Last Chance Rebel
“What?” Alison asked.
“Nothing,” Rebecca responded. She stood up, taking a long drink of the last of her beer. “I need another drink.”
She made her way back over to the bar, too late remembering that everything hurt and walking across the space was an assault. “More beer,” she said to Ace, setting the glass on the countertop.
“What happened?”
She turned around, her heart thundering hard against her chest as her gaze clashed with Gage’s stormy blue eyes. “Nothing,” she bit out.
“Then why are you limping?”
Rage poured down through her like an acid rain. “Oh, I have a little bit of a problem sometimes with my joints. My bones ache. Not because I’m old, mind you. But because I sustained a pretty serious injury to my leg and sometimes after I work, the muscles tighten up and everything goes a little bit nuts.” She gritted her teeth. “I feel like you might know something about that.”
“The work is too much for you,” he said, his voice flat.
Ace came back over to the bar and set the glass down in front of Rebecca.
“Put that on my tab, Ace,” Gage said.
She grabbed hold of the beer, her heart hammering hard. “Don’t do that, Ace.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Gage said.
“I’m going to pay for the beer if you can’t figure it out,” Ace said, turning away from them and going to help another customer.
“I’m trying to work off my debt to you,” she said, “not accrue more.”
“I can’t buy you a beer?”
“I’m confused about why you’re talking to me.”
“I don’t like you limping like this. I don’t like that the work hurt you.”
“I didn’t ask for your charity.” She scowled. “In fact, I think I’ve made it pretty clear I want to blot your charity from the record.”
“You’re not doing the work anymore. That’s it. Not going to have you limping around town because you’re trying to repay something I didn’t want you to pay for in the first place.”
He was just so large, hard and imposing, looming over her, his face a whole thunderstorm. He made her feel small and vulnerable. Like she was out of control. And she hated it.
“It isn’t your decision,” she said, her voice hard. “I have some say.”
He shook his head, and she found her eyes drawn to the grim line of his mouth. She was fascinated by it. By the deep grooves around it that proved this firm, uncompromising set was the typical expression for him. She wondered what he had to be uncompromising about.
She shouldn’t wonder. She shouldn’t wonder any damn thing about him.
“Sorry to say,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “But you don’t.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said, keeping her voice low. The last thing she wanted to do was draw attention to them. They probably already were drawing attention. Pathetic, scarred-up Rebecca Bear talking to the tallest, hottest guy in the room. People were probably pitying her. Or wondering if he was asking for directions.
Heat washed over her skin, leaving a prickling sensation behind. Humiliation. Anger.
“You don’t think I feel bad about this? Do you think you’re the only person who lost sleep over it?”
“Well, I know I lost sleep. Recovery is a bitch.”
“I want to fix it. I want to make it right.”
“You can see the way that I’m walking today, can’t you? There is no making it right, Gage. There’s no fixing it. You can’t just make it like it didn’t happen. I’m not something you can just walk into town and put back together. I’m broken. That’s the beginning and end of it. And it’s my burden to bear, it isn’t yours. It isn’t fair. To wander around acting like you’ve been shouldering some of this for the past seventeen years when you just haven’t been.”
“The hell I haven’t,” he said, reaching out, wrapping his fingers around her arm and drawing her in closer to him.
His touch burned her, scorched her from the inside out. Her mind was blank, except for one thought. How long had it been since a man touched her? Anyone? She couldn’t remember.
“You can’t buy me,” she said, her voice low, shaking. And she wasn’t really sure if it was from rage, or because of the way he touched her. So firm and sure and completely unexpected. “You can’t throw money at this and expect it to go away.”
“Hey.” Rebecca turned and saw Ace standing behind the counter right next to them, his expression hard. “Is he bothering you?”
Of course Ace knew who Gage was. Ace was his brother-in-law. She wasn’t sure if anyone else in town recognized Gage West yet. And even if they did, they didn’t know the connection she had with him.
