Ramona and the Renegade
Marie Ferrarella
Deputy Joe Lone Wolf never would've guessed that helping someone at the side of the road in a thunderstorm would throw his carefully controlled world into a tailspin.But that's exactly what happens when he realizes the sexy stranger is his childhood best friend, Ramona. He's spent years convincing himself that she deserves more than a former rebel with a scarred past. But all it takes is one stormy night in a deserted cabin with Ramona to make the fierce lawman change his mind.Falling for Joe is a risk veterinarian Ramona Santiago knows she shouldn't take. Everyone she's trusted has let her down and left her alone except him. Can she possibly hope that she and Joe were always meant to be more than friends?
“Are you trying to take advantage of me?” Mona asked
The question sounded incredibly innocent. The waves of desire that her undeniable nearness was fanning definitely weren’t.
Every fiber of his being wanted to give in, but he continued to fight it. “No, I’m—”
The rest of his adamant protest went unspoken. He found it impossible to speak when Mona’s lips were suddenly and firmly pressed against his.
She was quick—he’d give her that.
He tasted her moan and felt the blood surge through his veins as if it had been set on fire. Maybe it had been.
He needed to put a stop to this. In a moment. Just one more moment.
He promised himself that he would do the right thing in a moment, but right now, just for this erotic half a heartbeat, he wanted to enjoy this completely unexpected turn of events.
Dear Reader,
Here we are, back again in Forever, Texas. This time we’re going to explore two people who have loved each other but put up a lot of resistance along the way. Luckily, love does prevail. The neatest part of writing is that I know there will be a happy ending, no matter how rocky the path is for my characters. If life were perfect, my husband, son and daughter would read from the dialogue pages I have given them and act accordingly. But life isn’t perfect, and I have very independent people in my world who make life one surprise after another. Which works, too, and, I have to admit, keeps me on my toes. It also helps me write, because ideas come from all over and my family has appeared over and over again in all my books. You might stumble across my husband here. I’m not saying any more.
As ever, I thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
Best,
Marie Ferrarella
Ramona and the Renegade
Marie Ferrarella
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie Ferrarella is a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award-winning author who has written more than two hundred books for Silhouette and Harlequin Books, some under the name of Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.
To
Nicholas
The sky is the limit.
You just have to believe.
I do.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
He recognized the car immediately.
On his way home, hoping to beat the predicted flash floods, Deputy Sheriff Joe Lone Wolf brought his four-wheel-drive vehicle to a halt the moment he spotted the other car.
The rain was falling faster and harder with each quarter hour that went by. Because of that, his range of visibility was considerably shortened. It hampered him somewhat, but Joe still would have known the battered Jeep anywhere.
It was ten years old, silver, with a red door on its passenger side thanks to an unexpected, sudden meeting with a hundred-foot bitternut hickory tree one foggy night. With some effort on his part, Mick Henley, Forever, Texas’s best—and only—mechanic, had managed to find an exact match to replace the Jeep’s mangled door.
Well, almost exact. It would have needed two coats of silver paint to make it the same color as the rest of the vehicle. But Ramona Santiago had fallen in love with the bold red color and refused to change it once the new door was in place.
Red suited her.
It matched her personality, Joe had thought at the time.
He still did.
Mona was all things wild and bold. Far from shy and retiring, the raven-haired, green-eyed beauty had all the subdued qualities of a Fourth of July firecracker in the middle of exploding. The green eyes came from her Irish ancestors, the midnight-black hair was a gift from the rest of her heritage—Mexican and Apache.
They had the last in common.
Deputy Joe Lone Wolf was an Apache, through and through, born on the nearby Apache reservation where he spent his younger years before his uncle finally uprooted him and transplanted him into Forever proper, thereby rescuing him from an early demise.
He and Mona had something else in common—she was the sheriff’s younger sister, and he was technically in Rick Santiago’s employ. One of three deputies, Joe had been with Rick and on the job the longest, although only by a matter of a few months.
If Rick knew that his sister was coming back to Forever tonight, he hadn’t mentioned anything. Joe had a strong suspicion that the sheriff would be just as surprised as he was that Mona was here. The last anyone had heard, Mona was due to reach Forever the day before her brother’s wedding.
Why the change in schedule? Joe wondered.
The vehicle’s windshield wipers were already set on maximum speed and were clearly losing the battle for visibility against the rain. He would have had better luck seeing if he just stuck his head out the side window.
But he’d seen enough, approaching on the gently inclining slope, to know that something was definitely wrong. Mona’s Jeep was stationary in a place where no one would willingly choose to stop. Moreover, Mona wasn’t in the vehicle but was standing outside it.
Specifically, Mona was in the process of wrestling with a tire iron, cursing the very flat front passenger tire that was, of necessity, the focus of all her attention.
Though never demure, the Mona he recalled didn’t ordinarily turn the air blue around her. She’d obviously been at this for a bit and, just as obviously, been unsuccessful in her endeavor to change the tire.
Just the slightest hint of amusement ran through him, even though it made no appearance on his face. He knew better than that. Mona had eyes in the back of her pretty head. At least, she did before she’d gone off to college to become a veterinarian.
Parking his vehicle several feet away from hers, Joe got out and, braving the rain, approached the sheriff’s sister from behind. She didn’t appear to hear him, but under the circumstances, that was more than understandable. The wind howled, the rain pelted and made its own mournful noise, and Mona, damsel-in-distress in this scenario, was cursing.
Loudly.
With all this going on, Joe doubted if she could have heard a train approaching from a distance.
“Don’t you know you have to sweet-talk a car to get it to cooperate?” Joe asked just as he came to where Mona was standing.
The next thing he knew, he was literally jumping back, out of her reach, and not a moment too soon. Startled, Mona immediately turned the tire iron in her hands into a weapon and swung it at her invisible target for all she was worth.
“Hey!” Joe cried indignantly, barely avoiding being separated from his midsection by the metal tool.
Tired, annoyed at the sudden downpour that had wreaked havoc with her schedule, and furious with the tire that had almost caused her to go careening off the road and down into a ditch, Mona was definitely not at her best. In addition to that, the knowledge that, at this moment, she bore a strong resemblance to a resuscitated drowned rat did nothing to improve her mood.
When she saw who it was, she let go of the tire iron, dropping it to the ground. After a beat. She took in a deep, shaky breath, trying not to think about what might have happened if Joe’s reflexes hadn’t been as good as they were.
“Joe, you scared me!” she snapped. Turning the bolt of fear that shot through her into anger and aiming it at Joe.
“Then I guess we’re even.” His voice was calm, but beneath the deadly still exterior he had to admit he was anything but. Moving in closer again, Joe looked down at the tire that was still very much a part of Mona’s vehicle. She hadn’t gotten very far in her attempt to remove it, he noted. Raising his eyes to hers, he asked, “Got a flat?”
Mona laughed shortly and shook her head. “I always did love the way you could grasp any situation at lightning speed.”
His expression never changed. “It was a rhetorical comment.”
She pushed her plastered wet hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “So was mine.”
With the rain beating a faster and faster tattoo on his tan, worn Stetson as it showered down all around him, Joe gave her a long, measuring look.
