In Tune (Red Bird Trail Trilogy Book 3) by Laramie Briscoe Page A

telling them no—numerous times.
    “I went in there to get a pack of smokes.” His eyes traveled to the cigarette he held in his hand. “When the cashier opened the drawer, it was packed full; it must have been a long time since she’d done a drop. I had the gun because I’d gotten paranoid. I owed drug dealers money, and they had been threatening the both of us. Without even thinking about it, I pulled that gun and told her to give me the cash. She did, but then she struggled, and the gun went off.”
    “That still doesn’t answer why you used your own daughter as a shield.” She crossed her arms over her chest and leveled him with a glare.
    “All you were in that moment was opportunity. I’m ashamed to say, now, as a man clean for ten years, I can’t even tell you what in the world I was thinking back in those days.” He ran his hand over his hair. “I want you to know, I understand why you never came to see me, I understand why you don’t think I’ve changed, I get why you can’t have me be a part of your life. Fuck, I get why you won’t speak to Cara.”
    “I’ve never needed approval from you.” She lifted her head so that she could look into eyes that were very like her own. “But there is one thing that keeps me from moving on; it keeps coming up, no matter what I do. It’s this fear. This fear that I’m the one who sent you to jail, and you will want retribution. I live with that fear a lot,” she admitted, sounding like the scared kid she was.
    “Then stop it, because whether you believe it or not, you saved my fucking life by getting me caught. Do I think we’re ever going to have a relationship? No, and I’ve made my peace with that. I can tell you that I hope like hell you have everything you’ve always wanted because you deserve it.”
    Those words, spoken softly, hit a spot in her that she hadn’t realized was there. “Thank you.” It was the least she could do, thank him for giving her closure.
    “And I can guarantee you, if I thought for one second I could to do something to you, that boy parked back there glaring at me would tear me from limb to limb.”
    Harper turned her head back to where her dad was pointing and saw Cash leaning against his car. He waved a hand to her, and she waved back. “I’m okay,” she yelled.
    “I’ll stay here until you leave,” he yelled back, his eyes never leaving her dad.
    “Is this what you needed?” Clayton asked, finishing his cigarette and throwing it down on the ground.
    She thought about what he’d said. Did she believe him? In the end, she had no reason not to.
    “It was,” she told him, holding out her hand to him. She couldn’t hug him, wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to, but she did appreciate his time. It had taken a lot for him to talk to her if he’d felt the way she had about it.
    “Take care,” she told him as she turned to walk towards her car.
    “You too, Harper.”
    As she got in her car and drove away, Cash behind her in the rearview mirror, she breathed easy for the first time in a very long time.
    *
    “I wish you would have let me be there to hear what he had to say to you,” Cash told her later on that evening as they sat out on the back porch. They had blankets, and he took a drag off the occasional cigarette.
    She reached over and tapped his shoulder, indicating she wanted to take a hit of the tobacco. “It was something I had to do for myself,” she told him as she blew smoke away from him. “He was much scarier in my mind than he was in real life, but I wonder if that’s because he has so much time away from the man that he once was.”
    “I don’t know.” Cash shrugged. “I mean think about when we’re kids and we think there’s monsters under our beds. In our heads we make them up to be the scariest things in the world. Maybe your imagination had run away with you. I’m not saying you had no right to be scared—you lived through something traumatic, but while he spent time overcoming