by Lucy Connors
I dragged my gaze away from her chest and gave myself a stern warning to quit being a horndog. Just because, blue blood or not, the girl had spectacular tits, legs that went on forever, and the fierce heart of a mama badger, there was no reason to lose control and jump her.
And just because she seemed to care about me—she stood up for me—was no reason to lose control and fall for her.
I wasn’t sure which scared me more.
“Did you hear me?”
I shoved my hair back out of my eyes and tried to remember what she’d been talking about before my brain fizzled at the sight of her breasts. “Yes. Sorry. Experience with feuds? Trust me, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
She turned away from me, and suddenly I was looking at the back of her head.
“No. Experience experience. I’ve never done it before. I’ve never even, um, done anything beyond kissed a boy. So if you thought we were going to have sex, well, we’re not,” she said in a very small voice.
First, I irrationally wanted to find every guy she’d ever kissed and beat them to a pulp. Then, I irrationally wanted to jump up and down and cheer that she hadn’t done anything else with them.
It was Crazy Town in my brain.
“Ever?” I finally said, trying for lighthearted.
She glanced at me reproachfully over her shoulder, and I felt like a jerk.
“I’m sorry, Victoria. I’m an idiot. Look, I should never have made that stupid comment about taking your dress off. Guys my age are a mass of boiling hormones, it’s not personal—”
“It’s not personal? So, any girl would do?” She bit off the words, and I realized I’d put my size-ten boot firmly in my mouth.
“No! That’s not—I’m not good at talking to girls,” I muttered. “What I meant was that I’m not going to attack you like some crazed beast or something, just because I want you so bad I can taste it. No matter what everyone says, I’m not violent or a dangerous animal.”
Except when I was beating the shit out of Sam Oliver, a little voice in my head nagged at me.
Unexpectedly, Victoria turned to me and smiled. “Mickey, of course I know that. Do you think I would have come here with you if I thought you were dangerous? I just wanted to put it right out there on the table that I’m not the type of girl to jump in bed with every boy who says romantic things to me in the moonlight.”
“You thought I said something romantic?” I thought back, trying to figure out what it had been, but she laughed at me and opened her door.
“There’s a blanket behind the seat. Let’s get this picnic started, okay?”
Chapter 31
Victoria
It’s incredible. If I could, I’d build a house right here so I could have this view all day long,” I said.
We walked over to the edge of the grass, where there was a steep drop-off. I’d put my flats back on, because the heels would have been stupid, but I still stumbled a little. Mickey caught me and pulled me away from the edge, and then he leaned back against a large boulder, still holding me.
I gradually relaxed against him, resting my arms on his where they circled my waist. I could feel the warm hardness of his chest against my back, and I felt completely safe but also a little breathless, like I was poised on the brink of something hugely wonderful.
Or maybe, like Melinda, I was just hungry.
Thinking of Melinda and Buddy made me feel restless and a little guilty, but I’d only been gone an hour and a half or so, not even the length of the first movie they’d been planning to watch.
“Does it have a name? This place?”
“People call it Lonesome Ridge,” Mickey said. “I never thought of it that way, though. To me, it’s not lonely at all, but peaceful. We can see the whole of Whitfield County up here in all its glorious potential, but we’re too far removed to be part of any petty troubles.”
“It feels peaceful to me, too. We’re not like everybody else, though,” I said. “We’re both alone in the middle of large families. Except for your mom and my Gran, but nobody else really.”
“The young and the lonely. Sounds like a soap opera,” he said, and I could feel his chest vibrate with his quiet laughter.
“This is Lonesome Ridge, so we’d be the lonesome young,” I pointed out. “Sounds like a song.”
“Sounds like a heartache,” he said, tightening his arms around me and resting his cheek on the top of my head. “I don’t want to be lonesome. I want to be with you.”
“I want to be with you, too, but nobody wants to let us. Mickey, are we ever going to be normal?”
“Who knows? Is anybody really normal?”
“Biff probably is,” I said lightly, because he’d started to sound depressed, and I didn’t like the idea of him hurting.
Mickey’s stomach growled loudly, and I jumped, and then started to laugh.
“Even my stomach hates Biff. Or else I’m really hungry,” he said.
“Me, too,” I confessed. “Should we find out what’s in the basket?”
“It’s fried chicken, or Nora’s in big trouble.”
I turned to go back to the truck, but he stopped me with one hand on my shoulder and bent down and kissed me. It was gentle and undemanding, a whisper of a promise, but without any pressure to take it further right now.
“I don’t want to be with you so I can have sex with you,” he said quietly, but then a corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. “Okay, we said total honesty. I absolutely want to have sex with you. I have dreams about getting you naked. But we can talk about all of that way in the future at some point, on your timetable, okay? For now, just the chance to spend time with you is enough.”
“With kissing,” I said, trying not to hyperventilate at the idea of Mickey making love to me.
“Definitely with kissing.”
