by Stacy Gail
“I’m curious. Do you like being hung up on, Katherine?”
“No.” She heard a slow, indrawn breath. “No, you’re right. Going down that path is pointless. Certainly, you’re free to make your own choices, and Garden Court is...a fine choice.”
She glanced around her toxic surroundings. Fine was hardly the word she would have used. “Thank you. Was that all you wanted to know?”
“I’d like to know more about what happened with Rodas.”
“Oh? Like what?” Did Katherine expect her to admit she’d secretly hoped Coe wouldn’t have any effect on her after all these years? Did Katherine want to hear that her little sister was now and forever free of the intoxicating spell Coe had woven around her when she’d been an idiotic kid? Did she want to hear that Miranda had finally realized with an adult’s mind that she’d been crazy to give her heart to someone who hadn’t deserved it?
“What was his response to the will?”
Her face flooded with heat, and all at once she was glad her sister wasn’t there to see it. Self-absorption, thy name is Miranda. “I didn’t wait around to find out. I delivered the copy and left. If Anthony’s father hasn’t received word from Coe, then you know as much as I do. I made it clear that Coe needed to contact Mr. Carstairs if he wished to get what was coming to him.”
“I’d like to give that guy what’s coming to him.”
She sighed and wondered not for the first time if either she or Katherine were somehow adopted. It just didn’t seem possible that they were biologically related. “I know Coe seems like the source of your pain right now, but he’s not. The fault of this sordid debacle lies solely with Dad.”
“Of course. Whereas your Roscoe Rodas is a bright and shiny innocent in all this.”
Hanging up was looking better and better. “He’s not mine, and he is innocent—in the strictest legal sense, of course. Blaming Coe for this mess is akin to blaming the owner of a priceless work of art for its theft. It wasn’t Coe’s fault that he invented something so valuable Dad couldn’t resist stealing it from him.”
“Don’t say that word, Miranda. Dad didn’t steal it. He...he manufactured and marketed it for him.”
“Without permission or acknowledgment that the fuel valve wasn’t his idea to patent, manufacture and sell to the entire world. Nor did he give Coe one cent of the profits throughout these many years. Pray tell, what other word would you like me to use?”
“Did you explain that he’s got a time limit?” Katherine demanded, apparently suffering a convenient bout of deafness so she wouldn’t have to answer. “According to Anthony, the will stipulates that this Roscoe person has to be informed of the time limit.”
Good grief. “Of course I did. If Anthony’s dad hasn’t heard from him yet, then it’s possible Coe might not be able to immediately meet the requirements.”
“Do you think there really could be a possibility that after all these years, Rodas might not be able to come up with what he needs to fulfill his legal obligations? Do you realize what would happen then?”
“Stop right there,” Miranda warned when her sister’s voice began to climb out of its apathetic pit to ring with excitement. “Don’t get your hopes up. If there’s a problem, I plan to help him in any way I can. One way or another, I will put things right.” Even if she had to go to the most extraordinary measures after the sixty-day time limit was up, she’d do it. It would ruin her life, but she’d do it.
“If you let things be, no one could fault you for that.”
“If I let things be and he doesn’t come up with any evidence, you are aware there’s another way I can give him the patent, aren’t you?”
There was a beat of horrified silence. “That’s going above and beyond the call of duty, Miranda, even for you. What’s more, you’re not legally obligated to take this no-name grease monkey by the hand and do the work for him.”
“Legal obligation has nothing to do with this. I’m morally obligated, and you should be too.”
“The only obligation I have is to look out for number one, and I’m not going to apologize for it. We’re talking about survival here.”
Just when she thought the drama couldn’t get any worse. “No, Katherine. We’re talking about you cutting back on a few taken-for-granted luxuries.”
“Like what, the roof over my head?”
“Like your personal makeup artist who drops by your house every morning just to make you presentable. Speaking of which, shouldn’t that be happening right about now?”
“Damn it.” She could imagine her sister torn between the all-important instincts to grab for all that she could, and looking supermodel perfect. “Look, we’ll talk later, all right? Just lay low for now and don’t interfere. Let’s see what events unfold.”
The only event she was interested in was the one that brought her to Bitterthorn in the first place, Miranda thought, at last managing to cut things off with her sister. The mere thought of it tightened her mouth as she slung her hobo bag over her shoulder and headed for the mobile home’s exit. She had to return to Coe everything that was taken from him, so that he could live the life that should have been his from the beginning.
With that in mind, she opened the door, only to jump back when the man occupying her thoughts stood on the other side of it, fist raised.
* * *
Coe stepped back as the dilapidated trailer’s door opened, caught off guard when he’d been all fired up to be the one to catch Miranda flat-footed. For the time it took a heart to beat he noted every last detail about her—a blue sweater a few shades lighter than her eyes. Jeans encasing slender legs that could squeeze like a damn vise when she was coming. Long blond mermaid’s hair pulled back from a face that could make a grown man believe in angels. And her neck...oh, that neck. He was a weak-kneed sucker for it, arched like a Grecian statue and a magnet for his mouth.
