Last Chance Rebel

“It’s not really a neighborhood, per se. Mostly, you’re in my driveway, and I need you to not be in it.”

“I just bought the place across the lake.”

Rebecca was certain she blacked out. Her rage was an epic creature, rising up from the depths inside of her and threatening to consume them both. “You what?”

“It’s a coincidence that we’re so close to each other.”

“Sure it is, Edward Cullen.”

“What?”

“If you start watching me when I sleep, I’m going to shut your dick in the open window.”

“I have no interest in watching you sleep,” he said.

“Then what is this? What is all of this? If you’re interested in using me to appease your conscience, then you’re shit out of luck. Because I’m not going to provide balm for your wounded soul. I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I forgave you years ago when I didn’t. And I’m not going to suddenly grant you absolution now.”

He paused for a moment, looking past her, his eyes fixed on the lake. “That isn’t what I’m here for. I think you need a soul to be forgiven. I think you need a conscience in order to soothe it. I don’t have either. Not anymore. I’m here to make things right, though.”

“You can’t. So, you might as well stop trying.” She crossed her arms, staring him down. She didn’t owe him anything. Not reassurance, not some kind of absolution. Because, whatever he said, he must be after that.

“Let me finish what I started.”

“No problem. Right after you return full range of motion to my arm. My scar tissue is a little bit thick...makes it difficult to straighten completely.”

He didn’t flinch. And in that moment, she had to wonder if he was right. If he didn’t have a soul or conscience. But if that were the case, why was he back at all?

Of course, if he had either of those things, why had it taken him seventeen years to come back?

“You’re too proud to take help from me? Is that it?”

“Yes. I am too proud. I’m too a lot of damn things, Gage West. Everybody has monsters in their closet when they’re little. You were mine. You are the reason I was in physical therapy. The reason I endured months of recovery. The reason that I had to have more than one surgery to try and restore the skin on parts of my body.”

He tilted his head back, as though her words were physical blows. “I know.”

“And it doesn’t matter,” she continued, her voice shaking, “that it was an accident. It was an accident that could have been prevented if you would have just used a measure of common sense. If you weren’t driving too fast. If you hadn’t been horsing around with your friends, or whatever you were doing. And maybe it’s something that all teenage boys do, but when you did it, you crashed into me. And congratulations, you got to walk away. You got to walk right out of town and never look back. But I had to stay. I had to live in this body, and exist in your consequences.”

His eyes darkened, her words touching him for the first time. “You think I wasn’t affected? I changed my entire life because of that accident. You’re right. I was a spoiled, entitled, selfish ass who didn’t think of anyone but himself. I didn’t have respect for consequences. I didn’t think for one second what my behavior might do. I’ve spent every day since then thinking about it.” He looked down, brushing his fingertips over his forearm, over the dark band that was inked there. “This is a reminder.”

Rebecca was shaking. Rage all but consuming her. “That’s lovely,” she spat. “You got a tattoo. So that you would be permanently scarred by all of this too. Well, here’s a news flash for you: I didn’t get to choose a designer scar. I’m marked by it even if I don’t want to be. Even if I want to forget, I can’t. I’m so very glad that my suffering has become a monument to your change and betterment.”

“Would you prefer that I didn’t change at all?”

“I would prefer that I didn’t know a damn thing about you. I would prefer that I had no idea if you felt guilty, if you had changed or if you had drunk yourself into oblivion. Because I don’t want your life touching mine. Not again.”

If he had been human, he would have been reduced to ash by her rant. She was breathing fire. Instead, he simply lifted a shoulder. “I can understand that. But that isn’t the way things are working out. I’m back. I’m dealing with my parents’ property, and your building happens to fall under that umbrella. This is the situation. You can self-destruct because you hate me, or you can accept my help.”

She gritted her teeth, refusing to back down. “Where’s that self-destruct button? I’ll hit it now.”

“You haven’t had any trouble spending my money for the past ten years—I don’t know why you need to stand on principle now.”

A line of frost bloomed down her spine, leaving a painful prickling sensation on her skin. “I’ve never taken anything from you. And if you’re talking about that payoff from your father—”

“I’m not. When you were eighteen you received settlement money.”

“From the insurance company. From your insurance company. That was what the letter from the lawyer said.”

“Yeah. That’s because he lied to you. I sent you the check.”

“And the adjustments after that?”

“Also from me.”

Her knees wobbled, threatening to give out beneath her. She turned sideways, leaning up against the rough-hewn side of her house, trying to keep from collapsing onto the ground. She was such an idiot. But she had no idea how insurance worked. She had no idea how any of this worked. Not beyond the way it had worked for her.

She had gotten a letter from a lawyer claiming to work for the West family, along with a check for an obscene amount of money that had allowed her to cover the start-up of her store. Those payments had given her the livelihood she had, especially in the beginning. Without it, she would have nothing.

