Her first instinct was to drive out into the night and search for him, but she had no idea where to find him. Then just as the panic was threatening to choke her, she thought of someone who knew Wyatt better than Wyatt knew himself.
* * * *
The dull buzz of plastic vibrating against wood had Clay rolling over blindly. He smacked at his nightstand until he found his phone. He lifted it up, squinting at the screen, but nothing but the time glared back at him.
2:31
He frowned at the early hour and then looked past Melody, seeing that it was her phone still buzzing.
“Mel.” He shook her. “Your phone.”
“Huh?” Melody moaned and pulled the covers tighter over her.
“Your dang phone. It’s ringing. Get it. What if it’s Jules? Oh, hell.” Clay leaned over her and used his long reach to swipe at her phone. He answered it, expecting it to be Jules announcing she was in labor. “What happened?”
“C-Clay?”
He sat up in bed, knowing who it was despite not having a real conversation with her in over thirteen years. “Tab?”
“I’m sorry. Melody gave me her number and—”
“No, no, it’s okay.” He took a deep breath and looked at his own phone, staring at the early hour once more as his adrenaline spiked in apprehension. “What’s wrong?”
“Um.” Tabitha’s voice shook in a way that terrified him. “Wyatt’s gone. I was hoping you could help me find him.”
“He’s gone?” Clay repeated as he looked at Melody, who sat up next to him, making it obvious the phone call had jerked her out of sleep. “Where’d he go?”
“I dunno.” Tabitha sounded frantic. “I think he might have gone off to do something dumb.”
“Did you tell him?” Clay asked, knowing he was betraying Melody by doing so, but something told Clay the situation was a little too serious to pretend he wasn’t fully aware of what was going on. “Does he know it was Vaughn?”
“Oh God.” Tabitha sucked in a sharp breath of horror. “She told you.”
“Give me the phone, Clay!” Melody shouted next to him.
“No, I can do this.” Clay leaped out of bed to avoid Melody’s swipe for her phone. He held it closer to his ear and whispered, “Listen to me, Tab. I ain’t blaming you for leaving. I ain’t mad at you. I should’ve never been mad at you.
I am sorry
.” His voice cracked with emotion he couldn’t hide. He didn’t want to hide it. “Melody’s right. I am an asshole. I should’ve known—”
“No, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. I wanted you to be here for Wyatt.”
“You’re important too,” he said softly. “You don’t have to fight alone anymore. I’m in your corner.”
“You are?”
The sheer disbelief in her voice tore at Clay, but he pushed the pain back to deal with the problem at hand. “What happened tonight?”
“I think I was talking in my sleep.” Tabitha took another shuddering breath. “God, Clay, I think he knows. I sorta remember him asking me questions.”
“I’ll find him.” Clay didn’t put it past Wyatt to use the advantage of Tabitha talking in her sleep to get answers to questions that had been plaguing him for years. “I promise.”
“You’ll stop him?”
“I have to find him first. I’m handing the phone over to Melody. She’s gonna drive out to you,” Clay said as he walked over to his drawer and pulled out a pair of jeans.
“No, she’s been so nice. I don’t wanna put her out and—”
“Listen to me,” he growled in a low voice. “This shit ends now, Tabitha. You have been sacrificing yourself for too long because your cunt of a mother fucked you up. We don’t have time to teach you how to accept help, so you’re just gonna have to trust me when I say we’re in your corner if you want us there or not. Watching you do this to yourself hurts us too. Do you want to hurt us?”
“No!” she said quickly. “That’s the last thing I want.”
“Then you go downstairs and wait for Melody to get there.”
Clay handed the phone to Melody, who took it with a glare. She put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “That wasn’t very tactful.”
“That’s okay.” Clay tugged on his jeans. “Tabitha was my first friend, remember? She knows I ain’t tactful.”
He grabbed the shirt he’d discarded earlier and tugged it on as he walked out the bedroom, determined to save Wyatt from himself.
* * * *
It wasn’t the first time Wyatt used this spot. On slow nights, he’d pull off to the side of the road across the street from Jake’s Bar. The trees hid his SUV that everyone in town who had even a remote inkling toward breaking the law could usually spot from a mile way.
