All Shook Up Read Free Page A

place.
    Rat City didn’t imbue a taste for subtle or girl-next-door, and he liked his women brassy. Big hair, big tits, clothing spray-painted on to show every curve.
    Watching her stride down the trail in front of him in her shorts and Keds, J.D. tried to figure out what had caused that uncharacteristic craving. He had to admit she had a body that would probably be dynamite in tight clothing. But it didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t the type to wear it. She was too…fresh-faced. She had that silky, swingy hair, those freckles across the bridge of her nose, those big, guileless, startlingly blue eyes. He’d bet his last buck she wasn’t a woman to hang out in bars, waiting for some stud to come along and buy her a drink, like the barflies he associated with. She looked more like one of those happily-ever-after, put-the-ring-on-my-finger types.
    They rounded a curve in the trail and the lake was suddenly laid out in front of them in all its splendor. Shaped like a Christmas stocking, it was placid and blue. The sounds of kids splashing and laughing, the sprong of a diving board, and the occasional shrill blast of a lifeguard whistle cut through the silence of the woods.
    “There’s a roped-off swimming area and a float around the next bend,” Dru said over her shoulder. She veered onto a short spur trail, and a moment later they emerged from the sun-dappled track into a small clearing, across which stood a cabin with half its porch roof missing. A man who looked to be in his mid-fifties sat with one hip perched on the railing, smoking a cigarette, while a little boy in a Star Wars Phantom Menace T-shirt wielded a light-saber against an imaginary foe.
    The kid saw them first and his face lit up. “Mom!” he yelled and, the plastic light-saber clattering to the floor of the porch, launched himself off the steps. A second later he hung like a monkey from Dru’s front, skinny legs around her waist, grimy hands linked behind her neck as he leaned back to give her a huge, goofy grin.
    “Whoa, you’re getting way too big for this.” Staggering under his weight, she nevertheless grinned back and kissed him on the nose.
    It was a scene like a hundred others J.D. had observed as an outsider looking in. Crossing his arms over his chest, he watched mother and child and congratulated himself on his acumen. There you go, bud. All that’s missing here is the carpool-mobile.
    It doesn’t get any further from your type than this.

2
    S upporting the warm weight of her ten-year-old son by linking her hands in the small of his back, Dru looked over Tate’s head at her uncle. He was extinguishing his cigarette, and the fact that he’d been smoking in front of Tate could mean only one thing. “Aunt Soph having a menopause moment?” Her normally easygoing aunt’s moods had been erratic for the past several months, and they’d all learned to get out of her way when one was upon her.
    “She’s hot-flashing, Mom,” Tate said. “And when Grandpa Ben told her she’d missed one of the cobwebs on the ceiling, she said, ‘How would you like this dust mop up your—’”
    “Tate!”
    “I wasn’t gonna say it, Mom.” But he clearly relished the idea.
    “I got him out of there before she actually completed the sentence anyway,” Ben assured her.
    “But I know what she was gonna say,” Tate said with a grin that showed his adult front teeth. “She was gonna say buttho—”
    “Don’t even think you’re going to slip it by me by attributing it to someone else, bud.”
    “Dang.” With another big-toothed grin, he unhooked his legs and hopped down. Turning back toward the porch, he caught sight of J.D. and stopped dead. “Hey. I’m Tate. Who’re you?”
    “I’m sorry, J.D.; where are my manners?” Hard as it was to credit, Dru had actually forgotten him for a moment. “This is my son, Tate. Tate, this is Mr. Carver.”
    “Just J.D.,” he corrected her and thrust out a callused hand to Tate. “How’s it