For the most part, Mona had been away at college, then veterinarian school these past eight years. Although it didn’t seem possible, every time she came back, she seemed even more beautiful than when she’d left. But her sharp tongue hadn’t dulled a whit. He supposed that there were just some things in life you could count on.
“You want some help or not?” Joe asked, quietly eyeing her.
Mona had made it a point never to ask for help. It was a matter of pride with her. Plus, if she wasn’t counting on anyone, if she didn’t depend on anyone, then she would never have to go through the agony of disappointment again. It was a philosophy she was forced to develop very early in life, when she finally realized that her mother would never come back for them the way she’d promised.
The only exceptions to Mona’s philosophy were her brother, her late grandmother and Doc Whitmore. Over the years, the latter had slowly became the father she’d never known, as well as her mentor. Those were the three who’d brought stability into her life.
As for Joe, well, Joe was someone she’d gone to school with. Someone who’d always managed to be somewhere in close proximity, like the air and the trees. One way or another, Joe seemed never to be that far out of range. In short, he’d been her best friend, though neither one of them had ever verbally acknowledged the role.
She might have known she’d run into him before she saw anyone else from Forever, Mona thought.
In response to his offer for help, her slender shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug beneath her soaked jacket. “Well, since you’re here and all…”
As she spoke, she stepped back from the defunct vehicle. Because of the torrential rain and the dust now swiftly turning into mud, Mona found her footing compromised. She was about to slip backward and come perilously close to ignobly landing on her butt if not her back altogether. At the last second, she was rescued from the impending embarrassment by Joe’s quick reflexes. He grabbed her, pulling her forward toward him before she could slide backward. Due to his strength, the abrupt motion was a matter of overcompensation and suddenly, rather than discovering herself sprawled out on the ground and flat against the oozing mud, Mona slammed up against Joe without so much as the width of a raindrop between them.
She raised her eyes to Joe’s, doing her best to regroup as quickly as possible. Her pulse raced and she didn’t like it. She also didn’t want him taking any note of it.
“Is that your heart pounding?” she asked flippantly, doing her very best to sound as nonchalant as she didn’t feel.
“Nope,” he lied. “Must be yours.”
The same strong hands that had grabbed her now pushed her back by a good twelve inches, if not more. Having Mona against him like that took control out of his hands.
“You’re an accident waiting to happen,” he told her, his voice flat, emotionless as he tried to deflect any more attention away from the state of the organ that was betraying him. Or one of the organs that were betraying him at any rate, he thought ruefully.
He nodded toward his vehicle that was parked off to the side. “Why don’t you just go and wait in my car while I handle this?” She was not about to take a chance on slipping again so soon. The last thing she wanted was to hear him laughing at her.
“What? And miss the learning experience of a lifetime, watching you change a tire?” she scoffed, raising her voice so that the winds didn’t whip it away. “How will poor little me ever learn how to do such a big, manly thing if I’m shut away in an ivory tower?”
For emphasis, she waved toward the vehicle which became less visible despite its close proximity.
Joe shook his head. “I see you still have a smart mouth.”
The grin on her lips was deliberately exaggerated. She batted her eyelashes at him like an old-fashioned movie goddess. “It goes with my smart mind.”
“Then I guess you must be brilliant by now,” he commented drily.
Moving slowly, he picked his way around her Jeep, going to the rear.
“I am,” Mona answered in the same tone, punctuating her sentence with a toss of her wet head. “Where are you going?”
He glanced in her direction. “Someone with your brilliant mind would know that I wanted to check the condition of your spare before going through the trouble of taking off the flat.”
“I knew that,” she retorted, then added in a more mellow tone, “but I didn’t know if you did.” She followed him to the rear of her vehicle.
The spare tire was mounted on the back of the Jeep. Testing the tire’s integrity, Joe frowned and shook his head. This was not good. He spared her a glance over his shoulder and could see by her body language that she’d become instantly defensive before he even said a word. He said it anyway.
“Don’t you ever check the condition of your spare?”
Her eyes narrowed beneath her soggy bangs. “Somewhere between studying for my finals—and the examination for my vet license—and juggling a part-time job to pay for little incidentals like food, it must have temporarily fallen off my ‘immediately to do’ list.”
He ignored her sarcastic tone and answered matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s a shame,” he told her. “Because your spare’s flat, too.”
Mona closed her eyes. It figured. All things considered, this had not been one of her better days. Opening her eyes again, she looked at Joe. “As flat as the one on it?” she asked.
You just didn’t substitute one flat tire for another. Flat was flat. His dark eyes would have pinned her to the wall—if there had been one around. “You know better than that.”
Yes, she did. She was just desperate. And really, really annoyed. With both tires for being flat and with herself for not noticing that the spare had slowly lost its air. And most of all, right now she was annoyed with Joe for pointing it out.
Hands fisted at her waist, Mona swung one booted foot at the right front tire and kicked it.
“That’s not going to make it come back to life,” Joe commented.
She glared at him. “I know that.” The hood she had on provided next to no protection for her at this point and when it slid off her head, she didn’t bother to try to pull it back up. “Now what?”
The weather seemed to be getting more hostile by the moment. He turned so that the rain was at his back. Because he was taller, he provided a little shelter for her, as well.
He gave her options, although only one was really viable. “Well, I could call Mick and you could wait here for him to come with his tow truck—if you don’t wash away first. Or I could give you a ride into town and you could talk to Mick yourself, face-to-face.”
Mona was in no mood to share a car ride with him, even though she knew it was her best bet. “No third option, huh?”
“Sure.” Joe raised his voice again, competing with the increasing sound of the wind and the rain. “You could wait here for the tire spirits to come and perform the miracle of the reinflating tire.”
His expression was so serious that anyone not knowing Joe would have thought that he actually believed in the spirits he’d just invoked. But she had grown up witnessing displays of his deadpan sense of humor.
With a sigh, Mona resigned herself to her only real alternative. “I guess I’ll have to pick option number two.”
“Good choice,” he answered.
Turning on his heel, he started to lead the short distance back to his parked vehicle. It took him less than a minute to realize that Mona wasn’t following behind him. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. She was still next to her Jeep.
“Change your mind?”
Crawling into the rear of the vehicle, Mona hauled out a large suitcase. She had no choice but to set it down in the mud.
“No,” she told him, “I don’t want anyone making off with my clothes.” She didn’t bother looking at him as she leaned into the back and grabbed a second suitcase. This one, lodged behind the driver’s seat, proved to be less cooperative and she struggled to get it out of the vehicle.
Joe shook his head at the woman’s unadulterated stubbornness. He crossed back to her in a couple of long strides. Firmly taking hold of her shoulders for a second time, he moved her out of the way and easily pulled the large suitcase out. Instead of putting it down next to the first one, he held on to it, keeping it out of the mud.
Mona squared her shoulders. “I could have managed,” she protested.
Arguing with her served no purpose. “No one said you couldn’t,” he answered. Still holding one suitcase, he deliberately picked up the other with his free hand. “This it?” he asked. “Or are there more?”
She’d never been one to be careless with her hard-earned money, but she had accumulated a few things in the past eight years. “The rest are being shipped,” she told him.
Something small and hopeful zipped through him. He banked it down quickly, giving absolutely no indication of its momentary existence. Instead, he asked in what passed for a disinterested voice, “You moving back?”
