Justified (2 page)

Chapter Four

“Hey, babe.” Tyler didn't so much as glance at Ruthie when she stomped past him on her way to the diner. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on me, humming the words softly as though approaching a spooked colt. “Was hoping I'd run into you.”

My breath caught in spite of my defensiveness. His unexpected appearance, the low timbre of his voice, and the term of endearment worked together to transport me from Trapp's quiet Main Street to a dozen different places he and I had experienced together.

His black hair had grown longer across his forehead, and he had muscled up, but the biggest difference lay in his eyes. They didn't mock as much as they once had, though a glimmer of self-importance remained, and a protective shield hardened around my heart.

“You found me.” I wanted to wound his confidence with a glare, but I couldn't muster it, and I let my gaze wander to his truck parked nearby. A pair of binoculars lay on the dash, and I wondered if he'd been hunting recently.

He rapped his knuckles against the hood of the Chevy. “Classy ride. Your dad still holding your Mustang hostage?”

I didn't want to discuss my car, or my parents, or any other controversial topic. I didn't want to talk to him at all. Without a doubt, half the Dixie's Diner patrons across the street were ogling us while they shoveled chicken-fried steak into their mouths, and I wouldn't have put it past Sophie to video the event from her post at the salon. “What do you want, Tyler?”

His eyes roamed a circle around my face, bounced to the Gucci bag hanging from my elbow, and then deliberately examined my body from neck to ankle.

I instantly regretted my choice of clothing, knowing my baggy shorts and oversize Texas Tech T-shirt did nothing for my new body type.
But I shouldn't care.

He nodded. “You look
good
.”

The emphasis he placed on the last word indicated surprise, and my palm quivered with the urge to slap him. “Right.”

“Fawn …
babe
… don't stay mad. I miss you something fierce.”

The scent of his Dolce and Gabbana cologne flashed a string of memories across my heart. A lingering hug after a fraternity social. A candlelight dinner on the balcony of his father's house in Snyder. A midnight swim in my parents' pool.

But once he found out about the baby, it had taken him weeks to speak to me and two months to stand up and propose. I fingered a curl hanging near my shoulder. “I'm doing fine without you.”

“You can't be having an easy time of it.”

Of course not.
I lived in a shack without enough money for groceries or doctor bills, but I'd rather live alone than with someone I couldn't depend on. “Like I said, I'm doing all right.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts. “I shouldn't have been drinking. I never meant to hurt you.”

We had danced this number before, breaking up because of his lack of self-control and getting back together because of my need for security. Five times I forgave him. I could count on the fingers of my right hand the number of times I took him back, but once he endangered our baby, I vowed I wouldn't continue the count on my left.

“It won't happen again.” He ran his palm across his forehead, and his hair fell back into place exactly the way it had been. Shiny, straight, unchanging.

“That's what you said last time.”

“But things are different now. You and the baby mean everything.” He peered at me through his eyelashes. “Please forgive me.”

The muscles behind my knees weakened, and I shifted my weight. “I've never heard you apologize.”
Not to me or anyone else.

“It's about time I did.”

Something in the droop of his shoulders chipped at my resolve, but I hugged myself to mask the effect.

With his middle finger, he poked my abdomen. “How's our little bundle?”

“It's a boy.”

“Seriously?” His eyes puzzled. “That's cool. If we're going to have a baby, I'd want it to be a son.” He seemed to realize too late the double edge of his statement and did his best to recover. “Are you happy about it?”

I blinked into the wind. “I can't wait to hold him and rock him and all that.”

“Sure.” Tyler looked down the street, hesitated, then squinted back at me. “The kid got mentioned in Dad's will … Nothing to speak of, but as soon as he's born, there'll be papers to sign.”

I hadn't considered Byron Cruz's will. The man had treated me as an inferior, and when he died, I figured my child hadn't crossed his mind. “Sorry I didn't call when he passed.”

The glass door of the diner jangled open, and an elderly couple ambled out and to their car.

“No big deal.” He brushed his fingertips across my arm. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

“Better not. Ruthie's waiting for me.”

He cut his eyes toward the diner. “She's probably got her eye on me.”

