Chapter 5

      DELTA WORTH DIDN’T THINK there WAS any job in the world more boring than keeping a business’s books, and she’d been doing Headlights’ accounting long enough to hold stock in her own opinion.

      Oh, she took the occasional break to schedule employee work hours and meet with restaurant vendors hawking their wares. But since she did it all from her small windowless office tucked between the kitchen and the restrooms, the breaks in her routine didn’t feel like breaks at all.

      And it didn’t help that she was still working up to seven days a week with her estranged husband a closed door away.

      Pushing out of her chair, she circled the desk to the corner file cabinet where she jammed the folder of reconciled bank statements into its top drawer slot, breaking one of the nails she’d just had done at Lila’s in the process. She and Eddie were going to have to resolve this thing between them—and soon.

      Not only could she not afford the abuse to her manicure, she didn’t want to spend more time than she had to living in her daughter’s apartment—and she was quite sure Cardin was ready to get away from the house she’d already moved out of once.

      Living with Eddie and Jeb for eighteen years would be enough for any young girl. Delta had made it twenty-six years before she couldn’t take it anymore—though if Aubrey Davis hadn’t turned her whole family end over end, she would likely have stayed until the Mississippi ran dry. And probably to her own detriment, she mused with no small amount of self-deprecation.

      Grabbing their produce supplier’s vendor file and returning to her chair, she forced herself to admit she was as set in her ways as the men in her family; more than once she’d wondered how much of the trait was inherent personality, and how much she could blame on having married into the Worths.

      A knock on her door stopped her from doing more with the folder than setting it on her desk. “Come in.”

      Ah, Eddie. The last person she wanted to see. He tossed his hand towel over his shoulder, and leaned against her door jamb, arms and ankles crossed. The noise from the dining room flooded her small office, but asking Eddie to close the door meant he would have to move.

      And she’d been lying to herself when she said he was the last person she wanted to see.

      Looking at him now—his blue eyes bright, his black hair too long, his beard stubble way too sexy—had her stomach tumbling just as powerfully as it had the day he’d walked up to her at the Speedway, and licked her cone’s melted ice cream from her thumb.

      She dropped into her chair, hating that he was her weakness.

      “Why are you here, D? It’s Sunday. Your day off.”

      Thanks. Way to rub salt in the wound of her having no life since she’d left him. “I had a few things I wanted to catch up on before tomorrow.”

      Eddie frowned, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. “What’s going on tomorrow?”

      “It’s Monday,” she reminded him, resisting the urge to get up and smooth her thumb from the fringe of his lashes to his temple. “Monday’s always insane. You know that.”

      “I do,” he said, pushing away from the door and closing it behind him. The chatter from outside was silenced, and the room became a cocoon. “I also know you’ve been here too many weekends lately. What gives?”

      He grabbed for the only other chair in the office—a molded plastic waiting room number—stepped around it, straddled the seat, and took it over. That’s what had gotten to her all those years ago. The way he took over. A chair, a conversation, an ice cream cone.

      There was no way she was going to tell him she was here because he was. He’d take over then and demand she come home.

      “Am I hearing you right? Eddie Worth questioning an employee for putting in extra hours?” She crossed her arms, crossed her legs, sat stiffly in her seat.

      Eddie spread his legs and slouched farther in his. “You’re not an employee, D. You’re family, and you know it.”

      She was a Worth in name only, one who had moved out and left her husband because she couldn’t take his silences—or his rage—anymore.

      “Did you want something, Eddie?” Besides to sit there and make it hard to remember how bad things were?

      “Yeah, actually. It’s Cardin. She’s out back.”

      He wasn’t worried, so Delta knew there was no reason for her to be. “And?”

      “With Whip Davis.”

      Ah, well, now she understood why Eddie was here. God forbid their daughter become involved with a Davis. Though to be honest, Delta wasn’t overjoyed with the news. She wanted better for Cardin than a life spent on the road, a life not her own, but Whip’s.

      “If you’re worried, why aren’t you out there playing chaperone?” she finally asked, realizing she’d been lost in thought way too long, and Eddie had been staring at her all the while.

      “Because Cardin’s twenty-five, making Whip twenty-seven, and I remember being that age.”

      What he meant was he remembered being seventeen and not even out of high school, and then by eighteen, both a husband and a father. “Are you more concerned with their privacy, or with the embarrassment of catching your daughter in flagrante delicto?”

      “Up against the Dumpster in broad daylight?” Eddie shook his head, snorting an incredulity Delta didn’t buy. “I hope we taught her better than that.”

      “Oh, Eddie.” Frustration squeezed her like a too tight belt. “It doesn’t matter what we taught her. Hell, if kids listened to what their parents said, Cardin wouldn’t even be here.” She paused, added, “Or maybe your memory of being that age isn’t so great after all?”

      His eyes flared with heat, then grew smoky, smoldering as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his fists bracing his chin. “I have the memory of ten thousand elephants, D. I haven’t forgotten a thing.”

      That made two of them, and was the reason this conversation was now at an end.

      She looked down at the folder she’d completely mangled, and at a second fingernail that was now a mess, and tried to find a thought that didn’t have the remembered imprint of Eddie’s hands and mouth all over it.

      She had absolutely zero luck, so couldn’t have been more appreciative of the interruption when Cardin opened the door.

      “Mom, I need to change my schedule—” Cardin cut herself off and careened to a stop, her ponytail flying, her face flushed. “Dad. What’re you doing here?”

      “He’s worried about the company you’re keeping,” Delta answered before Eddie could say a word.

      Cardin looked