Chapter Seventeen
Jail? What the…
“Charlize!” thundered that voice. “You can’t keep me from my girl! I swear to God you better open this fucking door and tell me who the hell’s truck this is in your driveway!”
T.R. snagged Daisy down from the ladder as Charlize dragged Daisy to her belly and bundled her head in her arms as if she could block out the angry ranting and incessant barking simply by covering her ears.
Jason Thompson.
The prick was about to eat some dirt if he didn’t watch his mouth around the girl when … He gripped Charlie’s ashen face, angling her toward him, took in fear.
Just like two weeks ago. She was terrified that morning, and I accused her of cheating on a man…
Daisy hadn’t just been coming home from a sleepover. His fingers sifting into the base of her sunshine hair.
“Who is he?” he rumbled darkly, dipping his head and leveling his eyes with hers, needing to know the full truth in his bones before he blazed to the front door and put the man in his place.
Charlize’s lips tremored with something she didn’t want to admit, but a fight lit in her gorgeous jade eyes as she lifted her chin.
“You can’t be here,” she breathed.
“Too late.” Naw, not this time. This was the same shit she’d pulled then.
She panicked. “You have to go; you have to—”
“His. Name.”
She froze at his icy demand and the demons that taunted the edge of his words and, Christ, he willed his tone to gentle because he didn’t want her scared of him, too, even if she’d have every right to be if she knew what he was capable of.
She inhaled deeply, exhaled, then breathed. “Daisy’s dad. My ex. He’s the one who called that … morning. Jason.”
He’d remembered all too well that blood-curdling sickness that had assaulted him that morning when he’d passed Jason while leaving here, wondering why that asshole was close by.
She’d kicked him out that morning because of this jealous asshole who tormented her.
I’m done chasing cute boys in a band. Well, Jason didn’t get to have any say in Charlie’s life anymore if he was an ex.
He’d clearly been as shitty of a husband as he’d been a business partner to T.R.
How in the hell did someone wield that much control over another unless he’d taught her to be … scared of him.
“But the police took him away last night,” Daisy continued, looking up at her mom while Charlie’s arms torqued around her and the banging and barking continued. “I saw them.”
Cops? Okay, there’d clearly been more to Charlie’s bad night besides Daisy almost being trampled.
“Get her up to her room,” T.R. growled. “I’ll go have a chat with him.”
His eyes traveled over her face, to the age that seemed to suddenly linger on her otherwise unblemished skin. There was no reason such secrets ought to lurk within her eyes. What was she hiding?
“You don’t have to fight this battle, Thaddeus,” she said.
“I don’t recall asking if I did.” He tore away from her, but she grasped his arm, and he swore a spark sizzled his skin there, because it was the first time she was willingly grabbing him again in two weeks and he might jump out of his skin at the pride it induced, swirling like a cocktail with the adrenaline hitting his blood for a fight.
He looked down at her manicured nails, rose-petal pink, matching her shirt.
Picked them up and wove his fingers into them as they trembled.
Like the beauty queen she’d once been, so girlie for the woman who liked to dig in the dirt for a living and used plumbing wrenches and still secretly dreamed of Nashville stage lights.
He arched a brow at her. The pounding and barking continued. And miracle of miracles, she didn’t pull away, but squeezed more tightly as he squeezed her, as if he were a lifeline.
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
A smirk twisted his lips as he chuckled. “You think I’ll get hurt, baby? Shoot. It’s like you don’t even know me. If this is the Jason Thompson I think it is—” He leaned into her ear and whispered, “He won’t be much of a problem.”
“You know him?” She gasped.
“T. Rex,” Daisy said, and those wide, watery blues killed him as he glanced down at her.
He hitched up a smile just for the girl and notched his chin, swinging her up into his arms. Her thin ones came around his neck and he rubbed her back. “I got you, girlie. Ain’t no one gonna bother you on my watch. Take your stubborn momma upstairs with you.”
He didn’t wait to see what daggers his beauty queen would glare at him for that and, instead, set Daisy down and moseyed into the house as Artex shimmied in behind him, flexing his fingers together to crack the knuckles, hearing Charlie haul Daisy up the house’s pocket staircase through the kitchen.
Atta girl.
The old frame reverberated with each bang on the door.
The roof rose with Artex’s thunderous barking and bounding back and forth, rattling the windows.
Fury lapped like sparks in his blood with each curse lobbed at Charlie, and he willed himself to temper his temper, but his sister, that call, that fateful night, and the worst decision he’d ever made, no matter how valiant, rushed back in a fiery streak of fury.
He popped his neck side to side, rolled out his shoulders, then dragged open the main door and leaned a shoulder casually on the frame and folded his arms.
“Wh … who the hell arrr…?” Jason demanded, words slurred, when realization dawned. “T.R. McClintock.”
T.R. grinned. “Howdy, partner.”
Jason smirked. “You sleeping with that trash?”
Oh, Jesus take the wheel.
