Second Chance Love (Heaven Hill Book 6) (15 page)

Beside her, Rooster tensed, and she could tell this was going to be bad. Telling him what she had to might break the two of them. Their relationship was on thin ice, she knew that, but she had to tell him. This relationship had to be right.

“This is hard,” she sniffed. “I don’t want to tell you this.” She looked over at him. “But I want this to work, and I can’t go any further without telling you. I can’t get this close to you again and then have it all fall apart. I won’t survive it again.”

He reached over, running a thumb over her cheek bone. “Tell me, please just tell me.”

“A few weeks after Liam got locked up and you got sent away, I started feeling sick. I thought it was because I missed the two of you so much. I was always around both of you and there you were gone. I was alone, in a situation I didn’t want to be in. You were my support system, and I worried myself to death about both of you. I wrote it off as me manifesting all that worry physically. I was tired all the time, puking, stomach rolling at every turn—then certain smells starting getting to me. I knew I was pregnant, even before I took the test. I didn’t want William to know.” She couldn’t call him “dad” in this moment. It hurt too much.

Rooster inhaled sharply, doing his best not to jump to a hasty conclusion, but his stomach had dropped. He had an awful feeling about this. Roni had no child, so obviously something had happened.

“I was able to hide it for a few weeks,” she continued, not meeting any eyes in the room. She held her head down, afraid to lift it. Part of her was scared to look and see how Rooster was taking the news. “Those weeks were happy, even though I was scared to death. I was making plans. My mom had found a way to get out of there; I was going to do it too. Rooster wouldn’t be at the camp forever and Liam wouldn’t be in juvie forever. I was going to bide my time until I could talk to you and we could make a plan together. We were going to be a family.”

“What happened?” His voice was raw, it sounded the way he felt. He knew with everything in him that William had fucked this up too.

“He found out. He got me in the car and told me we were taking a drive. I didn’t think anything about it,” she told them. “He was my dad. Why would I have any cause to be scared? He did things to other people, not to his own daughter.” She choked on the words, gazing off as she told the story.

“C’mon Roni,” William yelled. “We need to get going.”

Why was he in such a hurry? Her stomach was rolling—she’d been sick since she’d woken up that morning. The saltines were no longer doing it for her, and she knew that soon she’d have to find a doctor and get verification of everything. Maybe they could prescribe her something to help with the morning sickness. Usually it wasn’t so bad, but some days, she could barely lift her head—this was one of those days. “Be right there,” she yelled back. It was going to take every bit of control she had over herself to get out of bed and face this day head-on.

Slowly, she made her way to her dad’s truck and got in.

“You okay?” he asked, glancing over at her.

He wore cologne, and the smell of it was overpowering to her senses. She quickly rolled the window down, sticking her head out as far as she could to get away from the stench. “Fine.” She shook her head, gulping in the fresh air.

They didn’t speak as he took off towards town, and honestly, she was so tired that she didn’t even want to carry on a conversation. Abruptly, she pitched forward, realizing that she had fallen asleep.

“Get out of the truck,” William said to her sharply.

She fought to get a handle on where they were, she’d never seen this place before. It was a house, but she wasn’t sure why they were here. “Where are we?”

When she didn’t move fast enough, he came around the side, opened the door, and yanked her out. “We’re someplace that’s going to take care of the little problem you have. You will not be having Brandon Hancock’s baby, now, or ever.”

It was then she understood what he was saying. She started screaming, trying to kick away from the hold he had on her. With one hand, he grabbed her by the hair, with the other, he backhanded her.

“Get your ass up those steps and into the house. You don’t want me to take care of it for you,” he whispered through gritted teeth.

He would beat her until she lost the baby. How was this man her father and what had she done to deserve this?

“For three weeks, I bled, and I would cry myself to sleep every night. I waited for you to get out of that camp. I wanted to tell you everything, and all I wanted was to feel your arms around me, you to tell me that it was okay,” she trailed off.

“And when I got out, I was different, I wasn’t all like what you expected,” he finished for her.

“No.” She shook her head. “You hated to even look at me.”

“I hated that I had put you in that situation,” he told her. “And now I find out this? God, why would you even want to mess with me after everything I put you through?” His voice was tortured. What had he done to the two of them? How had she been able to look past all the shit he’d done in the last few years? How could she come to him now and really want to make a life with him?

“You’re the only thing, the only person, I’ve
ever
wanted.” Her voice was clear and truthful. “No matter what, I can’t change the way I feel.”

“I’m a lucky son of a bitch, but you might change the way you feel after I tell you my secret.” He ran a hand over his face.

How the fuck were they going to overcome all of this? Would it be worth it, in the long run? Were they fighting for something that wasn’t going to last?

Chapter Eighteen

R
ooster didn’t know if this was a great idea, he was still reeling from what she had told him about their unborn child. That had been the last thing he’d thought she’d tell him when he’d agreed to come here. Of course, he’d had a feeling that whatever it was, it was going to be big. This was much bigger than anything he could have ever imagined.

“Go ahead,” Doc Jones encouraged him. “You get yours out and then we’ll work through it all together. It’s better to just say it, and then we can take the ramifications one by one.”

