Daddy’s Little Convict (Daddy’s Little #5)

1. Chapter 1

T abby was eighteen when she was arrested.

Eighteen exactly, since she was arrested on the eve of her birthday.

At twenty minutes after midnight, which was twelve minutes past the moment when she’d taken her first breath according to her mother and her birth certificate, Tabitha Markle was officially booked into the Cook County jail.

All she’d wanted was to celebrate her birthday.

All her best friend had wanted was to steal a car and go joy-riding.

If only she’d told her so before Tabby had gotten into the car.

Honestly, when Kaylah pulled up in front of Tabby’s house and honked the horn of that candy-red Trans-Am, she did give the car a second look.

Kaylah usually drove a clunky, accidentally two-tone, thirty-something hatchback that more often than not needed a push to get going.

Tabby knew that hatchback very well. She’d been the one pushing it—oh, at least once a week since she’d turned fifteen.

And yet, when she asked, “Where’d you get the ride?” and Kaylah answered, “Rental car,” Tabby was tickled, not suspicious. She hopped into the passenger seat, happy that her friend had gone to such an extent—an expensive car, no less—just to take her out for her birthday.

They went to the bars to try the new fake IDs Kaylah had in her purse.

They probably didn’t work. Small towns like this?

Yeah, no. The bartender knew everybody. Tabby was pretty sure hers was a virgin daiquiri, but she was happy to sit at the bar, sipping on it, enjoying the strawberries and whipped cream while she watched Kaylah dance up the floor with first one guy, then another, and then another after him.

Men fought over Kaylah. Nobody fought over Tabby, but that was all right. She was pretty in her own way. It was just that nobody was as pretty as Kaylah, and they’d been friends since kindergarten. Really, there was no point in getting jealous about it now.

So they danced the night away. Or at least, Kaylah did.

Every once in a while, Kaylah’s man of the moment offered up his wingman for Tabby to dance with, but she wasn’t good at dancing.

She sat at the bar instead, making small talk with all the best wingmen while Kaylah danced, and Kaylah laughed and, finally, Kaylah decided it was time to forget the bar scene and go cruising.

All the way up to Lover’s Point, which honestly overlooked the county dump and smelled like it, but it was rarely ever patrolled by police.

So off they went, Kaylah driving, revving the engine of that rental car and tearing up the roads much faster than Tabby would ever have done with a car she didn’t own.

Perhaps even, especially not in a car she didn’t own.

But she laughed with Kaylah and the two guys her friend thought most suitable to make out with, and not wanting to be a Debbie Downer, she kept her tongue behind her teeth and held onto the Oh-Shit handle, especially going around these tight, winding desert-mountain curves.

Out of town and into scrubland they went, where sagebrush and yucca plants far outnumbered the juniper trees. And the crumbling rock of all the old prehistoric lake beds jutted, angular black shadows against the starlit backdrop of night, until the headlights hit them.

“Watch out for deer,” Tabby cautioned, hugging onto the armrest of her seat.

From the backseat, one of the boys scoffed, “You’re more likely to hit a cow.”

“Watch out for those too,” Tabby drawled.

Everybody laughed and Kaylah just went faster, right up until flashing red and blue lights lit up the interior of their sportscar as the patrol car they hadn’t noticed, tucked behind the roadside scrub, came racing up behind them.

“Fuck,” one of the guys in the backseat said.

“Uh oh.” Tabby craned her neck to study the pursuing lights through the back window.

Kaylah glanced in the rearview mirror and frowned, her brown eyes narrowing. She wasn’t slowing down.

“Pull over,” Tabby sighed. “I’ll help pay the ticket.”

Kaylah neither answered her nor pulled over. Her head shook slightly back and forth and then a corner of her mouth quirked in the slightest of smiles.

The wail of the police siren went off behind them and over the horn, they were ordered, “Pull over right now.”

Kaylah floored the gas pedal and the car shot forward, picking up speed each time she shifted higher. The engine roared, but not louder than Tabby.

“What are you doing?! You’re going to get us in so much trouble!”

“Pull over! Are you crazy?!” one of the guys from the back ordered.

