Wild Card (Wild At Heart Series Book 3)

by Christine Hartmann

  Until the prom.

  On the highway outside Las Vegas, when the last suburb gave way to the dry desert, Bree emerged from her fog, unclear how far she had driven and relieved she hadn’t made a wrong turn. The GPS indicated another seven and a half hours until she could return the rental car. That, she thought, was enough time to get herself back to normal. She gritted her teeth. Faye unnerved her, but her future mother-in-law was correct to complain. Bree’s obsession with control was unrealistic. Over a decade had passed since the accident. She was an adult, not a fourteen-year-old. Not flying wasn’t preventing her from imagining her parents’ last moments. And it wasn’t suspending them in the air, halting them from crashing with the sixteen other passengers of the commuter plane into the side of a mountain.

  Refusing to fly only enabled her to live in an illusion. It created a tiny bubble in the world where accidents like her parents’ didn’t happen. But they did. Pretending otherwise was make-believe, the escape used by children.

  Time to grow up, Bree. Time to tell Faye she’s right. Time to tell Mal I’ll fly to Las Vegas for our wedding.

  She pulled out of the fast lane. Biding her time, she navigated across highway markers and, at a spot where the breakdown lane merged relatively seamlessly with a wide, smooth expanse of desert, she rolled to a stop. With the car in park, she bent over her purse in the passenger seat, searching for her phone and headset.

  A black Mercedes braked behind her in a cloud of dust, but Bree didn’t notice. A man sprung into the dirt. Gravel flew as he dashed for her white SUV. He ripped open the driver’s side door just as Bree was fiddling the headset onto her ear. At the sight of his face and the familiar knife she screamed.

  The next second, her foot kicked his arm and dislodged the blade from his grip. It fell into the dirt. Her hand struggled to propel him away from the car and shut the door. She fought with a pent-up fury, her body rebelling with all the power she had repressed in the garage. But he jerked her by the blouse, his dirty fists balled around her lavender silk fabric, and wrenched her to the ground.

  The cloth closed around her neck. Cars whooshed by. She felt the sides of her visual field go black. He lugged her, both hands tight on her collar, to the far side of the car. With one hand on the base of her neck, he pinned her against the vehicle. With his grip looser, she flailed against him, her blows landing on his face, neck, and torso. His thick arm pushed against her, unyielding. She screamed again and tried to jam her knee into his crotch.

  “You should have given me my fucking phone when I asked.” He raised his other arm. A new blade shone dully, level with her eyes.

  Bree dropped her chin. She bit hard at the hand at her neck. The man yelped and released his grip. Bree careened through the scrub and cacti as footsteps pounded in close pursuit.

  Her short legs pumped. She shot across the arid expanse. Thorns tore at her clothes. Her high heels threatened to trip her. She heard her assailant puffing. She pushed herself harder, swerving around yucca plants and Joshua trees.

  Suddenly, she tumbled into and then over a creosote bush and landed painfully on her back. The man flung himself on top of her, pinned one of her hands and then the other. She butted her forehead against his until her head exploded in a blaze of white. She lay still.

  When she opened her eyes, he sat astride her, panting. His stained white dress shirt expanded and contracted with his breathing. His dark gray eyes stared at her with an uncaring coldness. The glare frightened her. She looked away.

  “Why didn’t you give me my phone?” His voice mixed equal parts ferocity and incredulity. “This is all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t stolen it, none of this would’ve happened.”

  Bree twisted her hips underneath him, trying to free herself. “I don’t have your phone.”

  “You’re lying.” He leaned forward, his face an inch from hers. “Do you want money? Is that what this is all about?”

  She jerked her head to the side. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  He slowly righted himself. When she dared to peek at his face, she stopped moving. There was nothing human left in his eyes. They reminded her of stones. The desire to fight filtered out of her into the hot desert sand and left her body limp, resigned. Was this, she wondered, how her parents felt when they saw the mountainside approaching?

