Read Online Unhinged by Timberlyn Scott - Free Book Online Page A

hurried through the meal,
excusing myself without his permission and hiding out in the garage attached to
the guesthouse. This one was mine, the one place I spent hours and hours alone.
It gave me time to think, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing sometimes.
    As though they knew I
didn’t need to be left to my own devices, ten minutes after I’d started
tinkering with my Camaro, Leif and Toby showed up. My two closest friends tried
to convince me to go out to the sports bar that we generally went to on
Thursday nights, but I declined. I had too much shit to do — which translated
to: I didn’t want to be around people .
    They were my closest friends
and it was true, when I wasn’t working, I was usually hanging with them. That’s
what friends did.
    After I had refused to
go out, Leif and Toby decided to stick around, snatching two beers from the
refrigerator and planting their asses on the tailgate of my truck. We were
talking about the new big block engine I was working on when my father made an
appearance.
    Standing to my full
height, I put my hand on the edge of the Camaro’s open hood and stared at him.
    “I wanted to make sure
you were planning to be at the party tomorrow night,” Conrad stated in that
authoritative tone that he generally used on his employees.
    He almost made it sound
as though I had a choice. I knew better.
    “Busy. But y’all should
have a grand ol’ time,” I replied sarcastically, glancing back at the engine.
    “You will be there.”
    That’s more like it. I
knew it hadn’t been a request.
    “Why? Why the hell
would you even want me there?” I turned my full attention on him then, noticing
out of the corner of my eye that Leif and Toby were watching us intently.
    “I want to unveil the
new concept car.”
    “It’s not ready,” I
informed him, as though he didn’t already know that.
    “But it will be.”
    “Not by tomorrow it
won’t,” I argued.
    “Maybe not. But it will
be soon. I want to announce it, see if we have any potential buyers.”
    I should have been used
to this shit. It wasn’t the first time Conrad pushed a deadline on me. In
return, he should have realized by now that the harder he pushed, the harder I
pushed back.
    “I’m busy.”
    “You’ll be there,” he repeated
more sternly.
    I could see the
discomfort on Leif’s and Toby’s faces and I knew that I needed to chill. My
father and I were notorious for going to blows whenever we engaged in
conversation and more than once, my friends had been caught in the crossfire. I
knew how uncomfortable it was. Hell, I lived this life. No one knew it better
than me.
    “Fine,” I snapped,
dropping the hood on the Camaro as a punctuation mark on my temper.
    “Black tie. Seven
o’clock.”
    I nodded, keeping my
mouth shut for fear of what I might say. I didn’t want to go to one of his
stupid fucking parties. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the assholes that he
called friends. A few people knew who I was, but the rest of them had no clue.
How Conrad had managed to do that all these years, I still didn’t know. I
didn’t want to know.
    If I had to guess, he
had paid them off the same way he paid me off. At fourteen, when they were
laying your mother in the ground and throwing dirt over her casket, you did
what you had to do to survive. You see, my mother died in a car accident. She
was T-boned by a drunk driver, or so the story went. Since the driver had fled
the scene, no one really knew that to be true. She died on impact, and after
losing her, I hadn’t been right in the head.
    Still wasn’t.
    I survived the
overwhelming grief of losing the only person who loved me by blackmailing
Conrad Trovato.
    A paternity test proved
that he was my father, although part of me had always hoped my mother had been
wrong. Considering he was the only man she’d been with before I was born, it
was a little difficult for her to make that shit up.
    I’d been backed into a
corner with only two options. The state