“Well, I hope you’re right.”
“Guess we’ll find out,” I said with an unconcerned shrug.
A half hour later, Chase pulled the Porsche up in front of my childhood home. He parked on the street and jogged around to my side. I practically skipped up the sidewalk with Chase on my arm.
I turned the doorknob to the unlocked house and called out, “Mom! I’m home.”
“Oh, Harley?” she asked, a note of panic in her voice. She hurried out of the kitchen with a flush on her cheeks.
“Mom. This is Chase.” I gestured to him. “Chase, my mom, Tanya.”
“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am.”
“I didn’t expect you home.” Her eyes jumped between me and Chase.
She was acting weird. And I didn’t know what that was about. It couldn’t be Chase.
“Is everything all right?”
“Oh, sure. Yes.”
Then, a figure I never wanted to see again strolled out of the kitchen.
“Owen,” I said in disbelief.
What in the fuck was my dad doing here? Not only was I no contact. So were all my brothers. He hadn’t been at Jordan’s wedding. Even Whitt had cut him out. And as far as I knew, so had my mom.
“Hey, honey,” he said with a charismatic smile, as if nothing at all was amiss.
And maybe he could have pulled it off, but my mom couldn’t.
“Mom?” I asked. “What the hell?”
“It’s fine, honey. Your dad just came by to say hello.”
Sure.
Hello.
I highly doubted that. Especially since I knew that my mom, for some unknown reason, still loved the man. She’d given him her whole heart, and he’d abused it to the point where she couldn’t ever leave. She was too enamored with him. And I hated it.
“This must be your young man,” my mom said in a high-pitched voice. “I was telling your dad that you were out on a date.”
But Owen was looking at Chase with narrowed eyes.
“Chase Sinclair,” he said as if placing Chase’s face with a name.
My heart sank.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
This was a disaster. A total fucking disaster. Owen couldn’t know who he was. He couldn’t know him from Lubbock. He couldn’t know the Sinclair-Wright rivalry that had been alive over the last decade. He just couldn’t.
This would ruin everything.
“Yes, sir,” Chase said.