“This is the wrong decision,” Clinton whispered.
“No,” Chace did not whisper. “Your boys are runnin’ so scared at the same time thinkin’ their money and position can buy them anything, they haven’t been payin’ attention. Your first move is against Ty and Lexie, you’ll create a shit storm so extreme it’ll never blow over. Not only is Ty Walker a man who has taken enough and is not about to take any more and will do what he’s gotta do to protect himself, his wife and the family they’re makin’, he’s a man who’s got some serious power at his back. He stubs his toe and it looks suspect, the full force of the media, Samuel Sterling and whoever Sterling can round up will be all over your asses. I got their back and I’ll have it any way I have to have it even if it means throwin’ myself on my sword. Think of that in your strategy sessions. And since I’m handin’ out advice, Darren Newcomb is a racist asswipe, dirty cop who beat his wife so badly, the only play he gave her was for her to leave him and her kids. But he loves his daughter. He’ll go down for her. You fuck with him and any chance he has to help his daughter beat that shit eatin’ away at her, he’ll make it ugly. So counsel your boys to take on a new charity and learn to hope Newcomb doesn’t get greedy. You see his daughter through that shit, deal with him after. He deserves it. His daughter does not.”
“I’ll take this under advisement and share it with my colleagues.”
“Good call.”
“But you haven’t addressed the matter of your mother.”
Chace couldn’t beat it back this time and sucked in breath.
If his mother knew about his father, it’d kill her.
She’d been a beauty her whole life, even now, at age sixty. She came from money, had been spoiled but it didn’t make her like Misty, grasping and entitled. Nothing could beat his mother’s sweet. It was how she was because it was who she was.
She loved and adored her son.
She loved and worshiped her husband.
Trane Keaton was a lot of things and not one of them was good. Except the fact that in his sick way, he felt the same about his wife. Like Chace, he handled her with care, like she was exactly what she was, a delicate, fragile thing who gave nothing to the world but beauty.
But she wasn’t perfect precisely because she was fragile. The kind of fragile it took medication to strengthen or it would come flying apart. The kind of fragile that, before the meds and even sometimes after them, led to episodes that were at best unpleasant and at worst, especially when he was a kid, terrifying.
Fuck, she’d had a bad break that put her into treatment after reading an article about a little girl who’d been kidnapped, molested and murdered. As terrible as that shit was, she totally couldn’t deal.
Finding out her husband was unfaithful to her repeatedly throughout their marriage and how would end her.
Chace knew that. His father knew that. But it was Chace knowing it that bought them his cooperation, until he couldn’t stomach cooperating anymore because he couldn’t even look in his own eyes in the mirror.
His threat to tell her had been a bluff at the time and Clinton knew it. But now, as he had when he made the decision to approach Internal Affairs and offer to assist in exposing the corruption in Carnal, Chace had to weigh his mother’s mental health against the well-being of an entire town.
And he loved her a fuckuva lot.
But Ty and Lexie Walker had been through enough in their lives and they had a baby on the way.
Just they tipped the scales.
The rest sent them crashing.
“You force my hand, I’ll do what I have to do. I do what I have to do, I’ll deal with the fallout but you will deal with my father,” Chace replied.
Again, Clinton’s shades stayed locked to Chace’s eyes.
Then he murmured, “Please step away.”
“I will, I get your assurances I don’t see you again or hear from any of your crew of assholes.”
“I cannot guarantee that, Chace.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Chace whispered.
Clinton continued to hold his eyes long moments before he requested quietly, “I’m asking you to step back.”
Chace drew in breath at the same time he realized he couldn’t do what he very much would like to do. Use his fists to provide Clinton Bonar with the experience Darren Newcomb’s daughter was very familiar with and that was a prolonged hospital stay.
His only play was to step back and walk away.
So he stepped back and walked away. The direction he walked was toward the library.
“This isn’t finished,” Clinton warned his back.
“It never is,” Chace muttered, not knowing if Clinton could hear him and not giving a fuck if he could.