The Forgotten One (The Heirs #2)

Chapter Six

In her pajamas, head buried in her hands, Sarah groaned in frustration.

Patrick was right. The internet was not where she was going to gather her story.

Aaron Stone was everywhere ... at least for a dead man.

Yeah, Sarah had seen the headlines when the billionaire hotel mogul had died. Her employer ran stories for weeks. Mainly those about the trophy wife that wasn’t given anything more than what she’d signed in their prenup agreement. Which, considering what the man was worth ... wasn’t a lot.

Melissa Stone was forced to vacate the home she lived in with the man the week he’d been buried.

Then there was the second name she’d been given.

Maximillian Smith.

What kind of name was that?

A popular one, apparently. There were hundreds of them, of all ages, races, and statuses in life.

None that ran in the same circles as Aaron Stone.

The sound of a key unlocking the door to the apartment pulled Sarah out of the computer and into reality.

Teri walked through the door, two bags of groceries hanging on one arm, one bag on the other. She kicked the door shut once she cleared the threshold.

“Good God, are you still sitting there?” Teri had left at nine in the morning to hit the gym.

Sarah had already been at her computer.

“I can’t find anything!” Sarah all but screamed.

Teri slid the groceries onto the kitchen counter and started removing the items.

Sarah shoved her chair away from her desk to help.

“Didn’t your boss say you weren’t going to google your way out of this one?”

“Patrick underestimates my googling skills.”

Teri smirked. “Not this time.”

“I have cross-referenced Aaron Stone and Maximillian Smith up, down, and sideways. There’s nothing. I haven’t even found a Maximillian in the hotel business.”

“Maybe he isn’t in the hotel world.”

“I looked in the family tree, too. Nada .”

“An enemy?”

Yeah, Sarah considered that, but where did she start there? “Stone was popular with people that made money off of him. His personal life, according to the tabloids, was painted a bit darker.”

Teri gave her a side-eye. “And we know how accurate the tabloids are.”

“My stories are always on point.” Sarah opened the fridge, put the eggs inside.

“Maybe you need to find where Stone used to hang out and go there.”

Sarah tossed her head back with a laugh. “Yeah, right. I doubt the man had a favorite bar he hung around outside of a country club. I’m fresh out of memberships at the moment.”

“Then find out who the bartenders are at his country club and get to know them. If I could bill for the hours of free therapy my customers get during happy hour alone, I’d never have to work again. The bartender hears all.”

“That sounds deceitful.” Not that Sarah minded pushing the truth to get a story. She simply wasn’t going to print anything less than the truth. Patrick’s words “vaguely specific” were on repeat in her head ever since she’d heard them.

“I doubt a dead man’s bartender would worry about retaliation. It isn’t like there’s a patient–doctor confidentiality clause. And did I mention the man is dead?”

Sarah let out a breath. “I know.” The bar scene was all Teri. Not a place Sarah fit in or enjoyed. “Maybe the house staff would know something.”

“You think he still has a staff?”

Sarah tossed the plastic bag into the bigger plastic bag they kept them in. “When rich people die, they still have bills and staff that an estate pays. Yards don’t mow themselves, and houses still collect dust.”

“Sounds like you have some stalking to do.”

Teri grabbed an apple, tossed it in the air, and grinned.

“Sounds illegal,” Sarah muttered, almost to herself.

“If the man was alive, maybe. Besides, you’re not casing the joint to rob it. You’re trying to make friends with the staff.”

Sarah tapped her fingers on the counter. “Fine.”

She returned to her computer to write down Aaron Stone’s address.

Sunday was consumed with cleaning out the garage and making room for the new truck.

Using a window marker, Max wrote For Sale and then Best Offer and parked his old truck on the street leading into the neighborhood. By noon, five people had called, all of them giving him a price. He didn’t negotiate; he just wrote down their phone number along with what they wanted to spend and said he’d make his decision by the end of the day.

The end of the day happened just after two.

Elbow-deep in rearranging the tools in his garage, Max heard someone call out over the music he had blaring.

Standing next to his truck was the acne-ridden face of a kid who couldn’t be more than sixteen. All legs and no muscle, the boy waved, and Max turned down the music.

“Hi,” he said.

Max grabbed a towel from his workbench and wiped his hands. “Hello.”

The kid pointed a thumb behind him. “Is that your truck that’s for sale?”

“Yeah.”

“How much you want for it?”

“Are you even old enough to drive?”

“I’ve had my license for two months,” the kid said with a smile.

“And you want a truck for your first vehicle?”

The kid shrugged.

“It sucks down gas,” Max explained.

“Doesn’t everything that isn’t electric?”

He had a point.

Max grabbed a pencil off his workbench and the pad of paper that sat beside it. “Tell your parents to call me—”

“My, ah ...” He shifted his weight from one foot to another, looked around. “My parents aren’t paying for it. I am.”

Max stopped writing.

While this wasn’t a neighborhood that was filled with families flush with extra cash to buy their kids new or next-to-new anything ... there were a fair number of teenagers driving around in hand-me-down cars. And last Max had checked, none of the kids went around asking if there were any side jobs they could get paid to do. And before the age of sixteen, kids didn’t work. Not legally anyway. “You have enough money to buy a truck?”

“Depends on what it costs.”

“Best offer.”

“I’m not really sure what that means.”

“It means the person that offers me the most money is the one I’m selling it to.”