“Ruthie and twenty other people.” We were standing on Main Street. The news that Tyler Cruz and Fawn Blaylock had spoken would be all over town by sundown.

“I don't see why you hang with her, Fawn. She's not like us.”

My spine bristled. Ruthie and I shared a rocky history, but over the past several months, she and her family had done more for me than anyone else. “Meaning?”

“She's hardly even a Christian. And her family's a mess. You shouldn't get tangled up in that.”

“She comes to church now.”

“Ah … right. With her preacher boyfriend.”

“I'd better go.” I hurried across the street, but he jogged after me.

“Can I call you sometime? To talk about the baby and see if you need anything?” His words spilled over one another as though he were frantic for me to hear him, to acknowledge his feelings, to love him again. To share our son. That's what it sounded like, but did he mean it?

I despised him for pressuring me to sleep with him—even though I did it willingly and would agree with anyone who called me trash—yet in the midst of my strong feelings, it broke my heart to think of my little man growing up without a daddy. The baby deserved better. I glanced at the diner's tinted plate-glass windows, feeling like an actor on a reality-television show, wanting the studio audience to choose my fate.

If someone had asked me that morning if I would ever speak to Tyler again, I would have said,
Not in a million years
. He had gone too far, left my heart battered and my cheeks bruised. Yet here I stood not only speaking to him but considering letting him call me.

A good Christian would keep on forgiving, but when I looked back at him, a hint of nausea grazed my insides. He seemed to be inspecting my clothing, and then his eyes bounced to the diner windows, and he squared his shoulders.

He would never change.

Even though my life was falling apart, I hadn't given up my dream of a happy ending. A future involving roses and candles and sweet, kind words, not vanity and drunkenness and abusive rage.

“No.” I opened the door to Dixie's. “Don't call me.”

Chapter Five

When I walked through the entrance of Dixie's Diner, most of the merry patrons returned their attention to the piles of food in front of them, but a few couldn't keep their eyes from ping-ponging back and forth between Tyler and me as he pulled away.

The only person openly glaring was Ruthie.

“Sit.” The wooden legs of the chair across from her grated against the floor as she shoved it with her foot. “What did the un­dependable, shallow egomaniac want?”

I glanced at the two women on each side of her—Ruthie's aunt Velma and her mother, Lynda—and wished we were alone. Tyler's appearance rattled me, and I would have liked to discuss it with my friend … but not her entire family.

I eased into the seat, scooting back an inch to account for my swollen belly. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Don't play stupid.” Ruthie smirked.

Velma's plump palm patted my arm. “Aw, Ruthie, give the girl a break. Plain as day the boy caught her off guard.”

A grunt of disgust came from Ruthie's mother, but she didn't look up from the laminated menu. She merely raised one condescending eyebrow and tucked her hair behind her ear. I never knew what to make of Lynda Turner.

My mother once described her as an unambitious small-town floozy, but Mother, understandably, was biased.

Velma Pickett, on the other hand, she described as
homemade soap
—functional, old-fashioned, not much to look at. But ironically, Ruthie's aunt Velma, more often than her mother, caused a stifling wave of guilt to press against me like a sauna. Even though she hadn't set foot in a church building since her marriage to Ansel thirty years before, she still had more jewels in her crown than I ever would.

All three women shared the same skeptical brown eyes, compelling me to open my own menu. “Tyler asked about the baby. He didn't want anything.”

“Tyler Cruz?” Lynda finally spoke. “Wanting nothing?”

Ruthie glanced at her mother out of the corner of her eye, but she didn't rebuke her the way she often did.

“The man doesn't exactly have a good track record for love and devotion,” Lynda said.

She had worked at the diner over a year, so she had no reason to read that menu. She merely used it as a prop to hide behind, like a hot-wire fence separating her from the rest of the world.

I pressed my lips together to keep from snapping at her. The woman had every right to hate my family. Especially my father. “I know Tyler's a mess, but so am I.”

“No, you're not,” Ruthie said. “You're making something of your life and taking responsibility for your actions.” Her head jerked to the window. “He's only flumping along doing whatever feels right in the moment.”

“You don't even know what he said.”

