Last Good Man (A Crown Creek Standalone) by Theresa Leigh

Author:Theresa Leigh [Leigh, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LuxLife Publishing

* * *

Chapter

Chapter Twenty-Five

Willa

It was bigger than the pictures Liam used to show me. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t have the imagination required to come up with a house like this. It would have been easy for me to believe the Mulligans had bought someplace new. But when the motion lights had snapped on, I saw the deep gash hacked deep into the wood by the side of the basement entry.

“I told him I had no idea how it got there,” Liam had confessed. He’d come over to use the wheezing, ancient laptop he’d lent me freshman year and had just finished sending off a very long email. He snapped it shut and then leaned back, lacing his fingers on top of his head. He’d smirked when he saw me staring at him. “Stop looking at me like that. He’s never going to find out.”

“Are you sure?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t like it, Liam. Your dad…”

“I’m already taller than my dad by five inches,” he’d spat. “Beating the crap out of me to turn me into the son he’d always wanted isn’t going to work anymore.” He hissed with such vehemence I had no problem imagining him sinking the ax head deep into the side of his father’s beloved “cabin.”

And now I was here, seeing that same mark six years later. I wondered why Bill Mulligan had let it stay there this long. A man that fastidious about image, that concerned about putting forth the perfect front at all times shouldn’t have been okay with letting a mark like that go for so long.

Unless? Unless he’d never noticed it.

I was making a note to tell Liam since I knew he’d probably take some perverse pride in knowing it was still there, when Cooper butted into my thoughts.

“Liam never took you here?”

He hadn’t. I told him that. But he didn’t seem to want to believe me. And every version of the truth - that I was looking at the ax mark - would lead me down a path I couldn’t go. He’d want to know why Liam was angry enough with his father to do something so drastic. Then he’d figure out that in order to do that, Liam would have had to be here without his parents. Which meant I’d have to dance around who he was with.

The strangest part was, I kept trying to tell Cooper. But no matter what angle I approached it from, I still couldn’t find a way around to tell him without betraying a promise I’d made a long time ago.

So I kept silent. Which pissed him off even more.

And as much as I hated doing that, at least then it was over. He went stalking up the steps by the side deck, leaving me behind. Which was fine. I was fine, after all. I didn’t even need to be here with him. This was silly.

The main entryway was at the end of a long, low staircase made of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.