AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Everyone looked to Merrick for a response, an answer. Everyone but me.
I was looking at Grant.
“Did you know the whole time?” I asked. “Why … why he was here? What he was doing to my mother?”
The misery on his face hit me like a baseball bat. He gave a single nod.
Merrick finally sighed, watching Grant with disappointment and disgust. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”
“Why, because I’ve been such a pushover in the past?” Grant snapped, looming in the direction of his father.
“I just didn’t think you were that stupid.”
I expected him to keep talking to Grant, or apologize to Mama. I did not expect him to zero in on me.
“I promised Grant that if he ruined my deal, I’d ruin his. As self-righteous as he is about what I’ve done, he didn’t tell you the whole story. Because he was using you long before I came for your mother.”
“I already knew that,” I said with my heart pounding.
“But did you know he was still using you? Did you know that everything he did was to get you to sign? Did you know I came to see him over a week before you ever saw my face?”
My face swiveled to Grant, praying for it to be a lie. But if he was misery before, now he was wretched, and I knew.
“He told me the day he got here that you were the key to getting your family to sign. That if he could get you to trust him, he could convince you to put pen to paper. And that you could convince the rest of them. When I got to town, he assured me you were a long game, a means to an end—this, minutes after you’d slept with him. He had no feelings for you then, and I doubt he ever will. He lied to you.” He scanned our faces. “All of you. Think what you want—Grant is everything he hates about me. We’re not that different.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Grant said through his teeth.
Merrick turned slowly, moving in Grant’s direction until they were nearly nose to nose. “Everything I did, you did. Everything I am, you are. Except for the fact that you were willing to throw a deal out the window for a piece of ass—”
Whatever he was about to say was interrupted by the flash of Grant’s arm as he cocked his fist and let it go almost too fast to see. Merrick wheeled back, hands to his nose.
The four of us were a mess of gasps, shrieks, and hands over our mouths. But none of us moved to help the traitors in our kitchen.
Merrick stood, his eyes narrowed and watering, his jaw firm, the bottom half of his face covered in gore.
“I told you not to say another fucking thing about her,” Grant said so still, so quiet, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
“You need to leave,” Mama said. I didn’t realize she was crying until then.
They looked at her, then at each other, like they didn’t know who she was speaking to.
“Both of you. Get the hell out of my kitchen. I don’t want to see either of your faces again,” Mama said, adding. “You can tell Flexion to fuck right off, because they won’t be getting anything inside our property line. And neither will you.”
I was too hurt, too raw to even appreciate my mother’s casual use of the word fuck. My eyes, my heart, my whole soul were looking at a stranger.
“It was a lie,” I said half to myself.
“It wasn’t,” Grant promised, taking a step in my direction.
I took one back. “I knew it was a game, but I thought … I thought after … after we—” I shook my head and swallowed, trying to master myself. “It quit being a game for me a long time ago, but how can I believe it was for you too? You lied about why he was here, even when he was here. You put my mother’s heart on the line and strung mine along with it all for your deal. Were you going to stay just to keep me in your sights? Were you going to keep sleeping with me so you could get your daddy his money?” My cheeks were wet and cool—I was crying, when did I start crying?—my voice wobbling and as unsteady as my knees. “Get out.”
“Jo, please—”
“Get out.”
“Just let me explain—”
Mama stepped between us with the menace of a lioness in front of her cubs. “She said to get out. My shotgun isn’t that far off. Don’t make me get it. I don’t wanna go to jail today, but I will—and gladly—if you don’t get off my property right this minute.”
Merrick gave my mother a cold look but said with a muffled nose, “It was just business.”