She doubted Ace knew either. But then, she couldn’t really be sure of what Gage had told his family, and what he hadn’t.
She pulled away from Gage, taking a step back. “It’s fine,” she said. She treated Ace to a hard look that expressed her to desire to have him go away.
She didn’t want him white knighting. She didn’t want anyone else enmeshed in this at all.
When he was out of earshot, Gage turned to her, leaning in slightly. “I’ve lived with it for the past seventeen years too,” he said. “Whether you want to listen to that or not, it’s true. Whether you think it’s fair or not, it’s true.”
“So, it sounds like you’re a big fan of being punished for your mistakes, then. Enjoy me withholding forgiveness.”
She didn’t even know what this fight was. Hating him for caring. Hating him for feeling some kind of responsibility for it. She shouldn’t know any of it, that was the problem. What she’d said to him earlier was the God’s honest truth.
She didn’t want to know his life. She didn’t want to know if guilt kept him awake. Didn’t want to know if he felt good, bad or indifferent.
This belonged to her. It was her pain. Her own personal tragedy. It had shaped everything she was, had disrupted her entire life in ways no one knew. In ways Gage West certainly couldn’t know.
Him feeling guilty...well, that seemed selfish. He wasn’t scarred up. His body was beautiful. Women didn’t look at him with pitying glances the way men looked at her. He didn’t have to deal with a terrible limp after a long day of physical labor. What right did he have to co-opt any of the suffering?
She should probably tell Jonathan what was going on. At least he could tell Gage to back the hell off. Except, she knew that she wouldn’t. Mostly because she wanted to handle all of this herself. It felt unwieldy and more than a little out of control, but she still didn’t want anyone else getting involved. Because her feelings were too raw. Too confusing. She didn’t know what to do with them.
She didn’t want to talk to Lane. She didn’t want to talk to Alison. She didn’t want to talk to anybody. She wanted to pick up a chair and break it over the back of Gage’s head.
Except she was too sore to do that. Because of him. Which made her want to hit him even more.
“I’ll be at your place tomorrow,” she said. “By six. Because I have to go in and work at the store afterward.”
“You damn well won’t be there.”
“I damn well will be, and if you stiff me out of my pay, I’ll make your life hell.”
“We haven’t even settled on a wage.”
“Make it a fair one!” She turned on her heel and hobbled back to her table, her heart pounding hard. She had no idea where all that had come from. All of that anger, all of that effortless rage. She wanted to stand there and scream at him forever.
She remembered her dreams then. She’d had all kinds of dreams after the accident. Some of them were about pain, and about more surgery. But then, after those dreams had faded had come the other dreams. Dreams of standing in an empty room, in front of a man whose face was hidden in shadow. And she would scream at him. Yell at him and hit him until all of her anger had quieted.
She would shout every detail of everything he had done to her. Emptying all of the toxic pain from her chest and pouring it into him.
She wasn’t going to do that in Ace’s bar. But she had a feeling she had it in her.
“Who was that?” Lane asked when Rebecca sat back down at the table. She had sort of forgotten that her friends were an audience for that encounter.
“That was him,” Alison said, “wasn’t it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She was starting to feel a little bit like a broken record. And like a terrible friend. She had never confided everything with them. She had never really confided everything with anyone. She didn’t like anyone knowing she was vulnerable. Didn’t like anyone to know that she was affected by what had happened all those years ago.
It was important that Jonathan not know how badly her injury still hurt sometimes, because he was already too protective for her sanity. It was important that her friends not realize what a ridiculous sad virgin she was.
It was just as important that everyone stayed a good distance away from the black hole of horrific nonsense that was the epicenter of her life.
“It was him.” Lane frowned. “He’s younger than I thought he would be.”
“How old did you think he was?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know. I just didn’t expect...that.”
Rebecca knew exactly what she meant. The tall, broad-shouldered, hard-bodiedness of him that just didn’t seem to be right or fair.
“It’s always the handsome ones,” Alison said, her tone decidedly bitter. “If evil men looked like the trolls they were inside, it would be much easier to avoid them.”
