“Sounds like it.”
“You called during dessert.”
“Bad timing, I bet.”
Candy nodded. She couldn’t look at him for the rest of it. She stared down at her hands, twisting on each other in her wet lap. “He called me to the phone and stood over me while I spoke to you. He was wearing a suit and tie. He smelled like that horrible cologne he wore mixed with Jack Daniel’s and anger. I could feel it rolling off him in waves.”
Turner moved a section of wet hair from her cheek. It felt reassuring. She continued.
“Daddy pressed up so close to me. I had to get off the phone. I was shaking all over when I hung up and had to go back to the table and pretend like nothing was wrong. The whole time my mother was laughing a little too much and trying to cover over Daddy’s anger. When the clients finally left…”
Candy took a big breath. She had wanted to calm herself but it sounded like a hysterical gasp for air instead. All she wanted to do was get the whole story out before she lost it completely.
“He hit me in the face. He called me a white trash whore. He threw me up against the wall.”
“Your father beat you. You never told me.”
Candy nodded. “I never told anyone. But it only happened sometimes. That night was the worst ever. And when he was done hitting me, he grabbed the cake stand from the table and threw it against the wall right by my head and there was cake and icing everywhere, all over the carpet and my dress and in my hair…”
“Oh, Candy. No. I’m so sorry.”
“And he just kept screaming at me saying, ‘I’m not sending you to some damn college to whore your way through life! You might as well just stay home and bake cookies! That’s what you want anyway, right? A bakery? Hell, you can be some stupid hillbilly girl and bake cakes and slut around Bigler without me wasting my hard-earned money on college! Why don’t you just do that?’”
Candy let her head drop into her hands and she began to cry again.
“I threw up all that night and again at school the next day, just sick with fear of my dad and guilt about how I treated you, and … I remember praying that you would never, ever talk about what had happened. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it. And you never did … Turner, you never brought it up again, and that made it easier for me to forget the whole night … forget that it ever happened.”
His hand remained on her back. She could feel the heat and strength of his palm through the cold, wet fabric stuck to her skin. She continued to heave and cry like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle of the Piggly Wiggly, feeling more ashamed than she had a few minutes ago, with her butt on display for half of Cataloochee County, if that was even possible.
“Oh, Candy. Baby.”
She bolted straight up at the sound of Turner’s voice. For a moment, she’d almost forgotten he was there. Oh, God, the last thing in the world she wanted was to let him see her like this.
She peered through the windshield and saw her car. She dug her hand into the front pocket of her denim skirt, located her key, and pulled on the door handle.
Turner grabbed her upper arm. “Where are you going?”
She ignored him and turned away.
“Candy, look at me. Seriously. Where the hell are you going? You’re wet to the bone. You’re traumatized. Please, let me take you—”
“Thank you for everything, Turner.” She managed to get the words out in between gasps for air. She didn’t dare look at him. “I am sorry if … I embarrassed you … in front of your coworkers.”
“What? I don’t give a rat’s ass about them. I only—”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She jumped out the door and ran to her car, throwing herself behind the wheel.
With a loud backfire, the car started. She turned on her windshield wipers, swiped at her eyes again, and hit the gas. Right then she made a bargain with herself. Keep it together until you reach the Tip Top, she told herself. Then you can grab your toiletries and a towel, buy yourself a dollar-fifty shower, and spend the entire fifteen minutes of hot water behind the locked shower stall door, alone, where you can totally lose your shit in peace.
* * *
Turner phoned in his brief report to the dispatcher while he followed Candy—at a respectable distance—out of Cherokee Pines. He had no choice but to follow. For starters, she was hysterical and trying to drive a death trap of a vehicle through mountain roads during a downpour. Also, he just didn’t think she should be alone. If ever a woman needed someone to hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right, it was Candy Carmichael, on this particular night. That story she’d just told him left him vibrating with anger and numb with sadness. If he had seen even a hint of what was going on in that house when they were kids, Turner would have killed the man with his bare hands.
Candy had hidden it so well.
And now Turner had the overwhelming urge to bring her home with him and keep her close. Keep her safe. The way he hadn’t been able to do when they were kids.
When Turner received that call from Wainright Miller about a break-in at the senior home, his heart had dropped like a rock. His first thought was it had something to do with the Spiveys and that Candy was in danger. He’d contacted O’Connor, who called in other members of the task force already in town. Happily, his hunch turned out to be a little off target.
Once he’d helped Candy out of the window, Miller had given him the details—he’d discovered that Gerrall Spivey was helping Candy stay longer than guests were permitted, working out a deal where Candy baked him a cake for every night he sneaked her inside. At least that explained how her cakes had made their way into the meth lab.
“Shocking,” is how Miller described Gerrall’s behavior. “I fired him on the spot, needless to say.”
Turner couldn’t say he was sad to see Gerrall leave the place.
He craned his neck, searching out Candy’s car. Where the hell was she headed? He might have been three cars behind, but there was no way in hell he’d lose her—all he had to do was follow the cloud of smoke and the rancid odor, now worse than when he’d written her up for an emissions inspection weeks ago. Turner sighed, thinking that the old Chevy was a lot like Candy’s life in general—it needed quality parts and a lot of skilled labor.
