Burn in Hail Read online

  I was more of a flats kind of girl, but I’d been informed by my best friend that professionals didn’t dress like I did—or had.

  She’d then gone out and forced me to buy a whole new wardrobe. For the most part, I adored the clothes, but the heels were taking time to get used to.

  The clothes made me feel free. The heels were an almost defiant thing just for me, that I wore—even though it was likely that professionals did wear flats—just so I could act like I wasn’t the preacher’s daughter that everyone knew before I went away to college.

  The only problem was that normally my father wouldn’t see me in them.

  I knew the moment that I got up, and his eyes went from the top of my head to the bottom of my shoes, that this wasn’t going to go well.

  I thought about closing the blinds, and then sending Isidra, my receptionist, a text message to tell her to get rid of my dad, but I couldn’t do that to Isidra.

  I glanced once over my shoulder to find Tate’s eyes not on me or my father, but on the window that led outside. Specifically, a car. My father’s car.

  I should’ve known when Tate’s eyes first strayed to the window, and I heard the familiar purr of the engine, that it was my father.

  I should’ve paid more attention. I should’ve closed the blinds.

  Instantly, I pushed that thought away.

  I was a psychologist. Sometimes I had patients that were all over the spectrum. Some of them could be completely sane, while others could have problems.

  I didn’t want to be closed in my office, and not have a way for Isidra—or anyone walking by—to see that my patient was going fucking nutso and killing me with one of my paperweights.

  Yes, I had an overactive imagination, and no, I’d never had any indication that a patient was going to kill me. However, a lot of times my patients were unstable, and I wasn’t a stupid woman. I planned ahead, just in case.

  My father knocked on the door again, his impatience evident.

  I winced and hurried.

  He’d never once come to my work.

  Why had he now?

  I opened the glass door and smiled at my father, my belly immediately tightening into a knot of dread at seeing the displeasure on his face.

  “Hennessy Harmony Hanes, what in God’s name are you wearing?”

  I looked down at my outfit.

  It wasn’t bad.

  The skirt was below my knees. It was tight, yes, but it wasn’t revealing. The shirt was a flowy black number that was held in place by a wide red belt.

  The only thing one could call revealing about the entire outfit was the lace camisole I had on underneath of it, circumventing the cleavage that one would normally see with this shirt. Even then, the camisole was above the part in my breasts.

  “I’m wearing a skirt and shirt, Father.”

  My father looked disgusted with me.

  “You’re wearing hooker heels.”

  Chapter 3

  Ladies, Wal-Mart panties will get the same attention that Victoria’s Secret panties will if you’re with the right person.

  -Food for thought

  Tate

  “You’re wearing hooker heels.”

  My eyes went from the reverend’s car to the reverend himself, and what I saw made me want to gag.

  The man hadn’t changed a single day since I’d last seen him before he’d gone to prison.

  He was still as nasty now as he was then.

  Dressed impeccably in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, and patent leather shoes, he looked like he was about to head straight to church.

  Did the man ever wear jeans?

  I doubted it. In the years I’d known the man, and my mother had forced me to go to his fucking church, I’d never once seen him in anything less formal than what he was wearing right then.

  God, sometimes I just wanted to rub my dirty, grease stained hands down the front of his stupid white shirts.

  I’d also love to do it to his daughter’s white fucking skirt that fit her like a goddamn glove, too.

  What was it with this family and white?

  “I’m wearing red heels, Father,” she said calmly. Much more calmly than any woman I knew would have. “And I’m in the middle of a session. Can this wait?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Your father is less important than working with this useless, no good…”

  I smiled, knowing that he was talking about me.

  The naughty librarian, I mean psychologist, hissed a ‘shhhh!’ at him.

  I nearly started to laugh right then and there.

  I’d never been the greatest fan of the preacher, and for sure he hadn’t been mine.

  It’d all started in the first grade when I’d started Sunday school.

  I hadn’t wanted to be there, and I’d taught every single kid in the class the F word.

  That F word being ‘fuck’ in case you were wondering.

  From then on, he’d barely stood the sight of me.

  “I’ll have to talk to you later, Father,” she said, closing the door. “I have another thirty minutes here, and then I’ll give you a call.”

  The rev’s eyes flicked to mine, and I didn’t bother to let on that I wasn’t listening to every single word that they were saying.

  Nor did I take my eyes away from the man’s calculating ones.

  “Call me when you’re finished here,” he ordered. “And make sure you keep your phone on you.”

  Hennessy, I mean Ms. Hanes as she’d instructed me to call her, looked at me, and then back to her father.

  “I’ll try, Father,” she replied. “Thank you.”

  He studied her for a long second, then his jaw locked.

  “Never mind. I’ll wait.”

  I watched as Hennessy’s hand fisted at her side, behind the metal of the door.

  With a quick jerk of her head in the affirmative, she cleared her throat.

  She finally closed the door and locked it for good measure, then put the blinds down.

  My brows rose at that.

