Southern Comfort - Fern Michaels [36]
He looked around at the room he was standing in because that’s what he did each time he entered the town house. The decorator, who had never met him, must have thought he was some kind of outdoor macho man who liked to hunt and fish. Probably because that’s what his mother would have told the decorator. He hated the dark leather, the earth-tone carpet, the hunting prints on the wall. He liked vibrant colors, bare floors, and fabric-covered furniture. He even liked green plants as long as he didn’t have to water them.
Tyler looked over at the bar and decided a drink was in order. The bar was stocked with manly liquor: scotch, whiskey, gin, rum, and vodka. He was a white-wine drinker. He uncorked a bottle and poured until the exquisite crystal glass was filled almost to the brim.
Still dressed in his suit, he sat down in one of the leather chairs and sipped at the wine. He finally yanked at his tie, then swiveled his neck from side to side to undo the kinks. What the hell kind of life is this? Every nerve ending in his body was twanging in protest. For one crazy minute he actually thought about digging his sweat suit and sneakers out of wherever they were to go running. The thought was so outrageous, he just shook his head in disgust.
He was no longer sipping at the wine in his glass the way he usually did. He was gulping at it, a sign that things were out of control. There was no way to unring the bell, to go back in time. No way to right the wrongs he’d done. He knew he was just weeks, maybe even days away from being fired. Fired! No one in the Tyler family had ever gotten fired. Never. The Tylers were the ones who did the firing.
Back at the bar, Tyler shed his jacket and pulled off his tie. He poured a full glass of wine and drank half of it before returning to the hated leather chair. He was about to flop down when he changed his mind and headed back to the bar, where he grabbed the wine bottle. He placed it on the coffee table, directly in his line of vision. If he was going to soul-search, he would need some false courage.
The glass steady in his hand, Tyler leaned back into the supple leather. It was all wrong. His life was wrong. He was tired of pretending, sick of the way he’d taken credit for others’ work, sick of the lying, sick of the covering up, sick and tired of his parents’ meddling in his life. Sick and tired of not being able to cut it. Sick and tired of being hated by his superiors and fellow agents even though he deserved their hatred. He wondered, and not for the first time, if there was any way he could get back on track. At forty, how hard could it be to start over without his father the governor paving the way?
Damn hard, he decided. They’d check his records. People in law enforcement had loose lips. Maybe if he told his father he wanted to transfer out of the DEA and go to the FBI or the ATF, he could pull it off for him, at which point Tyler would work his ass off to become the man he always wanted to be. He’d do it by the book this time, his book, not his father’s.
An hour later, Tyler looked at the wine bottle and was surprised to see that it was empty and realized that he was drunk. He could hear his mother now. “For shame, Lawrence! A drunkard in the family is totally unacceptable.”
“Well, Mummie dearest, tell that to someone who cares. And to my father and his White House aspirations,” Tyler mumbled as he made his way to the kitchen. He should probably eat something. One of the rules in law enforcement was always eat, you never knew when you’d eat again, especially if you were in the field. The refrigerator was full; his day lady always saw to it that there was cold chicken, cold ham, cold roast beef. The drawers held fresh fruit, vegetables, bacon, eggs, muffins, and there were all sorts