“I don’t know if he’s evil,” Rebecca said, not sure why she’d said it. He might as well be. What he’d done had changed her life forever. Ruined her life. If that wasn’t evil, she wasn’t entirely sure what was. Still, he wasn’t evil in the way Alison’s ex-husband was, and she couldn’t even pretend he was. “But, not exactly a nice guy.”
“Just be careful,” Alison said. “I know a little something about getting drawn into unhealthy relationships.”
“We don’t have a relationship. In fact, that’s why I’m working for him. I told you I owe him money. Apparently, some of the payout that I thought was from insurance came directly from him. I’m not comfortable with it. I want to make sure that I don’t have any kind of debt to him, and he doesn’t feel like he gave anything to me.” She was going to go ahead and leave off the complication of the store and the fact that he wanted to give it to her.
“That makes sense,” Lane said, frowning as though it absolutely didn’t.
“It does to me,” Rebecca said.
“I guess that’s what matters.” Lane looked down at her drink. “You owe me a cherry.”
Rebecca looked back over at where Gage was, leaning against the wall and brooding. He lifted a bottle of beer to his lips, and she felt the long slow sip inside of her. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.
“That’s all that matters,” she said, trying to convince herself.
She was going to show up at six o’clock tomorrow morning and she was going to work her ass off.
And nothing Gage West said or did was going to stop her.
CHAPTER SIX
JUST AS SHE’D said she would, Rebecca walked around the side of his house and toward the stable at exactly six in the morning. Gage was already out there, chopping wood and ready to jump into whatever work she thought she was going to do.
If she insisted on doing this, then she was going to have assistance. Whether she wanted it or not.
And you think this is the best way to mend fences?
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t exactly here to mend fences. Just to make the scales balance. Rebecca was never going to like him, and he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that. There were a lot of people who were never going to like him. He hadn’t earned it.
“Good morning,” he said, swinging the ax down so that the head was resting on the ground and leaning his weight on it.
Rebecca startled, jerking backward and looking up, her eyes clashing with his. “What are you doing out here?”
“Chopping wood.”
“Clearly. But, why are you out here now doing it?”
“I’m going to help you with your work.”
She scowled, her expression turning feral. “The hell you are.” She grabbed hold of her long dark braid and whipped it over her shoulder. “You seem to misunderstand the point of what I’m doing here. This is not leisure time for me, neither is it some kind of therapeutic thing where I put myself in the path of the one person that I can stand the least. I can’t owe you.”
“Or,” he said, taking a step toward her, “you just want to be pissed.”
“Yes,” she said, her tone dry, “I live to be angry. And I certainly enjoy investing all of my thought and energy into you.”
“Then why won’t you just take it? I could get out of your life a hell of a lot faster if you would just accept my help.”
“I’m not going to,” she said, breezing past him and heading toward the stable.
“Are you always this stubborn?”
“Yes,” she said without turning around.
“Why is that?”
“It may surprise you to learn that I have dealt with a little bit of adversity in my life.”
“I’d like to ease that.”
She stopped, whipping around. “Not your privilege.”
“Does standing on principle ever get uncomfortable?”
“Standing in general is uncomfortable, asshole. Why is that?” She turned away again, her words hitting their target even as she continued on toward hers.
She disappeared into the stable, and by the time he entered behind her she was already holding a pitchfork.
“Are you going to stab me with that or are you going to start cleaning stalls?”
“It’s up for debate.”
He grabbed a hold of his own pitchfork, heading to a stall at the opposite end. “I’m still going to help. You have to get to work, and so do I. This is my property, and if you’re going to work for me, then you’re going to help me in a way that makes sense to me.”
She nodded once, her expression fierce. She seemed much more able to take orders than she was able to take charity. Even though, in his estimation, it would never be charity.
How could it be?
“Does Ace know?”
The sound of her voice on the other side of the stall surprised him. He pushed the pitchfork down into the shavings. “Does he know what?”