“We’re not pulling over.” Kaylah raced into the next curve twenty miles over the speed limit and Tabby could feel the centrifugal force pulling the car out of their lane and almost all the way off the road on the other side.

Halfway through the curve up ahead, a new set of headlights popped out from around the mountain rock and hit them square in the eyes.

Tabby screamed. So did the guys in the backseat, as they jumped to grab onto both the car and each other.

Kaylah swerved off the road to get around the oncoming car, and then swerved back onto the road, driving into a roadside rut that briefly sent them airborne before all four tires bounced back down on the road.

Kaylah got the car back under control with an expertise that left Tabby blinking. Grateful, but still surprised.

“What are you doing?” she pleaded. “Please just pull over!”

Tight-lipped, her best friend glanced between her and the road. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Even more tight-lipped, Kaylah sighed and frowned, and finally confessed, “Because I didn’t rent the car… I stole it.” Kaylah looked at her.

Tabby’s jaw dropped. So did her stomach. “Wh-what? Oh my god, you took me for a ride on my birthday in a stolen car ?!”

“I wanted tonight to be special!”

Tabby’s jaw dropped all over again. “Special?! We’re going to get arrested!”

From the backseat, one of the boys offered a nervous laugh. “That does kind of make it special.”

“Dude,” his friend said, and smacked his shoulder. “Not funny.”

Behind them, the cop car was right on their ass and, as Tabby stared in dismay through the windshield, in the distance she caught glimpse of another set of red and blue flashing lights winking in and out through the brush and rock further ahead. It had to be at least a mile off.

“We can outrun them,” Kaylah decided.

“No, we can’t!” Pointing through the windshield, she cried, “There’s a cop coming at us from up ahead, we got another behind us.

Where the hell are we supposed to go? There’s no turnoff on this road.

You’re going to get us killed, and I don’t want to be dead for my birthday.

Pull over right now, Kaylah, or I’m never going to be your friend again! ”

“Oh, you’ve been saying that since the third grade…”

Tabitha almost shoved out of her seatbelt as she grabbed her friend’s shirt, yanking on her as she bellowed, “I said. Pull. Over!”

Running through every swear word she knew, Kaylah made a face. She also took her foot off the gas and, flashing her blinkers, pulled the car half off the road, which was all the narrow roadside allowed for before it became the sheer rocky upward slope of an escarpment.

Kaylah got five years with an additional ten on probation for the grand theft auto, reckless endangerment, and evading arrest charges.

Tabby got three, with an additional three years’ probation, just for sitting in the car beside her.

What happened to the boys, she had no idea, but the last she saw of Kaylah was at the sentencing when she was carted off to one prison and Tabby to another, 360 miles south of home.

They weren’t allowed even to hug each other goodbye, which just about broke her, but not as much as her father.

He came to the trial every day. He listened with no expression on his face while she tried to explain what happened and how she didn’t know the car was stolen, and she’d tried to get Kaylah to stop.

He came everyday all the way up to the sentencing, but halfway through it, he shook his head, got up and walked out.

That was the last she saw of anyone in her family.

No one came to visit her in prison. No one answered when she tried to call home on the phone.

Tabby sent hundreds of letters, praying her father or siblings might still love her enough to forgive her if only she apologized just right, but no one responded, not even to say her mother would be rolling in her grave.

Her father’s continued silence was devastating.

The time she spent in jail was the worst three years of her life. Or so she thought, right up until she was released.

They didn’t ship her 360 miles back to where she came from.

They just put her on a prison bus and carted her off to the nearby town of Starvation, with the fourteen dollars she’d earned pennies at a time working in the laundry room, and an official note telling her where and with whom to check in once she reached the halfway house where she’d been assigned until she was off probation.

She had nothing, just the things she’d had on her when she was arrested—her purse, a dead cell phone without a charger, the clothes on her back, and the now worthless bank card that her father had shut off while she was locked up.

The prison bus dropped her in front of Buster’s Hardware, the biggest of the six businesses attached to this small-town strip mall. Southern Utah was hotter than the northern part. As she stood with the heat of the late afternoon sun beating down on her shoulders, she studied the mall.