Read Roundabout Road (Saving the Sinners of Preacher's Bend Book 2) for Free Online

with a truck?” He picked up his glass and quickly set it back down
with a thud. Some of the water spilled over the top. To dare drink any would
have been foolish.
    “Where the hell have you been, Liddy?” He couldn’t help
but hiss his words through his clenched teeth, shaming a viper’s tongue.
“Forget how to use a telephone? Perhaps finally remember where it was you’d
lived most of your life? Stuff like that?”
    “There wasn’t time,” she admitted—ruefully.
    She suddenly looked sad and confused.
    Tough shit! He didn’t care if she burst into a flaming
waterfall of tears, blew a fuse, or killed someone. He was pissed.
    “Hell and damnation, Woman! There is always time. Damn
plenty of it, as a matter of fact.”
    Jake could feel the heat in his face; the shift in the
universe; a cosmic fluctuation he’d been unprepared for. This meant his anger
was surfacing faster than he expected.
    His eyes turned to hers, narrowing. “Ten years is a
whole helluva lot of time, Liddy. A two year stint in the county jail is a
lot of time !” He ground his teeth harder on that particular. “A man
trapped inside a personal hell, while said wife off running about the globe
with not a care in the world . . . is a lot of time, Liddy! Not seeing my wife
for years and then having her coming back here, today, with no good reason
other than she wants me to sign something? Fuck, Liddy! I would say time
is being quite cruel to me. For you to think otherwise is, was, and will always
be bloody damn selfish.”
    His jaw clamped together to hold the rest of what he
truly desired to speak to her in for as long as was possible. “And while we’re
at it, it’s a hell of stint for a man not to being having sex!”
    Jake rolled his eyes at what he’d suddenly admitted, unwittingly—aloud.
He then pinned his gaze to his estranged wife and held fast.
    “There was always time, Liddy. Yet not much of it had you
ever spent wisely.”
    She was about to speak but he wasn’t done.
    “And if anyone cares to ask, I’d say you’re the one
who wasted the most of it while we’d been together.”
    Liddy’s gasp ricocheted off the café walls.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    Liddy had nearly spat out her quickly taken sip of
coffee right in his face. Inwardly she wondered when Jake Giotti had gotten so
all-fired philosophical.Time spent wisely? This, coming from a man with
a snake tattoo on his friggin` arm, and who’d slept with another woman— many women?
    Liddy was trying to separate the good from the bad, and
getting nowhere but on the path to an enormous headache.
    Jake leaned forward, whispered his next and fatal
thought in her face. “You didn’t know, did you?”
    “What? Know that you spent time in jail?”
    Sharpening the blade to better cut him with, she
purposefully brought up his jail time, knowing it was mean, but she couldn’t
help doing it. Yeah! She knew. It ate at her soul. But she knew.
    Liddy knew all about the DUI charges against Jake.
What happened to him afterwards, and wasn’t a pretty picture to look at, even
in recall. If not, Theodora Rosebud had been more than willing to fill in the
blanks. Bitch day . Remember ?
    Jake smiled across the table, almost devilishly. Then
he frowned as if to do so was paining him. His liquid mercury gaze drilled
straight into the depths of her eyes—right through her soul, plowing her over
at ninety miles an hour.
    “No Liddy. That I have not had sex for ten very long years.”
    Her eyes widened even more so, perhaps in utter
surprise to him lying to her face.
    Shocked he would bring up his sex-life wasn’t the
exact word she’d been searching for, or would have ever used to describe her feelings
about the still painful hurt, but it was relatively close. Actually suspended in
time, she’d momentarily been set to speechlessness.
    The bases at explaining the actual moment this man told
her about his lack of sex was pretty much covered. Jesus! Jack and sex were
hand in hand—two peas in