“Those guys will be pissing blood for weeks. It was a bit of overkill, if you ask me.”
“They got off easy,” I said flatly. “Savannah’s only sixteen. They’re lucky Mr. Hornsberry showed such restraint.”
“Well, if they try to sue him…but there’s no way. No jury anywhere is going to convict a father for beating up the guys who tried to rape his daughter and assaulted the guy who came to her rescue.”
“I appreciated him getting there when he did.”
He took a breath. “It’s lucky for you they weren’t alone with you long enough to do too much damage.”
“Huh. That’s easy for you to say,” I scoffed.
“I—you know, it could’ve been a lot worse.”
I had bruised ribs on my left side, assorted scrapes on my hands and arms, a black eye—it was a beauty and would probably turn lots of pretty colors over the course of healing—a subconjunctival hemorrhage in my right eye, and a concussion. Thankfully, my MRI had come back clean. So yes, as injuries went, I was lucky, but I didn’t like his dismissive tone. I’d taken a lot of beatings in my life. Another person deliberately hurting you left marks both inside and out.
“I didn’t mean it like––”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. I suspected he didn’t mean to be a dick; he just came off that way because he spoke without thinking. Often. In high school he’d been a bully, and I believed he’d changed since then, but his brain needed to catch up with his mouth. “I don’t think the universe could give me many more nudges to move out of Barrett Crossing,” I finished, sitting up straighter and moving the pillows behind me.
“What?”
We both turned, and there, standing in the doorway, was Merrell Barrett. He had a plant with him, one of those peace lilies people usually sent for funerals. I had to wonder if someone mistakenly told him I was dead.
“Did you think they killed me?” I asked him.
“What?” he snapped, glaring.
“That’s a death plant,” McCauley chimed in, pointing at the lily. “You know that, right?”
“It’s not a—it’s just a nice plant.”
“No,” McCauley insisted. “When my grandmother died, we got a ton of those, and white roses and carnations. It’s the plant you send if you want something pretty that will live longer than a few days.”
Merrell looked from McCauley to me, and back to McCauley. “What are you even doing here? It’s Saturday.”
“I had to come explain to Jeremiah that I’m charging the men who attacked him and Savannah Hornsberry last night.”
“Why couldn’t you have just called?”
I turned to look at McCauley, because it was a good question.
“I thought I should check on him, Bear.”
Merrell growled. “Mayor-elect Barrett,” he corrected sharply.
McCauley snickered. “Are you kidding?”
“Listen,” Merrell said, putting the heavy plant down on the tray table, only to scoop it back up when the tray nearly collapsed. He took it over and set it on the counter by the sink and then darted back. “I’m the newly elected mayor of Barrett Crossing, and as such, all the guys I used to play football with—that means you and Dutch and Torres and Whitman—are going to need to treat me with the respect the office deserves.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t want to hear the name Bear ever again!”
God, he was kidding himself if he thought those guys were going to stop with the shoving and elbowing and cuffing him on the back of the head just because he’d been elected mayor. Maybe years from now, when serious people protected him—like the Secret Service—the roughhousing would stop. Until that time, though, I didn’t see it ending. But the nickname? Yeah, if he ever did get elected president, I could almost guarantee he’d go by the code name Bear.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I had always been wildly jealous of them, of the brohood and the football and the college scholarships, but I wasn’t athletically gifted—not that I’d ever had the chance to try, being consumed by work and worrying about where my next meal would come from.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath. I had decided years ago that feeling sorry for myself did nothing to help; it only hurt. Being jealous led to bitterness, and bitter was not something I ever wanted to be. I’d seen resentment eat my mother alive, and I vowed it would never happen to me.
“Becoming mayor of a town your family pretty much owns is not much of a stretch, Bear,” McCauley snarked. “Now, when you become Governor Barrett or Representative