That meant that Gage West owned her business. He owned her. In every way that mattered.

Is it any different than if it were insurance money? Isn’t it all money off of your suffering?

It felt different then. Different when it was an arbitrary sum of money that Gage had decided to bestow upon her. Different when it had seemed like an insurance company had decided it was official damages, or something to do with her hospital bills.

Why did everything always come back to him? Why was everything so tangled up in the West family so that she couldn’t escape?

“No.”

“You can say no—it doesn’t make it different.”

“Why are you telling me all of this? Why are you here? What are you doing? I just... I don’t understand why you thought it would be a fun thing to come in and completely mess up my life again.”

“I’m not trying to mess your life up. I’m trying to give you something.”

“Do I look like somebody that accepts gifts?” She flung her hand backward, indicating her house. “I work for what I have. I always have. My brother and I... It’s a point of pride. When life got hard, my mother just sat down and took it, and Jonathan and I refuse to do that. We always have.”

Jonathan had always told her they couldn’t depend on other people to help them out. That no one cared what happened to a couple of poor kids, so they had to make their own way.

So they had. And they’d survived because of it. Not only that, they’d become successful in their own right.

Needing people...that would only leave you crippled when they walked away. And people always walked away.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me. What good is pride if you don’t have what you worked for?”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you. It makes sense to me. You haven’t been in my life for all of this time, and you don’t have any right to walk in now and pass judgment on the way I’ve been living.”

“I’m going to sell off my father’s assets. It’s something that I have to do to save the ranch. I have to do that for my mother. While I was doing it, I wanted to help you. Instead of leaving you completely screwed in case somebody buys out your building and doesn’t want to give you any kind of fair terms.”

“It’s a little bit too late to worry about my well-being, don’t you think?”

He took a step toward her, and she pressed herself even more firmly against the side of the house. “You don’t need to be so stubborn.”

“Yes,” she said, peeling herself away from the wood. Because why the hell was she shrinking away from him as though she should be afraid of him? She wasn’t. She shouldn’t be. He had been a monster in her closet when she was a girl, but right now, he was just a man. And she was going to treat him like any man who was on her property when he shouldn’t be. “I have to be damn stubborn. Sometimes my stubbornness is the only thing that has gotten me through life. And I’ll be damned if I back down just because you showed up and told me to.”

“That’s where you have yourself a problem. Because I’m not exactly known for my easy disposition and temperament.”

“Are you actually fighting to give me something? I don’t understand you.”

“You don’t have to understand, just be reasonable,” he said.

“No. I don’t know how to be reasonable. I only know how to be right.” This, this right here, her inability to give on anything had gotten her in trouble more than one time over the years. But life was hard, so she had to make herself harder. She didn’t regret it. She didn’t regret learning to insulate herself from hardship. It was a necessity.

“You don’t want to be in debt to me, that’s your main issue. But the way I see it, you already are.”

“Get off my property.”

For once, he complied. Turning away from her and heading toward his truck. She watched him get in, watched him drive away. And then, her knees did give out. She slid down the side of the house, shaking, feeling every inch like the little wimp she was.

The fact that she wasn’t stronger than this was a blow. At least she had held her own when he was here.

Her head was spinning. She was trying to work out exactly what all this new information meant. Gage West was her benefactor. The man she attributed the ruination of her life to was actually responsible for the way that she lived now. He was the reason she had a business. He was the reason she had a house. He was the reason that she had enough money to hire employees and was now indulging in a completely ruined day off.

It all started with him. Even though her business was completely self-sufficient now, without that injection of cash, she wouldn’t have any of it. And yes, whether it should or not, it mattered that it was from him and not from the insurance company.

Like the monster had reached out of the closet to offer a piece of candy for everything he’d put her through. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to be bound to him. Didn’t want to be tied to him completely.

There was only one option. Only one option that was acceptable to her, anyway.

She dumped tepid coffee out into what would be flowers, if she ever bothered to plant any. Then she took a deep breath. She was going to get dressed, and then she and Gage West were going to meet on her terms.

* * *

GAGE HAD BEEN going over paperwork for hours. The text on the page was starting to wiggle, numbers beginning to reverse themselves. He was not a paperwork guy. He had a brilliant understanding of numbers and how investments worked. It was the reason he had any money to call his own. And he had quite a lot of it.

But, having a good head for business often meant knowing exactly which tasks you needed to farm out to other people. And that was another area he was expert in.

He had people to take care of the actual act of investing, people who managed his finances. Meanwhile, he continued to work with his hands whenever he could. Most people who had come into contact with him over the past few years probably imagined that he was destitute. And, he couldn’t really blame them. He tended to live in motels; he traveled from place to place; his truck wasn’t anything to write home about.

