Black Hills Native Son: a Hollywood-meets-the-real-wild-west contemporary romance series (Black Hills Rendezvous Book 5)

by Debra Salonen

  Now that Pam’s found out, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Mom threw her usual hissy fit. There’s talk of sending me to live with Aunt Marilyn in Montana. Like that’s going to happen. I’d run away and take my chances on the street before I’d put my baby within a mile of that creepy uncle of mine. All I know is it’s hard to be miserable when you’re carrying Eli Robideaux’s baby.

  The door wrenched open. “Give me that. You had no right.”

  He looked at the irate woman with the weird hair. She was leaning in, her hand extended. It shook with barely concealed fury. Or fear. He didn’t know. He couldn’t think and that made him more pissed off than he’d been all day.

  “You’re a liar. This didn’t happen,” he cried, crushing the notebook in his fist. It felt good to yell at someone.

  She yanked the book from him and pressed it to her chest. Her voluminous chest. A tiny hint of something akin to a memory flitted through his brain.

  No. It didn’t happen. She was a messed-up kid with a big time crush. I wouldn’t. I didn’t.

  “I don’t lie. Get out of my car.”

  He looked from the notebook flattened against her pumpkin-colored sweater to her face. A stranger’s face. “I’d remember if that happened. I’m not the kind of guy who went around screwing innocent little girls.”

  She dropped her chin in a challenging way. “Really? That number below your name in the yearbook—twenty-three, wasn’t it?—didn’t match the number on your basketball jersey. I always heard it stood for the number of girls you—”

  “No.” He put his hand to his face and groaned. “That was a joke. Robert started that rumor. It wasn’t true. Not even close. I wasn’t a saint, but still…”

  “You were passed out drunk when your cousin dropped you off at my aunt’s back door. He basically carried you to the gurney. She was on duty at the hospital. I was going to let you sleep it off, but you woke up. We talked.”

  He tried to picture the scene. If he could recall what she looked like back then, maybe he could figure out what was true. But even studying her face didn’t bring back anything. “What did we talk about?”

  “Your situation. The fact that Bobbi was pregnant and that was why you were marrying her.”

  “I wouldn’t have—”

  She interrupted. “Everyone knew it. You weren’t spilling some big secret. My friends believed she got pregnant on purpose to trap you into marrying her. I told them you were too smart for that.”

  “Dumb, you mean. Blind, smug and dumb. That was my dad’s opinion. But, the point is I was loyal. I wouldn’t have done what you wrote. Not on the night before my wedding.”

  She took a step back. “Really? You’re sure about that? You can’t remember anything. You don’t remember me. But you’re sure.”

  He hated having to swallow the lump that suddenly developed in his throat before he could answer. “Yes.”

  “Then how do you explain what I wrote in my journal dated that night?”

  “F—fantasy?”

  “Why? Why would I make something like that up? On the off chance that you became president someday? Maybe I was a fifteen-year-old blackmailer? Maybe I’m crazy and this is a plot to screw with your head?”

  He kicked the heel of his boot against the floorboard with such force the entire car shook. “How the hell should I know? You tell me.”

  She gave the notebook a shake. “I did. You read it yourself. Firsthand observation trumps vague recollection every time.”

  She had a point. If he weren’t so messed up and his head wasn’t pounding like he’d been on a three-day binge, he might have conceded round one to her, but he couldn’t. That would lead to a can of worms he didn’t have the energy to think about, much less let loose.

  He grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt and yanked it upward. Sinking in the seat, he did his best to disappear. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he muttered. “Talk about going from bad to worse. If I ever get my hands on that dumb-ass uncle of mine he’s going to wish he’d never been born. ‘A part of you is missing, nephew,’” he said in a sing-song voice. “’The answer you seek is in Paha Sapa.’”

  His disdain for the Black Hills couldn’t have been missed.

  “Was that supposed to be your impression of Joseph or Yoda?” she asked sardonically.

