Sandy’s smile was watery. “You thank me by living a good life, sweetheart. You go out there and you find your heart’s desire. Don’t you let him win. Fall in love and have a bunch of kids and live a beautiful life. You hear me?”
She nodded, unable to stop her own tears. She started the car and waved at the woman who’d given her this completely new life. It was scary. She looked at the entrance to the garage. There was a brilliant light at the end of the tunnel. It led to Amanda Cooper. She was Mandy Cooper now. She had to figure out who that was. Despite the horror of the past year, there was a little excitement in her stomach, like tiny butterflies that were excited at the prospects opening up to her.
Mandy Cooper drove toward that light, already shedding the vestiges of her old life. She would take the good stuff, her parents’ love and the lessons she’d learned, with her. She would toss away everything else. She didn’t need it. When she drove into the heat of the Dallas afternoon, she turned her face to the light.
The warmth of the sun felt like a benediction on her skin.
She pointed the car toward the highway and didn’t look back.
* * * *
Sheriff Ryan Harper sat on the porch watching Nina pack up her cute convertible. His dog, Quigley, lay at his feet, a tennis ball in his mouth, patiently waiting for someone to toss the nasty old thing. Rye wasn’t in the mood to play. If he was half the gentleman his momma had raised him to be, he would get off his butt and help Nina. He tipped back his bottle of beer and watched her. He should have known it wouldn’t work.
“You’re a bastard, you know.” Nina’s pretty face was flushed with exertion. She shoved her platinum blonde hair out of her eyes.
Rye shrugged, his Stetson low on his forehead. The heat of the Colorado summer was starting to make him sweat. He knew he should get out of his sheriff’s uniform when he was drinking, but he couldn’t work up the will to care. “I’m not the one running out on my wedding.”
His wedding. He was getting married in a week. No. He was supposed to have been getting married in a week, but his bride was running.
Nina sighed. Her shoulders slumped, and she seemed to get smaller. “I’m sorry, Rye. I got a better offer. You know how that goes.”
Rye huffed. “Yeah, someone with more money comes along, and you run off chasing him. Don’t think you can come back here when it goes bad for you in Denver.”
Nina flashed him a superior smile and was right back to being her arrogant self. “I’m never coming back here. I’m going to be a rich man’s wife.” She leaned against her trunk, seemingly more comfortable now. “Look, Rye, don’t take it too bad. You know I care about you. I just care about me more.”
In the distance, a truck pulled up the long drive. Quigley’s tail began to thump. “Didn’t you want to be gone before Max got home?”
Nina’s brow wrinkled as she took in the sight of that Ford coming up the dirt road. “Damn it, I told you not to call him.”
She worked overtime, shoving suitcases into the car. He sure hoped the next idiot had a large closet because Nina did not skimp on the clothes.
“I didn’t,” Rye said calmly. He knew something Nina didn’t know. Max wouldn’t care that she was leaving. Hell, Max would likely be thrilled. But Rye appreciated Nina’s fear too much to tell her differently. It was the only revenge he was going to get. “Big Brother has impeccable timing. He always has.”
Nina was trying to get the trunk closed when Maxwell Harper slid out of his old Ford truck. Quigley popped up, drooling around the tennis ball, and ran to his master. That old dog knew what Nina didn’t. Max had always liked animals more than humans. Max didn’t miss a beat. He pulled the ball out of the dog’s mouth and threw it as far as he could. Quigley ran off, happy to have found a playmate. Max’s eyes slid from his younger brother to the blonde and back again. “The wedding’s off, then?”
“Yup.”
“Thank god.” Max didn’t even attempt to hide his relief. He smiled broadly. He wore blue jeans and a neatly pressed shirt. It was what he wore when meeting with clients. Rye took note of the paperwork sticking out of his small laptop bag. At least someone had scored. “And someone wanted me to buy a tux. Who’s happy I rented now?”
