by Sarah Hegger
“Is that Barron?” Kim peered through the windshield. She pulled a face. “I don’t like Barron. I don’t want to talk to him.”
That made two of them. “That’s okay.” She kept the fear out of her voice. “You don’t have to talk to him. I’ll see what he wants, and then he’ll go away.”
“Okay.” Kim’s eyes were huge.
Blythe dug out her phone and got Nate’s number up. She passed the phone to Kim. “If you see anything you don’t like, you press the green button, baby girl. That’s Sheriff Nate, and he’ll come and help you.”
Kim’s voice went small and she held the phone to her chest. “Okay.”
Only one thing would bring Barron here. He wanted money.
“Took you a while to get here.” Barron sipped from his bag. “You been out there sucking dick?”
Blythe breathed deep, not about to rise to the bait. Barron was drunk and spoiling for a fight. If she gave it to him, it could very well end up in a Barrows-style crawl and brawl scene she really didn’t want her new neighbors to see. She didn’t want Kim to see it anymore either.
“What do you want, Barron?”
He sneered at her. “Is that any way to talk to your brother? Careful now, Blythe, or I might think you didn’t miss me.”
The sooner she let him get crap off his chest, the sooner he would leave. So she waited.
“I need money.” Barron shook the bottle in his bag. “This shit doesn’t come cheap, and your boyfriend got me canned.”
She hadn’t even known Barron worked for Eric, but she didn’t blame Eric in the least.
Like hell she would say anything about Eric, however. Now came the tricky part. Her choices really sucked. If she gave Barron money, he would go away but then he’d be back and back again until she ran out of money or he got bored. If she didn’t give him money, he would not be happy, and Barron wasn’t shy about making his unhappiness known. She should have dialed Nate from inside the car.
Too late for that. She glanced over her shoulder
Kim was watching them both, her thumb in her mouth. She hadn’t done that since they’d been living in the condo.
Blythe took a breath. “I’m not giving you money.”
“Say what?” Barron laughed. “Because for a second there, it sounded like you said you weren’t going to give me what you owe me.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” She could only hope Kim would hit dial if things deteriorated. And how stupid was she to have left the responsibility in her baby sister’s hands?
Barron climbed off his bike and advanced on her. “There’s shit to eat in the house, and some dick came around the other day looking for his fucking payment. You gotta pay, Blythe.”
“I don’t live there anymore.” Blythe kept her voice calm, but her heartbeat jacked up. “I’m not paying for you anymore.”
A bottle smashing made her jump, but Blythe held her ground.
Grabbing her biceps, Barron tugged her closer. His breath stank of cheap bourbon. “I want money, Blythe, and you’re going to get it for me.”
“No.” Blythe struggled against his punishing hold. “I’m not giving you anything.”
“Bitch.” Barron hit her.
Her head whipped to the side, and she tasted blood.
“Leave my sister alone!” Kim was outside the car, screaming, clutching the phone, her little body shaking. “Leave my sister. I told Sheriff Nate.”
“What the fuck is she talking about?” Barron’s other hand gripped her hair. “Tell the little brat to drop the phone or I’ll give her a bit of what I gave you.”
“Don’t you touch her.” Icy rage crawled through Blythe. She yanked free of Barron with strength she didn’t know she had. Her voice shook as she blocked Kim from Barron’s view. “You touch her, and I’ll kill you.”
A bike growled into the parking lot.
Barron glanced its way, and then grinned. “Just the man I need to show you bitches how to act.”
Those massive shoulders and that bike belonged to only one man. Blythe snatched Kim and darted to the other side of the car.
“You better run, bitch.” Barron made a mock lunge at her. “Because when Brett gets hold of you, you’ll give me whatever the fuck I want.”
Blythe grabbed her bag from the seat and fled with Kim in her arms.
Clinging like a monkey, Kim stayed eerily silent, her little back tense beneath Blythe’s hands. “We’ll get inside, baby girl. We’ll get inside, and then they can’t touch us.”
“Brett.” Barron sounded delighted as he greeted their older brother. “Come help me explain to Blythe why she needs to help her brothers out.”
Brett’s deep rumble echoed.
“Not far now.” Blythe reached the stairs to her apartment. She had to take her hands from Kim to dig her house keys out of her bag.
Kim tightened her grip around Blythe’s neck and waist.
“What the fuck!” Barron yelled from somewhere below them.
Blythe kept climbing. She reached the top with her breath coming ragged. Her hands shook but she inserted the key the first time and turned the lock.
Boots sounded on the stairs.
Blythe got the door open and sprang into the apartment. She locked the door, put the chain on and bolted it.
A fist hammered on the door. “Blythe?” Brett asked.
Kim whimpered and buried her face in Blythe’s neck
“It’s okay, baby girl.” Blythe leaned her back against the solid door. Her knees gave, and she sank to the floor clutching Kim. She refused to crumble, and she kissed Kim’s head. “We’re safe now.”
“Blythe,” Brett called through the door.
Kim sniffed. “Make him go away.”
“He will.” Blythe tightened her arms around Kim. “If we stay very quiet. He will go away.”
