It was an asshole remark but it worked. Her shoulders slumped slightly and she took a step back.
“I’m just trying to be nice,” she pointed out the obvious.
“What would be nice is if you’d haul your ass back up the trail and leave me be.”
She didn’t move. Not for long moments.
Then she leaned slightly into him and said gently, “I don’t think you should be left be. I think you’re dealing with something heavy, you’re obviously doing it alone.” She threw a mitten-covered hand out to indicate the area, “You need to unload it, Chace.”
Christ.
Fuck.
Christ.
That voice, quiet, gentle, so fucking sweet saying his name, her eyes soft on him.
Fuck.
Better than he could have imagined.
Better than he ever could have dreamed.
And not his.
Never to be his.
Which meant finally hearing her say his name was torture.
“All right,” he started, “I’ve been trying to be nice –”
Her head jerked and she cut him off, her tone surprised, and again, Christ, fucking cute, “You have?”
“Yeah,” he fired back. “I have and you’ll know I have when I say, Miz Goodknight, I do not want your concern. I don’t want your listening ear. I don’t want your company. What I want is for you to walk your fat ass up the trail and leave me the fuck alone.”
He watched her body lock and her pale face in the moonlight become even paler.
This lasted less than half a second before she turned on her boot and ran from the clearing. She did it so fast, he could see the midnight shadow of her long hair streaming behind her even after she’d left the clearing and hit the trail.
Chace Keaton’s eyes didn’t leave the trail for a long while after she’d disappeared.
Kiss me, Chace.
He heard it in his head and he closed his eyes.
You need to unload it, Chace.
That time he heard Faye and his eyes shot open.
Just what he did not need.
Another demon.
“Fuck,” he growled, his eyes moving through the clearing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
Nothing there.
It wasn’t talking.
Fuck.
Like he had, night after night, Chace Keaton strode though the clearing to the trail and went home.
Two days later…
“Would it kill you to come to dinner?”
Chace watched over the counter as Shambles made his coffee. He felt the muscle jump in his cheek as he held the phone to his ear thinking, yes. It would kill him to go to dinner at his mother and father’s house.
Or, more to the point, it would drive him to murder if he had to breathe his father’s air.
“Ma,” he said into the phone, “like I told you, I’m busy.”
“But I thought you said they were hiring new officers and things were getting back to normal,” she replied.
“They are but it isn’t normal. Things are busy. Very busy. When they cleaned house, we lost practically everyone. Those new officers have to be trained and after what went down and the time it lasted, the citizens of Carnal aren’t gonna adjust in a few months to a Force they can trust. They got a problem, they still call each other rather than the Police Department. Then, when that goes south, and it usually goes south, we have to clean up the mess. No way I could make dinner this week.”
“How about next week?” she pushed as Shambles poured frothed milk from the little stainless steel pitcher into his drink.
“How about the weekend after next, I come to Aspen and take you out to dinner?” Chace suggested.
Her voice was disappointed when she replied, “But, you know your father always goes to that golf tournament in Florida the third weekend in February.”
He absolutely did.
He also absolutely knew his father was not attending a golf tournament in Florida but doing something else that could, conceivably, require sporting equipment but its usages were not something his mother could comprehend.
Unfortunately, Chace could. He just tried not to.
Shambles turned, smiling at him and shoving the white lid on top of his coffee.
Chace jerked up his chin to Shambles but said into his phone, “Is Dad’s attendance required at our dinner?”
“Chace, you never see your father,” she replied quietly.
“And, Ma, you know that’s by design,” Chace returned just as quietly, pulling out his wallet, flipping it open and yanking out a bill. He handed it to Shambles, Shambles set his coffee on the counter and turned to the cash register as Chace kept talking. “Now, are we on the weekend after next?”
She ignored his question and whispered, “I wish you two would heal this breach.”
That was not going to happen.
Ever.
And this was because he and his father did not have a breach that could heal. It used to be just a breach, years ago when Chace just wanted out of the house that he grew up in and out from under his father’s thumb.
Now it was not a breach. It was a chasm he sure as fuck wasn’t going to cross and if his father tried, Chace would shoot him.
“Ma –”
“I’m worried about you, what with Misty gone. I mean, who’s taking care of you?”
His mother didn’t know this, she wasn’t Misty’s biggest fan either, though she tried to hide it just as Chace tried to hide from his mother the fact that he hated his wife, but Misty never took care of him.
She tried that for a while, after she finally figured out that he was not going to fall head over heels in love with her because she was great at giving head. This was mainly since he wouldn’t allow her to touch him and didn’t sleep in the same bed with her.
Once she realized that her usual tricks were not going to win his heart, she’d branched out. And her branching out came in the form of her trying to be a good wife. She was a decent housekeeper, a decent cook. All this went to shit when he eventually refused to eat her food, left the house more often than not before she got out of bed, came home late and never commented on her loving care or how she kept their home. Finally, she started to get nervous and fucked everything up.
He’d been hard on her and, at the time, felt she’d deserved it. She had trapped him into marriage after having whacked, sick-fuck sex with his father, doing this while conspiring with a dirty cop to tape it. Then she’d blackmailed his Dad and forced Chace into servitude not only to his father and his cronies, all of whom were under a local man’s thumb, but also to a crew of dirty cops that were so dirty, they were made of pure filth.
Yeah, he thought she deserved that.
Now she was dead and how she got dead, he had that and his treatment of her for their very long, very unhappy, five year marriage living as demons in his head too.
“I’m thirty-five, Ma. I can take care of myself,” he told his mother while accepting change from Shambles and tossing a dollar in the tip bowl.
“But I worry about you.” She was back to whispering, this time sad and concerned and, because he loved his mother, it killed.
He knew she worried. He was an only child. She could have no more. She was lucky to have him and she felt that acutely. She was also flighty, sensitive and nervous by nature. Therefore, she’d smothered him growing up, terrified the very air had it out for him.
Her tactics for raising her son clashed violently with her husband’s.
Valerie Keaton was all about protection, love and care.
Trane Keaton was all about making his son a man.
This was not conducive to a loving, secure, understanding, supportive home.
Therefore, as he’d promised himself starting at around age eight, the minute Chace could get out, he did. He worked at it, hard, and he got it.