I was going to make shit right with her. I still had one secret left that was weighing on me and I needed to find a way to make it right, which is how I found myself at her parents’ house while she was at work.
Fiona was right about her parents. Her mother was weak and her father was a classic addict. I knew I was shaking hands with a dangerous situation when I had approached her father, but like always, I did whatever I had to in order to be near her.
Fiona wasn’t due home until noon, so as soon as I deemed it a respectable hour, I had called her father and told him not to go into work this morning and that I’d meet him at his place around ten. Two hours was plenty of time for me to finish shit up with her father and get back home. And now I stood in front of a man I wanted to beat stupid for putting his hands on what’s mine.
“What do you mean I have to go to GA? That was never part of the deal. You never said I had to go to counseling. You said I could cash those checks with no issue. Now you’re saying I have to stop gambling? That’s bullshit!”
I shook my head. “I said you could cash some checks against your end-of-year bonuses. I never said you could write and cash unlimited blank checks, Jared.”
“Exactly! You didn’t, at any time, imply that there was going to be stipulations.” I had a good five inches on the man, but Jared was standing tall against me, or rather against the threat to his gambling.
“You’re lucky I’m just insisting that you go to gamblers anonymous instead of charging you with embezzlement after learning that you hit Fiona.” I was doing my best to contain my anger, but rage kept simmering at the surface every time I thought about this man hitting my Fiona.
He had the balls to puff up at me. “Fiona is my daughter and what happens between us is none of your business!”
“She may be your daughter, but that doesn’t give you or anyone license to put their hands on a woman.” I had to take a step back from this man before I started beating him in his own living room.
“Ha! I’m not as stupid as you’d to think I am, Greystone. We’d never had a relationship until you bought out Smith Tees. You didn’t think I’d put it together when you approached me? The whole goddamn town knows who you are, where you went, and what you accomplished. That’s the price for being the town’s prince, especially when you went after your father. That news spread like wildfire, my boy.”
I stepped back into his personal space. “You don’t know as much as you’d like to think…”
“I know you approaching me had something to do with Fiona. You guys went to school together, she is our only connection and you can’t deny it when I’ve seen that same black Mercedes parked outside in front of my house parked in her driveway too!”
“Fiona and I are none of your business, Jared. I came here as a courtesy. Yeah, I may have planned all this to get to Fiona, but that doesn’t change-”
“What?”
The stunned questioned asked in a whisper had me turning my head so fast heat rushed up my neck. Fiona was standing in the foyer of her parents’ house. I was so caught up in not wanting to strangle her father I hadn’t heard her come in.
“What are you doing here, Fiona?” Jared asked. “You don’t answer our calls and ignore your mother for weeks and then just decide it’s okay to-”
I turned to her father, ready to attack. “Keep speaking to her like that and I will do more than take everything you own. I will fucking kill you.”
Jared blanched and wisely shut his mouth.
I looked back at Fiona and saw she wasn’t even paying any attention to her father. “What’s he talking about, Damien? What’s going on?”
I wasn’t going to have this conversation in front of her degenerate father. I wasn’t going to give this man anything more that he could use against her. “Let’s go home and I’ll explain everything.”
She glanced quickly at her father and, thank fuck, she didn’t want to have this conversation in front of him any more than I did. She nodded. “I’ll meet you there.” She turned and walked right back out the