Borrowing Trouble

Borrowing Trouble by Kade Boehme





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


First, I gotta thank Heidi for believing in me, even when I write

stories that are totally not my norm.

I must thank, above all, Wendy, Meredith, Felice—the Boozy Brunch

Crew—and Nik for always being there to talk me off the ledge.

Many times my neuroses would have stopped a book from getting

titled, much less written without you angels to keep me sane.



Mon, because I would never have tried this, never have gone

for it and lived my dream without you. That first year

was rough as hell and you were a rock.

And of course, none of this would matter without my absolutely

amazing friends/family, my readers. This is all for you, babes.





DEDICATION



To the people who grew up with me HERE, where this book is based.

It always felt like a land time forgot, and in so many ways it has.

But I’m humbled and amazed at the few of you who still live there

who’ve reached out to me as an adult. This one is to us, to our

childhoods, to dirt roads and hayrides and lightning bug dreams.

To Montgomery County and the people who prove it’s not

the worst place to come from.





Chapter 1


Landon kicked his work boots on the doorstop before walking into the trailer that contained his father’s office. His father was obsessive about muddy floors, a bit too obsessive for a man whose business was a saw mill. The whole mill was dirt and wood chips. Landon couldn’t even walk across the driveway of Petty & Green Mills without tracking mud into his own truck and house every afternoon.

Once he was satisfied that his boots were as free of mud as they could get, he wandered in to where their office assistant, Ms. Lynne, sat on the phone bitching about something concerning insurance. As Landon handed over his trip report, he smiled fondly at the older woman who was rolling her eyes and making the blah, blah, blah hand gesture toward the phone. He felt for whoever was trying to tangle with Ms. Lynne, since she’d been doing this job for damn near twenty years. She was all of five-foot-five and constantly made up, her hair teased high, but one shouldn’t be fooled by her southern grandma fa?ade. She was all bulldog.

Landon walked to where they kept the coffee pot and poured himself a cup, trying to fend off the cold. “Landon,” Ms. Lynne called out. He turned back to her. She held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and continued, “Your Daddy wants you to pop in the office before you head out on your next load.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed with a nod and headed to his dad’s office, sipping his coffee. He was surprised his dad was even in his office. The old man was usually out supervising the hell out of everyone. His dad was a strict boss, but he was fair, and for their little county in Mississippi, he paid well.

The office door stood open, so Landon stuck his head in and knocked on the door frame. “Knock-knock. Ms. Lynne said you needed to see me.”

Landon’s dad looked up and waved his son in with a grunt. Ricky Petty was a burly man, three inches taller than Landon’s five-feet-ten, and built like a barrel with a pair of sticks for legs. His grunt was one of his good mood grunts. Landon and his mother had turned deciphering his father’s grunts into an art, though his father was not a complicated man. He was big and intimidating, with a red beard and dark brown hair always covered in a straw cowboy hat that shaded his dark brown eyes enough to make him seem much surlier than he was. He was actually just your typical country-bred, good ol’ boy with a teddy bear disposition—unless he was in a snit. Then he was damn near horrifying to watch. Landon had stayed out of trouble as a kid, the wrath of his father’s rare temper and the firm set of his face when disappointed had been enough to make even a bigger man feel two feet tall.

Landon plopped down in the wooden chair that faced his father’s desk, waiting for his dad to finish up whatever he was doing with the papers he was shuffling. Landon had finished his coffee before his dad finally looked up. “Sorry, son. Lynne and I are dealing with new hire insurance horse puckey.” Landon smiled at his dad. The old guy was not one for cursing, and Landon found his silly curse-word replacements endearing, coming from such a big man.

“You guys hired someone new?”

His dad grunted an affirmative, then shut the folder containing the papers he’d been fiddling with. “We finally hired on a new manager so you can focus on hauling full time.”

Landon breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been hauling full time as well as handling overseeing the day-to-day management of the mill, so he was usually around until late in the night dealing with schedules and payroll. His dad had been looking for a while for someone so Landon could focus on the part of the job he liked most, hauling their wood chips from the mill down to the plywood and paper plant in Laurel, Mississippi. It was typically a six hour round trip, and when you started at three in the morning and didn’t get home ‘til eight at night, it made for a long day. Plus, his dad really wanted someone around to help on-site so they could both cut out earlier than they had been over the last year since his dad had bought out his partner, Jimmy Green.

“That’s great, Dad. Decided not to use one of the old timers?”