Heartbreaker

by Claire, Grahame

  She was the only person I’d ever let continuously punch me in the face without fighting back. I hoped she’d eventually grow tired and realize I wasn’t the enemy. The scars she left behind would end up as reminders of how it was worth every single jab.

  A small part of me wanted to let things go, give her what she wanted, and move on. But the bigger part didn’t want to do that at all. She was wrong. She’d done me wrong, but I wasn’t beyond forgiving, because I saw all that bark for what it was.

  Mulaney was scared.

  When she’d become interim CEO, my intentions had been derailed. It had happened unexpectedly and fast, and to pressure her then would’ve made things worse. So I’d waited. She didn’t have to be afraid of me. By now she should have known she could count on me. We’d made an agreement that was best for both of us, yet she wouldn’t stand by her end of the deal.

  I wanted her to decide to make things right. While my father had backed me into one corner, she’d trapped me in her cage. Heartbreaker had better get ready. I was busting out when she least expected it.

  My phone buzzed as I secured the other side of the plank.

  “You’re missing out on the fun stuff,” I answered after glancing at the number. “If you hurry, you can get here in time to paint the steps.”

  “Isn’t it too cold to be painting?” Drew asked.

  “Probably, but I don’t have any other time to do it, and I can’t leave one step undone.” My grandfather would roll over in his grave if I left something unfinished.

  “I wondered why you hadn’t called me back.”

  I set the hammer down and moved into the yard. “Did I have a reason to?”

  “I emailed you fifteen minutes ago. That was more than enough time for you to get back to me.” He sounded both excited and annoyed.

  “That long, huh?”

  “You’re fixing steps on Christmas Day. Don’t act like working is out of the realm of possibility,” he said moodily.

  I lowered the tailgate on my grandma’s old truck and sat. “I was beginning to think you couldn’t get me the info I need.”

  “I can do anything,” he boasted. Somehow, I didn’t doubt that. “These things can take time. You can’t just barge into the system. It’s like a foreign invasion and everything will shut down.”

  “Did you figure out what happened with EXODUS? Why isn’t it updating?”

  He let out a frustrated sigh. “I’m still working on that.”

  “Then what did you find?”

  “There’s plenty of money in the operations and investment accounts.”

  I switched ears uncertain I’d heard him correctly. “Come again?”

  “It’s less than it was when Dad first started talking about this merger nonsense, but not by much. Only a couple hundred grand. You’re the money man, but looks to me like our intake was up this month.”

  I jumped off the tailgate and headed down the driveway. “Is that information in what you emailed me?” I kept my voice low as if my family inside the house could hear me all the way out here.

  “Thought that would interest you,” he said.

  “You’ve seen all the accounts?”

  “What did you think? I’d only be able to look at one?” That defensive edge was back. The chip on my brother’s shoulder never went away. He’d had huge disappointments in his life, and I understood he felt he had something to prove, but damn it, I wasn’t always insinuating he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

  “I meant have you looked at all the data?” I attempted to keep my voice even, squelching the rising irritation.

  “Nothing appears atypical as far as I can see. Like I said, you’re the money man, but I wrote some diagnostic code to check and didn’t come up with anything.”

  “So why the urgency? From what you’re telling me, we definitely didn’t have to sell.” I turned and looked back at the house in the distance. It had always represented trust, the one place in the world where I didn’t have to worry about the issues on the outside. Had I been disillusioned, only seeing what I wanted to see?

  “I can’t find anything that indicates we had to either.” He let out a long breath. “I did stumble across something else though,” he said hesitantly.

  “What?”

  “Mom and Dad’s personal bank account looks low.”

  I stared back at the old yellow farmhouse. “I didn’t ask you to look at that,” I said quietly, avoiding the sinking feeling settling in my stomach.

  “I wouldn’t have, but there was a file called Bank and I thought it related to Carter Energy.”

  “How low are we talking?”

  “Five grand is all that’s left.”

  I plowed a hand through my hair. My parents had the best health insurance money could buy, though I wasn’t sure at what price the privilege came. I did know there were expenses for my mother’s treatments above and beyond what was covered. I also knew my father would go broke to save her life with zero regrets just as Drew and I would.

  “Is that account number in what you emailed me too?”

  “No. Once I realized it was a personal account, I just took a quick look and closed the document.”

  “Maybe he’s moved the money around. He’s never discussed the particulars, but they have several accounts,” I reasoned. Over the years, Dad had tried to talk to me about what they had where in case anything happened to them. I’d always brushed him off. Their assets weren’t my business, and beyond that, I didn’t like thinking about either of them not being around.

  “This looks like their main account they pay expenses from. Earlier in the year, there was several hundred thousand in there.”

  “I thought you just took a quick look,” I accused. A prickly feeling came over me about sneaking around behind their backs. This was crossing a line I wasn’t prepared to traverse. But if my parents were in trouble . . .

  “There are a lot of cash withdrawals in varying amounts. The account was drained over the span of a few months.”

