Second Chance Love (Heaven Hill Book 6) (13 page)

This, however, was tearing him apart. He wanted a future with Roni and he knew that keeping a secret this big from her and Liam was not the way to go, but he had to be sure before he brought his accusations to someone. If he had one piece of this wrong, then he could fuck up every little bit of progress he’d made in getting his life back in order. He wasn’t prepared to give that up. His back against the wall, he was listening closely but not hearing much as he saw Charity coming down the hallway wearing her clothes from cheerleading practice.

“Hi, Rooster,” she called out to him as she got closer. She walked slowly towards where he stood.

“Hey, Charity,” he answered back. Suddenly he looked alive. Maybe she was the way for him to get to Drew. “What are you doing?” he asked, hoping to make pointless conversation with her but steer her towards the answers that he wanted.

“I need to talk to Drew, so I figured I’d come down here and wait on him,” she explained as she had a seat on the floor. She knew, just as well as anyone else, that the football players didn’t get into a big hurry after practice and it could take them an hour to get out of the locker room.

“How are things going with the two of you? You’ve been together for a little while, right?” He didn’t know the answer to that, and as far as he knew no one else in the club knew they were hanging out, seeing each other, whatever teenagers called it. He had definitely heard no rumblings of it.

She smiled up at him, the shy smile of a young girl exploring new feelings for the first time. “Yeah,” she answered. “We’ve been talking since January, and we’ve been kind of dating since May.”

May? And nobody knew about this? Drew was a master at keeping his private shit private. How had no one found out about this yet? “That’s years in teenage time,” he joked, as he had a seat next to her.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Mom says it’s crazy, that I shouldn’t tie myself down to one guy. I’ll be sixteen the week after Drew. She says I need to spread my wings and play the field.” She shrugged.

“But you don’t think so?” The easiest way to get a woman to talk was to turn the conversation over to something about her. At least that’s what he’d learned in his adult conversations, he hoped it was the same for younger women too.

“Mom’s a stripper at
Wet Wanda’s
, what does she know? She’s not even sure who my daddy is. I don’t want that for my life.” Her voice was strong, no room for argument in what she was saying. She knew that if she said it enough times then it would happen, her dreams would come true. She didn’t want to be working where her mom was, doing what her mom did for the rest of her life. She had goals.

It was admirable to hear a teenager talk this way, with so much determination to do things the way she thought they should be done. Rooster imagined it couldn’t be easy growing up and knowing that your mom sold her body for money. “Your mom’s a very nice woman.” Rooster, in his sheriff days, had a few run-ins at the bar, but Jasmine had always been polite and respectful.

“That’s not what she’s known for,” Charity snorted. “But thank you for saying that. It means a lot.” It wasn’t often that she found people who were willing to overlook her mom’s profession in order to realize what a nice person she could be.

He wanted to turn the conversation away from this and back to Drew, back to the answers he wanted to know. “How’s Drew doing with football practice? Especially now that he made varsity? I haven’t been able to talk to him lately. I’m workin’ here and helping out at Walker’s Wheels,” he offered in way of an explanation. Charity was a smart girl, and he had a feeling if he just came out and asked her, the girl would know he was running a line on her trying to get information.

“He’s okay,” she answered slowly. “But it’s a lot of pressure and I worry about him.”

How did he get this girl to talk? “Worry about him getting hurt?”

“Well, that too, but there’s so much to worry about being on varsity. You have to be bigger, stronger, and faster than everybody else. It’s a huge time commitment. I just hope he has time for me when it’s all said and done,” she admitted. “We’re not seeing eye to eye about a couple of things right now.”

“All couples have arguments, I’m sure you’ll come through it,” he told her, resting his hand on her shoulder.

“We’ve been arguing a lot lately,” she whispered.

He knew that she was on the verge of telling him what he wanted to know. He had to make this sound good. “Anything you wanna talk about?” Rooster hoped like hell she wouldn’t say anything that he couldn’t handle. This was a teenage girl above anything else, and he wasn’t sure he had the emotional capability to get it out of her, but he was damn well going to try.

Charity had apparently been waiting for someone to ask because as soon as he did, she opened up, spilling a lot of words in a short time period. “He’s being stupid, thinking that the shit he’s takin’ is gonna make him better. It’s not—he’s better because he’s workin’ harder at it. All that shit is doing is making him mean, and he’s not the guy I met and liked. He’s an ass. I see people like that all the time with my mom. I don’t wanna be with somebody like that, but I’m scared to tell him I’m done, he’s got such a temper lately.”

“What shit is he doing?” He needed someone to confirm it, someone who knew the truth to let him know exactly what was going on.

For a long time, she was silent, and he wondered if she was going to shut down on him.
Please, tell me
.

