CHAPTER SEVEN
LAWSON HAD DONE some pretty stupid things in his life, but this might make his top ten. Top five if he didn’t figure out something better to say other than Uh, Tessie, I’m just here in Austin to check on you because my ditzy aunt Belle and your mom are worried about you.
This was definitely an example of sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. And even though he’d told Dylan he might visit Tessie, Lawson had also dismissed it shortly after the dumb-assed notion had first entered his head. So, why had he let Belle talk him into it with her repeated pestering calls and garbled texts?
Because he’d obviously wanted to be talked into it, that’s why.
Despite his dismissing this visit, he was still running with the self-serving theory that if he could smooth things over between Eve and Tessie, Eve would leave Wrangler’s Creek. Then he wouldn’t have to risk seeing her every day in a house and place that would eventually make her miserable because it would bring back old memories of why she’d left in the first place.
Every time that theory played out in his head, he felt lower than squished shit beneath a horse’s hoof. But a happy resolution between mother and daughter with Tessie would benefit Eve, too, since Belle had assured him that Eve was sick with worry about the rift with Tessie. So, even if this didn’t make Eve leave Wrangler’s Creek, at least she wouldn’t be miserable if she could reconnect with her daughter.
Following the directions of his GPS, Lawson took the final turn onto a narrow street lined on both sides with parked cars. He didn’t have the name of the building, only the address that he’d gotten from Dylan, but there’d probably be a sign for the boarding school or whatever it was called. But no school sign. It was just rows of apartments.
“Arriving at destination on left,” the GPS told him.
Yep, definitely an apartment building, but maybe the middle or high school that Tessie was attending was using some of the units as dorm rooms. Top-of-the-line dorm rooms, since this was a pricey area of Austin. Lawson knew that because his cousins’ business headquarters, Granger Western, wasn’t too far from here, and it certainly fell into the pricey category. Eve was loaded though, so she probably didn’t mind shelling out the money if this was a good place for her daughter.
There were no parking spots nearby, so Lawson kept driving until he found one at the end of the street. The August heat slammed into him the moment he stepped from his truck, and he hated to admit it, but it almost felt like some bad omen. Maybe like one of Vita’s foretellings that he dismissed but still gave him an uneasy feeling. He shook that off, went up the steps to the building, but the door flew open before he could even reach for it.
And the smell of booze came rushing out at him.
Lawson quickly saw the source of the smell. Three teenagers, two girls and a guy, who were trying to come out the door despite the fact that he was directly in front of them. They were giggling and wobbling but tried to straighten and look sober when they spotted him.
“Shh,” the guy said to the others. “Just keep walkin’.” His attempt at a whisper could have probably been heard as far away as Kansas.
The guy, who had stringy long blond hair, was on one side of one of the girls—a brunette with her head down—and he had his arm hooked around her waist, obviously supporting her weight. The other girl, a blonde, was doing the same thing on the other side of the middle girl.
Even though the trio was trying to get by, Lawson didn’t move. “Are y’all all right?” he asked.
It didn’t matter what they said because he already knew the answer. They were drunk. And clearly underage. A bad combination. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the flashbacks that hit Lawson like a mean kick from a rodeo bull.
Brett.
It all came back—the handful of parts that he could remember, anyway. The party. The drinking. And yeah, Eve, Brett and he had been underage, too. They’d been so sure they weren’t doing anything wrong, that it was something plenty of kids did. Kids like these. But it had been wrong, and Brett had died.
“We’re doin’ just fine, man,” the guy said, or at least attempted to. He missed a couple of syllables and slurred the ones he did manage to say. Even the smile he tried was off the mark and looked as if someone had yanked up the right side of his mouth with an invisible fish hook. “’Kay?”
No, it wasn’t okay, and Lawson felt the anger slide through him. It wasn’t anger directed at the kids but rather himself. Yeah, and Eve, too. The trifecta of Eve, Brett and him usually led to his piss-poor attempt to completely shut out what he’d failed to shut out for the past eighteen years.
And he failed today, too.
The anger was there all right, but Lawson tried to keep his touch gentle when he put his fingers beneath the middle girl’s chin to lift it. His heart felt as if it stopped until he saw her eyelids flutter open.
Alive.
Thank God. But she wouldn’t stay that way if she got any more booze in her or if her blood alcohol was already too high.
Most people wouldn’t have thought the worst-case scenario in a situation like this, but since Lawson had been there, done that in the worst-case department, he knew how fast things could turn ugly.
“All of you live here in this building?” Lawson asked.
That got the attention of the girl on the end. “You a cop?”
“Yeah,” he lied.
Her eyes widened to the size of hubcaps, and she suddenly looked as if she might puke. Good. That would get the booze out of her stomach. The guy did puke, and when he turned his head to do that, he let go of the brunette in the middle. If Lawson hadn’t caught her, she would have probably splatted on the floor. He hooked his arm around her, moving her away from the puking—which was only getting worse because the blonde girl started barfing her guts out, too.
