BUCKED Box Set: A Bull Rider Western Romance (45 page)

I tried not to think about the fact that
the longer I stayed away, the longer I was allowing my mother and her father to
grill Ashley about our relationship and she probably wasn’t going to appreciate
that. But at the moment, I felt that I was too angry to be helpful. I wasn’t
going to want to explain myself like some fucking child.

I was going to want to barge in that house
and demand that I was allowed to do whatever the hell I wanted, with whoever
the hell I wanted.

They didn’t give a shit about us all
summer. All they did was fuck one another, but they were going to get pissed
off at us for doing the same thing?
What?
Because we’re step-siblings
.
Go blow
it out your ass. We’re not related and chances are, they won’t even last when
the novelty of being a married couple wears off.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before.
Actually, I had seen it twice before. My mother thought that marrying a man and
then taking him for all he was worth made her honest, but that only compounded
her sins.

At
least there’s no ulterior fucking motive for us being together,
I thought, not allowing myself to slow down, for I knew if I gave into the
temptation I would not be able to stop myself. Surely, I would just barge in
there and give her father and my mother a piece of my mind that they would
probably choke on.

That wouldn’t end well and even though I
wanted to do it really fucking bad, something told me that I would regret it.
So I continued to make my way down the beach, focusing, almost a little bit too
much on the hot sand being kicked up by my feet and the feel of my shallow
breathing trying to keep pace with the rest of my body.

For once, I didn’t know what I was
supposed to do and I didn’t want to act on my instinct so, I just kept running.

When I finally did stop, the fight hadn’t
been completely lost from me, but I wasn’t blindingly angry and I had managed
to stop seeing the situation as so unbelievably dire. I knew that I needed to
get my head on straight if I was going to walk in there, but I also was going
to lay down and take their shit.

So, once I had come to this conclusion, I
breathed a long sigh of relief before I huffed loudly as my body caught up with
everything I had demanded from it that day.

I knew how I was going to handle this
situation; the only thing that I needed to do now was find my way back to the
house.

I walked back up the dunes and gauged what
street I was on. I thought things looked familiar and I was right. I certainly
wasn’t that far from the house, so I decided to walk the rest of the way.

By the time I began my ascent up the
driveway, past the car that I had first seen Ashley come out of and the
family
car that we had driven up in, I
had made the decision that no matter what happened when I walked through that
door, I didn’t want to make anything more difficult for Ashley.

If need be, I would leave and never
return, if that would make everything all right. After all, my mother wouldn’t
give a shit and it would save Ashley from hating me when my mother eventually
tired of her father.

As I thought of this, I stopped to
reconsider the idea before I shrugged and thought that maybe I should leave and
never come back now.

However, then I thought of Ashley and knew
that I had to at least announce that I was leaving, if it came to that, but
there was also something else. There was a large part of me that didn’t want to
leave and I realized then that I hoped it didn’t come to that.

Perhaps
something could be worked out,
I considered with the
first stretch of positivity that I had ever since Ashley’s father showed up at
the competition.
I can’t believe I
actually want something to work out.

It was beginning to get dark now and I
figured I had better get to it and get this shit over with. Hopefully, it
wouldn’t take all that long.

With all of this in mind, I jogged the
rest of the way up the driveway and actually, honestly and truly hoped for the
best.

Chapter
41

Ashley

Awful would have been a gross
understatement to describe every long, daunting, terrible second of the ride
back to the beach house.

Via car, the ride from where the
competition was held back to the house was usually extremely short, but at the
present time, I thought it would have been easier, quicker and far more
preferred to get back home and spare the thick, awkward silence that surrounded
us.

I sighed, trying to figure out what I
should say to my father to get him to stop looking over at me with such a sense
of disappointment. I knew that he wasn’t happy, but the silence and sizzling
sense of nothingness that surrounded us was wholly unbearable.

At first, I went to speak to him, but the
intensity of his eyes as they glowered at me from the driver’s side of the car
made me rethink the idea. I didn’t want to upset him even more than I already
had.

So the silence bellowed and the ride continued
to be everlasting.

I looked out the window and tried to focus
on something other than the situation I was currently in.

We passed plenty of different places
throughout the entirety of what seemed to be the never-ending trip that I knew
well, but that didn’t matter to me at the moment. All I cared about was trying
my best to have something to think about and therefore, I felt as though I was
seeing the entirety of the world anew. I noticed details of the familiar island
that I had never realized were there.

I thought about everything I saw and tried
to experience everything that was passing by my slow-moving window as though I
was seeing it for the first time. It worked, sort of. I definitely saw plenty
of new details, but none of them were able to distract me from the forbearing
silence that bore down upon the vehicle.

Part of me still wanted to try to talk to
my father, but each time I went to speak, his cold, angry eyes dissuaded me.

I didn’t want to fight. I knew that
wouldn’t do us any good, but by the look on his face, it seemed that anything I
said or did would cause an eruption of pent-up emotion that would lead to a
meltdown of nuclear proportions.

Therefore, I continued to conclude that my
silence was probably best.

Eventually we made it to the driveway.
After my father pulled in and stopped the car, he turned off the engine and
air, which automatically made the heat burst through the crevices, making the
small space even more uncomfortable.

I drew in a deep breath, even though it
made me feel sick to do so, just so the hotness of the car would not suffocate
me.

My father didn’t get out of the car right
away, though, so I figured that I shouldn’t try to get out of the car either.

