Chapter Thirty
T.R. called Charlie again as he idled in front of Ty’s farmhouse, wanting to reassure her.
Straight to voicemail again, when it had rung the first time. Which meant she’d turned her phone off. To silence him? Had Jason come back? Were they okay?
He’d felt her unease at him keeping secrets. He knew she’d seen his phone. He didn’t like how he’d left Charlie. Didn’t like that he’d made her suspicious.
He glanced at the Silverado parked in front. At the woman on the porch, slouched against the post laughing with Tyler, flinging her golden-brown hair over her shoulder with the command of a cowboy roping a bull.
“You’re staring at me like you’ve never seen me before!” the woman called, grinning.
He waved through the windshield as she marched over to him, and creaked open his door.
“You gonna give me what I came here for, McClintock?” she said, softer now. “I believe you owe me my payment. I don’t provide my services for free, and all the online chatter says this one is gonna be hot.”
He moved around the hood and opened his passenger door.
“I’ll give you a ride.”
She climbed into his driver seat. “So glad I always get first dibs on you,” she teased.
And he, never able to tell her no, hitched up his grin in spite of his worry about Charlie, and shut the door to take her to his house.
*
A shiny Silverado and horse trailer were parked at the main house as Charlie crossed onto Dixon-McClintock land and wound around the farmyard and outbuildings, up the escarpment to his cabin.
Thaddeus’s truck was parked—haphazardly?—in front of his single garage. She and Daisy got out and stepped up the porch to the front door. No one answered when she knocked, when the sound of a woman laughing filtered out from behind the house.
Her pulse quickened. Her feet stalled…
A woman. The comments on the social post still swirled illness in her.
Her suspicions from earlier she’d done her best to stamp out raced anew.
Thad’s cageyness, his abrupt departure. The certified letter still clenched in her grip, crumpled, as she’d tried to cling to some shred of reality to keep her mind from reeling, and Daisy—who’d fallen silent in the back seat—from suspecting something wrong.
The laughter continued. Her feet picked up again, anger now swirling with the distrust and the helplessness from what she knew had been Jason’s anonymous post. Harassing her.
He hadn’t humiliated her in public in a long time.
But he liked to do those things when he felt cornered.
And he knew Thad was in her life now. What better way to silence her, scare her off, than to drag her name through the mud!
It would threaten her career, too, if the university caught wind of it. They didn’t like bad press.
She and Daisy circumvented the porch to the back steps that led down to Thad’s firepit and yard, anxiousness to see him, to not be affirmed of the worst about him, and her eyes landed on…
His back, sitting on the steps gazing out onto the cold firepit in the sunlight blinking through the trees.
Arm around a woman tucked beside him who was hugging his waist, all curves, tight denim, and long, golden-brown waves over her shoulder. The woman laughed again, looking up at him adoringly, and he hooked his arm around her neck and planted a kiss to her head, chuckling about something.
“Naw, I’m just a hopeless romantic,” he replied to whatever it was the woman had said. “The thing is, she actually trusts me.”
“Well, you’re breaking more than a few hearts on the McClintock Alumni page,” the woman teased, knocking him playfully in the arm, coming back together again.
“Thanks for the reminder,” he grumbled sarcastically. “God why the hell do I love you?”
Charlie’s stomach fell to the decking.
This was the final straw. She couldn’t handle anything else landing on her shoulders. The weight of it all was crushing her. She didn’t want to see Tyler, either. Resented being embroiled in this family.
Her eyes watered. Her feet slowed and pounding thudded hard in her ears. Or maybe it was her heart thumping out of her chest.
Daisy let go to run to him.
“Daisy come,” she clipped sharply.
Thad’s head snapped around and looked up.
Daisy, for the first time in her life, listened and stopped.
Thad’s brow furrowed as he unhooked his arm from the woman and pushed to standing, turning on the stairs to face up at them. “Hey girlie, you’re, uh, early.”
And a good thing they had been too. Her blood roared in her ears and humiliation flooded up her neck. Her feet felt stuck in concrete.
“Momma, what’s wrong?” Daisy asked as she took her daughter’s hand.
The woman turned and stood now, too and … God, the woman whose face she’d seen on his screen! She was gorgeous! Ropers and bright blue eyes and … oh, this heat, this sickening pulse twisting her stomach in knots…
Why had she given him the benefit of the doubt?
Why had she let herself start to fall for the blue-eyed charmer in the band all over again?
