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

That was okay with Yancey. The boy was helping out a man in need and that was as good as going to church in his book. But then this morning, Monday morning, and the trash, and there wasn't much good at all in what Yancey had found.

He wasn't trained in forensics but he knew enough to differentiate between a slice and a rip or a tear. The garments had been stabbed or slit, and that brought to mind too much of what had happened to Jeanne almost twenty years ago.

He wasn't going to sit back and have Spencer disrespecting, mistreating, or harming any woman. He wanted to date Candy Roman, the boy would damn well be a gentleman about what they did together. Rough play was one thing. The blade of a knife was another.

At the sound of Spencer's heavy boots pounding down the stairs, Yancey palmed his coffee mug and looked up. "Your mother's still sleeping. You might want to keep the noise down."

"Sorry." Spencer trudged toward the refrigerator, grabbed milk and orange juice in one arm, then raided the pantry for the Raisin Bran and the Rice Krispies. He dropped the lot on the table where the night before his mother had set out his glass, spoon, and bowl.

"What's on your calendar for today?" Yancey asked. The boy had been working odd jobs since graduation, picking up spending money here and there, enough to keep his truck running good enough to get him to Lubbock next month.

"I'm doing the yard around the post office this morning. It's grown up pretty high in the back. Then I'm checking in with Doc Hill. He has some cleanup he needs done around the clinic. Trash to burn. Stuff like that."

Yancey watched as Spencer poured the two cereals into the same bowl and flooded the mixture with milk. "Look, about Friday night—"

"It's done. It's over. I don't want to talk about it." And now he couldn't because he'd shoveled his mouth full of food.

Talking wasn't exactly on Yancey's list of fun things to do either, but they needed to get this out of the way. "It had been a long day. I'm sorry it went sour. I took a lot of crap out on you that I shouldn't have."

Spencer nodded, shrugged, and filled his glass with orange juice, keeping his gaze averted, avoiding the situation, the subject matter, everything but that noisy cereal blabbering away in his bowl.

Yancey felt his frustration rise. Yeah, he'd screwed up. But he wasn't the bad guy here. He was just a father doing his job, raising his son to be a responsible man. "Here's the thing, Spencer—"

Spencer groaned. "Do we have to do this now? I'm already running late."

"You're goddamn tooting we have to do this now." Yancey reached into the seat of the chair behind the table and grabbed up the trashed lingerie. He slammed the pieces down on the table so hard milk sloshed out of Spencer's bowl.

"We have to do this now because I want to know what the hell you think you're doing taking a knife to a woman's clothes."

Fourteen

Spoon in hand, Spencer stared down. "Where did you get those?"

"Right where you left them. In the trash."

Seconds clicked by, and then he dug back into his cereal. A petulant child blindsided by the error of his ways. "Did you think maybe they were there for a reason? Like I didn't want to see them again?"

"Well, you're seeing them now, aren't you, boy?" Yancey barked back. "And you're going to tell me what happened, because I'm not going to sit around on my thumb and let a son of mine hurt any woman."

"I thought you didn't like Candy," Spencer said with a sneer that didn't quite reach its full potential when he shoved a spoon in his mouth.

Yancey took a deep breath. "What I don't like is your smart mouth, for one thing. For another ..." Shit. He didn't even know what to say to the boy. He didn't know how to get through. "Talk to me, Spencer. Tell me what went on here so I don't have to drive out to the Barn and check on Candy myself."

At that, Spencer's shoulders drooped as did both corners of his mouth. "Leave Candy alone. I'm not going to be seeing her again, okay? She's fine. I'm fine. The whole fucking world is fine, so drop it."

In the past, Yancey had dropped it. Each and every time. He dealt with enough conflict on the job that he didn't want to deal with it at home. A big mistake which might have a whole lot to do with the bond he and Spencer now seemed to be missing. How they couldn't talk about anything. How they each walked out of their way to avoid the other.

That wasn't the relationship he'd envisioned sharing with his adult son. "No, son. Nothing's fine. Not when we can't talk like two grown men."

The kitchen clock ticked its way loudly toward eight o'clock—the only sound in a silent room with Yancey letting Spencer stew, Spencer stewing, swirling his spoon through the milky mush he no longer seemed to want, keeping his head down as he did. "Since when did you start thinking of me as a grown man anyway? I'm pretty sure three days ago that you were treating me like a no-good kid."

Sighing, Yancey sat back in his chair, spread his knees, and crossed his arms over his middle, which he hated to admit was beginning to bulge. "If I treated you like a kid, it was because you were acting like one. But I've never once treated you like you were no good."

"Seemed that way the other night. Running me off the road like you did."

"And I apologized for that. If it helps, I'll apologize again." Funny how it wasn't quite as hard to say it this time, he mused before pressing on. "I let my temper