The Lonesome Young (29 page)

Silence.

“Victoria—”

“Where are you?”

It wasn’t “yes,” but it hadn’t been “no,” either.

“Practically on your front porch.”

Another, longer silence.

“Come to the back porch, instead,” she whispered.

I left thousands of dollars’ worth of motorcycle without a second thought and ran the half mile to her house in under four minutes.

The back door was open just wide enough that I could see the long sliver of light from the kitchen and Victoria’s shadow standing behind it. I knocked quietly anyway, and she opened the door all the way and motioned me inside.

Now that I was here, I didn’t know what to say first. I watched as she closed and locked the door, and I tried to frame my arguments for why we should ignore everything our families wanted and everything that made sane, logical sense, just so we could be together.

“Victoria, I—”

She stepped forward into my arms and kissed me.

Chapter 45

Victoria

A
ll the carefully planned-out reasons I had for why we should stay away from each other evaporated like mist over the fields at sunrise when I saw his face. I threw myself at him, desperate to touch him—to hold him—to kiss him.

Everything I’d believed I’d never have the chance to do again.

He felt like sanity in a world that had gone crazy. I clung to his strong shoulders, and he stroked my back and my hair, kissing me and murmuring gentle, calming things that didn’t make any sense at all. None of it made any sense.

I didn’t care.

The house phone rang, and I didn’t care about that, either, until the answering machine clicked on and I heard Gran’s voice.

“Victoria, in case you’re there ignoring the phone, we checked out the place and Melinda loves it, so we’re signing her up. I’m staying overnight in the guest room, and I’ll head back tomorrow around lunchtime, so I’ll be home when you get back from school. It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. Get some rest.” The machine clicked off.

“What was that? Signing Melinda up for what?” Mickey asked.

“Rehab,” I whispered. “Finally,
finally
, rehab. They were on the way out the door when I got home today. Gran said that she wanted to get Melinda out of here before my parents got home to try to stop them.”

Mickey looked puzzled. “Why would they stop her? That’s the best place for her.”

I struck a haughty pose. “Rehab is trashy, Mr. Rhodale, don’t you know that? A Whitfield would never be caught dead in rehab.”

He laughed, but I stopped—stricken. Talking about anybody being “caught dead” was a terrible idea in our situation.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get the second-thoughts look on your face. It’s too late. You can’t kiss me like that and then throw me out again,” Mickey said, looking grim. “We need to talk.”

“There they are again.”

“What?”

“Those four horrible words.”

“I don’t care. I need to apologize. I never should have pushed your dad; I was out of my mind when it looked like he was threatening my mother, and he said those awful things to her. She was bleeding.” He stopped and shook his head, shoving a hand through his hair. “It was so damn stupid, and reactive, and all the things I know better than to do, but hell, Victoria, it was my
mom
. She’s the one innocent, truly good person in my entire shitty family drama, and I just went kind of nuts.”

“I understand, but I don’t know how to be with you if you can’t figure out a way to control your temper, Mickey,” I said, clasping my hands in front of me.

“I know. I know. And I also know it was a half-assed apology, but it was the truth. There’s something in me that explodes when I see somebody hurting or threatening the people I care about.”

I remembered his face in the cafeteria, before he’d laid into Sam. I imagined that his sister had seen the same face, only a dozen times more intense.

“You don’t have to grovel,” I whispered. “But maybe therapy, or anger management classes?”

“Yes. Anything. Definitely,” he said, taking a step closer to me with each word, until he had me backed up against the kitchen counter.

“Anything for you,” he murmured, and then he kissed me, and it felt like my world had righted itself again.

When he let me catch my breath several minutes later, I took his hand and showed him around the house, and he laughed when I pointed out the downstairs guest bathroom, but he wouldn’t tell me why. None of the rooms downstairs felt right as someplace for us to sit and talk, so we ended up in the upstairs rec room, where the
Pirates
movies were still scattered all over the place.

“Interesting choice,” Mickey said, picking up one DVD case. “There are some strange tides around here, that’s for sure.”

