The Divine Creek Ranch Collection Volume 3

by Heather Rainier

Kemp reached for the note, and Ace handed it to him. “This name sounds familiar to me.”

  Summer scooted over and looked at the information with him. “The girls are going to be so thrilled that you have a lead.”

  Ace felt like a hunting dog hot on a trail, but he wanted to take care of Summer tonight, too. “Can we put this on hold, just for this evening?”

  Kemp looked him in the eye and smiled. “Just for tonight. Sure.” From his vantage point, Ace could see Kemp slide his palm over her thigh.

  He’d told Ace it made sense that Ace be the one to show her affection in public, since it came more naturally to him. Kemp was prone to be quiet and in the background and didn’t mind as long as Summer was happy. As irresistible as Ace found Summer, he didn’t see how Kemp could keep his demonstrations of affection so subtle.

  As if on cue, the waitress brought the bill, which Ace paid in cash. After the waitress returned with his change, he rose from the booth and helped Summer as she slid from it, too.

  They walked her out to her Mazda Miata, and Ace murmured as he caressed her hips, “Just follow me, kitten. I won’t lose you.”

  Summer blushed again and smiled as Ace leaned toward her and kissed her soft lips. He lingered there for a few seconds, sipping from her mouth and suckling gently on her lower lip as he inhaled her natural, womanly fragrance. Her hand came to rest on his forearm as if she needed to steady herself. He slid his right hand over her shoulder and threaded his fingers into the silky locks at her nape, then cradled her head and kissed her more deeply.

  The essence of Summer’s mouth was sweet, and her silky tongue stroked his with hesitant flicks as her grip on his forearm increased. He hadn’t meant to take so long kissing her, but now that he’d gotten started he didn’t want it to end.

  Her breath left her in a shuddering sigh as he finally withdrew from her lips. His cock throbbed, and he indulged in a fruitless, momentary fantasy, imagining how good sliding into her snug, silky pussy would feel. He stroked the back of her head and smothered a growl of satisfaction at the dazed look in her eyes.

  In a dreamy voice, Summer whispered, “If there was an award for being a great kisser, you’d both be gold medalists.”

  Ace chuckled. “Think so, kitten?”

  “Oh, yes.” She drew the simple response out expressively, and his cock surged with need. Glancing at Kemp, she blushed and added, “You both would.”

  “Thank you, darlin’,” Kemp murmured, sliding a single fingertip up her arm and then cupping her shoulder. “Would you like some company on the ride?”

  Very intuitive, Kemp.

  Ace nodded slightly at his suggestion. It was a good idea and what they should’ve done to begin with. Then Summer might not have been so badly frightened by the vehicle harassing her.

  “Sure,” she murmured, still looking a little dazed.

  Ace smiled, wondering if she was counting the days, hours, and minutes until they could truly be intimate like he was.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summer was relieved that Kemp was riding home with her. She watched with slight amusement as he folded his large, muscular frame into the front seat of her little red Miata. The man was built like a tank and obviously found it to be a challenge. When he realized she was watching him as he struggled with the seatbelt he grinned at her.

  “Having difficulty, big man?”

  Finally strapped in, he chuckled and gamely replied, “Nope. I’m ready to go.”

  She backed out of the parking space and followed Ace. “So what will you do with the information Mrs. Sheridan gave you? Will you go see that other woman?”

  Summer’s heart fluttered when he laid his hand on her thigh and stroked her gently. “Eventually, but not yet. First we have to figure out her motivation for doing this. In my experience, when people voice moral outrage like she is doing on that blog, there is usually a deeper, more private reason for it. She’s using the moral outcry as a means to punish you and the other girls for something else entirely. At least that’s my supposition right now.”

  “What will happen in the meantime?”

  “We’ll watch her. I hope now that we have a link, we can discover who is attacking the shop and you girls. There may or there may not be a connection between the two. The man who broke into your shop may be working on his own or he may have a connection to her. It’ll take some careful digging.”

