Chapter 8
Eight
This coffee tastes like you should shut up until I finish it.
—Coffee cup
Romeo
“What’s your deal, pal?”
I kept walking, despite the fact that everything inside me urged me to intervene.
I wouldn’t, though.
Couldn’t.
I needed to keep a low profile. And the kind of trouble this was bound to kick up would be the opposite of low profile.
The town I was living in may be small, but it still had a police force. And that police force was all over being a huge pain in the ass when they wanted to be.
“My deal is that that was my spot, and you stole it. Do you know how fucking hard it is to clear snow off a parking spot when you have a broken hand?”
I made it inside where, thankfully, I could no longer hear any of the argument going on at the hotel that was across the street.
Sawtooth may not be huge, but it had a hell of a ski slope, and it drew people from all over.
Some local. Some not local. It was the biggest small town I’d ever seen for three months of the year.
Though, I didn’t know that it would only be for three months from personal experience.
A lot of the crew had explained just how many tourists came knocking on Sawtooth’s door during the months that there was enough snow on the ground to ski down the mountain.
And we were small enough that everything hadn’t gotten insanely expensive due to the number of tourists that visited it a year.
“What can I get you?”
I walked to the far side of the bar and answered the bartender, “Beer. Whatever you have on tap that’s dark.”
He pulled a beer and set it in front of me, and I nursed it for a few minutes before my friends showed up.
I was halfway through before Gentry, Weaver, and Court showed up.
“You didn’t wait?” Court asked as he took the seat closest to me.
“You’re late.” I shrugged.
“Snow’s fuckin’ awful right now,” Gentry grumbled. “I’m hoping it gets bad enough overnight that people stay the fuck home.”
Funny enough, in his second lease on life, Gentry had decided to do the exact opposite of what most of us had done. He’d gone ahead and applied at the police department in Sawtooth. With his new identity, that would be the last place that anyone ever thought to look for him.
Courtland decided to go the trucker route and worked at the mill with me. In the winter months, he became the ice road trucker you saw on the TV doing those dangerous jobs. When that road wasn’t frozen over, he drove regular roads.
“Where are King, Creed, and Odin?” Weaver asked.
“Not coming,” I answered. “They said they were too busy with work.”
We met up like this once a month to get the lay of the land.
We hadn’t been friends in prison. Several of us had been at different prisons across the country and hadn’t met before we’d all ended up here.
The first time we’d been introduced was when Apollo chose this city as our meeting place and gave us all of our new life details.
I pretty much liked everyone except for Odin, though not because he was a bad person. He just didn’t care enough about anyone or anything to make any friends. Neither did he go out of his way to make any meetups, so I hadn’t had the chance to get to know him all that well.
“Understandable.” Court took a healthy swallow of the beer the bartender had just placed in front of him. “What do you think’s going to happen tonight?”
“I think it’s going to snow like a motherfucker and close all the roads,” I admitted. “Some of the guys that’ve been doing this for their entire lives swear that they can tell when it’s going to be a bad one. And every last one of them said that it was going to knock us on our ass.”
“Should’ve gotten groceries,” Court muttered.
“Too late now.” I laughed.
“You’re not lying.” He shook his head. “That’s why I was late. I tried to hit up a few of the grocery stores, but they were all closed. It’s only seven o’clock.”
One thing we’d found out about in this small-ass town was that everything closed down around six. The only thing that stayed open past that time was Hopps—because they lived within a couple hundred feet of their restaurant, and the bar we were currently in.
“Wonder why they all close down so early?” Gentry wondered. “Hell, even the crime seems to shut down.”
“No one out there wants to go involve themselves in a crime when it’s this cold outside.” Weaver chuckled.
Agreed.
It was fucking cold.
I was a Texas boy to my bones, and I only thought that I could handle any kind of weather.
That was before I’d come to Montana and experienced my first ever Montana winter.
Give me a hundred and ten degrees any day over this negative six bullshit.
“Any word from Apollo?” Weaver asked, changing the subject.
“Not much,” I said. “No news is good news.”
“May be cold as fuck out here, but at least I feel like I can breathe,” Gentry admitted.
“Whoa, check them out.”
I turned to “check them out” and found myself staring into baby blue eyes that had a chokehold on my every thought.
Mable
“So, I’m highly attracted to him.”
My best friend, Cordelia, otherwise known as Cody, stared at me with a look of expectation on her face.
“What’s his name?” I wondered.
We were at Hopps, out on the back deck under a blanket and heaters, nursing our chips and hot sauce while we waited for the rest of our food to be done.
She was on her fourth Pepsi, and I was on my fourth sweet tea.
Which was hilarious because two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought to ask for a sweet tea.
Now I had the owner making sweet tea for everyone.
I had it on good authority that one of those people that was happy with the addition of the sweet tea was none other than the man I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“It starts with a J, and rhymes with a spice.”
My mind blanked for a moment as I racked my brain and tried to come up with a name that would match those two descriptors.
