by Lucy Connors
“Here they come,” Mickey said grimly. “Showtime.”
Chapter 18
Mickey
Stay here. I don’t want you in the middle of this,” I said, and before Victoria could argue, I got out of the truck and walked into the road right in front of Ethan’s truck.
I wasn’t sure he’d stop. He stared at me through his windshield, grinning like a fiend, and I had a split second to wonder if I’d end up splattered all over his hood before he slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the truck.
“Melinda’s coming with me,” I told him. “No drugs, no messing with her.”
“She wants what I’ve got, baby brother,” Ethan said mockingly.
Behind me, I heard Victoria’s door open. I should have known she wouldn’t listen to me. She ran over to the passenger side of Ethan’s truck and yelled at her sister to open the door. I didn’t take my eyes off Ethan, though, just like I wouldn’t take my eyes off a rattler in the road in front of me, either.
“Need any help, boss?” The thug at the gate had apparently finally figured out that something was going on.
“High-quality employees you’ve got there,” I pointed out.
“I do like the dumb ones,” Ethan said, still grinning at me.
“No, I don’t need help,” he called out to the guard. “This is my brother, you moron. Go tell Ma to put some coffee on.”
“We won’t be staying for coffee. We’re taking Melinda home,” I said evenly.
Ethan would either let us go without a fight, or he wouldn’t. We stared each other down for a minute or two, until Melinda unlocked the door and fell into her sister’s arms, crying. Victoria half dragged, half carried her across the road toward her truck, and I waited to see if Ethan would make a move on Melinda or shoot me first and then make a move.
“I just want to quit seeing his face,” Melinda sobbed, and I could hear Victoria making shushing, soothing noises.
“She thinks she killed Caleb,” Ethan said, his predatory gaze following the girls as they crossed the road back toward me. “I told her she was wrong. That fire was purely an accident. Bad ventilation in the trailer.”
“Right. Bad ventilation. Whatever you say. The fact that they were moving into your territory had nothing to do with it.”
“Accidents happen to people who get in my way. Doesn’t mean it’s my fault, but they still happen. You might remember that.” He paused as if making a decision, and then his hand moved away from the gun in his waistband. “All right, little brother. You can have your Whitfield girl’s sister, this time. But you’re going to owe me one, and you might not like the favor I ask.”
I nodded, glancing at the guard and knowing we weren’t out of trouble yet. “Fine. I owe you one, but I won’t run drugs in the high school for you. I won’t run drugs at all.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a clean, upstanding citizen. I got rehabilitated in jail, didn’t you know?”
I just stared at him, waiting for him to change his mind and try to take Melinda, but he climbed back in his truck, motioning to the guard to open the gate.
“Don’t forget, Mickey. You owe me one. I fully intend to collect.” He started to roll up his window but then stopped with the glass up halfway. “And you’d better stay away from these Whitfields. Consider this a friendly warning. The next one won’t be so friendly.”
• • •
Melinda sat silently, staring out the window, all the way to their house. Victoria sat between us, holding her sister’s hand, and I wished that I could do something to relieve the terrible strain in her expression.
“You should take us to the school so you can get your bike,” she said when we passed the road that would have taken us there.
“And leave you to drive home on your own with Melinda like this? Not a chance,” I said quietly, not wanting Victoria’s sister to hear me. “I can hitch a ride from your place.”
She shook her head. “No, you can take my truck, and I’ll get a ride to school in the morning.”
“She needs help,” I said finally, even though it felt wrong to talk about Melinda like that when she was sitting right there.
“You think I don’t know that? My parents won’t even let me talk to them about it, and Gran is worried that they’ll block her from trying to get Melinda into rehab.”
“Maybe this will make them open their eyes.”
Victoria shifted restlessly. The long line of her leg came into contact with mine, and that sizzle of electricity sparked between us again. She glanced up at me, and then away.
“No, I’m not telling them about this. Can you imagine what Daddy would do? He’d call the FBI down on Ethan for kidnapping or some such nonsense. If the feud needs an excuse to flare up again, this would be it. And I don’t think Melinda could handle the fallout.”
Melinda, still crying, didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know if she’d heard us.
“You may be right. It’s probably better to keep our parents out of this. And before you ask, I’m not saying that to protect my slimeball brother.”
I turned onto the long, curving driveway marked with a sign that read WHITFIELD RANCH, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and realized I was entering enemy territory.
“I never thought that for a minute, Mickey,” Victoria said. “Thank you for—for everything. We’ll just tell anybody who’s around that Melinda didn’t feel well, so you drove us home because I was worried.”
It wasn’t a very good explanation, but it would probably work. As long as her dad wasn’t around, nobody else would know who I was, after all.
But when we pulled up to the house, we discovered that it was too late for feeble cover-ups. Victoria’s dad came storming down off the porch to greet us, and he was pissed. Melinda stumbled out of the car and ran past him up the stairs to the enormous house, and he didn’t even pay attention to her.
“You,” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing in Victoria’s truck?”
Another man came running toward us from the direction of the huge barn, and he looked angry, too, but he headed for Victoria, not for me.
