TYLER (Blake Security Book 2) Read Free Page B

chuckle. I wasn’t afraid of Brandon…just of messing up what I had with my best friend. If it came down to it, I wouldn’t fight him over it. “Nothing man, there’s nothing else. She said yes about having dinner with me, and we’re supposed to go out tonight…if that’s okay with you.”
    “What if it isn’t?”
    I hadn’t given that a lot of thought. I wanted to take Ariana out more than I had wanted to do anything in a really long time. “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I just know that I really like her, and I really want to go out with her. You know me, man. I’m not going to hurt her or disrespect her. I would never do that to any girl, much less your sister.”
    Brandon still looked unsure about the whole thing, but after another nerve-wracking pause, he said, “Yeah…okay, I guess.”
    “Thanks, man. I won’t hurt her.”
    “I know,” Brandon said, making me feel a lot better. “If I thought you would, I’d kill you right now.”
    I laughed again. I was even happier when Brandon laughed, too. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” I told him.
    He gave me a chin nod, and just as I was about to get into my car, he said, “You do know I’m not the one in the family to convince, right?” I knew he was talking about his parents and their obvious dislike of everyone Petit.
    I grinned. “I know. We’ll cross that shaky old bridge when and if it comes to that.”
    ********
    I drove home in the sixty-nine Challenger my parents had bought me when I turned sixteen. When my dad wasn’t being an asshole, we’d worked on it and fixed it up. It was almost fully restored now, and other than my mom and football, it was the thing I loved most in the world. It was an Indian red with black leather interior and custom black wheels. In my mind, I saw myself fixing it back up for my son one day. If I knew anything at that stage of my life, it was that I would have a better relationship with my kid than my dad had with me.
    I drove into the driveway of the house, and I was both surprised and a little nervous to see my dad’s car home. It was early for him to be home from the office. As a matter of fact, it was early for both of them. Mom usually left and came home around dinnertime, but some days Dad was there until seven or eight at night. Bobby Petit had been raised in a nice, middle-class family. His father wasn’t a drunk, and he encouraged mine to get a college education. My dad got his real estate license instead. Now that my grandfather had passed on, he likes to talk about how much smarter he was than his dad. He’d used that license and my mother’s inheritance to invest in land around the parish. By the time I was ten years old, my dad had made his first million. I wouldn’t chance a guess at how many millions he had now, all I knew was that we definitely weren’t hurting for anything. He’d even bought up half of the French Quarter in New Orleans. If he wasn’t a drunk and a mean drunk, and if he hadn’t essentially used my mom to gain his wealth, I might have a lot of respect for him. As it were, I did my best to avoid him, and since he never seemed to care about spending time with me, it was easy.
    My mom’s family owned a big sugar cane plantation. When it became non-operational, they turned it into a tourist attraction. Mom still loved that place, and she oversaw all of the restorations as they took place. I wondered often if she ever regretted marrying my father. She never said anything negative about him in front of me, and if I hadn’t loved her so much and saw what an amazing woman she was otherwise, I may have lost a little respect for her over the way she let him treat her. One thing I did have to give credit to dad for was his work ethic. In spite of gaining his wealth from my mother to start with, he’d definitely worked his butt off for everything else over the years. 
    I walked into a quiet house and found my parents sitting at