“Does he know that you caused my accident?”
“Nobody does.” The words fell flat in the mostly quiet room. The only sound was the horses swishing and flicking their tails and nickering softly.
That response made him feel...well, more ashamed than he had imagined it could. Everyone knew what she’d been through, more or less. She wore the evidence of that time all those years ago on her skin. He didn’t. And sure, he had left town, had left his family, but if he didn’t want anyone to know, then they wouldn’t know.
Rebecca didn’t have that luxury.
Her response surprised him more than his own did. “Good.”
“What you mean?”
“I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t really want anyone knowing my business. At first, I didn’t talk about it because of the hush money your dad paid. But, at this point, I’m just more comfortable with people not knowing the particulars.”
“Why is that?” He was genuinely curious. Curious as to what she got out of hiding the details. She could point at him, scream at him and have him strung up in the town square if she wanted to. And yet, she seemed to have no interest in it.
Well, she seemed to have an interest in screaming at him, but mostly in private.
“Maybe I don’t have a choice about whether or not people know I was in an accident. It’s pretty obvious. But I don’t need people to know everything about me. I don’t need them all up in that.”
“Distance,” he said. “I get that.”
“It’s hard to get privacy in this damn town.”
“Why are you here then?” He looked up, his eyes connecting with the wall that separated them.
“Because it’s my home. Why should I leave just because people are difficult? Or because you made things hard for me?”
She really was stubborn. And angry. He couldn’t blame her for either. “I suppose you shouldn’t have to.”
“I love it here,” she said, stubborn. “And I’m proud of everything I’ve accomplished. People like me... We’re not supposed to be able to end up owning businesses.”
“People like you?”
“Poor people.” Her answer was simple and to the point.
“Who says that?”
“Everyone. Though, sometimes especially other poor people. It seems like people don’t want you to get too far ahead of yourself sometimes. Don’t want you to be too ambitious. They say it’s because you’ll only be disappointed, but sometimes I think it’s just because they’re afraid of being left behind.”
She was more comfortable with this. A discussion that wasn’t focused specifically on her.
“But you did it anyway.”
She laughed. “Well, I’m not exactly rich. But my business supports itself, and I have a house. I don’t know what else you really need.”
“A fancier house? Fancy car, vacations to tropical islands.”
“I live alone, I own a truck and can you imagine me on a tropical island? It’s not like I’m going to wander around in a bikini.” There was that bitter edge to her voice again.
“So you’re content. That’s pretty unusual.”
There was a long silence. “Yeah,” she said finally, “I guess I am. More content than a lot of people.”
“But also sort of angry.”
“I’ve earned that.”
He finished up with the stall and walked out into the main part of the stable at the same time Rebecca did.
“All right,” he said, “why don’t I help you get the first one saddled up?”
She glared at him. “I don’t need help with tack, thank you.”
“Well, since you don’t have a lot of time, what if I go ahead and get Deuce ready and we’ll go on a ride together.”
He could tell that she had no interest in that whatsoever, but that she also couldn’t figure out a position from which to argue. She didn’t have that much time, and she wanted both of the horses ridden, so she might as well accept his help. He could see all of that in the slight contortions of her facial muscles, her dark brows snapping together, the corners of her lips tugging down in a frown. That frown pulled at the scar tissue on one side of her face and he felt an answering pull inside of himself.
“It’s settled then,” he said, knowing that in Rebecca’s estimation it was far from settled, but that she wasn’t going to argue.
They got the horses ready to go and he watched as she got herself into the saddle effortlessly. She had been sore yesterday, but she seemed much better today, which was a relief to him. Watching her limp, knowing that he was the cause of it... Well, it really was no more than he deserved. And in this instance, he was the cause of it in more than one way. But she was also refusing to do this a different way.
“Where did you ride yesterday?” he asked, bringing his horse alongside hers as they headed up on the trail that went behind his house.
