Courting Trouble by Maggie Marr

through school Tulsa had watched her friends with their normal families.
    Ash dropped her chin and stared at the now-folded red sweater she held in her hands. Her voice barely a whisper, she said, “I saw him.”
    Tulsa’s throat tightened and her jaw flinched. Her molars ground together. She willed a practiced placidity to her face—an openness to her eyes and a softness to her lips. Ash didn’t need another closed-off adult judging her and judging her actions. Tulsa couldn’t risk demolishing the line of communication with her niece by giving away her own fears.
    “Ash,” Tulsa said slowly, picking her words as if carefully stepping through a minefield. “There is a whole past between your mother and your father. There’s a lot you don’t know—”
    “I know enough,” Ash shot out, her eyes now filled with fire. “I know Mom drove him nuts and he left. He left her and he left me. Mom can be a handful. She gets emotional, she cries, she yells, she—”
    “Ash,” Tulsa interrupted, her voice soft, “ everyone gets emotional. Your mom does the best she can. We McGrath women are sometimes prone to—”
    “Craziness?”
    “ Passion .” Tulsa finished Ash’s sentence. It was the kindest word she could say.
    Ash leaned against her headboard. Her lips were tight and her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her expression was so appropriate for fourteen. Who was this woman-child sitting before Tulsa? Ash didn’t seem like a little girl anymore; instead, she seemed close to being a woman.
    “Whatever.” The harsh bite in Ash’s tone stunned Tulsa. A bitterness and anger toward not just Savannah, but the world. “Mom wants everything her way and she always gets it. If she doesn’t want me to see Dad, then I probably won’t, but it’s only four years until I turn eighteen and then she can’t do a thing. Not one thing. Once I graduate I’m going to be just like you, Aunt Tulsa.” Ash locked eyes with Tulsa.
    A tremor tumbled down Tulsa’s spine. “How so?”
    “Once I get my diploma, I am out of here. Gone. The very next day.”

Chapter Seven
     
    Cade’s leg muscles ached as he tromped up the steps to the ranch house. A wide, slatted-wood porch of mahogany circled three sides of the house. The home was well-kept and clean, but there were few female touches. Cade supposed all those extras, the lovely little things women did to a home, had ended when his mother passed.
    Once and again their housekeeper, Lottie, put out a pot of flowers, but now as the Colorado days grew short and the nights grew cold, nothing adorned the porch but a heavy scrub welcome mat on which to wipe your boots. A dull throb thumped along his chin and gathered into a tight-fisted ache at the base of Cade’s skull.
    He opened the ranch-house door. A fire crackled in the fireplace. His father sat in his recliner with a stack of legal files on the coffee table. Half of his dad’s face lay like melted wax, the result of his first stroke. Hudd’s eyes traveled over his son as Cade pulled off his boots and set them beside the door.
    “Your brother give you that?” his father asked, referring to the bruise along the rim of Cade’s jaw. Cade had seen the deep purple setting in before he left the gym. “Don’t need enemies when you’ve got a stepbrother like that.”
    “Half brother,” Cade said and hung his jacket in the closet. “There’s a difference.”
    “There certainly is,” Hudd mumbled and flipped the page of a deposition.
    Cade moved to the fire and held out his hands. The heat chased the ice from his fingertips.
    “You see your opposing counsel on the Hopkins case?”
    “I did.” Cade’s gut clamped tight.
    “She’s done better than any McGrath I ever knew. Especially her damn whore of a mother.”
    Cade locked his jaw and let any hint of emotion fall from his face. His father might believe what he said, then again he might not. His father was testing him. A game from Cade’s childhood that long ago he always