They stayed liked that, wrapped tightly together, barely daring to breathe.
Boots walked away from her door. A bike started up, and then another, and finally Blythe breathed again.
“Blythe?” Kim wriggled in her arms and looked up at her. She held up Blythe’s phone. “I called Sheriff Nate. Like you said I should if I got scared.”
“When, baby girl?” Blythe took her phone back. She had eight missed calls from Nate’s number. She dialed from his last call.
“Blythe?” Nate sounded urgent. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.” The relief made her want to cry, and she hauled herself to her feet. “I’m okay.”
“What the hell happened?” The hum of a car engine underpinned Nate’s voice.
“Barron came around and wanted money.” She smoothed Kim’s hair back. Baby girl had done so well and kept her head. Blythe didn’t remember being that smart and self-possessed at the same age. “I told Kim to call you if she got scared, and she did.”
“Why did she get scared?” Nate didn’t sound the least reassured.
For his and Kim’s sake Blythe tried to downplay it. “Barron got a bit frustrated when I wouldn’t give him any money.”
“How frustrated?”
“I’m okay.” She put as much reassurance as she had in her into those words. “Kim and I are in my apartment, and we’re safe.”
Nate grunted. “I want you to press charges.”
How many times had she wished Carly would do the same? “Can we talk about it in the morning?” Kim was still clinging to her leg. “I need to see to Kim.”
“Fine,” Nate bit out. “But we will be talking in the morning, Blythe.”
She hung up and looked down at Kim.
Tears filled Kim’s eyes. “Is Sheriff Nate mad at us. He sounded mad.”
“He was mad.” Blythe hugged Kim to her. “But he was mad for us. He doesn’t want anybody to hurt us, because it isn’t right.”
“Barr
on hit you.” Kim shivered and pressed closer. “I saw it.”
Blythe forced herself to scoff. “Barron’s a weenie.” Maybe making light of things wasn’t the best way to handle this, but Blythe was all out of ideas. “Let’s make some dinner.”
“The groceries are in the car.” Kim stared at the door.
“Right.” Blythe took a breath. “I’ll go and get them.”
Still they both stared at the door for a minute or so before she moved.
After checking through the keyhole, Blythe opened the door.
Her grocery sacks sat outside the door, and her car was in her parking place, doors closed. The car keys lay on top of the groceries. One of her neighbors had earned a huge thank you.
* * * *
It took longer to get Kim to bed than normal. Given the crap evening they’d had, Blythe let her stay up thirty minutes later and read her one more story than normal. Truthfully, it helped her as well. Concentrating on Kim kept her from thinking about everything that had happened.
Eventually Kim went to sleep, and the apartment settled around her. She tried not to, but every noise posed a threat, the low growl of every engine sounded like her brothers’ bikes returning.
She turned on the TV and played it louder than usual. Then she did what she always did when she was stressed; she cleaned.
It would have been better if she’d asked Nate to come around and make sure everything was fine, but it was too late for that now, and Nate was probably settled in with Bella by then.
How Bella had gotten a great guy like Nate amazed her. Everyone thought of Bella as sweetness and light, but they hadn’t been on the judgmental side of Tinker Bell and her assumptions. When they had been in high school together, Blythe had made a game of seeing how outraged she could get Bella to look. With Bella’s long-standing crush on Nate, it had been low hanging fruit to flirt with Nate and give Bella a helping of payback.
No, it hadn’t been nice, and she wasn’t proud of it, but neither was the way Bella had gossiped about her and looked at her as if she were lower than shark shit.
A knock on the door stopped her in the middle of shining the countertops. She stood in the kitchen, frozen by indecision. It could be either of her brothers, or it could be Nate.
The knock came again. “Blythe?” Eric called through the door.
That made her paralysis worse. Only that morning she’d told him she couldn’t see him anymore.
Eric knocked a third time. “Blythe, I’m not going away until I see you.”
Shit! He wouldn’t either.
Blythe opened the door.
Both hands braced on the doorjamb, Eric looked up. He hissed out a breath and cupped her chin. “Did Barron or Brett do that?”
The slap must have left a bruise. “Barron.”
Eric’s gentle touch was the most dangerous thing of all. The temptation to stay still and bask in it rose and threatened to drag her under.
Blythe lifted her chin from his hold. “Nate called you?”
“Yeah.” Eric shoved his hands in his pockets. “He thought I would want to know, and it’s not like you were going to call, is it?”
Nate had no right to involve Eric. “Is that even allowed, with him being a cop and all? To call you and tell you someone else’s business.
“Give me a break, Blythe.” Eric’s eyes flashed darker with irritation. “He’s my brother, and he knows I care about you.” He shrugged. “Besides he was not happy with not checking up on you. I said I’d do it.”
“Oh.” Nate hadn’t really done anything bad, and he couldn’t know how she felt about Eric. Being Nate though, he probably knew more than he let on. Behind his pretty face, Nate didn’t miss much. “Well, you’ve checked, and I’m fine.”
“Really?” Eric gave her a probing stare.
