Run To You (16 page)

I care about you
, he’d said, and she’d never felt so foolish. Never. Not even that time she’d streaked through a Tennessee bar, only to realize, once she’d raced outside, that she’d left her clothes back in the women’s bathroom. In her own defense, she’d been highly intoxicated and a friend had bet her twenty bucks.

With Beau, she didn’t have an excuse. Not money or booze or double-dog dare.

She tossed the phone on the bed as someone knocked on the door with what sounded like a key.

“Housekeeping.”

Housekeeping? Most housekeepers were women. This voice clearly belonged to a man, and she quietly moved to the door and looked through the peephole. She half expected to see Lefty Lou, not a pair of gray eyes staring back at her from beneath a Marine baseball cap. Her heart thumped in her chest and ears and she held her breath. Afraid to move. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid to blink and he’d disappear.

“I know you’re there, Boots. Open up.”

How did he know?

“I’m not going away.”

She knew him well enough to believe him. Part of her heart screamed a steady
Yes yes yes!
while the other part yelled,
No no no!
She compromised and opened the door, but she left the guard on just in case. “What are you doing here?”

He moved his face closer to the opening. “The question is, what are
you
doing here? I told you not to come back to Miami.”

“Well, I don’t take orders from you, Sergeant Junger.”

“That’s obvious.” His familiar frown settled into place as he rocked back on his heels. “Why didn’t you answer my phone calls?”

The ones he left five days ago? “That’s obvious.”

He wore a bright white T-shirt and his usual cargo pants. Her stomach got its usual tight feeling. “What are your plans?” he asked.

God, she hated him. No, she loved him. No, she hated that she loved him. “None of your business.”

He tried to smile, like he was all Mr. Friendly, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Humor me, Boots.”

Fine, what did it matter? She’d tell him and he’d leave and then she could go pass out from anxiety. “I’m packing up a U-Haul tomorrow and driving to Lovett. I talked to the manager of Slim Clem’s and he’ll give me a job working nights. And I’m taking a few classes at West Texas A&M in Amarillo this spring.”

All pretext of happy smiles vanished. “Slim Clem’s is a dive.”

“I’ve worked in worse.” Just the sound of his voice stabbed at the wounds in her heart.

“This hotel is a dive. The security isn’t worth shit.”

“I’ve stayed in worse, too.” She cleared her throat to cover the waver in her voice. “I’ve got to go now,” she said before the tears pinching her eyes blurred her vision and the
yes yes yes
part of her cracked heart won and she threw open the door. “Good-bye, Beau.”

He raised a hand. “Stella—”

She slammed the door as her eyes flooded. “Go away before I call the cops.” It was an empty threat but it apparently worked. She heard his footsteps, then looked out the peephole. He was gone. He’d just left. The a-hole.

She moved to the bed and the strap of her blue sundress slid down her arm. She couldn’t believe he’d left. That easy? Like when he’d left Lovett. One minute he’d been in town and in the next he’d vanished. Like the super-secret spy he assured everyone he wasn’t. His brother had left with him, too. Which had been good. The last thing she’d needed was to run into a carbon copy of Beau.

She brushed her tears from her face and rose to check the peephole once more. Yep. He was gone. She turned and leaned her back against the door. If he was just going to leave, why had he come? Why was he here? Why hadn’t she asked him?

The hard wood felt cool against her bare shoulders and she wiped away more tears. How had he tracked her down? Sadie and Vince were the only two people who knew where she was, and she doubted her sister would give Beau any info. That left Vince, or else Beau had tracked her cell phone. She closed her eyes and rested her head back against the door. He’d probably tracked her.

A loud bang brought her upright and her eyes wide open. Another loud bang, followed by several big pops, made her jump so hard her spine made a cracking noise. Outside, it sounded like a shootout was going down in the parking lot and she ran to her window. She pushed aside the drapes and stared down at the thick white and gray smoke rising from the lot. For a brief second she thought maybe a car had exploded, then Beau walked through the smoke, arms loose at his sides as he looked up at her window.

