Hot Mess (An Iron Tornadoes MC Romance Book 5) by Olivia Rigal Read Free Book Online Page A

her story.
    "The school gave me a week to move out. Thanks to a college friend, I moved into a tiny sublet, took the first job I found, and managed to keep it together."
    So she hasn't been a dancing barmaid that long. Good.
    "I lived in a haze for a bit and it took me a few months before I allowed myself to think. That's when I remembered Mom bitching about some life insurance contract she was always paying. I wanted to kick myself for not thinking about it sooner. I went searching through her papers hoping she'd taken a policy that would, you know, give me a sort of starting block if something happened to her."
    She squeezes my hands in hers and I squeeze back gently to encourage her.
    "That's when I found out!" She spits out each word. "There was a contract all right, but the beneficiary was John F. Russel." She looks up from our hands to my eyes and the mixture of sadness and anger on her face is heartbreaking.
    "See, my mother was a very organized person. You can't run a school with hundreds of kids if you're not meticulous and able to keep up with the paperwork. I knew right away that his name on the contract was no accident. She couldn't have postponed changing the name of the beneficiary for more than twenty years. No way."
    "So you searched for your father." Who wouldn't? I would have gone looking as well. I try to imagine how I would have felt in her place. Hurt. Yeah, hurt and betrayed.
    "I looked up the address on the contract in the white pages, found a phone number and called. Guess what? Not only do I still have a father, but I also have a grandmother. She lives in the Pink Flamingo community of Point Lookout. She's old and she's lost a few marbles, but when I called, she knew right away who I was and she promised she would let my father know I had called."
    Kristal pulls her hand from mine and wraps her arms around herself as she tells me about the letter I found in her bag last night, how she quit her job, cashed her savings, and drove all the way to Florida to meet her grandmother and help her father.
    That still doesn't explain how she ended up running drugs, but I'm now confident we'll get there.
    I just need to give her a little time.

    * * *

12
    " H ow did it go with your grandmother?"
    A huge smile grows on her face. She stops bracing herself and answers with passion.
    "She's incredible," she says. "She's in her nineties and still going strong. She's tall and so big." Her hands spread wide to indicate a very large woman. "It must have skipped a generation 'cause in the picture, Dad's so rail thin, it makes me want to cook for him."
    I laugh good heartedly. I love that she's the caring type. I keep to myself the fact that, with such genes, it's probably her father's drug habit that has kept him on the skinny side.
    "She was a teacher, just like Mom. Of course, she's retired, but she barters tutoring kids against some housekeeping and stuff. That's how she's managed to stay in her home."
    I nod to encourage her to keep going while wondering if the pension of a retired schoolteacher is enough to pay for the maintenance in the Pink Flamingo community. It's a rather fancy over fifty-five gated community with serious security. Maybe the drug money her son does is going to some good use. Somehow I doubt it. That sort is more the taking than the giving type.
    "She had many sisters and brothers and so she's got a bunch of nieces and nephews who had kids as well. I guess that makes them my second cousins or something, I've never been big on family stuff..." Her smile vanishes again and she rolls her lips together riding on a rollercoaster of emotions.
    Discovering an instant new family sure must be overwhelming, especially for someone who's still mourning her mother and never knew her dad.
    "You know what the strangest thing is?"
    I shake my head. I have no idea.
    "She doesn't blame my mother one bit for running away with me. She said she would probably have done the same."
    "But you still do?"
    The surprise in