around. Yes, he would allocate funds to the volunteer firefighters.

There was also talk of a school. Bobby and Will had been homeschooled, but if Sierra was going to school, there would be a forty-five-minute bus ride both ways. Bliss needed a small school, an innovative, multi-grade learning institution.

That was where he would use Stef and Seth. He would casually mention some of the things he would need, perhaps even indicate that he was having some sort of bake sale as a method of raising money. Stef’s eyes would roll and he would tell Rafe what a waste of time that would be, and suddenly Rafe would have a six-figure check in his hand.

And then he would mention Stef’s utter generosity to Seth. He would go on and on about how the King of Bliss was investing in its future.

Seth would be cutting an even bigger check.

Sierra would have the best of all worlds—the beauty of the mountains, the close-knit family of a small town, and a world-class education. It only took a man who knew how to work the Bliss system. It would be good for everyone. There was a baby boom happening in Bliss and someone needed to be prepared.

“I just think it would be a cool gig,” Cam said. A frown suddenly crossed his face. “Except for all the Nell and Henry interaction.”

“I’m worried about them actually,” Laura said. “Something’s off. Nell seems fine, but Henry is anxious about something. He just hasn’t been throwing himself into his protests the way he used to.”

Cam looked around, his eyes perfectly innocent as he took in the room. “He seems fine to me. They were protesting Jack Barnes just yesterday. Apparently even though he’s organic, he still kills cows and that’s bad. I don’t know. His burgers are pretty tasty.”

Something about the eyes gave him away. Cam never looked that innocent unless he was hiding something. Laura sighed and mumbled something about male hormones being involved, but then she wandered off to look through Hiram’s office.

“What’s wrong with Henry?” Rafe asked quietly.

Cam looked through the mail on Hiram’s small bar. “Like I said, absolutely nothing.”

Rafe was not buying it. “You figured out his past.”

There had been rumblings about it in town ever since the incident with Gemma and her ex. Caleb had told a few people that he didn’t believe Henry’s story about how the man had tripped. Caleb thought Henry had taken him down and in a very calculated way.

A single shoulder shrugged up and down.

“Since when do you hide information from me?”

Cam’s eyes came up and there was an unfamiliar hardness there. “Since I took an oath to protect and defend the citizens of this town.”