It felt like it was happening in slow motion. Her hands going for his zipper. His hands reaching out to stop her. Her bending over. His hands on her shoulders, ready to push her away forcefully.
Piper in the doorway of the parlor, jaw dropping.
His thought that this could not be happening. His strangled, “Piper, it’s not what you think.”
Trina’s hand continuing into his pants.
His jerking away, shocked, the blow coming to his head, and his going down like a ton of bricks.
* * *
PIPER HEARD THE VOICES AS SHE CAME ONTO THE porch, wondering why on earth the front door was open. One of the kids must have left it open, but she didn’t see Shelby’s minivan in the drive. She wondered again what it was Brady wanted to show her.
“Just ten bucks, that’s all I need. I’m pregnant.”
Who the hell was that?
Piper turned towards the parlor, and then what she saw made all thoughts vanish from her head. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. A thin girl with dark hair was unzipping Brady’s pants. He was holding her like he was going to shake her.
And Piper was six years old again and watching her stepfather force her mother onto her knees to do things that seemed dirty and wrong to her, especially since Mark always said her mother owed it to him for paying for her pills. If he spotted Piper, he’d lock her in the closet, so she always tried to run away and hide first when it happened, to cover her ears so she didn’t hear the sounds that were so strange and foreign.
Now there was this girl and she was clawing at Brady’s pants, her thin, pale fingers reaching inside to touch what she should never touch.
Piper ran. She thought Brady said something but she wasn’t sure what it was. She just ran. She got in her truck and she drove home, to the farm, sobbing.
She fell out of the cab and tripped in the gravel before she made it to the door. When she got inside, she ran up the stairs as fast as she could and locked herself in her empty bedroom.
Chapter Fourteen
BRADY GLARED AT THE POLICE OFFICER. HE VAGUELY remembered him from his childhood. “Can I go now?”
The officer nodded.
Thank God.
“You should go to the hospital,” Gran told him.
“I’m fine. She just hit me with a vase. It’s not that big of a deal.” He didn’t have time to go to the hospital. He needed to find Piper. He’d called her three times and texted her twice, and she hadn’t answered. He had no doubt that she had gone to the farm, but he was worried about her driving so upset. Terrified that she might actually think he was on board with getting a blow job from a drugged-out teenager.
It must have looked bad from where she was standing, and he wanted to make sure she knew what was really going on.
“I can’t believe it took the cops so long to get here.” Gran glared at the two officers who were talking in the foyer. “I called them as soon as I realized what that girl was about.”
“You shouldn’t have told her where Shelby lives, Gran.” Brady couldn’t help but reprimand her even though he knew she felt terrible. Usually his grandmother was super savvy, but for some reason she had gotten her wires crossed and thought Marcus’s girlfriend was one of Piper’s friends. It made Brady concerned that she wasn’t as sharp as she used to be.
“You don’t need to tell me that, punk. I am well aware of that fact. Feel bad enough already.”
Brady felt guilty instantly. His grandmother looked shaken to the core, her skin pale, her usual bravado missing. “I’m sorry, Gran, I know. I’m just worried about Piper.” He was more than worried. He was freaking out on every level.
“I know, I know. Go get her. Fix this. The cops will have the girl picked up before the night is over, so don’t worry about her.”
Brady figured Trina was long gone and they wouldn’t see her again anytime soon. After beaning him with a vase, she’d managed to snag five bucks from his pocket and a brass snuffbox off the mantel during the thirty seconds he’d been down. That smacked of serious desperation. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to press assault charges unless he thought it might get her a spot in rehab. Otherwise, he didn’t feel good about watching a young girl with some serious problems go to jail. But then he reminded himself that if she was willing to hit him on the head, she wasn’t fit to be walking around with innocent people.
It wasn’t his pressing concern right then, though. He kept thinking about that moment, turning and seeing Piper standing there . . . It made him sick. He loved her more than he could ever have imagined. He wanted to protect her, to take care of her, to love her day after day until he was a wrinkled old raisin of a man with erectile dysfunction. The thought that it could be slipping through his fingers, that he might have inadvertently hurt her, was killing him.
Kissing her grandmother on the cheek, he said, “Wish me luck.”
He was going to need it.
* * *
PIPER HAD MANAGED TO STEM HER TEARS BUT SHE couldn’t bring herself to explain to her parents what she had seen, despite their coaxing concern. Her mom had finally left her alone after stroking her hair back and washing her tears off with a washcloth. Piper wrapped her arm around Prada when the dog leaped into bed with her and cuddled the dog close against her chest, her head hurting, her sinuses swollen from sobbing, her stomach sick.
But nothing hurt as much as her heart. She felt like she had been kicked and stomped, like her soul had been wrung from her body and flung into a ditch. She wasn’t sure what she had seen in Shelby’s living room, but she kept hearing Brady tell her over the phone that he wanted to show her something. Why would he want to show her that?
Almost as disturbing to her was the realization that she had completely forgotten about seeing her stepfather using sexual favors as a control tool with her mother. Maybe she had blocked it out because she hadn’t really understood what she was seeing. Or maybe she didn’t want to remember that her mother had been subjected to such humiliation.
For all she knew, it was a game her mother and stepfather had played. Foreplay. That didn’t change the fact that she hadn’t remembered it. What did that say about her?
It said that the first eight years of her life weren’t something she could easily shake off.
There was a knock on her open door. “Piper, Brady is here to see you,” her mom said.
“I can’t see him,” she said. She felt too vulnerable, too hurt, too much of an idiot. How dumb was she to think that Brady Stritmeyer, who had access to a whole city of single women, would want her?