Rebel Soul: (Rebel Series Book 1) ((Rebel Series)) (6 page)

I swallowed hard, looking up at him again. Brock’s eyes were focused on my face, on my lips. My heart was rattling around in my chest. I stepped back, overwhelmed by the intensity behind his gaze. I needed space. I needed to breathe. “Thanks. For, you know…”

“My pleasure,” he replied, giving me half a smile.

I pretty much bolted out of Brock’s trailer, away from the heavy air and those intense eyes, away from my stupid, girlish response to him.

When I heard a rustling coming from the tents, I turned to look. Elle was unzipping the flap and spilling out, her eyes frantically looking for me. When she finally saw me, she visibly relaxed. She crawled the rest of the way out of the tent as I approached.

I watched her expression change from relaxed to on edge as she took in my face. “You look better than you did last night,” she exclaimed, touching my chin and turning my face to look at my cheek and eye. “It’s still a little swollen though.”

“Brock,” she said, looking behind me. I turned, seeing him a few paces behind me. I hadn’t even realized he’d followed me out from the trailer. “Could you tell Braden when he wakes up that I’ve taken Tessa back to my place to get cleaned up? She’s got a show this afternoon and absolutely cannot look like this. I need to break out my best makeup for this job,” Elle added, pursing her lips thoughtfully as she studied me.

I groaned, nearly forgetting about the horse show entirely. Every year, I entered the Show Jumper competition with my horse, Scared Spirit. Spirit was a fantastic jumper, and I supposed I was pretty talented too.

Normally, I loved feeling Spirit’s powerful body beneath my thighs as we flew over jumps. We usually placed in the top three. Today, jumping was the last thing I wanted to do. I was still shaky from the close encounter last night. Plus, I knew jumping would mean that I’d just have to see my father even sooner. It was tradition for him to help me load up Spirit and accompany me to the show.

Brock focused on my face again and he nodded once. “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

* * *

Elle drove my truck to her place and forced me to sit down on her bed with a cold compress against my cheek and eye for an hour. Then I showered and got dressed in clean clothes I’d packed the night before. I came back into her room after leaving the bathroom, spotting her fussing over the massive amounts of makeup on her vanity desk.

“Sit,” she demanded, pointing at the velvet chair. I obeyed, my feet carrying me across the room. I sat heavily, a sigh escaping my lips. “Don’t furrow your brow,” Elle scolded, shaking her head. She set to work, adding foundation and contouring. Finally, she blended it all together and added a little mascara and eyeliner. Elle’s makeup skills hid the bruising on my cheek completely, and the end result was me looking normal, aside from a hint of swelling.

I pressed a finger against the skin nervously, worried that last night would be written all over my face and that my Dad would just
know
. I was afraid to go home; afraid to face him. Elle spotted me fretting.

“You can just tell your dad that your allergies are bothering you,” she said. “Or, you know…you could tell him the truth.”

I frowned at her. “Right, so I can get grounded for the entire duration of summer? Thanks, but no thanks.”

“I highly doubt your father will ground you for being attacked,” Elle huffed, crossing her arms like a sulking toddler.

“No, but he’d ground me for lying about where I was last night, and for going to an unsupervised party with alcohol and boys,” I retorted.

“Woah, woah,
woah
!” a voice from the doorway startled us both and we jumped. Elle’s mother, Sue, was standing in the doorway. The expression on her face clearly said that we were busted.

I swallowed hard, looking back to Elle with a panicked look on my face. She rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Mom. It’s under control.”

Sue Thompson was not going to let it rest. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorway, fixing us both with her no bullshit mom-stare that made me want to confess everything. I wondered briefly if my mom would have had that ability if she was still alive.

“What happened last night, girls?” Beneath the calm, I knew she was vibrating with anger. Elle was her only daughter, and she was fiercely protective of her. By proxy, and because I’d been her best friend’s daughter, she was equally as protective of me.

Elle sighed heavily, not sensing an out either. “Well, you know how I said we were going to the bush to camp and stuff, right?” she asked. Sue nodded, pursing her lips. Sue knew that we drank and hung out with friends, but in her words, she’d rather know where we were, and she’d rather us
know
that we could call her in heartbeat. It wasn’t her style to be completely clueless to what we were doing, and she’d told us on more than one occasion that what little trouble we got into would never amount to the stuff that she used to do with my mom.

“Go on.” Sue gestured with a wave of her hand, growing impatient.

“Well, Ezra invited his cousin and his cousin was a dirt bag who followed Tessa into the woods when she went to pee. And he attacked her but –”

“He did
what
!” Sue very rarely raised her voice, only right now, she was definitely yelling. She pushed off the door and came towards us, her eyes searching mine. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked Elle accusingly.

“Because nothing really happened. He just hurt her a little –”

“He just hurt her a little,” Sue repeated darkly, glaring at Elle. “Eleanor Reese Thompson, I expect better from you.” She tipped my chin up, examining me.

“He didn’t hurt me like that,” I rushed to say. “He was going to, but Braden’s brother got there in time and stopped it.”

Sue’s eyes locked on mine. “Brock Miller was there?” I nodded, my throat dry and scratchy. “And he stopped anything from happening to you? What did he do to the guy?”

“Don’t worry, Mom. He didn’t do anything, but you could tell he wanted to. He just made Ezra get him off the property before he called the police.”

Sue was worrying her lip, probably thinking the same thing that
I
was thinking. If Bill Armstrong ever found out about this, I’d be grounded forever. He likely wouldn’t let me leave for college with Elle, and Sue knew how much I wanted to go to college. She knew how desperately I wanted independence. She’d been arguing with Dad herself for years about letting me have a little more freedom.

“What did the guy do to you, Tessa?” Sue was at war with herself.

