Chapter Nine
Two weeks later. Nacogdoches, Texas. Saturday
T.R. checked his phone again. Six-thirty p.m. The sun was glowing barley yellow over the pasture through his shop door.
“Kiss me like it’s your last goodbye…”
His song was on the local radio, droning amid the rhythmic heartbeat of an air compressor, like an insult. Because tonight was his band’s first gig since two weeks ago, and his boys were hoping he’d finally nailed down the hot banjoist. Soon enough, they would realize he hadn’t.
He tossed the lug wrench back into the drawer as a pulley whined across the cattle yard, as a flatbed ground its gears and beeped, backing up, as Jayce, his wrangler, shouted directions from the hay door to align the flatbed loaded with bales beneath it.
“Naw, keep going … park it there!”
After the tornado that had barreled through the holler two weeks before, that fateful morning, and a storm two nights ago when Tyler’s son Seth, caught in a mudslide, had been hospitalized, the farm buzzed with commotion.
Perfect Harvard Tyler, for the first time in his A-plus Eagle Scout life, was a mess. None of them had slept that night, though if T.R. were honest, he hadn’t slept in two weeks.
And as if to pour salt on T.R.’s wounded pride, Tyler’s new girlfriend Heart Carvahlo was Charlie Bradford’s best friend who’d gotten lucky with Ty that same night the blond bombshell had plied her banjo and twined her roots into T.R.
’s heart. Tyler and his sons had fallen head over heels for her, though Heart had left after Seth’s accident, because Tyler was a pain in the ass to love.
He’d held out so much hope that Charlie would call. He’d almost gone back to her house.
He’d even begged Heart for her friend’s number, though Heart had said, if she’d wanted him to have it, she would have given it to him.
Look, with a girl like Charlie, just … trust me, you’ll have to be patient.
Heart wouldn’t say any more except something about sisters before misters.
Which meant Charlie wasn’t interested.
She hadn’t given him her number; she’d taken his. So she could blow him off.
He picked up a different wrench. Tossed it back. Ripped his trucker cap off, yanked it back on. Checked his phone again. It was 6:31.
The gig at the carnival was approaching. He was about to face the music that … he’d failed to bag the banjoist. He’d fucked the whole thing up with a sexcapade, when he’d never slept with the same chick more than once.
He rummaged around for another lug wrench, wiping his forehead with his mechanic’s rag and climbed onto the tractor wheel. He aligned the socket over the bolt and realized once more he’d grabbed the wrong size.
“Dammit.” He huffed and tossed it into the drawer with a clatter, as he rolled out his shoulders.
It should only take a few hours to fix the tractor and yet, here he was at … 6:33. “Kiss like a sin, feels like my life’s about to begin…”
He cranked down the music, the damning lyrics making him miss her. He dragged out his cell. Tapping open his browser again as he straddled the wheel well and slipped on his prism glasses. Tapped at each letter as his focus homed in. Searched, like he’d done a thousand times since that morning.
“Charlize Bradford Tiara Rescinded,” an old newsreel played, pictures of the beauty queen from the pageant that had won her a scholarship.
“Miss Lone Star dethroned. In a turn of events, the Nacogdoches County winner who dreamed of singing in Nashville someday, has been ordered to pay back her scholarship after filing for divorce, which breaks the rules. Feminist groups decry archaism, while Moms for Modesty say Texas values should be upheld…”
Miss Lone Star couldn’t be divorced.
And couldn’t be a mother out of wedlock.
Antiquated rules, promoting outdated ideals of virtue that always seemed to punish a woman harder.
Laughable when the pageant made the contestants parade around in bathing suits and heels like a guy’s fantasy.
He’d remembered his sister, Charity, voted Miss Legacy Creek and representing Webb County, and had seethed in that audience, watching her show off her body with all two hundred and fifty-three others, representing every county in Texas.
With their perfectly sculpted hair and tanned legs walking like trained poodles, he’d had no idea Charlie’d been dethroned.
After his sis had come in second and gotten her agent contract with Andrew fucking Beaumont—as long as you don’t have a record—he’d stopped paying attention. Was this why Charlie had sold her house? Was this the debt she’d had to pay off, clinging to a scrapbook of dreams?
And why was he still obsessed? Two weeks of silence ought to send a loud message.
And yet every morning he woke up hot and heavy pushing his flower girl up against the wall of her tunnel, stripping her sterile suit and gloves as he fought his way out of his clothes and their bodies collided among her daisies.
Because you felt it. Felt that connection.
With someone who’d challenged him and believed in him.
