Now, all he had to do was reach up and—
His fingers slipped apart, compromising his hold and sending a hell of a cramp into his hand. He stretched out a foot to stabilize himself, but the whole thing went pear-shaped, his fingers sliding off the plastic rock. That was when he remembered his last bold move had increased the amount of slack in his rope.
He tried to catch another handhold as he fell, but the only part of his body that made contact with a grip was his chin. The pain from the impact shot up, into his nose and behind his eyes.
That spun him around. And as his brake jerked his descent to a stop, the back of his head rammed into a protruding grip. Stars? No, as his skull took the brunt, what Grif saw were black spots of doom.
He hung there, eyes closed, just waiting for those black circles to stop expanding and shrinking.
Finally, he was able to pull back the lever on the brake and slowly rappel the wall. His last thought as his feet hit the ground and his knees wigged out on him was I’ll never fucking live this down.
16
From somewhere high above him, Grif heard a guy say, “I fucking told you, you dumbass. If you’re dead, I’m gonna kill you and then tell Mom I warned you.”
“Reid?” Grif croaked, his throat feeling like he’d gargled with kitty litter. And even though he opened his eyes, he couldn’t see much because his silverback of a brother was crouched over him, two fingers pressed to Grif’s carotid artery.
Reid’s face was a portrait of what an artist would probably call Study in Pissed Off. “Did I tell you or did I tell you not to climb that mother-effing wall off belay? And unless whoever was belaying you just happened to wander away after you took a header, I’m damn sure you didn’t listen.”
“Old woman,” Grif said, closing his eyes again.
“Uh-uh. Keep ’em open, asswipe. If there’s anything worse than me walking in here to find that you’ve gone and killed yourself, it’s having you bite it on my watch. For some reason, our mom seems to have a soft spot for you. And I’m not going down for murder.” Holding up three fingers, Reid asked, “How many?”
“Dude, six fingers?” Grif blinked a couple of times, just messing with his brother since he could see those three thick sausages perfectly well. “You’re a freak.”
“Dammit.” Reid scrambled for his phone, jabbing at the screen with his big fingers.
With his right hand, Grif tried to push himself off the floor. Big-ass mistake. His wrist gave out below him—and whomp—down he went again. That’s when he realized his neck and T-shirt were wet with something. If he’d passed out and slobbered all over himself—or God forbid, even worse, pissed himself—Reid wouldn’t have to worry about murder because Grif would just kill himself.
He swiped at his throat and came away with a handful of thick stickiness.
Meanwhile, Reid barked into his phone, “We need an ambulance out at Tupelo Hill.” He glanced up. “Yeah, looks like he took about a twenty-foot fall off a rock climbing wall.”
No way. He wasn’t going to get away with that, so Grif said, “I was almost at the top and my brake held.”
“What?”
“But I had slack in the rope.”
“Fine, the idiot tumbled ten feet.”
“And I don’t need an ambulance.”
“The fuck you don’t,” Reid growled at him. “If Cash Kingston is on shift tonight, make sure he’s in the ambulance…I think he lost consciousness. Not sure how long because he was out when I found him.”
“Didn’t,” Grif mumbled. “Just had my eyes closed.”
“How the hell would you know?” Reid barked at Grif, then said into the phone, “Yeah, I’ll stay on the line.”
“Not my fault,” he told his brother.
“That’s what they all say when the sugar turns to shit,” Reid said. “You think you’re freakin’ invincible and don’t have to climb safe. I tell you what, if this place was mine, you’d not only be on a real belay, I’d have your stupid head in a helmet. You should’ve been wearing protection. Hell, what am I saying? You shouldn’t have been on that wall at all.”
“Carlie Beth was here.”
“Are you saying you were showing off for a girl?”
“I wanted to kiss her.”
Reid snorted. “Looks like you kissed the floor instead.”
Grif smiled and the motion shot an arrow into his frontal lobe. “She left and I was frustrated. Decided to take it out on the wall.”