She wanted to. But there were things she needed to work out. Not to mention that her brother had said he had other plans for her, plans that included having her move to a large city. She didn’t want to disappoint him, but Forever was really the only home she ever knew. The only place she’d ever felt she really belonged.
“For now,” she allowed.
Joe weighed her tone and made a judgment.
He was forced to raise his voice yet again as he walked to his vehicle. The wind grew louder, the rain more harsh. He felt as if his words were being snatched away even as he uttered them.
“Set your sights on somewhere else?” he asked.
She had nothing to carry but the shoulder bag that had seen her through both college and veterinarian school. Holding it tightly against her, Mona moved quickly to keep up. At this point, she wanted nothing more than to get out of the rain and curl up somewhere warm and dry. In lieu of that, Joe’s car would do.
“Not me,” she told Joe, then repeated the words when he looked at her quizzically. Satisfied he’d heard her, she added, “Rick.”
Reaching his vehicle, Joe loaded first one suitcase, then the other into the backseat. When he turned to look at Mona, she had already scrambled into the passenger seat in the front.
He opened the driver’s-side door and got in. “You want to explain that?”
Mona felt around for the seat belt. Finding it, she secured it around herself. “Rick—” She realized she was still yelling and lowered her voice. “Rick has high hopes that I’ll move to the big city, open an animal hospital and be a big success.”
“And you?” He put his key into the ignition, but didn’t turn it just yet. “What are your hopes?”
Mona ran her hands up and down her arms, trying not to shiver. It was unseasonably cold for spring.
“To get dry again,” she answered.
She glanced out the side window. The rain was getting worse, but that wasn’t what was bothering her. She heard a distant muffled roar and it was getting louder. That could only mean one thing. She turned toward Joe. Now wasn’t the time for any false bravado or stubborn ploys on her part. They had trouble.
“Joe—”
Joe turned the key and after a what seemed like an unnaturally long moment, the engine caught and turned over.
“Yeah, I know,” he answered. “Looks like we’re in for it.”
They both knew what he was talking about. “It” was Joe’s loose reference to the flash floods that they were periodically subjected to when Mother Nature decided to be too bountiful with her supply of rain and drenched the lands far too quickly to be of any actual benefit to anyone.
Mona twisted around in her seat, looking back at her vehicle. She knew she had no choice, but she really hated leaving it behind.
“My car,” she protested.
“We’ll find it once it stops raining,” Joe told her with an assurance that defied argument.
She turned back around and sat facing forward again. Mona watched as his car’s windshield wipers vainly battled the downpour, losing ground with every stroke they spasmodically made. To her dismay, the man beside her slowed down and began driving at a speed that would have brought shame to an arthritic turtle.
The fearless daredevil she’d once known would have laughed at the rain and gone full throttle into the storm.
But that boy was gone now and in his place was a cautious man who thought things through.
She knew that any faster and they risked driving off the road and landing in a ditch.
Or worse.
Another thought suddenly struck her. She turned to look at his profile. “We’re not going to make it into town, are we?”
If this had been anyone else in the car with him, he might have uttered some platitude meant to be reassuring, doling out a spoonful of hope to someone he knew was silently asking for it.
But this wasn’t anyone else. This was Mona. Mona, who took every white lie as an affront, every sugar-coated fib as an insult to her intelligence. So he said the only thing he knew she would tolerate.
He told her the truth.
“Nope.”
Chapter Two
“‘Nope’?”
Stunned, Mona repeated the single-syllable answer Joe had just uttered. If they couldn’t reach town, that meant the oncoming flash flood would cut off access to Forever.
But she knew Joe, knew him as well as she knew herself and her brother. Joe was not the type to merely give up or surrender, even if his adversary was Nature itself.
Still, the seconds ticked by and he wasn’t saying anything beyond the one word he’d already uttered. Mona felt herself growing antsy, in direct correlation to the force of the storm.
If they couldn’t make it to town, they would have to find shelter somewhere. They couldn’t stay out in the open. Flash floods were known to sweep vehicles away in the blink of an eye.
“Say something, already,” she ordered, then immediately added a warning. “I swear, Joe Lone Wolf, if I hear you say, ‘Today is a good day to die,’ you are going to really, really regret it.”
He stole a quick glance in her direction, taking care not to look away from the road for more than half a heartbeat. Visibility was next to impossible, but at this point, he was searching for something very specific.
“So much for my one dramatic moment,” he quipped. “How about, ‘Let’s hole up in the old Murphy place until this passes’? Will that get me beat up, too?” he asked.
“The Murphy place?” Mona repeated uncertainly. She hadn’t realized that she’d gotten this disoriented. She squinted as she peered through the all but obliterated windshield. Visibility was down to approximately twelve to eighteen inches in front of the vehicle, maybe less. “Is that around here?”
The “Murphy place” was little more than a three-room cabin that by urban standards hardly qualified as a vacation getaway, much less a regular home. It was more in the realm of a shack, really. More than three quarters of a century old, it had once been the center of a dream—and a budding cattle ranch—until an outbreak of anthrax had eventually killed both. The cabin, which should have been the beginning of a sprawling ranch house, had stood empty for close to twenty years now, after the last descendent of Jonas Murphy died without leaving any heirs, just a mountain of bad debts.
Somehow in all that time, the building, a veritable feasting ground for vermin, had managed to escape being torn down or even claimed. No one cared enough about the unproductive piece of land to buy it and begin building something from scratch again. So the decaying cabin stood, enduring the seasons year after year and, like an aging octogenarian with osteoporosis, it grew steadily more and more frail.
The last time he’d passed this way and actually looked at the cabin, Joe had thought that the only thing keeping the building up were probably the termites, holding hands.
He sincerely hoped that they were holding tight for at least one more night.
Instincts that were generations in the making guided him toward where he had last seen the cabin this morning on his way into town.
“It should be close by,” he answered Mona, then spared her a grin and added, “Unless those pesky tire spirits decided to move it just so that they could annoy you some more.”
She doubted that it was possible to annoy her any more than she already was, Mona thought. “Very funny.”
The grin on Joe’s face softened into a smile and then that faded, as well. He found that he had to fight not just the rain but the wind for control over his vehicle. He sensed Mona’s tension. She was watching him.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he assured her quietly as he continued to stare intently through the blinding rain.
Mona bristled. “I’m not afraid,” she retorted, stopping just short of snapping at him.
She hated the fact that Joe could read her so well, that all he had to do was just look at her to sense what she was thinking. What bothered her most of all was that she couldn’t return the “compliment” and do the same with him. It just didn’t seem fair.
“Okay,” Joe allowed. “Then why are you about to rip off my dashboard?” he asked. Without looking, he nodded in the general direction of her hands which were gripping the aforementioned dashboard.
Mona gritted her teeth. Damn it.
She was completely unaware that she was gripping the dashboard. Swallowing a curse, Mona dropped her hands into her lap, trying hard not to clench them.
“Just bracing myself for the inevitable crash. You’re not exactly the best driver in the world,” she reminded him pointedly.
