Rugged Cowboy - Elana Johnson Page 0,53
She paced from one end of her room to the other, desperate for someone to just tell her what to do.
No one did, and Jess had to make her own decision. She dialed Dallas, her heart beating in her throat. Once, twice, three times, and finally he said, “Jess, I have ten seconds. I’m fixing a truck to pay off Martha’s debt. Can we reschedule?”
Chapter Fifteen
Dallas hung up the moment Jess said yes. The last thing he needed was for Josh to catch him on the phone. He shoved the device in his back pocket, wiped his hands on the rag he’d been using, and turned back to the driveway.
He and the kids had been home for less than an hour when someone had knocked on their door. Josh himself had stood there, and Dallas had only known panic as severe two other times in his life. First, when he’d been arrested and charged with a wrongful death suit. Second, the first day he’d entered River Bay and been beaten to within breaths of his life.
A man like Josh Hurley had done that, and Dallas could see the malice in the other man’s eyes the moment he’d opened the door. He’d closed it just as fast and moved his children into the master bedroom. “Don’t come out,” he told them. “No matter what. Promise me right now.”
They’d both promised, and Dallas had locked the door behind him. By the time he made it back to the living room, Josh was yelling and kicking at the door. Dallas had opened it again, because while he had enough money now, he didn’t need to be replacing the door on this rental house.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I need you to fix my friend’s truck.” Josh indicated the white one-ton truck in the driveway, a muscled, tattooed man leaning against the driver’s door.
That had been four hours ago. Josh had given a steady stream of rules as Dallas went down the front sidewalk to the truck, and one of those was no phone calls and no texts. Dallas’s phone had already been on silent, so no one knew about all of Jess’s texts.
His heart pounded again, because he didn’t know how this situation ended. He’d been forced to use the bathroom on the side of the house, with Josh watching him from the corner. The truck had multiple problems, and Dallas had fixed three of them already, after a trip to the automotive store.
“What’s left?” Josh asked as he came up beside Dallas. His shoulder ached, and a steady pain radiated up and down his spine.
“The radiator.” Dallas didn’t look at the other man. He hadn’t explained much more than Martha owed him some money, and she couldn’t pay it. So Josh was going to get what she owed from Dallas. When Dallas had asked how much she owed, Josh wouldn’t say.
He’d said he’d ask how much fixing the truck would be worth, and then he’d know if Martha was out of the woods.
Worry kicked through Dallas again, because he hadn’t heard from Martha in a while. One look at Josh, and it was very easy to imagine her being in very real trouble. He stood a couple of inches taller than Dallas, and while Dallas had worked out in prison, this guy worked out before breakfast, afterward, at lunchtime, and well into the evening. He also had a mean, squinted look about his eyes, and Dallas had known guys like him in River Bay.
He did not care who he hurt, as long as he got what he wanted.
Right now, he wanted Dallas to fix Mario’s truck. The other man had gone in Dallas’s house, found something to eat, and put on the TV. A vein of anger pulsed just beneath Dallas’s skin, and he kept it there.
Nate had taught him how to do that. How to hide how he really felt until he could release it. How to deal with people he’d rather not deal with and make them think he didn’t want to be anywhere else, even if he didn’t like them.
“It’s a complicated process,” Dallas added. “Because of where it is in this model. Labor-intensive.”
“How much longer?”
“At least an hour,” Dallas said, and he worried about his kids. They hadn’t had dinner yet, and their lunch had been snacks and beef jerky from a gas station halfway between Sweet Water Falls and Temple. Thomas knew to be quiet, but Remmy was six years old, and Dallas almost started crying thinking