Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

Behind her, Yancey slammed the door hard enough to crack the lower corner of the insert glass where it had always been loose. "Shit." He pointed toward the door. "That's coming out of Spencer's pocket."

Jeanne lifted her chin, prepared to play peacemaker when she wished for once she could simply drop this weight on her husband's shoulders. She was so tired of this friction. She so wanted to be absolved of the need to erase it. "Don't be silly. It's been loose forever, and that was an accident."

He jerked out his chair from beneath the table and dropped into it, knees spread, elbows on his uniformed thighs, and stared at the floor. "How the hell we managed to raise a boy who doesn't know the meaning of obedience or respect or responsibility is beyond me."

"He most certainly understands all of those. And you know it." She returned to her own chair, sat facing her husband. "You also know that you butted heads with your own father more than a few times in your life."

Yancey looked up, lifted one brow. "Hopefully when Spencer is my age, he'll have the same twenty-twenty hindsight I do and admit that I was right."

"About Candy?"

"About everything."

Jeanne couldn't help but smile. "So all these years later, you're finally going to admit Clive Munroe wasn't out of his mind to keep you from moving to Nashville to sing for your supper?"

Snorting, Yancey rolled his eyes. "I would've figured that out on my own."

"Just like Spencer will eventually figure out where his relationship with Candy fits."

"We don't have time for him to be jacking around with that girl." He brought his fist down on the table. "You know as well as I do he's not thinking with the right head."

Jeanne refused to speak about sex and her son. "Actually, Candy may not be the problem with his thinking."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"It's about your missing Jase Bremmer. Spencer and his buddies are seriously thinking about postponing school for a year to work the Bremmer ranch for the boy's father."

Yancey's nostrils flared. "Oh no he's not."

She nodded. "Oh yes he is. He wants to be more than a good football player. He wants to be a good person."

"What kind of nonsense is that?"

Jeanne reached for her husband's hands, so large, so cal-lused, his nails always so jagged, and stroked her thumbs over his palms, keeping her gaze cast down as she spoke. "Is this our fault, Yancey? By moving here? Is it my fault for running away?"

He immediately softened. "Oh, honey, no." He leaned forward in his chair, wrapped her in his arms and pulled her almost into his lap. "Why would you say something like that? Why would you think something like that?"

"Because we might have given him a better life if we'd stayed in Dallas," she said, burying her face in the comforting crook of his neck.

"There's not a thing wrong with the life we've given that boy. We've been the best parents we could be." Yancey paused, stiffened. "Unless I haven't been the father he deserved."

This time, Jeanne was the one to pull away. She took Yancey's face in her hands and cradled his cheeks. "You've been a perfect father. Spencer couldn't have been brought up to be the man he is by anyone else. And don't you ever tell yourself anything different."

There was no way Neva was going to be able to fall asleep. Absolutely no way. She didn't know what he wanted, didn't know why he was here. She didn't know what she'd been thinking inviting him to stay.

It didn't matter that she still had his gun tucked safely away with hers. A gun wouldn't protect her. Not when what she was feeling was more about exposure, of her feelings, of her past, of the present, which had turned into the biggest mess she'd ever been in in her life.

When she claimed not to harbor girls from Earnestine these days, she was telling the truth. When she denied knowing what had become of the ones who had gone missing, the truth she told was more painful. She should've known. She should've been able to follow them, to map their journey from the moment they left her care until they reached the end of their journey.

She feared the leak in her network was going to put her out of business. And that Mick Savin was a part of that. That he was law enforcement, looking for evidence in order to charge her with harboring runaway minors on multiple occasions, resulting in multiple counts and multiple convictions. She didn't consider herself a martyr by any means, and she had no desire to become one by going to prison.

Rolling out from between her sheets, she tiptoed to her bedroom door. Her room was above the guest room, and the last thing she wanted to do was wake her guest. In the past, a warm bath had often cured her insomnia.

Tonight she had a feeling she was going to have to add a mug of hot chocolate milk and a handful of whatever drowsiness-inducing, over-the-counter meds she could find in the house. And even then she doubted any sleep she managed would be worth the effort of closing her eyes.

Since Liberty Mitchell had shown up at the Barn a week ago, Neva hadn't been sleeping much at all. She'd been waiting for the other shoe to fall, for the girl's real story to unfold. Looking at herself now in the oval mirror hanging above the bathroom's pedestal sink, she knew a bath wasn't going to get her anywhere but wet. There was too much going on in her eyes and the dark circles beneath.

In her white tank top, white gym socks, and baggy gray sleeping shorts, she padded her whisper-soft way downstairs and into the kitchen, only pausing at the first floor hallway long enough to listen for sounds coming from the guest room. She heard none, which made a