  She screamed. He spat at her. But she didn’t stop, her voice evaporating into the vast, deserted expanse.

  In a lightning movement, he closed one hand around her throat. The other joined it. He leaned his weight on her neck. Her cry faded, then stopped. She felt blackness close in from the sides.

  “Let her go.”

  With her last strength, Bree opened an eye, sure that her assailant was giving voice to a second personality inside himself. But a moment later the grip on her throat relaxed. The weight on her stomach disappeared. The homeless man jumped to his feet and scampered across the dirt. She watched him dissolve into the desert landscape, as though he were mirage.

  She coughed and fingered her neck, eyes closed. When a hand touched her arm, she shouted, sure the nightmare vision of the man had returned. But when she opened her eyes, the man before her regarded her with concern.

  “Ryder?” She croaked out the name.

  He fell to his knees. “Are you okay?”

  Bree nodded. He lifted her, one hand under her head, the other supporting her back. His denim shirt felt smooth and smelled lightly of men’s soap. She leaned her face briefly against his shoulder. He stroked her hair, picking burrs and leaves from it as he spoke. “Juli texted me about what happened at the hotel. So I thought…”

  Bree pushed away and rubbed her face. “Do you never give up?”

  Ryder shrugged. “I already planned to drive. I didn’t think I’d actually see you. But then there was your car on the side of the road with the door open. And that other car behind it.”

  Bree peered into the desert around them. There was no sign of her assailant. “Did you see where he went?”

  Ryder shrugged. “He was running away from the road.” He helped her to her feet. “Can you walk?”

  Bree bent and examined her legs. “Besides scratches, I’m fine.” She refused Ryder’s offer of an arm and hobbled back to the three cars—hers, the black Mercedes, and Ryder’s. Close to her SUV, something glittering in the sand caught her eye. She picked it up.

  Ryder whistled. “Nice find.” He held out his hand and inspected the frames. “Gold aviators. The person who lost these out here must be cursing himself.”

  Bree stared. “They belonged to that guy.”

  Ryder looked around the desert as though he expected the man to come back for them. “Why would a homeless person own sunglasses that cost four thousand dollars?”

  Bree shook her head. “I saw them up close more than once. I’m sure they’re his.”

  Ryder strode to the Mercedes and wiped his hand along the glossy black finish. “And this was his car? In most states you could buy a house for what this is worth. He couldn’t have been homeless.”

  Bree shuddered. “I don’t think he was sane. All that with the phone. It didn’t make any sense. He probably lost his mind. After that, his life went downhill.” She pulled herself into the driver’s seat of her car. “My keys are still here.” She held up the rental car agency’s plastic fob.

  Ryder returned from the other car dangling a different set of keys. “He left his too. But I take back what I said about his not being homeless.” He held his nose. “That car smells like a toilet.”

  Bree leaned back, feeling suddenly faint. “What do we do?”

  Ryder pushed the Mercedes’s remote and the car locked itself with a subdued whoop. “We could call 911 and wait for the cops to show up. Or…” He twirled the keys on his finger. “We could just take off and leave the car and him here to fend for themselves.”

  Bree rubbed her temples. “It’s not the first car left on the side of the road.” She started her engine. “And somebody will pick him
up.” She shut her door and rolled down the window. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Ryder wiped the keys on his pants and then hurled them into the desert. “Right behind you.”

  ***

  It took an hour for Bree to realize she never called Mal. Dropping him and his family off at the airport felt like something that had happened a week ago. She remembered she’d wanted to call him but couldn’t remember about what.

  What mattered to her at that moment was leaving insanity behind her. The trip to Vegas, while not entirely a mistake, felt in retrospect like the ride of a roller coaster car that jumped the tracks. Precipitous ups and downs, dizzying twists and turns, nothing like what she expected. The final crash in the desert symbolized the end. She miraculously escaped unharmed. But, she told herself, she wasn’t exactly the same person who drove this highway in the other direction just a few days ago.

