Chapter Seven
All happiness and floating in protective bubbles vanished.
“Throwin’ yourself around on stage with that prick last night? You still that beauty queen you always used to be? Your picture’s all over, seducing that Disclaimers asshole.”
What was Jason talking about?
“Who is it this blazing early?” McClintock’s deep voice grumbled still scratchy with sleep.
“Who the hell was that?” Jason rumbled through the cell.
Charlie bolted to her feet, tripping over her banjo and barely hopping aside before stepping on it. She dashed to her window, peering up the road. Wind whistled through the gap in the sash, smelling of impending rain, licking across her skin.
“What’s wrong?” McClintock’s baritone resonated at her back.
She glanced over her shoulder to see he was taking in her rigid stance and not liking it.
“Jesus, Charlie, you playing your same old tricks on Thaddeus McClintock?” His real name was Thaddeus?
“You’re dumber than I thought. Gonna let him knock you up too?
Fuck, he just uses girls up and spits ’em out.
Now you got him in my daughter’s house?” Jason fumed in her ear.
“You think you got a chance at him? You divorce me and hop into bed with him to replace me?”
Oh God. She couldn’t deal with this on two hours of sleep. Why did Jason always insist on sabotaging her private life? She’d done everything to shrink away and, still, it was never enough.
“Is Daisy all right?” she asked, pacing away, trying hard to ignore the hateful barbs.
She hated this knot of dread tightening in her belly, this knot that torqued tighter with each passing month.
“Daisy’s mad at me. Talking shit about wanting to go home, all damn night. As if my place ain’t also hers.” No, a dingy studio with a man who couldn’t hold down a job and decorated with J.D. bottles was hardly a home.
This farmhouse that had once been in Charlie’s family for generations and becoming ramshackle, was still far more of a home than a deadbeat dad’s place would ever be.
“So, fine, she gets her wish. Like mother like daughter with so much attitude. I swear, if you’ve got Thaddeus McClintock hanging around, I’m going to flip my sh—”
She hung up. Ashen. Shaking.
Jason hardly adhered to his visitation with their daughter as it was, and now he was going to cut Daisy’s weekend short? Color her surprised. It was for the best anyway. She didn’t want her little girl anywhere near him, so he was doing them all a favor.
“You have to go.” She panicked, voice knotting tightly, whirling around.
Her eyes flitted up from her phone to McClin—Thaddeus? Trouble…
Her breath froze in her throat. Her Miss Lone Star sash hung contemplatively in his grip.
His straw-blond hair was boyishly tousled, sparkling gaze fixed upon her as his brow pleated. “Why?”
God, oh God, oh God. He couldn’t be here, looking like he fit.
She ached that this wasn’t her life. That he wasn’t the man to put his boots under her bed at the end of each workday.
Looking like they’d been meant to lie together teasing each other with cheesy lines on lazy Sunday mornings.
And if he was the player Jason had accused him of being…
Jason was wrong about most things, but a broke clock was right twice a day.
Did Trouble play women like he played guitar?
Of course he did. Illness twisted her stomach.
Still, he was so beautiful, his arm propped under his head, popping his suntanned bicep, his cattle-grate abs, and the treasure trail of blond that peppered over his navel beneath the disheveled sheets outlining the heavy bulge between his thighs.
It was all an illusion. Cute guys charmed girls; reeled them into their webs.
Jason, case in point.
What the hell had she been doing? Bringing a guy home?
She severed eye contact and hurried for her panties and tank top from the night before.
His confused brow looked too real, too innocent, to process.
And too much like the past repeating itself.
A dropout? Couldn’t hold a job? A band frontman who would always be traveling and satisfying himself at whatever town he was in?
The wind was thrashing now, and the moonlight had vanished. A storm coming in?
He cleared his throat and sat up, the sheet falling dangerously low as he propped his knees up and rested his forearms across them, still fingering that sash. “I, eh, thought maybe I could, you know, take you to breakfast to talk about that proposit—”
“I’m serious. You have to go.” That proposition was just him leading her on for more action.
She threw on a pair of work jeans as her long hair tangled around her limbs, shimmying into them and buttoning them.
“You steppin’ out on a man, Flower Girl?” His voice cooled. “Is he on his way home?”
“What?” She whirled around, this time anger pricking. He was suggesting she was cheating? “I’ve never cheated on a soul in my life. I was honest, and faithful, while—while he—” Chewed me up and spit me out with his toxic infidelity.
“Easy … okay,” he said, pushing to standing like the tall, labor-muscled drink of water that he was and rubbing her arms.
God, she wanted to sink into the touch.
“No. I haven’t been with anyone since—” She shook her head to shut herself up again.
She owed him no explanation.
Steeling herself, she pulled away, grabbing his wallet, his jeans, wadding his plaid that smelled of bad choices and delicious mistakes and illusions that weren’t real, and this time, shoved his clothes into his hands, belt buckle dangling and clunking against her knuckles.
“H-hey now,” he croaked as if hurrying to placate.
She found his boots next, also shoving those into his hands as he tried to juggle everything and noticed his, his, oh he was a well-endowed man. Her eyes darted away, the soreness between her thighs reminding her just how he’d rocked her world with the tool in his belt.
“You’re really kicking me out?” And was there an ounce of shock in his tone?
