9. Harlan
Chapter 9
Harlan
“ F uck off, baby brother,” I snark at Boone, who’s busy raking in the pot of chips on Duke’s table. Rhett and Jedd are laughing quietly at how thoroughly Boone bluffed his way to winning that hand — and most of my chips.
“Not my fault you fell for it,” he says helpfully.
“Not my fault you’re a goddamn liar,” I grump at him.
I’ve been doing shitty all night. I nearly begged off in favor of a cold beer in front of my TV and an early bedtime. But begging off from hanging out with my brothers makes me feel old and like shit, so I came over anyway.
Yeah. A cold beer and the TV is why you almost begged off. The stunning brunette living above your garage had nothing to do with the thought.
Finch, our appointed dealer — because he’s the only one out of us that still doesn’t understand the rules of poker — tosses out cards. We all throw in our starting bet and wait for him to flip a card.
A pair of kings. Feeling smug at the luck, I school my face into blankness. A trick I learned on the job .
I can already tell that Duke’s got shit. His poker face is terrible. Rhett tries to play like it’s his job, barely picking his cards up and giving all of us a deadpan stare.
But what these assholes forget is that I’m the oldest. I know all of their tells. I grew up teaching them how to lie through their teeth to avoid trouble, and how to get away with damn near anything. Boone got lucky the last round, and the fact that he spent more time away from home than here recently gives him a slight edge.
Finch flips the king of hearts and two fours, and I damn near whoop. Full house. This shit is in the bag. Not wanting to give away my good hand, I only raise the pot by two chips.
We don’t play for money in the traditional sense. Everyone tosses a fifty into the group pot when we get here, and we are all given the same amount of chips. Whoever cleans house tonight goes home with the pot. If any of us run out of chips, we can buy back in for another fifty, though we rarely do.
I smother the urge to yawn, my early morning catching up with me.
“Tired, old man?” Boone asks. He’s thirty-two to my thirty-eight and has no problem rubbing it in my face.
I flip him the bird instead of answering and watch as Finch lays out the last two cards that do dick all for me.
We place our last bets, and again I raise the pot with my remaining chips. Duke folds, like I thought he would, and Rhett waves his hand at me while Boone smirks.
“Full house, boys. Beat that,” I crow, triumphant.
Rhett flips the last king, giving him two pair.
“Whatchu got, youngin?” I taunt.
Boone’s smirk is still firmly in place when he flips over a pair of fours .
“What the fuck?” I yell.
“Four of a kind,” he says with a smile. “I believe that beats your full house, isn’t that right?”
“You went from bluffing your way to a win to getting four of a fucking kind? What kinda bullshit is that?”
He leans forward to swipe up his pile of chips and officially clears me out.
I lean back in my chair and watch as Finch shuffles the deck to deal another hand and slides a glance in my direction.
“So, how’s it going with reelection?”
Immediate tension tightens my shoulders. I’ve been sheriff of Everette for the last six and a half years. My position is up for reelection this year, and while I should have been the only candidate, Cormac Lewis’s father recommended him for the position to the town council after Cormac moved back to Everette from Pocatello.
“It’s fine,” I say with a calmness I don’t feel. All I’ve ever wanted to be was the sheriff of Everette. Since I was a kid and Sheriff Denny came in to the school to talk about what it meant to be an officer of the law, I’ve had my sights set on the gold star I pin on my uniform each morning.
“Your face doesn’t say that it’s fine,” Rhett says.
“Come on man, you know Cornhole isn’t going to win,” Duke offers helpfully, using the same nickname they came up with for Cormac when we were all in high school.
I fucking hate Cormac Lewis. The hatred of him started in high school when I caught him pinning Jedd to his locker after Jedd accidentally bumped into him walking down the hallway. He’s nothing but a lazy bully who likes to belittle others for his own amusement. The animosity between us only grew from there. Cormac wanted everything that I worked hard for in high school — namely the quarterback position on the football team — but he didn’t want to put in the time or effort for any of it. His family is one of the founding families of Everette, and he thought he could coast by on that alone. After we graduated college and ended up at the police academy together, things only got worse.
I rub the muscles at the back of my neck. “I’m not so sure. Cormac is Phillip’s son. Phillip’s got some pull with the town council.”
“So what? You’ve been the sheriff for the last seven years and the crime rates in the county that were already low to begin with are all but nonexistent now,” Finch says.
And I know that. I’ve done good work during my time in office. I want to keep doing that good work. But that decision isn’t up to me, it’s up to the town council.
I can’t work for him. If he wins the vote, I’ll have to find a different job or move.
There couldn’t be a worse outcome for me.
“Cormac is such a sleazy asshat,” Duke says.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s going to happen with the reelection. The only thing that I can do is my job. It’s up to the town council whether they reelect me to my position or not.”
“You need to be careful,” Boone says quietly from where he’s been listening.