There was nothing worse than the smell of booze-vomit, so he took the semiconscious girl several yards away to the massive stairs in the center of the foyer and he had her sit down. At least she stayed upright. Mostly, anyway. She drifted into a slow lean until her arm was against the banister.
While he took out his phone to call an ambulance and the real cops, Lawson turned back to the two pukers. They obviously didn’t have the mobility issues of the nonpuker, though, because they ran out the front door. He didn’t go after them but was about to go through with the ambulance call when he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Lawson soon spotted a young woman making her way toward them. She didn’t look much older than the brunette, but at least she wasn’t drunk.
“What’s going on?” she asked. But she got her own answer because she groaned, then made a face when she got a whiff of the brunette and the puke. “Idiot,” she muttered to the girl. She caught hold of her, pulling her to her feet before she looked at Lawson. “Are you a cop?”
He frowned because he was reasonably sure he looked nothing like a cop. Hell, he still had some cow dung on his boots from the stockyard he’d visited earlier, and he was wearing one of his prize rodeo buckles.
“You know this girl?” he asked. Yeah, it was a cop maneuver, answering a question with a question, but he wanted to know what was going on.
The newcomer nodded. “She’s a sorority sister.” She rattled off some Greek letters. “And she’s my roommate.”
“Sorority?” His frown deepened. “As in college?”
She was no longer giving him an are you a cop? look. She was staring at him now as if he was an idiot. “Uh, yes. We’re staying here temporarily until our sorority house is ready.”
All right. So, maybe the brunette wasn’t underage after all if she was in college. But that immediately led Lawson to something that didn’t fit.
What was Tessie doing here if this was for college students?
Maybe there was still a boarding school along with the sorority sisters? Or it could be that Tessie was indeed college age. Since he’d never seen a picture of her, it was possible that Eve had adopted her when she was four or five instead of an infant.
“I’ll take her back to the room, and I’ll call the janitor about the throw-up,” the young woman said. “I’ll make sure she’s okay. Just please don’t arrest her. Wellsmore College has a no-drinking policy, and she could get in big trouble.”
Lawson wasn’t letting her off the hook just yet. “There were two other people with her, and they were also drunk. A guy and a girl, both blond.”
“Idiots,” she repeated. “I know them, too. They’re the ones who threw up?”
He nodded. “Someone will need to check on them.”
“I’ll make some calls,” she jumped to answer. “Just please—no arrests. If my mom hears about stuff like this going on, she’ll make me move back home.”
Lawson really didn’t want to let this slide, but the young woman did seem to be on top of this, and that “idiot” label hopefully meant she was going to give all three of them some grief over this screwup.
He finally put his hands on his hips. “When she sobers up, tell her I’ll be keeping an eye on her, and I will put her butt in jail if she does this again.”
She gave a shaky nod, and even the brunette attempted some kind of an agreement to that. It came out as a groan-belch-nod, but Lawson thought he’d gotten his point across. That’s why he didn’t stop the other woman from taking the brunette up the stairs.
However, it was only after he’d allowed them to leave that he remembered he hadn’t accomplished what he’d come here to do.
Find Tessie. Attempt a rift-mending. Go home.
He was about to call out to the sober girl to ask her if she knew Tessie, but the front door inched open. The pukers hadn’t returned though. This was a redhead in her thirties. She was wearing yoga pants and was carrying a baby in her arms. She was in midsmile—aimed at the baby, whose cheek she was touching—but she “ewww’ed” when she noticed the puke. She sidestepped it on her tiptoes and froze when her attention landed on him.
“Holy shit,” she spit out. Then her mouth twisted up. “Sorry,” she added to the baby. “Holy crackers.”
Despite the toned-down version of the profanity, her expression was pretty much still in the “holy shit” mode. Her gaze slashed around. At every corner of the foyer. Then at the stairs. The sorority sisters were already around the bend of the stairs and out of sight, but the redhead kept looking as if she expected someone to materialize out of the putrid air.
“It wasn’t me who got sick,” Lawson said when she glanced at the puke again. Then the door. But at the same moment he spoke, she said, “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t think that was a general kind of question. As in what was a grown man doing in an apartment building for a sorority? She seemed to want some specific information. “Do I know you?”
“Oh.” Her forehead bunched up. “Oh. No. We’ve never met, but I’m Cassidy Vale. What are you doing here?” she repeated.
It took Lawson a moment to realize that this was the actress who used to be on Demon High. Maybe Eve and she were still friends, and Eve had sent her to check on Tessie.