“I’m not buying the bullshit you’re selling. You came in here ready to climb.”
Guilty.
But he might not have felt the need to do it the hard way if he and Carlie Beth hadn’t had a run-in. “Something’s wrong up there. I grabbed a handhold, but it didn’t feel right, almost like…”
“Don’t tell me it was loose. We spent hours all over that wall double-checking the things. Sure as hell couldn’t trust the shoddy-ass workmanship of the people the city hired.”
“Not loose. Slick.”
“Sonofabitch,” Reid said. “Will you be okay by yourself for a couple of minutes?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“If you don’t stop hovering, I’m gonna start calling you Britt.”
Reid just glared at him, then hopped to his feet and strode across the room. A second later, light flooded the cavernous room, sending shards of glass into Grif’s eyeballs. He clamped his lids shut, but the brightness still seeped through. God, his brain really had been whacked around like a pinball inside there.
But the whole operation was still working well enough to allow him to picture Carlie Beth, all protective mother and sexy woman rolled into one package. Who in the hell would’ve ever thought Grif Steele would have a psychological hard-on for the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter.
His fourteen-year-old daughter.
He’d only intended to take a little cross-country drive, get away from the shadow hanging over him for a couple of weeks. How the hell could he have ever imagined he’d roll into his hometown only to be double-whammied with a freaking city job and a family?
Next thing he knew, he’d be sitting in a recliner asking for his pipe and slippers.
What the fuck was he going to do about all this?
Before he could come to a halfway decent conclusion, EMTs swarmed into the building and began giving him the once-over. Peppering him with questions about what happened, checking his pulse and pupils.
“Pulse is one-ten.”
His cousin, Cash, shined a light into his eyes. “Pupils normal and reactive.”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled. But they continued to pester him, checking him over and asking him questions like what month it was and who the president was. “Hell if I wanna discuss politics.”
Cash glanced up at the rock wall. “You fell off that?”
“Not exactly.” He didn’t have the energy to go through it all. And it was obvious they would haul him into the hospital regardless of his story.
“Still, you’re lucky.”
A pair of boots appeared beside Grif’s head, and Grif slowly turned his head to wince up at his brother. “Yeah”—Reid’s gruff voice echoed above him—“he was damn lucky.”
* * *
When Carlie Beth returned home and realized that Grif had distracted her like the slick hustler he was, that he hadn’t actually explained about Madison Henry, she immediately went for her emergency stash of white chocolate and Malbec, both wedged into the corner of the over-fridge cabinet. She had a hefty Ghirardelli bar in one hand and her fingers wrapped around the wine bottle neck when something shifted in the darkness behind her.
She spun around and lost her grip on the bottle. It arced away from her in slow motion. Damn, that was going to make a mess. And she needed it badly enough that she’d be tempted to lap it up off the ground.
Aubrey jumped up from the kitchen table and caught the wine just before it crashed to the floor.
The breath whooshed fr
om Carlie Beth’s lungs. “My God, you scared me.” The second time tonight her heart had tried to escape her chest.
“I’m sorry. I was just waiting for you.” Aubrey carefully placed the bottle on the table and eyed the candy bar in Carlie Beth’s hand. “It’s bad if you’re two-fisting it tonight.”
With a boneless movement, Carlie Beth plopped into a chair. “Sometimes it would be nice if I were the adult and you were the kid. You know, totally in the dark about my failings and foibles.”
“Foibles.” Aubrey articulated the word as if it were a mouthful of delicious white chocolate. “I wonder if that can be used as a verb, too. Ladies and gentlemen, the normally graceful Carlie Beth Parrish almost foibled her precious Malbec medicine tonight. And wouldn’t that have been a tragesty?”
All Carlie Beth could do was laugh. Her brilliant daughter had come out of the womb with an affinity for making up words. She’d played with them like some other children had shaped clay or put together Legos.
