Her mother’s tone suggested things that she didn’t want to hear. Didn’t want to think about. But despite her denial, Mona knew that it would eat away at her until she had the truth. Right now, her imagination made her think the worst.
“Is Doc a friend of yours?” Mona couldn’t bring herself to add to the question, to give Elena an alternative to choose from. As it turned out, she didn’t have to.
“Doc would have been the best thing to happen to me—if only I had let him.”
Mona shattered inside. She wanted to scream at Elena, to accuse her of lying. But the look on the woman’s face verified everything for her. Mona didn’t want to hear anymore. She felt angry and betrayed. Betrayed by one of the few people she’d ever allowed herself to trust.
How could he? How could he?
She ran out of the room. Behind her, she could hear Elena calling her name, but Mona didn’t turn around. She flew down the stairs with Apache anxiously right behind her.
Mona didn’t stop running once she got to the first floor. Instead, she kept going, blindly making her way out the front door. That was when she plowed right into Doc. Because he was so much larger and heavier than she was, Mona found herself stumbling backward from the impact.
Stunned, Doc caught her by the shoulders to steady her. “Mona, where are you going to in such an all-fired hurry?”
She angrily shrugged him off. “Let go of me!” she ordered.
Concern leaped into his eyes. “Mona, what’s wrong? What happened? Why are you running away from the clinic?” Doc glanced through the open door and toward the rear of the clinic as he tried to understand her strange behavior. “Did something happen with Mittens?”
“The cat’s fine,” she bit off. “But I’m not.” There was hurt and anger in her eyes as she glared at him. “I trusted you, Doc. I trusted you,” she repeated with angry emphasis. “You were the father I never had. How could you?” she cried. “How could you do this to me?”
For a moment, he seemed completely confused. And then he understood. “You went upstairs.”
“Yes, I went upstairs,” she spat out. “How long has that woman been hiding here in your house?” Mona asked. “Since the wedding?”
“Yes,” Doc answered in a heavy, solemn tone. “Mona, she’s your mother. Please, give her a chance. For both your sakes.”
“She’s not my mother,” Mona cried. “Abuela was my mother,” she insisted. “That woman you took into your home is a complete stranger. I don’t know her—”
“Then get to know her,” Doc interrupted, trying to get through to her. “You have to try, Mona. Elena’s been through a lot—”
He was taking her side. Mona went numb inside. “Yeah, well, so have I.”
She didn’t want to hear anymore, didn’t want to argue about this. Didn’t even want to think that this was happening. Mona spun around on her heel and ran away from the clinic she’d been more than ready to work in for so long. Without making a sound, Apache ran out the door right behind her.
Mona didn’t stop running until she got to her car. Getting in, she waited only long enough for the dog to jump into the backseat. Mona slammed the door shut and peeled out of the small parking lot.
In her rearview mirror, she saw Doc standing where she’d left him, watching her go. He appeared upset.
“That makes two of us, Doc,” she whispered.
Hot tears stung her eyes as she drove away.
* * *
SHE HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG she’d been standing there, in the cemetery, talking to the headstone that she and her brother had bought for her grandmother.
Pouring out her heart to the memory of the woman the way she hadn’t since she was a little girl.
On automatic pilot when she’d left the clinic, she didn’t realize she was driving in this direction until she’d almost reached the cemetery.
Ordinarily, whenever she was upset, whenever something was really bothering her, coming out here to talk it out with her grandmother seemed to help. Right now, as she talked to the headstone, Mona could almost envision her small, gray-haired grandmother sitting there, a solemn expression on her face, listening to her. When she was done, Abuela would advise her. The old woman’s advice was sparingly given out, but it had always made her feel that everything was going to be all right.
But now there was no low-key, gravelly voice to tell her what direction to take, or to say just the right words that would put her dilemma into the proper perspective.
Mona felt incredibly lonely. Incredibly lonely and betrayed.
“What do I do, Abuela? How can I ever forgive her for what she did? How can I forgive him?” Doc knew how she felt about the woman he’d taken in. How could he have done that? And how could he now ask her to give her a chance? Especially since what he was asking her to do was forgive the woman and start fresh?
“You know, this wasn’t what I pictured when I suggested we go out on a date.”
A second ago, she was the only one in the cemetery. The voice, coming out of nowhere, made her jump and gasp. The next second, she looked down accusingly at Apache. At the very least, she would have expected the dog to bark and warn her of Joe’s approach.
No bark, no warning. All Apache did was run up to Joe and enthusiastically wag his tail as if he hadn’t seen his rescuer in at least a hundred years. The dog’s tail thudded against the neighboring headstone, beating out what sounded like a rhythmic tattoo.
Joe blew out a breath, proceeding very cautiously. Despite all her bravado, he knew that Mona was very fragile right now. When he hadn’t found her at home, he thought she was still at the clinic. He assumed some kind of emergency had come up. No problem, he was willing to wait.
But when he arrived at the clinic, he discovered that she had fled. Doc had filled him in on what had happened. It wasn’t all that hard finding her after that. When Mona felt as if her world was coming apart at the seams, she always came here, to the cemetery, to talk to her grandmother. And search for peace.
