Last Chance Rebel (23 page)

Along with the acknowledgment that she was afraid of being left came some more crystallized thoughts about fear of abandonment than she would like.

She took a long swallow of wine, then picked the phone up. She opened her call list, and found Jonathan easily. He was the last person who had called her.

She sighed heavily. He had never done anything to deserve all of her fear and distrust. He had always been there. Even if he was surly, even if he showed his affection in his own way, he loved her.

She pressed the number, waiting as the phone connected then began to ring. She closed her eyes, anxiety building inside of her while she waited for him to pick up.

“Hello?” He answered. And she knew that he knew it was her. Because he sounded too grumpy to be responding to a stranger.

“Hi. I know you're still mad at me.”

“Yep.”

“That's fine. I just want to know... Do you know where our mother is?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

W
HEN
R
EBECCA
B
EAR
showed up on his doorstep bright and early, bundled up against the December chill—her dark hair hidden beneath a knit cap, her cheeks rosy from the wind, the tip of her nose bright red—Gage felt like he had been gut punched. He had been expecting her to come to the property, but he hadn't expected her to show up at his door.

Apparently, he needed adequate warning before he came into contact with her. He had most definitely needed a warning for last night. For how it would make him feel, for the distance he would need afterward.

It was a strange thing, to come into possession of something he had told himself he'd wanted for a long time.

To know she was okay. To find some form of forgiveness for his transgressions.

But he had it now. And he found there was still something missing.

Damned if he could figure out what it was.

He wasn't sure he wanted to.

“Good morning,” he said. “You're up early. And you're wearing mittens.”

“It's cold.”

He had never thought of mittens as being erotic. Suddenly, he wanted her to press her mittened hands against his chest. That was just weird. But, that feeling, at least, he had a name for, and had a handle on. He could deal with being horny for her. It was the rest that concerned him.

“What's up? You look impish.”

She crossed her arms and bounced slightly. “Aren't you going to let me in?”

He reflected on some of the other times she had come to the door. On how tense things had been. The aura of anger that usually wrapped itself around her. It wasn't there. Not now. She seemed different. Easy. And it wasn't just down to this specific interaction with him.

It was something that went deeper.

“You can come in. But you do have to give me a kiss first.”

He expected her face to contort in irritation. Expected her to scoff at him. Instead, she leaned in easily, as though closing the distance between them were the most natural thing. Then, she put those mittened hands on his face—and damned if he wasn't right, that was erotic as hell—and pressed her lips to his.

When she parted from him, her cheeks were even redder, and this time he knew it wasn't from the cold. “Now can I come in?”

“Okay.”

He moved to the side, and she brushed past him, removing her hat, scarf and gloves quickly. “I talked to my brother last night.”

“You did?”

“He's still mad at me. It wasn't about us.” She said that casually too. As if the two of them being an us was natural. “But I asked him if he knew where our mother is. He does.”

“I thought she'd... Disappeared or something.”

“She left us. And she doesn't see us. But, I'm not all that surprised that Jonathan kept tabs on her. I just never wanted to know. I spent a long time kind of pushing all of that to the back of my mind. I spent a long time making you the bad guy because it was easy. But I'm not doing that anymore. I'm kind of confronting things. And I want to keep doing it.”

Something shifted inside him when she said that. He supposed forgiveness meant he wasn't the villain anymore. And that was even harder to wrap his head around. “Go on.”

“If you aren't busy today... I want to drive down to Coos Bay and see my mom.”

“Are you going to...call first?”

She shook her head, her dark hair swirling around her face. “No. I just thought I would go. But, I want you to come with me.”

She was willing to drive a couple of hours south to go and see her mother, and he hadn't even physically gone to see his father since coming into Copper Ridge. Hadn't seen his mother. It galled him. And, something else that she said scraped against something inside of him that he was trying to ignore. The fact that he was throwing a whole bunch of things in front of issues he didn't want to deal with either.

“I can go down with you. Is the shop closed today?”

