Ridin' Solo (Sisters From Hell Book 1)

by Marika Ray

  “Holy shit,” I whispered in shock.

  “Watch your mouth, young lady,” Mom mumbled into the pillow.

  I rolled my eyes, but kept my mouth shut this time. Wyatt, my partner, the guy I’d thought I could build a life with in this little town of mine, was actually from a rich, elite family in Santa Cruz. He was old money. People knew his last name like they knew household brands. Wyatt could literally buy half the acreage of our county and still have money left over for a permanent European vacation.

  He was shown decked out in Armani suits, scantily clad in swim trunks on a yacht with a woman on either side of him, coming out of a dark building looking like he’d had a rough night, and even pictures of him and his sister when they were just kids. This version of Wyatt wasn’t the guy I knew.

  Which just proved I didn’t know him at all.

  I’d fallen in love with a guy that didn’t exist in my ordinary realm.

  I’d fallen in love with a guy I’d made up in my head.

  I threw the phone down on the bed and shoved my hands against my swollen eyelids. One thing was certain: I was tired of crying over him. He didn’t deserve my tears, time, or attention. Making decisions the morning after being shot at wasn’t the best time, but I knew what I’d say when I got ahold of the sheriff this morning. I’d ask to come in to work the desk and I’d ask for a new partner. If I had to disclose our fraternizing and risk punishment for it, then so be it.

  I refused to work with Wyatt any longer.

  Loud whispering, a muffled bang, and a snort echoed down the hallway, signaling the cavalry had arrived. My sisters were here. Esme nearly fell into the bedroom, the door hitting the wall with such force it bounced back, nearly clipping Izzy in the face.

  “Careful,” Izzy warned, shooting Esme a dirty look.

  Vee pushed past the two girls shooting each other looks that only twins could understand and jumped on the bed, officially waking up Mom and almost landing on my injured leg. “Mom made us promise not to come last night. Said you’d be too tired. But we’re here now, sister dear.”

  “Oh joy,” I deadpanned.

  “Hey!” Esme planted her hands on her hips, her tweed trousers and kitten heels looking ever so fashionable against my bedhead and pajamas. “Don’t bite the gift horse in the mouth, lady. We’re here to help out around the place and make sure our wrath is felt by he-who-shall-not-be-named.”

  “Girls, why don’t you start by making us some coffee and then we can get into the other stuff?” Mom sat up against the headboard, rubbing her eyes and yawning.

  Vee stuck her bottom lip out, but hopped out of bed just the same. “Fine. Coffee for us all, but then we want the full scoop. Dad was not a fountain of information, to say the least. Something about Wyatt not being Wyatt and ditches out back.” Vee threw her hands in the air. “Sometimes Dad makes zero sense.”

  Esme stayed in the room to help pick out an outfit for me, though I had to talk her out of the sundress that seemed way too happy and carefree to fit my current mood. I had an old pair of bootcut jeans that would probably fit over the new boot on my foot. A ratty old sweatshirt would do just fine as well. She huffed and rolled her eyes more times than a tween, but she got me dressed just in time for Izzy and Vee to come back with steaming hot mugs of coffee.

  Mom put her hand on my arm. “Only share if you feel comfortable, dear. I can get these hyenas to leave if you’d like.”

  “Oh my God. Seriously?” Vee took the pout up a level.

  Esme snorted her displeasure and Izzy just looked like Mom had kicked a puppy right in front of her. As annoying as younger sisters could be, I needed some womanly advice, and they were perfect. Well, close enough.

  “Wait for me!” Amelia huffed into the room, looking frazzled. “I thought the morning sickness was over, but the full barf bag I left in the car says it’s not.” She plopped down on the bed and I barely got my injured leg out of the way fast enough to avoid a second visit to the emergency room.

  “Ew!” Vee turned away from Amelia like morning sickness could be catchy.

  “Be quiet, you guys. Oakley got her heart broken,” Izzy stated quietly, looking at me with such firm commiseration, I knew talking to my sisters was the very thing I needed to heal.