“I quit the sheriff’s department after some things happened that I didn’t agree with. When I had to go to the camp, things changed and I became the do-gooder extraordinaire of the world because that’s what I had to do. For years, I was a dick to Heaven Hill and I acted like I didn’t even know who Roni was. There’s no doubt in my mind why she didn’t tell me about all this before now. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t.” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s neither here nor there right now. Anyway, I came back into the Heaven Hill fold this year and got asked to work at the high school doing security because of an anonymous tip that was called in. The tip said that there were steroids being used on the football team.”

He heard the swift intake of breath beside him. Roni had probably already figured it out. This was bad, he was done hurting her.

“Not Drew.” She shook her head. She had hoped their suspicions weren’t founded.

“Yes, Drew and his buddy Dalton. They’re knee-deep in this shit,” he confirmed, dropping his head into his hand that rested on the side of the couch.

“Shit.” She rested her head against the back of the couch cushion.

“So now,
I
have a dilemma,” he told Doc Jones. “I’ve only been with this group of people for a short amount of time. I’ve just begun to find my foothold and place here, she and I are working on our relationship, and now I have to tell two parents that their teenage son is mixed up in drugs. What do I do? I can’t go back to the way I was livin’. I can’t do it.”

To his complete surprise, Roni reached over and grabbed his hand in hers. “Before you start, Doc Jones, can I remind him of something?”

“Please do, I’m still trying to process all of this and understand everything that’s going on.” She watched the two of them carefully. When a couple came in to see her, this is what she wanted, them to help each other with their problems. It looked like this couple was more than willing to do that.

Roni turned in her seat to face him. “You have to remember that Liam sent you there, he asked you to take a look at this because he’d gotten the tip. He
wants
to know what’s going on. That doesn’t mean he wants you to sugarcoat anything. Whatever this turns out to be for Drew, we’ll all deal with it. He’s a teenager and he’s going to do stupid shit. Liam’s not going to be pissed because you’ve done what he’s asked you to. He knew there was a chance, and that’s why he asked you to do it. Liam’s not an idiot.”

Doc Jones held up her hand. “Okay, let me make sure that I understand this. You and Roni had a relationship as teenagers and you were best friends with Liam. When the two of you were sent away—you came back different? He went right back to where he was going to go in the first place, and you took the opposite track?”

“Exactly.” Rooster nodded. “My parents…” he trailed off and chuckled, but it was uncomfortable. “Let’s just say, I spent all the time I did with Liam’s family because my home life, it wasn’t great, and even though Liam’s family was as dysfunctional as they came…it was still better than my own house.”

“Shit, you two.” Doc Jones wrote in her tablet.

“I know.” He nodded. “Fucked up, huh?”

“So, things have happened, now you’re back and you and Liam have worked out your friendship. You and Roni are working on your relationship. She’s just admitted to you that she had to have an abortion because of her own father and you’ve just admitted that her nephew, Liam’s son, is knee-deep in a steroid ring at the high school. Am I following this all?” She blew out a breath and ran a hand through her hair.

“You got it,” he told her, running his hands along his jeans.

“God, and here I thought Layne was fucked up. I’m gonna need a drink after you two leave here.” She shook her head.

“Just help us, help us deal with everything we need to so that we can have a normal relationship, I want that more than anything,” Roni told her.

Doc Jones took a couple of minutes to compose herself and make a few more notes on her notepad. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Rooster, you have to tell Liam about Drew. Roni’s right. He wouldn’t have asked you to take a look into it if he didn’t want you to be honest with whatever you find. If you’re not honest, you’re doing your newfound friendship with him a disservice. He needs to know what his son is doing, not to mention the potential fallout once you find the source of the drugs.”

“I kinda knew that’s what you were going to say, and in my heart I knew that’s what I should do, but damn, it sucks,” he sighed. “Out of all the years I was with the sheriff’s office and how many people I took in or had to tell their parents that they were doing drugs, this hurts.”

“It’s because you’re so close to the situation, and if it didn’t hurt, I would worry about you,” Doc Jones assured him. “Now, Roni, my God, girl. How you haven’t had a nervous breakdown before now is a miracle to me.”

“I thought I was going to a few times.” She said it off-handedly but everyone in the room knew that she was telling the truth.

“How do you feel now that you’ve said the words out loud and you’ve told Rooster your secret?”

She was quiet for a moment, searching for the right word to convey what she did feel. “Relieved. This has been hanging over my head for so long—it was something that William could hang over my head, I don’t know what life is like without it. I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders.”

“That’s good, that’s a start.” Doc Jones made more notes in her yellow pad. “Rooster, how do you feel?”

“Shocked and angry, but not at Roni. I’m pissed at William. I knew he was a grade-A asshole. He showed a whole bunch of true colors once we got him behind bars. Things that I’d rather not discuss because it has no bearing on any of this, but suffice it to say, if I were still wearing a badge—he’d be a dead motherfucker.”

In the back of the room, an alarm went off, and Doc Jones got up to turn it off. “I hate to do this to you two, but I worked you in and I have another appointment in ten minutes.”