“I have a couple of teenagers that come and run it for me a few days a week. I asked one of them to fill in today. I just don't want to wait. I want to do this, or I'm going to lose my nerve.”

“What are you going to... Say to her?”

“I'm going to ask her why she left.”

She was bright eyed and hopeful, looking at him just then. It killed him to see her like that. At least that sharp-eyed, angry Rebecca he'd met when he arrived in Copper Ridge was insulated against hurt. This one? She was opening herself up to it. It made him want to grab her, shake her, ask if she was crazy. “Rebecca, you might not want the answer to that question.”

“I know I don't. Because there isn't a good one. There just isn't. There isn't an excuse for leaving your children like that. But I need to know. I just need to do this. I'm spring cleaning my soul.”

“It's December,” he pointed out.

“It's metaphorical.”

“And you think this is the best way to what... To change things? To heal things?”

“I can never heal the scars on the outside. But it may not be too late for the ones inside.”

He looked down at her, at the hope in her eyes, and he hoped like hell that what she was saying was true. For her. Because he knew it was too late for him. Knew that it was too late to do any real redemption. Maybe that's what was bothering him. He had her forgiveness, and while it mattered, while it meant something, it didn't come with the fix that he had always hoped it might.

It was just one more piece of evidence that Gage West was damaged beyond repair.

He should walk away from her. Hell, he never should have walked into her life in the first place. Now, for some perverse reason, he agreed with the Rebecca he'd first met, who felt like he had no right to be in her life shaking things up.

But if he could fix this for her, if he had any part in doing something good for her, then he supposed it was worth it.

She was a better woman, a better person than he would ever be. And if he had never damaged her, he wondered what she might've become. Where she would be now.

She doesn't blame you, so maybe it's time you stopped blaming yourself.

He didn't like that. He didn't like it at all.

Maybe that was the other problem with accepting her forgiveness. He would have to give some to himself. And God knew where that might lead.

“Okay, I'll go with you. Do you want me to drive?”

“Please,” she said. “I'm too nervous.”

“I can hardly imagine you being nervous.”

“The man who took my virginity while I trembled can't imagine me being nervous?”

Her words were like a direct kick from a horse, straight to the gut. “We both know you were only trembling because you wanted me so much.”

That made her smile, and it resonated inside of him. Another bit of warmth, an unexpected bit of happiness. Another cut on his soul. “Okay, it was a little bit of that,” she said.

He put coffee in a thermos and they got into his truck, starting the drive down the coastal highway to the small town of Coos Bay, Oregon.

Rebecca filled the silence with chatter, which was funny, because he had never taken her for much of a chatterer, but apparently when she was nervous she did a bit of it.

She told him about her first horse, and her second, about learning to ride and doing it even when her injuries hurt because it was the only thing that had brought her some comfort in the months and years after their mother had left. In the large amount of time she had learned to spend alone while her brother worked and she rattled around a small, empty house. It was why she had preferred the outdoors.

That made him wonder about something. He couldn't remember the last time he had wondered about another person, but he wondered about her endlessly.

“You love the outdoors, so why do you run a shop on Main Street? It seems to me like it's a pretty claustrophobic choice for somebody who spends all of her free time rambling around in the mountains.”

She paused for a moment, a stretch of silence and road passing before she spoke again. “Because it's like a home. It's every great holiday, warmth and spice. I had a friend for a little while when I was growing up, and her mom used to put spices on the stove, not for any practical reason, just to make the house smell good. She decorated for every holiday. I mean, meticulously. She kept it perfect. And it was so warm. To me, that was what home should be like. I had a house. Which, trust me I knew was lucky. Because if Jonathan wasn't willing to work as hard as he did I wouldn't have had that. But to have a home like that... I aspired to it. So, I guess I work in that home. My store is that slice of happiness I never had. And I want to give people a little piece of it. People who maybe don't have it. Or people who want to.” She took a deep breath. “Other than the outdoors, it's pretty much the perfect place as far as I'm concerned.”

