Page 8 of Smooth Moves
Reid’s lips quirked, but he didn’t quite smile. “Speaking of annoying, maybe you and Smith should go out and get to know each other better.”
“Now who’s high? I’ll kill the asshole if I’m near him for more than two seconds.”
“Jordan doesn’t mind him.”
Cash glared, not liking the reminder. “Jordan’s too nice for her own good.” Something he’d never thought he’d say. “Look, if we’re so busy that we all need to be out in pairs, you know it makes sense to pair me with someone I work well with.”
Reid checked his notes. “How about Finley?”
Finley, an ex-Navy Master at Arms, what the Navy called its military police, had a decent sense of humor and an affinity for magic tricks. Weird and mostly harmless. But he sure didn’t fill out a pair of shorts like Jordan. “Fine. I’ll go out with Finley, but if he tries pulling a quarter out of his ass, I’m done with him.”
Reid chuckled. “Better his ass than yours.”
“Which is what I told him the first time he tried to impress me.”
Reid kept laughing until Cash pointed out that the stack of invoices on Reid’s desk hadn’t gone down any since the day before.
“Yeah, well…” Reid studied the papers and groaned. “What else is new? Oh, and so you know, I’ll be at Naomi’s tonight.”
Nothing Cash hadn’t already anticipated. Squelching the idea he was starting to lose his brother, he nodded and left. He jumped in his car, having the perfect excuse now to get things done. Cash would go to their mother’s, and Reid wouldn’t be reminded of the old house and the issues that came with it, leaving Cash to clear out all of their mother’s things.
At the thought, Cash drifted back to that dark place in his mind, hating the feeling but unable to make it go away.Worthless. A waste of space. Should never have had you, you damn sorry prick. You’re nothing more than a mistake.His father’s voice and his mother’s avoidance never failed to leave their impact, especially at thoughts of going home. Something he thought he’d never do again.
Yet following the death of their mother a month ago, he’d learned the shocking, disturbing truth: their mother had left her property and everything that came with it tohim,the same child she’d ignored for the past twenty-plus years.
He and Reid still didn’t understand it. Even their cousin Evan, the decidedly brightest Griffith of the bunch, had no idea why she’d done it.
For the first seven years of his life, Cash had been loved by Angela and Charles Griffith. He and Reid had shared an idyllic boyhood. Until something happened that to this day he still didn’t understand. He could remember the sun shining, a hint of lavender in the air, and the sound of a favorite cartoon in the background. Then the hatred in his father’s eyes and the immediate reversal of everything good in his life, including the gradual decline of Angela as she ignored the family more and more until Cash might as well have ceased to exist.
Angela even ignored Reid, the golden child, lost in her soap operas, books, and television. The woman preferred fantasy over reality, and the shell of the mother she used to be literally hurt to remember.
He and Reid had speculated about what might have caused the huge rift, though, come to think of it, Angela had never been too firmly planted in the here and now even before that traumatic day.
Had it been a massive fight about finances? Secret debt? A secret baby? Unfaithfulness? That Cash and Reid had different fathers would make sense. Except they looked too much alike, and Charles had never thrown the question of Cash’s parentage in his face. His old man had called him every name under the sun. He’d been verbally abusive, at times physically abusive, and had never held back from telling Cash how little he mattered. Yet the old man hadn’t mentioned infidelity.
As Cash pulled onto the cracked driveway of his mother’s house—hishouse now—he wondered how much it was worth, located as it was in West Woodland. The woman had lived in it for more than forty years until she’d needed assistance with the day to day, unable to care for herself. With no friends, her husband deceased, and her sons away in the Marine Corps, she’d checked herself into a care facility where she’d lived until just recently.
From what Cash and Reid knew, their Aunt Jane had visited her a few times over the years, though the women, sisters-in-law, weren’t close. In addition to seeing her boys once a month the past two years, Angela had apparently possessed one friend, a mystery woman who’d helped her take care of legal matters. Something they’d only recently found out when their mother died.
From the lawyer’s reading of the will, they’d learned their mother had given some money away to charity, the rest to pay her bills, and a small bit to take care of her property. But the majority of her “wealth” lay in the real estate Cash, not Reid, now owned.
He knew it had shaken his brother to be cut off so unexpectedly, especially because Angela had always seemed to favor her younger son. She’d been distant but affectionate…when she knew who he was. Reid had truly loved the woman no matter what. A good son, Cash thought. Not like the older loser with attitude.
With Cash, Angela had been there and not there. Never mean but cruel all the same in her neglect.
He knew his younger self must have done something to push her over the edge. Because try as he might, he couldn’t dismiss the reality that hewasthe loser his father had always accused him of being. He just liked to pretend to the world, and himself, that he could be so much more.
Since Angela’s funeral, he’d only been by once to test the keys, but he hadn’t been able to stomach being in the home that held so many bad memories. He knew he needed to clear the place out. Maybe then he and Reid could turn the house around and sell it for a profit.
If not for the fact an old Marine Corps buddy was renting them their current house for cheap, things might have been tough. Instead, they lived comfortably. Although…now with Angela’s place paid off and the title theirs, they had another option—to move in and live rent free.
Cash stared at the cracked front door and felt like an idiot for procrastinating. He let himself into the house he dreaded entering.
It smelled musty. Old. Dust and cobwebs had accumulated. He opened windows and the back door to let in some fresh air.
A glance around showed worn furniture, ugly wood paneling, faded green walls, and a tacky, rose-floral wallpaper that used to mesmerize him as a kid. Cash would sit in the corner and count the mini pink roses on lime-green vines that ran up and down the walls while being punished for one infraction or another. Truth be told, he’d preferred the silent treatment of the corner to his father’s verbal assaults. Only once had his father left major bruises, when Cash had been in high school. But before that, the threat of a slap or punch to the gut had scared him all the same.
He studied the tears in the wallpaper and the listing framed posters of old movies and soap opera stars and cringed. Cash, who had little in the way of taste, knew the house needed help. A few coats of paint, new flooring, some decluttering, and it just might be livable.