I sank down on the sectional sofa. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m hoping by that you mean that you don’t want to never see me again. Wow. How was that for a tangled-up sentence? I’ve been cleaning the garage for four straight days, so my brain might be rusty.” He smiled but his face was tense, as if he was waiting for me to shut him down or throw him out.

I couldn’t blame him, either, since I’d been up and down with him from the beginning. Changing my mind with the tides of family opinion, in a way, even after I’d made him promise he wouldn’t do that to me.

I looked down at my hands. “You know I want to see you. I
always
want to see you. But look what happened. Buddy got hurt, Melinda could have been hurt, and Pete got
shot
.”

“I know.” He sat down next to me, and I curled up against his side, unable to resist his warmth. “But none of that is our fault. Well, my shoving your dad is totally my fault, but I swear to you that nothing like that will happen again.”

I glared at him. “It better not. If anybody gets to shove my dad when he’s acting like a jerk, it’s going to be me.”

He smiled, and then he kissed me, and I had to push him away so I could think.

“You were right, Victoria. We need to find a way to end this hatred between our families. Things are going to keep deteriorating if we don’t.”

“I don’t know where we’d even begin. Most of this is way over our heads. Anna Mae said she loaned Daddy money he never paid back. I asked him about that on the phone, and when he got done blustering, he admitted to borrowing the money, but claims he did pay it back, at least at the original interest rate. Evidently when she found out about my mom—that Dad was dating her—Anna Mae tried to retroactively jack up the interest.”

Mickey took my hand and rubbed his thumb in circles on my palm, contemplating what I’d said, and I tried to keep from shivering at his touch.

“I’m surprised he told you that much.”

“I doubt he would have, except he was in full-on defensive mode. This was when we weren’t sure that Pete—that he—” I fought back tears, trying to hide my face, but Mickey pulled me across his body and onto his lap and held me, rubbing my back, until I’d calmed down.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m tougher than that.”

“You’re one of the toughest people I’ve ever known, but you can’t cry,” he said, a little desperately. “I can’t handle it.”

He stared down at me as if hypnotized by the sight of my pale face and swollen eyes. I started to jump up so I could go wash my face or find makeup or something, but he tightened his arms around me and kissed me.

Sensation shivered through me, and I pulled Mickey closer, almost trying to climb inside his skin, or at least inside his courage and confidence, so I could be as brave as he was about the challenges we were facing.

“I don’t know how to let you go, Victoria. So let’s figure out a way that we can be together.”

“I think I’d better sit over here, then.” I moved to the other side of the couch, far enough away that I couldn’t feel the heat of his body against mine and be tempted to do something from which there would be no turning back.

Also, I knew I had to ask the question that had been weighing on me ever since Friday night.

“Was it really Ethan who shot Pete?”

Chapter 46

Mickey

Y
ou didn’t see him?” I had to take this carefully, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to say, and I didn’t want to unconsciously influence her.

“I don’t know. I saw somebody, but to swear it was Ethan? I can’t be sure. It was too dark and rainy, and I was at the wrong angle—your dad’s deputies were here on and off all weekend, but I couldn’t name a name, because I didn’t see his face.”

I suddenly realized that Pa had protected me from any interrogation about the shooting, and I wondered, not for the first time, how many rules he broke doing his job and trying to protect Ethan and Jeb—and now me—all at the same time.

“I’m pretty sure it was Ethan,” I admitted slowly. “I guess a good defense attorney could crack me in two, considering the weather conditions, but who else could it have been? He saw Pete hit me, and he went ballistic.”

“So he does care about you,” she said slowly.

“Yeah, in his twisted way. He’s always been crazy protective of me and Caro, and even Jeb.
He
might give me or Jeb a black eye, but nobody
else
better so much as lay a finger on us.”

“I don’t think ‘who else could it have been’ is going to stand up in court,” Victoria pointed out, and I nodded.

She wasn’t wrong.