“Asshole,” Nina spat, looking at the older of the two brothers. “I can’t believe I wasted my time on you two. You know what, Ryan Harper? I’m going to give you a piece of advice. If you ever want to get married, you better dump Max. It’s fine for a night, or even a couple of months of sex, but no woman is going to put up with his shit. You’re going to be alone for the rest of your life if you insist on this perverted lifestyle.”
“You didn’t think it was perverted last night,” Rye replied. Last night she’d seemed pretty damn happy between them. Max had never thought Nina was the one for them, but he hadn’t minded fucking her.
“Oh, I thought it was perverted,” Nina corrected him. “But I liked it anyway. As a fantasy goes, the whole twin thing is pretty hot. I certainly can’t do it for the rest of my life. Do you know much laundry you two create? What you two want, no woman is going to give you. That’s my advice. Oh, and get the hell out of this weird little town. I sure as hell am. Bye.” She twirled around, her shorts hugging her luscious ass.
In a moment, the dust was flying as she drove out of their lives. Rye found himself strangely unmoved by her defection.
“You okay?” Max sank down into the chair beside Rye. He set his bag on the porch and started rocking. It didn’t escape Rye’s notice that there was a third rocker that sat empty. He’d bought it a couple of years back, hoping that they would find a woman to sit with them. Nina hadn’t been one to sit and enjoy the sunset while rocking on the porch. She was more a “sit in the house and complain about the cable” kind of woman.
What had he been thinking?
Rye shrugged. He wasn’t okay, but that had less to do with Nina than he liked to admit. “I didn’t love her. I suppose I wanted to start my life. I wanted to get married, have some kids, and start, I guess.”
It had begun to feel like he was in limbo. He had recently turned thirty, and the only marriage prospect he’d had in years was driving off to Denver.
Max got quiet. “She’s probably right, you know. You would do a lot better without me.”
“It’s not your fault she left.” Rye believed it. Max might be surly at times, but he was a genuinely nice guy. Well, he was a genuine guy at the very least.
“I think it’s time we tried something different,” Max said thoughtfully. “You should try dating on your own. I want out for a while. I just want to be alone. I’m not cut out for the long-term thing.”
Rye turned to his twin. “How can you say that?”
Max smiled sadly. Quigley returned with the ball. His massive paws rested on Max’s feet. He plopped the dripping ball on Max’s lap, and Max quickly began the process all over again.
“I can say that because I’m thirty years old, and I’ve never been in love. I guess I’m never going to be. It’s all right. I’ve got my work. That’s enough.”
Rye sighed and cursed the day he met Nina. Now Max was going to brood. The last time a long-term girl walked out, Max brooded for two years. Max had retreated, and Rye had been left to date on his own. He knew Max didn’t love Nina, but rejection was rejection, and his brother took it hard.
“We’ll see what happens.” Rye was the younger twin, but he took the lead when it came to things like this. He wasn’t willing to give up. He popped open another beer and scratched his chest. “What do you think she meant when she called this a weird town?”
Max yawned. “I have no idea. It’s a great town. It’s nice and quiet, except when the Farley boys try to launch those rockets of theirs.”
“Don’t forget the Wiccans chanting. That can get loud.” Woo Woo Fest was coming up in a couple of months. He hated Woo Woo Fest.
“They only do that a couple of times a year. It’s the live-action role-playing that I take exception to,” Ma
x said with a frown. “Those kids scare my horses. Other than that, we’re perfectly normal.”
Rye decided not to bring up the nudist colony on the outskirts of town or mention the performance art done in the square every Friday at noon. He smiled to himself. Bliss, Colorado, was a weird town, and he liked it that way.
And one day some gorgeous, open-minded woman was going to come through Bliss and like it, too.
He couldn’t wait for that day.
Chapter One
One Year Later
Rachel felt the tire blow and prayed she could get the Jeep under control. She was on a mountain, on some insane downhill swerve, and now she only had three tires. She’d never driven on a mountain and now it looked like this lack of education would be the thing that took her down.