Aubrey went to the cabinet and withdrew two wineglasses, then eyed the wine. “Don’t guess I could talk you into giving me some of that?”
“Sure you can.”
Her light eyebrows popped up.
And Carlie Beth finished her thought. “When you’re twenty-one.”
“Great, only seven years to go.” She handed over one glass and went to the fridge to pour herself some grape juice. Although she gave her drink a baleful look, she said, “I guess if it’s good enough for the Baptists, it’s good enough for me.”
Thank goodness Carlie Beth hadn’t already taken a drink because she would’ve snorted perfectly good wine out her nose. “Don’t let Miss May hear you say that.”
Settling into the seat across from Carlie Beth, Aubrey moved her own glass from place to place on the table as if she were playing a particularly challenging game of chess. “I’m sorry about what I said to you a few days ago.”
“You mean the asshole comment?”
One side of Aubrey’s mouth lifted in the same way Grif’s had that day in Yvonne’s storeroom, and Carlie Beth was filled with a combination of pain and pride. “Most moms would’ve gone crazy and grounded me for saying something like that.”
“I think we’ve already established I’m not most moms. You’re entitled to your opinion about the situation, and honestly, you weren’t completely wrong. I’m sure I’ve made a lot of wrong choices over the years—in your life and in mine. But I won’t sit here and say I think keeping him out of your life was one of them. Right now, I don’t know if it was or not.”
“I went to see him…Grif.”
Although she already knew, Carlie Beth’s heart shrank to half its normal size. She forced herself to take a casual sip of wine, then said, “So did I.”
“He told me I could call him Dad.”
Forget half-size. Her heart was now trying to figure out if it wanted to run and hide or jump clean out of her chest. “Baby, I don’t want you to get hurt—”
“I’m not a baby. You know that because you’ve never treated me that way a day in my life.”
“But you’ve never had Grif Steele in your life before.”
“So are you saying he is an asshole?”
Carlie Beth winced into her wine. Was it right to warn Aubrey about the man when she had no idea what had truly happened between him and the hotel heiress he’d been accused of abusing? The charges had been dropped. But he’d also dropped the subject when she brought it up. “No, I just don’t want you to make him into Prince Charming. Everyone has faults.” Has secrets. “And this isn’t his home anymore.”
“He’s leaving?” The panic was clear in her daughter’s tone.
Carlie Beth set aside her wine and took Aubrey’s hand. “His life is in Los Angeles. Just because he knows about you now doesn’t change that.”
Aubrey’s face closed up and she snatched her hand away. “What are you really worried about, Mom—that I’ll get attached to him? That he’ll hurt me?” With one motion, she drained her juice and clicked her glass back onto the table. “Or that he’ll hurt you?”
* * *
Several hours later, after being poked, prodded, and sutured, Grif was finally taking the stairs—one at a time—to his new second-floor apartment. Reid was on his left side, hovering like he expected him to take another dive.
“You’re starting to piss me off,” he grumbled.
“Welcome to my world,” Reid shot back. “You’ve been doing that to me for years.”
On the landing, Grif angled his body so his brother wouldn’t see his unsteady hand as he inserted his new key and unlocked the door. “I don’t care what the discharge papers said, I don’t need you to stay with me tonight.”
“Not planning to,” Reid said, his voice full of cheer that made suspicion crawl up Grif’s back.
When he pushed open the door, he immediately understood the source of his brother’s peppy mood. Because there in his living room sat big brother Britt. On a couch Grif hadn’t owned when he walked out of the place earlier this evening.
“What the hell?”
“Aw…” Reid mock-sympathized. “You hurt my witty-bitty feelings by saying you didn’t need me.”
Turning his entire torso so his brain wouldn’t go sunny-side up in his head, Grif glared at his brother. “So you sicced Britt on me?”
Britt didn’t budge from from his perch on the ass-ugly green, pink, and yellow couch.
“Where the hell did that thing come from?”
“The thrift shop down the street.”
Grif glanced at his watch. “At ten o’clock at night?”
