Chapter Four
The Wolf’s Den
Cal could have had a few drinks up at the ranch. In fact, he’d started to pour himself one in his little apartment area off the main house.
Then he’d felt a little too much like Dad. Alone and drinking felt like a slow slide into a place he didn’t want to be. Into a person he didn’t want to be—even if he didn’t know the person he wanted to be anymore. Ruling things out seemed like a good step in that direction anyway.
But he’d still needed a damn drink, a damn distraction.
So, he’d rounded up some company. Company that wouldn’t give him that itch that Landon and Aly did. Not a bad itch. Not a dissociative trauma itch. Just a … don’t you two know that good things never work out kind of itch.
He wanted things to work out for them. God knew those two deserved it. But what did deserve matter in this life?
Nate understood that. And Nate was alone too.
Well, not alone. Sam was something like a complicated shadow. But it didn’t feel so much like third wheeling hanging out with them. Not like it did with the engaged couple up at the ranch.
Close, but not quite.
Nate and Sam stepped into the dark room of the bar. Cal watched them carefully. He found the two of them an intriguing puzzle—much more interesting than any other puzzle that currently occupied his brain.
They spent a lot of time together. He thought there were a lot of longing glances involved. But considering they were both unattached, reasonable adults, he couldn’t understand all that … tension.
Sure, Sam was technically Nate’s boss, but this wasn’t some corporation with an HR department. So, he didn’t understand why they just didn’t sleep together and get it over with.
He raised his nearly empty glass as they approached. “Head start.”
“I didn’t realize you’d called me from the bar,” Nate said, sliding onto the stool next to him. Sam surprised him by taking the other one next to him, rather than over by Nate.
He was flanked.
Sam shrugged out of her coat, leaned across the bar to be heard by the bartender.
Cal had never given Sam Price much of a thought prior to this summer. Landon and Aly had nursed their whole feud with her since Sam’s dad had been arrested for killing Mom, but Cal had never really had any feelings about her one way or another. Maybe that had been easy because he hadn’t lived here.
But suddenly he was here in Montana a lot, and Sam Price was in his orbit a lot of that time too. So he noticed.
She was one of those women who somehow used swagger and confidence and a straightforwardness to appear … taller than she really was. But she was short, an interesting compact body. She was straightforward, all sharp angles and direct stares and words.
Not his type—he’d always liked something a little soft—but interesting, nonetheless. And part of that interest was at least partially motivated by how much Nate would not like it. He looked over at his brother now, who was indeed scowling. So he flashed Nate a grin.
Nate pretended like he didn’t notice. But he noticed. Which improved Cal’s mood considerably.
“So, Sam, you talk to the lawyer?”
“Yeah, few days back. He doesn’t want to get too far off track by bringing my old investigation into it, just focus on certain pieces. Then obviously my role this spring.”
“You got an idea of when you’ll go up?” Nate asked Cal as the bartender put Nate’s and Sam’s drinks in front of them.
Cal shook his head. “Depends. They really want to solidify the crime itself before they delve into the background. It’s a solid move.
Make sure the jury understands the severity, the violence, the personal nature of the crime, then slowly build up the identity of the victim.
That’s where we’ll come in. It’ll take some time to get there. Mr. Vanderbilt is thorough.”
Nate shifted uncomfortably. Cal didn’t need to be a mind reader to have seen that Nate wasn’t happy about the lawyer going over personal family questions this afternoon. Build a sunny picture of their mother.
But she had been sun in all that dark. Cal assumed that his mother’s warmth was what allowed his father’s evil to hide in plain sight for all those years.
And it had also allowed him and his brothers to survive—maybe they were three traumatized, broken SOBs, but they weren’t their father.
There was something good somewhere in all of them, and it was because of her.
Cal looked down at his drink, any good mood soured at the memory of his mother and the way she’d died. So needlessly. So unfairly.
“I thought you weren’t worried,” Nate said after Cal downed half his glass in one gulp.
He motioned the bartender for a refill as he answered Nate. “I’m not. Not about the outcome.” Which wasn’t the total truth, but it was mostly the truth.
It was a solid case. Cal thought Vanderbilt was a better lawyer than Dad’s. Cal had made sure of it. It’d take quite the coup from the defense to wriggle Dad out of a guilty verdict.
“Then what are you worried about?” Sam asked. She took a dainty sip of her beer.