He knew what she was referring to. At thirteen, he’d been angry at the world in general and specifically at the absentee father he’d never known and his mother, who’d died suddenly three years earlier. He’d been passed around from relative to relative and raised by committee, which compelled him to steal one of the elders’ cars just to thumb his nose at everyone.
For the space of half an hour, he’d felt like his own man, free and independent. But the joyride ended when he lost control of the car and ended up in a ditch.
Miraculously emerging unscathed, he’d wound up working the entire summer and half the fall to pay off the repair bill for the car. He figured the episode would always haunt him, no matter what he might go on to accomplish in life. He didn’t mind. He considered himself lucky to have walked away alive, much less without so much as a scratch.
What amused him about the whole thing is that Mona had a similar incident in her past. It had happened when she was ten. Rather than a joyride, after an argument with her grandmother Mona decided to run away from home. She took her grandmother’s car to enable her escape. But the adventure was short-lived. Mona managed to go down only two streets before her grandmother had caught up to her—on foot. Even at that age, the old woman had been swift.
The car sustained no damage. The same, he knew, couldn’t be said for Mona’s posterior or her dignity. She was grounded for a month.
“I wouldn’t throw rocks if I were you,” he said, leaving it at that. When she frowned, he knew that she knew exactly what he was referring to.
A second later, Mona sat up straight in her seat, suddenly animated. “I see it. You were right. The cabin is here.”
“Nice to know you have faith in me,” Joe cracked, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It was getting harder to keep the vehicle from veering.
“It’s raining horses and steers,” Mona cried, gesturing at the windshield and doing one better than what she considered to be the stereotypical comment about cats and dogs. “Anyone could have gotten turned around in this storm.”
“Most people could have gotten turned around,” he allowed. Things like that never happened to him. He took his natural sense of direction for granted.
She sighed, shaking her head. Same old Joe, she thought. “Despite what you think, you are not mystically empowered, Joe Lone Wolf.”
Not for one minute did he think of himself as having any special, otherworldly powers, but he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I came to your rescue out of the blue, didn’t I?”
“You were just on your way home and stumbled across me,” she corrected. “You’ve been taking the same route ever since you went to work for my brother as one of his deputies.”
He turned the tables on her with ease. “Are you saying you took this path on purpose?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Just to run into me?”
“No, I’m saying that you—I mean, that I—” This wasn’t coming out right. He was getting her all tongue-tied. Mona gave up. “Oh, hell, think what you want—but you do know better than that.”
Yeah, he thought, he did. Had known it from the first moment that he’d laid eyes on Ramona as she walked into his second-period tenth-grade English class that February morning ten years ago. She’d been so beautiful to look at that it hurt him right down to his very core.
And right from the beginning he knew that girls like Ramona Santiago did not wind up with guys like him. He was an Apache through and through and it wasn’t all that long ago that people regarded Native Americans like him as beneath them.
Granted, Mona, like her brother, was one third Apache herself, but it was the other two thirds of her, the Mexican-American and especially the Irish side of her, that carried all the weight. And those two thirds would have never welcomed a poor Apache teenager into her life in any other capacity than just as a friend.
So a friend he was. Someone for her to talk to, confide in if the spirit so moved her. Being her friend—her sometimes confidant—he’d long since decided is what made his life worth living. And what had, ultimately, made him abandon the wild, bad boy who didn’t play by the rules and take up the straight-and-narrow path instead. The guy he had been would never have pinned on a badge and sworn an oath to it. But he’d done it for her, for Ramona.
She probably hadn’t had a clue, he thought now.
Just as she didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. About his feelings for her. And he intended for it to stay that way.
Resisting the urge to speed up just a little, Joe slowly drove the Jeep up to the rickety cabin that had once been home to an entire family.
Silently breathing a sigh of relief, he pulled up the hand brake as he turned off the engine.
Mona, he noticed, hadn’t undone her seat belt. “Something wrong?” he asked her.
“Is it safe?” she asked, eyeing the cabin uncertainly. There’d been ghost stories about the cabin when she’d been growing up. She didn’t believe those for a minute, but the cabin did look as if it was about to blow away in the next big gust of wind.
Joe knew that the cabin wasn’t as structurally sound as some of the newer buildings in town, but he really didn’t expect it to fall down around them—unless one of the termites sneezed, he thought, suppressing a smile.
“It’s standing and it’s dry inside,” he pointed out. “Or reasonably so,” he added, figuring that time had been hard on the roof and there had to be places where it would leak. “Right now, that’s all that matters.” Unbuckling his seat belt, he glanced at her, waiting. “Now are you coming, or are you planning on spending the night in the Jeep?”
The latter idea thrilled her even less than spending the night in the rickety cabin. With a sigh, Mona pressed the button and undid her seat belt.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered.
Opening the passenger door, Mona got out. As she stoically battled her way to the cabin’s front door, she suddenly shrieked as the cold rain whipped about her face and body, drenching her for a second time in a matter of moments and stealing her breath away, as well.
The next moment, a strong arm tightened around her waist and pulled her the rest of the way to the cabin.
Joe pushed the door open for her. The cabin hadn’t had a working lock on it for most of the twenty years it had been empty.
“I can walk,” Mona protested as he all but propelled her into the cabin.
“You’re welcome,” he replied after putting his shoulder to the door and pushing it closed again, despite the fact that the rain seemed to have other ideas.
Steadying herself, Mona scanned the area to get her bearings. The interior of the front room looked particularly dreary, like an old prom dress that had been kept in the closet years too long. The roof, she noted, was leaking in several different spots.
“So much for staying dry,” Mona muttered under her breath as she moved aside after a large splotch of rain had hit her on her forehead.
Rubbing his hands together to warm them, Joe gave her an amused look. “You just have to make sure you don’t stand under any of the holes in the roof.”
“Brilliant as always.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Did you figure that out all by yourself?”
Joe’s expression remained stoic and gave nothing away. He deflected the sarcasm with a mild observation as he pointed out, “I’m not the one getting rained on.”
Mona struggled with her temper. He wasn’t the reason she was in this mood. She’d planned on surprising Rick with her early arrival. He thought she was coming in a couple of weeks, just in time for his wedding. She had sped things up on her end, taking her license exam earlier rather than later, so that she could come and lend a hand in the preparations. Her almost-sister-in-law was six months pregnant and most likely not up to the rigors involved in preparing for a wedding.
Mona knew that a lot of the town was probably willing to pitch in and help, especially Miss Joan who ran the diner and knew everyone’s business. But Rick was her only brother, her only family, and she wanted very much to be part of all this. Wanted, she supposed, to be assured that even after the wedding, she would still be a part of his life.
It was all well and good for her to go gallivanting out of town for long spates of time as long as she knew that Rick would be there when she got back. But the thought that he might not be, that he could go off and have a life that didn’t directly include her rattled Mona to her very core.
Changing the subject in her attempt to get back on a more even keel, Mona frowned. She zigzagged across the small room and looked around at her surroundings in the limited light. There was hardly any furniture and what did exist was falling apart.
“Can you imagine living here?” she asked Joe, marveling at the poor quality of life the last inhabitants of the cabin must have had.
“I’ve seen worse,” Joe replied matter-of-factly.
