Page 26 of Silver-Tongued Devil
“Right, then.” He sat his butt down on the curb and stuck his long legs out into the street. “Sit down and lay it on me.”
Karen McCallister was across the street watering her window boxes and staring at them. Dakota didn’t want to have this conversation here. On the other hand, she was the one who’d walked out of the privacy of her backyard.Russell’sbackyard. And it felt so much better to be mad at Blake than to think about what Russell had said. Thinking about that made her throat close up tight and her chest hurt.
She sat down a good foot away from him, which made her skirt ride up, which she tried not to care about, and said, “He got hurt on your job. Painting your Sundays over in Coeur d’Alene.”
“He told me that.” Blake still sounded so calm, she wanted to hit him. “But that was all he’d say. I was going to check it out on Monday.”
“Sure you were.”
He exhaled. “I don’t have to prove myself to you, you know. Think what you want. Why is that my fault? The project’s fault? Didn’t OSHA investigate it—an injury that bad?”
“Sure they did. And everybody lied up and down. Said Russell had changed the planned rigging of the scaffolding himself, because he wanted to get it done faster, because he was in a hurry.”
“And that wasn’t true, I’m guessing. Wasn’t your… his… your company, whatever it is, the contractor on the job?”
“No. He and Evan were working that job for the company you hired instead.”
“Which was…”
“Sawyer Contracting. Steve Sawyer.” Even saying the name made her shoulders tense up.
“The guy who had the contract for the painting on the resort at first,” Blake said. “I wondered if I’d been too much of a micromanager on that one. I don’t usually supervise this close. I haven’t been able to.” It sounded like he was talking to himself. “You can’t be a football player and a hands-on CEO.”
“You can make decisions, though,” Dakota said. “I know you can. Like that there’s a bonus for on-time and under-budget, and never mind how that happens.”
“I never said ‘Never mind how that happens.’ I don’t say that.”
“Well, that’s nice for you.” She was getting agitated again. He was socalm.But it wasn’thisstepfather. It wasn’thislife. “Nice to have your hands clean. Russell would never have taken that job. He knew what Steve was like to work for, but they needed the hours. Evan’s girlfriend was pregnant, and the winter’s always slow. So they took it, and Steve cut every corner he could, because that’s the kind of contractor he is, but the client doesn’t care if he’s cheaper. And do you know what? Do you realize one thing?”
“Uh… no,” he said. “Not until you tell me.”
She stood up again. She couldn’t stay sitting down. And he stood up with her like he was some kind of gentleman. Like your manners mattered if you ran a company that way. “Evan was supposed to be up there. Russell went up high himselfbecausehe didn’t trust that scaffolding.”
“Why didn’t he say something at the time, then?”
“He did. Of course he did. And nobody cared, and they needed the work. So Russell went up there instead of Evan, because Evan’s girlfriend was pregnant, and because Russell’s that man. You must have seen that he’s that man. And Russell was the one who fell. He’s the one who’s still hurting, and he’d still tell you that at least it was him and not Evan.” The tears were standing in her eyes, but she didn’t care. “He’s lucky if the physical therapist even shows up. I keep thinking that there’s something else they could do, because he hurts so much, but I can’t get anyone to listen, because it’s workers’ comp, and everybody knows that everyone getting those payments is a scammer who doesn’t want to work. They wouldn’t even give him hundred-percent disability, because he can still walk. He can still use his hands. But what good does that do if he can’t paint, and he can’t sit, and he hurts that much, and he won’t even take pain pills?”
Blake was silent for a long time. “But you weren’t there.”
“So what? Sowhat?You mean Russell lied? And Evan lied, and Steve Sawyer told the truth? Like he’s told the truth about everything else he’s done, all the way back to high school? Like it didn’t really happen, and the other person’s lying anyway because she’s out to get him?”
“Wait, what? What does high school have to do with it? Who’s ‘she?’ You? I didn’t say Russell lied. I meant, you weren’t there. You weren’t working with them.”
She hauled herself back under control. Not all the way, because that was impossible, but closer. “No. I came home from Portland after Russ got hurt, and I took over for a while. Until he was back on his feet, I thought it would be. Able to retire on that disability. And that’s when I found out that he’d gotten behind on the mortgage, too, when I opened the letter from the bank. And I couldn’t help with that if I had to pay my own rent, especially not in Portland. I couldn’t just leave him here to… I don’t even know what. What would he have done? Where would he have gone? And you can say he hadn’t saved enough. You can say whatever rich people say who have no idea what it’s like.”
Blake was still just standing there frowning at her. “So you stayed. You moved back in and stayed. What did you do for work in Portland?”
She took a couple more breaths and tried to dial it back. When you raged, the other person stopped listening. The louder you talked, the less they could hear. She knew that, but it was so hard. “Same thing as here. I painted. I worked with Russ during the summers in high school and learned how, and after that, I moved. I didn’t want to stay in town, because… because I didn’t. I’ve got an eye for… for color. I moved where there was more money and more big old houses that people like to paint more creatively, where they’d pay more for what I did. And then, after my brother died…” She had to stop again.
“Riley,” Blake said. The green in his eyes was showing now, his gaze as direct as it had been in Russell’s bedroom, but the way she felt under that gaze was completely different.
“I stayed a while.” The words came out too jerky. “And then I left again.”
“Until he got hurt.”
“That’s it.”
Blake wasn’t looking at her now. He had a thumb hooked in his waistband and was gazing into the distance. Toward where, Dakota saw with a quick glance, Karen McCallister was still watering, probably drowning her plants.