He tipped his cowboy hat and was about to introduce himself, but she spoke before he could. “I know who you are. You’re Hot Cowboy.” She frowned as if sorry she’d admitted that. “That’s what Eve used to call you. She kept your picture in her purse when she first moved to LA.” Another frown. “Now, why are you here?” She made one more of those nervous looks up the staircase.
Hot Cowboy? Well, it was better than cop. Actually, a lot better. But why had Eve talked about him like that? And carried his picture? She’d been finished with him when she left Wrangler’s Creek.
Or so he’d thought.
At the exact second he was thinking that, the baby made a fussing sound and squirmed, drawing Lawson’s attention to it. Or rather to him. It was a baby boy wearing denim shorts and a shirt that said Number One Son. The kid smiled at him. And Lawson instantly knew who he was.
“Eve’s baby,” he muttered.
“Yes. Aiden,” Cassidy confirmed.
Well, the kid had changed a lot in the six weeks since Lawson had delivered him. For one thing, he was bigger, and his eyes were open. He didn’t look pissed off and ready to kick the world in the balls. Nope. He looked, well, like a cute kid. One who was smiling at him, and Lawson found himself smiling right back.
“Eve’s parking the car,” Cassidy went on. “Now, why exactly are you here?”
Lawson heard the repeated question, but his brain latched on to the first part of what Cassidy had said. Eve was parking the car, which meant she’d soon be there. He didn’t especially want to avoid her.
Okay, he did.
But the important thing was there was no reason for him to be there if Eve had personally come to check on Tessie. It was best for him to leave. Immediately.
This time he tipped his hat in farewell and had even managed a couple of steps when the door opened and Eve came in. Like Cassidy, she made an ewww sound when she spotted the vomit. Lawson wasn’t ewwwing though. He was cursing. Because, hell, there it was again.
Lust.
Apparently, old lust was just as potent as the fresh stuff because one look at her, and it heated up every inch of him. Which only caused him to mentally curse himself even more. Thankfully, he didn’t have to deal with the lust for very long because the inevitable second reaction came.
Grief.
Yeah, this was the Brett-effect again because all of that came back, too. Since he’d just had to fight off the flashbacks minutes earlier after seeing the drunk teenager, he didn’t have them tamped down enough. They came much too fast to the surface. At least it was a cure for the lust, but Lawson knew it was a temporary one.
Eve shifted her attention from the floor. To Cassidy. And then she spotted him.
“Shit,” Eve snapped. “I mean, shoot. What are you doing here?”
Lawson had heard that question more today than he had in years. “I was on my way back from a buying trip, and Belle asked me to come by and check on Tessie.”
Judging from the way the color vanished from Eve’s face, that wasn’t an answer she’d expected. Or one that she wanted to hear.
“Belle?” Eve repeated. She looked at Cassidy as if she expected her to have some enlightening thing to say, but Cassidy only shook her head.
“Uh, you saw Tessie?” Eve asked. She scooped up the baby from Cassidy’s arms, but for some reason, the kid kept looking at Lawson. Kept smiling, too.
Lawson shook his head and hitched his thumb toward the stairs. “According to the address Dylan gave me, Tessie’s on the second floor. I was about to head up there, but I had some...interruptions. Not the puke,” he added when Eve glanced at it again. “The people who did that were the distractions.”
Along with Cassidy, the baby and Eve.
Like her son, Eve looked a whole lot different from the last time he’d seen her. Her face wasn’t screwed up in pain, and of course, she didn’t have a pregnant belly. She was back to looking like her old self. Plus, eighteen years. Those eighteen years had settled nicely on her though.
And he had to curse another hit from that old lust.
“How are you?” Eve asked. But she wasn’t looking at his face. No, her attention was flickering in the general area of his crotch, which meant she was probably talking about his butt injury.
“I’m fine. A doc in Abilene took the stitches out while I was up there. I’m as right as rain.” He couldn’t believe that had just come out of his mouth and didn’t know what the hell it meant. What the heck was right about rain, anyway? “Since you’re here, there’s no need for me to check on Tessie,” he added in a grumble.
Cassidy and Eve both blew out large enough breaths to fan a small forest fire. Lawson figured he should wonder what that relief exhaling was all about. Maybe even question it, but to do that, he’d have to hang around. Right now though, there was something he wanted more than answers.
A whole lot more.
And that was distancing himself from Eve, the puke and this tangled mess of memories leaking from their old baggage.
“Tessie?” He heard Eve call out at exactly the same moment that Lawson headed for the door. The sound of his own footsteps blended with those coming down the stairs. Tessie’s, no doubt.
Good. Eve was going to get to see her daughter and maybe accomplish the very thing that he should have never come here to try to do.
Maybe.
Tessie certainly didn’t respond with a welcome greeting to her mom, but Lawson didn’t wait around to see how this would play out. Nope. He headed home, knowing he’d filled his “stupid things to do” quota for the day.