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Chapter Fifteen
South Carolina license plates, Spencer thought as he swung his truck in next to the one already sitting in front of his cabin. His brain screamed a warning at him, especially since no one sat behind the wheel, and no one sat on his front steps or front porch.
Where had they gone? Right inside?
Hiscabin?
He didn’t know anyone he was familiar enough with who would do that, except all of the men and women he’d just left behind at Hope Eternal Ranch. And none of them drove a pickup this rusty and this beat up.
He got out of his truck, the darkness nearly complete now. He put his hand on the hood of the light blue truck that didn’t belong there. Cold. Whoever had driven this thing here had been here for a while.
Clarissa joined him at the hood, and he squeezed her hand. “Maybe you should just go home.”
“So you can go in alone?” she whispered. “No, let’s just go see who it is.”
“Do you really think they went inside?”
“Did you lock your front door?”
“No,” he said. “I never lock my door. Who’s going to come in and rob me?” He frowned as he went down the short sidewalk and up the steps. Clarissa moved right with him every step of the way, which only made his heart pound louder and louder in his ears.
He reached to open the door, calling, “Hello?” into the dark and supposedly empty house. He really needed to start leaving a light on when he went out at night. Or install some of those motion lights like Clarissa had next door. Something.
His fingers fumbled along the wall, and then he found the switch. He flipped it, and the house burst to life with light.
A man groaned, and Spencer’s eyes flew to the couch. His heart dropped to his feet, then rebounded painfully to the back of his throat. He felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach.
“Who are you?” Clarissa demanded. “This isn’t your house, you know. You can’t just wander around and enter any old house you want.”
Spencer couldn’t get his voice to work. He only kept breathing and blinking because those were involuntary bodily functions. His pulse boomed through his whole body, and his chest was nowhere big enough to hold his heart.
The man sat up, and if Spencer had had any doubt, being able to see him more fully would’ve erased it.
He hadn’t seen this man in twenty years, but Spencer knew his father when he saw him. He automatically tried to touch the inch-long scar that slashed diagonally from the base of his thumb up toward the middle of his palm.
An accident, his dad had said, though he’d been swinging the knife that had caused Spencer to get thirteen stitches in his left hand.
“Hello?” Clarissa said, still at his side, the two of them framed in the doorway. “You have to leave.”
“He’s my dad,” Spencer said quietly as Ernest Rust rubbed the sleep from his eyes and squinted through the bright lights toward him and Clarissa.
“Your dad?” Clarissa asked, looking up at him too. “Really?”
Spencer nodded, his throat too tight to speak.
“I thought you said you didn’t speak to your dad.”
“I don’t,” Spencer said. “I haven’t in a really long time, at least.” He wasn’t sure how he felt. At the moment, numbness seemed to be the predominant emotion spreading through him, and he couldn’t latch onto a single thought to think it.
Ernest got to his feet, where he immediately stumbled into the coffee table in front of the couch.
Spencer’s irritation and anger sparked to life. He’d shown up drunk. Spencer wasn’t sure why he’d expected anything different from his father, only that he had. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“You’ve been in the same place for years, son,” Ernest said, and Spencer wanted to shove him against the wall and tell him never to come back.
He stepped in front of Clarissa. “Baby, I think you should go home.” He had to get her out of there before Ernest said something to her that would embarrass all of them.
She looked at him with fear in her wide, green eyes, but she nodded.
