BUSTIN’ LOOSE

  REAL ESTATE RESCUE COZY MYSTERIES, BOOK 9

  PATTI BENNING

  SUMMER PRESCOTT BOOKS PUBLISHING

  Copyright 2023 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying, or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Also by Patti Benning

  Author’s Note

  Contact Summer Prescott Books Publishing

  CHAPTER ONE

  A year ago, Flora Abner worked at a dreary job that she hated, with no end in sight. Today, she was working at a hardware store. It may not have sounded like an improvement if you had asked her a year ago, but she had never been happier.

  “Thank you, and please come again. I hope you get the leak figured out!”

  She waved as her most recent customer left the store, a genuine smile on her face. Becoming part-owner of a small-town hardware store had never been her plan, but she couldn’t say she regretted it. There was something about owning the business that made her hours there feel a lot less dull than they might have otherwise.

  It also helped that this was just her side gig. Her main focus was on flipping the old farmhouse she had purchased and moved into the year before. Now that it was spring, and the weather was improving, she was preparing to tackle some of the larger outdoor projects she had been putting off. Namely, dredging and landscaping the small pond in the woods behind her house. Right now, it was a mess of branches, old leaves, and trash. She wanted to clean it up and cut some well-groomed walking paths through the trees. She needed to sell the house at a decent profit, and the multiple acres of land were going to be a big draw for any potential buyer.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Abner?”

  She forced her thoughts back to the present and turned to see the hardware store’s new employee, Ellison Adams, trying to get her attention.

  “Sorry, I was lost in thought. What’s going on? Oh, and I told you, just call me Flora. Ms. Abner makes me feel old.”

  He gave a slight grimace. For some reason, it was hard for him to call herself and her business-partner-slash-boyfriend Grady Barnes by their given names. It did make her feel old. She and Grady were in their thirties, and Ellison was not quite twenty. Being called Ms. Abner made her feel like someone’s mom. Which was fine. Really. She would just rather be Flora.

  “The woman I’m helping in the garden center needs five bags of gravel and we only have two. When are we getting more in?”

  “I think the next shipment of gravel and mulch is supposed to come Friday,” she said, ruffling through the papers on the front counter. She and Grady had slowly been upgrading to a new computer system, but the previous owner had kept all of his records by hand, and it wasn’t an easy habit for Grady to break. “Yeah, it’s Friday. If she wants to pay for them when she checks out today, we’ll put them aside for her and she can pick them up over the weekend.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Ellison said. “Thanks!”

  He hurried away to the back of the store, where the exit to the garden center was. Flora turned around and leaned back against the front counter, gazing out the window. The sky was overcast, and it had been drizzling all day. She waited for a few minutes, watching the occasional car drive past on Main Street, then turned back around and grabbed one of the notebooks on the counter, flipping it open to her to-do list. She needed to pick a few things up for the house while she was here. It wasn’t just the pond that needed work — she had finished most of the interior repairs that the house needed over the winter, but she still had to replace the kitchen counters and do a few smaller fixes here and there. She wanted to get matching hardware for the bathrooms today. The current fixtures were dated, and new towel rods, toilet paper holders, and vent register covers would help with first impressions.

  She felt the same dull pain as she always did at the thought of selling the house, but did her best to ignore it. Part of flipping houses was selling them when the work was done. That was just a fact. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with the house and the little Kentucky town of Warbler, was all. Between the money she owed and the fact that she needed more income than a part-ownership and part-time work at the hardware store could provide, there was no getting out of it. She had to sell the place in just under a year.

  The bell over the front door jingled and she turned, her customer service smile morphing into something a lot warmer when she saw who had come into the store. The town and the house weren’t all she had fallen in love with. Grady Barnes had been her first friend here in Warbler, and that relationship had quickly become something more. They had been dating ever since the previous summer. When she bought the hardware store with him, they had only been together for a few months. It had been a risk, both financially and emotionally, but she hadn’t had a single reason to regret it. Having ownership in a hardware store had turned out to be a great investment for someone who wanted to flip houses for a living, and it had also brought her and Grady closer than ever. They worked well together, and she couldn’t have asked for a better partner, both in the business and in the romantic sense of the word.

  “Hey,” she said. “Dreary afternoon, isn’t it?”

  “Everything is damp,” he muttered, sounding displeased by the fact. Despite his ire at the weather, he greeted her with a gentle kiss, then looked around the mostly empty store. “Not our busiest day, I take it?”

  “We’ve had a few customers, and Ellison’s helping someone in the garden center right now, but it’s been quiet. It’s the sort of day where most people want to cozy up at home with a book, I guess.”