  And so I did. I told them everything. Every little detail between us. All the sweet things, all the moments of confusion and doubt. And then I ended with telling them who he really was and how I’d found out from a stranger.

  “Dolby?” Vee shouted, knocking over her empty coffee mug as she leapt to her feet. “They’re fucking—oh, sorry, Mom—farking rich!”

  Esme swung to her. “Who cares? He’s a jackass who lied to her the whole time they were dating. All the money in the world isn’t worth that.”

  Vee frowned. “Well, yeah. Of course. But it’s still kinda cool you dated a Dolby.”

  “I worry about this next generation,” Mom said absently, sipping her coffee and staring at the wall.

  “Well, I don’t care how much money he has. If he broke your heart, then he’s enemy number one to me.” Izzy stood and clapped her hands. “And this makes me doubly glad I brought my stash with me.”

  “What stash?” I asked, feeling better just having told my family everything.

  She hooked a finger over her shoulder. “In the kitchen I have three bottles of wine, four ice cream flavors, a box of tissues—the real expensive kind with lotion embedded in it which I never truly understood—and Sleepless in Seattle.”

  My heart still felt split in two, but it was pumping again with the support of my sisters. “Thank you. This means the world to me.”

  Amelia stood abruptly and left the room without saying a word.

  “She okay?” I asked, frowning.

  Vee shrugged. “Probably has to pee. She does that, like, every fifteen minutes. I’m warning you…never drive somewhere with her.” Her eyes went wide and Esme snickered.

  Izzy and Mom went to the kitchen to make waffles while Esme cued up the movie.

  “I can’t believe you still have a DVD player.” Esme shook her head in disgust.

  “Sorry. We can’t all be mega bucks like you with state-of-the-art everything.” I struggled to take off the boot, wanting to take a peek at my wound before wrapping fresh gauze on it. “What do you do to make all your stacks of cash, anyway?”

  “I make miracles happen, sister of mine.”

  I snorted. “Do you always have to talk in riddles?”

  “Only when the riddle is more accurate than the straight answer.”

  “Okay. Forget we even had this conversation. Just help me get this gauze taped up.” God bless her, I loved Esme, but she was a handful I just didn’t have the patience for today.

  Vee popped back in the room, wagging her eyebrows. “I just googled him.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be making waffles?” Esme reminded her, securing my gauze and helping me back into the boot.

  She tossed her hand, looking exactly like Mom. “Nah, Mom’s handling it. So get this. Wyatt’s dad died two years ago from a sudden heart attack. Wouldn’t that be right around the time Wyatt became a deputy?”

  I bit my lip as my eyes burned again just hearing his name. “He told me about his dad dying, but what does that have to do with anything?”

  Vee and Esme looked at each other. I felt like I was missing something.

  “Maybe he changed his name to avoid the spotlight,” Vee said softly.

  “Maybe he moved here to start a new life,” Esme whispered back.

  “Maybe he came here under false pretenses and couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me the truth,” I said loudly.

  Both of their heads swung toward me, looking guilty.

  “Oh, Oakley!” Amelia’s singsong voice hit our ears right before she sashayed back into the bedroom, not looking even a tiny bit sick.

  She smiled, and I shivered, envisioning devil horns on top of her head.

  “Come see my artwork.”

&nbs
p; We all filed out of my room, the girls having to slow down to accommodate my awkward limping. Amelia waited until I’d joined her in the living room, swinging the curtain away from the window dramatically. My gaze zeroed in on Wyatt’s black truck parked in the driveway next door.

  In pink block letters on the side were the words Big Truck, Little Willy.

  I gasped. “Oh, my.”

  “Oh, yes,” Amelia echoed back.

  “Please tell me that’s not spray paint,” Mom said, her voice carrying the weight of thirty years of dealing with Amelia’s high jinks. Her question was valid. Amelia had been known to tag things around town before.

