She ignored his question and whispered, “I wish you two would heal this breach.”
That was not going to happen.
Ever.
And this was because he and his father did not have a breach that could heal. It used to be just a breach, years ago when Chace just wanted out of the house that he grew up in and out from under his father’s thumb.
Now it was not a breach. It was a chasm he sure as fuck wasn’t going to cross and if his father tried, Chace would shoot him.
“Ma –”
“I’m worried about you, what with Misty gone. I mean, who’s taking care of you?”
His mother didn’t know this, she wasn’t Misty’s biggest fan either, though she tried to hide it just as Chace tried to hide from his mother the fact that he hated his wife, but Misty never took care of him.
She tried that for a while, after she finally figured out that he was not going to fall head over heels in love with her because she was great at giving head. This was mainly since he wouldn’t allow her to touch him and didn’t sleep in the same bed with her.
Once she realized that her usual tricks were not going to win his heart, she’d branched out. And her branching out came in the form of her trying to be a good wife. She was a decent housekeeper, a decent cook. All this went to shit when he eventually refused to eat her food, left the house more often than not before she got out of bed, came home late and never commented on her loving care or how she kept their home. Finally, she started to get nervous and fucked everything up.
He’d been hard on her and, at the time, felt she’d deserved it. She had trapped him into marriage after having whacked, sick-fuck sex with his father, doing this while conspiring with a dirty cop to tape it. Then she’d blackmailed his Dad and forced Chace into servitude not only to his father and his cronies, all of whom were under a local man’s thumb, but also to a crew of dirty cops that were so dirty, they were made of pure filth.
Yeah, he thought she deserved that.
Now she was dead and how she got dead, he had that and his treatment of her for their very long, very unhappy, five year marriage living as demons in his head too.
“I’m thirty-five, Ma. I can take care of myself,” he told his mother while accepting change from Shambles and tossing a dollar in the tip bowl.
“But I worry about you.” She was back to whispering, this time sad and concerned and, because he loved his mother, it killed.
He knew she worried. He was an only child. She could have no more. She was lucky to have him and she felt that acutely. She was also flighty, sensitive and nervous by nature. Therefore, she’d smothered him growing up, terrified the very air had it out for him.
Her tactics for raising her son clashed violently with her husband’s.
Valerie Keaton was all about protection, love and care.
Trane Keaton was all about making his son a man.
This was not conducive to a loving, secure, understanding, supportive home.
Therefore, as he’d promised himself starting at around age eight, the minute Chace could get out, he did. He worked at it, hard, and he got it.
And he never went back.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her quietly. “I’m fine. Just busy.” He replaced his wallet, grabbed his drink and gave Shambles another chin lift. He got one of the undeniably talented but definitely a full blown hippie proprietor of the coffee shop’s goofy grins in return and went on, “Though, I’d be better, my mother let me take her out to dinner the weekend after next.”
He turned to the door just as it opened, the bell over it ringing and, her eyes to her eReader, Faye Goodknight wandered in.
Fuck.
Chace stopped dead.
“Okay, Chace, honey, I’d like that,” his mother said in his ear.
“Good,” he muttered into the phone.
At his voice sounding, Faye’s head came up, her eyes hit him, she stopped moving and she gave it to him. The expression he couldn’t fully see in the moonlight but he definitely saw in the daylight in La-La Land Coffee.
Her eyes instantly turned pained, her face paled, her full, pink lips parted.
And taking in that pain etched into her features hurt like a bitch.
She was wearing a wool overcoat, the design of it somehow cinched it at her tiny waist which had the effect of throwing her curves into visible relief. It had a shawl collar around the neck and the coat was cream, its color highlighting the dark auburn of her hair. A light blue, knit cap was pulled down to her ears and, with the color of the coat, this accentuated her hair, displaying far more prominently an alluring feature that couldn’t be missed. She had on dark brown leather low-heeled boots and he knew she was wearing a dress or skirt under that coat because that was what she normally wore but also because all he could see on her legs up to the hem of her coat were the boots.
Her makeup, as he noted it normally was, was subtle. There simply to highlight her natural prettiness, not falsify it.
Her wounded, crystal blue eyes were wide.