Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: The Still House

I stopped on the bottom step.

Brady grinned at me over the top of his phone.

"Morning, Jess. Long night?"

The little red dot kept glowing.

I could have run back inside.

I walked down the drive toward him instead, in my inside-out shirt and bare wet ankles, right into the shot.

"Get my good side," I said.

His grin flickered. "Oh, I'm getting all of it."

"Then get this too. You stole my private files and sold them. You sold my grandmother's funeral to a man in Nashville."

He lowered the phone an inch.

"Prove it."

"I will."

Behind me the farmhouse door banged open.

Forrest came out onto the porch in yesterday's jeans and nothing else, barefoot, his hair flat on one side.

Brady swung the phone up at him.

"There he is. The man of the house."

Forrest came down the steps and across the wet gravel. He didn't hurry.

He stopped beside me, not in front of me.

"Get off my property," he said.

"It's my house too."

"It was," Forrest said. "Until you sold her."

Something moved in Brady's face. For half a second he looked about eleven years old.

Then it was gone. He got in the truck, still filming through the window, and spun gravel all the way down to the road.

The post was up before my kettle boiled.

A short clip of me walking out of the farmhouse at dawn, shirt inside out. Then Forrest, shirtless, on the porch.

Moved right in. Like father, like son.

By eight it had two hundred thousand views.

By eight thirty, Lettie was at my door.

"The distributor," she said. "They've been calling Forrest since seven. Their rep's driving out from Louisville. He wants a meeting at ten."

"About me."

"About the brand." She made a face like the word tasted bad. "They move eighty percent of our bottles, sugar. If they walk, we lose the liquor stores from here to Ohio."

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