“That right?” Brendon asked, warning bells clanging in his head. “Last I heard, it hadn’t been announced to the public.”
Frankie’s hands knotted on the table as she stared at Paul, probably waiting for him to come up with a profound answer to get them out of this.
“Don’t fool yourself into thinkin’ you know everything that’s goin’ on with that girl. She doesn’t like a bunch of people up in her business. I doubt she’d tell you just who she’s been talkin’ to. Cheyenne’s always been big on gettin’ as much attention as possible,” Paul noted.
Brendon disagreed. Wholeheartedly. If these two people were trying to make him believe Cheyenne was the deceitful one, they were going to have to work a hell of a lot harder than that.
“What exactly did you hear?” he inquired, curious as to what they’d come up with.
“Oh, not much,” Paul said, his eyes dropping to the floor. “Whatever was on the news.”
“Did you hear that the guy broke into her apartment and trashed her things?” Brendon asked.
“Yeah,” Frankie said quickly, her eyes lighting up. Oddly, she didn’t seem at all concerned. “We heard that.”
Brendon considered that for a moment. There was a police report, so it was possible that word got out, although no one in his family had known—including Travis—which meant it hadn’t been made public. However, he was pretty sure Frankie and Paul were merely going along with whatever he said.
“What about when her truck was stolen?”
Paul met his gaze. “Yeah, we heard about that, too. We were sad to hear she was havin’ so many problems. Tried to get in touch with her, but she disappeared.”
Brendon nodded. Her fucking truck hadn’t been stolen.
“Well, I guess you heard that they’ve got the guy, then.”
Paul’s eyes widened, his gaze snapping over to Frankie briefly before he returned his attention to Brendon. “Then why does she have security outside?”
“ ’Cause she’s a celebrity,” Brendon explained. “She should always have security on her.”
“Right. You’re absolutely right,” Paul agreed, doing a relatively good impression of a man who cared.
Brendon pretended to confide in them. “She’s considerin’ just payin’ this guy off to make him go away.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “I’ve heard that sometimes people do that.”
Lord have mercy, this guy was a fucking moron. Brendon shook his head and glanced out the window to see where Cheyenne had wandered off to. He saw the back of her head. She was staring out into the yard, probably rolling her pretty green eyes at everything that was being said.
“Look, Cheyenne really doesn’t have room for y’all to stay. The upstairs is torn apart and there’s only one bedroom, but there’s a motel—”
“We don’t mind takin’ that one,” Frankie interrupted.
Damn, this woman was something else.
“It’s not available,” Brendon clarified.
“We don’t have anywhere to go,” Paul told him. “We spent the last bit of money we had drivin’ down here.”
“Well, sounds to me like you shoulda called first,” he told them. As much as he wanted to sit here and entertain their nonsense all day, Brendon was growing tired of the bullshit fast. Not to mention, he wanted to get ahold of Z and have him do some research on these two.
No, he wasn’t inclined to believe that Paul was the mastermind behind the death threats—face it, the guy didn’t have the brainpower to come up with a decoy—however, Brendon wouldn’t put anything past them. In the few minutes he’d been within their company, the fact that they cared more about Cheyenne’s money than anything else was glaringly obvious.
Brendon wanted to check on Cheyenne, but he didn’t want to leave these two alone in the house, which left him in quite a predicament. Throwing them out wasn’t going to be as easy as he hoped, either. They certainly didn’t appear to have any intention of leaving. At least not until they got what they came for, and Brendon was sure that equated to something green with dollar signs in front of it.
Too bad, so sad, he thought to himself. Based on Cheyenne’s reaction earlier, that was the last damn thing they would get before they walked out of there.
chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
By the time the sun began to set below the line of storm clouds brewing in the distance, Cheyenne was ready to pull her hair out. She welcomed the storm over the grating sound of her parents’ voices. She was actually surprised to see they were still there, although she got the impression they thought they were going to wear her down and convince her to let them stay.