“Flashbang,” she whispered as he stopped just below and tilted his head back. He’d brought her flashbang.

Another crackle like the Fourth of July sent her racing from the room. She flew out the exterior door and down the steps, toward Beau like she had that day she’d run from two mobsters. Only this time, there was only Beau, standing in front of smoke like he was descending from a cloud. No fancy hearts or flowers. Just flashbang and him.

She stopped ten feet away. Suddenly unsure.

“Someone told me that I give excellent flashbang.”

“I think I said wonderful.” The strong smell of sulfur burned her nose and stung her eyes.

He smiled and didn’t seem affected at all. Maybe because he loved the smell of flashbang. “Then I’ll have to work harder.” He closed the distance between them as a few people stuck their heads out of the motel. “I’ve missed you, Stella.”

She tried not to smile or let his words make her think he cared about her. Oh wait, he did
care
about her.

“You’ve led me on a chase trying to track you down. Vince wouldn’t tell me where you were for fear Sadie would gut him.”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts as a breeze carried the smoke away. Thank God.

“Aren’t you afraid someone will see all this smoke and call the police or fire department?”

He grinned. “I flashed a badge and told the girl working the front desk that I’d be checking out the motel’s security. Not to get alarmed if she sees or hears anything unusual.”

“Like bombs and smoke?”

His grin got even wider. “Exactly.”

She’d rarely seen that grin. Which she had to admit was pretty handsome. “Why are you here?”

His grin faded and his eyes moved across her face. He simply said, “I love you.”

Her arms fell to her sides and she was afraid to blink. Afraid this was all a dream. “You said you didn’t love me.”

“I’m an idiot. I thought love happened like bullets and flashbang.” He waved the smoke away. “I was wrong. It happens one smile at a time. One beautiful, torturous smile at a time. One look into your eyes. One touch of your hand. The sound of your laughter.” He closed the small distance between them and took her hands in his. “I’m a Marine, and I expected something that was so life-changing as love to slam into my chest and knock me to my knees.” He smiled and raised her knuckles to his lips. “Instead it started out soft and small. Sweet. Like you.”

Okay. She liked that. That was good. That and the kisses across her fingers. She’d never seen this Beau. She could get used to him.

“Here I am,” he said, and ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders. “Slammed in the chest and knocked to my knees. I love you, Estella Immaculata. I want to look into your eyes and feel your touch for the rest of my life. You gave me the best gift I’ve ever received. You gave me you. Marry me. Not because we had sex and I feel responsible, but because I love you.”

Oh God! She couldn’t breathe. Her heart grew too big. She was going to faint for sure this time. “It would really suck if you did all this,” she said and waved a hand toward the flashbang canisters, “and I said no.”

He gave her his best Sergeant Junger look, but a smile creased his eyes. “Your joke isn’t funny.”

She laughed anyway. “Yes,” she answered. “I’ll marry you.”

He picked her up so that her gaze was level with his. “Promise you won’t run from me again like you ran from Vince’s apartment.”

“I left. I didn’t run.”

“You scared the shit out of me, is what you did. I drove around looking for you for an hour. If Vince hadn’t called me, I’d still be driving around Lovett.”

“Never again. Wherever you are, that’s where I am. Where I want and need to be.” She placed her hands on the sides of his face as the last of the smoke trailed away. “I love you. You’re my very own super-duper secret spy.” He opened his mouth to correct her and she put a finger softly to his lips. “You are my superhero and I will always run to you.”

If you loved
Run To You
,

don’t miss the first book in the series

RESCUE ME

Available now from Avon Books!

Read on for an excerpt . . .

O
n December third, 1996, Mercedes Johanna Hollowell committed fashion suicide. For years, Sadie had teetered on the brink—mixing patterns and plaids while wearing white sandals after Labor Day. But the final nail in her fashion coffin, worse than the faux pas of white sandals, happened the night she showed up at the Texas Star Christmas Cotillion with hair as flat as roadkill.

