“What other word should I use for a girl who spreads her legs for money?”
“You’ll use no word at all if you care to keep your teeth.”
Theodore’s eyes bulged at the threat. “You won’t speak to me like that. I should’ve known you weren’t visiting friends while you were gallivanting around here. You had that bitch on her skinny little knees the whole time! And then you came back to my house with that filth still on you.”
Something bigger than anger was pushing against Caleb’s brain, urging him to violence.
His stepfather sneered. “You’re mistaking a tight cunt for love, and I won’t allow it. Not at the expense of my good name.”
Skinny knees. A tight cunt. Strange words for a girl who’d nearly been a daughter to him.
And suddenly Caleb knew. He knew exactly, even down to how it had happened. A farmer hadn’t owned that property. The bank had. Theodore had. Caleb hadn’t gotten Jess’s letter after her father’s death because Theodore hadn’t included it in the packet. And he hadn’t given Jess the letter from Caleb either.
“It was you,” Caleb said, hearing the words as if someone else had spoken them. He hadn’t even felt his lips move.
Theodore snapped his mouth shut and gave his head one hard shake. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Caleb stepped forward. He felt the pail drop from his fingertips, heard it thump and roll over the dirt. “It was you. You told her I wasn’t coming back. You left her with no choice. You probably made up her father’s debts.”
“Now see here, those debts were real!”
That was what outraged him? An aspersion on his professional character? That was the accusation he answered?
Caleb’s hand shot out and wrapped around his stepfather’s neck. He watched his own fingers tighten, watched Theodore’s face begin to turn purple, and that small taste of satisfaction made him want more.
Theodore struggled, so Caleb shoved him against the shed wall to keep him still. “How many times did you have tea with her father? How many times did you sit across from her at your own dinner table? Were you thinking up ways to rape her the whole time?”
Theodore tried to shake his head. “Wasn’t…rape,” he choked out.
“It was rape,” Caleb growled, squeezing tighter. “You pushed her into a corner and then told her there was only one way out.”
Theodore’s eyes started to roll back in his head, so Caleb let up his grip enough to allow blood flow.
His stepfather coughed and wheezed. “She had a choice,” he managed to say.
“You had a choice.” Caleb let go of the man’s throat just so he could slam his head against the wall. Hard. “You had a choice, and you chose to violate a girl who needed your help.” Caleb slammed him against the wall again, that animal inside him growing stronger, howling at the sound of a skull hitting hard wood. “How long were you waiting for an opportunity to violate her? How long were you thinking of her as a piece of meat you wanted for yourself? You fucking bastard!”
He leaned in close, ignoring the way his stepfather’s hands clawed desperately at Caleb’s arms. “I’m going to live my whole life happy I’m the one who sent you to hell.” Caleb slammed him into the wood one more time, then pulled his arm back, already envisioning his fist crashing through Theodore’s face, breaking bones and tearing skin and driving all of it into his worthless, vile brain.
“Your…your mother,” Theodore rasped.
Caleb looked over his shoulder, fist drawn back and shaking. There was no one standing there. His mother hadn’t seen a thing.
His stepfather wheezed in a breath. “Your mother. Think of her!”
Caleb’s arm trembled. He pulled his fist back another inch and watched Theodore try to hunch down. “She deserves better than you.”
“This will destroy her!”
Caleb shook his head. He closed his eyes. He needed to make this monster pay. He needed to beat him into nothing.
But was he really going to murder his mother’s husband? Destroy her life as well as the life Caleb meant to build with Jess? He’d stopped short of killing anyone in California, despite what the bosses had wanted. But this would be easier, wouldn’t it? Killing this man who clearly deserved it?
But Caleb couldn’t buy land to start a new life if he was a wanted man. He wouldn’t be able to promise Jess much of anything. Then again, he could give her all his gold and let her make her own life, free of this fucking family of beasts who’d hurt her.
“Caleb,” his stepfather whispered. “Your mother’s a good woman. Please don’t do this to her.”
Caleb shook him. “You did it.”