Free The Ninth Step by Barbara Taylor Sissel Page A

doing here?
    He couldn’t make amends to these people. He wasn’t sure he could even stand to be around them another moment. Cotton glanced toward the street. He needed a drink. He’d get a bottle when he left here, but even as he said it to himself, he knew he wouldn’t, and later, sitting in a metal folding chair at an AA meeting, he’d realize he’d crossed a line. He’d tell Anita on the phone after the meeting that it seemed as if he’d made some kind of deal with fate.
     But right now, Nikki and her dad were arguing about a babysitting job she had for the summer, the need for extra supervision. “I’m at the Stablers’,” she was saying, “every day until after two o’clock, you’re home by six. I’m old enough to look out for myself anyway,” she insisted.
    Wes was patient. “Can I finish my business with Cotton and have this discussion with you later?”
    A horn honked. “There’s Becca and her mom.”
    “Home by ten-thirty,” Wes said.
    “I know. See you.” She started to turn away and then found Cotton’s gaze and her eyes on his were so intent that his heart stalled. Was she remembering him? Was it possible? But all she said was, “It’s nice meeting you. I hope you’ll help us,” and waving, she ran lightly to the street where a red Ford Taurus waited.
    Wes looked after her. “All her friends are leaving tomorrow for three weeks at this high dollar dude ranch in Wyoming, but Nikki wanted a studio and I told her we couldn’t afford both.”
    The girls got into the back seat of the Taurus. When it pulled away from the curb, Nikki waved and so did Wes. And almost immediately, he waved again at the sheriff driving the patrol car that passed.
    It was knee-jerk when Cotton put up his hand to shield his face.
    Wes remarked that there’d been a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood. He laughed and said, “It’s good to see my tax dollars at work.”  
    Cotton laughed too, ha-ha, like he’d never heard anything so funny. 
    Wes picked up where he’d left off talking about Nikki. “It wouldn’t be so hard on her, having her friends go off if her brother was around, but Trev got a summer job coaching baseball at a kid’s camp in Tallahassee, then he’s off to college in Austin, University of Texas. Leaves her at loose ends, you know? Except for the project. I’d put the whole thing under a tarp until I could get to it, if it weren’t for her.”
    “So, what kind of deal did you have with the other guy?” Cotton asked.
     

Chapter 5
     
    A man was sitting in the rocker on her porch when she pulled into her driveway at the end of the day and the pick-up nosed onto the apron wasn’t Charlie’s old Chevy, but a shiny new silver truck. A Dodge, Livie thought. Her foot eased off the accelerator and her heart faltered even as the idea formed that it was Cotton, that he had come in spite of her message. A surge of adrenaline spawned colder currents of dismay and alarm. She idled up the drive, sightless for a moment, lost to the confusion of her emotions. But now the man stood up and in a flash she saw that it wasn’t Cotton at all. No. It was him.
    Joe. The guy she’d met the other night.
    At Bo Jangles, when she’d made such an ass of herself.
    God!
    She felt his gaze on her, felt him waiting while she stopped the car. The engine ticked as it cooled. She couldn’t look at him and looked through the windshield instead, thinking witlessly of the mango sherbet she’d bought at the store just now, thinking it would have already begun to soften. . . .
    How had he known where to find her?
    She must have told him, she answered herself. Maybe, like an idiot, she’d given him her card.
    Livie curled her fingers around the steering wheel and lowered her head to her hands. She’d been so looped that night, she couldn’t remember half of what . . . He was a doctor, she thought. In Navasota. Kat would be pleased, or maybe not. He specialized in horses, not humans, if Livie recalled