Crazy on You Read Online Free Page B

enough to the truth.
    She blinked. “Oh.” She tilted her head to one side and a wrinkle pulled her brows as if she were suddenly trying to place him in her memory. “You work the night shift at the meat packing plant? I worked there for a few weeks about five years ago.”
    “No.” He dribbled the ball a few times and waited.
    “Hmm.” Her brow smoothed and she turned to go. “I’ve got to see to Pip. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Matthews.”
    “We met last night.”
    She turned back and once again her brows were drawn.
    “I pulled you over for inattentive driving.”
    Her lips parted. “That was you?”
    “Yeah.” He shook his head. “You’re a shitty driver, Lily.”
    “You’re a sheriff?”
    “Deputy.”
    “That explains the tragic pants.”
    He looked down at his dark brown trousers with the beige stipe up the outside legs. “You don’t think they’re hot.”
    She shook her head. “Sorry.”
    He tossed her the ball and she caught it. “Tell Pippen that if he cuts me a break tomorrow morning, I’ll teach him how to slam dunk tomorrow afternoon around four.”
    “I’ll tell him.”
    “You’re not afraid I’m a pervert?”
    “Pippen knows he can’t leave the yard without telling me or his grandma.” She shrugged. “And you already know I’m licensed to carry concealed. I’ve got a Beretta 9mm subcompact.” She stuck the ball under one arm. “Just so you know.”
    “Nice.” He managed not to laugh. “But are you bragging or threatening a law officer?”
    “Pippen’s daddy isn’t really in the picture. I’m all he’s got and it’s my job to make sure he’s safe and happy.”
    “He’s lucky to have you.”
    “I’m lucky to have him.”
    Tucker watched her go, then turned and walked back to his house. Only one person in his entire life had made sure he was safe. His grandmother Betty. If he thought hard, he could recall the touch of her soft hand on his head and back. But Betty had died three days after Tucker turned five.
    He moved into his kitchen and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. His mother had split when he was a baby and he had no memory of her. Just photographs. He didn’t know who his father was and doubted his mother had ever known. She’d finally killed herself with a drug cocktail when Tucker was three. As a kid, he’d wondered about her; wondered what his life would have been like if she hadn’t been an addict. As an adult, he just felt disgust—disgust for a woman who cared more about drugs than her son.
    He turned off the television on his way to his bedroom and kicked off his shoes. After Betty’s death, he’d been shipped off to aunts who didn’t want or care about him; and by the time he turned ten, he was turned over to the state of Michigan and shuffled through the foster care system.
    He took off his pants and tossed them into the hamper he used for dry cleaning. No one had wanted to adopt a ten-year-old with his history and bad attitude. He’d spent most of the years between the ages of ten and sixteen in and out of foster homes and juvenile court, which finally landed him in a halfway house run by a retired Vietnam vet. Elias Peirce had been a no-bullshit hard-ass with strict rules. But he’d been fair. The first time Tucker had given him lip, he gave Tucker an old cane-back chair and a pack of sandpaper. “Make it as smooth as a baby’s backside,” he’d barked. It had taken him a week, but after his daily homework and chores were done, Tucker sanded until the chair felt like silk beneath his hands. Following the chair, he’d made a bookcase and a small table.
    Tucker couldn’t say that he and Elias Peirce had been as close as father and son, but he changed Tucker’s life and never treated him like a throwaway kid. Elias made him work out the pent-up anger and aggression just below his skin in a constructive way.
    Tucker didn’t like to talk about his past—didn’t really talk about his life. During the course of normal