Courting Trouble (17 page)

Holt hammered the ball right into the receiver’s numbers.

“Nice pass,” Cade said. Wayne was right… in theory. But Cade couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow taking care of his father was his responsibility. He didn’t expect Wayne to share his feelings or even understand them. Wayne’s biological father had skipped town right after Judith and he got divorced and Wayne’d had little contact with his own father for his entire life. Hudd hadn’t been much of anything but a curse for Wayne. Constantly reminding Wayne of his tenuous status within the Montgomery household. How Wayne wasn’t a
true
Montgomery and never would be. Cade was actually surprised how much Wayne actually cared for the old man.

“You know you’ve got a blind spot as big as the sun when it comes to Hudd.”

“There’s nothing for Dad to tell her,” Cade said.

“You really believe that?” Wayne asked. “That Hudd had nothing to do with Connie’s death?” He turned back toward the football field. “Or with anything else?”

Cade’s heart pulsed an extra beat and a chill rushed up the back of his neck. A thought that there was something—
something
—he didn’t know caught in the back of Cade’s brain.

“What else could there be?” Cade squinted his eyes and shook off his irritation at Wayne’s words.

Wayne didn’t answer—didn’t look at him—didn’t flinch. A long time ago, without any words, the brothers sorted out that where Hudd was concerned the two of them would always be at odds. Regardless of Wayne’s strained relationship with Hudd, the facts were the facts and there was nothing to prove Hudd’s involvement with Connie’s death or any other damn mystery.

Cade stared at his nephew, who jogged toward the sideline for instructions from his coach. Cade had to believe in Hudd. What would it mean to his past and his future and even his present if he didn’t
believe
his father’s version of that April night years ago? To doubt Hudd wouldn’t mean anything good, that was for damn sure.

Chapter Seventeen

“Aunt Tulsa, you can drop me here.”

“That’s okay.” Tulsa pulled to the stop sign. The temperature was nearly zero—okay thirty, but it felt like zero—and they were three blocks from the high school.

“No, really,” Ash said. At the stop sign she opened her passenger door and jumped out with backpack in hand before Tulsa could move the Jeep to the side of the road. Ash slammed shut the door. Tulsa turned and looked at Savannah in the back seat. “What was that?”

“Hormonal adolescent,” Savannah said. “And probably embarrassed.”

“Of me?” Tulsa asked. “But I’m the cool aunt from Cali.”

“You’re the cool aunt from Cali when you have the convertible Mercedes, but today you’re just another old woman driving a Jeep.”

“Old?”

“To a fourteen-year-old everyone over twenty is old. Stop and I’ll get in front.”

Tulsa pulled to the curb. Savannah opened the passenger door and popped into the front seat. A block ahead of the Jeep, Ash fell in step with some girls and laughed.

“I’ve half a mind to pull up there and call out her name.”

“It’s not worth it,” Savannah said. “I’ve tried. She’ll find a way to make you pay later.”

“She liked me last night,” Tulsa said. Her voice sounded quiet and lonely. Ash continued down the street with her friends. “And a week and a half ago at the football game.” “That was then and this is now. It’s moment to moment with all those hormones.” Savannah brushed at her pants with her fingertips and then folded her hands in her lap. She turned her head toward Tulsa. The angle was jaunty—almost daring—as if to offset the flat, barbed tone of her next five words. “Your newness has worn off.”

Since the football game, the weather wasn’t the only thing chilly in Powder Springs. There’d been nothing overt—nothing obvious, no harsh words—instead, Savannah had gone “Grandma Margaret style” with her displeasure and met Tulsa with frosty silence.

Tulsa clutched one hand over her heart. “Are you insinuating that you, too, are irritated with me?”

“I’m not the one sleeping with the bad guy.” Savannah drew out the words at a slow, deliberate pace.

“No.” Tulsa put the Jeep in gear and pulled past a stop sign. “You already slept with the bad guy and now we’re here.” She tossed the words out with a light tone. “And I’m not sleeping with Cade.”

“Yet,” Savannah said, her voice low and thick with the kind of judgment only a sister could dish out.