“Damn, girl,” Turner mumbled to himself, watching her pull into the Tip Top. Why there, of all places? He just prayed Gerrall wasn’t there for a drop—that would be a little awkward. Turner parked his SUV on the other side of the diesel pumps and waited to see what she’d do.
After a few minutes, Candy exited the car with a large shoulder bag and headed for the entrance. Turner pulled around until his SUV blocked her way to the building. She looked up and shook her head slowly, then tried to walk around his vehicle. Turner got out.
“Candy, please. Just talk to me for a minute.”
“I need to be alone right now, Turner.”
“Really?” Turner heard the snarkiness in his own voice but didn’t feel like hiding it—especially since he’d had enough standing around in the rain for one night. “Because I’d think by this point you’d be good and sick of being alone, handling everything by yourself.” He paused. He ran a hand over his chin as the truth hit him. “I know I am.”
Candy stood clutching her bag, shaking her head as her lips trembled.
He decided she had to be the most bullheaded woman he’d ever laid eyes on, and that was saying something considering he had been married to and raised by two of the most stubborn women God ever created. Turner approached her slowly, then wrapped her tight in his arms and kissed her wet hair. “Just get in my damn truck, okay?” When he felt her body relax and her head nod in surrender, he opened the door and got her settled.
A few minutes later they were parked at the edge of the truck stop lot under a huge old pawpaw tree. Candy was sipping hot coffee with her bag of shower supplies at her feet, snuggled under a blanket Turner had fetched from her car. It nearly brok
e his heart to see that the Chevy was crammed with everything the girl owned.
The way Candy now sat, hunched over and protective of herself, made Turner think of some kind of exotic, graceful bird nursing a broken wing. He knew her bones were intact. It was her spirit he was worried about.
Turner had asked her several times to tell him what was going on, but she’d remained silent. As frustrating as it was, he had nowhere else he had to be. His cell and radio were on, and save for the call to Cherokee Pines, the night had been quiet.
“You know, Candy, I got all the time in the world, but you’re going to catch pneumonia if you don’t get out of those wet clothes.”
Finally, he got a response. She peered over the rim of her paper cup and looked him up and down. “You’re as wet as me,” she whispered.
“I know. And I’d sure like to get dry. So I’ll tell you what. How about we both drive to my house. It’s only about five minutes from here and you can get a hot shower that you don’t have to share with a gang of female truck drivers, not that I have anything against showering with female truck drivers, per se.”
That got a small smile from her.
“This will be a completely legitimate arrangement, Candy. Just come home and get some rest and we’ll figure this out together.”
She glanced sideways at him, doubt lingering in her eyes. At that instant, with her wet curls plastered to the sides of her face, she looked like she was about seven years old.
“What will people say?”
Turner laughed. “Probably the same shit they said after you kissed me at the counter at Lenny’s today.”
Candy’s eyes went huge. “You heard about that?”
“Of course I did. I hear everything. That was why I was so shocked that I somehow missed the news that you’d left Viv’s house over two weeks ago to stay with your mother! It hacked me off something awful.”
Candy’s brows met in consternation. “Why?”
Turner backtracked, knowing he had to stay cool. He shrugged. “I just wanted to keep an eye on you. Make sure you were all right.”
She nodded. “I appreciate that.”
“Candy. C’mon now. Let’s go home. Enough of this foolishness. We’re grown-ups. I care for you. I am not taking you to my house to get you in bed—although I’d be a damn liar if I said the thought had never crossed my mind, because you know it has—but not tonight. Please. Trust me. Come home with me.”
Turner watched her stare straight out the windshield, the muscles of her jaw working. He figured it was time to play his best card. “I’ve got a wall safe at the house,” he said.
Her head snapped around and her eyes widened in excitement. “Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
But just as quickly as Candy had perked up she scowled again. “Why do you think that would be important to me?”
Turner laughed once more and shook his head. He was still trying to recover from the vision that had greeted him upon arrival at Cherokee Pines earlier that night—Candy’s perfect, round, luscious, snow-white ass covered in a tiny pair of pink panties, sticking right in his face, some kind of money belt contraption secured around the juiciest part of her left thigh. Whatever she had in there she wanted to keep close by. Real close by.
“Oh,” she said, her voice flat. “I guess you saw it.”
“Whatever it is, yeah, I saw it, and I figure that anything that important to you should be in a safe and not tied to your thigh. Although don’t get me wrong, I think your thigh would be a fine place to be tied to.” Turner cleared his throat, thinking that might not have come out right.
After Candy stared at him for a moment in bewildered silence, he was sure it hadn’t.
“But you don’t know me,” Candy said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Huh?” Turner reared his head back. “What’re you talking about, girl? I’ve known you since—”
“I’m a failure,” she said, cutting him off. “I showed up in Bigler with about sixteen dollars to my name and nowhere to go. I lived in my car for a few days before I agreed to stay with Gladys Harbison, which is how I knew I could buy a hot shower at the Tip Top for a dollar-fifty. That’s who I am. That’s who you’d be taking home with you.” Candy jutted out her chin in challenge.