  “I know that she is guilty of libel, but if she’s connected with the other more serious incidents, I’m not sure how I feel about a mother being taken away from her child.”

  “If she’s connected with the fire and the vehicular attacks and the break-in, she’s got much bigger worries than just libel. She’s gotten herself into this mess, darlin’. Don’t worry about it for now. Give us a chance to discover her reasons for doing this and see how this all works out.”

  “Okay. I just hate the thought of a mother and child being separated.”

  Kemp stroked her thigh and squeezed gently. “That’s because you’re a nice person, darlin’. These things have a way of working out sometimes. Let’s just wait and see.”

  She glanced at him as she drove down the highway and caught him gazing at her, an inexplicable look in his eyes. “What?” His hand was very warm where it rested on her leg.

  Kemp looked out the windshield and shook his head before looking back at her. “Being around someone who puts others before herself is nice. I’m used to dealing with lowlifes and people who do things for purely selfish reasons. I grew up with a father who thought only of his own selfish desires. I deal with people who look good on the surface but are rotten underneath.”

  “Was your father abusive?”

  Kemp was silent for a moment but finally replied, “Yes.”

  He didn’t say anything else, and since he didn’t appear upset by the admission, she pressed just a little, softly asking, “What did he do? Was he physically abusive?”

  Kemp looked out the windshield as he replied, “Yes. Toward my mother, me, and my sisters. When he didn’t have work, or things weren’t going well, he would drink. He was a mean drunk, and when he lost his temper, he took it out on us. If we stepped out of line, disagreed with him, or made mistakes, he lost his temper. He was very volatile, even when he was sober.”

  “If you made mistakes?”

  “Yes, like made a mess and didn’t clean it up or broke something. If I—” He looked down, and when she glanced at him, she could see the tension in his face and the set of his broad shoulders.

  “If you what?” she whispered as she placed her hand over his on her thigh and entwined their fingers together, letting him know she was there for him.

  “If I stepped out of line, argued with him, or showed how I felt about what he did, I got his fist or his belt.”

  Oh, God. “If you showed how you felt?” That might explain why Kemp was so stoic and self-possessed. It might also explain how his nose had gotten broken.

  “If I reacted to his tirades, the things he yelled at us, or how he treated my mom and my sisters. If I showed emotion he beat me for it. Or at least he did until I grew big enough to defend myself and my family.”

  She pictured him as an adolescent. He must have shown signs of the large man he would be early on.

  “It was a good thing, too. He became increasingly explosive and began drinking more and more. I was as tall and as big as most of the men I knew by the time I was in eighth grade.”

  “You defended yourself and your mom and sisters as an eighth grader?”

  Kemp nodded. “I played sports and had access to the junior high school weight room. I worked out to get strong.”

  Summer wanted to cry, thinking of Kemp as an eighth grader. He should’ve been doing those things for fun and to be with his friends. Instead he’d worked out with weights so he could defend his mother and his sisters.

  “I had a coach that taught me some self-defense moves. I think he knew what my dad was like because he said he’d known him in school. Any
way, he taught me and some of my friends how to defend ourselves.”

  “I’m glad you had someone who could help you.”

  With a small nod, Kemp continued. “The next time my dad lost his temper I put a stop to it. He had my sister by the hair and was…” His voice broke, and Summer’s heart lurched at the vulnerable sound. Silently she waited. “Lizzie had always been frail and had fine, thin brown hair. He had her by a handful of it and was shaking her because she’d left the water faucet running in the backyard. It had been running all afternoon and flooded the area around the house which was mostly dirt. He told her he was going to teach her by rubbing her nose in it.”

  Summer pressed her lips together to stifle a gasp. Kemp was opening up to her, and she didn’t want to interrupt him.