“Why doesn't your house look like that then?”

He had a feeling it wasn't something he should ask. Had a feeling that he shouldn't take things deeper like this, not when it was so difficult for him to give anything else in return.

“I don't know. It just never seemed like I could.”

Silence lingered between them for a moment before Gage spoke. “Sometimes I wonder which one of us is really punishing themselves, Rebecca.”

It was the last thing either of them said before he pulled the car onto a narrow, two-lane road that turned into dirt, leading to a small trailer park just out of town. “According to the directions you gave me, it should be here,” he said.

He watched as Rebecca clasped her hands in her lap, twisting at them nervously.

“Maybe nobody's home,” he said.

She nodded slowly. “Maybe. Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, putting her fingers on the passenger side handle. “Will you come with me?”

An unexpected slug of emotion hit him in the chest. She had gone with him when he'd gone to the hospital to see his sister, and he had been happier about that than he would like to admit. All things considered, he supposed he needed to be with her now.

“Of course.”

They got out of the truck and the two of them walked up to the small, faded yellow house with metal siding that was peeling up and a porch that seemed like it might collapse beneath the weight of the two of them.

She took a deep breath, raising her fist and knocking on the tin door, the sound hollow and unsatisfying.

Then the door opened, and Rebecca took a step back, leaning against his chest as though he were the only thing keeping her on her feet.

* * *

F
OR
THE
SECOND
time in the space of a few weeks Rebecca was staring down a person she had built up to be much larger in her mind that she was in reality. Much like Gage, her mother had become something of a legend in her imagination. Not a real person anymore, not an accurate memory.

The woman standing in front of her was, undoubtedly, her mother.

But she was faded, shrunken. As if the years had taken pieces off of her, reducing her to something much less than she'd been. Roundness becoming hollows. The color had leached from her hair, all of the rich black faded into a tarnished silver. Her brown skin had the look of rawhide about it, her lips like wrinkled paper. A smile would tear them, Rebecca was almost certain.

But the other woman didn't smile anyway. Perhaps it was for the best.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice as thin and fragile as the rest of her.

“I think so. I'm looking for Jessica Bear.”

The older woman looked at her, her brown eyes cold, flatter than Rebecca remembered. “If you're going to serve me papers, I'm not going to take them.”

“I'm not here to serve you papers,” Rebecca said, her heart twisting gently. “I just wanted to see you.” Wind whipped across the porch, blowing through brittle coastal grass making a sound a lot like broken glass. “I'm Rebecca.”

What little color was in her mother's face drained away, but the hard, stoic expression remained. “If you're here for money, I don't have any of that anymore either. I would think that was pretty obvious.”

From the perspective of the child, Nathan West had given Jessica enough money to make a new start. As an adult, Rebecca could better understand how all of that could drain away in seventeen years. Though, the situation was a bit more dire than she had expected it to be.

“I'm not here for money either. I really did just want to see you.”

“Why?”

If Rebecca knew the answer to that, she would give it. But, she wasn't sure she possessed anything quite like deep insight at the moment.

“Just to see you,” she said.

“Well,” Jessica said, “you can come in if you like.”

She moved away from the door, granting them admittance into a threadbare room that smelled like old smoke and firewood.

Her mother lit a cigarette and took a seat on the green couch in the corner. Rebecca opted to stay standing. Gage stood behind her, a wall of strength that she was grateful for since she felt at the moment she didn't have much of her own.

She looked around at the fake wood paneling that seemed to close in around them, and the heavy curtains covering each window as a rebellion against any kind of light.

Rebecca didn't know what to say. There was too much to say, and really, not enough to say. She didn't want to yell at her mother. Not now. Not because she felt sorry for her, not because life had clearly turned out nothing like she had imagined it would when she had run away from her children, from her bleak life, with the money that she had been meant to use to care for them. No, she didn't feel sorry for her because of that. That, in Rebecca's estimation was nothing short of karma.

She just wasn't angry. And she couldn't hate her.