Of course, he’d owned this property on the lake for years. But no one knew that. He bought everything through a shell company and had his attorney handle all of his business. Finding caretakers for the place and everything else. He bought the house about a decade ago but had never actually lived in it.

It was the kind of place his father would find far beneath West family standards, but to Gage it was much better than the places he’d been staying while on the road.

It was rustic, but spacious. The property had a couple of outbuildings on it, including a barn that was housing horses for an older couple who weren’t in town half the year. His caretaker had taken care of them while he’d been gone, but he wouldn’t mind a chance to handle horses while he was in town.

Of all the things he’d done while he’d been wandering the country, rodeo and ranch work had been his favorite. And staying mobile had been a great way to keep ahead of his demons.

He wasn’t entirely certain what had prompted him to buy a place in Copper Ridge. Only that some part of him wanted to own a piece of it. Wanted to have a foot in it.

It was a difficult place to let go of, even when you were desperate to do it. But, it was all working out now. In that way that shit shows could work out. Which was definitely what this was.

He pushed his fingers through his hair and walked over to the kitchen window, looking out at the lake, barely able to glimpse Rebecca Bear’s house where it was nestled in the trees across the water.

He could totally understand why she felt like she was being stalked. In some ways, he kind of was stalking her. In order to get her to stop being so pigheaded and take the store. He supposed he could sign it over to her, and then there wouldn’t be much she could do about it. Except maybe refuse to sign her part of the deed. And then shoot him in the face.

His doorbell rang, and he could not for the life of him figure out who it might be. Maybe a neighbor with cookies. A neighbor who had no idea who he was. Because it sure as hell wasn’t a member of his family, or anyone else who had a clue that he was the disgraced Gage West.

His father had done a damn good job covering up what had happened the night of Rebecca’s accident. Nobody knew that he had been racing some friends on a back road and hit a car carrying a woman and her daughter. But, they did know that he had abandoned his family. They knew that he had left his fragile mother and a father who was endlessly generous to the community.

Gage West was nobody’s favorite. And he knew it.

He crossed the kitchen, heading into the entryway, jerking the door open without bothering to look out the window and see who was standing there.

When he saw his dark-haired, petite visitor, he felt like he’d been kicked in the chest by a bull. “What are you doing here?”

Rebecca frowned. “I thought you might like to see what it’s like to have somebody show up uninvited at your place.”

“I’m not nearly as disturbed by it as you were. But, I am curious.”

“I don’t want to owe you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I see you have a working ranch here.”

“Nothing major. Just a few horses.”

“Well, someone has to take care of them. Someone has to ride them. And there are bound to be other things that can be done around the property.”

“Are you offering to do manual labor in exchange for the multiple thousands of dollars that I gave you?” He was being an ass now, and he knew it. But then, he was often an ass, so he didn’t see why he should change it now.

“I know, it’s barely going to put a dent in it. But I’m going to do my best to work off my debt to you. And then, I will damn well buy that building from you. But I’m not going to owe you. The way I see it is this—I’m going to work, you’re going to knock some numbers off of the debt. And then, when all is said and done, whatever else I owe you can put into the cost of the building.”

He rocked back on his heels. “That isn’t quite how I saw it going.”

“Too bad. I don’t know what you expected to come back and find. I imagine you pictured some broken, fragile girl who was just going to get on her knees and weep at your unexpected charity. But that isn’t me. I’m not a crier. I’m a worker. And my life is my own. So, at the end of the day, I don’t want to owe you a damn thing, Gage West. At the end of this, we part ways, and neither of us owes the other a thing.”

He stared at her for a moment, his stomach twisting. This angry, strong woman, who was completely different than what he had imagined she might be, was offering him absolution in a way he had never considered.

Ultimately, he imagined that he was beyond forgiveness. And he stood by that. But she was right. This clean break could mean neither of them would owe anything to the other—it was the only way they could fully extricate themselves from each other’s lives.

He had never met her before. Not before this week. And yet, Rebecca Bear was the person who had affected his life more than any other. The reason he had made almost every choice he made in the past seventeen years.

And he could see that he was tied up in hers too.

So this could be the end. This could be the clean break. He would be a fool not to take it.

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Rebecca. I’m going to be here for as long as it takes. And in that time you can work on my ranch and assist me with other things that might come up as I organize my father’s assets. Then in the end, we’ll draw up an agreement for the building, and I’ll sell it to you, and we will filter all payments through a bank.”

He stuck out his hand, and she just looked at it as though it were a snake. He watched as she curled her fingers into fists, but she did not lift her hand. He let his own drop back to his side.

She tilted her chin up, her dark eyes glittering. “Then, it’s a deal.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“YOU AGREED TO WHAT?”

Rebecca rolled her eyes and shifted the phone so that she could hold it between her ear and shoulder while she finished spreading jam on a piece of toast. “Calm down, Lane. If I wanted hysterics, I would have told Jonathan.”