“I just went up this way,” she said, gesturing ahead. “I like the view. And... I like to ride. I don’t have a horse right now so...so this is nice.”
He could tell those words nearly choked her, so he didn’t acknowledge them. “How long have you lived up here?”
“I bought my house about a year ago. Before that, I lived with my brother, Jonathan.”
“What about your mom?” He wondered about her, because she had been the other person in the accident. Though, he knew she hadn’t been injured. At least, not to the degree that Rebecca had been.
“She’s not around,” Rebecca said, the words short and clipped, and clearly not an invitation for investigation.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“I’m not.” He could tell that she was. But hey, he knew all about complicated relationships with family.
The trail wound upward, going through a grove of evergreen trees, narrowing slightly and getting rockier. He hadn’t ridden out this way before, since he’d only just moved here. He missed being outdoors. It was the only therapy he’d ever gotten, and it had been more effective than talking to some doctor ever could have been.
When he’d first left Copper Ridge he’d had half a mind to work himself to death. And then, he’d more or less tried to ride himself to death in amateur rodeo events. Getting on the backs of bulls he had no business getting near, participating in a down and dirty, unregulated version of the sport.
It had never been about the money. It had just been about daring fate. It was what he’d been doing ever since he’d left. But he hadn’t found an answer there, and he sure as hell hadn’t found peace. So here he was in plan B. And he wasn’t really finding this all that much better.
Right now was okay.
“You like to ride,” he said, not a question, because it was clear from her ease on the horse and from the mildly more serene set of her shoulders that she was enjoying herself.
“People are terrible. They judge you based on how you look, they leave you, broken and bloody in some cases. Horses don’t. Horses are forever.”
“Oh, come on now, Rebecca. The horse would happily leave you broken and bloody in the right circumstances.”
“Maybe they’d leave you. Horses are excellent judges of character.”
“Is that so?”
“I’ve gotten a lot more scars from people than I’ve gotten from horses.”
He let that go. Let the barb hit. He had no call to be defensive, or to protest. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the trail ahead. He moved easily with the horse’s gait as he picked up the pace to get up the side of a rocky hill that spilled them out of the trees and into a clearing.
The view in front of them was endless, a patchwork of mountains that wove together, creating an endless tapestry of green. Clouds hung low around them, the mist the only thing that blunted some of the deep color. And beyond that was the gray, endless sea.
It made him feel small. Made him conscious of all the history that was contained in this land, more than just his own. He dismounted, leaving the horse standing as he walked toward the edge of the mountainside, letting the thick silence close in around him.
He heard the sound of feet hitting the ground behind him, and turned to see Rebecca moving toward him. “Going to shove me off?” he asked.
“No. That would be stupid. Then who would end up owning my business? Better the devil you are already dancing with, right?”
“Better to not be dancing with the devil at all, I expect.”
She shrugged. “Sure. But that’s the kind of option I’ve never been afforded.”
“What are your options, then?”
“Deal with the devil, figure it will cost you your soul. But maybe you’ll get something in return. Otherwise, just keep living in hell without getting anything in return. There’s really no decision to be made if you think about it.”
“There’s another option.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t care about anything. Doesn’t matter if you’re in hell then, or if you get anything in return.”
“You don’t care about anything?”
There was no good answer to that. Not one he liked. He wished he didn’t give a damn. The problem was he gave too many.
He looked out at the expanse of scenery, avoiding looking at her. At her face that bore the marks of his actions. It was a complicated question. If he didn’t care at all, he supposed all the things he’d left behind wouldn’t feel so heavy.
“I don’t have very many connections,” he said, because that much was true.
Just a bunch of people he used to know, people who had been in his life and weren’t anymore. He had never maintained a connection. When he moved on, he moved on. Whether it was from old coworkers, friendships or women.
He didn’t look back. He never had. He never went back to a place he’d been before either. The country was vast, and if you were willing to work with your hands you could do just about anything. And then, there was the financial stuff on top of it. He supposed he had the longest term relationships with his accountant and his lawyer.