He might say all the right things when she needed to hear them, he might not use his hands to do his talking when he was angry, but there’d still been warning signs, and she’d been so desperate to believe he was good, that this honest pull between them was something she shouldn’t let her past define.
Honest? She nearly snorted, as her eyes stung and her throat tightened so hard she couldn’t swallow.
“Charlie?” Thad called, as the other woman’s brow furrowed and darted from her to Daisy, then to her again.
Oh man, Daisy. Exactly what she’d been afraid of. By taking a chance on him, Charlie’d embroiled her daughter in the wreckage.
The social media comments, the flirts, the flashing of chests at that concert. Jason’s humiliations. Silencing her. It was easier to give up. It was easier to go back to her quiet tunnel and put the dream of music back in the box where it should have stayed. Daisy didn’t deserve this.
She took up Daisy’s hand, hurrying around the deck toward the front of the house. “But, Momma, I thought w-we were gonna cook out with T. Rex and work on the chicken coop and I wanted to hear him play guitar—”
“Charlie,” Thad called, boots thudding behind her, but she hurried faster, remembering each time Jason slept with another, dishonored their marriage, because he’d never wanted her enough.
It had hurt differently than his hands, but it had still hurt as much as hands. She’d never been good enough, and God, why couldn’t she rid her heart of these ghosts of the past?
“Hey, Flower Girl!” he hurried behind her.
Flower Girl. How naively she’d capitulated to that sweet endearment!
“Wait!”
She jogged down the front steps, fishing out her keys from her handbag, Daisy confused and in tow, dashing to her Rover when something grabbed her arm—
She snapped herself free, whirling around, key wedged in her knuckles, as Thad jumped back, palms up.
“Nothing but trouble,” leaked from her lips as tears now rolled over her eyelids.
“Whoa, Flower Girl, put your thorns away,” he breathed softly, alarm in his gaze flashing between her face and her key wedged in her fingers, his brow contorted as he took in her rigid posture.
“Get in, Daisy.” Her eyes pricked and her lungs pumped as if she’d run a mile. “We’ll talk about this when we get home.”
“This ain’t what I think you think it is,” he croaked.
She laughed sardonically. “It never is.” She blinked the tears down her cheek and swiped them away stubbornly.
Because it was exactly what she thought it was, but no, this was worse.
She was going to be ill. She was hurt because she really did like him.
Really could imagine Daisy as his little girl as he picked her up from school or sat with her to read.
Really had hoped he’d say yes to Daisy’s dance so she could doll her daughter up in her favorite sequins and send her away to the ball and give her the world.
His hands, carefully now, took her arms. Squeezed. Her lungs squeezed harder, and she cringed. She turned away, hand squeezing Daisy’s, everything so tight—
“Charlie, hey,” he barely breathed near her ear as he stepped close behind her.
She sucked in air, and God it smelled of teak and mint and lies. “I didn’t realize you had company. I’m sorry.” Nacogdoches’s biggest flirt was busy when he wasn’t busying himself with her.
They shouldn’t have come early. He’d warned her. Those suspicious prickles, she should have heeded them. But it was good to know. She didn’t want to be in the dark about the man she loved and his extracurricular activities…
Loved. Love.
It was too soon for that, and yet, if so, then why did it hurt so much? It had been a precursor to something much more.
“You gonna let me explain or run away scared?”
Her brows lifted. Was he really asking that?
The woman on the porch put a Stetson on her head and pressed it down onto her crown, at least retaining a respectful distance.
Lush chest, stretched-on tank, golden-tan arms, crystalline eyes shielded by her brim.
Wranglers so fitted they might as well be painted on her curves, except where they flared out over her flat-toed boots.
She exuded sexuality. And yet, she wore a bright, hopeful smile, not the sheepish look of a side piece about to confront the girlfriend.
“Am I missing something?” Charlie murmured.
“Yeah, sweetheart. I’d say you’re missing somethin’ big and jumping to some bigger conclusions.”
She shook her head and nearly scoffed, but the other woman was coming this way. She smiled and her entire face glowed—
“I’m Faith.” She thrust out a confident hand, slender fingers work-roughened but kept. “You must be the Charlie my kid brother here has been going on, and on, and on—”
“All right, Faith, you don’t gotta make this worse,” Thad grumbled with a dose of irritation and a heavier dose of affection.
The woman laughed “And on about.”
His … sister?