  “At least all this rain is giving us a chance to see if those roof repairs we made are holding up.”

  He eyed the ceiling suspiciously, but the interior of the store remained dry. Gone were the slow, steady drips that had sprung up over the winter. Flora was proud of the fact that she had gone up on the roof and helped him make the repairs herself. A year and a half ago, she had hardly known how to hold a hammer. Doing most of her own repairs on her house had paid off in bushels with practical knowledge and skills.

  “If you’re here for the afternoon, I might pick up what I need for the bathrooms at home and get going,” she said. “I want to get them done, so I can focus on the kitchen once the new counter tops arrive next week.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be here until close. Sorry I’m later than usual. I got an… unexpected call just as I was about to leave my place.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Unexpected in a good way or a bad way?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s from the prison. My brother got an early release. He’s getting out this weekend.”

  Flora blinked. She knew Grady had a brother, and that said brother had a reputation around town as a troublemaker and was currently in prison on a drug-related charge, but she had never met the man and Grady rarely talked about him.

  “His name’s Wade, right?” she asked. Grady nodded. “Well, that’s good. I’m sure he’ll be glad to be out, at least.”

  “Yeah. He’ll have to stay with me until he gets his feet under him.” He didn’t look thrilled at the prospect. “It’ll be cramped, but I can’t turn him away. He’s family, you know?”

  “I get it. If one of my siblings needed somewhere to stay, I’d offer them my spare room in a heartbeat.”

  Not that either of them would ever need it. She and Grady came from very different financial backgrounds. She was the black sheep of her family, having gone voluntarily from a comfortable, if mind-numbing, white-collar job to a career that demanded a lot more physical labor with much less guaranteed income. Grady, she knew, hadn’t had much money for most of his life, though now that he was the majority owner of the hardware store, that was beginning to change.

  “This probably means I’ll have to cancel our date on Saturday,” he told her. “I feel bad about it, but I need to go pick him up and help him get settled in. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, smiling. “Just focus on your brother. I’m happy to focus on the house and spend some time with Amaretto this weekend. I should probably have Beth over for tea at some point too. I’ve been so busy lately, I keep having to turn her down when she asks me to socialize.”

  Beth was her elderly neighbor, a kind of opinionated woman who had befriended Flora when she first moved in. She dropped by to chat whenever she saw Flora’s truck in the driveway, and even though she drove Flora up the wall sometimes, she had come to value the older woman’s friendsh
ip. She was kind-hearted and well-meaning, even if she could be a bit much sometimes.

  “I’ll make it up to you later,” he promised. “Things should go back to normal after this weekend.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As the week went on, Flora could tell that Grady was nervous about his brother’s homecoming. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it either. She had never known someone who had been to prison before. Still, she did her best to pretend everything was normal, and when she arrived at the hardware store to take the afternoon shift that Saturday, she sent Grady off with an extra tight hug, and the hope that his brother got settled in over the weekend without any problems.

  With the hardware store closed on Sundays, she had a much-needed day off the next day. She forced herself to take time off from working on the house, too. Going from an office job with set hours to a job where the only boss was herself and she could work anytime she was at the house had taken some getting used to, and she had learned the hard way that she needed to take at least one day completely off each week, no matter how tempting it was to do just one or two small jobs around the house.

  Before she started working part-time at the hardware store, she took both Saturday and Sunday off most weeks. Hopefully, once Ellison was more confident with opening and closing the store, she could start doing that again soon. For now, he still needed someone else with him while he worked. Part of the reason was because she and Grady kept changing things. The store’s previous owner, Mr. Brant, hadn’t made a single change to the store for decades, and now the two of them were trying to figure out a good balance between modernizing the place, and keeping to the small-business feel the locals loved.

  Sunday was a lazy day spent with her fluffy white Persian cat, Amaretto, a frozen pizza, and a few episodes of a show she was eager to catch up on. Grady didn’t call, but she did get a text from him letting her know he was thinking of her. She was beyond happy that she had finally been able to convince the man to buy a cell phone. Previously, the only way to contact him had been to call his land line and hope he was home.

  She felt refreshed and ready for another week when Monday came around. Putting off making her own coffee in favor of a stop at Violet Delights, the local coffee shop, for some good coffee, she went through her morning routine, kissed the top of her cat’s fluffy head goodbye, and hopped into her truck. She was eager to hear all about Wade’s first weekend out of prison. It was just a matter of time before she met the man now that he was back in town, but she hoped he didn’t tag along with Grady to the store. She wanted a chance to talk to him first, and hear about how his brother was faring.

