Smiling smugly at me, he shrugged, “You’re still telling the poor girl’s dad you kissed her, and it didn’t mean jack to you. How would you feel if that was your daughter?”
“I’d be kicking his ass if he did that to Layla,” Hurst chimed in, winking at me evilly behind Kenton’s back.
Looking down at his boots, Kenton shook his head and sighed sadly. “It’s going to break Lorena’s heart when I show her this video and tell her you kissed our daughter—our only baby—and it was all a worthless mistake. You know, Pops always said y’all were meant for each other, and with you stepping up the way you have, he’d be so happy.”
“Damn, son,” Gramps winced. “You’ve broken a dead man’s heart and her mother’s.”
Kenton was opening his mouth to say something else, so I threw my hands up in the air. “Fine! It meant something, okay? It meant a lot, but it was still an accident. She didn’t mean to kiss me—”
“And she booped him on the nose and knocked twice on his head after it,” Carter interrupted, laughing his ass off with the others. “I think we’ve got it on the security cam from the reception area. Funniest shit I’ve seen in a long time.”
“What’s this?” Alex asked as he joined us.
“When Logan kissed Bex,” DB explained through his laughter. “I need to pull the footage up so we can relive it.”
The typically somber and serious Alex burst out laughing, getting a glare from me.
“Sorry, man, but it was hilarious. I was just coming out of the door from the cells when it happened. I swear I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”
“So you’ll talk to her about doing dumb shit?” her dad asked again, looking at me hopefully.
Rubbing my face with both hands, I gave in. “Fine, I’ll tal
k to her about it, but knowing Bex, she’ll probably stew over it for the next thirty years anyway.”
Nodding at me, he turned back to the house and shouted, “Time to make it look like a homicidal maniac’s dream.”
Yup, because I was a sucker, we were going back in to put the plastic down on the floors for her.
As we walked back, Alex asked, “Why are we doing this if she’s getting them sanded and refinished?”
“Because she doesn’t want to risk the guy sanding down too far. She got it in her head that if she gets paint on it, he’ll have to sand down, even more, to get it off and ruin the grain of the wood,” I explained.
“She’s not all wrong,” Hurst nodded. “That can happen. When we were redoing the house, Lindee dropped yellow paint on the floor, and sanding it out was a bitch. The guy who came to refinish the floors had to sand a bit more to get it out of the grain, which meant he had to put an extra coat of varnish over the area. I swear even now, it looks different.”
I have no idea if that was true because I’d never done it before, but Bex had started the job, so I was going to have to finish it.
With the mental image of her shitty gag reflex haunting me.
The next day…
I hadn’t slept for shit last night, and coming into work today to hear that Diego Mantoya, his buddy the linebacker, Ashesh, had made bail just put me in an even worse mood.
“Once it goes to court, they’ll be sentenced. It’s just shitty they got bail,” DB sighed as he told me the news.
“How did that even happen? He’s got a record for similar crimes. Hell, we found the drugs in his home, we have Cinder’s statement, and we’ve got the bodycam footage of those fucking tear gas canisters,” I growled, wanting to tear the head off whoever granted him bail.
“I don’t have the answers for why, Logan. The judge heard the case this morning and granted it. We’ve got three months until his next appearance in court for the case, so we gather as much evidence as we can, and we keep an eye on them.”
“It was Ingleston, wasn’t it?”
Ingleston was a judge who was notorious for granting bail when it shouldn’t be given. We hadn’t been able to get anything on him to date, but there was a lot of suspicion over how lenient he was with some cases.
He didn’t say the words, but the way DB’s lips pinched answered my question.
“I thought the ADA was looking through his cases for us?”
“He is, but there isn’t sufficient evidence to go after Ingleston yet. Mantoya lawyered up with none other than King Kirkwood, too, so it was always going to be a shit show.”