“You’re wearing hooker heels.”
My eyes went from the reverend’s car to the reverend himself, and what I saw made me want to gag.
The man hadn’t changed a single day since I’d last seen him before he’d gone to prison.
He was still as nasty now as he was then.
Dressed impeccably in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, and patent leather shoes, he looked like he was about to head straight to church.
Did the man ever wear jeans?
I doubted it. In the years I’d known the man, and my mother had forced me to go to his fucking church, I’d never once seen him in anything less formal than what he was wearing right then.
God, sometimes I just wanted to rub my dirty, grease stained hands down the front of his stupid white shirts.
I’d also love to do it to his daughter’s white fucking skirt that fit her like a goddamn glove, too.
What was it with this family and white?
“I’m wearing red heels, Father,” she said calmly. Much more calmly than any woman I knew would have. “And I’m in the middle of a session. Can this wait?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Your father is less important than working with this useless, no good…”
I smiled, knowing that he was talking about me.
The naughty librarian, I mean psychologist, hissed a ‘shhhh!’ at him.
I nearly started to laugh right then and there.
I’d never been the greatest fan of the preacher, and for sure he hadn’t been mine.
It’d all started in the first grade when I’d started Sunday school.
I hadn’t wanted to be there, and I’d taught every single kid in the class the F word.
That F word being ‘fuck’ in case you were wondering.
From then on, he’d barely stood the sight of me.
“I’ll have to talk to you later, Father,” she said, closing the door. “I have another thirty minutes here, and then I’ll give you a call.”
The rev’s eyes flicked to mine, and I didn’t bother to let on that I wasn’t listening to every single word that they were saying.
Nor did I take my eyes away from the man’s calculating ones.
“Call me when you’re finished here,” he ordered. “And make sure you keep your phone on you.”
Hennessy, I mean Ms. Hanes as she’d instructed me to call her, looked at me, and then back to her father.
“I’ll try, Father,” she replied. “Thank you.”
He studied her for a long second, then his jaw locked.
“Never mind. I’ll wait.”
I watched as Hennessy’s hand fisted at her side, behind the metal of the door.
With a quick jerk of her head in the affirmative, she cleared her throat.
She finally closed the door and locked it for good measure, then put the blinds down.
My brows rose at that.
The woman apparently had a thing with windows, because each and every window in her office had the blinds open. It was like the girl was afraid of the fucking dark or something.
Even with the afternoon sun glaring straight into her eyes, she hadn’t put the blinds down.
Her father waiting outside, though? That she put the blinds down for.
“Your father hates me, by the way,” I thought to tell her.
Hennessy turned to stare at me, eyes wide.
“He does not,” she immediately disagreed.
I snorted.
“He’s hated me since I was a young kid and taught twenty first graders the F word,” I told her bluntly. “When I was twelve, I fell and broke my arm, accidentally tripping a little girl and causing her to rip her dress. He said I did it on purpose, and that little girl had pushed me away and I deserved to break my arm. When I was seventeen, he refused to give me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship. At nineteen, I put him down as a reference for a promotion. The owner wanted to know what kind of character I had. So, he called your father because I’d stupidly put down that I’d gone to that church thinking it would be in my favor. Your father made it a point to tell him my every sin—at least how he saw it. I got fired instead.”
Hennessy’s mouth fell open.
“That little girl was me,” she breathed. “I never knew…”
I shrugged.
“Don’t know what that man has against me, but seriously, he hates my guts. I’m pretty sure if it didn’t break some kind of moral code, he’d have done everything in his power to get me kicked out of this county.”
She looked away. “My father is very…”
She looked like she was struggling for the word, and I grinned as I filled in the blank.
“Assholeish?”
She snapped her gaze back to me.
I expected an immediate denial, but she pinched her lips together and shrugged.
“Shit,” I said. “You agree.”
She looked away.
Then, when she turned back, her eyes were distant, as they had been this entire time.
“You were telling me how you and the rest of the men in the Hail Raisers were misunderstood,” she said primly.
I wanted to bring that light back in her eyes, the defiance that I saw shining there for a few short seconds while I told her about how much her father hated me.
In fact, that became my new mission in life.
I, Tate Edward Casey, was going to make Ms. Hennessy Hanes step out of her comfort zone.
At first, it started out as a flame.
Much later, though?
Well, then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from watching her eyes light with something—anything—that wasn’t blankness.
Chapter 4
When two people kiss, they create a long tube from butthole to butthole.
-Useless facts that you’ll probably share with your best friend Hennessy
I found myself counting down the days until the next session with Mr. Tate Casey.
At first, I wasn’t sure that was what I was doing, but as I got up the day that he was supposed to show, four days after the last time he’d come to my office, I found myself looking at my closet with a different eye.
No longer was I going for clothes that said ‘professional.’
Now I was going for clothes that screamed ‘I’m sexy.’
Or at least, that’d been my intention as I stood in front of my closet.
Everything that was in my closet was so new that most of it still had tags on it.
I’d moved from the apartment my father had paid for and into my new place that I now paid for solely on my own a short three weeks prior. The moment that I had, not only had I bought a new wardrobe, but I’d also splurged on makeup and girly shit that I’d never been able to have before.
Like big hoop earrings that my father used to hate.
Those were the first things I slipped into my ear that morning.
And when I say big, these earrings were big. Like the size of an onion ring from Outback Steakhouse.
They hung so far from my ear that if I bent my head over sideways, the hoops would touch my shoulder.
I freakin’ loved them!
The next thing I found were the stockings.
I hadn’t worn this particular pair yet.
I hadn’t dared.
They were too sexy.