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“And it wasn’t enough,” I say after he’s quiet a long time, lost in his own head again.
“No.” He turns, stares at me with sad, hopeless eyes. “He wanted Grace, too. I saw the way he looked at her.”
His lips peel back, hot rage coming alive in his eyes.
Shit.
I’m not far behind him in the hellfire and brimstone department. Imagining the demon who’s been torturing them for years getting his hands on her gives me the urge to hire a whole hit team and end this now.
“I swore to him Grace didn’t know anything about his gig. I barely ever said the name Old Town Boys. She didn’t know who he really was, but he said he couldn’t take that chance. He needed to talk to her.” His jaw tightens. “He…he offered to give her a better life than what she had with me.”
He’s sick at the memory.
Pure revulsion shows on his face.
So does the blame for what he’d put his daughter through, the horror. Because Nelson knows exactly what men like Clay Glendal do to women when they’re through with them.
After they get what they want.
I do, too, no thanks to Linus Hammond.
They dispose of them, drug them, and push them off balconies.
I shove my hands together on my lap, careful not to let him see them twitch. It takes every morsel of discipline I’ve got to control my short fuse, this urge to start beating holes in the wall.
“When did this happen?” I ask through clenched teeth.
“A few years ago. The day I was shot. He would’ve killed me that day, but just wounded me instead. A neighbor driving by heard the shots and slowed down at the edge of our driveway. Clay saw the guy coming and left. I hid in the barn until the neighbor disappeared, hobbled in the house, then Grace got home and forced me to the hospital. They kept me there overnight. When I got home, I started selling whatever we had left, gave it to his goons whenever they’d show up. Usually it was Jackknife Pete playing collector. The last thing I left them was the title to the farm…” His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows thickly. “Some escape. This is as far as we made it.”
“He’s not going to get to Grace here,” I say, anger boiling over inside me. “I guarantee it, Nelson. You’re both in good hands.”
“If you can’t stop him…it’s gonna be real ugly. Clay warned me not to go anywhere. Not to the police. He has connections and I’ll be the one serving time for drug trafficking. Hell, maybe I deserve to die in jail—”
“Bullshit. That’s not going to happen,” I snap.
“They ransacked our house a couple months ago.” His voice is soft. Sorrowful. “They…they broke Eleanor’s urn. Spread her ashes all over.” A tear slips out the corner of his eye. “Grace had to clean that up. Her own mother’s ashes.”
I’m fucking speechless.
And now I get why she reacted the way she did the first day she flipped over my mom’s memorial.
My throat burns at the agony this asshole caused.
I’m going to need Faulk, Grady, Tobin, somebody to help me cool off before I do something wild.
“He’s not going to win, Nelson,” I manage to grind out. “Not this fucking time. Not ever again.”
Grace isn’t in the cabin when I leave Nelson’s room, but as I step outside, I see her through the window in the sunroom.
She’s been working on some of the other old—antique—junk she’d found in storage with Tobin’s help.
I want to go to her, hold her, tell her that madman will have to get through me if he ever wants a piece of her.
I’m a giant safety net, her shield, her rock.
Only thing that riles my nerves is whether or not I’m good enough, knowing I fucking have to be.
So I head for the front of the house and walk straight into my office, hating the fact that I’m the best she’s got.
Who the fuck am I to be her protector, really?
Money, fame, and military experience aside, I’ve never finished anything.
I quit acting as a kid because I hated it, so I said I wanted to go to school.
I almost quit school because it bored me, so I went through the motions with Tobin’s help and then right back to acting.
Only to quit again because I still hated it and went into the Army. I blamed my decision to discharge on my mother and a random injury, but bottom line?
I was the one who chose to quit that, too.
Nobody else.
Uncle Sam held me more accountable than I’d ever been in my life.
I went back to acting and produced hit after hit until Mom’s death and the trouble with Hammond started.
Then I tried producing a couple films, mangled it, quit again, left L.A. for Dallas, and truth be told…that night at the Purple Bobcat, I was considering giving this up. Moving somewhere else because I was sick of Old Man Winter.
