“You givin’ me a mediocre piece of ass once does not buy you a role in my life or the right to open your smart mouth about me to anyone, but especially not to someone I care about,” Toby told her.

The pale was going away and red was seeping into Jocelyn’s cheeks.

Not embarrassment.

From the flash in her eyes, anger.

“You’re nothing to me but a bad choice that didn’t mean enough even to regret,” he carried on. “But you drag someone important to me into your nasty, you’re gonna get my attention.”

“I don’t want your attention,” she snapped.

“Bullshit,” he bit. “Newsflash, that attention isn’t the good kind. I just thought you were conceited. Now I think you’re a bitch.”

“You aren’t all that, Toby,” she bit back and did a lame toss of her hair. “Newsflash, big man, I faked it with you.”

“No kidding?” Toby asked. “That wasn’t lost on me. You were bad at doin’ that too. I just didn’t care. After putting up with half an hour of you preening and arranging your hair instead of paying even a little bit of attention to me, all I wanted was to get outta there,” he shared.

Yikes.

Ouch.

“And just so you know,” he went on, “you aren’t the only one’s got a mouth they can use to share shit they shouldn’t, and it’s known wide you can’t let go enough, not to get it good, but to give it good, and you fake it with everybody. And I’m not only talking about orgasms. That’s the reason you can’t get laid unless you go to the city to find some dupe who doesn’t know all about you and the fact, in a lot of ways, you aren’t worth the effort.”

He’d hit a nerve with that, and she wasn’t smart enough to hide it.

This was why she leaned forward and hissed, “Fuck you, Toby.”

“You wish, and that’s why you screwed with Addie. That’s another thing you’re poor at faking, Jocelyn. You know what you want but you’re mistaken that all you gotta do is crook your finger and you can lead a man around by his dick. It takes more than being an expert at applying lip gloss to get a guy to like you.”

“Well, that’s obvious.” Her eyes came to me peeking around Toby’s shoulder.

“Christ, Jocelyn, you’re even bad at hiding how fuckin’ jealous you are,” Toby muttered. Then he spoke clearly, “Her line at the store doesn’t exist for you. You with me?”

“I’ll use whatever line I want,” she snapped. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “And honest to God, standin’ here wasting my time on you, I’m wondering again why I did it.”

He then stopped doing that immediately, turning to me, hooking me around the neck with his arm, and leading me away.

I didn’t look back.

I just glided my arm around his waist and moved with him.

“Well, you kinda seriously annihilated her,” I stated carefully.

“I have zero tolerance for stuck-up bitches,” he rumbled.

I could get on board with that.

However . . .

“You still did that rather publicly.”

He stopped us and looked down at me.

“What’d she say to you?”

“Um . . .”

“Adeline, what did she say to you?”

“Do you, uh, known that some folks refer to you as—?”

“Take ’Em and Leave ’Em Toby,” he finished for me.

He knew.

Eek!

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“She go at you in a line at the grocery store I don’t know about that’s private, so it was just you and her who got to hear her have a go at you, and incidentally, babe, do it havin’ a go at me?”

“No,” I told him something he knew, though I didn’t share that was how I met Lora who heard it all. “But that’s you stooping to her level, honey. And I hesitate to say this in your current mood, but you shouldn’t let her take you to a place where you do that.”

“I knew exactly what I was doin’ and I knew I was getting into the ugly with her to do it, and I don’t give a fuck,” he retorted.

I blinked up at him.

“Sometimes, Addie, you take the higher road. Sometimes, it’s worth getting down in the mud. She fucked with you, at work, where you couldn’t fuck back, and she knew it. That was why she played it that way. And that is not okay. I am not gonna let that go without payback. So I got up in her shit at the Christmas Fair so anyone close could hear she’s a bad lay and a malicious bitch. They think I’m a dick I did that, I don’t care. Though most know Jocelyn, so they probably think something like that was a long time coming. I’m just glad, she went at you when you were defenseless, it was me who got to get up in her shit.”

One could say that wasn’t your usual knight in shining armor behavior.

But I’d take it.

“Another thing, babe, and the reason I did that,” he carried on. “She is not gonna go through your line again. She could say that she will to save face, but it’s not gonna happen. She’s an adult bully. That means either consciously or unconsciously she knows she’s lacking. She isn’t hard to look at, but it doesn’t take spending much time with her to know that’s all she has going for her. And every time a man scrapes her off or a friend drifts away, she’s reminded of that.”

This was definitely the truth.

Toby wasn’t done laying it out.

“Instead of taking a look at herself and how she treats people and making good changes, she lashes out at who she thinks is weak to make herself feel superior. I’m with you and your son and have been in a way since the summer, and she knows you have your hooks in me and probably gets why. To make herself feel better, she wanted to take you down a peg. Knowin’ you, she probably failed. But it’s my job as your man to do whatever I have to do to make sure shit like that doesn’t happen. And if it does, make sure it doesn’t happen again. I did that. And I don’t care how it had to get done, as long as it gets done.”

He dipped down so he was nose to nose with me.

“It . . . got . . . done,” he finished.

“It certainly did,” I said quietly, no longer feeling concerned Toby got down in the mud to verbally and publicly flay Jocelyn.

Instead feeling other things.

I decided to share some of those things with Toby.

“We need to go to Grayburg. I’m not thinking cavemen or cops and fugitives. I’m thinking armor and damsel in distress,” I declared.

He stared at me a second.

Then he burst out laughing.

I grinned up at him as he did it and put pressure on us to get us moving, saying, “According to Deanna, there’s a wreath that has my front door written all over it. Let’s fair this mother up.”

“Okay, baby,” he muttered, setting us on course back to my boy, Deanna and Charlie.

That drama done, in short order, I’d see the wreath was made of vintage glass baubles, some narrow tinsel trees sticking out around one, a discolored carousel ornament, some bells, a plastic snowman, a gold-faced skinny Santa, a glittery house, and the ugliest elf in history hugging his spindly, striped legs to his chest tacked on one side.