Bad Decisions & Back Roads (Southern Veterinary #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

GIA

“You plan to lie there and bleed out, or what?” I crossed my arms and glared down at Timothy Hurst.

I knew exactly who he was. Our families had been feuding since before indoor plumbing. He’d always been too many grades ahead of me to notice I existed.

He squinted up, one eye already swelling. “You said the principal was coming. Is he almost here?”

I blinked. Even with blood running down his face, he somehow still looked annoyingly like he had stepped out of one of those thirst-trap edits girls reposted with way too many drooling emojis.

His long legs were stretched out in worn jeans.

Dark blue eyes peeked out from messy dark hair that curled around his ears.

“You’re lying there to get caught on purpose?” I pressed my tongue against my teeth to hold back saying something ugly.

I’d shouted a warning about the principal coming to stop the fight, and it had worked. Not because I needed the big bad junior to notice me. And definitely not because I went around doing nice things for people.

Nobody would accuse me of that. Around school, I was “a problem,” “trouble,” or “bad news,” depending on who was talking. I landed in detention at least once a week for running my mouth, and most people knew I usually got my way one way or another.

But Timothy had surprised me today. Famous for his temper and refusal to back down, he’d picked a fight on purpose just to draw a notorious senior away from a band geek.

Right before the bell, the senior had been seconds from stuffing the poor kid into a trash can in front of half the school.

The band geek was an insufferable know-it-all.

Nobody liked him. Me included. But that kind of humiliation crossed a line. Apparently, Timothy thought so too.

Or maybe I’d just been stupid enough to believe that.

“You’re ruining my plan.” He dragged an arm across his eyes, smearing blood from the cut on his cheek.

“The principal isn’t coming. He’s at wrestling practice. The vice principal might wander out eventually, though. She loves handing out suspensions.”

“You lied?” He pushed himself upright with a wince, staring at me like I’d betrayed him somehow.

My stomach sank, hard and ugly. For a minute there, I’d thought somebody with a reputation as bad as mine had done something decent for no reason other than it being the right thing. Turns out he’d just been looking for another way to raise hell.

“I said it to stop the fight.” I lifted my chin. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

He stared at me for a beat. Then huffed out, “You stole my day of vacation.”

“How disappointing for you.”

He almost smiled. Almost.

“I’m Gia.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “Regina McClary.”

I felt that one in my bones. “Only someone with a death wish calls me the R-name.”

His mouth twitched like he was fighting a laugh. “Pretty sure it’s Regina.”

“It’s Gia. People who want to be socked in the balls call me the other name.” I glanced to his crotch with intention.

“Noted.” His tone suggested the opposite.

He looked me over slowly and deliberately, like he was trying to decide if I was worth the trouble to keep noticing.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Instead of sitting in detention, which is far more likely than getting a suspension, meet me at the old oak tree tomorrow. Eight a.m.” He would know exactly what tree I meant. It stood a bit off the road at the division of our family lands.

He narrowed his eyes. “Why would I do that?”

“We’ll skip school and take that vacation day you wanted.”

“To do what?” His gaze flicked over me again—half skeptical, half like he couldn’t quite place me. Like I didn’t fit whatever box he’d already built for me.

“Fishing down at the lake.” I turned to leave, like that settled it.

Behind me he called out, “They call parents when you don’t show up at school.”

“I’ll handle it.”

That got his attention. I could feel it. “How, exactly, will you pull that off?”

I glanced back over my shoulder. “I work in the main office after school. Filing, phones… attendance.”

Now he was interested. There it was—a spark.

“Why would I want to go fishing with you?” He pushed to a stand, dusting off his jeans.

I started walking again. “You make bad decisions. I’m offering you a better bad decision.”

Silence.

Fifty-fifty he’d show. I was curious to know more about the angry oldest son of the Hurst family.

I paused long enough to toss over my shoulder, “Bring your own pole. I’m not sharing.”

I stopped once more to glance at him. “Park on the road. Bring your own bait too. I won’t touch worms for you, Hurst.”

* * *

Eighteen months later…

TIMOTHY

I tore from the car I’d left crooked on the roadside and sprinted into the downpour, rain needling my skin and mud sucking at my boots. I pushed toward the tree that split Hurst land from McClary.