Everyone knew the higher the hair, the closer to God. If God had intended women to have flat hair, He wouldn’t have inspired man to invent styling mousse, teasing combs, and Aqua Net Extra Super Hold. Just as everyone knew that flat hair was a fashion abomination, they also knew it was practically a sin. Like drinking before Sunday service or hating football.

Sadie had always been a little . . . off. Different. Not bat-shit crazy different. Not like Mrs. London who collected cats and magazines and cut her grass with scissors. Sadie was more notional. Like the time she got the notion in her six-year-old head that if she dug deep enough, she’d strike gold. As if her family needed the money. Or when she’d dyed her blond hair a shocking pink and wore black lipstick. That was about the time she’d quit volleyball, too. Everyone knew that if a family was blessed with a male child, he naturally played football. Girls played volleyball. It was a rule. Like an eleventh commandment: Female child shalt play volleyball or face Texas scorn.

Then there was the time she decided that the uniforms for the Lovett High dance team were somehow sexist and petitioned the school to lower the fringe on the Beaverettes’ unitards. As if short fringe was a bigger scandal than flat hair.

But if Sadie was notional and contrary, no one could really blame her. She’d been a “late-in-life baby.” Born to a hard-nosed rancher, Clive, and his sweetheart of a wife, Johanna Mae. Johanna Mae had been a Southern lady. Kind and giving, and when she’d set her cap for Clive, her family, as well as the town of Lovett, had been a little shocked. Clive was five years older than she and as stubborn as an old mule. He was from an old, respected family, but truth be told, he’d been born cantankerous and his manners were a bit rough. Not like Johanna Mae. Johanna Mae had been a beauty queen, winning everything from Little Miss Peanut to Miss Texas. She’d come in second place in the Miss America pageant the year she’d competed. She would have won if judge number three hadn’t been a feminist sympathizer.

But Johanna Mae had been as shrewd as she’d been pretty. She believed it didn’t matter if your man didn’t know the difference between a soup bowl and a finger bowl. A good woman could always teach a man the difference. It just mattered that he could afford to buy both, and Clive Hollowell certainly had the money to keep her in Wedgwood and Waterford.

After her wedding, Johanna Mae had settled into the big house at the JH Ranch to await the arrival of children, but after fifteen years of trying everything from the rhythm method to in vitro fertilization, Johanna Mae was unable to conceive. The two resigned themselves to their childless marriage, and Johanna Mae threw herself into her volunteer work. Everyone agreed that she was practically a saint, and finally at the age of forty, she was rewarded with her “miracle” baby. The baby had been born a month early because, as her mother always put it, “Sadie couldn’t wait to spring from the womb and boss people around.”

Johanna Mae indulged her only child’s every whim. She entered Sadie into her first beauty pageant at six months, and for the next five years, Sadie racked up a pile of crowns and sashes. But due to Sadie’s propensity to spin a little too much, sing a little too loud, and fall off the stage at the end of a step ball change, she never quite fulfilled her mother’s dream of an overall grand supreme title. At forty-five, Johanna Mae died of unexpected heart failure, and her beauty queen dreams for her baby died with her. Sadie’s care was left to Clive, who was much more comfortable around Herefords and ranch hands than a little girl who had rhinestones on her boots rather than cow dung.

Clive had done the best he could to raise Sadie up a lady. He’d sent her to Ms. Naomi’s Charm School to learn the things he didn’t have the time or ability to teach her, but charm school could not take the place of a woman in the home. While other girls went home and practiced their etiquette lessons, Sadie shucked her dress and ran wild. As a result of her mashed education, Sadie knew how to waltz, set a table, and converse with governors. She could also swear like a cowboy and spit like a ranch hand.

Shortly after graduating from Lovett High, she’d packed up her Chevy and headed out for some fancy university in California, leaving her father and soiled cotillion gloves far behind. No one saw much of Sadie after that. Not even her poor daddy, and as far as anyone knew, she’d never married. Which was just plain sad and incomprehensible because really, how hard was it to get a man? Even Sarah Louise Baynard-Conseco, who had the misfortune to be born built like her daddy, Big Buddy Baynard, had managed to find a husband. Of course, Sarah Louise had met her man through prisoner.com. Mr. Conseco currently resided fourteen hundred miles away in San Quentin, but Sarah Louise was convinced he was totally innocent of the offenses for which he’d been unjustly incarcerated, and planned to start her family with him after his hoped-for parole in ten years.

