Page 7 of Holding Penalty

Is she falling apart on the inside? Is everything that happened to her tonight, including ending up in my truck, just so bizarre that she doesn’t know how to respond to it yet?

Her phone starts to ring.

“It’s him,” she says, looking at it. The tone of her voice is flat, unreadable.

My nostrils flare. “Want me to answer it?” Protectiveness floods my veins. Piper shouldn’t have to hear that fucker’s voice right now. And I wouldn’t mind letting him know exactly how much of a piece of shit he is for what he’s done.

The road ahead of us is still empty. We haven’t passed a single car since I picked her up. So, I turn my head to get a good look at her, to try and assess where she’s at mentally and emotionally right now.

To my surprise, there’s a smile curling on her full lips. It has that edge of mischievousness I remember so well from our college days.

“You know, working as a baker has its pluses and minuses.”

“Oh?” I don’t know where she’s going with this. The phone still rings in her hand. I can read the name Crew on her screen.

“The pay isn’t great, and work starts early in the morning,” she continues. “But a big plus? I don’t really get contacted outside working hours. I can step away from my phone for as long as I want. Especially if someone I have no interest in talking to keeps trying to call me.”

Then she rolls down the window—and tosses her phone out of it.

My jaw drops. I’m not sure if everything she’s experienced tonight has cracked her sanity, or if she’s just being the same impulsive Piper I always knew her to be. Tossing her phone out the window just because she’s avoiding someone trying to get in touch with her isn’t entirely off brand.

She takes a deep breath and lets it out with a loud, “Wow! That felt great. Fuck him and fuck his stupid phone that he used to cheat on me and fuck my phone too because I used it to tell him I love him even while he was fucking some other girl.”

A hard ball of concern weighs down my gut. “Piper, are you okay? Seriously.”

“Of course I’m not okay,” she says. “But that felt good. Empowering, actually, to toss him right out the damn window while he’s trying to call me.”

I know exactly how un-empowering getting cheated on feels. It makes you feel small. Insignificant.

As bad as you want to take back some feeling of control when you’re in that situation, it never crossed my mind to get a hit of it by throwing my phone out the window of a moving truck. Then again, I’m not Piper Dashwood.

A couple more moments of silence pass by. During which, I ease my foot off the accelerator, decreasing our speed, because I’m pretty sure …

“Uh, hey, Nash?”

My lips are twitching again, even though I’m fighting back a groan. “Yeah?”

“Can we go back and find my phone?”

I sigh, exasperation mixed with sympathy mixed with annoyance mixed with more amusement than I should be feeling right now.

When I found out Bridgett had been cheating on me for years, only using me for the money I was about to be making when I signed with the Alligators … even though I’m a natural loner, I wished I had someone there for me. Someone by my side so I didn’t have to go through it alone.

“Sure,” I sigh. I roll to a stop and pull a U-turn, ready to try to find a needle in a haystack with hardly any moonlight to help us.

Piper might be a pain, but with what she’s going through right now … whatever she needs me to do for her tonight, I’ll do it.

3

PIPER

It took an hour to find my phone, and Nash didn’t complain even once.

Luckily, the land that stretches out at the side of the road is mostly grassy, so my phone didn’t get damaged by the impact. It was Nash who found it, about twenty minutes after he insisted I sit in the truck because I was in no state to be on my feet with the heel of one shoe broken.

He spent those twenty minutes bent over, searching every square inch of the ground with the flashlight he had in his truck.

Because of course Nash keeps a flashlight in his truck.