  Violet Delights had been one of the very first places Flora had gone back to when she moved to Warbler, and it was there that she had met her now-best-friend, the owner of the coffee shop, Violet. With her black hair, her purple contact lenses, and her stylish clothes, the other woman didn’t look like she belonged in such a small Southern town, and the interior of the coffee shop was no different. Every single inch of the place was done up in various shades of purple. It was like stepping into another world whenever she visited. Flora loved the place — and not just because their white chocolate caramel latte was to die for.

  There was a short line inside when she arrived. She waved at Violet from the back of it, then waited for her turn as her friend made drinks with ease Flora envied. She had spent a few days helping out at the coffee shop the year before, and hadn’t progressed much beyond pouring drip coffee and cleaning the counters. It was hard to remember all of the recipes for the various drinks, though she supposed the fact that Violet had come up with all of them herself probably helped.

  “Good morning,” Violet chirped when Flora reached the front of the line. “Do you want your regular?”

  “I’m boring like that,” Flora said, grinning. “Busy morning?”

  “Mondays always are,” her friend said as she accepted Flora’s card and ran it before handing it back. “I think it helps people get out of bed at the start of a new week when they know they can treat themselves a little on their way to work.”

  “I think they’re on to something. Having a latte in my hand definitely makes it a little easier to open the hardware store.”

  “Doesn’t Grady open most days?” Violet asked as she started making the drink.

  “He usually opens five of the six days we’re open,” Flora said. “Mostly because he’s a lot better at waking up early than I am. Hopefully Ellison will be able to take over some of those days once he’s trained up a bit. I told him I’d handle opening today, though.” She inched closer to the counter, lowering her voice. “His brother, Wade, got out of prison this weekend and is staying with him. I didn’t want him to have to rush back to work first thing on Monday morning after being busy all weekend.”

  “Wade’s out?” Violet’s eyes widened slightly. “Wow. I almost forgot about him.”

  “Do you know him?” Flora asked. Violet was friends with Grady too, but Flora had never heard her mention his brother.

  “Not exactly. It’s more that I know of him. He’s not a great guy. I know he’s been arrested more than once, but this last one was the only one to stick. Grady’s a good person, we both know that, but don’t expect his brother to be anything like him.”

  “I don’t,” Flora said. “I haven’t met him yet, and if I’m being honest, I’m a little nervous about it.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” Violet said, giving her a reassuring smile as she handed the latte over. “Have a good day at work. Let me know if you want to do anything this evening. I should be able to get out of here at three.”

  “I should be able to leave the hardware store by then too. Maybe we can get lunch.”

  Cheered by the thought, she said a quick goodbye to her friend and left, not wanting to hold up the line.

  She parked in the lot behind the hardware store and let herself in through the back door. It felt odd to admit it, but she loved the way the hardware store felt first thing in the morning, with the lights dimmed and completely silent except for the hum of the central air unit. It was peaceful. She had a few minutes to spare before she had to open the store, and she spent them walking the aisles, double checking that everything was in place and admiring the new shelving units Grady had installed. The old, wooden floors were still creaky, but the two of them had cleaned and polished the wood until it looked almost new. They had reorganized too, widening the aisles so it was easier for customers to maneuver the carts and moving the most commonly sought after items to the front.

  They had also added a catalog of everything they could order but didn’t usually keep in stock, along with a stack of order forms and a cup full of pens. While the steady trickle of customers they got each day was helpful and welcome, the bulk of their sales came from small-time contractors who needed supplies for their businesses. The catalog and order forms streamlined the process, so their biggest customers no longer had to call in to place sometimes lengthy or complicated orders. They could fill out a form in the store, or even take one home and drop it in the drop box whenever they had time.

  Flora wanted to implement an online ordering system too, but that was a work in progress.

  She spent an easy morning running the register and chatting with the handful of customers who stopped in. She was beginning to recognize the regulars. One of them, Teddy Martin, was a grizzled yet friendly man who ran a scrap metal business. He was fixing up his office, and she was ringing him up for a few pails of white paint when she spotted another customer striding toward the door with a new drill in a box under one arm.

  Shoplifting was so rare that she almost didn’t register what was happening. She glanced toward the man out of reflex, then turned her attention back to Teddy, opened her mouth to tell him the total, then paused and snapped her gaze back toward the man with the drill.

  “Hey! You need to pay for that!”

  The man froze. She saw his eyes move from the door, to her, then back again and knew he was going to make a run for it an instant before he started to move.