She shook her head against his chest. “No, that’s okay. I want to tell you everything and I don’t know if I can continue this story another time…”
He kissed the top of her hair. “Okay, Gorgeous.”
“Where was I?” she mumbled mostly to herself he thought, when continued, “Oh, right. I was telling you about Eric showing up at our apartment in Detroit. He was drunk and he threatened my mother. He told her that he was back and would stay with us. My mother wasn’t having it and told him to leave. He broke her jaw when he pushed her against the kitchen counter.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Well, that wasn’t all of it. He threatened my mom and me, told us we should work the streets to earn him some money as he was getting back on his feet after his release from prison.”
“Damn it, Tara. How old where you?”
“Fifteen.”
He took a deep breath through his nostrils, needing to keep his calm while he much rather get up and search the country for Eric Houston and kick his ass for ever hurting his Tara.
“My mother went wild after he told her that. She flew at him and because he’d been drinking and hadn’t expected her to fight back for once, she had been able to hit his head with a frying pan. She yelled at me that I needed to help her when she tried to pull him on one of the two kitchen chairs.
“I held him steady on the chair while my mother yanked the cables from the TV leading to the wall and tied him up to the chair with those cables. He came to and cussed up a storm, threatening to call the police on my mother and that he would get full custody of me. That’s when I grabbed the frying pan and swung. His eyes rolling back into his head gave me such a satisfaction. I often wondered if I wasn’t a psycho just like my father…”
His fingers caressed her hair as he soothed, “You’re nothing like him, Gorgeous. You’re the most sweet and caring person I know. And I know a lot of awesome people—just look around in my family.”
“Your family is the best, O. And so are you…” She kissed his chest and he hoped she found a dry spot of his shirt to leave those sweet full lips.
“So you guys left Detroit?”
“Yeah. My father wasn’t dead and I know my mother feared him coming after us. She took us through six states in two years’ time before we ended up in Winter Peaks.”
“My God, Tara. You were seventeen and already been through so much…”
His heart stopped when she said, “The worse is yet to come…”
“What happened?”
“That night I came over before I left town… I was in our apartment and my mother was working in Gabletown, four towns over. Someone knocked on the door and at first, I thought it was Jenny, asking me if I could turn down the music. I opened the door and there was my father, grinning in this eerie type of way.”
He held his breath, lying perfectly still so she would continue her story.
“He just said ‘Hi’, like he was coming over to visit. I almost peed my pants in angst while I stood there frozen with the door handle still in my hand. I knew that my mom wouldn’t come home soon and that I was all alone with the man I smacked unconscious with a frying pan.”
“He deserved much more, sweetheart…”
As if she hadn’t heard him while locked up inside her head, she continued, “He asked me if I knew where my mother was, and I realized that he knew that I was home alone. I told him that my mother went away to clean rooms in a hotel and he just laughed in my face. He said that my mother went to a massage parlor in Gabletown and fucked men for money.”
“That bastard…”
“It turned out he was right, though. She’d kept it a secret, like she’d kept a lot of things from me. Sometimes I wonder if I even knew my mother.”
“I guess that wasn’t exactly something she was proud of, sweetheart. I think she did that kind of work in order to keep you both safe and far away from your father.”
“Mrs. Bear had been the one who got my mother arrested on those bogus charges. It had been all over the news how a woman from Detroit had dared to steel a gold medal out of the room of her cousin Justin. My mother lost her job as a cleaning lady all over town after that and started working in that massage parlor. Justin’s gold medal being stolen was newsworthy enough to travel throughout the state and I guess my father had found us because of that.”
A lot of pieces of the puzzle fell into place. “So that’s why you ran from Winter Peaks?”
“He threatened to tie me to a chair and ram a frying pan against my head when Jenny walked up the stairs. She didn’t miss a beat and sneaked up on him, holding a gun to the back of his head.”
“Jenny? Our Jenny from the bistro? She walks around with a gun?”
Tara nodded. “And she knows how to use it, too. She’s like special ops, but then one who owns a restaurant in the middle of the Colorado Mountains.”