Hell or High Water

Montana

Momma hadn’t been gone from the world for twenty-four hours before the first letter showed up. Blue paper, folded into an origami heart, left where the writer knew I’d find it. Dealing with my grief, I was able to put it out of my mind until the next one came, then the next. Each one more disturbing than the last. Until I woke up to find one beside me.
He’d watched me sleep.

Only desperation could drive me to ask the man who had fertilized my momma’s egg for help. I preferred to forget him and his existence, just like he had us… me. But with Momma gone, I had no one, and I needed a safe place to escape—out of this town and away from the stranger who was stalking me.

To say I was shocked that my father turned down my request for help would be a lie. I’d expected as much. He’d left me with no choice but to threaten to expose his sins to the God-fearing people of Mississippi who placed him in office. The nineteen-year-old daughter of a stripper he’d knocked up and deserted would know a lot about his transgressions.

However, the two men he sent to get me weren’t what I’d been expecting, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. It was trust the devil I knew or stay and live in fear of the one I didn’t.

Than

Waking up hung over and naked on the sofa of a friend’s house wasn’t out of character for me. Being woken up and told I was being ordered to babysit the Governor’s accidental offspring was another. It wasn’t fair that I’d been handed this task. Why me? I didn’t want to watch some stripper’s daughter who had decided to blackmail the governor. Why didn’t we have the philandering bastard hand over hush money, and then we could put enough fear in her that she kept her mouth shut?

When I didn’t believe it could get any worse, the stripper’s daughter opened the cheap ass motel room door she had been staying in and knocked the wind out of my chest.