Her stomach lurched, but a certain peace came over her as she slid inevitably toward the side of the road. No guardrails. Nothing to stop her from falling right off. How high up was she? Would she feel the impact or would the world simply go dark?
Somehow it didn’t matter and, in that moment, she let go of the wheel and stopped her desperate pounding on the brake.
At least it would be over. Somehow she’d thought running would help. It had only made him try harder. It had only made him want to hurt her more.
She’d given up Liz Courtney and then Mandy Cooper. Now she would die as Rachel Swift, and maybe he would never know. Maybe that fucker would spend the rest of his life looking for a dead woman.
It was the only revenge she would get.
The sound of gravel and dirt crunching filled her ears and her life seemed to flash before her eyes. So little of it was happy. There had been some moments of childhood, but even those had been marked with tragedy. What she saw was a woman who’d tried to go with the flow, to be polite, to never make waves.
She saw a woman determined to waste her life so no one thought she wasn’t a good person. So no one thought poorly of her.
She saw a woman who’d forgotten to care at all about herself and what she wanted.
And yet there hadn’t been anything particularly selfless about her life since she’d never really loved anyone.
The Jeep stopped, the fender somehow lodging against a heavily posted sign.
Harper Stables – Welcome was painted in pretty lines, the design oddly Victorian. Underneath someone had taken what looked like a black Sharpie and written in: No Trespassing. I mean it. Evil dog will kill.
Okay. It was good to know she was going to be eaten by an evil, territorial dog. She took a deep breath even as the Jeep shuddered and died on her.
She sat for a moment, breathing and trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
“You all right, lady?”
She screamed and flinched as she took in the man standing right outside her window. He was tall, his body bent in half as he stared in at her. Roughly sixty, with gray hair peeking out from his trucker cap. And something…was that tin foil? She didn’t get much of a look at his face because she was too busy taking in the gun in his hand.
“Look here, asshole, if you think for one minute you can kidnap me and rape me, you better think twice because I have killed and eaten better men than you.” She wasn’t sure where the words had come from, but she was tired of being fucking polite and scared and alone. She was done begging for her life, and this newest dude with a gun was going to get the brunt of her rage.
He grinned. “That’s good. You talk like that to the aliens when they come down. Now some people will tell you they don’t understand English, but that’s plain silly. Except for the insectoids. But the Greys totally understand English and they can be scared. You tell them all about your ninja skills, but the whole cannibal thing might be taking it a bit far. Human flesh doesn’t scare them. Beets. You gotta tell them about all the beets you eat.”
Rachel sat there, her hands on the wheel. Beets?
“Looks like you got a flat.” The man was casual as he stared down at her. He held the long shotgun in his hand like it was merely a part of him. “Was it a rock or a laser beam? Because if it was the latter, we should probably head back to my place and call the sheriff.”
Her heart was still racing, but she took a deep breath. “I think it was a rock. I’m not good at mountain driving. I thought I was going to drive off the road.”
“Well, you picked a good place to do it,” he said with an oddly charming grin. “If you’re going to drive off the mountain, do it at the base.”
She looked ahead and saw what she hadn’t before. The highway was in sight. She’d almost made it off the mountain.
Even her “Jesus take the wheel” moment had been overdrama.
Her Jeep was dead. She had no cell phone and only ten bucks in her pocket after her last boss refused to pay her if she didn’t give him a little something extra.
She was stuck.
“Want a ride into town?”
With the crazy beet guy? The crazy beet guy with a gun. Then again, she had no idea where “town” was and he seemed oddly nice. “Sure.”
What did she have to lose? Her life? That kind of sucked hard, and she’d been willing to go over a mountain to find some peace.