  The woman apparently had a thing with windows, because each and every window in her office had the blinds open. It was like the girl was afraid of the fucking dark or something.

  Even with the afternoon sun glaring straight into her eyes, she hadn’t put the blinds down.

  Her father waiting outside, though? That she put the blinds down for.

  “Your father hates me, by the way,” I thought to tell her.

  Hennessy turned to stare at me, eyes wide.

  “He does not,” she immediately disagreed.

  I snorted.

  “He’s hated me since I was a young kid and taught twenty first graders the F word,” I told her bluntly. “When I was twelve, I fell and broke my arm, accidentally tripping a little girl and causing her to rip her dress. He said I did it on purpose, and that little girl had pushed me away and I deserved to break my arm. When I was seventeen, he refused to give me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship. At nineteen, I put him down as a reference for a promotion. The owner wanted to know what kind of character I had. So, he called your father because I’d stupidly put down that I’d gone to that church thinking it would be in my favor. Your father made it a point to tell him my every sin—at least how he saw it. I got fired instead.”

  Hennessy’s mouth fell open.

  “That little girl was me,” she breathed. “I never knew…”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t know what that man has against me, but seriously, he hates my guts. I’m pretty sure if it didn’t break some kind of moral code, he’d have done everything in his power to get me kicked out of this county.”

  She looked away. “My father is very…”

  She looked like she was struggling for the word, and I grinned as I filled in the blank.

  “Assholeish?”

  She snapped her gaze back to me.

  I expected an im
mediate denial, but she pinched her lips together and shrugged.

  “Shit,” I said. “You agree.”

  She looked away.

  Then, when she turned back, her eyes were distant, as they had been this entire time.

  “You were telling me how you and the rest of the men in the Hail Raisers were misunderstood,” she said primly.

  I wanted to bring that light back in her eyes, the defiance that I saw shining there for a few short seconds while I told her about how much her father hated me.

  In fact, that became my new mission in life.

  I, Tate Edward Casey, was going to make Ms. Hennessy Hanes step out of her comfort zone.

  At first, it started out as a flame.

  Much later, though?

  Well, then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from watching her eyes light with something—anything—that wasn’t blankness.

  Chapter 4

  When two people kiss, they create a long tube from butthole to butthole.

  -Useless facts that you’ll probably share with your best friend

  Hennessy

  I found myself counting down the days until the next session with Mr. Tate Casey.

  At first, I wasn’t sure that was what I was doing, but as I got up the day that he was supposed to show, four days after the last time he’d come to my office, I found myself looking at my closet with a different eye.

  No longer was I going for clothes that said ‘professional.’

  Now I was going for clothes that screamed ‘I’m sexy.’

  Or at least, that’d been my intention as I stood in front of my closet.

  Everything that was in my closet was so new that most of it still had tags on it.

  I’d moved from the apartment my father had paid for and into my new place that I now paid for solely on my own a short three weeks prior. The moment that I had, not only had I bought a new wardrobe, but I’d also splurged on makeup and girly shit that I’d never been able to have before.

  Like big hoop earrings that my father used to hate.

  Those were the first things I slipped into my ear that morning.

  And when I say big, these earrings were big. Like the size of an onion ring from Outback Steakhouse.

  They hung so far from my ear that if I bent my head over sideways, the hoops would touch my shoulder.

  I freakin’ loved them!

  The next thing I found were the stockings.

  I hadn’t worn this particular pair yet.

  I hadn’t dared.

  They were too sexy.

  But as I pulled them out of my drawer, and held them up with the garters I’d bought to hold them up, I knew that today I’d be wearing them.

  I sifted through my pile of lingerie, things that I’d only ever dreamed about wearing, and selected the matching pair of underwear and bra that I’d bought to go with the stockings.

  They’d all been online.

  When I’d found the stockings, I’d seen the ‘Customers who bought this, have also bought this’ section of the page, and from there, I’d gotten lost.

  I had twenty thousand dollars that I’d had left after I’d spent most of my inheritance on a new home and an office in the middle of downtown Hostel—an inheritance I’d received from the death of my mother’s mother—and with that money I splurged.

  Five hundred and sixty-nine dollars later, I had every kind of lacy lingerie that every woman dreamed of.

  And I’d never once thought about wearing it.

  Not until Tate had entered the picture.

  Now, as I slipped the thong panties on over my hips, and turned around to examine myself in the mirror, I wondered if a man could tell a woman was wearing a thong through a skirt.

  Then, as I looked at myself in the mirror, the same monster that sounded exactly like my father started speaking in my head.

  Only sluts dress like this.

  High heels are for girls that plan on working their vaginas for a living.

  Short skirts scream for a man to rape you.

  Yes, that last one was actually said by him, in the middle of a freakin’ church picnic, when I was on the cusp of womanhood.

  I’d come outside, a medium length skirt on that was flowy and wispy around my knees, and my father had seen me. Then he’d flipped a freakin’ switch, and had gone from that loving man that everyone loved, to the father and man that only I knew.

