Chapter Thirteen
J ocelyn jolted awake, her mind foggy and disoriented as she sat up on the sofa and caught her laptop before it fell to the floor. The soft click of a lock snapped her attention over to the door Birch was opening slowly. His back was to her as he slipped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.
Although she told Angelo she wouldn’t be delving into the invoices and deposits until morning, she and Birch had sat up late into the night entering the numbers into her spreadsheet and flagging the ones they deemed suspicious for further investigation.
It was a long night with few words spoken. The tension thrumming off of Birch put her own nerves on edge. She could see the dots connecting in his head as he flipped back through the stacks they’d already finished with, but whatever those connections were, he wasn’t sharing. Every so often he would stop and stare at the floor for a few minutes, his shoulders hunched and his hands flexing. Then, as fast as he fell into the zone he would return to work, reading out the numbers and details to her while she typed them out until she literally fell asleep on the job.
Getting to her feet, she trudged to the bathroom to wake herself up with a hot shower, the early light of dawn peeking between the heavy hotel curtains. She stripped down and stepped under the spray, her thoughts on the man who had just snuck out the door without a word.
She barely knew him.
So what was it about Birch Baker that made her so certain he truly wasn’t the bad guy in this mess?
It wasn’t like her to overlook flaws, to rationalize them away with weak justifications.
And being under investigation for fraud was a pretty damning flaw.
But no matter how hard she tried to be objective, she simply couldn’t believe the man she was falling for was able to fool her so completely. His reactions to everything were too honest, too raw. The hurt flashing across his face when she demanded he reassure her he wasn’t the bad guy was too deep.
And it was those unfiltered moments of vulnerability that drew her in further.
She could never be accused of being a bleeding heart when it came to men. Not anymore, now that she knew there were guys out there who had no qualms about using her to their advantage. And she never had the desire to fix, save, or change anyone.
But Birch didn’t need fixing. Or saving. Or changing.
What he needed was to be seen and heard for who he was, not who he was deemed to be.
When his guard dropped, every tiny thing he revealed called to her. She wanted to know all the stories he held tight to the chest, wanted to know how he saw the world. Even if it was only for the short time before she returned home, she wanted to know everything that Baker boy kept from the rest of Epson.
And there was one story in particular she needed to hear from him, not from the whispers around town.
Wrapping a towel around her chest, she returned to the sofa and tugged her phone out from between the cushions, tapping his number and waiting impatiently until he answered.
“If you’re going to run out on me, at least make it a fair race,” she said, squeezing the water from her hair. “I’ll be at the track in fifteen.”
*
Birch stood at the starting line of Epson High’s track and watched Jocelyn’s car pull into the parking lot.
He’d woken up sprawled out in the corner of the hotel sofa with her legs on his lap and spreadsheets in a pile at his feet. For all the aches in his bones from the awkward position he’d slept in for a few hours, his head had gone to one place and one place only.
He wanted to wake up with her every day.
And that was a desire he needed to shake if he was going to survive the next few weeks.
Yet when her name appeared on his phone while he was seeing Grey off to school, his pulse raced and he answered.
Now here he was, unable to look away as she strode down the hill toward him in her grey racerback top and black shorts.
“You came,” she called as she neared the starting line, pulling her hair into a ponytail.
Stretching out his shoulders, he turned toward the track. “I shouldn’t have.”
With a hmm, she set her phone and two water bottles at her feet. “First race, one hundred yards.”
A tinny voice counted down from her cell, the buzzer sending him tearing toward the finish line. Crossing it a split-second before she did, he slowed to a walk and doubled back. “Four hundred now?”
“Of course.”
He took the four hundred with enough time to turn and watch her cross the trampled white paint on the track, her eyes hard. “Eight?”
“Of course.”
He retained the lead in the eight-hundred-yard race until the final stretch, his legs unable to move fast enough to hold it as she surpassed him, clinching the win easily and finishing the lap to grab the water bottles.
“Fifteen?” she asked, taking a long drink.
“Of course.”
He knew he’d be slaughtered in the distance run. Back in his high school days before he was expelled, he was strong in the speed bursts but always faltered in the pacing needed to win the longer races. So it was no surprise to him when she finished a solid eight or nine seconds ahead of him, already walking her heart rate down when he caught up to her.
“I’m going to dive into the deposits and invoicing today” she told him, as they looped the track slowly. “Anything I should watch for?”
“I have no idea. Ryder does most of the deposits, so the whole thing might be a clusterfuck.” Looking over at the trio of men who’d joined them on the track, he lowered the volume of his voice. “I never should have trusted him.”
