by Jessie Evans
The next morning she would recall scraps of teasing conversation and flashes of images from the road to Broody’s house—a line of cypress trees lit up in the high beams and the moon peeking out from behind dark clouds as the snow showers blew over—but after that…nothing.
Nothing until she woke up wearing a strange man’s tee shirt, alone in a strange man’s bed and looked out the window to see a gut-wrenchingly familiar view.
“Oh, shit,” Reece whispered, clutching her aching head as her eyes scanned the dusty yard, mammoth barn, and impeccably maintained fences stretching out toward the gently rolling hills in the distance.
She’d been on the property when those fences were first going up, back when she’d still been taking riding lessons from Mr. Parker, before her eighteenth birthday, when the coach she’d respected had shown his true colors. Ugly, fucked up, “you’re not jailbait anymore” colors that had sent a wrecking ball swinging through her entire life.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she repeated, heart racing as her stomach tried to turn itself inside out.
Neil Parker could be in the house right now. She had no idea who Broody was—a friend visiting for the holidays or one of the men Neil had hired to take over handling his cattle—but she couldn’t stick around to find out.
Thanks to her stupid decision to mix painkillers and alcohol, she couldn’t remember what she and Broody had done in this bed last night. But whether he’d given her the most exquisite pleasure she’d ever known or proven to be all talk and no action, it didn’t matter. She didn’t have the luxury of waiting for him to come back to bed and refresh her memory. She had to get dressed and get the hell out of here.
She never wanted to see Neil Parker again. Even nearly twelve years wasn’t long enough to banish the memory of his thick arms pinning her to the wall of the barn or his cold, rough hand shoved up her shirt. It had been so much worse than if he’d been a stranger or one of the losers she’d dated back in high school. She’d trusted Neil, idolized him. He’d been the supportive, indulgent, proud father figure she’d never had and then he’d poisoned every memory with what he’d tried to do.
As Reece struggled into her jeans and yanked her sweater back over her head, her traitorous brain replayed scenes of that rainy spring afternoon again and again, until she was shaking all over and felt like she was going to be sick on the Navajo rug spread over the bedroom’s hardwood floors. Her duffel felt like it weighed fifty pounds more than it had yesterday and her knees threatened to buckle as she stepped into the hall and came face-to-face with a portrait of Neil hanging on the wall beside the staircase.
Cursing beneath her breath, Reece fled down the stairs, clinging to the banister as the world tilted on its axis. She didn’t have time for a dizzy spell; she had to get the hell out of here before it was too late. Heart pounding in her throat, Reece made it through the foyer and out the door without seeing a soul. As soon as she was outside, she aimed her body for the hills in the distance, and the ranch on the other side, and ran.
The only good thing that had come out of last night was that she was now only a couple of miles as the crow flies from home. Because Neil Parker hadn’t just been her coach, he’d been her closest neighbor and her father’s best friend. Her father, who had believed his old buddy’s side of the story instead of his daughter’s. Her father, who had agreed she should be stripped of her Clayton County Rodeo queen title for fraternizing with a judge.
Her father, who she was even more grateful was in Montana right now. If she had to look him in his pale green eyes this morning, she didn’t know if she’d be able to keep from confronting him and that wasn’t the way Reece worked. She didn’t dredge up the past. She didn’t hope for the future. She lived for the moment because the past was too messed up and the future too damned scary to look it in the face for too long.
Until the accident, she’d been able to hold both the past and the future at arm’s length. But as she fled across the snow-covered field, the cold air rasping in her lungs until she tasted blood in her throat, Reece could feel all the things she secretly feared ganging up on her. They chased her through the woods to the home she’d left years ago with nothing but three hundred dollars in her pocket and a suitcase full of anger and dreams.
Look for GLITTER AND GRIT in December 2014