“And you immediately set about changing that. Which you’ve done. That’s not failure, Candy.”
“I’m greedy and shallow and materialistic.” She sniffed. “I brought Cheri down with me because I kept pushing for more and more success and more and more money! It was my fault we lost everything in the real estate crash. I’m one hundred percent to blame!” Candy emitted a sound that was part wail and part hiccup, and Turner decided to retrieve the small package of tissues from the center console of his SUV.
“Here, darlin’,” he said. “Have you talked to Cheri about this?”
“Oh, sure,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “She told me I’m nuts, that we made decisions on the way up together and we went down together. But that’s a bunch of crap.” Candy grabbed the pack of tissues and began twisting the plastic in her hands. “I transferred to three colleges down in Florida, did you know that, Turner? I owned six houses while I lived down there. I started a bunch of businesses for the sole purpose of selling them—what does that tell you about me?”
Turner shrugged. “That you’re an entrepreneur?”
“Ha!” Candy grabbed a few tissues and blew her nose. “I didn’t care about those businesses. They were stupid! They never helped anyone! All I cared about was the money they made! What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m greedy!”
“Okay,” Turner said. “But you provided a legitimate product or service someone needed, right? It wasn’t like you were out selling drugs or something.”
She grimaced. “My most successful business was a dog poop removal service, okay? Rich people paid money so they didn’t have to bend over and clean up their own damned backyards!”
“Wow,” was all Turner could think to say. “There are companies that do that?”
“And when I sold Doo-Away I had sixteen full-time employees, a fleet of eight cars, and over two hundred and fifty clients so lazy that they’d pay a hundred bucks month to have someone else pick up their dog’s crap!”
Turner laughed. “What a great name,” he said.
Candy cocked her head to the side and produced a smirk. “What I’m telling you is that my businesses weren’t created to save the world. They were created to make me rich. I’m materialistic, like I said.”
“Hey, some of my best friends are capitalists.”
“And I’ve dated a whole bunch of men, but no one for very long,” she said, obviously too far gone to appreciate his sense of humor. “I got bored with them, Turner, that’s what I’m trying to tell you! I’ve never been big on commitment!”
He nodded. “They weren’t right for you, I guess.”
“And my family—my God!” Candy waved her hands around. “You know my mother and I have never been close, and I’m just now understanding what a racist asshole my father was. But here’s the thing, Turner, here’s what you need to know—I was a coward! I didn’t stick up for you with Daddy! I didn’t stand up for what I knew was right! Is that the kind of woman you want staying in your house? Is that the kind of woman you want kissing you in public?”
“Candy,” he said, reaching out for her hand. “You were a kid. You were scared of your dad. It’s over and done with.”
“I hurt you,” she said, shaking her head, the tears slipping down her cheeks.
“You’ve already apologized. I accepted your apology. It’s done.” Turner squeezed her hand until she raised her eyes to him again. “Anything else you want me to know?”
Candy laughed. “Oh, Lord-ee! Seriously? You can take more?”
Turner smiled and plied a fresh tissue from her clutches to dab at her tears. “I’m a pretty strong man. I can take a lot, darlin’.”
She rolled h
er eyes. “Okay, well, I should tell you about the thing on my thigh.”
“If you’d like to.”
“I’ve got a bracelet in there.”
“Okay.”
She laughed again. “A really valuable one—over twenty thousand dollars’ worth of pavé diamonds and sapphires in platinum.”
If Candy’s goal had been to shock him, she’d finally done it. Turner felt his jaw unhinge.
“Yeah. That’s what I was trying to tell you—I’m shallow! When Cheri and I were hocking everything to stay alive, I kept it, and I never told her I had it. I just couldn’t part with it. To me it symbolizes everything I ever wanted, it symbolizes success. Sophie is my lucky charm. I thought if I kept her, I could keep my dream alive, and someday she’ll provide the seed money to make my dreams come true.”
“The bracelet has a name?”
“Sophie. I thought it sounded like a nickname for sapphire.”
“Ah.”
“That’s it?” Candy’s eyes went huge. She gestured toward him. “That’s all you have to say to me?”
“I’ll add one thing—thank you. Thank you for telling me all that. You’re right—there was a lot I didn’t know and I’m sure there’s a lot yet to find out.” Turner leaned closer to her. “I’m looking forward to the adventure.”
Candy pulled her mouth tight. “I do not want to interfere with your life. I will be gone as soon as I find a place.”
“If anything, you make my life more interesting. You add spark to it. And I’m in no hurry to kick you out.”
It happened slowly, but Candy finally smiled, and once it started it couldn’t be stopped. The smile plumped the apple of her cheeks and filled her beautiful eyes with light. “Okay, then,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”
She threw off the blanket, placed her coffee in his cup holder, and ran through the rain to her car.
And just like that, Candy Carmichael was coming home with him. Turner’s hands gripped the steering wheel as his heart banged around in his chest like a just caught fish in the bottom of a boat.