Mona bit her tongue. She could have kicked herself. For a moment, she’d forgotten that he’d spent his early years living on the reservation where poverty and deprivation had been a vivid part of everyday life, not just for Joe, but for everyone there. More than likely, she realized, he’d grown up in a place like this.
She hadn’t meant to insult him.
Mona pressed her lips together as she turned to look at him. An apology hovered on her tongue.
“Joe, I didn’t mean—”
He didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to glimpse the pity he was certain would come into her eyes, accompanying whatever words would ease her conscience. He wasn’t proud of his background, but he wasn’t ashamed if it, either. It was what it was. And what it was now was behind him.
Joe waved his hand, dismissing what she was about to say. “Forget it.”
Turning his back to her, he focused his attention on the fireplace. Specifically, on making it useful. Squatting down, he angled his head to try to look up the chimney.
Curious, Mona came up behind him. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to see if the chimney’s blocked. Last thing you want, if I get a fire going, is to have smoke filling this room.” He leaned in a little farther. “Damn,” he uttered sharply, pulling back.
Mona moved quickly to get out of his way. “Is it blocked?” she guessed.
“No,” he muttered almost grudgingly, “the chimney’s clear.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said gamely. “Why are you cursing?”
Disgusted, he rose to his feet for a moment. “Because I wasn’t expecting to be hit with big fat raindrops.” The last one had been a direct hit into his eye.
Mona laughed. “Especially dirty ones,” she observed. He looked at her quizzically. With a flourish, Mona pulled a handkerchief out of the back pocket of her jeans. “Hold still,” she ordered.
“Why?” he asked suspiciously. Mona was nothing if not unpredictable. Added to that she had a wicked sense of humor.
“Because I can’t hit a moving target,” she deadpanned, then said seriously, “Because I want to wipe the dirt off your face.” Doing so in gentle strokes, she shook her head. “God, but you’ve gotten to be really distrusting since I was last home.”
“No, I haven’t,” he protested.
Saying that, he took the handkerchief from her and wiped his own face. He told himself it was in the interest of efficiency and that reacting to the way she stroked his face with the handkerchief had nothing to do with it. Some lies, he argued, were necessary, even if they were transparent.
“I never trusted you in the first place.” He raised his chin a little, presenting his face for Mona’s scrutiny. “Did I get it all?”
“Why ask me?” she asked innocently. “After all, I could be lying.”
“True,” he agreed, “but seeing as how you’re the only one around this cabin besides me who talks, I have no choice. You’ll have to do.”
“You look fine,” she told him, playfully running her index finger down his cheek. “You got it all, Deputy Lone Wolf.”
He held out the handkerchief to her. “Thanks.” When she took it from him, Joe turned his attention back to the fireplace and getting a fire going. There was kindling beside the stone fireplace. It didn’t appear to be that old. Someone had obviously been here and used the fireplace since the last owner had vacated the premises. He shifted several pieces, positioning them in the hearth.
Mona went over to the lone window that faced the front of the house and looked out. The rain seemed to be coming down even harder, if that was possible. She shivered slightly, not so much from the cold as from the feeling of isolation.
“Think this’ll last all night?” she asked Joe, still staring out the window.
He hefted another log, putting it on top of the others. “That’s what they say.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. Turning away from the window, she addressed her words to his back. “You mean, we have to stay here until morning?”
Joe fished a book of matches out of his front pocket. He didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t for years now, but he still liked to have a book of matches in his possession. You never knew when they might come in handy—like now. He had no patience with the old ways when it came to making fire, even though, when push came to shove, he was good at it.
“Unless you want to risk being caught in a flash flood the way we almost were back there.”
She sighed, moving about restlessly. The cabin was sinking into darkness and although she’d grown up in Forever, this setup was disquieting.
“Not exactly the way I pictured spending my first night back home,” she told him.
“You mean, stranded and hungry?” he guessed.
“For openers,” she agreed. Mona ran her hand along her extremely flat abdomen. It had been rumbling for a while now.
He crossed to her. It might have been her imagination, but Joe seemed somehow taller to her in this cabin.
“When did you eat last?” he wanted to know.
“This morning. I skipped lunch to get an early start driving down to Forever.” It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She hadn’t bothered to listen to the weather forecast. She wished she had now. “I figured I’d be in time to grab a late lunch at Miss Joan’s,” she added. Miss Joan, the owner of the diner, had been a fixture around Forever for as long as she could remember.
Arms wrapped around her to ward off the chill, Mona glanced around the cabin’s main room again. “Doesn’t look as if there’s been food around here for a good long while.”
“Except for maybe the four-footed kind,” Joe interjected as the sound of something small and swift was heard rustling toward the rear of the room. A rat?
“I’ll pass, thanks,” she muttered. She wasn’t that hungry yet, Mona thought. She preferred meals that didn’t deliver themselves.
“You sure?” Joe asked, a hint of a grin on his lips. “I hear that squirrels and possums taste just like—”
“Chicken, yes, I’ve heard the same myth,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ll let you know if I get that hungry. I’m not there yet.” And hopefully never would be, she added silently.
He looked mildly amused. “Suit yourself.”
“What, you’re willing to eat a squirrel?” she challenged. He couldn’t be serious, she thought. Joe knew better than that. “They’re full of diseases. You won’t have any idea what you’re swallowing,” she insisted.
“Yeah, I will,” he said.
Was he just trying to bait her? And then she realized that Joe was walking toward the door. He couldn’t be going out—or could he? “Where are you going?” she wanted to know.
“To my Jeep to get the dinner I was bringing home from Miss Joan’s.”
“You had food all this time and you let me go on about the rodents?” she demanded.
“Never known anyone to be able to stop you once you got wound up,” he pointed out. “I figured I’d just wait it out, like the storm. Be right back,” he told her. He opened the door only as much as he had to in order to slip out.
He heard her muttering a few choice words aimed in his direction before the wind carried them away.
Making his way to the Jeep, Joe smiled to himself. Yup, same old Mona. There was a comfort in that.
Chapter Three
Wind and rain accompanied Joe’s reentry into the cabin several minutes later. Mona was quick to throw her weight against the door in order to shut it again.
“Took you long enough,” she commented, hoping to divert his attention from the fact that she had been right next to the door, waiting for his return. Her concern had nothing to do with hunger. But there was no way she was about to admit that.
“I’ll move faster next time.” Opening his jacket, he took out the prize and placed it on the rickety kitchen table. The next moment, he shed the jacket and spread it out in front of the fireplace. With any luck, it would be dry by morning.
“Any sign of the storm breaking up?” she asked hopefully. She really wanted to be in town before nightfall.
Joe shook his head. “If anything, it’s getting worse,” he told her.
Frowning, Mona glanced at the food he’d braved the elements to bring in.
“This is all that you eat?” she asked incredulously. The only thing on the table was a roast-beef sandwich, perched on a bed of wax paper.
“I wasn’t planning on having to share it with anyone,” Joe said a little defensively.
“Share?” she repeated. “It’s not big enough for one person, let alone two.” The man was six-two with a far better than average build. Didn’t that take some kind of decent fuel to maintain? “Don’t you get hungry?”
Wide, strong shoulders rose and then fell carelessly beneath his deputy’s shirt. The material strained against his biceps.
“Not really,” he answered. “Eating’s never been a big deal for me.”