  Amelia shrugged, the smug smile tugging a matching smile on my own face. “Nah, I promised Titus I wouldn’t do that anymore. It’s just chalk paint. Pretty sure some soap and water will take care of it.”

  “Pretty sure?” Mom asked.

  Amelia shrugged. “Who’s ready for waffles?”

  26

  Wyatt

  * * *

  “What the hell happened yesterday?” Emmeline kicked the bedroom door open with her foot, waking me abruptly from the worst night of sleep I’d ever had. I kept dreaming about being in the middle of a barn, bullets flying left and right while Oakley screamed for help. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get to her.

  I shot up in bed, just barely keeping myself covered when my first instinct was to grab my gun and deal with an intruder. Em stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, her gaze flickering over me. I instantly regretted giving her a key to my house.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head and blinked the sleep from my eyes. “What? No. I’m fine.”

  I almost snorted at the irony. Fine was definitely not how I was doing. More like “gutted” or “drowning in despair” if I wanted to be perfectly dramatic about it. I wanted to take a page out of that one fight movie and beat the shit out of myself for what I’d done to Oakley. For not having her back at work, for not coming clean about who I was right from the beginning, for not being the man she needed in life.

  “Well, good.” Her hands left her hips. “Put some clothes on and I’ll make some breakfast.”

  Em twirled on her chunky heel and left to make a mess in the kitchen. Pretty sure I didn’t want anything she could make. I preferred my breakfast edible. Besides, I wasn’t hungry. No amount of food could fill the gaping wound in my torso hearing my real name on Oakley’s lips, accompanied by the lip curl that could only mean one thing: she wanted nothing to do with me now.

  I threw back the covers and slid on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. My hands twitched with the impulse to flick apart the blinds and check on Oakley’s house. I’d kept tabs on her condition yesterday while she was at the hospital by texting Sheriff Locke repeatedly until he’d told me he’d fire me if I so much as looked at my phone again. When her father had brought her home hours later, the sight of her torn pant leg and lopsided gait had torn a hole in my already aching heart.

  She was injured because of me.

  Plain and simple. No use sugarcoating it or trying to convince myself otherwise. She was my partner, and I let her down. And then I’d let her down again by being outed right in front of her. To add insult to injury, I couldn’t even be there for her while she got looked over at the hospital.

  She never should have found out about my family that way. I should have told her over a candlelit dinner where I could have told her the truth and begged her to look beyond all those crazy years. Who I’d been then, a drug-addicted rich boy with no responsibilities and a broken moral compass, was no reflection on who I was today. I’d worked hard to turn my back on everything I’d been back then. How many other people would legally change their last name and refuse their trust funds so they could work a nine-to-five in one of the most deadly careers there was?

  I found Em in the kitchen, pouring cereal in a bowl and handing it to me with a shoulder shrug. “Turns out I burned your last two eggs.”

  I gave her a weak smile and had a seat at the tiny table I’d found at Ikea for mere pennies compared to the furniture Mom bought. “Cereal’s fine. Thanks.”

  She sat across from me and eyed me as I ate. The silence dragged out, my crunching the only sound in my house, but I didn’t care. Just more time for me to stew on all my mistakes and what I was going to do going forward.

  “I have a confession!” Em blurted out when I laid my spoon down after the last bite of cereal.

  “Okay.”

  Em stuck her finger in her mouth, biting her cuticles, which was highly unlike her. She was a manicure-every-fourteen-days kind of girl. Then again, maybe she’d changed while I was gone.

  “Spit it out, Em. I have stuff to do today.”

  She slammed her palms on the table, rattling the bowl. “I told a few people about you being in the sheriff’s department.”

  A thundering noise took up inside my skull. “When, exactly, did you tell a few people, Emmeline?”

  Her thumb tapped out a rhythm on the table. “Um, yesterday morning?”

  I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath to keep from shouting at her. I knew how our old circle of friends worked. You tell something juicy to one person, and before an hour had gone by, that person had told a hundred others.

  My own sister had caused those paparazzi to show up at the crime scene and ruin everything between Oakley and me.