“Victoria, are you okay?”
Okay. At least somebody had his priorities straight around here. I waited for Victoria to answer, willing to take my cue from her about how much to say.
“I’m perfectly fine, Pete” she said, and her voice had a bite to it. “Mickey was nice enough to drive us home after Melinda got sick—”
“That’s not how I heard it,” her father broke in, glaring at me. “The principal called me. He said this Rhodale chased Melinda out of the school.”
I forced my face into a perfectly blank expression. So he had heard that his daughter was in trouble, even though he’d gotten it all wrong, but he’d ignored her completely so he could get at me. What an asshole.
Victoria laughed. “Wow, gossip flies in small towns, doesn’t it? And they always get it wrong. Melinda voluntarily went for a drive with Mickey’s brother Ethan, and we picked her up and brought her home, because, as I said, she’s not feeling well.”
The man she’d called Pete was giving me the once-over, his face skeptical, but at least he wasn’t on the verge of hitting me, like her dad appeared to be.
“Now maybe, instead of yelling at Mickey, Dad, you could thank him for—”
He spat on the ground. I hadn’t even known Whitfields knew how to spit. From the expression on her face, neither had Victoria.
“It will be a cold day in hell before I ever thank a Rhodale for anything. Now get the hell off my property.”
With that, he grabbed Victoria and headed for the house, dragging her after him. Every instinct I had was urging me to go after him and teach him a lesson about how to treat his daughter, but I fought it back and stared blandly at Pete.
“So.”
“So,” he echoed me. He was staring after Victoria and her father, and I had the odd feeling that he wanted to punch Whitfield as much as I did. “You need a ride?”
“Victoria said I could take her truck back to school to get my bike, and she’d get a ride to school in the morning.”
Pete gave me a long, measured stare. “How about I drive you back now, instead? That way we’ll have a chance to talk.”
I couldn’t think of a good way to refuse, so I just nodded and held out the key ring and then climbed into the passenger side of the truck.
Pete started the ignition and then shot me a look. “You want to explain what the Rhodales are doing messing with the Whitfield girls? Your pa will have your hide when he hears about this, and you know he will. It’s Clark, after all. Everything that happens around here during the day is practically plastered on the front page of the Clark Gazette by dinnertime.”
He had a lot of fucking nerve. I wanted to laugh in his face, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. He’d been worried about Victoria, after all.
“I don’t know you, and I don’t feel any obligation to discuss what my father will or will not do. Respectfully.”
He laughed, which I hadn’t expected. “Oh, I doubt that you’re feeling respectful at all, or in the mood to listen to me, but I’m going to warn you, anyway. Nothing good can come of your having anything to do with Victoria. There are plenty of girls out there. Pick one of them.”
“There aren’t any girls like Victoria. Also, if you care so much about them, why aren’t you helping Victoria get Melinda into rehab?” I fired back.
He shot me a look that, if he had been anybody else, I might have thought held a measure of respect. “It’s not quite that simple.”
“Nothing ever is,” I said, and after that we drove the rest of the way to the school in silence.
Chapter 19
Victoria
Don’t even think about leaving this room, young lady.” Dad pointed to the couch. “Sit.”
“I’m not a dog,” I snapped.
“No, but you’re hanging out with one. Stinking Rhodale dogs.” He tried to open his liquor cabinet, found out it was locked, and slammed a fist on the wooden top so hard the bottles inside rattled. “Why is this locked?”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Are you freaking kidding me? It’s locked because your daughter has a problem with alcohol. How can you not know that? Now she’s trying to work her way up to a serious problem with drugs, which is how she ended up climbing—voluntarily, I repeat—into Ethan Rhodale’s truck.”
He whirled around and glared at me, and his face was turning red, which was a prime indicator that we were about to have a patented Richard Whitfield Big Damn Blowup.
“So what’s your excuse? Why was the other Rhodale in your truck? If you think I’m going to let you have anything to do with any of Anna Mae’s whelps—”
“What are you talking about?” I was confused. “I thought this was about the stupid feud. The sheriff and Anna Mae got divorced a long time ago, and his new wife is Mickey’s mom.”
“She’s also Buddy’s teacher,” my mom said from the archway to the dining room.
I hadn’t heard her walk in, and apparently neither had my father, who took a deep breath and started yelling at her.
“What the hell are you talking about? And where is the key to my booze cabinet?”
My mother narrowed her eyes, but her voice was calm and steady when she answered him. “If you yell at me again, I’ll bury your key in a pile of the most reeking horse manure I can find on this ranch.”
I was stunned. Go, Mom.
“We should have never moved back here, Richard,” she continued, producing the key out of a pocket and unlocking the cabinet. “I still have some of the money that Daddy left me. We can move back to the city and start over. It would be a smaller house, but—”
“No. Are you out of your mind? Let the Rhodales drive us out of our own place?” Dad pulled out a bottle of bourbon and sloshed a lot of it into a cut-crystal glass. He took a long drink and then glared at Mom and then me.