• • •
There was, in fact, fried chicken in the basket, and potato salad, baked beans, and chocolate cake. I ate way more than I should have and then lay back on the blanket in a carbohydrate haze and stared up at the stars, because what else was I going to do on a romantic picnic with the hottest guy in the known universe?
The sound of crickets whispering secrets to each other was the only thing we could hear for miles, and I realized that it was the first time in my life that I’d been surrounded by true silence. The silence and the stars blanketed the world and wrapped me in a sudden feeling of being part of eternity’s very own horse race. What did petty hatreds matter to the stars that circled the universe?
Mickey moved the basket out of the way and then lay down next to me.
“Do you ever think about what you’ll do after this? After high school?”
“I think I want to be a large-animal vet,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t admitted that to anybody except my old boarding school roommate, Simone.
“Horses?”
“Always horses. Other farm animals, too, and the usual cats and dogs that come with a farm and ranch practice, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know how practical that is in today’s world of veterinary specialization, but I grew up with horses and with James Herriot’s books, and I’ve always wanted to be part of that world. Except with modern medicines.”
“All Creatures Great and Small? I loved those books,” Mickey said, surprising me. “My favorite story was the little old lady who healed that abused golden retriever with her special magic powders. She sounded like somebody who could live here in Kentucky, you know?”
“I felt that way about all his stories,” I said. “I think that’s what was so great about his books. Growing up in Kentucky, or Ireland—it didn’t matter. The characters were so real, they felt like people we could meet anytime.”
“Except for Siegfried,” Mickey said, laughing. “Nobody is like him.”
“What about you?” I turned to face him, propping myself
up on an elbow. “What’s in your future?”
His smile faded, but he reached out and twirled a strand of my hair in his fingers.
“What’s my future? I don’t know. When I was little, I wanted to be a cop like my dad. When I got older, I just wanted not to be a criminal like my brothers. These days, I actually think I might want to write.”
“Write what? Books, movies, comics, plays, blogs, news?”
He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Books, I guess, but that sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? What could I have to say that anybody would want to read? I’m just some hick kid from a backwater town in Kentucky that nobody’s ever heard of.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t put yourself down. There are enough people around here who want to do it for you. Don’t help them.”
His eyes widened, and then a beautiful smile spread across his incredibly gorgeous face. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Stand up for me. Even when it’s myself you’re defending me from. I don’t know how to take it. It causes a funny feeling in my gut.”
I considered that for a moment, and the butterflies dancing in my own stomach. “That funny feeling might be the potato salad,” I said, teasing. “Mayonnaise can go bad fast.”
He pounced on me and tickled me, and then he was kissing me, long, slow kisses that made the stars overhead swirl crazily around in the night sky. His tongue touched my lips, and when I opened my mouth to his unspoken demand, he angled his head and deepened the kiss until I was trembling beneath him with the sensation of too much, too much, too much.
Or maybe not enough.
He pulled away from me, breathing hard, and then sat up, and I realized I wasn’t the only one shaking.
“We need to take it slow,” he said. I nodded, and he groaned.
“Help me out, here, Victoria, because I’m trying to say what I should say, not what I actually want to say.”
“We need to take it slow,” I parroted, trying to believe it.
He looked down at me and then closed his eyes. “I need a cold shower.”
The first crack of thunder sounded, and a fat raindrop smacked me on the nose exactly then, in a feat of spectacular timing, and I started to laugh.
“I think you’re going to get your wish.”
We raced to pack everything up and get back to the truck before the rain became a deluge. Mickey carefully backed up the truck, turned it around, and headed back down the hill.
“The last thing we need is to get stuck up here if the road washes out,” he said, shaking his head so that drops of rainwater from his hair sprayed all over. “We’d never be able to explain that one.”
I checked my phone to see if Melinda had texted me that our folks were back yet.
“Crap. My phone must have died.”
Mickey glanced over. “Yeah, I think it died way earlier, unless you were deliberately ignoring my call when I left my house.”
A shiver of unease snaked through me, and I plugged my phone into the car charger and it immediately lit up with a listing of six missed calls. I pressed the speakerphone button, and the first voice mail message shrieked out at me.
It was Buddy, and he was nearly incoherent.
“Victoria where are you? They took Melinda, they came to the house on motorcycles and took her, and I’m all alone and nobody is answering their phones, you have to come home right now.”
I dropped the phone out of suddenly numb fingers and stared at Mickey in horror.
“Oh, my God, what happened? What is he talking about?”
I retrieved the phone and called the house, but there was no answer. Then I tried my parents, who also weren’t answering. Gran didn’t own a cell phone, and Pete wasn’t answering his. Finally, I tried Melinda’s phone, knowing she probably hadn’t charged it in weeks.
No answer.
I hit play on the rest of the messages, and they were all increasingly worried and then hysterical messages from my little brother, who had been all alone in the house and afraid, while I was stealing kisses with Mickey.