  “Emmeline.” The tone was not kind, but it was the safest thing I could say to her at this moment. My fingers tingled with the need to beat something. Even the tips of my hair were incensed.

  “I know!” She hopped up out of her chair. “I’m sorry! I’m just so proud of you, and I wanted my friends to know the kind of man my brother had become. But then I started getting texts, and I saw the pictures taken at that barn and they were all over the internet. They were saying you had a new name, which is insane because wouldn’t I know my own brother’s name? As much as I’m mad at you, I also know all the craziness online was because of me. I know I screwed up.”

  “They shot Oakley, Em,” I thundered.

  She sat down with a plop and a gasp. “What? Is she okay?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know for sure because she isn’t talking to me any longer.” I stared at her with all the fury I felt showing in my eyes. I knew it wasn’t all her fault, but I couldn’t seem to keep the rage bottled up. “I hadn’t told her who I was yet, and she found out from a coke head and some paparazzi trespassing on a crime scene.”

  “Oh, no.” Emmeline put her hand to her mouth, her eyes shining with tears.

  “Oh, yes,” I sighed, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back in the chair. Honestly, it didn’t even matter how it had happened or my sister’s involvement in it. I was the one to blame here. I knew it, just like I knew Oakley wouldn’t forgive me for it.

  “Can you apologize?” Em asked in a small voice.

  I shook my head and stared at the ceiling like it might provide the answers. “I don’t think that’s going to work this time. A mistake that big needs more than flimsy words.”

  “Do you love her, Wyatt?”

  I looked down at Em. “I do.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks, but she brushed them away impatiently. “Then we’ll make a plan and get her back.”

  I hated how quickly I latched on to that enthusiasm. Latched on to the idea that something I said or did could get Oakley back. My guilt over her being shot said I needed to wallow in it for much longer, maybe even forever.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that easy.”

  Emmeline stood again. My neck was getting a workout from watching her constantly move. “No, you’re right. It won’t be easy, but that’s why I’m here, big bro. I would really love to have a sister, and Oak is, like, totally kick-ass, so I’m going to help you. I know you prefer to be a Smith now, but don’t forget that us Dolbys don’t take no for an answer.”

  I sat forward and rested my elbows on the table. He
r support was touching, even after I’d kept my name change from her. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’ll always be a Dolby. The paparazzi will never leave me alone. I can’t outrun my past. I’ve tried that and failed epically. Oakley just wants a quiet life, protecting the citizens of this county. She sees things as black and white, right or wrong. There’s no room for my shade of gray.”

  Em rolled her eyes, already lighting up in a blinding smile. “See? That’s why I’m here to guide you properly, silly. Women love shades of gray. Duh.” She marched around the table and grabbed my arm, pulling me until I quit resisting and stood up with her.

  My lips quirked into a smile at her joke, but nothing she said could change my mind on things with Oakley. I’d screwed up. I needed to feel the full extent of that pain before I could ever hope to forgive myself, or even crazier, ask Oakley to forgive me.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and resigned myself to at least listening to her ideas. “Here’s my one condition. Absolutely anything I do has to be one hundred percent honest, above board, truthful, and above reproach. That’s the only way for me to be from now on, whether Oakley forgives me or not.”

  “I told you to take the week off until we close the investigation,” Sheriff Locke barked when I stuck my head in his office. No one had died from their gunshot wounds, but when any firearm discharged in the line of work and a cop was injured, the stack of paperwork was mind numbing.

  Despite the less than warm greeting, I came through the door and closed it behind me. He’d be in a foul mood anyway when I got done saying what I needed to say.

  I held up my hands and tried out a grin. “Not in uniform, sir. Just need to speak to you.”

  He spun away from his computer to give me his attention, sighing when I sat down like I intended to stay awhile. “If this is about your partner being tagged, you can just stop right there. We’re doing a formal investigation into everything that happened out there yesterday, but you need to understand that sometimes these things happen even when you take all the right precautions. Oakley knows that and so do I.”