Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness by Sandra Hill

Author:Sandra Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

When Vegas came to the Outer Banks . . .

Merrill stared with humor at the scene unfolding before him. A ball-of-fire chatterbox and an overage bimbo dragging on an e-cigarette had invaded Elvis Presley land. Obviously Delilah’s daughter and grandmother.

Delilah Jones was like a jigsaw puzzle to him. Piece by piece he was finding out things about her, like last night’s whopper of a revelation about the lifer felon ex-boyfriend. He would bet his last dollar that these new arrivals would add a few more clues to the mystery of Delilah.

“You think this is funny?” Delilah said when the little girl ran back to the car and was dragging out a stuffed dog bigger than she was, or just about.

“Don’t you?” He just noticed that the car, a honkin’ big Buick station wagon from another less gas-conscious era, was stuffed with boxes, and there were a bunch more bungeed to the rooftop luggage rack. What was the old lady hauling?

“Pfff! It’s either laugh or cry.” She shook her head at the pinup queen—who had a surprisingly hot body for a woman her age, he just noticed—as she hobbled over the gravel stones of the parking lot to stare up at the giant Elvis.

“I had a date with Elvis once, in Vegas when I was a showgirl,” the grandmother remarked, to no one in particular. “By then his hunka hunka burning love had gone the way of too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”

“Your grandmother was a showgirl?” he asked Delilah.

She nodded.

Actually, she told me that last night. But it didn’t sink in then. Whoa. Another piece of the puzzle. Raised by a showgirl grandmother. “Cool! Bet she’ll fit in great with the dance crowd over at the Patterson house.”

Delilah groaned. “Oh, my G . . . gracious! You’re right.”

“Of course, it’s a nonsmoking crowd.”

“She’ll convince them that it’s not really smoking since no nicotine is involved.”

He was bent over laughing by now.

“You do know that these unexpected visitors mean your plans for the evening have gone south.”

“Oh, crap!” He adjusted the towel around his hips.

Which caught Delilah’s eyes, which went wide. She seemed to suddenly realize that he was half-naked and made a hissing sound of distress. “Hurry. Go get dressed.”

“You’re wearing my shirt,” he pointed out.

She looked down at herself and blushed. She must have forgotten her own lack of attire.

This scene out of a bad comedy, or a really good comedy, just got better and better.

“Go!” she ordered. “And while you’re inside, take all those sticky sheets off the bed, and gather up all those wet towels. Pick up any, um, loose clothes off the living room floor, too.”

Sticky sheets, he liked the sound of that. But maybe now wasn’t the time to tease her. On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, though, all bets were off. “Sticky sheets” was going to be their code word for a certain activity. And, no, he wasn’t going to examine why he was thinking of anniversaries when weddings weren’t even discussed yet, or imagined.

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