McCall didn’t stop her mother this time when she reached for her cigarettes.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Ruby said after taking a long drag and blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth, waving her hand as if that would save her daughter from the secondhand smoke.
It was hard to tell exactly what her mother was sorry for. Tricking Trace. Getting pregnant. Marrying Trace. Cheating on him. Or believing for years that her infidelity was the reason he was gone.
Whatever Ruby was sorry for, she’d paid for it the past twenty-seven years.
McCall drove home, wanting nothing more than to sleep for twenty-four hours. The cold night air did nothing to chase away her fatigue. The river bottom was quiet, the low clouds of the spring sky overhead a deep ebony.
Rounding the corner of the deck, she was almost to the door when something moved in the darkness. McCall froze as a dark shape came across the deck at her.
Chapter Twelve
As Eugene Crawford stepped from the shadows, McCall knew he’d been waiting for her.
Her stomach tightened as she reached for her weapon only to realize she wasn’t wearing it and she’d left the gun Luke had given her in the truck.
As she reached in her pocket for her cell phone, Eugene stepped in front of her, blocking her path with one big, heavy arm and slapping her cell out of her hand. It skittered across the deck and disappeared over the side.
“You bitch.” Anger contorted his ruddy, thick features. “Because of you my father was arrested for murder.”
The sheriff had arrested Buzz for her father’s murder? Grant was so cautious he wouldn’t have done that without sufficient evidence. He must have found something in Trace’s pickup.
“I know you framed my old man,” Eugene said, shoving her back against the wall of the house.
She could smell alcohol on his breath and warned herself to be careful of this dangerous man. Eugene outweighed her by a hundred pounds and had a mean streak that she’d seen all through grade school. In high school he’d asked her out, and when she’d turned him down, he’d done everything he could to make her life miserable behind Luke’s back.
McCall had known that arresting him the other night at the bar would come back to haunt her. Here he was spoiling for a fight again, only he planned to win this one.
She tried to remain calm, not easy when they both knew that they were all alone out here. Even if she screamed no one would hear her, and Eugene was too big to fight.
“I’m sorry, Eugene, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.
“Right. You wouldn’t know anything about him getting arrested and hauled off to jail for murdering the man your mother claimed fathered you.”
McCall held her ground although it was hard with Eugene Crawford this close and reeking of alcohol, sweat and anger, but she knew that any show of fear would feed his need to hurt someone. And tonight that someone was her.
“If the sheriff arrested Buzz, then he must have his reasons,” she said, and started to move past him.
He stopped her, slapping one large beefy palm onto the wall next to her, trapping her. He leaned in. “You always did have a mouth on you.”
McCall feared how this was going to end. “You might want to consider that you are threatening an officer of the law, Eugene. Do you really need that kind of trouble?”
“After the trouble I’m already in?” He laughed, a harsh, spittle-filled laugh. “You ain’t no deputy. That’s right, word’s out about you.” He let his gaze slide down her body. “That’s why you aren’t wearing your gun.”
“I’m only suspended. Technically—”
“Let me tell you what you can do with your technicalities,” Eugene grabbed a handful of her hair in his fist, making her eyes water with the pain. “I got news for you—you were always a tramp just like your mother.”
“Easy, those are fighting words,” she said on a painful breath and clenched her right hand into a fist as she remembered the satisfaction she’d felt when she’d slugged this bully back in grade school for words along that same line.
Eugene sneered at her, egging her on. He wanted her to hit him so he could take some of his meanness out on her.
“This must have been a red-letter week for you,” he said. “Locked up two Crawfords. Bet you’d like to see Luke behind bars, too, wouldn’t you.”
“Eugene, I have nothing against any of the Crawfords.”
“You mean against Luke. Oh, that’s right. He used to be the man of your dreams. But I took care of that. You remember in high school?” Eugene asked. “That night down by the river?”
She felt her stomach drop. The night she and Luke had made love.
“You thought he was the one who went to school the next day and bragged about bagging you,” Eugene said, grinning viciously.
Luke hadn’t lied. It had been Eugene. Luke had sworn he hadn’t said anything. But how could she have believed him? How could she when no one else had known about the two of them making love by the campfire.
At least that’s what she’d thought.
“You destroyed my reputation in high school just to get back at me for not going out with you?” Her voice broke, trembling with rage. Eugene had destroyed more than her reputation. He’d destroyed what she and Luke had shared and every dream they had of being together, not to mention her broken heart.
McCall would have tried to take Eugene on, throwing everything she had at him, even though she knew she couldn’t win and would come out of the fight the worse for wear.
The only thing that stopped her was the dark figure that appeared at the edge of the deck.
“I followed the two of you,” Eugene was saying, “Saw you beside the campfire.” He let out a low whistle. “I said right then that I
