Hustle Him (Bank Shot Romance #2) (32 page)

Before I could even open my mouth, I felt the tears building in my eyes. “He found other ways to deal with the breakup,” I confessed in a quiet voice, just hoping he understood.

“Other ways? Or someone else?”
He
he
asked calmly.

“Yes,” was all I could get out.

Colt took another sip of his beer. I still couldn’t look at him. “Are
ya sayin' he had another woman?”

“Women. Plural,” I said with my hands over my face. This person across from me knew me and I should have been okay with letting him see me like this, but I was so ashamed.

“I don’t blame him. I can see how he would be all messed up over you,” he blurted out.

I removed my hands and looked right at him. One of his eyebrows was cocked. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked angrily.

He held up his beer to motion to our waitress that he needed a refill,
then
and then
he leaned in closer to me. “All I am sayin’ is that I can see how the breakup would hurt him. You both have been together for a long time. He was just tryin’ to forget ya
,
that’s all.”

I hated him. I hated his words, even though I knew he was just being honest. I wanted to get up and leave. He had to know how awful he was making me feel.

“So, what happened that night? You catch him with his pants down?”
He
he
asked.

“Yeah, I did.” I swallowed back the tears and tried so hard not to picture the last time I spoke to Tyler. I could smell the liquor from the time I opened that bedroom door. His little blonde conquest was sprawled out on all fours on the bed and he was on top of her, riding her into tomorrow. I shook my head. “His pants were off actually and he was very drunk. He tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t stand there watching them together. I just needed to leave, to get as far away from Tyler as I could.”

When I stopped talking, Colt started. “Let me guess. He got in that car and went
lookin' for ya. Ya see, alcohol is a funny thing. It makes you do things you
wouldn’t never
would never
do, but it always makes you tell the truth. It heightens your emotions.”

“I get it, really I do. I know it was my fault. If I would have just stayed….”

He cut me off. “No. You didn’t do anything wrong
,
Van. He messed up. Sure, you broke his heart, probably tore it into pieces, but he made his bed that night.”

I looked up at him. I was shocked. “You believe me?”

“Look Van, it’s easy for my aunt and uncle to blame someone. They see their son and have no answers. You can’t blame them,” he explained.

“I miss them though. I miss them so much
,
Colt. They were a big part of my life. I feel so empty without all of them. I feel like I don’t want to live anymore,” I confessed.

He reached over and pulled my hand away from my face. “Don’t ever say you don’t want to live.”

He was serious. His face was stern, almost like a parent to a child.

I quickly changed the subject. “So what are you here for
,
Colt? Are you just visiting Ty?”

“Na, I am here to help with the summer crops and some of the livestock. Uncle Mitch can’t do it himself. Dad has plenty of help at home, so I offered to stay through the harvest.”

“Can I ask you something?”

He stared at me for a second and took another sip of his new beer. “Shoot!”

“Do you think you can help me see Daisy? I am not really welcome at the farm right now and I miss her something fierce. I don’t want to sneak around, but I think it would be better if I visit when they are not there,” I admitted.

He waited a minute. “I reckon I can do that. Just give me your number and I will text ya.”

I had to laugh. “A country boy like you knows how to text?”

He gave me another cocked eyebrow. “Look here
,
Van. I may be from the country but it
aint
ain't
the ice age
,
Darlin'
darlin
'
. We have indoor plumbing at home as well,” he added with a wink.

We didn’t say much more when our food came and as soon as we were done, we both paid and went our separate ways, once he dropped me back off
,
of course.

I watched him pull away before getting into my own car and calling it a night.

Chapter 3

Colt

I never knew what my cousin saw in Savanna Tate, but that was before she became a woman. The girl had acquired never-ending curves. Her grey eyes that used to be so big, now fit her face perfectly. Even her lips and cheekbones had changed. When she was younger, she had her hair
cut like a boy and never even dressed like a girl. Now, if I hadn’t seen the pictures on my parent’s fridge, I would have never believed it was the same person. She had become quite beautiful.  It’s no wonder that Tyler assumed there was someone else. It would have been my first assumption as well. With the way she looked, she could probably get any guy she wanted.

For some reason I believed she was telling the truth, not that it even mattered anyway. The past couldn’t be changed.

Tyler was far from perfect, in fact, when he came to visit me just last year we went to a bar, where he hooked up with one of the local girls. He claimed that being in a different zip code
s
gave him the right to ‘sample the land’. I could only assume that he never came clean about that to Van. 

My cousin looked like shit. I imagine that was from being in a bed for months. I hadn’t believed my aunt when she said that Van spent all of her time there. How could they doubt her love for Tyler? I had never known someone to be so devoted. It was sad. She had to know that he
may
might
never wake up. Was she going to sit there day after day until she got so old she couldn’t anymore?

