Courting Trouble (6 page)

*

“You okay?”

The hard, cool surface of the boxing ring pressed against Cade’s shoulder blades. He sat up, shook his head, and pulled out his mouth guard.

“I’d already thrown before your shoulders dropped,” Wayne said, part apology and part explanation. He grasped Cade’s forearm and pulled him to his feet.

Cade nodded. Served him right. When a man lost his focus he deserved to get laid out on his ass.

They ambled across the ring and ducked out between the ropes. Wayne squeezed water into his mouth.

“Another round?”

Cade shook his head no. He didn’t have it in him. Not tonight.

“She looks good,” Cade finally said. He stood beside the ring and pulled on the glove laces with his teeth. Good wasn’t the right word. Tulsa looked hot, sultry, like sex in high heels. She was every fantasy he remembered from sixteen but now wrapped in a woman’s frame.

Wayne nodded. “I’ve seen her on television.”

Cade pulled off his gloves and sat on a bench beside the ring. He unwrapped cotton and more athletic tape from his palms.

“What the hell, Wayne? I can’t get off the case and I can’t stay on it.” Cade threw a strip of tape into the trash. “She makes me as crazy as she ever did.”

Wayne sat beside him. “Brother, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve each got someone in life who drives us nuts.”

“Great, my brother the sheriff is also a philosopher.”

“Half brother. And I’m a realist, not a philosopher. Besides, I bet she doesn’t stay on the case.”

“Oh, she’ll stay. If only to give me fits. Judge Wilder will chew her out for sure, but she’s as stubborn as she was at eighteen. She won’t let this case go—she can’t. Won’t want to be looking in from the outside.”

“Not an easy place to be in Powder Springs.” Wayne pulled the final bit of tape from his right hand. “Looking in from the outside.”

“What’s that mean?” Cade asked. Wayne’s somber tone held more meaning than just his words.

“Tulsa spent most her life in Powder Springs looking in from the outside—might not be a place she’s very comfortable. Believe me, I know.”

“You know? Your father was the district attorney and then a state senator and—”

“My
step
father,” Wayne said. “He’s
your
father and he’ll tell that little fact to anyone who asks.”

Cade stripped a piece of tape from between his fingers. Wayne spoke the truth. Hudd had never claimed Wayne the same way he claimed Cade.

“Look, brother, my dad and Tulsa’s mom came from the same side of town. And it wasn’t the good one. Not from the places the Montgomery family liked to hang out.”

“No one ever made Tulsa feel bad about Connie… We… I—”

“They didn’t have to,” Wayne said. He stood and picked up his towel. “She’d have known it on her own.”

Cade followed Wayne into the locker room.

“Tulsa’s seen more than most people who live in Powder Springs, is more educated, has more money, more class—”

“Right,” Wayne said. “And why do you think she tries so hard?” Wayne stripped off his shorts and his shirt and wrapped a towel around his waist. “Not easy being on the outside in a town like this.” Wayne pushed open the steam room door. “Especially when the closest friends you have are on the inside looking out.”

Cade followed Wayne into the mist and took a seat on the porcelain-tile bench. Maybe once upon a time he’d cared. Maybe once upon a time he’d even tried to understand Tulsa’s fears and her concerns. But now? Now all he had to do was help a man regain custody of his daughter.

“Not my problem,” Cade said and leaned back onto the bench. He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve got a job. And that’s what I’ll do.”

Wayne humphed and Cade turned his head toward his brother. “What? You think I can’t do it?”

“Oh, I know you can do it. You’re half Hudd.”

“What’s that mean?” Cade asked without really needing the explanation from Wayne.

Heartless.

Wayne was calling him heartless and stubborn with a questionable sense of morality.

“You don’t need me to elaborate. You live with the old man.”

“Somebody’s got to. He nearly burned the ranch down twice before I moved back.”

“I offered.” Wayne wiped sweat from his brow. “He didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Nice to see you’ve chosen a side,” Cade said. “You know, as much as you might try to deny that we’re related, we do have the same mother.”

“I don’t take sides, brother. But if I did I wouldn’t be on the side of a man the likes of Bobby Hopkins and against Savannah McGrath.”

“What do you want me to do, Wayne?” Cade’s temper was hotter than the steam room. “Wilder will have me disbarred if I even appear to go easy on Savannah. It’s the law. Surely you understand that?”