It wasn’t exactly a new revelation. Thinking back, she knew that no one could ever accuse Joe of consuming too much. He’s always had the build of a rock-hard athlete without so much as an ounce of fat to spare. It was the reason that so many girls drooled over him. Or at least one of the reasons, she amended. The fact that he had brooding good looks didn’t exactly hurt.
Joe didn’t sit down at the table. Instead, he pushed the sandwich toward her. “You can have most of it if you like. I’m not really hungry.”
Well, she was. While tempted to take him at his word, Mona didn’t really believe him. He was just being Joe and that entailed being quietly noble. She wasn’t about to take advantage of that. Hungry or not, it didn’t seem fair. “When did you last eat?” she asked him, repeating the question that Joe had put to her less than a few minutes ago.
He didn’t even bother trying to remember, shrugging off the question. “I don’t know.” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “I don’t live by a clock when it comes to food. I eat when I’m hungry, I don’t when I’m not.”
“We’ll split it,” she declared, her tone saying that she wasn’t about to take no for an answer and she was done discussing it. Gingerly sitting down on one of the two chairs, Mona picked up the half closest to her.
Joe ignored the finality in her tone. “You just said that there wasn’t even enough for one person,” he reminded her. Was he trying to pick a fight? Mona forced a fake smile to her lips. “And now I’m saying that we’re splitting it. Seems to me if you can listen to me say one thing, you can listen to me say the other.”
He laughed shortly and picked up the half closest to him. “It’s been dull without you here.”
She took a bite and savored it before commenting on his statement. Miss Joan’s food was plain, but it could always be counted on to be delicious. “I don’t think my brother would agree, what with finding first a baby, then the baby’s aunt on his doorstep.”
“Technically, the baby’s aunt turned up on the diner’s doorstep,” Joe corrected just before he took his first bite of the sandwich.
Mona looked at him. She’d known that. Rick had given her all the details—after she’d pressed him for them—when he called to tell her he was getting married. For the purpose of narrative, she’d exaggerated. She should have known better around Joe.
“I forgot what a real stickler for details you could be.”
“Gotta pay attention to the facts,” he pointed out mildly. “Without the facts, your story can turn into someone else’s.”
Too tired to unscramble his remark, she took another healthy bite of her half, but needed something to wash it down with.
“You wouldn’t happen to have brought along a beverage with your ‘dinner,’ would you?” she asked.
“I’ve got beer at home,” he told her.
“Doesn’t exactly do us any good here, now does it?”
Setting what was left of her half down on the wax paper, Mona eased herself off the chair, taking care not to make any sudden movements that might cause the legs to separate from the seat.
Meanwhile Joe had made his way over to the sink and slowly turned the faucet. It squealed in protest just before the water emerged. The smell alone was terrible. The color was a close second.
He turned off the faucet. “Well, water’s out unless rust is your favorite flavor.”
Since he was conducting the search, she sank back down on her chair. Her half of the sandwich was disappearing much too quickly, she thought, silently lamenting that he hadn’t brought two.
“I’ll pass.” She watched Joe as he opened and then closed the overhead cabinets. “Anything?”
He was about to say “No,” but the last cabinet he opened contained an old, half-empty bottle of whiskey. Judging from the dust, it had been left behind a long time ago.
Turning back to face her, he held the bottle aloft. “Does this count?”
“Rot-gut,” Mona cried, using the word that had defined crudely made alcohol a couple of centuries ago. That wouldn’t have been her first choice, but any port in a storm, she reasoned. “It’ll do in a pinch.”
“We’re going to have to drink straight out of the bottle,” he told her, crossing back to Mona and placing the bottle in the middle of the table. “Seems like the last owner didn’t believe in glasses.” His eyes briefly met hers. “I can’t find any.”
Mona scrutinized the bottle. The light from the fireplace bathed it with gentle strokes, making it gleam amber. But there was no missing the thick dust. She hesitated. “Think it’s safe to drink?” she asked him.
“Only one way to find out,” Joe answered gamely. Before Mona could say anything further, he tilted the bottle back and took a small swig. Even that little bit jolted him. It took him a couple of seconds to find his breath. “Hell of a kick,” he told her.
Suddenly, Joe grabbed his chest and began making strangling noises. His eyes rolled back in his head. Horrified, Mona was instantly on her feet. Throwing her arms around him, she struggled to lower him to the floor. She needed to get him to a flat surface before she could start CPR.
Mona did her best to fight back panic. “Joe, talk to me, what do you feel? Can you breathe? Damn it, you shouldn’t have—”
The words dried up on her tongue when she caught a glimpse of Joe’s face. He wasn’t choking, he was laughing.
Furious, she opened her arms and his upper torso dropped, hitting the floor with a thud.
“Idiot!” she bit off. “I thought you were poisoned.” She crossed her arms before her angrily. “I should have known the poison hadn’t been invented that could do away with you.”
Getting up off the floor, Joe dusted himself off. “A second ago, you were worried that I was dying. Now you’re mad that I’m not. You sure do blow hot and cold, don’t you?” he asked with a laugh.
Mona frowned as she sat down at the table again. For a moment, she said nothing, just ate the rest of her sandwich in silence.
He supposed it was a dirty trick. Sitting down opposite her, he apologized. Sort of. It would have carried more weight if he wasn’t grinning. “Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.”
She raised her eyes to his face, glaring at him. “That was a rotten trick.”
“Yes, it was,” he responded solemnly. She knew he was just humoring her.
“So? How is it?” she pressed, changing the subject. When he looked at her quizzically, she nodded at the bottle on the table. “The whiskey.”
“Pretty smooth for rot-gut,” he told her. When he saw her reaching for the bottle, he advised, “Go slow if you’re going to try it.”
He realized his mistake the moment the words were out of his mouth.
“The day I can’t hold my liquor as well as you can is the day I’ll admit myself into a nursing home and spend the rest of my days sitting in a rocking chair in a corner—rocking.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “There is middle ground, you know.”
“Not for people like you and me,” she told him just before she took a swig from the bottle, determined to match him.
Joe watched her eyes tear up as the whiskey hit bottom. He knew better than to laugh, or even point the fact out. That would only goad her on. For all her education, she really hadn’t changed that much, he mused. She still had that sharp, competitive edge that made her see everything as a personal challenge, even when it wasn’t.
She would have never made it as a Navajo, he thought. The Native American tribe was known for not competing. They saw competing against their fellow man as being impolite.
Mona had never been hampered by those kinds of feelings.
“How is it?” he asked, infusing just enough disinterest in his voice to sound believable.
“Smooth, like you said,” she managed to get out, her voice a raspy whisper. It felt as if the whiskey had instantly stripped her vocal cords, but she wasn’t about to let on. Mona deliberately took another swig.
Liquid flames poured through her body. Even so, this time it was a little less jarring than the first sip she’d taken.
He wanted to tell her not to overdo it, but he knew better. Mona was nothing if not contrary. When she set the bottle down, the look in her eyes wasn’t hard to read. She dared him to take another swig himself.
So he did.
And then it was her turn again. Joe caught himself thinking that he was grateful the pint bottle was half empty when they found it. The damage caused by the whiskey wouldn’t be too great.