Cal took a long, long drink of his newly refilled scotch. Not high dollar, but it’d do the trick. “The shit sandwich that is going to be getting to the outcome.” And probably after the outcome.
He knew better than to wholeheartedly believe Dad would be convicted. It wasn’t that simple. Being guilty didn’t always land you behind bars.
Justice didn’t always work.
But even if Dad got put away forever, hell, even if he got the death penalty, this wouldn’t be over. Years from now, everyone in town would talk about it. Just like they’d talked about it when they’d thought Gene Price had been behind the murder.
And his mother would still be dead. And Cal would still have the image of that seared into his brain—something he’d forgotten out of survival or whatever the hell for fifteen years. And now that he’d remembered, he couldn’t seem to work his way around it.
He downed the drink. Alcohol wasn’t the answer, but there were no answers, so why not try to blot it all out?
“It’ll suck, but we’ll muddle through. We’re all on the same side this time.”
Cal wished he had Nate’s confidence, but at least it was something to agree with. Something to hold on to.
They were going to get through this—whatever shit sandwich it was—together. And maybe that didn’t fill him with any kind of joy, but it was right.
It was what their mother would have wanted.
When he finished his drink, asked for another refill, he didn’t miss the quiet look that passed between Nate and Sam around him. He didn’t know what it meant—pity, worry, something else?
It left him feeling like he did at the ranch. That the world was spinning on without him—and he was stuck, stranded. Lost in a past he wanted to leave very far behind and had to live inside in order to put his dad behind bars.
And, as his therapist claimed, heal.
He wasn’t convinced. But he hadn’t stopped going to therapy. Hadn’t stopped any of this. He kept all that halting progress moving forward, wondering why none of it seemed to do anything.
Since that depressed him as much as thoughts of his mother did, he focused on the world around him—one of those coping mechanisms his therapist was teaching him.
He listened to the chatter of conversation, noted the smell of alcohol and tobacco, and old building. He felt his body sit in the stool. Watched with some amusement as a drunk cowboy got thrown off the mechanical bull.
“Gonna hit the bull, Sam?” he asked.
She glanced at the mechanical bull in question. Then met his gaze with a sharp one of her own. “You first, Cal.”
“Can’t.” He patted his side. “Bullet wound.”
She gestured with her glass toward the crowd around them. “You should use that one as a pickup line.”
Cal surveyed the dim, thumping bar. Smoky and grimy. Not exactly his choice for pickup places. Not that he’d picked up anything in ages.
Impending father on trial for murder with Cal’s traumatic dissociative amnesia as the crux of the prosecution was probably not the time.
But since Nate was sitting next to him like a grumpy lump on a log—no doubt not having picked up anything in ages longer than Cal—Cal flashed a flirtatious grin at the woman no doubt occupying his brother’s thoughts.
“You looking to be picked up, Sam?”
She snorted out a laugh. “I think it’s time to cut you off, slick.”
Probably. But he’d earned a glare from Nate, and that was what he’d been going for.
There were still wins to be earned in this life, it seemed.
*
Nate might have indulged in one too many thanks to his idiot brother. He knew what Cal was doing. Cal did that kind of thing with Aly all the time. Flirt. Look for a reaction from Landon.
Well, Cal wasn’t getting one from him. Cal could flirt with Sam all he wanted, and if she wanted to flirt back…
He’d break Cal’s nose.
The little spurt of internal violence left him feeling like his dad, gross and slimy and tainted. He wasn’t going to hit his brother for flirting with Sam. He wasn’t going to get worked about it at all. Fake. Real. Didn’t matter.
He might have a lot of fucking issues, but he knew he didn’t have a right to jealousy—over Cal or Jake Hayes or any other damn guy who gave Sam a second look—when he wasn’t willing to do anything about his own … issues.
But all of that whirling around inside of him had left him a little too vulnerable and he’d taken that last drink Cal had shoved at him. Even knowing he should have stopped at one. Certainly two. Absolutely three.
Instead, he’d downed the fourth … or was it fifth? And now his balance was off.
Drunk. Great.
But Sam rounded them up into her tiny car. She drove them back to his rental cabin. Which meant she’d have to come get him in the morning so he could pick up his truck from the office.
When she pulled to a stop at his cabin, Cal was the first one to fling the door open. He got out of the car on a stumble.