With only a slight amount of trepidation, she reached over and unlocked the door. Everything she owned was in her backpack. Normally when she had a place to stay, she hid her proper ID and the ones the nurse had given her in a hidey-hole in the Jeep’s floorboard, but when she was on the move, she kept everything in her pack.
“I’ll go grab my truck,” the beet guy said with a huge, weirdly welcoming smile on his face. Like he lived for this shit. Like he enjoyed helping people out. He turned to go, but then turned back again and held out a hand. “My name’s Mel. Well, that’s my human name. The aliens call me Quelshawish. That means Destroyer of Worlds, but I’ve promised the president that this one is totally safe.”
She should run the other way but she found herself taking his hand and smiling. Her instinct told her this Mel dude would be fun. Her instincts had told her Tommy was a nutcase. She’d ignored her instincts once. Maybe it was time to start trusting herself. “Hi, Mel. I’m Rachel. And I’m not an alien or an alien assistant of any kind. One hundred percent human, but you should know a whole lot of earthbound creatures suck, too.”
Mel nodded wisely. “Absolutely. The vampires do, but I’ve heard some of them are lovely people. But yes, a lot of humans are assholes. Just not here. We weed them out here. I’ll be back.”
She watched as he started to jog off the road. In the distance she could see a house, but it wasn’t close. Still, the beet dude was tall and seemed super interested in getting there quickly.
If he’d wanted to murder her he could have. Damn, it was hard to remember there were genuine people out there. People who weren’t psychotic.
What the hell was she going to do? She’d fled California because he’d found her. He knew she was alive and he would find her again. He was a tenacious son of a bitch.
Meanwhile, she also knew her townhouse fire in Dallas had been labeled an electrical fire. No one was coming to save her. No one cared.
She’d tried two big cities. Maybe it was time to give rural America a shot.
If she could find a place to work.
Her stomach grumbled and she realized she did have one possession left that was important.
Her Snickers bar.
She reached back into the Jeep. She’d bought it when she’d gotten gas in Durango four hours back. It was supposed to be her lunch, but it was almost noon. She’d slept in her Jeep the night before in the parking lot of a national parks center. A ranger had come around and roused her out.
How much longer could she last? The beet guy might be cool, but she didn’t have money for a tire. She didn’t have money period. She had what was in her backpack and this damn Snickers bar and that was it. End of the road. No going forward from here.
She could hitchhike but she knew where that would lead.
There was one last
thing she could sell.
A loud hurumph split the air and she felt a wind of warmth on her cheek. She turned and there was the largest creature she’d ever seen in her life standing beside her. How it had gotten to her without alerting her, she had zero idea.
Moose? Elk? She wasn’t sure, but it was big.
“Maurice!” Beet guy rolled up in his beat-up Ford, the windows down. “Hey, buddy, how’s it hanging? Don’t freak out, Miss Rachel. That’s Maurice the Moose. He’s considered good luck around here. Everyone he visits has good things happening. Well, also he likes Snickers bars. I blame the aliens.”
Yeah, he seemed to do that a lot. She stared up at the moose. He was enormous, with pitch black eyes and massive horns. The damn thing had to be ten feet tall. Rachel looked into those eyes and realized that there was nothing to be afraid of. Warmth was in those eyes. She’d seen evil and there was none of that in Maurice the Moose. He was an animal and she was an animal, and how they got along was up to her. She could run in fear or she could be brave.
She was damn tired of running in fear.
Was he hungry? Was he lonely? Tears pricked her eyes and she realized how much she’d given up strictly to survive.
Rachel opened the Snickers bar and offered it up. Maybe the moose would bite her fingers off. Maybe this was all some trick to capture her and force her to mate with alien males.
Well, it would be the most action she’d seen in for-freaking-ever.
And if not, then maybe, just maybe, she could connect with another creature in a way she hadn’t in years. The problem with being on the run was that she constantly thought of only herself. She’d lost her kindness, banished her humanity in place of salvaging her life.
But what did life mean if she didn’t care about anything else?
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