“Steroids,” she whispered. Once the word was out though, her voice grew stronger and she started telling him what he wanted to know. What he needed to know. “He’s getting it from older guys on the team, and it’s the worst kept secret ever. The coach even knows about it, which I think is shady, but everyone tells me it’s none of my business. If you ask me,” she looked up at him, her eyes looking much older than fifteen, “the coach has something to do with it. I see this type of shit all the time from the people my mom hangs with.”

Now that was interesting, Rooster decided. He’d have to do some research on the coach and see what was going on there. “He knows that shit shrivels his dick up, right?”

Her face blushed a bright red, and he realized he probably shouldn’t have said that to her. To Drew, yes, but not to her.

“Sorry, I’m used to being around guys,” he said by way of apology. It had embarrassed him too.

“It’s okay.” She shrugged, once again looking much too old for her age. “I’m used to people saying wildly inappropriate things around me.”

Just then the locker room door opened, and Rooster knew that Drew would be walking through there soon. He got up. “I gotta be goin’, but hopefully I’ll see you sometime soon. Maybe you should make Drew bring you out to the clubhouse.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she laughed.

He wasn’t sure if she was scared or if Drew didn’t want her there so that no one else could be up in his business. Either way, it looked like something she didn’t want to do. There was nothing else to say as he made his way down the hallway. Once he got out of the line of sight from the football players coming down the hallway, he stopped and beat his head against a locker. What the fuck was he going to do? How was he going to explain this to everyone? It was the same question he kept asking himself over and over again, but he still had no answer, at least no easy answer. He hated this and he hated what he was going to have to put Drew through, but first he had to call in a favor and he had to figure out just what in the hell the football coach had to do with any of this. Usually when something like this happened, there was a spearhead figure that caused it all and he, without a doubt, knew that the coach had a hand in this. Investigating this wouldn’t be easy, but he sent a text to Travis, asking him to get everything he could on the coach, but to keep it between the two of them. He even used the token word “cuz”, just to let Travis know that this was serious. They still didn’t refer to themselves as family very often, but Travis knew that when they did, it was something serious. If he didn’t figure out how to make this work, he was fucked, and the new relationship he’d managed to start with Roni—that was over.

Chapter Sixteen

A
n hour later, Rooster had what he was looking for and Travis was asking questions that he knew he couldn’t answer. That seemed to be his token job lately, having answers that he couldn’t reveal.

“This is the high school football coach. What the fuck is going on?” Travis whispered as he held onto the papers he had printed for Rooster.

“I can’t explain that right now, I need this information, so I need you to let go of the fucking paper,” he whispered back.

It was stupid, the two of them whisper shouting at each other in Steele’s cave, but Rooster couldn’t afford to let someone else hear them. What if Liam heard and then he had to confess that he’d kept all of this a secret? That he hadn’t been completely on the up and up. It made his stomach hurt, but he didn’t want to cause emotional pain to anyone until he knew exactly what he was dealing with. It didn’t matter that he was waiting to get a bead on everything, to find out if what he thought was true was actually true. Liam wasn’t going to listen to that. He was going to do what every normal father did and react first, think later. That reaction would surely be against both Rooster and Drew, but Rooster didn’t know how bad that reaction would be. Liam could be calm, but he could also be as hot-headed as they came too. No matter how far the two of them had come in their friendship, he worried that this whole situation would set them back. Maybe it would all work out—maybe it wouldn’t, but Rooster was scared as hell to take that chance.

“Don’t ask me to keep secrets. You know what happened last time.” Travis referenced the secret romance he’d had with Jagger’s sister. It had been a bad deal when Jagger had found out by accident. Travis had ended up with a buzz cut and staples in his head. Neither one of them wanted to go there again.

Rooster nodded. “I know, I know. I’m asking you to let me tell Liam about this, and I promise you, I will do that in the next 48 hours. Is that good for you?” Rooster could tell just by looking at Travis that it wasn’t but he would make the exception this one time.

“Forty-eight hours, and then my mouth opens, big time.”

Rooster took the folder of papers that Travis had printed for him and was making his way out of the clubhouse when his cell phone went off. Roni. Fuck. He hadn’t heard from her in a day or so, and he really wanted to hear the soft tone of her voice. She would be a calming factor in this shit storm that had somehow made its way into his life. Getting into his truck that he drove back and forth to the school, he answered the call. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” she started, and he could hear uncertainty there. “I was wondering if you could make time to come somewhere with me this afternoon. There’s a couple of things I wanna talk to you about.”

He wasn’t sure he liked the tone of her voice. Now he was kind of regretting that he’d answered. What he didn’t need now was another issue to mess with, but trying to be with her meant being with her when the going wasn’t always so easy. “Sure.” He backed his truck out of the parking lot at the clubhouse and started down the drive. “Do I need to come get you? I’m leaving the clubhouse right now.”

“That’s perfect, I’ll be waiting on you.”

Rooster hung up and beat his hand against the steering wheel. He had a bad feeling about this, and this wasn’t what he needed on today of all days. Putting the paperwork that Travis had given him under the seat, he resigned himself into realizing that this whole situation just might suck ass.