Page 28 of Love Me Back (Diamond Creek #2)

Jessie

Grayson left the dining room, and I stared after him as the others spoke over each other, asking questions and making assumptions about an uncle they never knew.

“This is all my fault,” Pops whispered. I barely heard him as everyone spoke at once.

I slammed my hand on the table the same way Grayson did, and it had the effect I wanted. All at once, mouths closed and eyes narrowed at me.

“You all need to shut up.”

“ Yessica ,” my uncle hissed.

“No, Uncle Mando. It’s my turn to speak.”

My father smiled at me as he stood from his chair.

I knew where he was going. Despite my concerns about what Jamie had said, my father was an honorable man.

He might be involved with the cartel, but he was my uncle’s conscience.

And I knew that was why Uncle Mando had asked him to come home.

And more importantly, it was why my father agreed.

Family was everything to my father. And sometimes you had to sacrifice your own happiness for the well-being of the people you loved. He would speak to Grayson.

“Pops, do you know why David would hurt his sister? Or his nephew?”

“Money. It was always about money.”

“Is it drugs?” Hudson asked.

Pops placed his elbows on the table and held his head in his hands.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He lifted his head and looked at his grandchildren through the tears in his eyes.

“I don’t know nothing about him. It was my fault he left.

We always fought about money. I had it, and he didn’t.

He thought he should live the life of a prince because I worked the way I did.

The way my father did. He never appreciated nothing. Always looking for the easy way out.”

“That’s why he tried to take Thunder,” Emerson offered. “Thunder’s worth millions. But no one knows that but us.”

“Mom knew,” Carson supplied. “I wonder if he went to Mom, and she turned him down.”

“My associate did some digging into your mother and her finances. Mary Powell was paying her brother a regular monthly amount.”

“What?” Pops asked, his hand hitting the table in anger, but it didn’t have the same effect given his age and lack of muscle tone.

“She set up a trust for him. It should have lasted him a lifetime. But with the way he spends money, it recently ran out,” Uncle Mando said.

“That’s why he came back,” Addie confirmed.

“That low-down, sneaky bastard,” Pops growled. My eyes widened at his tirade. I had seen Pops get after the boys for their manners, and in town everyone called him old man Johnson, who was famous for his crotchetiness. But I had never seen him angry like this.

He stood from the table, and as he walked to the back door, Carson rushed over in front of him. “Where do you think you’re going, old man?”

“To the tunnels. I’m gonna find that son of a bitch and put a bullet in his head.”

“Pops, that’s not the answer,” Grayson said from the doorway. “We need to call the sheriff and let him handle it.”

“I could call King, and the Silver Shadows will handle it,” Tyson announced.

“No!” Grayson shouted. “This is our shit. We’ll clean it up.” He rolled into the dining room over to Pops. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. This isn’t your fault.”

“It is. I should have locked him up when he burned the barn down. ”

“Pops, Uncle Mando has enough evidence to put him away now. He will be in prison for a long time,” I told him, trying to placate him before he did something stupid, like kill his own son. Regardless of the reason, that wasn’t something you could come back from.

Pops looked at Grayson. “My tears weren’t for him. They were for the boy I thought I’d lost. Truth is, he was never really my boy. I knew when he was a baby, something was off. But we did the best we could.”

“Hudson, call the sheriff.”

Before Hudson moved, the door opened and Carl walked in. “Need you at the barn, boss.”

“What happened?” Grayson asked, rolling closer.

“You best come. And call the sheriff,” Carl said.

Hudson pulled his phone out, and I heard him talking to Martha at the station. She would get ahold of Sheriff O’Rourke and send him out. The rest of us followed Carl to the barn.

Thunder was snorting and stomping his foot. He was clearly aggravated, and once we got to his stall, we discovered why.

The man I saw in the barn. The one that yelled at me to get out and stay out, lay in the corner of the stall. His crumpled body was in a heap, his head twisted at an unnatural angle.

“That’s him,” I whispered.

Carson tried to get close to the stall door, but Thunder kicked it, making Carson jump back. Grayson rolled forward, and Thunder snorted, shaking his head.

“Let me get him out,” I said, moving in front of Grayson.

“Jessie, no. Not while he’s riled up.”

“It’s okay.” I unlatched the door and slipped into the stall.

My hands rubbed against Thunder’s side, and I whispered to him.

“It’s okay, boy. It’s okay.” I ran my hand along his neck, and he nuzzled against my face.

I slipped under his head, to the stall opposite where David lay, and opened the door to the paddock.

Thunder followed me out, and I closed the door behind us.

Climbing over the fence, I made my way back to the barn. The distant sound of a siren called out as I stepped back up to the stall.

“Sheriff’s here,” I said, watching Carson stand up from where he kneeled to check for a pulse we all knew he wouldn’t find.