Tulsa pursed her lips together and focused on the road that led to downtown Powder Springs. Irritation lodged in her chest. She wanted to spin on her sister and tell Savannah that she was crazy for making the suggestion that Tulsa still harbored emotions for Cade. But if Tulsa were completely honest with herself, any denial was a lie. She still wanted Cade. She still thought of him, and if there were no roadblocks like Ash’s future and Connie’s past, then yes, she would explore her feelings for Cade. But there were roadblocks and giant red flags and flashing lights, so going any further with Cade was impossible.

Tulsa put the Jeep into third. “These feelings… Cade…” Tulsa held her palm up as if imploring Savannah to understand. “None of this was my intention.” She glanced at Savannah. “I never thought… I never expected…” Tulsa shook her head back and forth. What
had
she thought—what
had
she expected? That she could live in a state of denial for her entire life? Denial about her relationship with her niece, her relationship with her sister, her hometown, and her dead mother.

Savannah rested her head against the seatback. Her shoulders relaxed in surrender and the tightness around her lips smoothed. “I remember the day you fell in love with Cade,” Savannah said. Her voice was forlorn and yet soothing, as though she were revisiting a fond memory in her mind.

Tulsa squinted her eyes and glanced toward her sister.

“It was the middle of your junior year. You came home from something. Maybe cheerleading practice or yearbook or who knows what? You belonged to more clubs than anyone else at PSHS.”

True. So true. What Tulsa lacked in money she made up for with hard work.

“You walked into the kitchen with this weird look on your face.”

“Weird look? That’s how you knew? Have you seen the looks that Ash is throwing at you, because weird looks—”

“I’m not finished.” Savannah glared at her sister. “You interrupt me too m—”

“I don’t interrupt you,” Tulsa said.

“Please tell me that was meant to be a—”

“Joke?” Tulsa interrupted again. Her faint smile grew into a giant grin.

Savannah’s head jerked back and a laugh burst over her lips. Her hands flew to her eyes and she looked at Tulsa through her fingertips as her belly rolled with laughter. Tulsa laughed too. The laughter felt good and released the tension. Their laughter made them smile and reminded them that their relationship as sisters was sometimes hard, but forever permanent.

“Are you going to let me finish the story?” Savannah finally gasped out around the traces of her laughs.

“Does it involve me?”

Savannah nodded.

“Then by all means,” Tulsa said.

“Okay, so you come home from school with this
dreamy
look on your face. And I’m all of what? Thirteen at the time?”

Tulsa nodded.

“You walk to the refrigerator—”

“Nothing strange about that,” Tulsa said.

“Again, let me finish.” Savannah tilted her head. “You walk to the refrigerator. You stop. You stare out the window. You laugh. You open the refrigerator. Laugh again. Then you put your chemistry book inside the refrigerator, close the refrigerator door, and walk upstairs.”

“I don’t remember that,” Tulsa said and pulled to a stop on Main Street in front of the courthouse.

“Of course you don’t,” Savannah said. “You were in some sort of love trance. All I heard you mumbling up the stairs was ‘Oh Cade.’ That was just so perfect. ‘Oh Cade.’”

“I did not!” Tulsa sounded similar to a fourteen-year-old girl embarrassed by her first crush.

Savannah nodded. “You did.”

“Well…” Tulsa raised her eyebrows, her forehead crinkling. “As for the chemistry book, perhaps it was an experiment… something to do with my class.”

“No.” Savannah shook her head and the right side of her smile lifted. “The only thing that dreamy look had to do with was the one thing you couldn’t ever get off your mind. From homecoming your junior year ‘til…” Savannah stopped, her silence abrupt. Both sisters held a beat—as if their breath stopped for a second in their lungs. Savannah turned and looked out the window toward the courthouse. Her voice was quieter now, with less humor, but soft with acceptance. “Well, until practically never. It was Cade. You were in love with Cade.”

Tulsa put the car in second and pulled around to the parking lot behind the courthouse. Even when a sister knew the truth, there were some things you just couldn’t say out loud. No matter what.

*

Cade poured his second cup of coffee from a pot in the office kitchenette. The brew smelled less fresh and more bitter than it had an hour before, but he wanted the caffeine. He had a deposition in a medical-malpractice case to read and interrogatories to draft. The Hopkins case wouldn’t move forward until after the settlement conference, if it moved forward at all. Without a permanent custody order from Judge Wilder, Cade couldn’t see Savannah agreeing to Ash spending more time with Bobby.

