Chapter 3
Three
C arter answered his phone, knowing it wouldn’t be a call from the one person he wanted to hear from. Since their conversation the day after Mia’s accident, he hadn’t heard a word from her. And now, Bennett was losing his shit, which was undoubtedly the reason his mother was calling.
“Hey, Mama,” he said. He could see his plan of going to the bar and getting completely shitfaced, and maybe bringing home some Amazon woman who’d make him completely forget about his own little pixie from hell, going down the toilet.
Lynnette Hayes clucked her tongue at him like a worried hen. “Carter, you need to go pick up Bennett and head out to Emmitt’s. That boy needs to clear his head. Some good, hard work on the farm will fix him right up.”
It wouldn’t. The only thing that would fix Bennett up was climbing right back into Mia Darcy’s pants, but that caused a whole slew of new problems, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to say that to his mother.
Lord, he wanted to be done with it all. He wanted to not be assigned to take care of poor, brokenhearted Bennett or to lure surly ass Emmitt out of his house or keep Savannah from letting her mouth write checks her ass couldn’t cash.
For someone that was a reputed layabout, he sure as hell didn’t get a moment’s peace from people asking him to fix things.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m on my way to Bennett’s now. Emmitt already texted me.”
Lynnette grew quiet. “Emmitt can text? Does he say more that way than he does in person?”
Carter laughed out loud in spite of his shitty mood. He couldn’t help it. “No. Not really. And yes, in spite of the fact that his hands are the size of a Christmas ham, he can text.”
“All right, then. Get Bennett out there and let him work off some of the mad…or whatever else it is that’s got him wound up like a long-tailed cat. And don’t drink too much while you’re out there! You boys act like fools when you get drunk!”
Carter pulled his truck into Bennett’s driveway, knowing his mother was watching from her front window across the street.
Climbing out of the truck, he waved a little and headed for the porch.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a streak of movement across the backyard.
Turning his head fully, he caught sight of Mia Darcy’s retreating form as she sped through the woods and back to her very own ivory tower.
“Shit,” he muttered, as he opened the door to let himself in. Bennett was standing in the kitchen looking poleaxed, for lack of a better word. “Dude, what the fuck?”
“Mind your own business, Carter,” Bennett snapped, but he didn’t bother to turn around.
That pissed him off. Hell, when Bennett had mooned over her a decade ago, Carter had been the one to drag him kicking and screaming back to the land of the living.
“Last time I checked, you were still my blood…and she’s still the woman who tried to rip your heart right out of your chest, just like in the Temple of Doom, so I figure that makes it my business.
” There was no way this was going to go well.
Bennet would be heartbroken. The whole town would be talking about them.
Again. And any time a Hayes tangled with a Darcy, Samuel would start calling favors.
Property taxes doubled, mortgages were suddenly called in, or payments were misplaced.
That man had fucked them over more times than any of them could count.
“You figured wrong. I can handle this.” Bennet had poured them both glasses of bourbon as he spoke.
Carter laughed—hard. He bent over double with his hands on his knees and laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
The sheer ridiculousness of Bennett, the original love-sick fool, telling him he could handle it was just too much.
Finally, breathless and wiping tears from his eyes, Carter rose to his full height and shook his head.
“You’re so damn dumb I almost feel sorry for you.”
Bennett passed him a glass of bourbon and a warning look to accompany it. “I get that you don’t have more than a passing acquaintance with sympathy, Carter, but in general, people don’t express it by laughing so hard they damn near piss themselves.”
“Can’t help it,” Carter replied, taking the glass and slamming the bourbon before handing it back for a refill.
It burned like fire, but damn, it was worth it.
What he had to say wouldn’t be taken well, but that didn’t make it any less true.
“It’s funny now. But when she chews you up and spits you out again, none of us will be laughing.
We don’t need another reason to hate the Darcys. We got plenty already.”
The Darcys had been his family’s enemy for so long that he wasn’t even sure why they all hated one another. He just knew that it ran deep, and Bennett and Mia would never not be caught in the middle of it. They both needed to accept it and move the hell on.
After a long pause, Bennett nodded. “You’ve made your point. Why are you here?”