  Her tone was less angry than it had been, but he heard a tremor of bruised feelings. He’d done something—whether intentional or not—that affected her back in high school. She’d been a kid.

  So was I.

  But that argument didn’t hold water because he’d never really been a kid. His parent’s loud and turbulent love-hate relationship, their divorce, his mother’s remarriage and subsequent death from ovarian cancer when Eli was thirteen contributed to his very truncated childhood. He’d grown up too fast. People had depended on him from a very young age. His mother. His younger half siblings. His alcoholic father. Then Bobbi, who was by far a better mother than she was wife.

  What did the county shrink call him? An enabler. He’d enabled the people he loved to take advantage of his need to be needed. A character flaw that probably contributed to his decision to go into law enforcement.

  “Can you take me back to the main road? If not, I can walk there.” Liar. He’d probably fall flat on his face if he made it a block.

  She didn’t answer right away but a few seconds later he heard her sigh. “Okay. I said I’d take you to Sturgis and I will.”

  As she walked past the front of the car, Eli caught a glimpse of her profile and a shiver of recognition traveled from the nucleus of his brain to the tips of his boots. “Boobs Jones makes my Johnson hard” someone had scribbled on the door of the boys’ can. He might have had a wet dream or two at her expense himself. He couldn’t say for sure, but there was always plenty of speculation over the exact size and shape of the breasts freshman Charlene Jones kept hidden under her bulky sweatshirts.

  Which, he told himself, was the main argument against her story being true. If he’d had a chance to see and/or touch Char Jones’s nubile breasts, the image would have been seared into his brain—even if he was on a gurney in her aunt’s kitchen with a possible concussion.

  “Why would I blank out something like that?” he asked as they backtracked through town. A few of the landmarks, like the stupid little dinosaur next to the Civic Center, looked familiar thanks to the television show he’d caught a couple of time with his daughters. But at the moment he didn’t give a rat’s ass about seeing it.

  “How would I know?”

  “Were you on top? Or was I?”

  The passenger-side tire dropped into a rut on the shoulder of the road. It took her a few heart-stopping seconds to recover. Enough to make Eli’s knuckles turn white from clenching his fists. “Forget I asked. Dumb question.”

  “You’d been in a fight. For all I knew you were suffering from a concussion. I did my best to keep you calm and stable until my aunt came.”

  “By jumping my bones?” he asked, reserving the right to use blunter terms later on.

  “Not at first.” He looked at her and saw how pink her cheeks had become. A pretty color that make her look a good twenty years younger than he felt. “I was treating your cut when my aunt called to say there was an accident on the bridge and she wouldn’t be home for several hours. She wanted me to know my mother wasn’t involved.”

  He frowned, confused.

  Char took her hand off the wheel and made a wobbly motion. “Aunt Pam had a police scanner, and on the nights my mom was late coming home, Pam knew I’d sit in the kitchen listening. Mom partied a lot.”

  He understood. His father had lost his license twice that Eli knew of. “Did you tell your aunt I was there?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not a doctor, but even I could tell that cut above your eye wasn’t life threatening. I managed to close it with two little sutures and a bandage. My only real concern was whether or not you had a concussion. I figured the best thing I could wa
s try to keep you awake.”

  “And you figured the best way to do that was by having sex?”

  His cynical tone made her scrunch up her face and sort of duck her head. The car wove slightly between the two lanes. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

  He searched his memory again, trying to pull some image to mind that might back up her story. What did the place look like? Nothing. Was the treatment room her kitchen? He didn’t think so but he couldn’t say why. Was he on a gurney? He’d seen all kinds on the job. If the one he’d been on had wheels…he couldn’t picture making love on the move.

  “Where’d we do it?”

  She shook her head, as if she’d been expecting the question. “Pam saw patients in a small room off the kitchen. It was a screened porch when my grandparents lived there. She bought a used examination table from an old clinic. The back was raised about like this.” She held her hand horizontally between them then made the fingers tilt upward to a sixty-degree angle. “I thought it would be better to keep your head elevated.”

