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The world was against us.
He looked at his phone with a frown and sighed. “I need to take this.” I nodded, and he accepted the call. “This better be good, Crete. Fuck. Yeah, let me get Lex home and I’ll be right in.”
Oh, this isn’t good.
With another curse, he ended the call.
“Bad news?”
“Yeah. Bernie came in, pissed off at the world. Mack said something. Bernie swung. Roy came. I’ve got to go.” Roy was the sheriff in Skagway.
In the past, our dates had been ruined on more than one occasion because of a similar situation. About once every other month it had seemed to happen. “You don’t have to follow me to your parents’. I’ll be okay.”
“Roy can wait. I want to make sure you get home.”
That warm, squishy feeling made its way back. Drake winked at me and headed to his truck. As I drove to his parents’ house, it was impossible to wipe the grin off my face with Drake’s headlights in my rearview mirror the entire way. With Drake Foster, I always felt like his number one priority.
Chapter Eleven
Drake
It was past midnight, and I sat on the back porch of my parents’ place drinking a beer and unwinding. Lex was already asleep—she hadn’t stirred when I opened the bedroom door to check on her. She’d wanted me to wake her when I got there, but after seeing how peacefully she was sleeping, I couldn’t do it.
Once I’d gotten to the bar, it didn’t take long to get things sorted. But I ended up staying to make sure things remained that way. Bernie and Mac had gotten into a fight about who’d caught the bigger fish. Fuckin’ stupid. They’d probably both been so drunk they’d only caught some tiny perch.
I was still pissed they’d interrupted things with Lex. I’d wanted to tell her how much I still loved her, but twice that night, something had gotten in the way. Is fate stopping me from moving too quickly? Fuck if I knew.
I took another swig of my beer, thinking about Lex’s letter from Lloyd, which was still in my back pocket. Since the moment she handed it to me on the dock, I hadn’t let it out of my sight. What are we going to do about it? How do I prove Lloyd didn’t write it? Lex believed me, but this still had to weigh on her. Shit, it weighed on me and I knew it was a damn lie.
Maybe I’d talk to Dad and see if he had any idea how to sort this out that wouldn’t take forever.
As if he’d known I was thinking about him, Dad walked out the back door. “Thought I heard you come in.” He sat and scrubbed a hand down his face with a yawn.
The blackness of the night calmed me. “Sorry, Dad. I thought I was quiet. I needed to decompress.”
“Something on your mind, son?”
“Lex.” There wasn’t a moment she didn’t consume my mind.
“Are you regretting getting back together?” Dad asked hesitantly.
I looked him straight in the eye. “No. Never. She’s it for me. Always has been.”
The tension in Dad’s shoulders relaxed. “Then what’s going on?”
It had been awhile since I talked—truly talked—with my father. For the last two years, I’d bottled everything up and pretended I was okay. But I hadn’t been. I’d forgotten how much talking helped. I pulled out the note from my back pocket. “You know I asked Lloyd to marry Lex. And he gave his blessing.”
“I remember. You had the ring and were going to ask her that Christmas.”
Before I’d asked Lloyd, I’d talked to my Dad, wanting to make sure I did things right. I handed over the note. “Well, I found out why Lex broke up with me. She got a note at the reading of his will. I remember the lawyer handing her the envelope, but she didn’t open it. The letter was supposedly from Lloyd and told Lex to break up with me.”
Dad swore as he read it. “I never understood what happened. But that would make sense. Her dad’s last piece of fatherly advice. They were close. How could she stay with a man her dad didn’t approve of?”
The thought made my blood boil. Lex had been all sorts of messed up and feeling guilty for not being home when he died. And then she gets the letter from her Dad… Yeah, it would fuck with anyone’s head.
“Exactly.” I took a deep breath. “I told her I asked Lloyd for his blessing to marry her and what he’d said when he was dying. I do not believe Lloyd wrote that letter.”
Dad kept starring at the note. “I don’t, either. Lloyd wasn’t one to be underhanded. His word was his bond. And he wouldn’t have asked you to watch over Alexa. He would have told you to leave her even with his last breath.”