I was going to hell for this.
I was already in hell for this.
My hands wouldn’t quit shaking. “Take me home. No, to the school for your bike. No, it’s raining too hard. To your place, and then I’ll go to my house by myself, and—”
Mickey’s phone rang, cutting off my frantic chatter, and his face hardened when he read the display.
“Hello, Anna Mae. I should have known you’d be involved in this.”
He listened for a minute. “And the boy?”
When he shut off the phone and put it back in his pocket, I wanted to strangle him. “Well? What was that? Does she know something? Where is Buddy?”
He finally reached the road and pulled out, headed toward Ethan’s place if I had my directions straight.
“She doesn’t know anything about Buddy. Maybe he wore himself out and fell asleep, Victoria,” he said, taking my icy hand in his. “Isn’t there anybody in the barn you can call? I know you must have staff who work the night shift with the horses, right?”
I hadn’t even thought about that. I dialed the barn number but got the answering machine. I left a message and then looked at Mickey.
“What about the police? Can I call your dad’s office to have somebody go out to the house to check? I know it sounds extreme, but he’s only nine—”
My phone rang again. Pete’s number, but when I answered, it was Gran.
“Your parents are on the way to the Rhodale compound, Victoria, and I’m on the way home. They took Melinda, or maybe she went with them on her own, we don’t quite know yet. Either way, you need to get home right now, do you hear me?” Her voice was shrill and quavering, and I had the desperate thought that if my family didn’t drive her to a heart attack or a stroke soon, it would be a miracle.
“Gran, I’m on the way,” I said. I could hear Pete trying to get her to calm down and then she hung up. So he must be driving her home, and my parents were on the way to Anna Mae’s.
I related to Mickey the part of the phone conversation that he hadn’t heard, but he shook his head. “We’re heading to Anna Mae’s. She said if we don’t show up, she won’t let anybody in the gate to get Melinda.”
“Mickey, we’ve got to find a way to end this,” I said, throwing it out as a challenge—or maybe a prayer.
Or a death wish.
He held out his hand, and I took it, holding tight in the darkness as we sped toward the most terrifying encounter I could imagine.
After several long minutes of silence, he squeezed my hand. “I agree. Let’s end this. We’ll make it our goal. They can’t keep acting this way, and they can’t keep us apart. Pact?”
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out, centering myself, trying not to panic—either at the situation or the thought of trying to accomplish something so enormous in the future.
“Pact.”
And then we raced through the night to the compound, hoping the entire world wasn’t about to explode in flames.
Chapter 32
Mickey
The gun. I had the gun.
The words ran through my head continuously, like a mantra or a curse, as we drove through pounding rain toward my brother, his mother, and whatever the hell they had in store for us.
I have the gun, I have the gun, I have the gun.
I’d changed my mind back at the house. Staring at it, I knew I couldn’t take the chance that Jeb would wake up and somehow find it. I hadn’t known what to do with it, so I’d carried it with me and slid it under Victoria’s seat when I took my jacket off.
Problem: Ethan knew I had the gun.
I’d worry about that later.
Would I be able to use it? Would I be able to take such a dark and final step toward a wasted future like Etha
n’s, even if Melinda was in danger? I didn’t know.
If Victoria was in danger?
No question.
So what did that make me?
I didn’t know that, either.
“I’m scared,” Victoria whispered.
She tightened her grip on my hand, and I squeezed back, but then let go to put both hands on the wheel. If we were going to get hurt tonight, it damn sure wasn’t going to be because of reckless driving.
“Would it make you feel better or worse to know that I’m scared, too?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Worse.”
“Nothing scares me,” I shot back with a straight face, and she rewarded me with a ghost of a smile.
She put her phone on speaker and kept compulsively calling her parents, but both of their phones were going straight to voice mail. I gritted my teeth against pointing out that her dad sounded like an asshole even on his voice mail greeting, ordering people to leave a message in a tone that implied he didn’t particularly give a shit if they did or not.
“Why would he take her? Is it revenge for last time? Do you think she went voluntarily?”
Her teeth were chattering, and I pushed my jacket across the seat toward her. She wrapped it around herself, and I turned on the heat in the truck and pushed it up a notch. Taylor Swift started to sing something cheerful and up-tempo, and Victoria viciously stabbed the off button with her finger.
“This is my fault, you know. I had to be so clever and stage a showdown at my house to try to get my parents to pay attention to Melinda. She said we all treated her like she was invisible, and I researched the rehab but didn’t push hard enough. She probably thought I was abandoning her, too, and when I left her tonight . . . It’s my fault.”
Victoria told me the long, painful story of the “dinner from hell.” It wasn’t her fault—not even a little—but I could see why she thought so. Her asshole parents had really done a number on her over the years.
“I would have paid money to see your dad watching those peas roll down the table,” I told her, but she didn’t even blink; she just started speed-dialing her house again to see if her brother would pick up.