Or at least, it had been a magnet. Now he didn’t give a fuck what her neck—or any other part of her—looked like. All he cared about was where she’d decided to land. Garden Court. Jesus. She’d probably chosen this shithole to stay in—no more than a few trailers down from where he grew up—just to give him the proverbial finger. That had to be the case, because to have a princess like Miranda living in a goddamn dump like Garden Court made no sense. It also made him want to tear apart the decaying green-and-pink monstrosity she was staying in with his bare hands. Yeah, this had to be some kind of cheap shot at him. She’d already done everything to kick his teeth in, yet here she was trying to ream him with this sick little reminder of where he’d come from.
The princess putting the unworthy peasant in his place.
That sounded about right.
“Well.” The sound of her cultured voice made him hurt in ways he couldn’t explain. It was like the mere vibration of it ripped at the darkest places he had inside, and it unsettled him so much he only vaguely noted that she sounded congested. “This is an ill-timed surprise. I’m afraid I’m on my way out the door. If you’d called—”
“Cut the bullshit. I don’t know your number, and I don’t want to know it. What I do want to know is what game you’re playing.”
“Game? You’re going to have to forgive my ignorance, since I have no clue what you’re—”
“Enough.” The thin thread of patience holding his shit together snapped, and without invitation he pushed his way into the trailer. Then he was almost sorry he did. The mingled odors of mildew and bleach assaulted him, with an underlying scent that was flowery and powdery and delicate.
Miranda.
For some reason it was her scent that pushed his irritation into the eye-twitching zone. Miranda’s classy fragrance was the one thing that should never even be in a place like Garden Court. It didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong here. And goddamn it, if he had to carry her out of this fucking cesspool, he�
��d do it.
“Excuse me.” The words that left her even as she scrammed out of his way were like blades of ice. “I didn’t invite you in. You may leave now.”
“Oh, you giving me permission to bounce? How fucking polite of you.” He couldn’t help but do a cursory look around, and the cramped, disintegrating metal cocoon brought back a childhood he wished would become like those fancy repressed memories tearfully talked about on daytime talk shows. “The only problem with that is that things like permission and politeness aren’t part of the culture here at Garden Court. You probably should have thought of that before you decided to taunt me by setting up shop here.”
Her mouth, that sweet pink softness that could be so damned dirty, dropped open in a semblance of shock. “What in the world are you babbling about? What does my new zip code have to do with you, other than the obvious fact that you seem to think you’re the center of the universe?”
Her denial kicked his iffy temper up another notch. “There’s no fucking way a Brookhaven has a legitimate reason to set up housekeeping in my old neighborhood and Bitterthorn’s version of hell.”
The muscles in her jaw knotted. “This particular Brookhaven does. As I’m still paying for an apartment in Grapevine, this trailer is what I can afford while I’m in town.”
He had to laugh at that, but even he heard the lack of humor behind it. “Get real, princess. Even before you and your father robbed me blind, your family was swimming in money. This poverty-stricken act is a feeble joke.”
“Don’t call me princess, and it’s not an act.”
“Does this have something to do with your old man’s death?” Coe snapped his fingers as a new thought occurred to him. “It does, doesn’t it? Did he disinherit you? Well, shit, that’s gratitude for you. You went to all that trouble to heist my notes and prototype valve for that coldhearted bastard, and he left you with nothing, didn’t he?”
She frowned up at him. “Did you even bother to read the papers I gave you?”
“I threw them away.” And he was damn proud of the strength it took to not take so much as a peek at it.
She put a hand over her eyes as if she’d been hammered with a sudden migraine. “Of all the thickheaded, monumentally stupid...Here’s a news flash for you—throwing legal papers away won’t change what they say, you unmitigated numbskull. It merely tosses vital information out the window, information that everyone else has, except you. Your future is directly tied to that document, do you understand?”
“Do you understand that I don’t give a fuck about anything that has to do with you?”
“No one understands that better than me.” The hand dropped from eyes that looked straight into his, and he was unpleasantly surprised by the flat coldness he saw in them. For just a second she was almost unrecognizable as the blonde-and-pampered knockout he’d once known. “Maybe it was a waste of my time coming here to try and put things right, if you’re going to be so impossibly blind. But I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Maybe it was,” he agreed, nodding with a bitter mockery. As if he would ever trust her to put things right. Had she forgotten she was the one who’d fucked everything up in the first place? “Just like it was a waste of your time to spread your legs for me all those years ago. All that time on your back didn’t get you into Daddy’s will after all, did it?”
Her face flooded with color. While he could have believed he’d scored a hit in his—yeah, he’d admit it—childish attempt at humiliating her, the murderous rage in her eyes had him thinking he might have just screwed up.
Big time.
“And here I thought that not even you were so low as to slut-shame when you were right there in bed with me,” she gritted out. To his amazement, the once-delicate princess snatched a up a fistful of his jacket and jerked him bodily around so that he faced the door. “Clearly I gave you too much credit. Get out of my sight, you pathetic hypocrite, and make sure I never see you again.”