Catching drunk drivers had been one of Wyatt’s personal goals in life ever since he’d been forced to walk up to Delores Johnson’s house at four in the morning and tell her he’d found her son’s mangled body inside the truck he’d gotten for graduation the day before.
He heard her screams in his mind every time he slapped a pair of cuffs onto some drunk fool who decided to risk a drive home, and the town had gotten the message loud and clear. He hadn’t arrested someone for drunk driving in three months.
No one was safe from the campaign. Hell, he’d even arrested Terry for it last year.
He’d been the first one Wyatt let off before booking him, but now he was second-guessing that decision. He should have driven over to his house and punched the smaller man for letting Tabitha leave knowing what happened to her.
Wyatt knew she’d told him.
Tabitha told Terry
everything.
He’d turned off his police radio and phone and just sat there in the darkness—waiting—with his gaze on Vaughn Davis’s car. The anger hadn’t subsided. It’d grown into something raging and untamable instead. The longer he sat there, the more he thought about his and Tabitha’s lives and what this asshole had stolen from them. He thought of his girl alone in New York. He thought of her fear and terror over suffering through what she had after Wyatt had abandoned her that night.
The self-loathing was the worst, hazing his vision and making his chest tight.
He’d probably end up having a heart attack one of these days from the burden of it. He wouldn’t be the first sheriff to drop from one. It had turned into a family tradition. He ate better than his father and grandfather had. He took the fucking blood pressure pills the doctor forced on him. He exercised and did all the things a man was supposed to do to stay healthy. He shouldn’t need them, but he did because no amount of exercise and protein bars could eliminate the stress of knowing his wife had been out there somewhere—alone—while he was stuck in Garnet with a breakup letter.
She hadn’t wanted to be found. That had been very obvious, and the hurt of knowing she’d rather be alone stopped him in his tracks every single time.
He’d been taking those damn pills since he was twenty-nine, keeping them hidden in his bottom drawer because Jules would have come unhinged if she knew he was suffering from the same issues their father had. He kept aspirin everywhere—in his glove compartment, in all the drawers of his house—because he’d been in the sheriff’s office the day his father dropped. He’d done chest compressions on him until the ambulance arrived, but it hadn’t done a damn bit of good.
He watched his father die. Then he had to call his sister and tell her he wasn’t able to save him. Until right now, he thought Jules’s screams that day had been the worst thing he’d ever hear in his life. Then Tabitha confessed in her sleep that her brother had
sold her
to Vaughn Davis.
And it was Wyatt who had driven away that night, abandoning her four days after they had gotten married.
It all felt like too much to bear. He had big shoulders, but it was starting to be more than even he could take. If he was going to die from a heart attack like his father had, he was gonna make sure he took Vaughn Davis with him before he went.
He was sitting there, with that light-headed, adrenaline-pumped feeling throbbing at his temples that told him Doc Philips would’ve upped his prescription if he’d taken a reading when a knock at his window made him jump.
For a moment he thought his heart
had
stopped beating, because he couldn’t remember the last time someone sneaked up on him like that. Then he found himself looking into the night at Clay’s scowling face.
Unbelievable.
Wyatt pushed the button to roll down his window, because he knew Clay would stand there forever. The asshole didn’t even have a jacket on. “What?” he snapped, knowing Clay could hear every ounce of rage in that one question.
“Unlock the door,” Clay said in a low, furious voice.
Wyatt pushed the button to his window instead, arching an eyebrow at Clay when it started going up. Clay reached in before Wyatt could block him out. His large hand wrapped around Wyatt’s throat, squeezing tight enough to block his air supply.
“Open the fucking door!”
Wyatt pushed at the button again, trapping Clay’s arm; then he reached up, squeezing at the pressure point between Clay’s thumb and forefinger. It was one of those hard pressure points that would make most anyone’s grip loosen, but Clay wasn’t just anyone.
“I will choke you to death before I let you do this to Tabitha!” Clay growled, sounding serious. “I swear to God, Wyatt. Open the door!”
Wyatt could have broken out of his grasp, but he unlocked the door instead. Clay was just the sort of stubborn asshole to stand there in the cold beating on the window until he broke the police glass.
Clay let him go and slipped his hand out of the car. Then he stomped around to the other side of the car and got in. He reached down to move the passenger seat back, making it clear he planned to stay awhile.