Someone who’d synced with him when nobody ever did.
Because it was real. For him, that was. He hadn’t wanted her to reject him, like everyone else in life.
He tore off his trucker cap. Slapped it on his thigh and affixed it backward on his head again, changed the station and cranked up the music and swiped up another wrench, trying to fit it on the lug.
Dammit, wrong wrench again! He tossed it back down groaned, scouring his face—
“Never seen you struggle to find your way around a toolbox before but, damn, it’s like you need a road map.” His cousin, Tyler’s, deep voice resonated up behind him.
Tyler was back in the land of the living after being dumped?
“Hilarious,” T.R. bit out, glancing over at him. “You look like hell.” Face overgrown with scruff, no shower. Tyler’d been certain his son was going to be found dead in that mudslide, and now his woman stealing his heart and taking off like she had?
“What’s got you tied up in knots?” Tyler asked.
No phone call, that was what had him tied up in square knots and sheet bends and timber hitches like a tangled slinky.
She’d said she’d call. He pulled out his cell. Only 6:36. Was time standing still like a broken crankshaft.
“Could ask you the same, cuz.”
Maybe another piece of tail was what he needed, except when he’d watched one of his dirty flicks, his equipment wouldn’t finish the job until he’d shut off the fake moans and bad acting and let his mind drift to a green-eyed flower girl who begged for forever.
“Take a breath, man. Ain’t seen you in such a bad mood in a long time, neither. Couldn’t have anything to do with a blond who rocked your world and left you high and dry?”
T.R. chuckled, reaching for nonchalance as he tried out the wrench. “None of your business.”
“It is when it’s affecting your work. We need that tractor.”
Anger surged and he glowered down at Tyler, crossing his arms. “You gonna fire me too?”
Tyler returned his glower. “Naw, man. I’m gonna make you talk it out. Or put on the boxing gloves and beat it out. Put you in your place like I used to.”
He ignored the fraternal chest-bumping. As a little kid, T.R. hadn’t stood a chance in Tyler’s much older headlocks. But he wasn’t a kid anymore. You’re not a kid anymore, though…
“Funny, old man,” T.R. quipped.
Tyler snorted. “Your choice.”
“Get the boxing gloves. I could use a chance to punch something legally.” He jumped down, checked his phone again—6:38—rummaged through his tool drawer again, shoving it shut and storming to his shop door, rolling it all the way open. “Jayce! D’you take my twenty-one millimeter again?”
“Yeah! Sorry, boss!” the wrangler replied, hoisting up one of the bales on the pulley from the back of the truck. “It’s at my workstation!”
T.R. stormed out and around the building to Jayce’s workstation as sweat rolled in a rivulet between his bare shoulder blades, digging his heels in instead of leaving well enough alone.
He found his wrench with the chipped wrought iron.
His granddad’s tools. A man who’d understood him and had gifted his tools to him when his hands had gotten too shaky with age to use anymore.
T.R. liked the feel of them in his palms, liked channeling his granddad’s patient energy through them with each engine he rebuilt.
He marched back to his shop and hoisted himself up the tractor as if a jungle gym and fit the socket over the bolt, cranking, his body torquing with each hoist to loosen the lug nut.
“I’ll go get the gloves, then,” Tyler said.
“Yeah, you do that because I mean—” T.R. cranked the nut. “Why should I—” His body torqued again as he grunted. “Give a shit—”
“Why should you?” Tyler quipped, and a glance down showed his cuz leaning on the wall, ankle slung over the other as if enjoying the show, as music and air compressor and flatbed buzzed together.
“She don’t want me—” He cranked it again.
“Nope.”
T.R. threw his weight into it. “Lied—didn’t call.”
“Yup.”
He glared at the humored tone in Tyler’s voice. Bastard had gotten him talking.
Tyler snorted and shook his head, turning to leave. “You need a good lay, man.”
“I need Charlize Bradford. I need to enter that competition.”
“You needed her to choose you.”
Shit, it hurt when the hammer hit the nail head and he was the nail. Because the truth felt awful.
“She tumbled with me for a night and sent me packing the next morning.” He shrugged. “No biggie. Ain’t like I’ve never done the same. I ain’t a monk like you.”
Joke was on him though. His equipment wouldn’t work without thinking of her. He might as well don a cowl and pick up a bible.
“You were that bad you only got one night?”
T.R. yanked his mechanic rag out and whipped it at Tyler who dodged it, chuckling. Finally. The bastard had been a monolith ever since Heart had left. Still, Tyler cooled.