  “I heard what he’d said to her and watched him as he dragged her out the back door. My mom and my other two sisters were terrified of him and started screaming and crying. Something broke loose inside me. I’d been scared of him so long. I’d watched him take his anger out on everybody around him. If work was tough, we suffered. If he lost his job, we suffered. If the house wasn’t perfect, we suffered. If he drank, we definitely suffered. I finally reached the point where I was done suffering and watching my sisters and mom live in fear.

  “Lizzie was only nine years old, the youngest. He was very angry, and she’d been sick. I knew whatever he did might put her in the hospital. My mom had said she was really worried that if one of us got put in the hospital that we would be taken away from her. That’s what my father had told her. If we got hurt, she tended us at home because she believed her babies would be taken from her by the state. It wasn’t until later that she found out the state would’ve placed us in a shelter together until she could get help. My father had complete control of her and us. Anyway, I stopped him when he tried to drag her out into the yard. I hit him and he let go of her.”

  Summer squeezed his hand and followed Ace down the highway, hearing the pain and loss in Kemp’s voice.

  “He was surprised, and that allowed me to land the first blow. As it turned out, it was the only blow.”

  “Good.”

  “He landed in the mud with a really surprised look on his face. He didn’t come back inside when I took Lizzie back in the house for Mom to tend to. When we looked for him later, he was gone. He came back drunk during the night but slept it off on the couch.”

  “Did he hit any of you again?”

  “It happened one more time, a few weeks later. He was drunk and taking some small offense out on my mom. He had her backed up against the kitchen counter. He pulled back to hit her and I caught his arm and spun him around so my mom could get away. He tried to hit me.”

  “What did you do?”

  Kemp looked down, and it took several seconds before he replied, “I hit him until he passed out.”

  It made Summer incredibly sad that Kemp had to deal with that horrible situation as such a young age.

  “By the time he came to, we were already gone.”

  “Where did you go?”

  A small smile crossed his full lips, and he replied, “Down the block to Ace’s house. His family took all five of us in. His mom and dad had talked privately with my mom a few months before and I realized later that what they were doing was offering her a place to stay if she ever needed it. My dad would do those things to us and then sober up and promise her that he’d never do it again. She loved him and wanted to believe him so much.”

  Summer’s heart sank because it seemed like there was more he hadn’t told her yet. “Did she go back to him?”

  Kemp nodded. “Two weeks later. She felt we were a burden to the Websters, even though they assured her several times that she wasn’t. We were all school age, and she’d decided to get a job and go back to school herself. She went to our house one day to pick up some more of our belongings because all we had was what we’d carried when we walked down the street to Ace’s house.”

  Oh no.

  “My dad was home, and he talked her into staying. He was sober, and he vowed that he’d changed. She came back for us that afternoon, looking so happy, swearing Dad was a new man. The girls were younger and had no choice, but I refused to go with her. Ace’s mom assured her that I was no trouble at all and that she was welcome to leave me with them for as long as necessary. I think Arlene—Mrs. Webster—wished she could’ve stopped my mom from taking the girls home, but it wasn’t her call to make. They left and that was the last time I saw my mom or my sisters.”

  Summer’s heart froze in her chest. “What happened to them?”

  Kemp sighed deeply and settled back in the seat. “I wasn’t sure for a long time, but we did some checking into it a few years later and were able to piece things together. We talked to some of Dad’s friends, a counselor he saw, and our pastor. He was sober and getting clean when Mom went back to the house that day. His friends remembered talking to him and said they were convinced that he was going to change his life and be a good father and husband. Waking up on the kitchen floor after I knocked him out and realizing we were gone must have been a turning point for him. He took my mom and sisters out to eat that night, and on the way home they were involved in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.”

  She remembered him saying he didn’t have any family left. “They were all…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “They all died in the accident.”

  “Oh, Kemp. I’m so sorry.”

  Kemp was quiet for a minute, and then said, “I found it ironic that it was a drunk driver that killed them. Ace’s family petitioned the state to become my foster parents, since my parents didn’t have any siblings and my grandparents had passed on years before. Thank God the state allowed it and they raised me to adulthood. Ace and I have been best friends since we were kids, and his family treated me like one of their own.”