“How’d you find me?” Wyatt asked curiously.
“Everyone knows you hide here, asshole. Jake’s been bitching ’bout it for months. You’re bad for business.”
Wyatt raised his eyebrows at that. He needed a new hiding place.
“Why are you here?”
Clay turned his head, giving Wyatt a sharp look. “You know why I’m here. Tab called.”
“Clay—”
“No.” Clay cut him off. “You’re gonna sit there and listen to me.”
Wyatt snorted. “The fuck I am.”
“I ain’t giving you a choice ’bout it,” Clay went on as his eyes narrowed. “Look, I ain’t gonna say I don’t understand this. I nearly killed Melody’s ex-husband, and I’d do it again if the prick wasn’t serving forty years.”
“Do you know what Davis did to her?” Wyatt asked with a growl.
“I know.” Clay nodded as he swallowed hard and pain showed on his face. “But Wyatt—”
“Can you stop and imagine what that had to have been like for her?” Wyatt went on as his voice cracked with agony. “I’d just left her in the middle of the road. I’d just told her that she was no better than her mother. That she was gonna turn out just like her. Then she goes home, and that motherfucker”—Wyatt leaned into Clay and screamed—“
raped her
!”
Clay shoved him back against the seat. “It was thirteen years ago!”
“That makes it worse!” Wyatt pushed Clay’s arm off his chest and then leaned over and punched him in the shoulder because he needed something to hit. “She’s been alone all that time! I was alone!”
“And if you do this, then you will make
everything
she’s gone through pointless!” Clay shouted back. “You owe this to her. Make the sacrifice worth it.”
“Oh, I’m gonna make it worth something,” Wyatt assured him with a mirthless laugh.
Clay fell back against the seat and ran both his hands through his hair as he stared ahead. “We got to figure something else out. You can’t just show up and kill that fucker. There has to be another way to make this right without ruining both y’all’s lives.”
“Our lives have been ruined for a long time now.”
“Yeah, but you have a second chance now,” Clay reminded him. “You honestly want to fuck that up? Doing this is worse than leaving Tabitha in the road that night. What do you think will happen to her if you end up doing something that gets you arrested?”
“Who the fuck is gonna arrest me?” Wyatt raised his eyebrows. “This is
my
town.”
“A sheriff can still be arrested while he’s in office, can’t he?”
“I guess,” Wyatt had to reluctantly admit. “The coroner can do it if he has to, but it would be a really bizarre situation. I ain’t even sure how they’d go about getting the paperwork pushed through unless it was a federal crime. You’re talking ’bout my sheriff’s office and my deputies. Who’s gonna help him get it done?”
“That’s it?” Clay raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Aren’t we in the twenty-first century? There’s nothing else in place to keep you from breaking a law?”
“Not really.” Wyatt snorted. “The fine voters of Garnet Country just gotta trust me. I’d have to go out of my way to get arrested. Like actually walking into that sheriff’s office and slapping the cuffs on my own damn wrists.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing, Wyatt,” Clay said slowly. “That’s exactly what you’d do, because you’re stupid like that, and it would kill Tabitha. I can’t let you do that to her, even if it lets Vaughn get away with what he did. I owe it to her to make sure she’s got a husband to grow old with. She deserves that.”
“I ain’t gonna let Vaughn get away with it.” Wyatt shook his head in denial. “No fucking way, and let me tell ya something else. Her brother ain’t far behind. He’s my next stop.”
“At least be smart ’bout it this time, rather than going off half-cocked and kicking their heads in. Then they’ll really win.”
“I was actually gonna shoot ’em.” Wyatt corrected him. “I’m starting to think it’s mighty unfair my sister got to put bullets in some folks before I did.”
“Romeo said they were shotgun shells.”
“No shit?” Wyatt couldn’t keep the admiration out of his voice as he turned to Clay. “Jules took those mafia guys out with a shotgun? I never got to read her statement, and we ain’t never really talked ’bout it.”
“That’s what he said.” Clay shrugged. “He said it still gives him nightmares. It was grisly.”
“Damn, don’t piss my sister off.” Wyatt laughed in spite of everything. “I should’ve brought a shotgun.”
“Are you serious, Wyatt?” Clay asked in concern.
Wyatt turned to him again. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”