Boone was still young by the time I finished school. While he knows about the history, he and Rhett didn’t start high school until after I had already left for college.
“Why?” I ask.
“I overheard the mayor talking to someone the other day. I was at city hall filing a permit for the house, and I could only make out the mayor, don’t know who he was talking to — but if I had to guess it was probably Phillip Lewis. But they told the mayor that they hope they can count on the town council to run a fair and equal race — that things have a way of coming to light that might shock the council.”
“I don’t have anything to hide,” I say indignantly. If they want to dig into my past, they’re more than welcome to. I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that they could use against me.
“We know that, Har. But you know as well as I do that public perception plays into these small-town politics, and I don’t know a single person in town that’s more loved than you are. Hell, you practically are Everette. I’m just saying to be careful,” Boone says.
I open my mouth to argue when he continues, “Jem said that you offered up your apartment to Maisie for however long she needs it. And I get it, you want to help, but do you think that was smart considering you’re under the microscope right now?”
I ignore his question. “Did you hear anything else?”
He shakes his head. “No, the file clerk came back too quickly for me to listen anymore.”
“You offered your apartment up to the chick and her kid when you won’t even let us stay there longer than a night?” Finch asks with a smirk.
“She’s stranded in a town she doesn’t know, with both her home and her only mode of transportation sitting in the mechanic shop and there are no rooms at Holly’s or the resort. Oh and she has her infant daughter with her. What the hell was I supposed to do?” I turn to Boone. “Also, it was your idea for her to stay in my apartment, and now you suddenly think it’s a bad idea?”
“I didn’t say that,” Boone starts but gets cut off by Finch .
“You liiiiike her.”
“What? No, I don’t,” I say while clearing my face of all expression.
“Bullshit. You’re doing the cop face,” Rhett chimes in.
I stand and gather the empties around the table. “Drop it.”
All of them crow at me with some sort of taunt.
“Harlan has a crush,” Jedd singsongs.
“Bro, she’s too young for you,” Rhett teases.
“Harlan and Maisie sitting in a tree…” Duke joins in.
I roll my eyes at them, because I know saying anything will just egg them on.
Stepping into the kitchen, I rinse the bottles for recycling and then run my hands under the tap.
Is Maisie drop-dead gorgeous? Sure. But that’s not what pulls me to her. It’s the wounded look in her eyes and the incessant need to fix whatever is wrong.
It’s the way she went mama bear in the hospital when she realized that there were strange men changing her daughter’s diaper. It’s the small smile she had on her face when she realized that those same guys were fighting over who got a chance to hold her after she realized she was safe.
The need to know more about Maisie has only grown since I found her unconscious in her camper on the side of the freeway.
Jedd follows me into the kitchen where I’m shrugging on my jacket and grabbing my keys from the glass dish on the island.
“You leaving?” he asks.
“Yeah. I work in the morning, and I need to get some sleep.”
“Okay, well I wanted to catch you before you left. About Maisie. Her camper is well and truly fucked,” Jedd says as he rinses his own empties before chucking them in the recycle bin.
“You look at it finally?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah. Crawled under it today. Discounting the cosmetic damage, I’d say that her insurance is most likely going to total it out.”
Well fuck. “You want me to tell her?” I ask.
“Yeah. But if she has questions, she can call me, or have her insurance call me.”
I nod and start through the kitchen to the living room intent on making my escape before my brothers can tease me anymore.
“Hey, Har. Wait up,” Boone calls, jogging from the dining room in my direction. We both step outside and Boone pulls the door shut behind him.
“What’s up?”
“I just wanted to tell you to watch your back. I’ve got a bad feeling about Cormac and the reelection.”
Boone’s face is devoid of emotion, but Dad taught us to trust our guts, and if Boone says there’s trouble on the horizon, I’m not going to discount his intuition.
“I will. Listen, I gotta get home. I work in the morning.”
“And you want to check on Maisie and Audra.” His gaze narrows on my face.
“No. I just want to get to bed.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Har. She’s got your interest piqued. From what Jem told me, she’s a nice girl. A bit jumpy, and very cautious. Don’t get tangled up in her problems on your way to playing knight in shining armor.”
He claps me on the shoulder and then disappears back into the house.
Boone’s words of caution stay with me on my drive home. As I pull into the driveway, my gaze automatically goes to the windows above the garage that are dark.
If there is someone from the town council watching my every move waiting for me to fuck up and remove me from my position, then I have to be careful. But I’ll be damned if I turn someone away because I’m worried about public perception of me and how I do my job. My personal life is none of the town’s business. Maisie’s life is none of their business. How she came to be here, in my apartment, is between her and I. Even though the naive part of me believes those words with my whole being, all it’ll take is one slip before she’s enmeshed in the town gossip which is likely the last thing that she wants.
What kind of man would it make me if I turned her away when she doesn’t have any other options?
Not a man I want to be, that’s for sure.