Bless her heart.

Sure, sometimes in a small town it was slim pickings, but that’s why a girl went away to college. Everyone knew that a single girl’s number one reason for college wasn’t higher education, although that was important, too. Knowing how to calculate the price of great-grandmother’s silver on any given day was always crucial, but a single gal’s first priority was to find herself a husband.

And Tally Lynn Cooper, Sadie Jo’s twenty-year-old cousin on her mama’s side, had done just that. Tally Lynn had met her intended at Texas A&M and was set to walk down the aisle in a few short days. Tally Lynn’s mama had insisted that Sadie Jo be a bridesmaid, which in hindsight turned out to be a mistake. More than the choice of Tally Lynn’s gown, or the size of her diamond, or whether Uncle Frasier would lay off the sauce and behave himself, the burning question on everyone’s mind was if Sadie Jo had managed to snag herself a man yet because really, how hard could it be? Even for a contrary and notional girl with flat hair?

S
adie Hollowell hit the button on the door panel of her Saab and the window slid down an inch. Warm air whistled through the crack, and she pushed the button again and lowered the window a bit more. The breeze caught several strands of her straight blond hair and blew them about her face.

“Check that Scottsdale listing for me.” She spoke into the BlackBerry pressed to her cheek. “The San Salvador three-bedroom.” As her assistant, Renee, looked up the property, Sadie glanced out the window at the flat plains of the Texas panhandle. “Is it listed as pending yet?” Sometimes a broker waited a few days to list a pending sale with the hopes another agent would show a property and get a bit more. Sneaky bastards.

“It is.”

She let out a breath. “Good.” In the current market, every sale counted. Even the small commissions. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” She hung up and tossed the phone in the cup holder.

Outside the window, smears of brown, brown, and more brown slid past, broken only by rows of wind turbines in the distance, their propellers slowly turning in the warm Texas winds. Childhood memories and old emotions slid through her head one languid spin at a time. She felt the old mixed bag of emotions. Old emotions that always lay dormant until she crossed the Texas border. A confusion of love and longing, disappointment and missed opportunity.

Some of her earliest memories were of her mother dressing her up for a pageant. The memories had blurred with age, the over-the-top pageant dresses and the piles of fake hair clipped to her head were just faded recollections. She remembered the feelings, though. She remembered the fun and excitement and the comforting touch of her mother’s hand. She remembered the anxiety and fear. Wanting to do well. Wanting to please, but never quite pulling it off. She remembered the disappointment her mother tried and failed to hide each time her daughter won best “pet photo” or “best dress” but failed to win the big crown. And with each pageant, Sadie tried harder. She sang a little louder, shook her hips a little faster, or put an extra kick into her routine, and the more she tried, the more she went off key, off step, or off the stage. Her pageant teacher always told her to stick to the routine they’d practice. Go with the script, but of course she never did. She’d always had a hard time doing and saying what she’d been told.

She had a wispy memory of her mother’s funeral. The organ music bouncing off the wooden church walls, the hard white pews. The gathering after the funeral at the JH, and the lavender-scented bosoms of her aunts. “Poor orphaned child,” they’d cooed between bites of cheese biscuits. “What’s going to happen to my sister’s poor orphaned baby?” She hadn’t been a baby or an orphan.

The memories of her father were more vivid and defined. His harsh profile against the endless blue of the summer sky. His big hands throwing her into a saddle and her hanging on as she raced to keep up with him. The weight of his palm on top of her head, his rough skin catching in her hair as she stood in front of her mother’s white casket. His footsteps walking past her bedroom door as she cried herself to sleep.

Her relationship with her father had always been confusing and difficult. A push and pull. An emotional tug of war that she always lost. The more emotion she showed, the more she tried to cling to him, and the more he pushed her away until she gave up.