  He could have said something coarse but he managed to bite his tongue. “You were on top?”

  “Yeah. It seemed safer—concussionwise.”

  He turned to look at her, but it took too much effort to keep his gaze off her chest so he slumped down again and closed his eyes. “Do you really expect me to believe that a virgin would climb on top of an injured guy in her aunt’s make-shift E.R. where anybody could walk in?”

  He heard her take in a deep breath, but he willed his eyes to remain closed. No leering.

  “It didn’t take all that long, Eli. I put my hand down there and you were instantly hard. The smart thing would have been to give you a blow job, but I didn’t know how.”

  His eyes popped open. “What do you mean you didn’t know how? That’s a no-brainer.”

  The car made another unscheduled jog back and forth across the middle divider as she tossed up her hands on the steering wheel. “I’m sure I could have figured it out, but at the time, I didn’t want to look like a novice. Everyone said Bobbi was the best in school when it came to giving bj’s, and since you were marrying her the next day…”

  He groaned, wishing he’d never asked. His soon-to-be ex-wife was a topic he had no intention of discussing. “So you got naked and hopped on top of me?”

  “You wish,” she sputtered tapping the brakes to round a curve in the road. “Like you said, anybody could have walked in. As it happened, when Robert brought you in, it was past midnight. I’d already changed into my nightgown.”

  Nightgown? A tingle of something he didn’t want to acknowledge shot down his spine. He gulped loudly. “Pink flannel?”

  Her shoulders lifted and fell. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, actually, I think it was. We had a warm spring, then, suddenly in early June the weather turned cold. I remember someone saying if it snowed on her wedding, Bobbi was going to make the weatherman pay.”

  He muttered a string of words he’d have busted his son’s chops for using. He’d had a dream for years that he secretly called his guilty pedophile dream. Only now he knew it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory.

  Neither said anything for several miles. They were approaching the intersection of the main highway—he knew because he could see the cross-members of her teepee—when he worked up the nerve to ask, “So, you had an abortion, huh?”

  “What?”

  Her shriek made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. She stomped on the brakes so hard he had to brace his hands on the dash, despite the safety belt that cut into his chest. The rebound slammed him against the seat.

  The car slid sideways to a stop in the gravel driveway they’d left an hour or so earlier. “Get out. You’re not the man I thought you were. Back then or now. Go. Take the money I gave you and leave. Now.”

  She reached across him to open the passenger door. Her body touched him—that is, her wool jacket pressed against his grubby thermal sweatshirt, which covered a couple of other layers. There was nothing sexual in the touch. Nothing sexual between them. Only anger and hurt on her part, and confusion and desperation on his. No reason in the freaking world for him to kiss her.

  But he did. Hard, fast, deep, hot. And what flared to life like a fire carefully banked in a stark, barren hearth made less sense than anything that had happened so far. But, Lord God, it felt good. It felt real. Like a lifeline that would keep him from falling into the bone deep despair that had been his father’s ruin.

  The last thing in the world Char had expected was for Eli to kiss her. Not a mushy Thank-God-I-finally-found-you kiss. Things like that only happened in romance novels. No. His lips were icy-cold, despite the heat blasting from the defroster. His breath was surprisingly pleasant—as if he’d just sucked on a candy cane, but his several-days-old stubble felt like tiny wires piercing her skin.

  It should have been the kiss from hell.

  Should have been.

  Instead of freaking out—was the car completely off the road? She couldn’t say for certain—she actually leaned in and made a little sighing sound that she’d couldn’t believe came from her lips. She was embarrassed, but not enough to push him away.

  Even the fury she’d initially felt when he suggested that she might have had an abortion disappeared the moment he pulled her again him. She wasn’t herself. She was… Oh, no, I’ve turned into my mother.

  ‘Cept ya aren’t drunk.