  It’d been the one and only time he’d lost it in front of his congregation, and come to think about it, I remember seeing Tate there for that one. His mother had forced him to come, I remembered, and he’d been off in a corner, standing under the shade of a tree while all the other teenagers played Frisbee.

  I hated Frisbee.

  In fact, I’d always hated everything that ever had to do with anything remotely involving me getting sweaty.

  So I’d gone to the tree, too. I hadn’t seen him until I was nearly standing right next to him.

  ***

  The heat of the day was enough to cause a sheen of sweat to form along my spine from the moment I stepped out of the back door of the church.

  I looked down at my skirt, wondering if it’d upset my father that I was wearing it.

  It was white, flowy, and whispered around my knees each time I took a step. Although it looked transparent, it really wasn’t thanks to the white slip that was sewn inside. Not to mention I was wearing black bicycle shorts, so just in case I sat down and wasn’t crossing my legs, then I wouldn’t be showing anything off.

  My top was black, covered in sequins, and barely came to just over my shoulders at the top.

  The rest of it was tucked into my skirt where a wide bright pink, stretchy belt, also covered in sequins, completed the ensemble.

  My sandals were flat, ugly, and needed to be replaced.

  Unfortunately, since I had such a small foot, my best friend couldn’t share her shoes with me like she’d done the top and the skirt.

  Krisney, my best friend since I was old enough to walk, had grown over the summer, and although we were still the same size clothes-wise, she had a foot that was two sizes bigger than mine.

  Meaning we could no longer share shoes like we once did.

  “Watch your step.”

  Startled, I looked down at my feet, and saw that I was inches away from stepping into a hole the size of a small tire.

  “Thanks,” I smiled, looking up at the boy—man.

  That short beard and deep voice, as well as multitude of tattoos, screamed that this ‘boy’ by age, but man by appearance, wouldn’t appreciate being called a boy.

  “Hello, Tate.” I smiled.

  I didn’t know Tate well.

  If I were being honest, I wasn’t sure anyone knew Tate all that well except for Tate himself.

  He was quiet, reserved, and standoffish on the best of days.

  He must be having a good day.

  I was convinced that the angry boy was bi-polar. He seemed fine as long as there were no adults around. The moment that someone from the church, whether it be my dad or a freakin’ elderly grandmother, came around, Tate was hiding.

  I’d always wanted to ask him why, but that was also another thing I wasn’t allowed to do—talk to Tate Casey.

  My father had laid that ground rule out a long time ago, and seeing me here next to him would likely set my dad off into conniptions.

  “Oh, great,” Tate muttered under his breath. “The band is coming!”

  I snorted and looked over at him.

  “You don’t like music?” I asked.

  He snorted. “Love music. Journey, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Jimmy Hendrix?”

  I didn’t know who any of those men were, but I nodded as if I did. My father allowed me to listen to Christian bands, and Christian bands only. The one and only time I tried to listen to Britney Spears, he broke my radio by throwing it out the second story window.

  That’d been one lesson
I’d never wanted to repeat.

  “Those men are music. The crap that the church band plays? Yeah, that’s all shit.”

  I wanted to laugh, but that would be encouraging him, and I wasn’t very sure that I should be talking to him in the first place. Not with my father only a few feet away, talking to his congregation.

  “I’m sorry to hear that you don’t like them,” I told him. “Did you get something to eat?”

  Maybe a change of subject would help.

  “Yeah, had a hot dog,” he answered. “You got a bug on your skirt.”

  I looked down, and it wasn’t just a bug that was on my skirt. It was a giant, icky, gross roach.

  I squealed and flicked it off, only for it to crawl further up my side and around my backside.

  “Get it off!” I screamed, turning around like a chicken with its head cut off.

  Tate did, brushing his hand once over my backside, and then stomping on the offending bug.

  And that was when my dad rushed over and lost it.

  “What are you wearing?” he growled, yanking me to his side with a harsh hand on my bicep.

  “I’m wearing a skirt?” I whispered, making it sound as if it was a question instead of a statement like I’d meant it to be.

  “You’re wearing so little clothes that every single man here is having illicit thoughts about you. Go inside right now, and stay in my office until it’s time to leave,” he ordered, shaking me slightly.

  Tears started to form in my eyes.

  “But the game…”

  He held up his hand for silence, and squeezed my arm with the other.

  “What. Did. I. Tell. You?”

  I licked my lips.

  “Yes, sir.”

  My father growled something low and angry, and then pushed me away. “Go.”

  I went.

  ***

  I fastened the final clip, and then smoothed my skirt down my thighs.

  After taking one final look in the mirror, I walked out of my bedroom and straight to the front walkway where I kept my keys and phone.

  After making sure that I was ready, I walked to the door and opened it.

  It was when I was halfway to work, however, that I decided that maybe I wasn’t all that sure about this man. Why did I care if I dressed up around him or not? He wasn’t going to see what was underneath.