For years she’d tried to live up to anyone’s expectations of her. Her mother’s. Her father’s. Those of a town filled with people who had always expected her to be a nice, well-behaved girl with charm. A beauty queen. Someone to make them proud like her mother or someone to look up to like her father, but by middle school she’d tired of that heavy task. She’d laid down that burden, and just started being Sadie. Looking back, she could admit that she was sometimes outrageous. Sometimes on purpose. Like the pink hair and black lipstick. It wasn’t a fashion statement. She hadn’t been trying to find herself. It was a desperate bid for attention from the one person on the planet who looked at her across the dinner table night after night but never seemed to notice her.

The shocking hair hadn’t worked, nor the string of bad boyfriends. Mostly, her father had just ignored her.

It had been fifteen years since she’d packed her car and left her hometown of Lovett far behind. She’d been back as often as she could. Christmases here and there. A few Thanksgivings, and once for her aunt Ginger’s funeral. That had been five years ago.

Her finger pushed the button and the window slid all the way down. Guilt pressed the back of her neck and wind whipped her hair as she recalled the last time she’d seen her father. It had been about three years ago, when she’d lived in Denver. He’d driven up for the National Western Stock Show.

She pushed the button again and the window slid up. It didn’t seem like that long since she’d seen him, but it had to have been because she’d moved to Phoenix shortly after that visit.

It might seem to some as if she was a rolling stone. She’d lived in seven different cities in the past fifteen years. Her father liked to say she never stayed in one place long because she tried to put down roots in hard soil. What he didn’t know was that she never tried to put down roots at all. She liked not having roots. She liked the freedom of packing up and moving whenever she felt like it. Her latest career allowed her to do that. After years of higher education, moving from one university to another and never earning a degree in anything, she’d stumbled into real estate on a whim. Now she had her license in three states and loved every minute of selling homes. Well, not every moment. Dealing with lending institutions sometimes drove her nutty.

A sign on the side of the road ticked down the miles to Lovett and she pushed the window button. There was just something about being home that made her feel restless and antsy and anxious to leave before she even arrived. It wasn’t her father. She’d come to terms with their relationship a few years ago. He was never going to be the daddy she needed, and she was never going to be the son he always wanted.

It wasn’t even necessarily the town itself that made her antsy, but the last time she’d been home, she’d been in Lovett for less than ten minutes before she’d felt like a loser. She’d stopped at the Gas and Go for some fuel and a Diet Coke. From behind the counter, the owner, Mrs. Luraleen Jinks, had taken one look at her ringless finger and practically gasped in what might have been horror if not for Luraleen’s fifty-year, pack-a-day wheeze.

“Aren’t you married, dear?”

She’d smiled. “Not yet, Mrs. Jinks.”

Luraleen had owned the Gas and Go for as long as Sadie could recall. Cheap booze and nicotine had tanned her wrinkly hide like an old leather coat. “You’ll find someone. There’s still time.”

Meaning she’d better hurry up. “I’m twenty-eight.” Twenty-eight was young. She’d still been getting her life together.

Luraleen had reached out and patted Sadie’s ringless hand. “Well, bless your heart.”

She had things more figured out these days. She felt calmer, until a few months ago when she’d taken a call from her aunt Bess, on her mother’s side, informing her that she was to be in the wedding of her young cousin Tally Lynn. It was such short notice she had to wonder if someone else had dropped out and she was a last-minute substitute. She didn’t even know Tally Lynn, but Tally Lynn was family, and as much as Sadie tried to pretend she had no roots, and as much as she hated the idea of being in her young cousin’s wedding, she hadn’t been able to say no. Not even when the hot-pink bridesmaid’s dress had arrived at her house to be fitted. It was strapless and corseted, and the short taffeta pickup skirt was so gathered and bubbled that her hands disappeared into the fabric when she put them to her sides. It wouldn’t be so bad if she was eighteen and going to her prom, but her high school years were a distant memory. She was thirty-three and looked a little ridiculous in her prom/bridesmaid’s dress.