I was the last person to question her intentions. My dang girl had up and left me. I reckon it had to do with my drinking and the fact that I couldn’t be bothered with entertaining someone that I had
nothin’ in common with. If I had extra time, I was going to spend it fishing or hunting. I did miss the hot meals at night, but I could just head to my parents for dinner.

It was just
me and Sam
Sam and me
now
;
.
Sam being my lab
,
of course. When I offered to come work on the farm that had been my only stipulation. I couldn’t leave my dog back in Kentucky.

I didn’t always want to be a farmer, but the truth was that it was in my blood.  For four generations my family had lived off the land and provided for their families.  My father had never been too keen on me getting my college degree, but like my cousin Tyler, I was pretty damn good at football and got a scholarship. Had I not torn my ACL junior year, I may have been drafted. My major was business, but jobs in my small town of Kentucky were hard to come by, and even though my parent’s farm had enough workers to manage itself without me, my father wanted me
to be
around to do the books. My father’s ranch was well known and he and my mother never had to worry about money. They had the best cattle in the state.

I didn’t want to be a part of my father’s money, even though I knew
eventually it would
it would eventually
all
go
come
to me, if the old hard ass didn’t live to be older than
me
I was
. Knowing him, he would. I swallowed my pride and built a small cabin on the edge of my parent’s farmland.  It probably wasn’t small to
some,
some;
I mean eventually I wanted a family of my own. It gave me enough space to have my own life, but enabled me to be close enough to my family in case anything happened. There had been many nights where the cattle got out
,
and we had to go
we had to go out, and
round them all back up. Even the high tech chicken houses that we had, managed to break down every now and again.

Still, my uncle was desperate for help, and thought I would be put to good use if I came here to the Carolina’s for the summer. The fields had already been seeded when I arrived, and for the next week there weren’t any chickens to attend to. The last shipment had gone out last week in fact. After visiting my cousin at the hospital and having a meal with Van, I found myself having nothing to do.

Since I still had my uncle’s truck, I decided that it would be fine to stop by the one and only town bar on the way home. It was just about eight in the evening and the beaten up bar wasn’t very crowded. Several people sat around the wooden bar in the center. I found an empty spot at the bar and ordered a beer.

I was just sitting there minding my own business when someone came up beside me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“I thought that was you,” she said. “How the heck are ya
,
Colt?”

I remembered this girl from when I spent summers here as a kid. I was trying to think of her name when she interrupted my train of thought.

“It’s Sabrina
,
remember?”
She
she
asked.

Trying to play it off
,
I answered
,
.
“Of course, I don’t forget a pretty girl’s face.”

She blushed and gave me a second smile. She signaled the bartender to bring us two beers and turned to face me again. “So what brings you back here?”

“Just helping out my uncle with the farm.”

The
red head
redhead
took a sip of her beer. She had always been pretty attractive, but the problem was that she knew it. I hated cocky girls. “Have you been to see Ty?”

“Yeah, I saw him today. Looks like shit,” I added.

She looked at me with a curious grin. “Was Van there? Don’t tell me, of course she was. So how did that go? You
better  have
better have
been nice to her. Ty’s parents have been horrible.”

“Yeah, she was there. We uh, we had dinner and she told me about everything,” I replied.

She cocked her eyebrow at me. “Were you nice? I know your kind
,
Colt Mitchell
,
and being nice to a lady is not how you roll,” she implied.

I chuckled. “How I roll?” This was the second woman today to accuse me of basically being a dick.

“Yeah. You know exactly what I am saying, so don’t act all innocent. Just tell me you didn’t leave her even more depressed. That girl can’t take anymore. Did she tell you about her own hospital stay?”
She
she
asked.

“No. She didn’t. What happened to her?” I didn’t know why I wanted to know, but something made me ask.

She looked straight toward the bartender. Her eyes seemed so serious. As she began to talk
,
she never turned to face me. “She wanted to kill herself.”

“Well hell. She mentioned that.”

“She doesn’t leave his side. It isn’t healthy. None of this was her fault,” she explained.

I lifted my hat off my head and then put it back on. It seemed I did that a lot when I was at a loss for words. “No, I reckon it wasn’t. Why don’t you take her out? Get her to do something. Take her mind off of things.”

“She won’t
,
Colt. I try. I try like every day. I don’t know what to do with her. Tonight is a big bonfire and she refuses to come out. I know since it’s the weekend she will be coming home, and even then she just sits around in that house and mopes.”

“Maybe you need to drag her ass there,” I suggested.

She gave me a half smile. “Maybe you could ask her to come?”

“What? Why would she come for me? We aren’t exactly friends
,
Sabrina, in fact the last time I came to town she made it clear that she hated my guts,” I explained.

She pushed me on my shoulder. “That’s because you called her a buck toothed boy. You know how much she hated that.”

“Yeah, well in my defense she did look like a boy for a long time,” I added.

She pulled out her cell phone and started texting while she was still talking to me. “Trust me when I say that there is nothing boyish about that girl now. I am sure you noticed if you spent time with her earlier.”