In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(60)

This was no cause for celebration, and eating that ice cream would mean Frank was complicit in his father’s actions.

The thought made him feel dirty in a way he never had before, like he needed a good scrubbing with a gallon of bleach.

“Who says I’m not supposed to have sex with anyone but your mother?” his father queried quietly.

“Everyone!” Frank yelled, his face hot with embarrassment and anger.

He didn’t want to be the son of philanderer—he’d heard that word on one of the soap operas his mother watched in the afternoons, and when he asked what it meant, she’d explained that it was a man who stepped out on his wife and kids despite his promises to be loyal.

His father didn’t so much as flinch at his outraged roar. He simply grabbed the lighter and lit the fresh cigarette clamped between his big, white teeth. Dragging the smoke into his lungs, he blew it out and lazily watched it circle around the felt ceiling of the car before he softly posed, “Have you ever heard the saying ‘what you don’t know won’t hurt you’?”

“Yes.” Frank crossed his arms over his scrawny chest, for the first time in his life wanting to punch something, surprised that that something should turn out to be his own father. “But just because mom doesn’t know, that doesn’t make it right. What you’re doing is wrong.”

His father shrugged. “But who’s it hurting? I pay the bills. I put a roof over her head. She’s happy with her women’s groups and her pretty dresses and her shiny, new car. I’m discreet with my lady friends…you know what discreet means, don’t you?”

Frank nodded.

“Okay, then, so again, who is it hurting?”

He didn’t know how to answer, because his father was right. His mother was happy, and she’d stay happy as long as she never found out.

He suddenly realized he was trapped. Trapped in his father’s deception as neatly as a spider traps a fly in its silken web.

“I’m going in now,” his father announced after a prolonged silence, and Frank glanced toward the house. A woman stood in the doorway, dressed in cut-off shorts and a little lace top.

It was the first time he’d ever seen one of his father’s lady friends, and he was shocked by the sight of her. When he thought of a lady friend, he pictured the type of women his mother liked to invite over for tea and bridge. Round, soft, mom-like women with fine wrinkles at the corners of their eyes and hints of gray showing through their hair.

The girl standing in the door was none of these things.

First of all, she was skinny, as in skin-ny. Her ribs showed in her chest like the bars of a xylophone. Secondly, even despite her emaciated appearance, she was still one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen, with high cheekbones, big, heavily lashed eyes, and a mouth that made him realize for the first time that there was something utterly compelling about a woman’s lips. Her skin was a smooth, flawless, milky color and her hair a shiny, lustrous red.

“How old is she?” he asked before his father could step from the vehicle.

“Eighteen, I think.”

Frank recoiled at the thought of his father having sex with someone the same age as the girl who sometimes came over to babysit.

His father chuckled at his reaction. “The great thing about being a man is we get better with age. We may get older, but the women who want us never do. And you’ll come to realize there’s nothing sweeter than a girl in her first bloom.”

With that parting bit of advice, his father slammed the door and sauntered up the cracked walk, flicking his cigarette butt into a motley clump of grass.

That was the last time Frank went with his father for “ice cream,” but neither did he reveal his father’s secret.

Two years later, he caught one severe case of strep throat after another until his doctor sent him in to have his tonsils removed, and that was the day Frank’s life changed forever. When things went bad on the operating table and he almost died, Robert Knight conveniently used the excuse of the crisis to declare his dissatisfaction with family life and finally abandon them once and for all.

Frank shook his head now, pushing the painful memory away as he shoved back from Becky’s door.

What the hell am I doing here?

The question once more flashed through his aching head, but he didn’t have time to answer it before the door suddenly opened. And then he couldn’t remember his own name much less the answer to the question, because his mind blanked.

Full stop.

No thought whatsoever.

Because there she stood. The woman of his dreams, grumpy and disheveled, and warm and rosy from sleep.

He’d never been a devotee of anything that didn’t come with an extra clip or have the ability to be sharpened to a razor’s edge, but right now he wanted to prostrate himself at the baptismal fount of red lace.

Oh man, that top she was wearing…

It was cherry-colored satin, trimmed along the collar with soft lace that lightly brushed the smooth mounds of her unrestrained breasts and, yessir, those were her nipples lightly pebbled, pushing against the silky fabric.

“What do you want, Frank,” she grumbled, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, squinting up at him as she flicked on the light inside the bedroom.

It illuminated her messy hair, the pillowcase marks on her smooth, still slightly discolored cheek, and the fact that all she was wearing besides that ball-tightening top was a pair of soft red-and-green flannel boxer shorts.