Worst case, Mona would get light-headed and giddy for a bit, but since she was with him, she was safe.
Lucky for her, Joe thought rather grudgingly.
Yeah, you’re a regular Boy Scout, aren’t you?
The bottle was passed back and forth between them, traveling faster with each handoff. Before either one of them realized it, nothing was left.
With a sigh, Mona tilted the bottle all the way over, trying to coax another drop out, but without success.
She felt oddly relaxed and revved up at the same time, as if sliding around in a bright, shiny echo chamber.
Setting the bottle down on its side, she planted her hands on the tabletop and pushed herself up into a standing position. The chair behind her fell. There was a crash accompanied by a cracking sound as parts splintered against the floor.
Mona glanced behind her, mildly surprised. “Oops,” she murmured. “Don’t make them like they used to, do they?” Drawing herself up to her full height, she turned to her left a bit too quickly and found herself wavering unsteadily on her feet.
The sudden action had intensified her dizziness. “I think the wind is pushing the room around,” she told Joe just before she tilted too far to the right.
Jumping to his feet quickly, Joe managed to grab her before Mona could fall over. “Guess that must be it,” he agreed.
Her eyes narrowed as she forgot what had brought her to her feet to begin with.
“What are you doing over here? You were just over there.” She pointed to his chair as if it was located on the other side of town.
“Wind blew me over here, too.” He figured she’d accept that, thinking that if the wind was responsible for moving the room around, it could just as easily have moved him, too.
He should have known better.
Grabbing the front of his shirt with her hands in an effort to really steady herself—or the room—Mona stared up into his face rather intently. “Know what I think?” she asked him.
The woman was entirely too close to him, Joe thought. Her sweet breath mingled with the distinct scent of the whiskey she’d consumed, creating a very odd combination that reeled him in. He was acutely aware of every single supple inch of her. As well as his own body. Struggling, he did his best to appear indifferent.
He wasn’t, but in her present state, he hoped Mona wouldn’t notice. If she pressed up against him, all bets were off.
“What?” he finally asked her.
She was really trying to focus and not doing an overly good job of it. “I think that you’re trying to take advantage of me, Joe.”
That was when she moved in closer to him, as if that could somehow help her read him better. She pressed all her curves against the hard contours of his body and in turn threatened to create Joe’s own personal meltdown.
“Are you trying to take advantage of me?” Mona asked.
He did his best to try to make her turn toward the rear of the cabin. Hands ever so lightly on her shoulders, he maneuvered her toward it. “Right now, I think you should lie down. There’s a bed in the other room.”
“Ah-ha! I was right. I knew it,” Mona declared triumphantly, swinging around so that she could grasp hold of his shirtfront again, crumpling it beneath her fingers. “You are trying to take advantage of me. Oh, Joe—”
Every fiber of his being wanted to give in, but he continued to fight it. “No, I’m—”
The rest of his adamant protest went unspoken. He found it impossible to speak when Mona’s lips were suddenly and firmly pressed against his.
She was quick, he’d give her that.
She was also damn intoxicating, far more potent than an old, half-empty bottle of aged whiskey, Joe caught himself thinking—while he could still think.
But that ability quickly faded as the taste of Mona’s lips steadily got to him, weakening his resolve. Making him want Mona with a fierceness that jarred him.
The will to push her away, to do the right thing, was not nearly as strong as it should have been. As strong as it had been only moments ago.
His lips worked over hers, deepening the kiss.
He tasted her moan and felt the blood surge through his veins as if it had been set on fire.
Maybe it had been.
He needed to put a stop to this.
In a moment. Just one more moment.
He promised himself that he would do the right thing in a moment. Right now, just for this erotic half a heartbeat, he wanted to enjoy this completely unexpected turn of events.
Wanted to enjoy the feel of her warm body pressed so urgently against his.
Wanted to savor the taste of her mouth as it drained his soul away. With the least bit of encouragement, he would have fallen to his knees, silently begging her for more.
But that wasn’t going to happen for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was pride.
His.
So, realizing that this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, like Halley’s Comet, he took his time ending it.
Took full enjoyment of the moment—and her.
The very act, even as it was occurring, left him vulnerable, unmasking the secret that he had tried to keep, even from himself. That he wanted this woman with the laughing eyes and the sinful mouth. Had always wanted her and would, most likely, go to his grave wanting her.
In silence.
Because a man had his pride and any admission as to the depth and breadth of his feelings—his unrequited feelings—for Mona would expose him and leave him open to ridicule and pity, neither one of which he could endure.
With a jolt, Joe realized that he was very close to the edge of the vortex. To the point of no return. Any second now, it would suck him in, rendering him a prisoner of this feeling and leaving him incapable of cutting off this kiss.
Incapable of walking away.
He already didn’t want to. Fiercely.
If he didn’t back away in a moment, there would be no backing away. Because he was only a man, only flesh and blood, and his flesh and blood craved hers.
Now! Stop it now! Before you can’t!
Inflamed, Joe went on kissing her.
And she was kissing him back just as urgently.
Chapter Four
The sound of her own groan rudely nudged Mona into semiwakefulness.
An elephant tap-danced on her head. A heavy elephant that threatened to crush her skull any second now.
Mona curled up into herself, trying to hide from the creature, from the pain that his lumbering movements created.
But there was nowhere to hide.
As the haze lifted, scraping slowly along her awakening consciousness, she realized that she was squeezing her eyes shut. Squeezing them shut in self-defense.
Why?
Was she afraid of seeing something? Someone?
Very cautiously, Mona pried her eyelids open. The moment she did, she instantly shut them again.
The sunlight hurt her head.
Sunlight?
Her eyes popped open and she jackknifed up into a sitting position. The pain doubled but she valiantly struggled to ignore it as urgent messages telegraphed themselves to her throbbing brain.
The incessant, heavy rain had stopped. As had the moaning wind. The world was still.
She was on a striped, bare mattress that smelled as if it had been used every day for the past two centuries, all without being cleaned.
She’d gotten drunk, she suddenly recalled.
Drunk with Joe. Joe! Omigod, Joe!
Shock raced through her aching mind as bits and pieces of last night came back to her, jumbled and completely out of order. The only thing she specifically remembered was throwing herself at him.
Hard.
And then nothing.
She covered her mouth in growing agitation. She couldn’t remember what happened after she’d hermetically sealed her mouth to his.
Had he—
Had they—
“Oh, God,” Mona groaned more loudly this time as her distress mounted. She dragged her hand through her hair. The roots hurt. Her skull hurt.
Did that mean that she…?
That he…?
“Oh, God,” Mona groaned again, confused, embarrassed and absolutely, unequivocally miserable.
“He’s busy. Will I do in a pinch?” Joe asked.
The sound of her groaning voice had drawn him in. The expression on her face as she looked up at him told him everything he needed to know. She remembered last night.
That made two of them.
“You—you—” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, hoping against hope that nothing had happened. Afraid that it had. And worse, not knowing how to bluff her way through this to get him to tell her the details—or the lack of any—without admitting that there was a huge void in her aching brain.
“It stopped raining,” Joe informed her mildly as if he hadn’t noticed her sudden inability to form a complete, coherent sentence. “Hell, it looks as if it never even rained at all.” There were only a few small puddles to hint at the rising waters that had encroached around the cabin yesterday. “I can get you into town now.”