Averting her face, afraid that another tear might betray her, Mona murmured, “I’m sorry. I forgot about our date.”
“Good thing I don’t have an ego to bruise,” he said lightly, poking fun at himself in an attempt to get her to come around. He’d just given her a straight line. When she said nothing, he gave it one final beat, then said quietly, “Doc told me what happened.”
Tears all but choked her. Mona looked in his direction, struggling not to cry. But her eyes were welling up anyway.
“How could he, Joe?” she cried, wanting desperately to understand, to come up with a reason she could understand and forgive. “How could he do that to me? How could he take her in, knowing how I felt? I trusted him and he took her side.”
Very slowly, Joe drew closer to her by degrees, approaching her the way he would a wounded animal. Because that was what she was. Wounded. And he wanted nothing more than to help her heal.
“Doc wasn’t taking sides, Mona, you know that. You know him. He just wants to help the two of you heal a rift.”
“This isn’t a rift,” she retorted. “Friends have arguments, they get mad, they don’t talk for a couple of days. That’s a rift. This is a chasm,” she informed him with emphasis. “You don’t put a Band-Aid on a chasm and hope it’ll all get better.”
“Not unless you have one hell of a Band-Aid,” he quipped. And then he looked at her pointedly. “Or one hell of a heart, willing to forgive.”
“My heart’s the usual size,” Mona answered, still struggling not to cry. “And right now, it’s not feeling very forgiving.”
Joe had managed to cut the distance between them down to a mere couple of inches. Enough to be able to put his arms around her and hold her to him just as the dam broke open inside her.
“I’m not supposed to cry,” she sobbed against his shoulder, unable to stop.
“Don’t worry,” he told her softly as he tightened his arms around her, willing her to be comforted. “I’m not going to tell.”
Chapter Thirteen
Mona hoped that if anyone from the town drove by and saw her crying like this in the cemetery, they would think her tears were for the woman whose body rested in peace beneath the headstone.
There was no reason why anyone would guess that it was because she felt so betrayed by both the man she’d thought of as her surrogate father and the woman who had given birth to her, then took herself out of her life.
But no one drove by and no one knew she was crying except for the dog that stood like a sentry right beside her.
And Joe.
Desperately trying to get a grip on herself—crying never solved anything—and feeling as if she was dehydrated, utterly drained of any and all moisture, Mona drew her head back. She gazed up at Joe, whose arms were still very much around her, creating a shelter for her to cling to.
It was merely an illusion, she told herself, trying not to allow herself to believe it was anything more than that. But still, the idea helped her cope.
By degrees, she became aware of the front of his shirt and what she’d done to it. “I’m sorry, I got your shirt all wet.”
The price to pay was infinitesimally small for having her in his arms. He just wished that she wasn’t so terribly distressed. Ordinarily, he left people their dignity, allowing them to cope with whatever it was that upset them. But this was Mona. There was no such option here.
“Fortunately, it’s wash-and-wear,” he quipped, then added, “Don’t worry about it.”
Joe knew what this was about, what had made her crumple this way, and he wanted to make it all better. He wanted to make her see what he assumed Doc saw, as well. That by allowing her mother back into her life, by forgiving her, Mona would be a great deal happier and it would help to erase her residual pain and resentment.
But this wasn’t a time for lectures, however well-intentioned. She wouldn’t be receptive to any speeches about her mother right now. Mona was about to pull away, like one of the wounded animals she treated.
“C’mon,” he urged, slipping his arm around her shoulders and turning toward the front of the cemetery. “I’ll take you home.” They could go out to dinner some other time. Mona came first.
She shook her head, although she didn’t pull away from him. Having him here soothed her. With Rick gone and Doc’s betrayal, Joe was the only one she could still trust. The only real friend she could count on.
“You don’t have to,” she told him. “My car’s parked out front.”
Joe really didn’t want her driving anywhere in her present condition. She was far too overwrought to be by herself.
“I’ll have Larry or Alma bring it over tomorrow morning in time to get you to work,” he promised. With his arm still around her shoulders, he gently steered her toward the cemetery entrance.
Too drained and exhausted to argue, and more than a little afraid to be alone with her thoughts, Mona let him guide her.
“I don’t know if I’m going to work tomorrow,” she told Joe, struggling to keep her voice even. To keep the tears out. If she began to cry again, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Joe made no comment until she got into his vehicle. Taking care to get Apache into the backseat, he then rounded the Jeep’s hood and got in on his side.
This was serious, he thought. Mona had wanted to be a vet ever since he’d known her. Was she thinking of giving it all up because Doc had taken her mother in? He couldn’t let her throw everything away like that.
“Why not?” he asked as he buckled up.
“Why not?” Mona repeated. She shoved the metal tongue on her seat belt into the slot. The click echoed within the vehicle. “Why not?” she said again, this time her voice swelling in volume.
“That’s the question,” Joe said, his tone level, nonthreatening. “Why wouldn’t you go in to work tomorrow?”
