Page 69 of Chasin’s Surrender

“Because I wanted to see if you had the balls to speak up and ask your son for money. But you didn’t. As always, you let your wife control the conversation. Faulty play on your part, considering you know how much I hate the woman. For six months, I waited for a call that never came. And had you asked me for the money yesterday, I would’ve sent it. But after the shit you said to my woman, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I’m giving you one single penny.”

“Chasin,” Genevieve whispered, and her palm pressed harder against his chest.

“No, Evie. You called that shit right. He took one look at you standing by my side, at your beauty, and he called you a whore. No one, and I mean no one, disrespects you. They don’t cast judgment, they don’t talk shit, they don’t even get to look at you like you’re anything less than the perfect you are. I don’t give the first fuck if that person is my father. It’s not gonna happen.”

“We’ll lose the house,” Nancy hissed.

“Good.” Chasin shrugged his shoulders. “That den of debauchery should’ve been burned to the ground years ago.”

“You can’t mean that. We’ll—”

“I mean that so deep down into my soul, I can’t explain how far down that shit goes. How you think I’d give two shits about a house that holds nothing but horrifying memories I don’t understand. I watched you, Mother. I heard. Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit? Your own kid heard you banging away in the very room you shared with my father.”

Stone-faced and belligerent. Nancy Murray was trash, Chasin had known it his whole life, but seeing the woman who’d given birth to him looking unrepentant and unapologetic, made his stomach roil. Bile crept up into his throat, and if Genevieve hadn’t been holding on to him, he didn’t think he would’ve been able to keep his feet.

As much as he didn’t want to admit it, there was some small, dark place in the way back of his heart where the little kid he once was still hoped his mother felt some kind of remorse.

But she didn’t.

She never would.

“Out!” Bobby shouted. “Get the fuck out of this house now before I call the police.”

Chasin started to move but Genevieve held tight. “Let her. They don’t deserve to breathe the same air as you, honey. Let her get rid of them.”

A trail of warmth blazed through him. Then it burned so hot it neutralized the acid swirling in his gut. Not just from this latest unpleasant encounter with his parents, but from years’ worth of caustic waste that he’d never found a way to defuse.

Yet, it had taken Genevieve a handful of words and a touch to make it all start to fade.

Chasin had known it since the day he’d met her, and even knowing it, he’d almost fucked up and lost her. But now he realized he was not the fool his father had accused him of being. He was so far from it, he was never letting the woman at his side go.

Genevieve Ellison was one of a kind.

His perfect match.

Just plain his.

20

There was so much I needed to talk to Chasin about. But since Bobby had—hilariously—kicked his parents out of the house—and it was only funny because Bobby was a short little ball of fury and Chasin’s father might’ve been older, but he was not a small man. Yet, he was no match for Bobby’s feistiness. Through Bobby’s rampage, Chasin had remained at my side, my arms wound tightly around him.

Then his mood shifted.

I was seriously nervous I’d stepped over the line. I mean, I called his mother a whore, and I couldn’t remember, because I was pissed beyond all get-out, but I might’ve called his dad stupid.

The moment the door closed on his parents, something happened. Chasin checked out—totally. After he made sure I was okay, he turned to Bobby and checked on her. Once she declared his parents were massive dickheads—to which I flinched, at her outburst not because it wasn’t true, but because they were still his parents—he took me back to his room, told me to unpack, kissed me again, then said he had to run to the office.

I didn’t understand the change. I also didn’t understand why he was going back to the office when we’d just been there, but I didn’t question him.

Through the bedroom window, I watched him walk out to his Charger. He waited for Holden to finish walking up the lane from his Airstream and they had a brief chat, one I couldn’t hear. Then Chasin drove away and Holden came into the house.

I’d met all of the guys Chasin worked with. Jameson Grant was the scariest of the bunch. He looked like he could snap someone in two. But as I learned the other day when Bobby had her run-off-of-the-mouth, when he smiled it changed everything about him.

Alec Hall was the second scariest and Nixon Swagger took third place. Weston seemed happy-go-lucky, but then I met his wife, Silver, and their baby, Dylan, and figured those two were the reason he smiled a lot. Not that the other guys didn’t seem happy—they totally did, when their women were around—only changing when they were in the office.

But Holden struck me as the one who, out of all of them, had a true devil-may-care attitude. Though Chasin had been like that, too, before all of my drama hit him full-force.

When Holden walked into the house, his jaw was clenched, and his face set in stone. He was giving off some serious do-not-fuck-with-me vibes. Which worried me because I was afraid my needing a babysitter had interrupted whatever he was doing in his Airstream. Which, if I thought about it, it was weird that he was hanging out at home during a workday, but I wasn’t about to ask why he wasn’t in the office. First, it was presumptuous of me, and second, it was not my business.