The idea of talking to her brother about Gage being back in town—living near her—and enlisting her services to help on his little ranch spread made her cringe. Well, especially because she had enlisted herself, not the other way around.

“I’m not being hysterical, but I am questioning your sanity. This guy rolls back into your life...”

“He did not roll back into my life. That implies that he was part of my life prior to leaving town. He wasn’t. We ran into each other once or twice. Literally, in the most notable case.”

“That’s not funny,” Lane said.

“It’s actually hilarious. Don’t police my humor. But, it’s a whole big complicated situation, and I just wanted to let you know that I was going over to his house to do some work this morning so that in case I went missing you would know that I was finally finished off by the man who started killing me seventeen years ago.”

Lane growled. “Again, not funny.”

“Lighten up,” Rebecca said, lifting her thumb to her lips and licking a bit of errant jam from her skin. “I’m just doing what I have to.”

“Sure. But in a cagey fashion. You haven’t exactly explained to me how all this works.”

She took a bite of her toast. “It just does.”

“Rebecca, I often find your unwillingness to share the details about your life slightly charming. You’re kind of a little lockbox, kind of mysterious and that makes you interesting. However, in this case I’m a little bit frustrated with the fact that you are associating with this man without fully explaining everything.”

She took another bite and spoke around the bread. “I don’t have time to explain this morning. I have to get to work.”

“You don’t have time to do this,” Lane continued, protesting sharply in Rebecca’s ear. “You barely have any time off as it is.”

“I have an overprotective older sibling, Lane. The position is filled, there’s no need for you to apply.”

“Sure,” Lane said, “except you haven’t told Jonathan. So, seeing as your overprotective sibling has not been informed, and is therefore not able to comment...”

“Because his comment would be vulgar at best, potentially homicidal at worst.”

“Because you’re being crazy.”

Rebecca shoved the last piece of her breakfast into her mouth and grabbed her thermos full of coffee off of the counter. “I’m not being crazy. I’m making the most of a bad situation.” Claiming her business for herself, trying to regain some kind of control in this situation.

She hated being out of control. She hated being needy. After the accident she felt like she’d been existing in a period of extended victimhood. Her body hadn’t done what she wanted it to do, she hadn’t had any decision-making power when it had come to submitting herself to another surgery, to another excrutiating recovery.

To being cared for by other people.

And, once their mother left, Jonathan had gone into overprotective older brother mode, and even though all of his decision making came from a good place, it was still overbearing.

“Fine. We’ll discuss this later. See you tonight at Ace’s?”

“Maybe,” Rebecca said, shrugging her jacket on and zipping it up all the way to her throat.

“At least text me so I know you aren’t dead.”

“Promise.”

She hung up the phone before heading out the door. She closed it tightly behind her, not bothering to lock it. Usually, she just kept it locked when she was home. If anyone wanted to steal her crap while she was gone, they were welcome to it.

She was more concerned about somebody assaulting her person while she was in residence.

Curling her fingers tightly around her thermos, she began to walk down her driveway. It would be much faster to drive over to Gage’s place, but she wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get there. Anyway, a little bit of time in her own head before she had to deal with him would be helpful.

She took a deep breath of the morning air, letting it sear her throat. Then, she took a sip of her coffee, letting out a long slow breath that turned into a cloud and drifted past her as she continued to walk quickly down her dirt driveway.

Wind rustled through the pines and the oaks, a few brown leaves fluttering down to the ground in front of her. She stepped on one, satisfied with the slight crunch that it made beneath her boot.

She found a simple kind of clarity in mornings like this. In her surroundings. It was one reason she liked living so far out of town. Too many people, too much noise and her brain ended up feeling cluttered. She had to have time to sweep it all clean again.

She looked up at the gray sky, at the pale yellow shadow of the sun trying to break through. She imagined it would all burn off around noon, treating them to a clear fall day, which was as rare as it was enjoyed by the people in this part of the world.

You had to cultivate a bit of enjoyment for gray and mist if you were going to live on the Oregon coast. Rebecca had always felt like it was part of her blood. She had been born here in Copper Ridge and had never felt the inclination to leave.

She kicked at a pile of leaves as she turned that thought over. She supposed that in some ways her life might have been easier if she had left. She wouldn’t spend her time tripping over as many ghosts. But then, she supposed that all went back to control.

Why should she be the one to go? Why should she run away from her home because some teenage asshole had scarred her for life—more literally than emotionally.

Her conclusion had been that she shouldn’t. And anyway, Gage had been the one to leave.

“But he’s back,” she said quietly, the words floating away on another cloud of her breath.

She reached the main highway and walked on the narrow shoulder, keeping an eye out for any cars that might be driving on the road. She doubted she would see anyone. It was still pretty early and unless people lived here, they didn’t really have a reason to be driving out this way.