Free Blame It on Texas by Christie Craig

asked by a football player. Not that I wasn’t a catch.” He chuckled. “As a matter of fact… Where did I put that box?”
    He walked across the room and flipped open a box and pulled a book. “Here.” He turned a few pages. “Tell me I wasn’t every woman’s dream.” He handed the book to Dallas.
    Dallas laughed. “Damn, Dad, you looked like Tony.”
    “He couldn’t have been that good looking.” Tony, Dallas’s brother, walked in from the bedroom with a box in his hands and continued toward the front door. “Are we going to load furniture and boxes today, or are we gonna stand around and shoot the shit? You see that’s the difference between PIs and cops. We actually do the work.”
    “Kiss my ass.” Dallas laughed and passed the book to Tyler.
    Tyler looked at the picture. “Actually, I think you look like Dallas, too.”
    Mr. O’Connor reached in and flipped a couple of pages, and put his finger on a face. “There’s Nancy Bright. Soon to be Nancy Bradford. Pretty thing.”
    When Mr. O’Connor’s finger shifted away, Tyler’s breath caught. Holy hell, but it was as if he was looking at Zoe Adams.
    “Damn,” he muttered.
    “What?” Mr. O’Connor asked.
    “That’s… her. I mean, that looks like the waitress.”
    Dallas walked over and glanced at the picture. “Maybe it’s because they’re both redheads.”
    “No. The eyes, the mouth, everything.” The breasts.
    “Don’t tell me you’re actually thinking she might be this Bradford kid,” Dallas said. “That’s crazy.”
    “And absurd.” Tyler remembered Zoe saying, Admit it. There is a possibility that I’m right. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. Albert Camus.” Tyler looked back at the picture. “The resemblance is uncanny.”
    Tyler looked back at Mr. O’Connor. “Can I borrow this?”
    “Sure.” The old man pointed a finger at him. “I know where you work if you don’t return it.”
    Tyler remembered something else Zoe had said. And now someone is telling me to leave.
    It hadn’t made a bit of sense, especially when she admitted she hadn’t told anyone why she was here in Texas. But… if anyone knew her mother, and took one look at Zoe, they wouldn’t have to be told.
    Did that mean someone really had been threatening Zoe Adams?
    He set the book down on the bar. “Let me help you guys load a few things, and then I’d better head out.”
    “We’re going to end up taking her case, aren’t we?” Dallas asked.
    “Maybe,” Tyler said. The look Zoe had sent him when she told him thank you flashed in his head. “Show me some furniture that needs carrying out. You aren’t going to have me long.”
    Zoe sat at her kitchen table with her lunch—a bag of carrots and a bowl of ranch dressing—and her computer in front of her. She leaned her elbow on the table, and it wobbled. Looking under the table, she toe-kicked the piece of folded newspaper back under the table’s right leg.
    Not that she expected much from the prefurnished one-bedroom rental. She’d been fortunate to find one atall. Still the bland, run-down place and furniture did make her long for her own apartment. Her place in Alabama wasn’t anything grand, but it was cozy, colorful, and filled with things that belonged to her. She’d never thought of herself as materialistic, but she missed her things. Stupid things, like the bright red throw pillows her mother had made her, her favorite frying pan, and her microwave that had the perfect popcorn setting on it.
    Glancing over at the stain-spotted sofa, she frowned. She never sat on the piece of furniture because it looked… filthy, and for some reason every time she looked at it, she imagined some hairy, heavyset couch potato stretched out with half his dinner spilled on the sofa. Hence the stains.
    Refocusing on the computer, she finished reading another article on Tyler Lopez and frowned. “How could they do that to him?” Zoe muttered, feeling angry at a system that