  For one, there was Ryder, glued to her bumper like a tailgater from hell. Bree shrugged, reaching between the seats with one hand and feeling for the coffee that wasn’t there. She sighed and kept an eye out for the next exit. What Ryder wanted, she decided, didn’t matter. It was like the conversation with the homeless man about the cell phone. In the end, what made the most sense was for her to do what she needed to do and not worry about always being in control.

  She slapped her leg. That was what I was going to tell Mal. And she suddenly felt strangely grateful to Ryder and Faye and the man she’d left running through the desert. My fear of flying is over.

  The logos underneath the exit sign indicated only fast food restaurants and gas stations, but Bree eased down the ramp anyway, eager for a jolt of caffeine, no matter how bitter. At the junction, she tossed a mental coin and turned left on impulse. Just after the highway underpass, a bright yellow sign shone in the bright noon-day light. The golden circle with a hole in its middle beckoned like a beacon from heaven. Grinning from ear to ear, she swerved into the donut shop parking lot and maneuvered carefully into an empty space. She leaned back in her seat, rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. The aroma of frying dough, sweet glaze, and fruit filling drifted on the hot air.

  Ryder tapped gently on the back passenger window. “Want me to get you something?”

  Bree rolled up the window, shut off the ignition, and climbed laboriously from the car. Her scratches smarted and her body ached. She winced with every step. But her heart felt lighter than it had in days. “No one is going to deny me this pleasure.”

  Ryder held out his hand to stop her. “You look like you’ve been rolling in the dust with an armadillo.”

  Bree glanced at herself in the side view mirror. She dusted off her clothing and passed her fingers through her hair, pulling out twigs and leaves. Then she shrugged. “Good enough.” She tugged her blouse over her tummy and limped toward the entrance.

  A few minutes later, on a bench under a scraggly shade tree opposite the shop, she and Ryder sat with a box of a dozen donuts between them. Bree munched with closed eyes, savoring the cloying sweetness as though she had never eaten a donut before. When she opened her eyes, she found Ryder gazing at her.

  She blushed. “What?”

  He reached out and touched her forehead lightly. “Does that hurt?”

  Bree pulled back. She fingered the lump, remembered her head butt, and smiled. “A nice souvenir.”

  Ryder frowned. “It might be serious.”

  She shook her head and finished off the chocolate donut. She stretched her legs and slid down on the bench until her head hung lazily off the back. The ice coffee balanced on her stomach sloshed pleasantly with each breath. Sunlight filtered through the sparse leaves. She squinted through them at the clear blue sky. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  In the middle of her third donut, her phone rang. It was Mal. She left her purse on the bench with Ryder and strolled across the dry grass, her sunglasses pulled tight over her eyes.

  “We’re home.” His voice sounded strained and worn out.

  She grinned and hoped her contentment carried through to him. “I’ve still got quite a ways to go. I had another little delay.”

  There was a long pause. “Are you okay?”

  Bree smiled. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  Mal paused again. “I meant about what happened.”

  “Your mother? Tell her I’m grateful. Seriously. I needed to hear that. Next time we come to Vegas, I’ll get on the airplane with you and your parents.”

  “Not likely.”

  Bree laughed. “Really. I’m…”

  He interrupted her. “Not with Dad, anyway. He…”

  The armor of warm contentment encircling Bree cracked slightly. She halted her stroll. “Is your father okay?”

  Mal’s voice, suddenly ripe with emotion, sounded angry. “He announced something on the flight home.”

  Bree resumed her perambulation.

  Mal took a deep breath. “In front of all the other passengers, he stood up and told Mom he wants a divorce.”

  Bree dropped the phone. It bounced and came to a halt upside down on the dry grass.