That sort of thing wasn’t them. They’d always stayed on the periphery of each other’s daily lives. Eric had offered to help her in the past, with money mostly, but she had always turned him down. Apart from her not wanting to feel like his side piece, she had always needed to do things on her own. If for no other reason than to prove to herself that she could.
Eric watched her, waiting for her answer.
He knew her too well for her to lie, so she went with the truth. “They scared me, and frightened Kim. Mostly I’m angry. They invaded my safe space.”
He nodded. “Nate wants you to press charges.” He raised a brow. “For what it’s worth, I want you to as well.”
“I’ll think about it.” Maybe if only to get a restraining order on Barron, but that didn’t deal with Brett. Brett hadn’t done anything to earn one. Yet. Her head felt heavy, and she leaned it against the doorjamb. “I just want to get on with my life, you know?”
“I know.” He reached for her, stopped and jerked his hand back. “Sorry. Habit.”
They both had habits they needed to break, and Blythe straightened. “It’s okay that you came here tonight.” More than that, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. “Actually, it was sweet. A nice thing to do.” She inched the door closed. “But it would be better for both of us if it didn’t happen again.”
Chapter Eleven
Since Eric had been spending more time in Ghost Falls, dinner with his siblings and their significant others had become a thing at least one Friday a month. They had tried including Cressy for the first few times but had abandoned that quickly. Cressy had spent dinner taking potshots at Pippa and then Bella.
As neither Matt nor Nate would tolerate having their wives at the end of Cressy’s passive-aggressive cannon fire, the evenings had disintegrated fast. The others spent time with Cressy separately. Eric saw her as little as possible.
Matt might be okay with the way she had used him as a surrogate for her dead husband, but Eric still held that grudge. Cressy had clung to her children at a time when they needed her to be the parent. She still did, and Eric refused to get sucked into the same emotional vortex that had swallowed Dad whole.
Tonight’s dinner was at Nate and Bella’s house. A beautiful stone house with spectacular views on three sides that Nate was renovating bit by bit. Some weekends he and Matt would manage to muscle in and help him. But Nate was a stubborn bastard and liked doing everything himself.
“Eric.” Bella opened the door and beamed at him. Small and blond, Pippa had nicknamed her Tinker Bell, and the name suited Bella.
“Hey, Tink.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek.
“I hate that name.” Bella twinkled up at him. She was all the right kind of sweet Nate needed in his life.
For his part, Eric liked his women a little more salty. Like…
Not anymore.
“How is work?” Bella got started on her interrogation. She was always like that with friends. She wanted to know everything about their life. Unlike a lot of people, Bella asked questions from a place of genuine interest. Like he said, all kinds of sweet.
Eric followed her into the large open-plan kitchen.
“Eric.” Nate jerked his chin at him from the opposite side of a twelve-foot butcher block island. He knew the dimensions because it was one of the few things Nate had asked his help to source.
“Stairs look good.” Eric jabbed his thumb at the wood and wrought iron staircase that had still been a hideous seventies throwback when he had last been there.
Pride showed on Nate’s face. “Yeah, I finished them last weekend. They came out well.”
Eric clapped Nate on the shoulder. “You do good work. Even Dad would have liked those.”
“Is Eric here?” Pippa came through the French doors from the deck. She gave him a sultry wink. “How’s my sexiest brother-in-law?”
“Hey!” Nate threw his hands out. “Standing right here.”
“You’re my prettiest brother-in-law.” Pippa laughed at him. “Eric is the sexiest.”
“Gimme.” Eric motioned for his niece. Just because he didn’t want children of his own didn’t mean he didn’t like them.
Matt handed him Jasmine, and he breathed in the sticky, sweet baby smell.
Jasmine gave him a huge sloppy grin.
“Every woman.” Pippa rolled her eyes. “No matter what age.”
Except one, apparently. Eric slapped a grin on his face. “It’s my superpower.”
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Liz yelled from the door that she’d just flung open. Skinny, blond and always dressed like she’d strayed out of an episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County, Liz was good people. As was her short, unassuming husband, Noel, following in her wake as always and looking delighted to be there.
“Ugh!” Liz reached up and pinched his cheek. “Such a pity I didn’t get to you before Noel got to me.”
“You’re too much woman for me, Liz.” He nodded a greeting to Noel.
Liz waggled her head. “Damn straight I am.”
Coming in behind them, and much quieter, was the only girl in the Evans family. Dressed in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, Jo looked tired, but Eric knew better than to say anything.
Jo could be as stubborn as Nate. He greeted her, and then relinquished Jasmine to her.
Pippa studied him from the other side of the island. She cocked her head. “You okay?”
“Sure.” He accepted a beer from Nate and twisted off the cap. Pippa’s sharp gaze saw too much. “Just some stuff with the new project.”
“Hmmm.” She looked skeptical but accepted his explanation. For now.
Jasmine had the same dark hair as Jo and carried so much of the Evans genetics that she could have been Jo’s daughter. Since her disastrous engagement, Jo hadn’t mentioned anyone serious.
“What’s news, Jo Jo?” He moved closer to her. The look of contentment as she cuddled Jasmine tugged at his heart. “When are you going to see about getting yourself one of those?”
