Page 16 of Duke's Rescue
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Claire Whitfield. Twenty-six. Works in your office. You’ve been fucking her for eighteen months. Taking her to hotels, hoping you wouldn’t get found out. You want me to keep going? Because my guy found out the details, Buck. All of them.”
Silence. Everything was quiet. Behind me, I could feel Trixie, could feel the stillness of her, the held breath, the new information landing in a place that was already raw. I didn’t want her to find out this way, but there was no choice.
Buck’s jaw tightened and the mask flickered. For the first time since he’d walked into Forsaken, the performance wavered, and the man underneath looked out at me with something that was closer to hatred than anything I’d seen from him.
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“It has everything to do with this. Your whole game is the story. Concerned husband. Devoted father. Pillar of the community. That story falls apart when people find out you’ve been cheating on the wife you claim to love so much. It falls apart more when they hear what your five-year-old daughter said when she saw me, that daddy was hurting mommy. That’s what she said Buck, listen to it. She ran from you, Buck. Into the street, barefoot, crying, and the first person she ran to was me. And I’m not letting you fucking hurt either of them again. You’ll have to come through me, do you feel like such a big man now? Do you fancy those chances?”
He stared at me. The warmth was gone. The charm, the patience, the carefully constructed facade. What was left was theman Trixie had lived with for six years. Hard, cold, a man who saw people as things to be managed.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said. Low. Quiet.
“No. You made the mistake. You made it when you put your hands on her. You made it when you put your hand around her throat. You made it when you walked into this town and thought nobody would look past the suit.”
Ghost moved up beside me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. His presence was the statement. Two men in cuts, a club behind them, and a trail of evidence that would end Buck’s career if it got out.
“Here’s how this goes,” I said. “You leave Forsaken tonight. You don’t come back. You don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t send anyone. You contest the divorce, we release the records. You fight for custody, we put your daughter on the stand and let her tell a judge what she told me today. You come near Trixie or Ruby again, ever, and every newspaper in the state gets the whole file. Claire, the other women, the hotels, everything Rook dug up, and I promise you there’s more.”
Buck looked at me. Looked at Ghost. Looked past us, at Trixie, who was standing behind Ghost with her arms tight at her sides and her face wet and her chin up.
“You’ll regret this,” he said. To her. To me and then to Ghost.
“I regret a lot of things,” I said. “This won’t be one of them. I might regret not rearranging your face, of course.”
He left. Walked past us, his shoulder deliberately barging against mine as he left, his jaw tight, the last shred of his composure holding him together until he turned the corner and was gone. I heard his footsteps on the sidewalk, heard a car door open and close, heard an engine start and he left.
The alley was quiet.
I turned. Trixie was standing against the wall with her arms wrapped around herself and tears running silently down herface. I went to her. Put my hands on her face, wiped the tears with my thumbs, tilted her head up until she was looking at me.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“He was sleeping with someone, lots of women from what you said.” Her voice was flat. Gutted. “The whole time. While he was telling me nobody else would ever want me. He was...”
“I know.”
“I believed him. I believed I wasn’t enough.”
“You are enough.” I held her face, held her gaze, put everything I had into the words. “You are more than enough. You always were.”
She broke. The tears came properly, the ugly, shaking kind, the kind she’d been holding back for six years. I pulled her against my chest and held her while she cried, my arms around her, her face pressed into my shirt, her whole body trembling. Ghost stood at the mouth of the alley with his back to us, giving us privacy, watching the street.
I held her until the crying stopped. Until her breathing evened out. Until she pulled back and looked at me with swollen eyes and wet cheeks and a face that was raw and open and completely unguarded.
“Ruby?” she said.
“With Rosie. She’s safe. She ran straight to me, Trixie. She ran to me.”
Her face crumbled again. But this time it was different. This time it was the crumbling of a woman who’d just heard that her daughter had found the person she trusted most in the world, and he’d been right there like it had been fate.
We walked around to the front. Ruby was in Rosie’s arms, the teddy retrieved from somewhere, her face blotchy and tearstained. She saw me and reached out and I took her, the fierce, brave, terrified little girl, and she locked her arms aroundmy neck, pressed her face against my shoulder. “Is Mommy okay? Is Mommy okay?”
“Mommy’s right here, little one.”
Trixie put her arms around both of us. The three of us stood on Main Street in front of Rosie’s diner, holding on to each other in the afternoon sun, and Rosie watched from the doorway with a tea towel over her shoulder and tears on her face that she’d deny until her dying day.
