Jacqueline and the Judge by jaye c blakemore

Author:jaye c blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Jacqueline showed up much earlier than noon the following day. In fact, she took Luca by surprise as he slept in until after ten o’ clock, still catching up on missed sleep from his time in the holding cell. He’d barely rolled out of bed and brushed his teeth before he saw her car pulling into his driveway through the kitchen window. He was happy to see her, but he had also been looking forward to a quiet morning. There was a lot to contemplate, and that might be difficult with Jacqueline.

When they spent time together, there was usually lots of laughing and exploring the lighter side of things. For a man that has just lost his wife, that sort of friendship is helpful and, as far as Luca was concerned, necessary. But he wasn’t sure bouts of laughter and a childlike demeanor was going to be much help in his present predicament.

Still, he met her at the door, and they shared a brief hug. Such gestures had been awkward at first; despite their age difference, a pretty woman hugging you was still a pretty woman hugging you no matter how you looked at it. But the boundaries of their relationship had quickly been defined once they had grown that comfortable with each other. She knew that he was not a perverted old man that wanted her for his own deviant means, and likewise, he knew that she was not a gold-digger or one of those strange breeds of younger women that saw it as a challenge and conquest to bed an older man. She had even gotten comfortable enough with him to tease him about his age—and not in a cute flirty way. Luca knew deep down that he was filling in the role that a father would usually take up. And since she had never really had a father to speak of, she was getting in all the time she could.

With the hug broken, they went inside. In the ten months they had known one another, it was only the third time she had stepped foot inside of his house, and it still felt a little weird to Luca—not to have company, but to have another woman in the same space his beloved Sylvia had once roamed for the better part of twenty-five years.

“Sorry I’m in a bit of a shambles,” Luca said. “I sort of overslept.”

“Well, you had a miserable couple of days,” she said. “I think you deserve some extra sleep.”

“But you know what? I haven’t eaten breakfast. You think you could eat an early lunch?”

“Always,” she said. She then placed the six-pack of beer she had brought in the fridge. “I have rule about not drinking before noon though. Not even on a Saturday.”

“A good rule indeed,” he said. “Give me a second and I’ll fire up the grill.”

He made his way out onto the back porch and started the fire on the charcoal in the grill. Jacqueline followed him out and watched him as he worked.

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