Four generations of hatred were carved into the dirt and barbed wire. As a Hurst, I wasn’t allowed to cross it. Cows that wandered over weren’t returned. They were taken like prisoners of war. That was the kind of grudge we still carried. It had outlived the men who started it.

Lightning split the sky, and for a second the fence flashed silver ahead of me.

I didn’t slow.

I ran from the memory of my hand—out of control, reckless—hurling a knife toward my younger brother’s feet like I’d lost my damned mind. I could still see it flying. Still hear the thud as it buried itself in the dirt inches from Josh’s foot.

I should’ve taken the knife out of the dirt myself. I should’ve acted like the older brother.

But I didn’t.

Josh picked it up. And dropped it. The tip cut his leg, causing it to bleed.

“Idiot,” I rasped into the wind, although the word gutted me the second it left my mouth. The idiot was me, not Josh.

The fence loomed closer.

I ran harder, as if I could outrun the memories.

My youngest brother was two weeks in the ground after I’d handed him off like he wasn’t mine to protect.

I had trusted the reckless eight-year-old to the wrong person—Josh again—and walked away.

Josh was a good kid, but we all knew Brian was wild.

My decision condemned Josh to carry the guilt of our brother’s drowning, which should’ve been mine and mine alone. All of it was my fault. My fault.

I hadn’t been there when it mattered.

The guilt wasn’t a memory. It was a living thing, clawing up my throat, dragging me under every time I tried to breathe.

I hit the fence and shoved through the barbed wire, pain tearing across my jacket, metal biting skin. I barely felt it. Didn’t care. Because there was only one place left to go. One person left who could make any of this feel survivable.

Gia.

She stood beneath the massive oak across the line on McClary land.

Branches thrashed above her, wind whipping her reddish-brown hair loose from two small braids and across her face.

Her glasses were shoved into her hair, forgotten.

The worn jacket absorbed water rather than repelled.

Her rubber boots were planted like she was bracing against the world while waiting for me.

She was the only thing I could see through the wreckage of everything I’d destroyed.

“You’re late,” she said, like we both weren’t fighting a storm.

Rain streaked down her face, catching on her lashes, dripping from her chin. She didn’t wipe the water away.

“Sorry.” The word scraped out of me. I didn’t apologize to anyone.

Not to teachers. Not to the principal who’d suspended me twice already this year, my senior year.

Not to the coaches who benched me for bad behavior or the cops who dragged me home last week.

I’d built a reputation on not bending and never breaking.

But Gia? She got the version of me I didn’t let anyone else see.

To everyone else, I figured if I pushed hard enough—if I acted out, screwed up, made myself a problem—my father might finally look at me and decide I wasn’t worth handing the farm down to. That I wasn’t worth trapping here into a life I didn’t want.

Vision, North Carolina was a town that felt like it had been holding its breath for a hundred years and forgot how to exhale. Here, people sized you up by which church claimed your soul—Methodist or Baptist—and how many generations your blood had soaked into the same stubborn land.

“I’m sorry we have to be out here in this miserable weather, but you promised.

I need you to take him today.” She waved at a damp cardboard box with a towel over it next to her that I already knew contained a puppy.

She’d told me last week the small heeler was struggling.

Her father was going to shoot it, but she’d been hiding it in the barn.

She had a class field trip tomorrow and needed the puppy gone.

“I got it.”

“Thank you. Now about you…” She crossed her arms. The movement tugged her sleeve back. “We talked about your brother last week. It wasn’t your fault. I feel awful I couldn’t be at the funeral. You know…Dad.” She paused to frown. “What are you looking at?”

There it was on her wrist. A bloom of bruises worked their way up her pale skin—dark, mottled, half-hidden like something ashamed to exist.

“I noticed at school…” My voice snagged on the truth she kept sanding down into something harmless. I stared at the damaged skin.

She tugged her sleeve down to cover it. She always brushed the bruises off fast, saying they weren’t that bad, that her father just got mad sometimes. The lies never fooled me.

Since we started meeting to fish, I had noticed the things she couldn’t hide as easily.

The way her smiles never quite reached her eyes.

The quick flashes of hurt that crossed her face before she buried them.

The way she flinched at slammed lockers, then immediately mouthed off or picked a fight so nobody would notice she’d startled or that she was angry.

I recognized that trick. Straight out of my own playbook.

Only, my family was the polar opposite of hers—too loving, too protective, and parents who hovered so closely it felt smothering.