Pursing her lips, she scooped up her phone and their empty water bottles as they passed the men. She seemed distracted, her usual relaxed banter nonexistent as they began their trek up the hill to the parking lot.
“Birch?”
“Yeah?”
Stopping at her car, she stared at the ground for a moment before she turned to him. “What were you sent away for?”
He knew this was coming. It sat like a brick in the back of his mind, knowing he would eventually need to lie to her and dreading the moment he would have to do it.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his basketball shorts, he took an instinctive step back. “Armed breaking and entering.”
“Armed,” she echoed, her steel eyes narrowing on him. “Armed with what?”
He knew the story inside and out and the lie rolled off his tongue as easily as it had six years earlier. “A crowbar and a switchblade.”
“Did you hurt anyone?”
“Not physically, no,” he answered, taking another step back. “Did a lot of damage to the home, scared the couple pretty bad, but no, no one was hurt.”
Her delicate brows furrowed, her lips pursing as she nodded slowly. “That’s what the rumors are. I just wanted to hear it from you.” Giving him a tight smile, she unlocked her car and got in. “I’ll text you later and we can go over anything I flag, okay?”
His voice was tight in his throat, and he sounded hoarse when he spoke. “Yeah. Sure. Talk to you later.”
With a wave, she backed up and pulled out of the lot, leaving him alone to remind himself that it had been worth it.
Even if, for the first time since he walked into the state pen six years ago, he didn’t believe it.
*
Jocelyn yanked the elastic from her ponytail and ran her hands through her hair, blowing out a puff of air in frustration.
No matter how she organized the numbers, Serpent’s Tongue Ink’s deposit slips didn’t add up to its cash invoices. Breaking it down week by week, there was a constant overage of around five hundred dollars, the final total coming in at almost thirty thousand dollars for the year.
Checking the time, she hit the print button and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth, her eyes blurring from staring at a screen for thirteen hours.
She didn’t contact Birch all day, her determination to get through the stack of disorganized slips and handwritten invoices never wavering.
Her mother had swung by earlier, bringing with her a homemade meal and half a tray of lemon squares. They chatted for a bit until the last bite of lasagna was gone, her mom not so subtly fishing for information about Birch and Jocelyn deflecting it with talk of the family’s plans for the upcoming Fourth of July celebrations.
Collecting the stack of spreadsheets from the printer, she crawled into bed and set them beside her before giving in and firing off a text.
U up?
Birch was quick to respond, her phone buzzing in her hand as he called back.
“Hey,” she greeted him, snuggling down into her blankets. “How was your day?”
She could hear him closing a door, followed by the soft creak of his mattress. “Not bad. Got my ass handed to me on two distance runs this morning. Spent most of the afternoon doing a couples tattoo. Read through Grey’s assignment for his technical communications course without screaming. And now I’m lying in bed on the phone. How about you? Find anything the Feds might be interested in?”
Rolling onto her side with a groan, she turned off the light. “Well, it’s not good news. I’m going to need you to bring over Serpent’s Tongue’s bank statements from the past year as soon as you can round them up.”
“That good, huh?” he sighed. “I have them filed away, so I’ll drop by with them tomorrow after work. I’ll bring dinner too if that will soften the blow.”
“We’ll worry about it over burgers,” she agreed. “Can I ask you something personal?”
He went quiet for a moment. “Sure.”
Frowning into the darkness, she tightened her blanket around herself. “Why did you do it? The break-in?”
His response was quick, almost rote. “It was a Saturday night, and I thought the house would be empty because it was July Fourth and most of the town was at the park for the fireworks. I parked a block away and took the path between Hubbard Street and—”
“Not the how,” she interrupted. “The why.”
There was a long pause before he replied. “I was a twenty-two-year-old single guy raising two boys and under a lot of financial pressure. I didn’t have a strong role model growing up, so when things got rough, I looked for the fastest way to deal with it.”
Something was off in his answer. His words sounded as though he was reading a formulated statement to a judge. “Do you regret it?”
He chuckled dryly. “I was thinking earlier about that. Yeah, I do. I don’t regret a lot of things I’ve done, but that is one of them.”
“Would you do it again?”
“What do you think?”
Staring at the faint light peeking through her curtains from the street below, she thought about it for a moment. “I can’t even imagine you doing it the first time, so no, I don’t think you’d do it again. I have a hard time seeing you as a bad guy. Which I worry may come back to bite me in the ass, if we’re being up front here.”
He exhaled, the sound of his rustling blankets carrying through the phone. “It’s nice not being seen as the bad guy right out of the gate. I’d kind of like to keep it that way.”