  I hoped like hell this was the final bombshell Drew had to drop in this conversation. “I’ve got to talk to Dad, tell him I’m ready to go over their personal assets like he’s been trying to get me to do.”

  “He’s been wanting to show you what they have?” There was a note of anger in his voice.

  “Just in case anything happened so we wouldn’t be scrambling trying to figure things out.”

  “How long’s he been wanting to do that?” The anger ramped up another notch.

  “I don’t know. A few years? I’ve put him off every time.”

  “Shouldn’t that be something we all looked at together?”

  “If you’d have been up for taking care of it yourself that would’ve been fine by me. I—I just wasn’t ready to think about them not being around. I’m still not,” I confessed.

  “Neither am I,” Drew said quietly.

  A few leaves swirled in the otherwise calm as a heaviness settled between us. We were losing our mother and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. I hadn’t been oblivious, but when faced with it, I struggled.

  “I hate to even suggest this,” I finally said, once more avoiding thoughts of Mama’s battle. “Can you look for anywhere else they may have money? And send me that bank account number?”

  “You can’t add funds. Dad will find out,” Drew protested, knowing me too well.

  “What else am I supposed to do? I can’t let them go broke,” I argued.

  “There aren’t enough transactions for him not to notice.”

  “At this point, I don’t care. If Mama needs the money—”

  “Just let me do some digging before you sound the alarm.”

  “If you don’t send me that account number, I’ll get it another way.” I headed toward the house with determined steps.

  “Fine. Looks like you’re listed on it anyway.”

  I broke my stride. “How do you know that?”

  “I gotta run. Look at those fig
ures I sent, and don’t do anything foolish before we figure out what’s going on.”

  The line went dead. My brother was way more optimistic than I was. Every answer led to another question, the biggest currently: how much trouble was my father in?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mulaney

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  I grabbed Leona’s jacket off one of the hooks in the kitchen and handed it to her. She glanced back toward the living room where almost everyone else was gathered.

  “They’ll never notice we’re gone,” I said with a smirk.

  She pulled on her jacket and wrapped a scarf around her neck. I did the same, snagging Easton’s baseball cap before heading out the back door.

  We moved across the grass, brittle from winter, until we were at the gate to Ragnor’s pasture. He grazed, barely looking at me in acknowledgment. The ranch seemed to be good for him. My wild man appeared more at peace, and I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

  “You can talk about it or not. It’s up to you,” I said after a minute.

  “You sound like Great-Grandmama.”

  “That’s the highest compliment I’ve ever been paid,” I returned earnestly. If I was half the woman Ruby was, I’d be satisfied.

  “She doesn’t force you to talk about stuff to the point it makes you want to,” Leona observed. That was Ruby to a tee.

  “That’s how I end up telling her everything,” I muttered. Well, almost.

  “She says I should call you more often.”

  “She’s right. What else does she say?”

  “That the reason you never have a boyfriend is because you have to be in control. Except the one that won’t let you be. She says you’re scared shitless of him.”

  “Mmm. I knew my ears were burning. Y’all have got me figured out.”

  “Aren’t you going to correct me for cursing?” Leona asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m the last person to scold you for that. Besides, you were just quoting Ruby verbatim.”

  Her gaze drifted to Ragnor as he leisurely moved to another spot of grass. “Why were you so mean to Easton last night? He seems really into you.”

  “We work together. It’s not a good idea.” That succinct list of reasons tumbled out of my mouth, just like I’d rehearsed them in my head a thousand times.

  “He’s the one you’re scared of.”

  I wondered when the hell she’d gotten so damned smart. Even my teenage niece could read me like I was transparent. “He wishes he was.”

  “I saw it last night,” she insisted. I opened my mouth to protest some more, but she kept talking. “How do you stay cool? Men were falling all over themselves to talk to you, and you were so normal, like it didn’t matter. Like you didn’t care what they thought.”

  “Because I don’t.” I sighed and contemplated what to say to her next, grateful we’d moved on from Easton. “The reason all those men were talking to me last night is because I’m like their buddy. When they see me, they don’t get nervous the way they would around most women, because they know I’m like them. I curse and drink whiskey, and I don’t get emotional unless we’re talking about the Cowboys or the Rangers.”

  “So you hook up like a guy and forget about it after like they do?” I couldn’t tell if she was disgusted or impressed, but either way this wasn’t a conversation I was keen on having with my niece. She sounded like she might be speaking from experience, in which case I was going to have to wring some little punk’s neck.

  I suddenly thought about the day she was born. How had seventeen years passed so quickly that we could go from playing poker for candy to talking about men?

  “Sometimes I think I’m just wired differently,” I said more to myself than her. “Not all guys just forget about it.” I didn’t want to disillusion Leona, but she deserved more than my tainted view of things. I didn’t have relationships by choice. That didn’t mean she shouldn’t.

  She concentrated on Rage, almost as if she was disappointed in me for babying her.