“Oh I understand the law,” Wayne said. “I just don’t have to like it.”

Cade rested his head in his hands and realized that neither did he.

*

Ash’s room looked like an explosion at a Forever 21 store. Big piles of jumbled clothing lay spread out across her bedroom floor. The layer of clothes was so thick Tulsa could barely walk without stepping on a sweater or pair of jeans. Organizing Ash’s room was exactly the kind of long, tedious distraction Tulsa needed after her liplock with Cade.

With her long coltish legs, full mane of curly black hair and McGrath blue eyes, Ash looked like her mother and her aunt. The only evidence of Bobby on Ash’s face was her nose—instead of the upturned button that both Tulsa and Savannah shared, Ash’s nose was straight and aquiline like her father’s.

“Do high school boys think about anything other than boobs?”

Tulsa whipped her gaze away from the purple shirt she held in her hands and looked at her niece. “Uh… maybe?” She picked her way across the room to Ash’s dresser and slid the purple shirt into a nearly empty drawer. Adolescent boys and boobs—such a great topic when shared with your girlfriends, but not so great when you were an adolescent girl’s aunt, trying to field the question.

“Did Grandma Margaret make you clean your room?”

“And everything else,” Tulsa said, thankful for the non sequitur into the safer subject matter of family.

“Wish Mom was more like Grandma Margaret,” Ash mumbled and dug through her duffel bag, pulling out her kneepads, practice shorts, and a wet towel. Tulsa wrinkled her nose—the bag stunk like sweat and hormones.

“No, you don’t.” Tulsa grabbed a periwinkle long-sleeved sweater from the floor. “She was amazing in a lot of ways, but Grandma Margaret could be a little bit…” Tulsa searched for a word that wasn’t harsh. “…stern.”

Ash tossed her practice uniform on the top of the ever-growing mountain of laundry and turned to Tulsa. She set her jaw and planted her hands on her hips as though bracing herself for a storm. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on with my mom and dad?”

A tingle sliced through Tulsa. She turned away from Ash and back toward the dresser. Boobs and boys
might
be easier, because this was one hornet’s nest that she didn’t want to shake. On the best of days Tulsa walked a tightrope with Savannah—never certain if she would teeter and fall into the abyss of sisterly anger and recrimination. Tulsa reached for another shirt to fold and turned back to face Ash.

“What does your mom say?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Ash’s voice bore a quiet sadness laced with frustration. She sat on the edge of her bed and stared intently at her pointer fingernail. A sigh radiated through Ash’s shoulders and her head jerked upward. Ash latched her blue eyes onto Tulsa. “She won’t tell me anything. She didn’t even tell me she got arrested for shooting at Grandma’s house.” Ash looked away from Tulsa and again stared at her fingers. She picked at the skin around her nail. “I heard about it in school.”

Tulsa’s heart crumpled in her chest and sadness grasped at her throat. She remembered being broadsided by her own mother’s bad behavior in the hallways of Powder Springs High School. She wanted to save her niece from those shame-filled feelings.

Ash’s jaw locked and the corners of her mouth pulled down. She reached for a crimson sweater on the corner of her bed.

“I’m sure she’ll talk to you about it—”

“When?” Ash turned her head toward Tulsa. Her eyes contained dozens of questions—questions that Tulsa couldn’t answer and dared not try. Ash’s brows pulled together, her face balanced between confusion and hopefulness. Hopefulness that some adult—perhaps her aunt—would listen to her, listen to her and really hear all that she needed to say.

“Maybe, you could try again—
we
could try again. Maybe she was surprised that your father came back from Alaska.”

The longing in Ash’s eyes stilled Tulsa’s words. She understood what Ash wanted. All through school Tulsa had watched her friends with their normal families.

Ash dropped her chin and stared at the now-folded red sweater she held in her hands. Her voice barely a whisper, she said, “I saw him.”

Tulsa’s throat tightened and her jaw flinched. Her molars ground together. She willed a practiced placidity to her face—an openness to her eyes and a softness to her lips. Ash didn’t need another closed-off adult judging her and judging her actions. Tulsa couldn’t risk demolishing the line of communication with her niece by giving away her own fears.

