Page 74 of Whiskey Chase
Had one of my brothers felt guilty enough about dumping this on me that they—
It wasn’t a Bodine climbing up the porch steps. It was Devlin. And I wanted to cry.
“Hey, I thought I’d see if you needed a hand—”
The velocity of my body colliding with his cut him off. He was here to help me clean up a mess that wasn’t his because he cared. I clung to him like Virginia creeper. Gratitude made my eyes sting.
“Thank you,” I whispered against his t-shirt. He held me close and stroked a hand down my ponytail. I breathed him in, stealing a bit of his strength, and then unwound myself from him.
He was watching me with a soft look on his face. “Do you think you could greet me like that every time you see me for a while?” he asked.
“Yeah. I think I could do that,” I said softly. I stepped back and let him inside. “Welcome to Bodine Bungalow.”
Devlin glanced around, and I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of home he’d grown up in. I’d be willing to bet it was a bit grander than my own childhood home.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Cozy. I bet there are a lot of memories here.”
There were. Enough bad memories to be haunted by and enough good ones to make the loss still hurt.
“Yeah. Lots of memories,” I agreed, my throat tight.
“Where do you want me to start?” he asked. “You have me for the day. I’ve got cleaning supplies in the car, garbage bags, a couple of plastic totes. I have a scanner back at Gran’s if there’s any paperwork you want to save.”
My eyes started to water. It was the dust, I told myself. Not the freely offered help.
“Let’s start with the fridge. That’ll be the worst of it. Then, we can look for any paperwork and photo albums. Things I want to keep,” I decided.
He nodded. “I’ll grab the supplies.”
I watched him walk back down the porch steps—the same steps that I’d bounded down in a bid to run away from home twice in my teens—and fell just a little, tiny bit in love with Devlin McCallister.
* * *
Devlin hadn’t saida word when we’d cleared the dozen empty bottles of cheap Kentucky bourbon from the kitchen cabinets. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that the refrigerator was empty except for beer and moonshine and a really old jar of mayonnaise. And he hadn’t raised an eyebrow when I’d opened each and every bottle and dumped it all straight down the drain.
He was too polite to ask any questions. He knew the basics. But I was tired of not saying anything, tired of accepting.
“My father was an alcoholic,” I announced as we carted two waste baskets of recyclables out onto the front porch.
“Okay,” Devlin said.
“He always drank, but it got worse after my mom died,” I continued.
“How old were you when she died?” Devlin asked.
“I was fifteen. Car accident.”
His hand settled on my shoulder, and I stopped my fidgeting. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.
“She was a good mom, mostly.” It was important to me that he believed me. “She and my dad got pregnant in high school and married. In some ways, they never grew up. They fought a lot. There was a lot of jealousy. And obviously at least one of them wasn’t faithful. Daddy drank too much. Mama didn’t handle it well. And they raised four basket cases.”
Devlin leaned in close and cupped my cheek in his hand. “Baby. Nothing about you says basket case.”
I closed my eyes, relaxing into his soothing touch.
“I started going to work with my daddy in the summers at twelve because Mama thought he was drinking on the job. He was. By thirteen, I was driving his ass home. By fifteen, I was doing most of the work.”
Devlin towed me into him, wrapping his arms around me, creating a safe, warm space. “Gibson hates him. Daddy never kept it quiet that Gibs was the reason he and Mama got married. Bowie is the good guy trying to undo all the bad that Daddy did. Jameson just kept his head down and tried to live his own life outside of the drama.”