“I bet I can guess.” Lynda slapped her menu against the table. “He loves you, he wants to do right by you, he misses you. And the best line … he'll never let it happen again.”

I squirmed in the wooden chair. “What makes you think he said any of that?”

“She's heard it before,” Ruthie said with an implied
duh
in her tone.

They were ganging up on me.
“He apologized for what happened in April.”

Lynda's eyes rolled so dramatically, they seemed to pull an exasperated sigh from the depths of her lungs. “Good grief, those two men are just alike.” She glared desperately at Velma. “How can she not see it?” Lynda didn't wait for an answer from her sister but stood and stalked out of the diner.

As the cow bell on the doorframe clanked against the thick glass, indignation swarmed through my lungs like a cloud of angry bees. No matter how well Lynda Turner knew my father, she didn't have the right to criticize him.

Velma tsked as the waitress approached, and I quickly skimmed the menu for the lowest priced item. “I'll have the fried zucchini.”

“She'll also have an order of chicken and dumplings,” declared Velma to the waitress, “with okra and corn on the side. Same for me.”

“Me, too,” Ruthie said.

The baby chose that moment to kick me in the ribs, and I sat up straight and rubbed my side. “Thanks, Velma.”

She watched me as she sipped her sweet tea and then set her glass down with a thump, obviously forging the conversation in a new direction. “How's your new home?”

The woman could read my moods like a gypsy fortune-teller. “I get lonely out there.”

“I can come over more often.” Ruthie's statement seemed to double as an unspoken regret for her mother's outburst.

“You come over plenty.” I fiddled with the silverware bundle on the table. “I just miss campus life.”

Ruthie raised an eyebrow. “Partying and spending money?”

“Don't be ugly.” The older woman's chin jutted, and I got the impression she expected Ruthie to apologize then and there.

“She's a Blaylock, Aunt Velma. She can't help it.”

“For crying out loud, Ruth Ann.”

But Ruthie hit the target. I missed my right-side-up world, and my stubborn will was bucking the changes. “I'm not like my parents … I mean I'm not like my father.”

“Oh, Fawn.” Ruthie rubbed her palms over her face. “It's not your dad that has Momma upset. It's you.”

Velma chuckled. “My sister might not show it, but she cares.”

I almost laughed out loud. Lynda Turner cared for me about as much as a hawk cares for a field mouse. “Yeah, right. It's obvious from the kindness she's shown over the years.”

“That's Lynda, darlin',” Velma soothed. “Her love's prickly, but it doesn't make it any less real.”

A tractor rumbled down Main Street, and I gazed at it blindly, lost in thought. A person like me, with only one friend—two if I counted Velma—had no room to be picky when it came to affection.

“Well, at least your mother speaks to me,” I said. “That's more than I can say for mine.” I took a sip of ice water, and as its cool wetness washed the soot of bitterness from my lungs, I said a silent prayer, thanking God for these women He placed in my life. It was true Ruthie looked down on my sorority sisters, her aunt Velma naturally upstaged me and my sinful ways, and her mother resented my father so much she could never forgive, but the three of them cared about me.

Certainly they weren't the people I would have chosen for the job, but nevertheless, they were all I had. And their words of concern, painful though they were, floated around in my brain the rest of the day.

Chapter Six

For the first time in my life, I had a job, and—wouldn't you know it?—I was surrounded by men. When Dusty Burnett, from the feed store, insisted he needed some accounting work done, I assumed he asked me as a favor to Ruthie's uncle Ansel, but after inspecting his books—four spiral notebooks filled with pencil scratches—I could see the man truly did need help.

So every weekday morning at seven, I parked Velma's Chevy between the tractor implements in the parking lot, climbed the loading ramp past crates of livestock feed, and made my way through the dimly lit sales floor to Dusty's closet-sized office, where I crunched numbers, reviewed purchase orders, and organized files until noon. I loved the work, putting my college accounting classes to use, and took advantage of the opportunity to forget my troubles.

The downside? Customers—mostly men—sauntered through the store, a few of them greeting me, others ignoring me awkwardly, most of them paying no attention whatsoever. I had always enjoyed a certain reaction from men, but since I had gotten pregnant, their eyes skimmed past me. I felt like a jar of peaches on display at the youth fair, inspected for color, taste, and texture, then set aside in a dark cupboard until winter.