“Ash,” Tulsa said slowly, picking her words as if carefully stepping through a minefield. “There is a whole past between your mother and your father. There’s a lot you don’t know—”

“I know enough,” Ash shot out, her eyes now filled with fire. “I know Mom drove him nuts and he left. He left her and he left me. Mom can be a handful. She gets emotional, she cries, she yells, she—”

“Ash,” Tulsa interrupted, her voice soft, “
everyone
gets emotional. Your mom does the best she can. We McGrath women are sometimes prone to—”

“Craziness?”

“
Passion
.” Tulsa finished Ash’s sentence. It was the kindest word she could say.

Ash leaned against her headboard. Her lips were tight and her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her expression was so appropriate for fourteen. Who was this woman-child sitting before Tulsa? Ash didn’t seem like a little girl anymore; instead, she seemed close to being a woman.

“Whatever.” The harsh bite in Ash’s tone stunned Tulsa. A bitterness and anger toward not just Savannah, but the world. “Mom wants everything her way and she always gets it. If she doesn’t want me to see Dad, then I probably won’t, but it’s only four years until I turn eighteen and then she can’t do a thing. Not one thing. Once I graduate I’m going to be just like you, Aunt Tulsa.” Ash locked eyes with Tulsa.

A tremor tumbled down Tulsa’s spine. “How so?”

“Once I get my diploma, I am out of here. Gone. The very next day.”

Chapter Seven

Cade’s leg muscles ached as he tromped up the steps to the ranch house. A wide, slatted-wood porch of mahogany circled three sides of the house. The home was well-kept and clean, but there were few female touches. Cade supposed all those extras, the lovely little things women did to a home, had ended when his mother passed.

Once and again their housekeeper, Lottie, put out a pot of flowers, but now as the Colorado days grew short and the nights grew cold, nothing adorned the porch but a heavy scrub welcome mat on which to wipe your boots. A dull throb thumped along his chin and gathered into a tight-fisted ache at the base of Cade’s skull.

He opened the ranch-house door. A fire crackled in the fireplace. His father sat in his recliner with a stack of legal files on the coffee table. Half of his dad’s face lay like melted wax, the result of his first stroke. Hudd’s eyes traveled over his son as Cade pulled off his boots and set them beside the door.

“Your brother give you that?” his father asked, referring to the bruise along the rim of Cade’s jaw. Cade had seen the deep purple setting in before he left the gym. “Don’t need enemies when you’ve got a stepbrother like that.”

“Half brother,” Cade said and hung his jacket in the closet. “There’s a difference.”

“There certainly is,” Hudd mumbled and flipped the page of a deposition.

Cade moved to the fire and held out his hands. The heat chased the ice from his fingertips.

“You see your opposing counsel on the Hopkins case?”

“I did.” Cade’s gut clamped tight.

“She’s done better than any McGrath I ever knew. Especially her damn whore of a mother.”

Cade locked his jaw and let any hint of emotion fall from his face. His father might believe what he said, then again he might not. His father was testing him. A game from Cade’s childhood that long ago he always lost. Now Cade let his father’s unkind comments wash over him, drop away, leave no mark, like a wave touching the shore. After years of this game, Cade’s skin was thick as a buffalo hide.

“Lottie leave any dinner?” Cade asked. Most nights their housekeeper put a roast or casserole in the oven before her departure.

“Maybe wasn’t such a bad thing for those two girls when they found Connie dead in that ditch.”

Hunger slid from Cade’s stomach.

“Dad, don’t.” The tight ache at the base of his skull spread down through his spine and tightened in his back. His father pushed his limits.

“Margaret took damn good care of those girls, better than their mother ever would’ve.” This wasn’t an argument, but the unkind, bitter words of an angry old man. Perhaps a piece of Hudd’s brain the thrown clot had damaged.

“That family never did amount to much. Those women run off men like they’re wolves chasing rabbits. Tulsa still single? Can’t even find a man in a city big as Los Angeles?” Hudd shook his head, incredulous that a woman, any woman, might be without a husband.

“You know, Dad, some women don’t want to be married.”

His father squinted his eyes. “Seems like you’ve met a couple of those.”

“I have indeed,” Cade said.

“No worry, son.” His father flipped the file on his lap closed. “Some men just can’t pick the right one when it comes to women. Look at Wayne. He married that trollop and let her run around. And then you. With that woman who wanted a career and not a family. Would have thought you’d have figured that one out before the wedding. But hell, you’re out of it now.”