And there it was. Her justification for getting what she wanted, laying the guilt on thick. I’d seen her do it a thousand times, but I wasn’t usually the target.
This wasn’t about the house, or getting clean, or anything else but finding a reason to shake me down. Whatever I gave her would go straight to more drugs, or to pay off whoever she owed. Probably some small-time dealer or another.
“Wasn’t my decision to be born, now was it?” I ran my mouth while I looked for an exit.
“Listen, girl, you got twenty-four hours to hand over twenty grand, and we’ll call it even. You’re my daughter, so I wantwhat’s best for you, but these people I’m in with? They don’t care so much. I’ve tried to keep Joel away from you, but he’d be more than happy to help you find a way to earn the cash.”
“Twenty-four hours?” Ice dripped down my spine. Something told me that if Joel got involved, things would get way, way worse.
“Twenty-four hours.” She pointed at me and melted back into the tree line.
I trotted my ass back to work and called Jackson.
Jackson picked me up at five o’clock on the dot. He’d made it clear he didn’t want me stepping foot outside without him, and I didn’t feel like arguing with him. I was still too freaked out by what my mom had implied earlier today. She’d all but told me Joel would kidnap and sell me to cover her—his?—debt.
When I would have crawled into the passenger side of his SUV, he stopped me with a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Are you okay? Did she hurt you?” As he spoke, he turned me to face him, his eyes running up and down my body in a way that should have felt cursory, but didn’t. Not quite. Not after this morning.
“No, she didn’t hurt me.” Not physically, anyway. Emotionally? Yeah, well. That’s what Mom did.
With one more searching look, Jackson let me go, and I got settled into the car.
“Tell me everything,” he said as he started the engine. He’d flipped his shit on the phone, but he’d been too angry to ask for details. Just cursed and told me not to leave work until he got there. Not that I’d been planning to.
I gave him a quick summary, ending with, “She said something weird about paying her off, like maybe Travis had done it before. Do you know what she meant?”
He shifted in his seat, eyes dead ahead. “I can’t be expected to know every little thing Travis has ever done.”
I wrinkled my nose. “She seemed to think you’d helped.”
Jackson shrugged, the line of his jaw tight. “She might just assume that because I’d help you and Travis out of most any jam.”
So maybe Travis had paid her off and not told Jackson? Although, that seemed odd. With how tight they were, sometimes it was like they shared the same brain.
“Describe this Joel guy.” Jackson’s low rumble forced me to remember the more pressing issue: Whatever my mom was mixed up in, it wasn’t good.
“Skinny, white, a few inches taller than me.” I was five foot nine, so that put him on the tall side of average. “He had short, greasy hair, missing a few teeth. He could be either a rough thirty or an okay sixty; hard to tell.”
“That could be anyone.” Jackson pulled into his driveway, and I realized with a jolt just how long I’d spent telling him about my encounter with Mom.
“I didn’t get a picture of him during the thirty seconds he was standing in front of me,” I said as I got out of the car.
Jackson sighed and came around to my side to grab my laptop out of the back seat. He was only a few inches from me, his grease-stained work shirt unbuttoned in deference to the summer heat, so only his thin white undershirt covered his thick chest. A little bit of hair peeked out at the top.
And he kept shooting me looks from under his lashes. Ones that weren’t strictly assessing my mood, or if I was hurt or not. There was a banked heat, an added urgency that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago.
Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it.
“I know, I know,” he said, mouth a thin line. “I’ve been trying to find out where she’s holed up, but I’m not having much luck.”
“Really, it’s not your problem to solve—” I said the words on autopilot, even though part of me wanted to take two steps forward, lean my head on his shoulder, and thank him for caring.
“Bullshit it’s not. What would Travis say if I left you dangling?”
All those warm, fuzzy feelings vanished as if doused with cold water. “Of course it’s about Travis’s feelings. Not mine,” I snapped.
Jackson’s head jerked back. “I care about your feelings.” But I could see that he knew what I was getting at. The hint of fear that I’d make him talk about what had been brewing between us.
