The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(58)

“Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot!” Toby took off.

Mike still hadn’t acknowledged her. Only after he’d slammed the tailgate did he look in her direction. She turned away and stacked the last of the honey into a carton.

“I brought you something, too, Bree,” he said from behind her. “To help with your business.”

“I don’t want anything.” She grabbed the wheelbarrow and began pushing it through the scrubby grass. She needed to fix the doors on the storage shed behind the farm stand so she didn’t have to keep hauling everything back and forth twice a day.

“You don’t know what it is.”

“And I don’t care.” The front wheel caught in a rut, the honey jars rattled, and she barely prevented it all from overturning.

“You don’t believe in second chances, do you, Bree?”

As a kid, he’d always been whiny when anyone challenged him, but now his voice had a calmness she didn’t like. “What I believe is that a leopard doesn’t change its spots.” She struggled to get the wheel out of the rut. “I want you to stop using Toby to try to get to me.”

He pushed her aside, took the handles, and steered the wheelbarrow toward the driveway. “Myra said your ex-husband left you for an eighteen-year-old.”

Scott’s supposed soul mate was nineteen, but correcting him wouldn’t exactly help her save face. “That’s what happens when you marry the wrong man,” she said.

He stopped the wheelbarrow. “You don’t still believe David was the right one, do you?”

He was a lot more perceptive than he used to be, and anger coursed through her. “I won’t talk to you about David.”

“He never would have married you. You intimidated him.”

Despite Mike’s surface changes, he was as clueless as ever. David, with his blazing intellect and boundless self-confidence, had never been intimidated by anyone, let alone an ordinary girl like herself.

“The WASP princess and the kid from the ghetto …” He slipped his thumb under the gold bracelet on his wrist. Either he’d forgotten to put on his cologne or he’d taken her criticism seriously because he smelled like peppermint gum. “David was fascinated by you, but that’s all it ever was.”

Her hand itched to slap him. “Stop acting like you knew him.”

“Who do you think he talked to after he married Star and settled on the island?”

“You want me to believe you were David’s confidant? After what you did?”

“Living in the past is never a great idea,” he said, with an air of compassion she didn’t believe for a moment. “It makes things harder than they need to be. I can help you.”

“The only way you can do that is to leave me alone.” She abandoned the wheelbarrow and strode toward the house.

“You’re barely hanging on,” he said, not raising his voice. “What are you going to do when the tourists leave?”

“Get off the island like everybody else.”

“And go where?”

Nowhere. Her brothers loved her, but they didn’t want her living with them—not by herself and definitely not with a twelve-year-old boy tagging along. She had no place to go, something Mike seemed to know.

She could hear him coming closer, his even stride so much more confident than her fast, furious steps. “You’re going to need a friend here,” he said as she reached the front step. “Myra’s gone. David and Star are dead. And you don’t seem to have a long list of pals.”

Not ones she could count on. After Scott left, her friends’ so-called support had been nothing more than thinly disguised attempts to learn the juicy details of her breakup. She spun around to confront him. “I hope you’re enjoying your revenge. You have money and a successful business. I don’t have either one. I’m sure that makes you incredibly happy.”

He pulled on a solemn expression. “Would it make you happy to see somebody you once cared about in trouble?”

She thought of David and Star, how they’d hurt her, how fiercely she’d hated them, and how much she missed them. Pushing their images away, she focused on Scott and his nineteen-year-old hottie. “You bet I would.”

Mike surprised her by laughing. “Whether you want to admit it or not, you need me, so you’d better start acting like a friend. I’m picking you and Toby up on Sunday for church. Nine-thirty.”

“Church?”

“It’s the best place for you to get reacquainted with the locals. But there are some ground rules. Don’t disrespect me in public.” The steadiness in his fool’s eyes alarmed her. “Don’t make fun of anybody in the congregation, not even if some of them start talking in tongues. And if Ned Blakely shows up with his snake and starts quoting from the Bible, you’ll be polite. Church here isn’t what you’re used to in Bloomfield Hills, but this is Charity Island, and people worship with their whole hearts.”

Tongues? Snakes?

Mike smiled, not one of those unpleasant smirks she remembered, but a big smile. At her expense. “I’ve got to get this truck back to Hank Jenkins. I’ll see you on Sunday. Oh, and if you decide not to go, I’ll pass the word that you want to be left completely alone.”

“I do,” she said fiercely.