  “They don’t,” I insisted. I’d been on both ends of that spectrum, times when hooking up was forgotten almost as soon as it was done and another where—nope, not going there now.

  She pulled her scarf tighter around her. “That’s not my experience,” she said, going stiff.

  “This has to do with the one you went to homecoming with,” I concluded, tamping down my rising anger. I hadn’t heard much about this story, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like it.

  “Yeah.”

  I leaned forward on the gate. Ragnor trotted over and nudged me before he chose a new patch of grass to graze on, this one a little closer than before.

  “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told another soul,” I started, though my ego screamed at me to keep my mouth shut. I set it aside in hopes of giving my niece some reassurance. “When I was about your age, I took a liking to one of my buddies. To be honest, I wasn’t real sure what to do with that. Butterflies in the stomach weren’t really my thing.”

  Leona blinked at me, that dour expression carving the pretty features of her face.

  “I decided I’d do what I always do. Be fearless, right?” I couldn’t seem to break through, no matter what I said. “I asked him to go for a run. Nothing crazy. I asked him to study for a test. Still pretty normal. Then I asked him to go to the movies. After about a week or so, I told him if we were going to keep spending so much time together, we might as well date. He’d looked at me like I’d lost my mind until he realized I was serious. With a shrug, he agreed.”

  “That worked?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Yeah. Playing cat and mouse wasn’t really my style, but it took me that long to work out my nerves.”

  She snickered, and I took that as a good sign. “You’re still not very subtle.”

  “Don’t see that changing any time soon.”

  “I’ve never known you to date anybody,” Leona said, leaning against the fence.

  “Once was enough for me. I’m not cut out for emotional crap.” I stiffened as thoughts of the past swamped me.

  “What happened?”

  I swallowed hard. “After we’d been dating a while, he rejected me pretty publicly.” I yanked on my ponytail. “Humiliated me, really. I was the last one to know he’d been seeing Becky Crenshaw behind my back. If it weren’t for Mitch, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

  Memories of the whispers in the halls of school slithered into my head. They’d all been laughing at Mulaney know-it-all Jacobs, the girl nobody wanted to date because she was too brash and always one of the guys. I looked at my boot propped on the gate and forced the pain back. It was twenty years ago but still hurt like it had happened yesterday.

  “That’s awful.” At her tone, I looked up. Sympathy filled her eyes, the kind only someone who understood could have.

  “It was worse than that, but I handled it.” In a petty way shortly after the fact, and as best I could long-term. By nature, I didn’t like to lose. Bryce Green made me realize if I wanted to avoid a situation like that again, I’d have to do things differently. And I had. I hadn’t dated. Hadn’t done relationships. And I sure as hell didn’t do love.

  “He was a jerk.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” Rage came over to the fence again just when I needed him. I stroked his nose and behind his ears. “He made it hard for me to trust.”

  Her eyes rounded at my honesty. What I didn’t say was how I’d confronted him and the humiliation had only gotten worse. But something changed in me when we had our final showdown.

  Nobody was going to make me feel inferior ever again. Especially not a man.

  “I got dumped after I slept with him,” Leona blurted out, jolting me from the past. “I thought—I thought he was the one.”

  Ragnor’s nostrils flared when he felt the change in me. I stroked harder to keep from punching something.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

&n
bsp; “I knew it was too good to be true.” She hung her head. “Guys like him don’t go for nerds like me.”

  I tipped her chin up. “I don’t want to ever hear you talk like that again. You are beautiful, smart as a whip, and he’s the goddamn idiot.”

  “I waited until I was ready. He was so patient.”

  Because the asshole was collecting V-cards was my guess. Unfortunately, I’d been privy to conversations circling around that very thing.

  “He’s a patient idiot. Doesn’t make him any less stupid.”

  Her eyes watered. “I haven’t had my period,” she whispered.

  I clutched the metal gate, certain I was about to bend it. “When did this happen?” My attempt to keep my voice calm failed, the anger dominant.

  “Just before Thanksgiving.”

  Fuck.

  “I want you to go to my room, grab my purse and the keys to the truck, then meet me downstairs. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “You’re not going to tell my parents?”

  I grasped her by her slim shoulders. “I would never betray your confidence.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Easton

  “We need a ride back to the ranch.”

  The driver’s side door to my truck had barely slammed before Mulaney started making demands.

  “Merry Christmas, Heartbreaker.” I paused painting the steps. “Since you asked, Santa was pretty good to me this year.”

  The way she’d barreled down the dirt drive and skidded to a stop indicated this was not going to be a Merry Christmas visit.

  She looked ready to spit fire by the time Leona slid out of the passenger side. “Can you take us or not?”

  Mulaney hadn’t needed to return my truck at all, but in true fashion, she showed up without warning and wanted things done her way.

  “Can you give me five minutes?”

  “Hey, Easton. Merry Christmas.” Mulaney’s niece seemed like a sweet enough girl, though I didn’t know her all that well. They bore a striking resemblance, but Leona was more reserved whereas Mulaney was all fire, all the time.