Last Chance Rebel Read online

  Hell, there was nothing he could do about it now. What was done was done. All he could do now was fix it, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

  He looked toward the barn, toward where Rebecca Bear was currently working to pay off debt that in his mind she didn’t have. She didn’t owe him anything. But she was stubborn, and she had pride. He had taken enough from her. He wasn’t going to take that too.

  He had left a hell of a mess in this town. He wasn’t sure it was possible to clean it up.

  But, if he died trying, at least it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE HURT EVERYWHERE. There was nothing like a day of manual labor to remind her that she had once shattered her kneecap. And broken her femur. And that doing too much seemed to tighten her muscles up around the bone and make everyplace that had ever been fractured ache.

  She had never hated Gage West more than she did in this moment. Actually, that was a lie, she had hated Gage West plenty of times over the years. Too many to list.

  But, she could clearly picture him while she hated him now. She hobbled over to the bar, leaning against it, trying to get as much weight as she could off of her leg.

  “Beer me, Ace,” she said, pressing her hand to her forehead.

  The bar was crowded. It was Sunday night, and no one was looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. So, instead of getting a good night’s sleep, they were obviously out playing darts and riding on the mechanical bull that Ace had installed about a year ago.

  Recently, Ace had opened a more upscale place, but he could still often be found here at everyone’s favorite dive. The fact that he wasn’t here some of the time was strange though. Copper Ridge was a constant. A small, slow-moving community that didn’t often see change. But the last few years had brought quite a bit of it. Tourism was beginning to become a major industry, and while she was definitely grateful for that, it was also changing her beloved landscape.

  Just a year ago Ace had been single, and flirting with everything that moved. Now, he was married and about to be a father. Not that it bothered her. She had never been interested in Ace that way. It was just… Watching other people, people like him who had never even seemed interested in such a thing moving on with their lives and finding a companion made her feel hollow. Unsatisfied in a way she rarely was.

  The fact he had married a West made her feel even weirder. Because the Wests made her feel weird in general. It was like they were infiltrating everything.

  Not that she held anything that had happened to her against Sierra, Ace’s wife. Sierra was at least five years younger than Rebecca and wouldn’t remember anything about the accident, much less have any culpability in the events surrounding it.

  Still. It was the whole thing.

  “You feeling okay, Rebecca?” Ace asked, setting her preferred brew down in front of her. She hadn’t even had to specify what she wanted. He knew.

  “Just worked too hard,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to anybody who suffered from that affliction before,” he said, winking.

  “What can I say?” she responded. “I’m a glutton for punishment.” As she said it, she had to wonder if it was true. She nodded once, picking up the beer and lifting it to her lips as she turned away from the bar and headed toward the table where Lane and Alison were already sitting.

  “Is Cassie coming?” she asked, sitting down at the table slowly, her muscles screaming at her.

  “No,” Alison said. “Something about date night.”

  “As if that sexy mechanic she’s married to is better company than we are,” Lane said, grabbing hold of the toothpick in her drink and lifting it to her lips, plucking one of the impaled cherries from it and eating it.

  “That’s a fancy drink,” Rebecca said, looking down at her beer. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Wanting to feel fancy.”

  Rebecca doubted a cosmopolitan with an entire handful of cherries could make her feel fancy after today. “Well, I guess that’s fair enough.”

  “You’re limping,” Alison said, her expression concerned. “Are you okay?”

  She was annoyed that they’d noticed. “I’m fine.”

  “Except this is probably related to the work you were doing today?” Lane asked.

  “Maybe.” She looked resolutely at her drink and not at Lane.

  “What did he have you do? Were you riding the horses or bench-pressing them?”

  Rebecca scowled. “There was just more lifting than I anticipated.”

  “What’s happening?” Alison asked.

  Rebecca shook her head, and Lane shot her a sharp look, then spoke anyway. “Rebecca is working for the guy who caused her accident.”

  “You’re what?” Alison asked.

  Rebecca reached across the table and grabbed hold of the remaining cherry on Lane’s toothpick, then took the unnaturally red fruit and popped it into her mouth.

  “Hey!” Lane groused. “Cherry-stealing bitch.”

  “Loudmouth.”

  “What is going on?” Alison asked, clearly unamused by all of the antics.

  “Exactly what I said,” Lane said. “Rebecca has decided to work for the guy who caused her accident, and clearly she has put herself under physical duress doing it.”

  “Why?” Alison asked. “Rebecca, do you need money? If you need money, you can ask us. I would much rather give you some. Or, put you to work mixing frosting.”

  “I don’t need money,” she said, feeling like a cat that had been backed up against the wall. “There’s a specific thing that I have to work out. And it requires working for him.”

  “Could you possibly be more cagey?” Lane asked.

  “If I tried,” Rebecca said, her tone deadpan, “I suppose I could be.”

  “I just don’t get it.”

  “It’s complicated. I owe him money.”

  “How do you owe him money?”

  “It’s complicated!” A prickling sensation assaulted the back of Rebecca’s neck, and she looked up just in time to see Gage walking through the door of the bar. “Oh, great,” she muttered.

  “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?”