“Meeting up with Chance again hurt your pride, I know, but the worst part’s over. It’s happened for a reason, and maybe that reason is to get you this job.” She laid the card on Kyndal’s lap where it nestled among the wadded mass of used tissues. “An opportunity has landed right in your lap. Call him.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CHANCE RUBBED HIS THUMBS across his brow, noticing the tenderness underneath. Sinus pressure? Tension? Maybe both.
Saturday night. Eight thirty-seven. He’d hoped to be done with work by now. A normal day would’ve found him finished an hour or two ago. But this was no normal day. Kyndal Rawlings stepped back into his life for less than an hour, and he’d been unable to concentrate on anything else since.
“Dad, you were so right,” he mumbled to himself. “Tree hugger or not, that woman drives me to distraction.”
But, man! She’d looked good. A little on the thin side even for her tiny frame, but the tight thermal top and jeans she’d worn showed she still had curves in all the right places.
Her green, catlike eyes had been alarmed when she first recognized him. What was that about?
Fear wasn’t an emotion he associated with Kyn. She’d always shown so much spunk. Taking care of herself when her mother would leave and stay gone for days. Never missing school. Graduating as valedictorian. Kyndal was a fighter and a survivor.
He’d only seen her truly afraid twice. Once when Amos Turner showed up with his gun to run them away from the cave. And the day he’d broken up with her. The terror of losing him had radiated from her eyes. God, he could still feel her arms around him in that death grip as she pleaded for him to change his mind. These nine years later, the guilt and regret still ate at him. Guilt that he couldn’t make what they had gel with what he needed. Regret that he had to end it the way he did because he’d had no other option.
“Damn it! I’m doing it again.”
This was crazy. Yes, for a couple of years, he and Kyndal spent every possible minute together, but that finished long ago. They went their separate ways, became different people, grew up, grew apart. End of story.
He snatched up the notes he’d made on the Farley case, determined to divert his attention. It was clear why his dad had passed the case to him. The Farleys’ son, Morton, had been killed in a car accident so similar to Hank’s it made him nauseous to read.
College kids on summer vacation. Drinking to excess. Driving too fast. Crossing the center line and meeting a semi head-on.
No civil suit would ever bring their son back. Couldn’t they see that? Their lives would never be the same. But if they didn’t let go of the grief eating them alive, they’d soon be consumed by it, and it would destroy anything they’d ever had together.
The judge who’d presided over his family’s case had been a showboat, working hard toward reelection. He hadn’t demonstrated a true sense of right and wrong, or given a damn about fairness. He’d turned the whole fiasco into a venue to generate publicity with no regard of the pain he caused. That the idiot ruled in their favor against the tired truck driver was a travesty of justice.
Not a day went by that Chance didn’t remind himself how Hank’s civil suit ripped apart the last vestiges of family life for them and brought only heartache instead of closure. And it left him with a relentless drive to become a judge who would treat people with fairness and dignity no matter what their circumstances.
He stood and walked away from the desk, trying to leave behind the haunting image of his parents as they’d been since his brother’s death.
To this day, they’d never really dealt with Hank’s death. Never let their grief out like he had the day of the funeral with Kyndal. Thank God, he’d had somebody like her back then.
Damn it! Back to Kyndal. This round-robin thinking was getting him nowhere and getting nothing taken care of…but he couldn’t get her off his mind.
He sat back down and typed Kyndal Rawlings into the search engine on his computer and clicked on the first link that appeared—an interesting and eye-opening account of a lawsuit that shut down the True Tennessee website. She hadn’t mentioned any of that during their short visit. Not that he blamed her. The article indicated quite a scandal.