He shoved the screen open, nudging Jason off step. Inhaled lilac from that shrub’s downy lavender clusters.
Blond. Blue eyed. A worn Johnny Cash T-shirt stretched over his chest, bootcut Levi’s over an old pair of shitkickers. Chasing cute boys in bands. Charlie had a type, at least, on the surface.
“Be nice,” he growled in lieu of the stream of venom on his tongue, itching to be deployed.
“She’ll trrrap you … screw you too…” Jason slurred. “You’ll finnishhh last being a nice guy to her.”
“Damn straight.” T.R. let the screen swing shut behind him while he made himself a barrier between the deadbeat and the doornail.
“Nice guys make sure their women finish first.” T.R.
’s grin rose higher, belying his rising fury as he leaned forward and whispered, just to crawl deeper under Jason’s skin, “And I seem to be real talented at comin’ in last.”
“In the sh-same houshe as my little girl?”
T.R.’s jaw clenched so tightly he might crack a tooth. He’d never have rocked Charlie’s world like he had if the girl had been home. But Jason also didn’t get to call Daisy his little girl when his little girl only saw him as a monster. His fists balled beneath each bicep.
“She swoops in and shteals ’er during my weekend with her and gets me arrested so y’all can play happy family together? I didn’t think you kept chicks around long enough for that.”
His jaw tensed at having his reputation flung in his face, to know that Charlie might have heard it through the screen. “I’m gonna give you one second to walk back to your truck and get in, then get gone,” T.R. said low and measured.
“Or what?” Jason balled his fists. “S-sue me again, the dumbass who couldn’t even read the suit properly the first time—”
“Second’s up.”
T.R. whirled the man around, linking his arm through his elbows behind his back, shoving his chin down to his chest and forcing him off the step. Jumping off the porch behind him, he escorted him back down the walk to his beat-up Ford.
The guy thrashed. Smelled of stale liquor.
Cursing a storm. He’d gone to jail last night and was already drunk again?
And just the look of fear on little Daisy’s face and that ashen sheen that had drained Charlie of all color ignited a fight in him that he hadn’t felt since he’d discovered Charity, his sister, way up in New York City.
Charlie had tried so hard to treat him like a one and done. But maybe, he was starting to see why.
“I’ll sue you for assssault,” Jason rumbled.
“See you in court,” T.R. muttered flatly, then wrenched open the driver door and shoved him in.
The guy wasn’t sober, but he wasn’t staying here, either.
“You can explain to the judge why a loving father beats down his daughter’s door while drunk as a skunk and curses at his baby mama after being arrested the night before for the same exact bull.
I’ll sit back and smile.” He slammed shut the door, slapped the frame as if sending a friend on his way, and dragged out his cell.
“Tell you what, I’ll even call the police right now to get the ball rolling for you.
Oh, Officer, there’s a guy driving drunk in a rusting white F-150, plate number …
” He craned to look at the license plate. “J2R—”
“They’re mine.” Fuming, Jason glowered, eyeing T.R.’s thumb hovering over the emergency call.
“You done a shit job of keepin ’em proper,” T.R. retorted.
“You keep away from them.”
Oh … that was never gonna happen now. Because that fear on those girls’ faces meant something sinister T.R. didn’t dare think about without wanting to put his fist through Jason’s throat.
“Or what?” T.R. hitched up that devilish grin that always crawled under an adversary’s skin.
Prodded the beast and relished the flash of uncertainty flickering through Jason’s eyes when he realized T.R. was mad enough to do something more about it.
He chuckled, then leveled his gaze. “I ain’t got nothin’ to lose.” He’d been fired more times than he could count.
Been long-since disowned by parents now dead and gone. And maybe oversteps his bounds with Ty. That, and while he’d begged for a do-over with Charlie, it wasn’t as if she’d said yes yet.
“What about you?”
Coming to a decision, Jason bit his tongue, concealing something, and finally fired up his engine.
“Guess you got something to lose after all,” T.R. goaded.
Jason thumbed his chest, confidence overtaking his face. “I’ll fare jusss fine in court now. It’s you who oughta be worried.” He peeled out in reverse.
T.R. maneuvered into the middle of the driveway beneath the live oaks for good measure, taunting the fool to drive straight back in for him, for there was a crazy gleam in Jason’s eye that said he might. Wisely, he squealed away instead.
T.R. folded his arms, eyeing the back road to make sure it stayed quiet. He frowned. He needed to take off. It might be his day off, but Ty still depended on the vitamins. Yet he didn’t like the idea of Charlie being out here, alone and so remote, in case Jason returned.
What a bastard. Charlie’s fear … her divorce that had led to her losing her scholarship and her property to pay it back … that night two weeks ago, “Hold me like you want to keep me.”
And morning after when she’d panicked exactly like this…
The screen hinged open behind him, and he turned around to see Charlie stepping through while Artex shoved through and trotted nervously through the grass. His feet moved of their own volition, leaping up the porch steps, arms already opening to her.