I wasn’t sure how I could escape the car
without incurring more wrath, so I just stayed there patiently as my blood
began to boil and my breath began to pant.

By the time my father made any kind of
move, I was fighting back panting, sweating profusely and feeling as though I
was going to be dangerously sick.

“Ashley,” he said, in a voice that made me
wish he sounded angry, “why would you do this to me?”

“Dad I…”

“Don’t…” he whispered, shaking his head
and sighing angrily. “Please don’t lie to me.”

“I wasn’t going to lie!” I exclaimed,
narrowing my eyes at him and trying my best to remain as calm as possible. I
huffed a long sigh before I crossed my arms and sat back against the cushion of
the seat. I ground my teeth and rolled my eyes at the absurdity of what was
going on. If he wasn’t even going to hear me out, then I really had nothing to
say to him.

“What were you going to say then? You were
going to tell me the truth? You were going to admit to my face that you did
this to get back at me, that you wanted nothing more than to see my marriage
fall apart, while you just sit back and watch what you think is a house of
cards crumble? I know you two think that all Theresa and I do is have sex, but
we actually have a very loving relationship and this little attempt at
sabotaging that relationship just isn’t going to work.”

“You always think everything is all about
you!” I screamed, finally having enough of all his crap. I wasn’t sure exactly
what it was that had made me snap; there was sure a whole host of different
things that I could have picked up on, but I decided to lead with the big
picture. When I did, I felt the wave of fury strike me down suddenly and with a
great deal of strain. I felt my eyes bulge out of my head as my forehead grew
red and began to ache with pain and aggravation. I could tell that my blood was
boiling and all I wanted to do was scream.

The heat of the car certainly wasn’t
helping matters, but by that time, I wasn’t thinking about that at all. All I
was concerned with was making him see my side of the story.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he
demanded. His face was red for a while now, but I didn’t even care that he was
angry with me. I was far too irate with him to worry about what he was going to
say or do.

“Of course! You conveniently have no
idea,” I shot back. “When Mom died, it was all about you and how depressed you
were and now it’s all about you and how I could possibly do this to you,
instead of once thinking about my feelings.” I was screaming now. “I’m your
daughter! I lost my mother and all you could do was sit around and feel sorry
for yourself, feel guilty for what happened because you know as well as I do
that if she hadn’t gotten sick, you would have left her!”

“Why would you say that? I loved your
mother…” He yelled back, but with far less conviction than he had previously.

“Yes, well I still love her and you know
damn well that you were cheating on her. She knew it and I knew it. That was
what Mom had to hide from me and why she had to keep her illness from us,
because she didn’t want you to stay out of guilt!” Once I started, everything
began to tumble out. “I needed you and all you wanted to do was go crawl in a
hole and die for four years, not because you were grieving, but because you
were guilty. You couldn’t believe that you would do this to a woman who cared
about you, faults and all, literally until her dying breath.”

“Did your mother tell you that?” he
demanded.

“No! She didn’t say anything,” I answered,
growing even angrier by the second, “probably because she knew that I would be
stuck with you when she died and she didn’t want me to hate you.”

“Do you hate me? Is that why you did it?”

This time, I did scream and when I was
finished, I turned around and said, “When did you become so selfish?” I
stopped, put my hand up and answered, in a slightly calmer voice, “You know
what, I don’t even care. I am out of here.”

With that, I burst out of the car,
automatically feeling the temperature change hit my face as the air finally
moved around me again, while I stomped up to my room.

I heard my father in the background,
screaming for me to get back there as he loudly got out of the car, but I
continued forward. To my surprise, I didn’t even cry.

When I made it up to my room, I grabbed my
suitcase and began to pack it feverously. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was
going to go, or if I even really wanted to leave Tyler, but I was sure that I
couldn’t stay in this house any longer. There were too many emotions running
rampant around here, and I was fairly certain that I had just completely tore
the top off of our family’s Pandora’s Box. I was also fairly certain that I
didn’t want to wait around for the fallout.

I had probably already decimated my
relationship with my father, but I supposed that was a long time coming. I
didn’t want to ever have to do what I did, but he had pushed me to the limit.
How dare he accuse me of trying to ruin his relationship, when I was the one
who wanted him to start dating in the first place?

After a little while of me quickly and
angrily throwing things into my bag, I heard a light and gentle rapping at my
door. I heard my father’s voice as he said, “Hey… I wanted to talk to you. Can
I come in?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer before the
door opened. He looked around the room and instead of answering him, I just
glowered in his direction for a long while. I felt that anything I had to say
to him now would only make matters worse for us both later.

He sighed first and answered, while his
eyes continued to glaze over my hurried packing job, “Well, I just wanted
to…um…Wow! You’re really going, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered in a scary-calm voice
that I was sure my father picked up on. “I am really going.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know, but I cannot stay here.”

Instead of getting angry, he sighed again
and rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re right, you know? I did cheat on your
mother and I felt terrible for it, even before I knew she was sick…and you were
right about feeling guilty. Even though it was sudden, once I knew how sick she
was, I knew that it would only be a matter of time, so her death wasn’t a
shock, by the time she died. I knew what was happening and although there was a
long period of grief for the woman that I loved…” His eyes then rose to meet
mine as he amended, “The woman that I still love, I was mostly guilty. That is
why I didn’t date. I didn’t feel I deserved it.”