  No. She was stone-cold sober and she was making out with Eli Robideaux in her Honda, a stone’s throw from her store where her clerk and any customers could be watching. “This is nuts,” she cried, pushing back. “I must be nuts.”

  Her words were more effective than the pressure she exerted against his shoulders. He stopped kissing her immediately. He was breathing hard and now she could smell a stale hint of burnt tobacco on his breath. And sage?

  The musky, not completely pleasant scent helped clear her head. “You need a toothbrush,” she told him. “And a shower.”

  He let out a gruff snort but didn’t argue the point. Or apologize.

  She eased her foot off the brake and drove straight to her garage. The door was up, she noticed. Not something she ever did, since one half of the space was devoted to boxes of stock and seasonal displays. She pulled into the empty slot and killed the engine.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said, knowing there was no turning back from the confrontation that was coming. “I’ll wash your clothes while you clean up. We can talk over a bowl of soup. After that, I’ll drive you to Sturgis.”

  He didn’t jump at the offer. “My uncle’s staying with a woman I only met once a long time ago. I’m not sure I can find her place in the dark. She doesn’t have a phone.”

  She picked up her purse and took the key out of the ignition. “I can’t do anything about that. It gets dark early in the mountains.” She pointed over her shoulder. “You’re welcome to try your luck hitching again, but I really think we should talk about this like civilized adults. Seventeen years is a long time.”

  He didn’t argue. He got out of the car and followed her, even hitting the button to close the garage door without being asked. She found that odd, but she didn’t say anything.

  There was a lot to say. Too much, in fact. She’d always assumed that eventually her day of reckoning would come. With her son, not with Eli. She never saw this coming, and now it was too late to run away.

  Chapter 5

  Eli stayed in the shower longer than he had in his entire life. For several minutes, he stood directly under the powerful stream of hot water without moving. Maybe if he stood here long enough, the blood in his brain would start flowing again and he could come up with some kind of plan. He hoped.

  When the heat started to diminish, he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and lathered up. The scent was crisp and clean, faintly antiseptic. He didn’t recognize the brand, but he knew it wasn’t one Bobbi ever bought. For as long as he could remember he’d been using fruity-smelling girly products. />
  He never complained, but, honestly, didn’t anyone question his needs? If he happened to use the basement shower near his son’s room, he found manly-scented products. How come E.J. rated, he silently grumbled, and I didn’t?

  He now knew the answer, but he didn’t want to think about it. Instead he redirected his ire toward the woman he’d been married to for almost twenty years. She did the shopping. Were her purchasing habits one more way to emasculate the man of the house?

  He rinsed his hair and turned off the water. Thinking about Bobbi left a bitter taste in his mouth. He hated being angry all the time. Maybe that as much as anything had been his motivation behind falling for his uncle’s vision quest baloney. He wanted to start moving forward. If that meant he needed to fill in a few gaps in his past…well, who could have known the gaps involved other human beings?

  He used the big, fluffy, chocolate-colored towel that was hanging beside the shower to dry off, then he wiped the condensation from the mirror and looked at himself. Haggard. Worn down. Defeated. The way his father had looked the entire time Eli had known him.

  With his hands pressed flat against the countertop on either side of the sink, he leaned heavily on his arms. For the past six months his life had been spiraling downward like a jet plane in a free fall. He’d fueled the propulsion with anger and self-pity.

  “Enough,” he said, looking himself in the eye. “Enough.”

  He shaved and brushed his teeth using the disposable razor and new toothbrush Char had provided. A thick, white terrycloth robe—the kind you could pick up at fancy hotels—was hanging from a hook behind the door. He put it on and knotted the belt at his waist.

  He ran his fingers over the insignia on the breast pocket but he didn’t recognize the chain. No surprise there. Other than Disney World and a few family-friendly motels between Lower Brule and Enid, Oklahoma, Eli didn’t have a lot of hotel experience.