“He just…tried to…” It was difficult to talk with the lump in my throat. I swallowed, trying to break it up. “He hit me when I struggled, and then he was on the ground. He just…scared me.”

Admitting that Chris had scared me made me feel weak; it made me want to curl up in a ball and cry. It made me want to run to my mother for comfort. But I didn’t have a mother. She was dead.

Sue sensed what I needed, and she wrapped her arms around me tightly, pulling me to her chest. Her hand came up to hold the back of my head. “Oh, honey, it’s alright. It’ll be okay. You’re okay,” she said soothingly.

I let her hug me, fighting the urge to cry and break down. “I know, I’ll be fine. I’m okay,” I repeated, pulling away after several moments. “But if I don’t get home soon, I’m going to be late for the show.”

Sue had tears in her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand and nodded. Then her expression became stern as she looked from Elle to me. “Next time
anything
happens, you call me. Got it? I don’t care if it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, I don’t care if you’re drunk and I don’t care how far I have to drive. You call me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Elle and I said in unison, lowering our eyes with shame at the disappointment in her voice.

“Are you going to tell Tessa’s dad?” Elle asked, biting her lip.

Her mother sighed heavily and gave me a small, sad smile. “I’m sure that’d cause more trouble than it’s worth.”

* * *

Half an hour later, I finally headed home. After the intense heart to heart in Elle’s room, Sue had forced me to eat breakfast at the Thompson house. She wouldn’t let me leave until she saw that I’d eaten. I pulled into my long driveway and immediately caught sight of my dad’s red F-450 Super Duty parked near the barn. The horse trailer was hitched up to it, but my dad was nowhere in sight.

I exhaled and slammed the driver’s door before I cautiously walked into the barn. The scent of horses, hay and leather greeted me. To me, it smelled like home, like comfort.

The barn had eight stalls on either side. Twelve were empty and had been for a long time. When my mother was alive, each stall had a horse. She was a champion show jumper, but her passion was rehabilitating and rescuing mistreated thoroughbreds. I was told that she had a way with horses; that she knew how to fix their broken spirits and mend their tattered hearts. She could make them trust humans again.

Sue had told me these stories, and the rest of the stories I knew about my mom. My father very rarely spoke about her; he almost never walked down memory lane. It used to make me angry, my father’s reluctance to share anything about my mother with me. Now, I was old enough to understand just how much he missed her. I was old enough to realize that nothing had filled the void that she’d left when she died, and talking about her was painful for my dad.

When Scared Spirit caught sight of me approaching, he put his face over the stall door and whinnied. I stroked his velvety nose and rested my head against his, my nerves instantly easing in his presence.

Spirit was an eight year old palomino thoroughbred, the son of Artic Wind, who was my mother’s competition horse. They had been champion show jumpers. Spirit was the last foal sired by Artic Wind before he died. Spirit was the last thing and closest connection I had to my mother. He was also an incredibly intuitive horse. When I rode him…I felt as if he was an extension of me, or maybe that
I
was an extension of
him
.

Sometimes when I was jumping, I could almost feel my mother watching and smiling down on me. I wondered if she and I would have had the kind of relationship where I could tell her anything, like Elle and Sue.

I couldn’t help the tear that escaped, trailing down my cheek and absorbing into Spirit’s silky coat. Now was one of those times where I could really use my mother. All I had were pictures and the stories that Sue had told me.

“Everything okay, Tessa?” Dad asked, setting a bucket of grain down and effectively startling me. I blinked away the tears, conscious of the makeup on my face.

“Yeah…I was just thinking about Mom,” I responded quietly, knowing that my father wouldn’t push or pry if I was at least partially honest.

He exhaled deeply, nodding and turning his gaze to Spirit. He put his hands in his pockets, leaning back on his heels. “Your mother would have been so proud of you, Tessa,” he told me, his voice heavy with emotion that I could tell he was desperately trying to keep in check.

“Yeah, well…” I said, straightening my shoulders and pasting on what I hoped was a convincing smile. I didn’t want to make my dad sad anymore by forcing him to open up about the woman I never really got a chance to know. “We’ve got to get Spirit to the track,” I said instead.

My dad wasn’t the only one that had difficulty opening up.

* * *

On my drive home from Elle’s house, I worried that I would give a lousy performance during the show. My mind was so occupied by everything that had happened during the past eighteen hours. Seeing Brock, my reaction to him, the party, Chris, and finally my thoughts came full circle and landed on Brock again. Even with Brock nowhere near me, the butterflies fluttered around in my stomach at every thought of him. My skin remembered every subtle brush of his, and my lungs still fought for air just as desperately as they struggled when he was actually standing in front of me. It was ridiculous.

I figured it would be impossible to disconnect from those thoughts and focus on the show, but as soon as I stepped into that ring, everything else fell away so that it was just Spirit and me.

I was dressed in my best riding attire. I wore white breeches and a white collared fitted shirt with a beautiful black coat that my brothers had bought me last year for my birthday. My black field boots were shiny and my long, honey blonde hair was tightly braided to my skull and pinned up beneath a hairnet and my equestrian helmet. The black accents complemented the golden coat of my horse.

The jump course was decorated in flowers and foliage by the Agricultural Society. They’d really outdone themselves this year, investing more money into the event than any of the years before. The stands that lined the ring looked jam-packed full of people; the entire town seemed to be there.

Stuff like that used to make me nervous. Now, it just added to the thrill. I closed my eyes, focusing my energy on the feeling of Spirit beneath me. I leaned forward, stroking his long lean neck as we waited for the previous contestant to finish jumping. It was Melanie Clayton. She was a year older than me, and she was good.

I was better though. Or maybe it was Spirit. Spirit was a better horse; he rarely ever clipped the poles.