And Tulsa?

Cade couldn’t force Tulsa from his mind. He poured a packet of sugar into his coffee. How could someone who felt so good in his arms, on his lips, next to his skin, be so damn bad for him?

There was no way around the conflicts that stood between them—at least Cade couldn’t find the answer. He opened the mini-refrigerator and pulled out a carton of cream. If Cade won the Hopkins case then Tulsa lost. If Tulsa found something new about her mother’s death, something that implicated his dad, well, then Cade lost. He dumped the cream into his coffee and watched white swirl through the black. Nope. There was no way around these problems. Their attraction wouldn’t work. There was no solution to this puzzle. Cade shut the refrigerator door and sipped his coffee.

He walked down the hall from the kitchen and turned the corner to his office. His dad stood just inside Cade’s office.

“Why are you here?” Hudd asked, his voice pockmarked with irritation. He leaned against his cane. Since the stroke, Hudd looked like an aluminum can crumpled in on one side.

“I could ask you the same question.” Cade stepped around his father to his desk. The bandage on Hudd’s forehead hid his stitches. “You should be home in bed, resting.” Cade sat in his chair and pulled a file from the stack on his desk. An old fool. An old fool whom it was Cade’s responsibility to babysit. “Dammit, Dad, Dr. Bob told you—”

“That wackadoo? Like I’m gonna listen to him? Marrying Wayne’s leftovers? What kind of a brain can that man have?”

There was no filter for his father. Whatever Hudd thought, he said. Some people might say Hudd had never censored his thoughts. He limped further into Cade’s office and stood hunched over his cane.

“What in the hell are you doing here, son?”

Cade stopped pulling the interrogatories from the file and turned toward his father. Why was his dad so rattled? This was Cade’s office. It was a weekday. Of course Cade was here.

“Dad?” Cade raised an eyebrow and examined his father’s face. Perhaps the MRI missed something. “Where do you think I should be?”

Red started at the collar of Hudd’s shirt and rolled upward like a crimson tide. He lifted his stroke-embattled hand and pointed toward the front of the office. “The damn courthouse!” Hudd bellowed.

Cade glanced at the computer screen on his desk where his case calendar was open. There wasn’t a Montgomery & Montgomery case scheduled for court today.

“We don’t have a case on the docket today,” Cade said, his voice filled with soothing patience, as if trying to calm an angry child. “We don’t—”

Hudd’s hand flailed through the air. “I know that. I’m not three years old.” His impatient motion made it appear he was swatting at a mosquito. “Don’t talk to me like I’m an infant.”

“Okay.” Cade shifted his tone from cajoling to serious. He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest. The tightness that ran along his right shoulder screwed down harder and Cade tilted his head to the side to try to release the tension.

His father had been a giant in Powder Springs. A man with a great legal mind, a man who deserved Cade’s respect, a man that Cade would listen to and try to understand. “If I don’t have a case today, then explain to me why I should be at the courthouse?” There had to be some logic still up there in his father’s stroke-stricken brain.

Hudd’s nostrils flared and anger shimmered through his eyes. “Savannah McGrath.”

“She’s not our client.” Cade rested his body against the edge of his desk and swung his foot over his ankle. “You know that, right?”

“Of course I know that.” Hudd labored toward Cade. “Boy, that bump just rattled my teeth, it didn’t dent my brain. But it seems someone’s gotten so deep into your psyche you’re losing a step.”

The frustration his father stirred in him twisted tight the muscle in Cade’s shoulder. Cade usually squelched these frustrations. He was a good attorney—a very good attorney—but to hear Hudd tell it, Cade was a legal hack only a half step above incompetent.

“Get off your ass and get over to criminal court!” Hudd said.

Enough. Cade unwound his feet and stood from the edge of his desk. His father could bluster and blow in his own office, down the hall from Cade’s, or, better yet, at home. Cade tapped his knuckles down on the desktop with one hard knock. “Go home, Dad. I can handle the office.”

“Savannah McGrath’s criminal case is on the docket today,” Hudd said.

A slippery discomfort slithered through Cade’s gut. He paused and half turned to his dad. The residue of his second cup of old coffee bittered his mouth.

“As the attorney of record for the father of Savannah’s daughter, the man you are representing in a
contested
custody case, you should be in that criminal courtroom right now.”