I lifted my gaze from the computer screen and noticed Clyde Felton out on the sales floor. The man's muscular frame seemed to fill the entire back corner of the store as he casually studied a display of seeds and glanced at me every few seconds.

Great.
Of all the men in town, only the convicted rapist paid attention to me. With his dirty-blond hair pulled back in a short ponytail, he didn't look as rough as usual, but when he saw me watching, he shuffled out of my line of sight.

I dropped my head in my hands, running my fingernails through my hair before gripping handfuls of curls at the base of my neck. The good Lord would probably strike me dead for my vanity.

“You don't look so good.”

I jerked my head up, only to see Ansel and Velma's grown son. My shoulders relaxed. “Oh, I'm all right, Coach Pickett. Taking a break.”

“I told you to stop calling me Coach. You graduated from high school three years ago.”

“I'm trying, but
JohnScott
just sounds wrong.”

I didn't really know Ruthie's cousin except as my high school history teacher. Even though I'd lived with his parents for the past seven months, I mostly stayed locked in the spare bedroom with a box of tissues. Nevertheless, the coach and I developed a light friendship over evening meals, which he habitually ate at their house. He lived in a manufactured home on the back of their property, and Velma said she saw no sense in him cooking a random nibble every night when she planned an entire spread.

He rested a fist on the doorframe. “Mom's Chevy running all right?”

“Seems to be.” I gently swiveled my chair back and forth.

“Might need Freon soon.”

“Okay.” I had no idea what he meant by Freon, but I didn't ask. “Thanks for helping with the garage-sale furniture.”

“Yep.” His eyes traveled around the store before he looked back at me. “Your front steps could use a little repair. Thought I'd slap a few boards on there before somebody gets hurt.”

“There's no need for that, Coach Pick—
JohnScott
. The steps are fine.”

“They're not.” One side of his mouth lifted, creating a set of smile lines on that cheek, but I didn't mind him laughing at me.

When I sat in his classroom my sophomore year of high school, most of the girls tittered because he was straight out of college, attractive and single, but I hadn't paid him any mind. In the first place, he was Ruthie's cousin, and back then, the two of us weren't on speaking terms. And in the second place, I didn't see the point of wasting my time on a teacher.

Now he reigned as the head coach of the Trapp Panthers football team, still attractive, still single, and if I hadn't been in my current situation, I might have finally considered him worth the effort. But I didn't have that luxury. The most eligible bachelor in Trapp wouldn't settle for a pregnant college girl like me.

So I opted to ignore his smile lines and the soft curls teasing out from under his cap. Instead, I appreciated his kindness, because Coach JohnScott Pickett represented one of the few people who treated me exactly like he used to.

He nodded his chin in greeting to someone around the corner. “Fawn's working here now.”

The sound of boots dragging on concrete signaled the approach of another man, and then Clyde Felton peered at me over the coach's head. “Sure enough,” the ex-convict grumbled. “How you doing, Miss Blaylock?”

My lips fumbled a reply, but Clyde didn't wait for my babbled response.

“You'll be at the diner, Coach?”

“I'll be there.” JohnScott's gaze followed the older man out the front door, and when he looked back at me, his smile lines disappeared. “You don't like him much, do you?”

I fingered a stack of receipts. “They convicted him. I'd be a fool to ignore his past.”

His long arms folded lazily across his chest. “Why do you act like that?”

“Like what?”

“You know what statutory means, right?” Suddenly he took on the role of teacher, patiently explaining a lesson I hadn't quite grasped the first time around.

“Coach Pickett, I don't care if they were dating. The girl was still underage.”

“Huh.” Silence vibrated the room until I met his gaze, and when our eyes locked, he chuckled. “The way I see it, the only difference between his situation and yours is that you're a few years older than his girlfriend was.”

I felt naked, visible not only to every man in the store but to every person in town. In the county.

I dropped my hand to my abdomen in a reflexive attempt to hide my sins, but JohnScott Pickett only shook his head and smiled. As though it might take me a while to learn today's lesson, but I would eventually get it in the end.