Carter shrugged, trying to make it appear casual and not like the whole family plotted to get him out of the house and away from temptation.
“Emmitt’s tearing down that old barn today. Figured a little destruction might improve your mood.”
“You’re driving,” Bennett said as he moved toward the door. “You’ve had less bourbon.”
Carter followed Bennett outside and then climbed behind the steering wheel. Bennett was shifting in the seat, digging between the cushions until his hand emerged, clutching a very tiny and very pointy high-heeled shoe. He cocked an eyebrow at Carter.
“Changing up your wardrobe a little?”
Carter eyed the shoe for a minute and then smiled. That was his in. She wanted that shoe back, and she’d have to see him to get it. He laughed.
“She said she lost that in here. I thought she made it up to have an excuse to come back!” he joked.
“Who?”
Carter shook his head. He was keeping that to himself. Not just because Josie would never want anyone to know, but because he didn’t want the humiliation of having it blow up in his face when she more than likely rejected him.
“Like I’m gonna tell!”
“So you can butt your big-ass nose into my business, but I’m not allowed to know yours?” Bennett groused.
Carter took the shoe and tossed it behind the seat.
“That’s not ‘business.’ That was one wild, crazy, and fantastic night that will never be repeated.
No harm, no foul,” he lied. Deciding to turn the tables, he said, “This thing with you and Mia is going to bring hell down on all of us. You know that, right?”
Bennett sighed. “I know.”
For the longest time, they sat there in silence until Carter finally turned the key in the ignition. Carter thought about Josie, about the scandal he was courting, about the risks, and about all the things the upright citizens of Fontaine would have to say about both of them.
So he asked Bennett the burning question, “Is she worth it?”
“A million times over,” Bennett admitted.
It wasn’t Mia Darcy on his mind then. It was Josie Marcum standing in the middle of his bedroom in a T-shirt that covered her to her knees. He was starting to understand where Bennett was coming from.
“Then do what you gotta do, and we’ll sort out the mess later.”
Carter drove the short distance to the farm and turned onto the rutted gravel road, the truck bumping so furiously that Bennett very nearly came off the seat.
“You gotta get a new truck, man. This thing is a death trap.”
It was true, but Carter loved that truck. He held on to it out of nothing but sentiment. They all knew it. He could have bought another one years earlier and chose not to.
Bennett shook his head. “Fine. Keep this junk heap. And keep your secrets about whatever girl it was who lost a Barbie-sized shoe in here.”
Carter shook his head as he eased the truck into a parking space beside Emmitt’s monster SUV. “I’m not giving up this truck. It’s a classic. Do you know how many hours Papaw and I spent working on this thing together?”
Bennett was still shaking his head as he climbed out. “Not a damn one of us can count that high. From the time you were old enough to hold a wrench, you were covered in grease. Let’s go make Emmitt do all the work while we drink all his beer.”
That had been Carter’s plan all along.
Josie glanced at her phone for the fourteenth time in the last hour. She’d gotten used to daily texts from Carter. Now that they’d stopped, she missed them terribly. She missed him .
Carter had always said something that just hovered on the edge of inappropriate.
That boy—No, he was not a boy. He was a man.
He was definitely all man. And a master of the art of the double entendre.
If she even questioned him about anything he’d said, he’d lay the blame squarely at her door and call her a pervert.
It was infuriating and frustrating and…fun.
He’d given her the one thing she’d been missing in her life.
Not the only thing. The unhelpful voice at the back of her mind reminded her of their last conversation and the offer that was still on the table.
It’d expire eventually. He wouldn’t wait forever for her to decide, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she was being such a coward about it.
Because once he has you, he won’t want you anymore.
Again, with the unhelpful voice. Well, it was helpful, but way more truthful than she wanted to admit.
That very idea terrified her. She didn’t want to be just one of Carter’s women.
She wanted to be different and special, and it terrified her.
Because Carter Hayes, while he was a good time, and not just in the phone number on a bathroom wall kind of way, was also special.
He was funny and far smarter than anyone, including himself, gave him credit for.
And while she’d always thought he was good-looking, she had entered full-blown crush territory and was watching her phone like an idiot teenager.