The Brides of Purple Heart Ranch Boxset Volume 2 by Shanae Johnson

Author:Shanae Johnson [Johnson, Shanae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Those Johnson Girls

Chapter Four

Xavier pulled up behind the tow truck lugging Cassie’s car. The truck stopped at the address that Cassie had given. She tugged at the door handle from the back seat of his truck, but it was locked. Xavier had half a mind to keep it that way.

He thought he’d grown up in a rough neighborhood. This place made his old stomping ground look like an oasis. There were boards in many of the windows in the apartment complex. Graffiti covered the brick. And he was sure he just saw a drug deal go down between two adolescents.

He unlocked his door, then went around to Cassie’s side. Before he could hand her out, she already had a sleeping Alex in her arms and was stepping onto the sidewalk. Everything in him urged Xavier to march in front of the two to protect them both. But he had to deal with the tow truck driver first.

The driver lowered Cassie’s car to the street. Behind Cassie’s back, Xavier paid the guy to come back tonight and tow the heap to the junkyard. There was no way either Cassie or Alex would ever get in that death trap again.

They also wouldn’t be coming back to this dilapidated structure that someone was trying to pass off as living quarters. Once inside the building, his nightmares got worse as roaches reigned free. The stench burned his nostrils. The sounds made a seasoned soldier like him jerk and jump.

Inside her apartment was no better. His stomach hurt and the scars at his back tugged to think that they’d been living in this filth. The apartment was mostly bare. Other than a few toys littered around the room, there was only a mattress laid atop a box spring on the floor. Clothes were spilling out of a worn suitcase. A small square television sat on a metal chair, bunny ears protruding from the top at odd angles.

“Gather up everything,” Xavier instructed Carlos.

Xavier tried to keep his face nonjudgmental, but he was judging. She’d rather live like this than reach out to him? He turned to Cassie. She was rocking Alex who was wavering between waking up and falling back to sleep.

“Do your parents know you live here?” he asked.

“I don’t know where my parents are.” Her gaze never left the child whose eyes finally decided to close instead of remain open. Alex settled back in the crook of her mother’s neck and began breathing evenly and softly. “We haven’t spoken since Alex was born. Last I heard, they left town out of shame for their unwed daughter who got knocked up by a forked-tongue sinner.”

Her head was high in defiance, but her shoulders looked like they would break if just one more piece of straw landed on them. Xavier decided not to fight her perceptions of him right now. He’d have them too if he’d had to live like this.

He had had to live in his own version of hell these past four years. War had taken a pound of flesh from him.

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