Rock Me Gently Read Online Free PDF Page B

only read your own bad press?”
    “No, I don’t read that crap at all. I try not to even notice those rags when I’m in a store. It was awesome when I first started out—any publicity was good publicity—but then it just got to be a damn nuisance. They build ya up just to tear you down.”
    “Jill’s dad, he plays for the Jaguars.”
    “Yeah, I got that.”
    “He fucked around on Jill’s mom with anything that moved and not just like you did in your heyday, and at least you were never married or anything. And then when it all came out in the fuckin’ papers the press dragged them all through the mud. Even Mrs Markham, er, well, I guess Jill says she goes by Clarkson again.” The boy shrugged. “But they crucified her and made him look like a goddamn hero. Even now, he’s selling their house out from under them, he’s trying to say that the boutique was totally funded by him and that Jill’s mom has no right to it, and I’m not sure about the custody thing anymore, but at one time, he was trying to take Jill away.”
    The anger on his young face gave Jason the impression that Henry was invested in the situation somehow. 
    “But I think Jill’s old enough to make her own decisions and she wanted to stay here and she told the judge that,” Henry surmised.
    The bastard wanted to leave Lainey with nothing, nowhere to live, no job or livelihood, no daughter.
    “The media hounding them got so bad that at one point there was actually a cop staying with them. Overnight and everything just to keep the press away.” Henry leaned against the desk. 
    “But then Markham accused his wife of sleeping with the guy. So, Jill’s mom made the officer leave and when that didn’t get that fucker Markham the results he wanted, he accused the cop of messin’ with Jill when Lainey wasn’t home. Jill wouldn’t go along with her father’s slander, but that didn’t keep the cop from losing his job. His reputation was already fucked—the department really had no choice but to let him go. The damage was already done. Once those kinds of accusations are out there, people always have doubt.” Henry threw his hands in the air. “He had to leave town. Anyway, after that, one night Markham showed up and Jill’s mom went ballistic and no one seems to know what she did or said to Jill’s old man but he finally stopped accusing her and things kind of settled down for a while. After, that’s when he pulled this selling the house and taking the business bullshit out of his ass, like he wanted to punish her.”
    “How do you know all this, Henry?”
    “Well, Jill and I, we were kinda, I don’t know, in the early stages of maybe hooking up when this all blew up. I was walkin’ around like a big goof, feeling all quivery in my gut every time I thought about her. I was sayin’ stupid things like ‘breast the British’, just like you were this morning. It’s pretty bad when a guy’s blood flow can only go up to the brain or down… Well, you know. You got it bad, Teach, I can sympathize with ya. Anyway, for a while Jill kinda confided in me but then all of a sudden she pulled back and things haven’t been the same since. I’ve tried to ask her but she just says nothing’s wrong. She doesn’t want to talk to me let alone keep seeing me.”
    Jason noted the football jersey that Henry was wearing. “You on the team, Henry?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you just recently make the team?”
    “Yeah, how’d you know?”
    “Do you think maybe subconsciously Jill is associating you being on the football team with her father?”
    “What do you mean?
    “Maybe she’s afraid that you might do the same thing to her that her father did to her mother. Guys on the football team kind of have a reputation of being players and I don’t mean on the turf. I’m not saying you are, Henry, I’m sure you’d never hurt Jill like that, but she might not know that. I’m sure she trusted her father too and, well, look