“It was actually around eight. But that’s the way small towns work, in case you don’t remember. Neighbors and friends are willing to go the extra mile for people.”
“And of all the choices, you picked furniture that looks like Rainbow Brite puked on it?”
“This isn’t LA. I didn’t have a choice of Kobe cowhide or Italian leather. It was either this or a twenty-year-old daybed. Besides, this one is a queen-size fold-out. Important when I’ll be sleeping on it for several nights.”
“Fucking stupid.”
“Keep it up, asshole,” Reid said mildly, “and Britt’ll be your houseguest for a solid month. And we’ll go back to the thrift store to pick up a laminate kitchen table and a 1970s RCA TV.”
Britt had the balls to chuckle. “They actually had one of those. Bet that thing was five hundred pounds.”
Grif rubbed his chin, the stitches bristly under his fingertips and his skin sticky from blood and whatever gel they’d slathered on his skin. Damn, he needed a shower and his bed. “Mom set you up to this, didn’t she?” In fact, he was surprised she wasn’t the one glued to that couch. That was the kind of mother she’d always been—one who sat up and watched over her kids whenever one of them was sick or hurt. It was a freaking miracle the woman had ever slept for more than an hour a night.
Reid’s mocking expression clamped down and went serious in a microsecond. “No. She doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Now it was Grif’s turn to snort. “You do realize she goes to church with the ER triage nurse, don’t you?”
“I asked her to keep this little incident to herself for now.”
“There’s gonna be hell to pay when Mom finds out.”
“Grif, this is serious.”
He shuffled across to the makeshift kitchen he’d set up. The whole thing consisted of a microwave and an oversized dorm fridge, both new from the local discount store. Damn, what he wouldn’t give for his commercial beer chiller right now. Grif stooped to reach into the fridge and grabbed a Two Cocks Roundhead Bitter.
If it wouldn’t have hurt his head, he would’ve chuckled at the irony of his selection.
Before he could reach for the bottle opener, Britt was across the room yanking the beer out of his hands. “Dammit, Grif. I’d expect Jonah or Reid to be idiots about this kind of thing, but not you.”
“Thanks, bro,” Reid said.
“You have a concussion,” Britt said slowly, as if talking to a particularly hard-to-train dog. “Alcohol and head injuries don’t mix.”
Grif let out a long sigh. “Fine, then I’m hitting the shower. You two can fight over that floral monstrosity.” He waved toward the couch. “But if either of you are in my bed when I get out, I’m kicking ass. I don’t care if it gives me a fucking aneurysm.”
“Dammit, don’t blow this off—” Reid started.
Britt grabbed his arm and said, “Let him get cleaned up. I’ll talk with him when he gets out.”
As Grif carefully made his way toward the bathroom, the front door slammed behind him, sending a pain through his head that had him lunging for the toilet.
And if he’d thought that hurt, the dry heaving that came next was complete brain-blinding hell.
17
In all honesty, when he woke in the morning, Grif didn’t remember much about the night before other than Britt hauling his ass off the bathroom floor and threatening to take him back to the ER. But he’d somehow had enough wherewithal to wage a decent negotiation, promising he’d go back if he didn’t immediately rouse every time Britt came in to check on him during the night.
He must’ve passed each test because here he was, in his own bed, sunlight peeking around the shades on the windows facing Main Street. And someone had apparently removed the icepicks from his head during the night because he could breathe without feeling like puking or digging himself into a dark hole and never coming out.
But the crusty blood on his chin itched like crazy, and he couldn’t stand the grimy feeling on his skin. And obviously, Britt had allowed a parade of his beloved wildlife into the apartment during the night because Grif would swear a possum had curled up and died in his mouth.
He made his way to the bathroom, grabbed his toothbrush with one hand and used the other to piss for days. Mouth fresher and bladder happier, he eased under the shower, thankful this old building had decent water pressure.
Going Hard: Steele Ridge Series Page 13