“Jarlic?” I teased.
She scoffed.
“Uhhh,” I hesitated as I truly tried and failed to come up with a name. “Jepper?”
Cody put her hands over her face. “You’re not taking this seriously!”
“Oh, I got it!” I teased her. “Jallspice!”
Cody glared.
“Justard!”
“It’s Jacob,” she grumbled.
Jacob? Which spice was that?
Jacob.
Jacob!
“The guy that works at the bank? The one with the really soft hands?”
Cody crossed her arms over her chest and glared.
I looked away just in time to see a familiar old truck pull into the bar’s parking lot.
The man I couldn’t stop thinking about shrugged his worn Carhartt over his shoulders and zipped it closed.
Jesus, the man was built.
Strong thighs. Broad shoulders. One hell of a beard.
He even had great hair, though I couldn’t see it with his toboggan covering his head.
He walked through the snow, his gaze scanning the parking lot, as he made his way to the front doors.
He’d just reached to grab the door handle, his shirt sleeve lifting up to show some of a tanned forearm, when Cody interrupted my thoughts.
“What do you say?”
I looked back at Cody. “I’m sorry, what?”
She threw up her hands. “Are you even listening to me right now?”
“No,” I admitted, lying through my teeth about what I’d actually been thinking about. “I was thinking about why sweet tea was so good, and how you could somehow rhyme the name Jacob with a spice.”
To say that my friend was a dumb blonde would be an understatement.
She was the smartest dumb blonde I’d ever met.
“Here’s your food, ladies,” a waitress said, slipping in and out so fast that I only saw the back of her head.
“Thanks!” I called, even though she’d already gone straight back inside.
“Hope you don’t need any sauce,” I teased.
Cody flipped me off.
She was the sauce queen.
She used so much sauce that it had to add at least four hundred calories to her meals every time she ate.
“I know how to walk inside,” Cody said as she bit into her burger. “Yum.”
I took a bite of my own burger and agreed.
There was nothing better than a Hopps burger.
Nothing.
“So how did the rest of your day go?”
Cody hadn’t missed anything.
Her mom had filled her in on my dad’s douchebag ways.
“Better,” I said, thinking about the lunch I’d shared with Romeo.
Romeo.
For some reason, that name fit him well.
He looked like the type of guy who could star in a love story that could impact entire generations.
“Can’t get any worse after that.” She smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes. “I guess it’s time for you to block everyone.”
“I did that in the car after I pulled in,” I admitted. “I can’t have him in my life anymore. Between the three of them, they’ve made hurting me an art.”
“How’s Brawny doing?” Cody asked.
“Good,” I admitted. “The guy that had him the last six months taught him a lot of manners. He’s so much better now than he was. If I try hard enough, I can almost pretend that he was away at puppy boarding school that helps gain puppies some manners.”
“Your sister is something else.”
“My sister?” I laughed. “What about your sister? She’s more related to you than she is to me.”
“I hate her,” she grumbled. “I can’t stand the way she treats Dad. I wish he’d follow suit and block her from his life.”
“He won’t.” I smiled sadly. “Your dad is too good of a person to ever cut her out of his life. He’ll keep trying until there’s no breath left in his body.”
“Maybe she’ll go to jail or something once your lawsuit comes to light, and we won’t ever have to deal with her again.”
“Her mother and my father would just pay the fines for her,” I pointed out. “She’ll never have a threat of jail time.”
“Are you okay with taking their money?”
We’d talked about this before, and at first I’d been adamant that I wouldn’t take their money.
But the more they proved that they were forever and always on Birdee’s side over mine, I crumbled. At this point, I would take their money. Any money that they didn’t have meant they’d have less to spend on Birdee. And they weren’t going to be able to live off my mother’s trust fund forever.
“Do you think that you could petition the court for your mother’s trust fund?”
I scrubbed at my face. “Honestly, I don’t want to go through that hassle.
I have enough money in my own trust fund from my mother that I’ll never have to deal with money ever again.
I don’t want to go fight for my mom’s money when that’ll just mean having to deal with them more.
I’d rather just stay in my own lane, and hopefully never see them again. ”
“You’ll continue seeing them, because you live in the same small town as them,” she pointed out, bursting my bubble. “And Birdee won’t quit just because she lost a court battle. She makes a living out of making us miserable. To think that she’ll stop just because you sued her and won is na?ve.”
She had a point.
But still…
“We’ll figure it out if the time ever comes that I want to pursue that avenue.”
My mom had left me a bunch of stuff, including the house that my dad, stepmother, and stepsister were occupying.
If I wanted to be petty, I could. But the fight sometimes felt overwhelming, and honestly, useless.
Why give myself a headache when I didn’t need to?
“Does it not piss you off to pay the taxes on that place?”
It did.
A lot.
But usually I just sent the bill to my father, and he paid for it after I pointed out he was the one living rent-free in the house, after all.
“And you think that he’s going to pay it now after what happened today?”
I grimaced.
That bill was due now…