  ***

  Desert twilight whisked in quickly on the heels of the day. As the sun slid toward the horizon, the temperature dropped precipitously. Greenwood stumbled among the hills, feeling more lost than he had ever felt in his life. More than when a sudden blizzard enveloped the heli-ski lodge where he was staying and he, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, trudged through knee-high snow toward what he hoped was the warm building and not the beginning of an icy slope. More than when his son disappeared under the water at the lake house and he dove into the frigid, clear water, his eyes straining through the silt for a glimpse of the boy’s red swimsuit, his fingers groping for his warm flesh. And more than he felt the first morning after his stepfather forced himself upon him, when he looked into his mother’s eyes and saw only denial and stood at the bus stop with his young friends, feeling suddenly as though he and they occupied separate universes and theirs was one into which he could never step foot again.

  He lived, he considered as he floundered among the cacti, a lonely life. He hadn’t always let himself feel alone. Abigayle helped. The children helped. Most of all, work helped him turn away from the emptiness the events of his youth carved into his soul. But the emptiness never fully disappeared.

  Until Paulo. The celebration of union with that youth felt like fireworks exploding inside the Grand Canyon. When Paulo snuck out his window that first night to meet Greenwood in the parking lot, he knew. Paulo’s tears that night were the kind he had seen his own son cry when he had made the soccer team or passed the entrance exam for private school. Greenwood held Paulo tightly to his chest, because he knew. They were not tears of sorrow but tears of relief, of release, of joy. Paulo was showing him that he had been lonely too. And Greenwood knew then that they had saved each other.

  Night dropped in the desert like a final curtain across a stage, masking familiar objects, sucking away all vestiges of warmth, obliterating connections to the outside world. Nocturnal inhabitants crept, squirmed, and slithered from their hiding places. The starry sky morphed with the passage of clouds. Greenwood curled into a ball under a Joshua tree, his eyes scanning the darkness. If only Paulo were with him, he thought. Together they would make the night warm.

  But he shivered uncontrollably. His limbs grew numb. And as he faded in and out of consciousness, the only image he could conjure was that of his stepfather’s face. He closed his eyes a final time. A screech owl released its pent-up cry to the universe.

  And after a few hours, a kangaroo rat scurried up to inspect his cold, rigid body.

  ***

  Stephanie hunched over the steering wheel of her electric car, driving as she always did, with her nose as close to the windshield as she could get. “It’s not like Mal’s parents ever got along.”

  Bree fidgeted in the passenger seat of the narrow car, trying to find a comfortable position for her bruised parts. “Mal said they alwa
ys fought. But it got worse when she became more religious.”

  Stephanie glanced at her friend. “Does it make you reconsider?”

  Bree blinked. “Flying?”

  Stephanie laughed. “It’s not the big happy family you thought it was.”

  Bree gazed out the window at the familiar San Francisco evening landscape, the tech billboards illuminated at the side of the road, the Teslas and hybrid cars jostling for position on the multilane highway, and the lights in the windows of the houses scrunched close together on the hillsides. “I’m not marrying them. I’m marrying Mal.”

  Stephanie’s eyebrows shot up but she kept quiet, concentrating on fighting her way to an off ramp. “Are you sure you don’t want to stop by urgent care somewhere, amiga?”

  Bree’s fingers touched the bump on her head. “What I need is a bath, some more ibuprofen, a bag of ice, and a cup of tea.”

  “And a donut?” Stephanie winked at her.

  “Under normal circumstances, spot on.” Bree rubbed her stomach and closed her eyes. “But I had a few on the way up.”

  “With Ryder.” Stephanie drew out the name provocatively.

  “With Ryder.” Bree snapped the phrase to a close as if it were a book she shut with a bang.

  “Will you see him again?”

  Bree thought about how she and Ryder pulled to the curb in front of the car rental agency with his car still close behind hers. She felt like she had towed his car all the way from Nevada. She exited wearily, aware that the long sitting had done nothing positive for her aches and pains. One hand leaned against the doorframe. With the other, she massaged her thighs. The overhead streetlights cast yellow shadows in the deepening dusk.