Blinding Trust (Mitchell Family, #7)(79)

Making the move was the easiest of decisions. An old friend got me the job and had put in a good word for me. The town was small with only two thousand people. I found a cabin about five miles down a mountainous country road, off the beaten path.

I just wanted to be alone; to be able to live out my life in seclusion. I wasn’t an idiot. With the internet out there, it was obvious that some people would know the truth. Still, not one of them had the balls to mention my past to me. I’d rather them fear me, then ask the questions that I would never have been able to answer.

“Sheriff, are you alright?” My deputy, Shelton Morris, asked again.

I shook off the flashback and put on a fake smile. “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about something.”

“You want to talk about it?” Shelton was a nice kid. He was in his early twenties and his Grand pappy had been the last sheriff for the past forty years. He died of a massive heart attack six months ago.

“Nah, it’s all good. What were you saying?” I had to keep up the charade that I was just one man. They wouldn’t be able to understand what it was like to lose everything. Not one day went by where I hadn’t asked myself why I had lived and they had…died.

My girls were in my heart and the flashbacks were enough of a reminder that I had taken their lives. I just wanted to do my job and go home without the stares or the burning questions.

“Listen, I know you’re new here, but it ain’t good to hold things in. If you ever need to talk, just let me know. You seem like maybe you need a friend. You been here for nearly six months and nobody knows a dang thing about you, cept for what they read about. I’m just sayin’, if you need a buddy, we can have beer sometime.”

I put on a fake smile and stood up from my desk. “I appreciate that. I’m good. Just not real used to the quiet out here. I’m finding it hard to sleep at night.” The sleeping part was true, but it wasn’t because of the quiet. It was because I was alone. I was a broken man and I couldn’t be fixed, not by a therapist, or even a buddy. There was no hope for me.

Shelton shook his head and smiled back. “Alright, man. Well, I need to run out and check on Mrs. Parks. She claims that someone keeps vandalizin’ her mailbox.”

“That’s real crime there.” This was what we dealt with in this town. We didn’t have gangbangers or drive-bys.

“Yeah, well, it’s a job!” Shelton laughed as he walked out the door. I waited for him to leave before standing up and getting another cup of coffee. The flashbacks were worse when I didn’t sleep the night before. I usually had bourbon to help with that, but the more I used that as a solution, the less it worked.

This was my life. It was never going to be any better.





Chapter 2


Vessa Jean


Mornings were so hard for me, considering that I was usually up until two, closing out the bar that I bartended at. My life didn’t just revolve around my job though; I had two kids that needed to be taken care of. Sure, their dad was around, but between his job doing tattoos at the shop and his outside customers, he wasn’t home that much to be able to manage the kids schedules. Not that I expected it out of him either way. He was pretty much worthless when it came to being responsible.

I loved my children. They were my whole world. Asha was ten and Logan was almost six and with their opposite personalities, they were sometimes hard to handle. They fought a lot, making my life even harder at times. Gavin, my husband, was never there to see any of that though.

His parents were still pretty young and had two kids that were in school themselves. My husband happened to be their accidental teenage pregnancy that had led to their twenty five year marriage. Unfortunately, as much as they loved their grandkids, they were much too busy working and raising their two youngest, Gabe and Gwen. Yeah, they went with all the same letters.

My mother died when I was sixteen of an aneurism, due to complications from a rare form of brain cancer. She was fine when I went to school and by the time I came home she was gone. My father did a pretty good job raising me, but he’d drank himself to death and died of liver failure three years ago. Ever since then, I’d had to depend on myself for everything.

I’d been with Gavin since we were fifteen years old. Our on again off again relationship through high school was like gasoline to the fire. At times it was downright violent and, for some reason, we both kept coming back for more. When I got pregnant at seventeen, it was pretty much a given that we were going to get married. His parents wanted us to be just like them and, much to our surprise, we had made a pretty good life for ourselves. Granted, we worked our butts off and rarely had time for each other, but what married couple with young children did?

Gavin started doing tattoos when he was twenty one. He’d always been great at art anyway, so it just made sense. He started working for the current shop he was at about four years ago. An old friend of his started it and added Gavin to the list of artists there. The job was great and the pay was pretty good too, but what happened at the shop was not alright with me.

They had these little groupie chicks in there all the time. They’d just hang out and drink with the older guys that worked there, including my husband. Of course, he liked the attention, and last year, I found out that he’d hooked up with one of them after hours.

It broke my heart.

Every single day I was busy busting my ass trying to help pay the bills and make sure our children were taken care of, while he was out sticking his dick in some little wall banger. It made me sick.