“What if . . . what if we weren’t sure at all? Pete is going to be fine. What if we kept Ethan out of it? If we accuse him when we can’t prove it, we will have accomplished nothing but turning him and Anna Mae against us even more than they already are,” she said.

She had a very good point, but we were talking about obstruction of justice. Also, my gut rebelled at the idea of Ethan getting away with something else, and this time he’d almost killed a man.

“My pa would be pleased as moonshine-spiked punch,” I said bitterly.

Victoria shook her head. “Your father has a somewhat . . .
complicated
relationship with the law, doesn’t he?”

“You have no idea.”

She jumped up and started putting DVDs away and straightening the room, more out of an excess of nervous energy than anything else, probably. I didn’t mind, because I was content to watch her move, her hair flying around her delicate face, the long lines of her body, the rounded curves just where curves ought to be. I was getting hot just from watching her, and I had to casually pull a pillow over my lap so as not to shock her.

If I got this turned on just from watching her clean up, I was in trouble if she ever did anything purposely sexy, like dance.

She put a CD in its case and turned to me. “What do you think?”

Shit
. She could tell?

She bit her lip. “About Ethan?”

Oh.

“I can barely stomach him getting out of this so easily, but you might be right. Maybe we could use this as our trump card, though,” I suggested. “Like, we could say, ‘Ethan, we won’t rat you out, but you have to promise to end this crap right here and now.’”

“Is that even possible? It seemed to me like Anna Mae was the one holding the reins. Or at least the shotgun.” Victoria shivered, and I didn’t think it was from the cold.

“She wants money, right? And for everybody to leave her alone so she can live her life of crime. Maybe we can find a way—”

Victoria was shaking her head. “Maybe. Or maybe she wants revenge. A woman scorned and all that. Or both.”

“Well, she’s going to have to agree to let it go. Ethan is her favorite. If the threat of him going to prison for a really long time is hanging over her evil head, she’ll have to go along.”

Victoria looked doubtful, but I was on a roll.

“On your side of things, you have to convince your dad to quit being such an—” I started to say “asshole” but reconsidered, in light of how tactful she’d been about Pa. “So
complicated
.”

She started laughing, but she didn’t look like she found it funny.

“I can try. I can tell him we got Anna Mae off his back, but he has to stop going after Rhodales. I don’t know how to face Pete if we do this, though. He’s the one who got shot.”

“It was his shoulder, not his chest,” I reminded her, and got what I deserved when she glared at me.

“Really? Are we in the Wild West now? Getting shot in the shoulder is ‘just a bitty thing’ and a real man should suck it up?”

I scanned the room, as if the racks of DVDs and CDs or the pinball machine in the corner might hold some answers.

“No, of course not. But I’m kind of out of options here, and the truth is, even if we decided right this minute to never see each other again, our families would both be better off if we found a way to stop the fighting.”

“Pete doesn’t know who shot him,” Victoria said, her face troubled. “The police interviewed him, Gran told me, and he said he didn’t see anything; he just heard the shot and then he was down. He’s more worried about the horses than he is about catching whoever shot him, I think.”

“So we use Ethan’s guilt as a bargaining chip, and everybody will be better off,” I said slowly.

“You’ll have to convince them that you can identify him as the perpetrator, for sure,” Victoria said.

“Perpetrator?”

She grinned shyly. “I like police shows on TV.”

I pointed at the enormous flat screen. “Should we watch one? Solve somebody else’s problems for a while?”

“I’ll make popcorn.”

The bowl sat untouched, though, while we watched the show’s crime scene investigators wrap everything up neatly in the space of forty-three minutes or so. Or, at least, Victoria watched it. I mostly watched her, captivated by the way the strands of her hair caught the light. Enjoying the feel of her body next to mine on the couch, my arm around her shoulders and her head leaning back against my chest. I forced myself to keep from touching her, other than holding her hand, because I didn’t want to push anything on her that she wasn’t ready for.

During the final ten minutes or so, Victoria kept glancing at me and then down at our clasped hands, and I got the feeling she was trying to work up to something. When she switched off the TV, she took a deep breath and turned to me.