Page 42 of True Ruin

Fair enough.

By the time Steve started looking for another clue, Dallas had one hand braced on the collapsed tent roof, one leg going numb under the coffee table, and a humbling new respect for Gabi’s daily life.

Parenting, as it turned out, was not a soft assignment.

They were both asleep before Steve found the third clue.

THIRTEEN

You Were Meant for Me–Jewel

I’m goingto kill Fontana True,Gabi thought, striding up her cracked walkway, her leather briefcase banging against her hip. She shouldn’t have told her friend that the weekend with Dallas was dangerously close to perfect. About the homey cabin, the wildflowers in the stoneware pitcher, snuggling while watchingE.T.She’d been two glasses of wine in at that point, and she might have even tattled about how phenomenal he was in?—

Groaning, Gabi halted on the top step and dropped her head to her hand. Chardonnay and sexual devastation were, evidently, a perilous combination.

She also wouldn’t mind throttling her old friend Justin. When she’d barreled into theDispatchoffice, only to find Dallas had taken Sam home, he’d taken it upon himself to offer advice on the walk to her truck.

“He’s been known to run,” Justin had said. “Used to it being his story, his byline.”

“I understand him,” she’d simply said, wanting out of the conversation, unsure who he was trying to protect.

“I’m not sure he wants to be understood,” he’d added in full worry mode.

So that was it. Not Gabi’s heart on the chopping block. His kid brother’s.

Consequently, with a spiteful flame lighting her belly,veryunlike her, she’d mentioned something about Dallas, no secrets shared, that his family didn’t know. Enough to shock Justin into silence. Enough to make him recognize that she wasn’t playing with anyone’s head, she wasn’t playing games, and neither was Dallas. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t mess this up, or that he wouldn’t run—she’d always known that was a possibility—but she didn’t need his family trying to fix him. Or her.

Or fix whatever this was they were doing.

Justin’s Bronco was out front. No one had answered when she called from theDispatchoffice, but they were there. She trusted Dallas with Sam completely; that wasn’t it.

Her heart was the problem.

“Friends,” she whispered to herself as she turned the key in the lock.

She drew a tight breath as she hung her jacket next to Dallas’s on the hall rack, then smoothed the front of her brown corduroy skirt and cream ribbed turtleneck. She’d dressed carefully for the fire marshal’s certificate-of-occupancy walkthrough at the mill, an effort to present her best self for the people who would decide whether Wilder Grounds was one step closer to opening or buried under six more weeks of paperwork.

It was a small mercy that she looked decent. Not covered in flour, not streaked with frosting and in a ratty Promise Elementary field-day shirt with the hem coming loose. Unlike the only time she’d seen Dallas since the cabin, when she’dalmost melted into a puddle in the middle of the library. Those bookish glasses and the hot gaze behind them just did it for her.

Then she walked into her living room and found controlled chaos—minus the controlled part—and every coherent thought abandoned her.

It was how a home might look with more boys inhabiting it. An open bag of Doritos on the coffee table, one of Sam’s socks by a TV blaringBlue’s Clues, a tent fashioned from two, no, three blankets they’d dragged from the hall closet. Pillows scattered across the floor, as if there’d been a battle.

She was afraid to peek inside the tent. A gut feeling, foolish but strong.

But of course she had to.

And,oh?—

Her two darlings were fast asleep. Sam’s arm was flung over Dallas’s chest, his mouth open, his hair sticking up in sweaty tufts. Dallas was folded awkwardly, his glasses crooked, one hand resting lightly on Sam’s back. She reached in and quietly tested Sam’s forehead for temperature. He was cool, which made her suspect he’d done exactly what she feared: faked sick for an afternoon with the man he was starting to love.

The man his mother was trying very hardnotto.

She withdrew her hand before she could give in and touch Dallas, but she let herself look. At the dark shadows beneath his eyes, ones she’d noticed at the library, proof that whatever peace he’d found at the cabin hadn’t lasted. At the young, unguarded vulnerability on his face.

Hotshot,she thought, her throat tightening,what am I going to do with you?

The hem of his dark green henley had risen above his hip, showing a slice of muscled abdomen. Lips parting, he made a soft, sleepy sound, one she now recognized. The answering pulse between her legs was real, the memories rushing in hard andbright: his mouth on her thigh, fingers fisting in her hair, the wild way he fell apart after he stopped trying to be careful with her.