The kid’s shoulders slumped. “Oh.”

Max felt like he’d just taken away a puppy from a five-year-old. “It’s an old truck. Besides, you haven’t test-driven it.”

“Don’t need to.”

“Kid, you should always test-drive anything you buy.” Women, cars ... jobs.

“I see you out here working on it. You keep things clean around here. Someone like that doesn’t put off maintenance.”

He wasn’t wrong. The truck was old, but Max kept it running.

“Besides, they have auto shop at school, so I’m learning stuff,” he added.

“What’s your name?”

“Tucker.”

“You sure you wouldn’t be better off with something that gets better gas mileage?”

“You can haul stuff with trucks. People around here leave junk in their yards. I could use it to make money. You can’t do that with a car.”

Max narrowed his gaze—something about the kid felt familiar. “You need to make money?”

Tucker looked away. “I like money.”

Max tossed the towel in his hands onto his bench. “Well, Tucker, what’s your offer?”

Doubt fell like a curtain over the kid’s face. “I only have four hundred and fifty. Well ... I have five hundred, but it will need gas, so I can spend four fifty.”

“What about insurance?”

“Once I’m making money, I can afford that.”

Max would bet his new truck that Tucker had no intention of getting insurance.

“Will your parents help with insurance?”

Another shrug. “Maybe ... yeah. Probably.”

The kid didn’t lie well.

Max grabbed his keys. “You need to take it for a test-drive.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Like I said, you don’t buy something unless you try it out first.”

Tucker’s smile revealed crooked teeth and genuine excitement.

Max closed the garage door and walked to the corner where the truck was parked.

He tossed Tucker the keys and climbed into the passenger seat.

The kid jumped into the driver’s seat like he’d just won the biggest prize at the county fair.

He adjusted the mirror and ran his hand around the steering wheel. “Is the radio new?”

Max had purchased it less than a year ago. And it cost more than poor Tucker had in his car fund. “Not really,” Max lied.

Tucker turned over the engine and started to put the truck in drive.

Max stopped him. “It’s always best to let a car warm up. Especially old trucks.”

He sat back. “How long?”

“At least until the idle revs down. And on cold days, five minutes if it’s been sitting for any length of time.”

“Oh.”

Tucker sat back and waited.

The engine settled, and Max told him he could go.

“The brakes are a little—”

Tucker hit the brakes too hard; they both lurched forward.

Max extended a hand, kept himself in place by holding on to the dashboard.

“Sensitive.”

“I’m sorry.”

Max tightened his seat belt and questioned his sanity for getting in a car with a kid behind the wheel in the first place.

“You haven’t driven it before. All cars—new and old—take getting used to.”

“Right. Okay.”

The next fifteen minutes, while tense for Max, weren’t that bad.

Tucker followed the road rules and didn’t exceed the speed limit by even one mile per hour. Which honestly made Max a little nuts.

No one followed the speed limit that closely.

Tucker pulled up to Max’s house and turned off the engine.

“Well, what do you think?” Max asked.

“I like it. Drives nice. It’s clean.”

Max tried not to grin.

“Do you want to look at the engine?”

“I’m not really sure what to look for.”

Max cleared his throat. “Kid, never tell anyone that if you’re buying a car from them.”

“But I don’t—”

Max pointed. “That’s the lever to pop the hood.”

Outside the truck, Max gave Tucker a mini–man lesson. “Look for leaks. Push on the belts. Is the battery showing corrosion? In a used car, always check the heater and air conditioner. How much wear is left on the tires ...” Max went on, knowing damn well the kid wasn’t going to remember everything.

Once the hood was down, they both stood staring at the truck.

“I’ll sell it to you,” Max told him.

“Really?”

“Four fifty is kinda low, but I was a kid once.”

Tucker looked at the truck with a new light in his eyes. “Wow, I can’t believe it.”

Max walked back to the house, brought out the pink slip. After explaining to Tucker what he needed to do to transfer the truck into his name, the kid reached for his wallet.

Max stopped him.

“The price is four fifty, but I don’t want cash.”

Tucker looked confused.

“I have a lot of stuff I’m going to be cleaning out this week. You can come back next weekend and use the truck to get it out of here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and I’m getting tired of mowing my lawn. Do you know how to do that?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars a week to mow my grass. I have the mower. All I ask is that you leave it clean.”

“I can do that.”

“Great. You figure out how much money it costs you to take a trip to the dump. And keep in mind, Goodwill takes anything useful for free. Then let me know what you’ll charge, and we’ll whittle away at the truck payment. Sound good?”

“Are you sure?”

“One more thing.” Max raised a finger in the air.

“What?”

“You need to look up liability insurance. You get caught driving without insurance, and the cops can take the truck away.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s the law, kid.”

“Insurance is expensive.”

“That’s the price of owning a car. You do the insurance homework, let me see it next week. The truck is covered under my insurance for the rest of the month or until you take that pink slip to the DMV and change the registration. Put the pink slip somewhere safe, not the glove compartment, and do the DMV stuff later.”

Max removed the key to the truck from his ring and handed it and the pink slip to Tucker.

“There you go.” Max extended a hand.

Tucker went to shake on the deal.

Max held his palm to his a little longer than normal. “Firm shake, always look a man in the eye.”

Tucker tightened his grip, kept his eyes on Max.

Minutes later, Tucker pulled away from the curb, and Max knew he felt even better than the kid did about the whole deal.