Her eyes stung with tears at the sound of it.
“I thought we … I mean, it really seemed like we…”
Her eyes flitted back to his. She regretted it instantly. Because it wasn’t shock or anger marring his brow. The furrow was riveted with hurt. As if he really had wanted to stay. Was this charmer actually hurt by a one-night stand asking him to leave?
He huffed a wry laugh that was anything but humored and scratched his hair. “Okay, sorry I even said that about steppin’ out. It’s just … where’s that girl I met last night? The one who sang so pretty? The one whose face lights up touching a fossil, or collects magazine pictures in a scrapbook?”
“She doesn’t exist,” she whispered. At his look of utter sadness, she swallowed and closed her eyes. “Look, I don’t ever bring guys home but—”
Here goes. She inhaled deep. Exhaled. The kicker. Admitting she had a kid was usually enough to send a single guy hauling ass for the nearest exit.
It didn’t matter if her kid was beautiful and funny and innocent, loving unicorns and always begging for horses and chickens.
All that mattered to a guy was that she wasn’t his.
She hated the idea of this man fleeing like he was dodging a bullet, but Jason was never going to let her live a normal life, and the few guys she’d gone to dinner with since had stopped calling when she’d mentioned her daughter.
“I have a kid, and she’s coming home early from a, a sleepover—” She couldn’t tell him the line of fire he was standing in right now.
Jason thought he could have whatever flings he wanted but there’d be hell to pay if she, too, moved on.
“I’m not cheating on anyone. I’m divorced.
I haven’t been with a man in years until you.
” Her eyes bounced away, because he was so much more experienced than her.
“I can’t let her see someone rolling out of my bed. She’d never understand…”
“Okay … I get that. I’m sorry. But…” He was nodding, but more to himself, as if she’d validated something for him, and guilt sliced through her.
No. No guilt.
This was no strings. Two consenting adults who’d made no promises.
She never got babysitters. She’d worked so hard to get her research study off the ground, since it was the one thing Jason couldn’t destroy.
She was raising Daisy alone—except for when the courts dictated visits to a dad who couldn’t even be bothered to pay his child support.
There was nothing wrong with wanting to feel wanted on a rare night.
His brow twisted. She reached out to wipe away his concern, feeling her own furrow with unshed emotion she always held within, but stopped herself and her hand dropped. “I need you to understand. I just—”
“Can I call you, then?” He didn’t care that she had a kid?
Despite the resignation in the man’s eyes, a spark of hope still dwelled there.
“Me being a mom doesn’t bother you?”
“Is it supposed to?”
Her texts buzzed. Five minutes. Get him out of the house or so help me God, Charlie, there’s gonna be hell to pay.
“God, God, God,” she whispered, then tossed down her phone on the rumpled sheets and knotted up her hair.
Single moms didn’t get second chances. And anyone who’d endured Jason Thompson should know better than to trust a smooth-talking showman in a country band. They fired up a girl’s heart then smashed it like a guitar at the finale.
Her heartbeat ratcheted up as she raced to the door, opening it, hurrying him through as he, too, fought to get his legs into his jeans and into his boots, cramming his socks in his back pocket and still holding his wallet and his wadded flannel, stooping to snap up his beat-up Stetson from the corner.
At her silence, he glanced away as tight-lipped, the muscles beneath his ears pumped. He slipped between her and the jamb, pausing in the doorway, chest to chest, so close, as his jaw pumped and his blue eyes burned down on her.
“I knew you had a kid the moment I mapped those pretty stretch marks on your stomach.” A thumb touched her stomach, hand gentle on her waist, and why was he making this so hard? “It only made you more intriguing. Made me wonder where the daddy was. Why you were alone.”
He patted for his keys, his jeans still slung open and belt buckle dangling from those vees of ligaments she’d scored with her nails all night, then slipped away and trotted down the stairs like a batter walking first. He might be a pretty boy beneath the flashing stage lights, but he worked his body, honed into a machine…
He thought they were pretty?
He clopped across the old planks to the front door, as she grabbed her oversized thrift store cardigan and threw it around her, when she spied that picture, torn off the photo booth strip, on the table beneath the window. Swallowed hard at the lump in her throat and stopped in her tracks.
She picked up the picture, noting a wadded white T slung over the back of the chair.
His shirt? She brought it to her nose and inhaled. As she heard his boots creaking downstairs, heard Artex’s jingling collar as the furry monstrosity heaved himself up, shook, and ambled across the hall to greet him.
She pressed the cotton to her cheek as she absorbed the photo between her finger and thumb.
The reverent way his knuckles traced her downturned face in the picture, the way his cheek divoted, amused by what she was laughing at and yet, looking at her as if seeing a world unfolding before him.
She’d never been looked at like that before.
Jason said Thaddeus chewed up women and spit them out … her biggest fear. But what did her gut say? Why was she letting old fears Jason liked to stoke take over?
She rounded the banister just in time to spy Artex licking Thaddeus’s hand, tail wagging. He spared a scratch behind the ears for the dog and muttered softly, “At least you still like me. Guess my radar was off about her, huh? I never had a chance, did I, big fella?” He paused, stared at something.
A little pastel backpack with a unicorn running across a rainbow. He touched it, lifting the horse charm hanging on the zipper.
Then let it drop and pushed out the door.