“Hypocrite—”
“I said get out.” With an impressive snarl she shoved him through the open door, and to his absolute shock, felt her foot land solidly right on the crack of his ass, an exclamation point to make sure her message got through loud and clear.
Holy shit. The princess of Bitterthorn just kicked him in the ass.
Affronted and doused in the burning humiliation he’d hoped to give her, Coe turned in time to watch the trailer’s thin door slam in his face.
Chapter Four
The tremors that shook Miranda wouldn’t stop. She’d been angry before. Furious even. Hell, with a father like B.B. Brookhaven, operating while engulfed in a state of perpetual ire had been unavoidable.
But she couldn’t recall being so completely immersed in rage that she trembled from head to foot with the sheer force of it. And it didn’t leave when Coe did. For what seemed like forever, her body rattled with the desperate need to blow apart—or, more accurately, to rip Coe apart, limb from bloody limb. It almost scared her how easily she could picture it.
Long minutes ticked by as she sat on the edge of the bed gripping her knees, tears of pure frustration falling as she struggled to get some kind of slippery hold on the storm of emotion pummeling her from the inside out. At the root of it all wasn’t the bastard she’d just kicked out the door. No, she’d forever burn with self-directed fury for being such a stupid, clichéd pushover.
The internal storm grew darker, churning in her chest until it was hard to breathe. She’d rather bite her tongue off than admit it, but she had been easy to tumble when it came to Coe. For some reason, he had the old voodoo sign on her, affecting her in ways that no other man ever had.
And there had been others. She’d dated throughout her time in high school before Coe, and she hadn’t been a shrinking violet throughout college after him. As she’d settled into her job doing PR for Tarrant County, she’d even considered getting serious with a fellow graphic artist she’d met at a continuing education workshop. But after seeing each other for a few months, she’d realized something. Unlike her neighbor Geraldine’s phone number, Miranda hadn’t bothered to put a name to his number in her phone.
Looking back, it was a small thing, really. At the time when she’d made the realization, she’d told herself it was because she’d been too busy. But nobody was that busy, and she knew it. Deep down, she just hadn’t cared enough to bother. Hadn’t cared enough to put him in her phone, hadn’t cared enough to call him. And she hadn’t cared enough to miss him when they eventually went their separate ways.
Coe, though...she’d cared about him. To this day she still dreamed of their first kiss—a breathless moment in time when he’d insisted on washing her hands free of some grime she’d picked up from the tools he’d been working with. Even now she could feel the heat of his chest against her back as he held her hands under the water, his soapy hands sliding over her skin, and when she’d looked up at him over her shoulder, she’d known she’d die if she didn’t discover what his mouth tasted like. Then, as if he’d read her mind, he’d kissed her and turned her world upside down in the best possible way.
Only it hadn’t been the best.
By the end of summer, it had become a nightmare.
Her faced hardened. Without a doubt, Coe had been her first and only love, and that was where the root of her anger began. Not with him, strangely enough. Even after all this time, she was still angry with herself. She’d been so stupid, giving her heart away like it was nothing to someone who didn’t see its value. Worst mistake of her life, bar none. Well, that and believing her father could do no wrong. Learning Coe was unworthy of her heart and her father was unworthy of everything was a double knockout.
Here she was, seven years later, and she still hadn’t recovered from it.
Trusting in her father, though, was understandable. She could forgive herself that mistake. But
Coe...she shook her head and at last pushed shakily to her feet. If she could find a way to go back to that moment under Bitterthorn High’s football bleachers, silence her younger self before she swore her love and took that damned fuel valve, she’d do it. But time reversal was just a dream, and she didn’t have space in her life for anything but cold reality. And her reality was that she could never afford to be so stupid again. It cost too much.
With her sinuses more clogged than ever, Miranda forced herself out of the allergen-filled trailer in the hope that running a few errands would calm her edgy temper. From the beginning she’d known correcting a long-ago wrong wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Just being around Coe was enough to turn her into an ass-kicking mess, but that was her fault, not his. If she kept allowing him to gouge his way under her skin to poison her blood, she was going to lose her damn mind, and she’d already lost enough to that man.
No more, she decided, heading into the town’s only grocery store, Abel’s Market, and back to where she could see the pharmacy was still located after all these years. Other than making sure Coe fulfilled his obligations outlined in her father’s will, she wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence. For her own peace of mind, he couldn’t be allowed in her universe.
The price of the allergy meds made her already stuffed head swim, and with some quick re-budgeting she had just a few necessities in her basket as she went to check out. That was another thing she’d have to do—set up her laptop and transfer some money from her meager savings account so she could have some money in her pocket to live on. Life would be easier if she broke down and accepted the money set aside to pay for the added expense of living in Bitterthorn for a little over seven weeks, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She’d managed to stand on her own two feet all these years, after all. She was strong enough to find a way to do it now.
“I think this might be a first for me. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a Brookhaven do their own grocery shopping.”
