Chapter 34
Auggie couldn’t stop shaking. She just couldn’t.
She hadn’t stopped from the moment she had seen her father right there.
He’d obviously been looking for something.
Everyone in town was saying Bruce was looking for something.
Fletcher’s new fiancée Dylan had said as much.
Auggie’s father had been there when Dylan and Fletcher had almost been killed.
Her father had burned down the barn he and his cronies or pals or whatever they were had been using to hide drugs.
But Dylan distinctly remembered him looking for a trunk.
Auggie hadn’t heard what had happened to that trunk, or if it even still existed; all she knew was that Claudia knew more details. Claudia never told secrets. But that chest…Auggie had no clue anything about it. So why had her father been going through that old desk?
The only answer she had was…the money. The money that had been in it before.
That old desk had been her father’s. After the house had become hers and her sisters, Junie had stripped the desk of the old paint and redone it beautifully, with help from their cousin Kaece. Because her uncle—Kaece’s father—had made it himself when he’d been no more than a teenager.
But there had been memories associated with that desk.
Her father had liked to hit his daughters next to that desk when they’d been bad.
Junie had refinished it so she could erase the ghosts.
That was what her sister had said. And there had been…
papers…in there. Junie had packed them up years ago and shoved them into a box.
They were in the basement now, Auggie thought.
Where all of the old junk and memories were locked.
She hadn’t been down there in a long, long time. Not since she and Junie and Em had moved back to the ranch after each of them had graduated high school. Auggie had lived at the ranch alone for a little while. She had never found anything in this house that would explain what Bruce wanted.
Except…that money.
There had been almost ten thousand dollars in cash tucked into a broken panel in the bottom of that desk drawer. Em had found it two months after their father had abandoned them for the last time. That money…had saved them. For two years.
With it, Auggie had been able to buy food for her sisters and had been able to pay some of the bills that inevitably came from having a home.
She had made plenty of mistakes, but she had figured things out along the way.
For two years, that money had kept them going.
Until her aunts and uncles had realized what was happening and had swooped in and changed everything.
It had taken Auggie a while to get used to the changes after that. She’d had trouble trusting someone else, an adult, to make the decisions for her and her sisters that she was used to making for herself. Sometimes…she thought she was still stuck in that cycle.
It was all Bruce’s fault, too. But…it had to be the money.
Bruce had gotten himself into serious trouble lately.
Everyone in town was still talking about what had happened to Dylan Talley—and Fletcher.
Fletcher and Dylan were both still at the inn recovering after what Bruce had done to them. It hadn’t even been four weeks.
She’d been deluding herself that he had gotten out of town. Most likely he had holed up somewhere like the snake he really was. Watching.
She knew how determined he could be when he wanted something.
Just waiting to strike, to poison everything once again.
And Auggie had six beautiful little girls, and two big girls, to protect from the destruction that was Bruce. She forced herself to calm down. To be the cool, collected, always in charge Mama Aug that the girls were depending on.
Cal was still hurting. It was obvious in how he was moving around. Not that he would let that show. He could be so stubborn.
He stood now, when he should probably be sitting. At the window, watching. They were waiting for the Masterson County sheriff’s office or the WHP to send someone out. She hoped it was soon. She was starting to shake apart.
Her sisters would be home, soon. She didn’t want Bruce or anything about him to get close to her baby sisters. She would do anything to keep that from happening.
“There’re two cars coming down the drive,” Cal said, quietly.
He hadn’t said much since she’d explained to him exactly what had happened.
But…he had touched her. Multiple times. Little brushes along her arm, and he’d cupped her cheek once.
Even though he hadn’t said much, the emotions had been in his eyes.
There had been something about the way that man had been looking at her since.
And he had stayed at the windows. Guarding her.
“Faster than I expected. They were probably closer to this end of the county.” She was almost fifty minutes from town. Her nearest neighbors were fifteen miles south from where her ranch was.
Her father had always boasted that he’d taken this ranch in whatever devil’s deal he’d made back then specifically because he’d wanted the isolation.
He hadn’t wanted his brothers butting their noses into his business—he had said that so many times.
Her father’s brothers had all lived up on Tyler Road, north of town.
But not Bruce—even though he’d had property there years ago.
Before he’d lost it to foreclosure. Gil owned that land now, keeping it all in the family.
“It’s Claudia, and Zach. That guy…I swear he’s attached to her hip at times.”
“They are good friends. Considering…” Zach had been Claudia’s first. But Auggie wasn’t certain if Cal knew that or not.
She wasn’t about to tell, if he didn’t. Claudia had made it clear that sometimes Zach liked to yank Cal and Cadell’s chains, just for the hell of it.
Claudia had told her that even she didn’t know if her brothers knew about her previous relationship with Zach.
But that was all in the past. The two acted more like squabbling siblings than anything.
There was nothing romantic between Zach and Claudia at all now—even if Zach liked to make jokes that there was.
He did the same with Marin, too—they’d dated about six years ago, Auggie thought.
Zach was just a flirt. And she’d be really happy to see that man walking up her porch right now. “I’m glad it’s them.”
If it had been Joel, her cousin Phoebe’s husband and the sheriff, or Sage, she wouldn’t be able to keep this away from the rest of the family. But Claudia and Zach…they were a different story.
Claudia, at least, would understand.
Auggie wasn’t going to let Bruce destroy the girls’ newfound peace and sense of safety. She just couldn’t let that happen.