Page 62 of Hideaway Whirlwind
“Calm down, Berenson,” Cooke says, backing away toward Lopez with her hand on her service weapon.
“I am calm,” I bark, cracking my neck side to side, trying to think of a way out of this where I don’t get sent back to prison for shooting an officer or two.
“Bull—” Sheriff coughs. “You tell them to come out here right now.” When I start cracking my knuckles, he says, “I’m giving them to the count of three, and if they’re not down herebefore I get to zero, I’m going to haul you off on suspicion of—”
“Of what?” Birdie asks, standing at the top of the stairs with Kendall crushed to her front, resting atop her baby bump that’s grown even more obvious in the last few weeks since we met. Dustin and Sydney poke their heads out from behind her, clutching her legs. Birdie’s nostrils flare when she glares at Sheriff with disdain. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
Sheriff goes white as a sheet. “Your accent…You’re from out of state?”
Birdie lifts her chin in confirmation.
“You didn’t, by any chance, hitch a ride to Texas with one of the Berenson Trucking boys…say, with Elliott…did you?” he asks, sliding his eyes to me briefly.
“Something like that,” she says, growing impatient with his questioning, continuing to glare.
“And those are your kids?” he asks, mouthing as he counts them.
“They’re ours,” I growl, wanting his eyes on me so he doesn’t look at them too closely.
“Oh, gotdang it all to fudging heck!” Sheriff rushes to unbuckle his duty belt and tosses it to Cooke to catch.
“What are you doing?” Cooke asks uneasily, trying to hand it back, but he won’t take it.
“I told them last time I can’t take any more.” Sheriff roughly yanks apart his uniform top, the buttons flying. He balls the material after wrenching it off his shoulders, throwing it at her, too. “Consider this the official start of my retirement. You’re in charge, now. I’m out of here.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Cooke says, her color draining too. When Sheriff charges through the foyer, shefollows him out and yells, “You can’t just leave!” And when he doesn’t stop to reconsider, leaping off the porch and running to his cruiser, she gives chase, throwing the belt and uniform at Sheriff, but he dodges so that they land with a splat in the muck.
Green slides up next to me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, then nods at the door. “Uh…I’m gonna go.” He motions to Lopez to follow him, her long, dark brown hair secured in a thick braid past her shoulders. She gives me a witheringI’m keeping my eye on youglare when she passes.
When they take off, Russell stands with me at the open door, watching the three deputies try to corral Sheriff between them before Sheriff feints left like he’s the star running back on a football team and flat out starts sprinting down the driveway.
“This town is so weird,” Birdie mutters with evident exhaustion, making me leap out of my skin because I hadn’t heard her come down the stairs.
“Yup. Welcome to our slice of Texas,” Russell says, closing the door and leaning back against it. “Now, what the eff are we going to do?”
Chapter 25
Teagan
Elliott paces the living room, Sydney having cried herself to sleep in his arms, despite all the arguing that has increasingly grown louder since the deputies drove off thirty minutes ago and a tow truck came to get the Sheriff’s cruiser, what with the Sheriff still being unaccounted for. I hadn’t expected everyone else to stay, having bizarrely already been accepted into their tight-knit, protective group, and I’ve worked to memorize their names at last.
Goldie points at me while yelling at Elliott, “She’s coming home with us!”
“Then I’m coming, too,” Elliott says in a deep, rumbling voice, simple as that.
She scoffs. “Heck no, you’re not! After what you did last night—”
Elliott says, “They’re my family. Where they go, I go, and no one is going to stop me.”
Goldie’s voice is shrill when she says, “Just because you two kissed and made up—”
“Bet that’s not all they did,” Wyatt says with a laugh thatgarners him a curl of Goldie’s upper lip and a light swat across his belly from the back of Dolly’s hand, though she’s suppressing a laugh, too.
Goldie continues, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to let Teagan—”
“Let me?” I ask incredulously, emphasizing those two syllables when I cut her off, extricating myself from between Dustin and Kendall on the couch, where most of the other children have fallen asleep. “It’s not up to you to ‘let me’ do anything.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” she says with a tired groan, pressing the heel of her palms into her eyes.
