Worth the Wait (Picking up the Pieces #4) (9 page)

It’d been a week since mine and Kenzie’s little blowup outside the restroom of Elegant Nails and I was
still
beyond pissed at the stubborn, hard-headed woman. I’d been walking around all week long with a raging case of blue balls and a bad fucking attitude. That was not a good combination. I needed a night out with my friends. I needed to blow off some serious steam.

“Y’all coming to Colt’s tonight?” I asked Trevor as we worked on finishing up the rooms he’d contracted me to build out for his wife, Lizzy.

He started talking—something about his tattoo shop, but I was too busy staring over at Kenzie’s station and silently stewing to pay attention.

“So what’s going on there?” he asked, dragging my attention away from the one woman who was pulling me in two. A large part of me just wanted to wash my hands of her. She was too much damn trouble, but something just wouldn’t let me do that. And damn if that wasn’t doing my head in.

“Huh? Oh, nothing,” I lied and went back to mudding the joints in the drywall we’d just installed.

“Doesn’t look like nothin’. Looks like you got a hard-on for Lizzy’s friend.”

I tried to come off casual with a shrug, but I didn’t know how successful I was in pulling it off. “Nah. Woman’s got too much baggage. Two little kids. I’m not looking to play daddy any time soon.”

Where the hell had that come from?

“Jesus, man. What the hell?” Trevor asked, stupefied. It wasn’t like me at all to be such an asshole, and honestly, I had no clue why I’d just said that. It wasn’t like I’d meant it. I was just so damn mad and letting my anger get the best of me.

I dropped my head on a sigh. “That was harsh.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s a fucking understatement. What was that all about?”

I turned to look over at Kenzie’s table, thanking Christ she wasn’t there. For a second, I’d been terrified that she’d overheard me saying something so cold.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just finish this shit up,” I grumbled before grabbing the trowel and slapping down more drywall mud.

Christ, I needed to get my shit together before something came out of my mouth I wouldn’t be able to take back.

When Trevor headed off to his shop a little while later, I kept working, glancing over at Kenzie’s station more than what could be considered healthy. But she’d never come back to her little table.

“Hey,” I stopped Lizzy as she walked past me. “Where’d Kenz go?”

The knowing smirk the fiery little redhead gave me made me want to cringe. If I became any more obvious, Lizzy’d be up my ass faster than anything, trying to play matchmaker. I’d already fucked up enough on my own. Last thing I needed was her help.

“Went home sick. Said she was getting a migraine. Poor thing, works herself to the bone then goes home and starts all over again with those two little ones. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Cameron and Callie, but they’re exhausting.”

She’d left?

How had she managed to leave without me noticing?

My brows tipped down as I looked from the front door of the salon back to Liz. “Is she okay?”

She studied my face with curiosity before telling me, “Yeah, she looked okay; just a little down, I guess.” With that, she turned and walked off, leaving me with a sense of dread deep in the pit of my stomach.

What a raging hemorrhoid! I couldn’t believe I felt
guilty
for being rude to such a dick. Brett Halstead was a douche who didn’t deserve the time of day and I was done worrying about how to keep things from being messy.

Honestly, I was thankful to know what he really thought of me. Hearing that I had too much baggage and he didn’t want to play daddy to my kids was a relief. I could finally despise the jerkoff without feeling bad.

And
please
! Like I’d ever want that asshole to be a father figure to the twins. Yeah, I didn’t think so!

“Mommy, what’s a hemrod?”

I looked over at Callie where she and Cameron sat, drawing pictures at the coffee table. “Huh?”

“You was jus talk’ to yowself,” she told me. “What’s a hemrod?”

“Uh…” Since the twins were old enough to start picking things up, I’d worked my ass off to make sure I watched my mouth, but sometimes things just slipped out. “It’s an adult word, baby.”

“Is asshole an adult word, too?” Cameron asked.

Son of a bitch!
Note to self: make sure not to think aloud around impressionable young children who hear every-freaking-thing.

