The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(111)

She didn’t reach for it—couldn’t make herself—so he dropped it in her lap. It landed on the hem of her shorts, the yellow happy-face key fob staring up at her.

He reached for his sunglasses, as if he were going to take them off, but changed his mind. “Lucy, I—” The stubbornness she knew so well thinned his lips. He rested a hand on his hip and dipped his head. The words that emerged were as rough as if he’d rubbed them with sandpaper. “Stay safe, okay?”

That was all. He didn’t look at her again. Didn’t say more. Simply walked away.

Her fingers curled into fists. She squeezed her eyes shut, too angry to cry. She wanted to throw herself at his back and wrestle him to the ground. Slap and kick. The callous, unfeeling bastard. After everything that had happened, after everything they’d said and done, this was his exit line.

She finally managed to make her way back to the parking lot. She biked to the house, peddling as furiously as Miss Gulch on her way to collect Toto. No wonder he’d never come to the cottage to check up on her. Out of sight, out of mind. That was Patrick Shade’s way.

Bree was at the farm stand. She took one look at Lucy’s face and set aside her paintbrush. “What happened?”

It was over. Finished. Accept it. “Life,” Lucy retorted. “It sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

Lucy resisted the urge to hurl her bike across the driveway. “I need to get out. Let’s have dinner at the Island Inn. Just the two of us. My treat.”

Bree looked around at the farm stand. “I don’t know … It’s Saturday night. There’s a fish fry on the south beach, so there’ll be a lot of traffic …”

“We won’t be gone long. Toby can handle things for a couple of hours. You know how much he loves being a big shot.”

“True.” She cocked her head. “All right. Let’s do it.”

Lucy stomped around the small bedroom where she’d been staying. Eventually she forced herself to open the matchbox closet and study the clothes Temple had brought over. But she couldn’t go back to her Viper outfits, and she didn’t have much else with her. Even if the closet had held her old Washington wardrobe, the tailored suits and pearls wouldn’t have felt any more right than Viper’s green tutu and combat boots.

She ended up in jeans with a breezy linen blouse she borrowed from Bree. As they left, Bree stopped her car at the end of the drive to throw last-minute instructions out the driver’s window. “We won’t be gone long. Remember to ask people to be careful with the ornaments.”

“You already told me that.”

“Watch the change box.”

“You told me that about a thousand times.”

“Sorry, I …”

“Go,” Lucy ordered, gesturing toward the highway.

With one last worried glance, Bree reluctantly stepped on the gas.

Lucy hadn’t come into town since she’d cut her dreads from her hair and scrubbed off her tattoos, and Bree automatically took the chair that looked out into the dining room so Lucy could face the wall. But it had been almost three months since her wedding, the story had died down, and Lucy couldn’t bring herself to care whether or not anyone recognized her.

They ordered grilled portabellas and a barley salad sweetened with peaches. Lucy gulped down her first glass of wine and started on her second. The food was well prepared, but she had no appetite, and neither, it seemed, did Bree. By the time they drove back to the cottage, they’d given up the effort to make conversation.

The farm stand came into sight. At first they didn’t notice anything was wrong. Only as they came closer did they see the destruction.

Toby stood in a sea of broken honey bottles—far more bottles than had been out on display. He turned in a jerky, aimless circle, the honey-splattered quilt Bree tossed over the counter hanging from one hand, his game player in the other. He froze as he saw the car.

Bree jumped out, the motor still running, a scream ripping from her throat. “What happened?”

Toby dropped the quilt into the mess. The Adirondack chairs lay on their sides near the splintered remains of the Carousel Honey sign. The door of the storage shed that jutted off the back gaped open, its shelves emptied of several hundred bottles of next year’s crop Bree had stashed there to give her more working room in the honey house. Toby was streaked from head to toe with honey and dirt. A trickle of blood ran down his hand from broken glass. “I only left for a minute,” he sobbed. “I didn’t mean—”

“You left?” She charged forward, her shoes crunching in the glass.

“Only for a minute. I-I had to get my N-Nintendo. Nobody was stopping!”

Bree saw what he was holding, and her hands fisted at her sides. “You left to get a video game?”

“I didn’t know—I didn’t mean—It was only for a minute!” he cried.

“Liar!” Her eyes blazed. “All this didn’t happen in a minute. Go! Get out of here!”

Toby fled toward the cottage.

Lucy had already turned off the engine and jumped out of the car herself. The wooden shelves hung askew, and broken honey bottles were everywhere, even out on the highway. Shattered lotion jars spattered the drive; the luxurious creams and scented potions smearing the gravel. The cash box was gone, but that wasn’t as devastating as the loss of hundreds of bottles of next year’s crop. The glass from the bottles mingled with the silver shards of Bree’s precious, fragile Christmas ornaments.