“Are we going to have to battle Rhodales at every turn because of some blowup you and Jeremiah had in high school? How can this be a healthy place to raise the kids? And with Melinda’s little problem . . .” Mom’s voice trailed off, and then she glanced at me with a warning expression, as if telling me to keep quiet. Too bad.
“Two things,” I said, holding up the first finger. “One, I’m glad you finally realize she has a problem. Two, there’s nothing little about it.”
“Melinda just needs to have some willpower,” my dad muttered as he put his glass down, apparently conscious of the bitter irony of saying this with a drink in his hand.
“Willpower isn’t enough, and you know it. There has been a lot of drinking in this family, right? Your father, his father, and even you . . . She needs help,” I said. “Look, I’ll do all the research. We can find a nice, discreet rehab facility, and—”
His face hardened when I mentioned his own drinking, but then he sighed. “Yeah. Maybe. Do the research. Let’s see what’s out there. I can’t—we can’t—let Melinda fall into the pit because we were too proud or stupid to do anything about it.”
My mom’s eyes widened. “But rehab. It’s so—well. Forget that. What about moving?”
Dad snatched up his drink and downed it in one long gulp. “No. No moving. This is Whitfield County, not Rhodale County. I’ll be damned if I’ll let a bunch of petty criminals and a crooked sheriff with delusions of godhood run us out of our family estate.”
Now the ranch he’d avoided for most of his adult life, since he’d never liked horses anyway, was our family estate? Hypocrite. But his agreeing to let me search out rehab facilities was a huge victory, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I’m going to fire anybody who has even the slightest association with those damn Rhodales, that’s what I’m going to do,” he continued with that icy calm that meant he’d irrevocably made up his mind. “The last thing we need is another Caleb problem, one of our hands getting mixed up in Rhodale drugs, especially when I plan to host a major party for the Kentucky thoroughbred racing association.”
“And you planned to tell me about this when?” my mother interjected coldly.
I didn’t give a crap about upcoming parties, and I couldn’t believe they were cold-hearted enough even to be talking about it right now.
“Caleb problem? Right,” I said bitterly, unable to help myself. “We wouldn’t want to tarnish our reputation with another dead ranch hand, would we? Is everything about image with you? Don’t you have one shred of compassion?”
“Your mother is going to have something to say about this plan,” Mom said. “New hands around the horses are going to spook them, especially if there are a lot of them, and you know as well as I do that everybody’s related to everybody around here, so there are bound to be a lot of distant cousins to the Rhodales working in our barns.”
“Not to mention that people will lose their jobs,” I told my cold-hearted mother. “In this economy, we’re going to put people out of work just because of who they’re related to?”
“If it avoids stress, it’s good for the horses,” Dad said flatly, and I knew he’d go through with it. When he got that tone of voice, a dirty deed was as good as done.
“Your mother—” my mom began, but he cut her off.
“She’ll do what I tell her to do,” my dad said, refilling his glass and taking another gulp of bourbon.
Right then, I almost hated him.
He pointed at me. “You. Stay away from Rhodales. Do your damn homework. Go buy a party dress for the Founders’ Day Dance. And, if you must, research rehab facilities. We’ll figure the Rhodale thing out by ourselves.”
I stood up, shaking my head in disgust. “Since when were we ever able to figure anything o
ut by ourselves?”
Before he could change his mind about Melinda’s rehab, I ran out of the room. One win at a time: it was all I could manage.
Chapter 20
Mickey
Dusk spread her vivid colors across the sky as I pointed the Harley down the pavement, trying to find some clarity in the open road and the roar of the wind in my ears.
I was riding around aimlessly, trying to ignore the urge to go back to Victoria’s, pound on the door of the damn mansion, and find out if she was okay. I’d tried calling, but her phone went straight to voice mail every time, and I didn’t want to call the house phone, because it would probably get her into even more trouble with that jerk of a father of hers.
Asshole fathers, problem siblings—we were turning out to have a lot more in common that I’d ever thought possible.
When I got hungry, I stopped for a burger that I couldn’t even taste, and then I gave in to the impulse that had been riding me all afternoon and evening. Within half an hour, I found myself on the road that bordered the Whitfield ranch, and I called myself six kinds of fool. There was no way Victoria would want to talk to me now, after everything that had happened today. I should head for home.
A shimmer of movement in the darkness off to the right caught my attention, and somebody came into view, riding one of the glossy, expensive horses that probably had cost more than my entire house. Somehow, I felt it was her before I could even really see her. Victoria was racing across the field like a wild thing, like she was part of the horse, not just riding it.
I pulled my bike to the side of the road and parked it in the deep shadows cast by the trees, where the moonlight didn’t penetrate. I walked over to the fence, content simply to watch her.
She was beautiful. Her hair shimmered like silver in the moonlight, streaming out behind her as she rode. She was like a princess in a fairy tale.
But I sure as hell was no Prince Charming.
I’d been kidding myself to think that I’d ever have a chance with Victoria Whitfield. I took one long, last look at her and steeled myself to go, but then the horse stumbled. Victoria flew through the air, and I started running. By the time I reached her, she was sitting up, and the stupid horse was ambling along, munching on grass, completely unconcerned that she’d nearly given me a heart attack.