Pops stood there, his hunched shoulders, from years of hard work and age, shaking as he cried. Addie wrapped her arms around her grandfather, and I went to Grayson and sat in his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck.

He sat in his chair without a word. His eyes stared at the dead man in the stall. A man he had never met, who’d tried to kill him, all for a horse that had in turn killed him.

We stood in Grayson’s office, giving the sheriff every detail we knew. My uncle supplied him with the evidence of what David Johnson had done to his sister and his nephew.

Pops had given a statement about the barn burning fifteen years earlier. With everything the sheriff had been given, he gave the okay for Grayson to keep Thunder.

Given that David’s only family were all in the house when David illegally entered the horse’s dwelling, there was a clear case of self-defense.

Who would have thought a horse would need a self-defense alibi? The reality was, Grayson needed the self-defense alibi, as he was the owner and trainer.

Apparently, Nebraska had some pretty strict laws to protect people who were injured by farm animals. The sheriff could have ordered Thunder to be put down, but given Grayson’s standing in the community and in the equine world, the sheriff went easy on him.

I didn’t think Grayson would have survived having to put down his horse. The horse that helped Grayson keep the connection to his mother. Especially because the man Thunder killed was responsible for Mary Powell’s death .

The sheriff had also mentioned that he didn’t think David was behind the deaths of the women found on the ranch. He said the MO didn’t make sense. David’s motivation had been money, not sex. No one mentioned the tunnels.

After the sheriff left, Grayson and I went back out to the barn and put Thunder in his stall. I stared at the floor and asked, “What about the tunnels?”

“What about them?”

“Aren’t you curious?” I asked, my eyes fixed on Grayson.

“I am. But it’s not like I can go down there and roam around in a wheelchair,” he said as he turned away and rolled toward the doors.

“Maybe when you are walking again.”

“Maybe,” he sighed.

“Hey.” I grabbed the handles on the back of the chair. “Talk to me.”

“What can I say, Jessie?” Grayson rubbed his hands over his face in frustration. “I don’t know what the hell I’m feeling right now. I had an uncle I never knew about, who was responsible not only for putting me in this chair but also for the death of my parents? How am I supposed to feel?”

“There is no answer to that. You feel what you feel. Look, Grayson, I am not the best with feelings. I am terrible with most social cues. My answer to someone telling me how I should feel is ‘fuck you’, so I am the last person who should be giving you advice, but I will tell you what Ellie always tells me. Whatever your feelings are, they’re yours.

No one gets to tell you that you’re wrong for having them.

So what are you feeling that you think is wrong? ”

“I’m glad he’s fucking dead. I’m glad that we don’t have to go through all the shit that comes with being arrested, the trial, the questions, the lack of sufficient answers.

The strain it would put on Pops, thinking he has to be there to watch it all.

I feel nothing for David Johnson. We might share DNA, but he was nothing to me.

Nothing to my brothers and Addie. He was just a man who made our lives hell. ”

I smiled at him. Grayson was such a loving person, I knew he was struggling with what he considered a lack of empathy. But the truth was, we didn’t owe people empathy simply because they shared the same earth we did.

We weren’t required to feel bad for people because they made the wrong choices in life. This world was filled with opportunities. They might be hard work sometimes, but that made them all the more sweet once we’d accomplished what we set out to do.

I climbed onto his lap and said, “I love you. I am sorry you lost your parents. I wish I could have met them. But I’m not sorry you got hurt.”

“What?”

“Hear me out. I was stupid, Grayson. I knew from the first day I met you on that stupid mountain that you were the one for me. But I was so afraid of you finding out who my family was that I ran from you every chance I could. I was in the hospital on the day you came in. Ellie had just had her baby when Tyson called King. Nothing would have stopped me from getting to your room. And when you told me to go, my heart split in half, and I thought, ‘ well this is it, Jessie. You lost your chance. He finally gave up.’ When Addie asked me to come and help, I almost said no. In fact, I did say no, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“What I’m trying to say is that without your accident, I never would have gotten my head out of my ass. And if you never walk again, I will still love you with everything I have.”

“I love you, too.” His hand wrapped around the back of my head, and he pulled me down to kiss me. I felt it all in that kiss and more. Especially when my body jumped as his leg bounced under me.

I sat up quickly and looked at his feet. “What the fuck was that?”

Grayson chuckled and held me tightly. “I wasn’t going to say anything until after the doctor’s appointment this week, but I started getting some feeling back just before we found Thunder.

“Why didn’t you tell me? ”

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“You mean you didn’t want to get your hopes up,” I argued.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not a guarantee, but I am going to do whatever I have to do to be standing at the end of the aisle when I watch you walk toward me.”

“You’re assuming I’ll say yes when you ask me.”

“Addie’s not the only one who won’t take no for an answer.”

I smiled at Grayson and dipped my head to kiss his lips. “Best fear I ever overcame!”