  “Did you miss them?”

  “Very much. I was devastated, and it was worse because we didn’t know all the details. When I found out later that my dad had really cleaned up his act, it allowed me the chance to forgive him. I sometimes wonder how things might’ve turned out.”

  “You and Ace are brothers, aren’t you?”

  This time the smile on his handsome, craggy face reached his eyes. “Yeah. We decided when we were kids that we would be private investigators and help people to feel safe. That dream morphed over the years into what we do today.”

  “I’m sorry about your family. What were their names?”

  “My mom was Victoria. My sisters were Veronica, Lucy, and Lizzie.” He spoke Lizzie’s name on a broken whisper, and Summer knew he’d been especially close with her. “They’re all buried in the Woodlands Cemetery in San Angelo. My dad’s name was Jerome.”

  “I wish things had turned out different.”

  “Me, too. I wish my dad could have known some victory. I don’t condone the way he acted, but I did finally forgive him. Our pastor told me Dad was talking with both him and a counselor and trying to work out his issues. Everything might have turned out okay.”

  “I’m so grateful that you had Ace and his family.”

  Kemp nodded stoically. “If not for them I would’ve wound up in the system. Given my history and issues, I’m not sure how I would’ve turned out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I enjoyed whaling on my dad that day. I enjoyed it too much. If the Websters hadn’t gotten me some counseling of my own, I might have become just like my dad eventually.”

  “Oh.” Summer knew there was a tendency for abusive patterns in families to be handed down. It made her wonder about her own parents at times.

  Kemp stroked her thigh gently as he clasped her fingers and said, “Summer, I don’t want for you to ever worry about being with me. I’m nothing like my dad. I promise.”

  Briefly, Summer gazed at this gentle giant and replied, “Kemp, that never entered my mind. But if it makes you feel better, I come from a long line of really bitchy women, an
d I’m going to do my best to not repeat their mistakes, either.”

  “You? You’re all sweet, innocent, and angelic,” Kemp said with a deep chuckle.

  “Not if you ask my parents. If you ask them about me, they will have a vastly different opinion to share with you.”

  “Everyone is entitled to make mistakes.”

  “Not according to my folks,” she said as she slowed to follow Ace’s indecently wide Hummer through a turn onto a long driveway that led uphill. “I’ll tell you all about them sometime.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.”

  They rode along the curving driveway that snaked around the hill until they were on the backside of it and into the heavily treed area at the top of the hill. Kemp was right when he’d said earlier that the house was not visible from the road. The prolific growth of oak and pecan trees was too thick to allow it. It gave the area around the house a shady, green, haven-like feel.

  The house itself was more of a small mansion made of dark gray stone and beautiful natural timbers. It was two stories, and the front of the house faced away from the road. Upstairs was a deck that ran the full length of the house and could be accessed by three different doors as well as a staircase at the far end. Wide windows filled the upper story, so the view from inside must have been spectacular. The large garage doors opened, and she pulled in, parking alongside Ace.

  He climbed out of the Hummer and lifted her bags from the trunk after she hit the trunk release. Kemp unfolded himself from the front seat, came around to her side of the car, and held out his hand. She smiled and took it, impressed as ever with their gentlemanly manners as he helped her from the vehicle.

  He held on to her hand, and Ace led the way to a door. He opened it and allowed Kemp to help her over the threshold. They entered the kitchen, and she gasped when she saw the interior of Ace’s home.

  With the exception of the walls necessary for the kitchen cabinets and stainless steel appliances, the floor plan was completely open downstairs. In front of her, beyond the kitchen, were the large, heavy dining table and windows that looked out over the shady backyard. To her right were the huge living room and what appeared to be a hallway leading back to other rooms. The front entry was to her far right, and next it was an office, judging by the furniture, desktop computers, and other work-related paraphernalia inside.