“How can I go in there tomorrow and act as if nothing happened?” she asked incredulously. “It did happen. Doc lied to me, Joe. He lied to me. The man I trusted, looked up to, believed in, thought of as my father, for God’s sake, lied to me. How could he do that? And how can I face him now? That woman was there, in his house, all along. She’d been there since the wedding.”
Turning the key in the ignition, Joe put the Jeep into Drive and released the hand brake. “No, Doc didn’t lie,” he contradicted in the same emotionless voice.
Mona fisted her hands in her lap. “How can you say that?” she cried.
There was no moon out tonight. He turned on his high beams and picked his way back to the main road. The road that would take him to her house. “Did you ask him if your mother was staying with him?”
“No,” she spat out, exasperated, “but—”
“Then he didn’t lie.” He glanced at her for a moment, then looked back on the road. “He just didn’t tell you she was there.”
“All right, then it’s a sin of omission,” she insisted, her voice breaking as she uttered the last word.
Damn it, she upbraided herself, she wasn’t supposed to be this weak, this vulnerable. She was supposed to be able to say the hell with everything, everyone, keep her eyes front and just keep going, not fall apart this way like some delicate flower.
“Maybe,” Joe allowed. He made a sharp right as they cleared the chapel. “Way I see it, he figured he’d get around to telling you once he felt you were ready to listen.”
Mona stared straight ahead. Her reflection in the windshield bounced back at him. “Listen to what?”
“To your mother’s side of it.”
Mona could feel her resentment flaring all over again. “She doesn’t get to have a side. She dumped us and ran off to have fun.”
“Maybe,” Joe agreed, although he thought there might be more to it than that. Doc was a good man, but he wouldn’t have taken the woman in if there wasn’t more to Elena Ruiz’s story. “But I doubt she wound up having it.”
“How the hell did you come to that conclusion?” she demanded.
“Because she’s here, asking you to give her a chance. Because she didn’t leave after you told her to go.” He paused a moment, debating adding the next sentence, but if Mona was going to come around, she needed to know this. “Because she came back even after Rick told her to go that first time.”
Mona stopped staring out the window and looked at him. What was he talking about? “What first time?”
“Your mother—”
“Elena,” she corrected fiercely. The woman didn’t deserve to be referred to as her mother.
“Elena,” he amended for her sake, “was here before,” he told her. “When you were around eighteen. She went to Rick to try to make things up to him and you. He told her that she was eighteen years too late and sent her away before you could see her. He didn’t want you to be hurt,” he added.
Just like she hadn’t wanted Elena’s return to spoil Rick’s wedding day, Mona thought. She and Rick were protective of each other.
“Someone who keeps coming back like that,” Joe was saying, “really wants to make amends.”
“How do you know all this?” Mona asked. “That she came back before?”
“Elena told me when I escorted her out of Rick’s wedding,” Joe said. For a long moment after that, Joe said nothing. But then he decided that he had to. Otherwise, by his silence, he would contribute to the mistake Mona was about to make and eventually, that mistake would haunt her. And when it did, it would be his fault.
“We only get one mother in our lifetime, Mona. Mine died when I was a kid and I would give anything, anything, just to be able to spend one more day with her. You’re getting that chance. Don’t turn your back on it.”
Mona’s expression hardened. “Your mother didn’t abandon you. Didn’t just leave you with the first person she thought of and then take off. Big difference,” she insisted.
“No, not really,” he contradicted. “Not to me at the time.” She, of all people, should understand this, he thought,
considering how she’d felt when her grandmother had died. “I felt as if she’d abandoned me and I was pretty mad at her for about two years. Maybe even longer.” As he was passed from one indifferent distant relative to another, the resentment had been pretty intense at times. “Never mind that she hadn’t wanted to die, bottom line to me was that she did. And she left me behind, ten years old and scared, handed off from relative to relative like one of those cakes people try to get rid of at Christmas.”
She supplied the name he couldn’t remember automatically. “Fruitcake.”
“That’s the one.” He could see her house in the distance and began to slow down. “Be the bigger person, Mona. Give Elena a chance to talk to you. If you don’t like what she has to say, you haven’t lost a thing. But if her apology is sincere, if you decide to forgive her for leaving in the first place, the way I see it, you’re both getting a second chance.”
She shook her head.
He knew that she could be the most stubborn person ever created and he understood that she was hurt, but he’d never known her to be unfair.
“Don’t say no,” Joe advised. “Say you’ll think about it.”
“I’m not saying no,” she told him.
She’d been through a lot today. Maybe she was operating on the hairy edge. The corners of his mouth curved slightly. “You’re supposed to nod your head, not shake it, if you’re agreeing with me.”
“I’m just stunned,” Mona explained. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that many words at one time. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that many words in a single day,” she amended.
“It’s the job,” he commented, remembering that Alma and Larry had said almost the same thing the first day he was acting sheriff. “It makes you talk.”
Hardly hearing him, Mona blew out a long breath, as if she was centering herself. “Okay,” she finally agreed, “I’ll let her talk to me.” She raised her eyes to his. “I’ll do it for you.”
A Baby on the Ranch: A Baby on the RanchRamona and the Renegade Page 28