And then, because he wasn’t entirely a plastered saint and because he couldn’t resist teasing her just a little, he stood in the doorway of the tiny bedroom where he’d deposited her passed-out body last night and grinned wickedly at her.
“Unless, of course, you’d rather stay here for a while longer….” His voice trailed off, leaving the rest to her imagination.
Mona instantly stiffened. Something had happened last night. “No, I don’t want to stay here a second longer,” she informed him woodenly, scrambling off the sagging, weathered mattress. “Not one second longer.”
Feet planted firmly on the floor, her head still throbbing like a war drum pressed into use, Mona raised her chin pugnaciously, ready to go toe to toe with him in order to get at the truth.
“What happened last night, Joe?”
The wicked grin remained. “You weren’t yourself,” he answered.
There were so many different ways to take that, and from where she stood, none of them were good. “Exactly who was I?” she demanded.
Enjoying himself, Joe played it out a little longer. He turned on his heel, ready to leave the room and the cabin. “Maybe we’d better leave that to another time.” He kept his voice deliberately vague.
He figured she owed him, seeing as how he’d been the personification of honorableness last night. Turning a deaf ear to the demands that his body fairly shouted at him.
Stunned that he wasn’t answering her, Mona launched herself at the doorway, making it half a step before he reached it. Hands on either side of the doorjamb, trying not to wince from the pain in her head, Mona blocked his way.
“Maybe we better not,” she countered. Damn but her head was killing her. Any sudden movement on her part just intensified the crushing pounding. “What happened?” she asked again, enunciating each word slowly, her teeth clenched.
Silent, Joe watched her for a long moment. She didn’t remember anything. Hadn’t witnessed his superhuman struggles with himself to finally separate her lips from his and hold her at arm’s length. Didn’t remember that she’d pushed his hands away and snuggled up against him again, her soft, inviting body promising him a time he wouldn’t soon forget—and she wouldn’t remember.
That had been just the trouble. Whether it was just the liquor talking, or the liquor dissolving the inhibitions that kept her from him, he didn’t know. What he did know was that if he made love with a woman, she would damn well be conscious of her decision to meet him halfway, not slide to meet him on a slick path of mind-numbing alcohol.
“Nothing happened,” he finally said.
If it was nothing, then why had it taken him so long to say the word? And why couldn’t she remember anything beyond—
Oh, God, she’d kissed him.
Kissed him? She’d all but swallowed his mouth up whole, she realized as the memory came vividly crashing back to her, heating her blood at the same time. Heating all of her.
Embarrassed, Mona could feel her cheeks suddenly blazing. It took everything she had not to try to cover them up with her hands.
She tried diversion. “Don’t lie to me,” she snapped angrily.
His eyes captured hers, making a soul-to-soul connection, the way he used to back when he would walk her home from school and dreams were cheap.
“When have you ever known me to lie?” he asked her quietly.
Mona shrugged, struggling to recapture the dignity she felt she’d forfeited by allowing her old, and secret, girlhood crush on Joe to come out last night.
“For the most part, I’ve been gone these past eight years.” Although she had come home almost every summer. “I don’t know. You could have changed.”
But even as she said it, Mona knew she didn’t really believe that.
“I didn’t,” he replied flatly.
“So what did happen after I glued my mouth to yours?”
“You passed out.”
Mona froze inside. This was worse than she’d thought. No wonder she didn’t remember anything. She wasn’t conscious for it. “And then what?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“And then I carried you into this room and put you to bed,” he told her matter-of-factly.
“And?” she asked, her voice hitching in her throat as she waited for the rest of the details. Joe never said all that much, but he had a way of stringing it out, and right now, he drove her crazy. It was hard not to let her irritation just jump out at him.
“And I slept on the couch.”
Mona drew in a shaky breath, trying to do it quietly. Was he really saying nothing happened? “And that’s all?” she questioned.
“That’s all.” He cocked his head. “Why, what else did you want to have happen?” he asked innocently.
“Want?” she repeated indignantly. Did Joe suspect that she’d had feelings for him? No, how could he? She’d never given him any reason to suspect—until last night, she thought ruefully. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” Mona retorted with emphasis.
One dark eyebrow arched higher than the other. “That why you kissed me, Mona?”
“I didn’t kiss you!” Mona shot back. And then, because he was grinning at her knowingly, and because she actually had kissed him, she added, “Like you said, that wasn’t me.”
“Sure looked like you,” he told her.
He got a real kick out of watching her squirm. Since he’d played the noble guy while everything inside of him screamed not to allow this one once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip through his fingers, she owed him a little entertainment at her expense. After all, he’d been noble even though it had cost him.
Joe had taken off her boots, she noted, grabbing them from the floor. Going out into the main room, she hobbled over to the sofa. Overall, she was grateful to him, but right now, the humiliation of her unscheduled transformation into a passion-laced woman haunted her and she wanted nothing more than to divert his attention from that image.
Planting herself on the sofa so she could pull on her boots, she addressed Joe in a clipped voice, “Can we just get going?”
He nodded. “The rain didn’t sweep away the Jeep, so whenever you’re ready, we’re good to go.”
Boots on, she jumped up to her feet. “Ready,” she announced. The next moment she winced again from the pain shooting through her temples.
“Bad?” he asked sympathetically.
“What do you think?” She eyed him accusingly. They had both had the same amount to drink last night, that much she remembered. So why wasn’t his head splitting in two like hers was? “Why didn’t that whiskey affect you?”
“Oh, it did,” he told her, thinking of how his resistance to her had been lowered. Had the whiskey not affected him, he wouldn’t have let things go as far as they had. If nothing else, his background had taught him how to stoically do without. Not having her was part of that. “I just handle it better.”
Had she not been feeling sick, she would have taken that as a challenge to her own capabilities when it came to tolerating alcohol. But that was a catch-22 situation, she thought. So she said nothing as she lowered herself into the passenger seat and buckled up.
The less said, she decided, the less her head hurt, and right now, that was all that counted.
IT DIDN’T TAKE THAT LONG to get into the heart of Forever. Joe made the decision to go there instead of stopping at the house that Mona shared with her brother. He’d already gathered that her main purpose was to see Rick first, and at this hour, the sheriff was most likely in his office.
The additional benefit of going straight to town was that he could get Mick moving. The sooner he got the mechanic to tow in her vehicle and fix the flat, the sooner life would begin to get back to normal for Mona, he reasoned.
As for him, well, the memory of last night and what had almost gone down would linger in his mind for a very long time, as would the revelation that, just as he’d always believed, her lips had tasted incredibly sweet. That, too, would have to sustain him for an indefinite period to come. He knew there would be no replays, instant or otherwise.
Joe brought the Jeep to a halt before the sheriff’s building, parking it in the only space still available. Turning off the ignition and pulling up the hand brake, he was surprised that Mona remained beside him. He’d expected her to hop out. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d have to grab her to keep her inside the vehicle until it stopped moving.
“Something wrong?” he asked her.
Mona sat looking straight ahead, as if debating answering or just quietly getting out of the vehicle.
With a suppressed sigh, she turned toward him and said, “I’m sorry if I took your head off back there.”
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