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“Soon, less than a few months.”
“You getting cozy over there, Amber?”
“I’m clean. I have a job.”
“That’s not what I fucking asked.” Her long pause was enough.
“It’s different here, Laz.”
“Not fucking homesick, are we?”
“I miss our son.”
And there it was, the one fuck I gave about the world wrapped up in a single word.
“Then get him the fuck home.”
“Laz, Taylor—”
I ended the call and scrubbed my hand down my face. I had three counties chomping at the bit for my supply. I had no one I trusted enough to care for my business, and I was losing control of Amber.
Goddamn you, Taylor.
She’d manipulated her sister the way she had me. I was completely helpless to it all until my son was legally back in his mother’s arms. And even when that happened I’d have a fight on my hands.
And Taylor hadn’t, for one second, forgotten how to do that. Lucy blistered my ears from behind the bathroom door while I rubbed at the scar on my leg.
“Laz, you think rich people are happier?”
Taylor was staring out the window of my truck, her body present, her mind somewhere in a daydream as we drove down the back roads toward another sunset.
I looked her way. She had on the same jeans she’s worn the past three years and a lightly stained tank top, her ratty clothes did shit to taint her beauty. “I don’t think money solves everything, Red.”
“I think it does.” She looked over at me with glossy eyes.
I shook my head. “Look at George Hardin. Big house, beautiful wife, he owns half the county and fucks his secretary on the sly. That ain’t happy.”
“I’ll never get married.”
“The hell you won’t,” I said with a wink her way. “You’re going to marry me.”
Taylor rolled her eyes and looked out the window again as we passed the Rucker farm. It had been the latest in a string of family farms to go bankrupt.
“We can buy that place, make it our own.”
Taylor’s head snapped to me before her eyes narrowed. “We aren’t staying in Dyer.”
I shrugged. “What’s so wrong with home? It’s where we met. Nothing wrong with staying close. Hell, if it will make you happy, we can move two counties over. I’ve got friends out there.”
Mouth parted with accusing eyes, she scoured me. “Are you serious?”
“Why the hell not? This place is as good as anyplace else.”
That was the moment I lost her.
It took me years to figure it out. But I saw it that day, in her eyes. Her decision. A month later, she put a hole in my leg.
“She became Ray Tyco’s whore when she left here, you know.”
