No, Facebook. I don’t want to add that girl who slept with my ex. Stop asking.
—Mable’s secret thoughts
Mable
I was angry all over again. Or, more accurately, I was angry on top of angry. Angry squared.
That was why I didn’t stop Cody from tugging me toward the bar across the street.
Toot-Toots was a bar that was older than time.
I was fairly sure that it was the reason that the town was built in the first place.
It still resembled a saloon. The swinging door did nothing to keep the cold out, and Toot-Toots didn’t bother with heating and AC. You froze or you sweated your balls off when you were inside.
Today was a freezing kind of day.
As we made our way into the bar, I wasn’t thinking about the man that I’d seen entering it earlier in his sexy lumberjack getup.
All I was thinking about was what the hell my next step would be if my father refused to pay for the taxes on the property.
For my personal house, I owed somewhere in the ballpark of nineteen hundred dollars in taxes to the state of Montana. For my childhood home, paired with its nine bedrooms, formal ballroom, and six-car garage, it was upward to the cost of nineteen thousand.
I had the money.
My trust fund was decent enough that I could easily pay it and it wouldn’t make a dent.
That wasn’t the point, though.
Nineteen thousand dollars was a lot of money, and I tried very hard to live well within my means. I lived off of what I made for the month. I paid my bills and then budgeted the rest of my monthly allowance off of what was left.
My trust fund never came into play.
It felt like blood money to me.
The only reason I got the money in the first place was because my mother had passed away.
As per her will, upon her death, Mom’s fortune had split exactly in half. One half going to me, and one half going to my dad.
My dad, I was sure, was blowing through his at the speed of light.
One day, the time would come when he would need to examine his lifestyle and tuck it in a bit.
Plus, I’m sure it didn’t help that he was supporting two mooches that hadn’t worked since they came into our lives.
My thoughts were dark and morose as I tucked my belly in close to the bar and called out to Shade. “Hey, can we both get a couple of tequila shots?”
Shade, as his usual douchebag self, barely contained his sneer.
Shade and my sister, Birdee, had been best friends since high school.
Shade had feelings for Birdee, but Shade wasn’t rich enough for her. She would never settle with someone who had less than a million dollars in his bank account.
She had a lifestyle she was accustomed to, and likely would never see anything else but dollar signs when it came to her life partners.
Shade, however, was a lovestruck fool and held out hopes that one day Birdee would be his.
That was why he was such a complete douchebag to me.