“Yes, honey. Mommy said some bad words that she shouldn’t have. I don’t want to hear either of you repeating those words, got it?”

Luckily, my four-year-olds have the attention span of a flea and they both simply shrugged and went back to coloring. With that bullet dodged, I went back to making dinner.

Later that night, after getting the kids off to bed, I collapsed on the couch, queued up an episode of
So You Think You Can Dance
and got comfortable. I was in the middle of watching one of the boring ballroom numbers when my cell went off.

“Hello?”

“Hey, babe. How’s the headache?” Lizzy’s cheerful voice rang through the line.

I stretched my legs out and laid my head on one of my throw pillows.

“It’s better, thanks. Sorry for bailing early on you.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m just glad you’re feeling better. That headache wouldn’t have had anything to do with the fact you came home Friday night looking like you’d had your brains banged out and got into it with a certain hottie contractor this morning, would it?”

A deep sigh escaped my lips. “Really not in the mood to go there right now, Liz.”

“Oh, come on! You can’t hold out on something juicy like that!”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I lied. “Nothing is happening or ever
going
to happen between me and Brett.”

“Sure as hell looked like something was happening to me.”

I felt that annoying twitching in my eyelid again, accompanied by a dull throb behind my eyes. I couldn’t stand that stupid little eye tick. I’d had it ever since I was a teenager. Whenever I felt extreme stress, my eyelid would start twitching uncontrollably. I used to get so much grief about it, first from my father, then from Lance. They loved to make fun of my issue. Miraculously, after leaving Lance and moving to Cloverleaf, the twitch had diminished, only really occurring when the twins were on a rampage. But ever since I met Brett, the damn thing seemed to have come back full force.

I couldn’t hold in my groan as I asked, “Can we please talk about something else?”

I heard a faint giggle through the phone, “Your eye’s doing that twitchy thing again, isn’t it?”

Damn that bitch for already knowing me so well.

“If I say yes, will you drop it?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll let it go, but let me just say this; if you’re face is getting all ticky just from talking about Brett, how do you think you’re going to handle seeing him around town all the time? You can’t hide away forever, honey. Not in this town.”

She was right. And at that moment, I kind of hated her for it.

Past

Walking into the house, I felt that sense of dread that accompanied me every time I came through the front door of my home. I headed straight for the stairs on quiet feet, prepared to sit in my room for the remainder of the night and do my homework.

That was what I did every night.

Get home from school, close myself in my room, study, read, and then eat my dinner once my father had gone to bed, or he’d left to sit at some bar for the remainder of the night. Childhood in my house consisted of being neither seen nor heard. On the rare occasion my parents and I spoke, it was mainly so my father could berate me and my mother could blame me for what he had become.

Since I was old enough to understand, I’d been told I was the reason my parents’ relationship had gone south. When they’d gotten together, it had been a whirlwind courtship, intensely romantic, the stuff of fairytales to hear my mother describe it. They had been sweet and loving with each other. They had the perfect marriage. That was until shortly after I was born. The older I got, the more disconnected my father became. He and my mother’s relationship stopped being about passion as my father became more and more uninterested. He began drinking, leaving the house and staying gone all night. I’d hear them fighting about his affairs. He’d yell at her that she’d turned into a fat, lazy slob who couldn’t keep his interests so he’d had to find it somewhere else, and she’d spend days crying over his harsh words.

Mom lived on constant diets. She’d go days on end without eating just to lose a few pounds. At times like that, the only person she’d cook for was my dad, so I’d go hungry as well.

All of their marital problems rested solely on my shoulders. I was told by the both of them that if I hadn’t been born, they’d still be happy and in love.

The older I got, the worse my father became. The verbal and emotional abuse morphed into physical. He loved to take his issues out on my mother and me using his fists. I used to pray Mom would pack us up and take me away from that awful house, that she’d see his abuse wasn’t right and she’d finally have enough. But that never happened. She remained insanely in love with Dad throughout everything, never once faulting him for his own actions. It was all my fault.
I
was the reason he didn’t love her anymore.