Page 86 of A Case of You
That’s when he’d ordered them to sit.
The fuck.
Down.
They would be driving Jeff to the hospital shortly. Brandon had wanted to let the ambulance take him, but Jeff refused to get in because he’d had one ambulance ride in his life and didn’t want another. So the paramedics cleaned him up as best they could.
Brandon had already called Grace’s parents and assured them she was not only fine, but apparently ready to star in her own anti-hero comic.
“You can’t punish them, Bran.” Jeff’s grin widened. “They saved me.”
“A barbecue fork?Really?” He stared at Grace. “You were going tokillhim?”
She nodded. “Damned straight I was. He fucked with my family.”
Emma and Jeff both gave her fist bumps, although Grace was obviously more gentle with Jeff, due to his scraped hands and arms.
Jake had begged the deputies to get him out of there before Grace murdered him, insisting that she needed to be arrested for being violent.
That’d only made the cops laugh harder.
An initial blow into a Breathalyzer showed Jake was twice over the legal limit to drive. Brandon and Stuart had arrived home just as they were loading Jake’s car onto a wrecker to haul it away. Upon Brandon’s arrival, Jake had ranted and raved at him from where he’d been handcuffed in the backseat of a cruiser.
Brandon wondered if deputies frequently got to laugh that hard over arrests, but apparently the guy had also pissed himself in fear on the lanai. And Jake could barely walk, because Emma had bounced on the dip net pole as she stood on it, injuring Jake’s knees and bending the pole.
The barbecue fork, which had left several deep, bloody gouges in Jake’s fleshy neck, had been taken into evidence.
So had the dip net.
“By the way, we need a new dip net,” Stuart said from the chair. “Do you think they sell barbecue forks at the pool supply store?”
Brandon pointed at him. “That’snothelping.”
“Sir, theysavedJeff. How can you be mad at them?”
“That’s not the point! They put themselves at risk!”
“Would have been more risk if they hadn’t snuck up on him,” Jeff said. He sat with his raw and bandaged hands cradled in his lap, more bandages wrapped around his knees. “I mean, I didn’t want them there, but looks like they took care of themselves pretty well. Seriously. Theysavedme, Bran. I’m not too proud to admit I was in serious fucking trouble. Jake likely would have killed me if he’d gotten his hands on me.”
As it was, Jeff looked like he was getting off easy, despite the fact that he’d have two black eyes tomorrow from how Jake had sucker-punched him.
“Hey, don’t I get points fornotkilling him, Pop?” Grace asked in a remarkably calm voice, her head tipped to the side. “I could have easily punched that fork right through the base of his skull and taken him—”
Brandon held up one hand, the other now covering his mouth as his stomach threatened to upend over that mental image.
Stuart snorted. “She’s got a point, Bran.”
“That’s not the point!” he shrieked from behind his hand.
“Dad, she’s practically memorizedDexter,” Emma drawled, looking amused. “It’s her favorite show. Don’t even get me started on how she lovesAmerican Horror Story.”
“Andyou’regoing to be a criminal profiler,” he mumbled around his hand.
“I think it works for us.” Emma grinned. “I can study her. Channel her powers into good instead of evil.”
Jeff snorted.
“My brother’s an asshole,” Stuart said. “Seriously dangerous. I’m not happy Jeff got hurt, but I’m also not upset that Grace nearly shish-kabobbed Jake.”
