Love Me Two Times (Rock Royalty Book 8)

by Christie Ridgway

  It might as well have been a baited hook and she a gullible fish. She was on her feet and at his side in an instant. He slung a casual arm around her neck and turned them so they both could peer out the window. Two lights flanking the driveway gave off a meager glow that did little to alleviate the darkness in this corner of the canyon.

  The distant yip of a coyote only added to the suddenly spooky atmosphere.

  When she shuddered, Beck tightened his hold on her. “Okay, sweetheart?”

  “Just a goose going over my grave.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.” He pressed his lips to her temple, but Jewel sensed his own apprehension hadn’t eased. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Ren and Cilla really didn’t leave you with any hint about what they want to discuss? I hope it isn’t problems with their wedding plans. Like the Lemons finding out about the date of the ceremony.”

  “Maybe they’re going to tell us there’s not going to be any ceremony,” he said.

  She turned to face him. “No! Why would you say that? Are you suggesting they’re going to elope?”

  “Not elope, not go through with it at all.”

  “Not get married?”

  Beck shrugged. “Ren Colson never struck me as the kind of man to settle down. Not Payne or Bing or Brody or Walsh or Reed, for that matter.”

  Insult stiffened Jewel’s shoulders. “But Cilla and Cami, being female—”

  “Never thought they’d settle either. What we all saw at the compound, what many of us did at the compound…That place provided no healthy examples of relations between men and women. We certainly never learned how to love there.”

  “Yet how to explain that all of them have found someone with whom they want to spend the rest of their lives?”

  “Mass hypnosis is a possibility I’ve considered,” Beck said. “Or perhaps mass hysteria.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Or a big chip of cynicism resting on your shoulder.”

  “Funny,” he said, smiling. Then his expression sobered. “But you didn’t have parents who married and attempted the monogamy thing either. So how come you believe in all that until death-do-us-part business?”

  Because I fell in love with you. Jewel opened her mouth to tell him the truth, but then beams from a car’s headlights bore through the window and bounced on the walls.

  “They’re here,” Beck said, and followed Jewel to the front door.

  Ren and Cilla came up the front walk hand-in-hand. Jewel shot Beck a smug look and stage-whispered, “Looks like the wedding is on to me. We should have made a bet. I love winning.”

  He gave a teasing tug to a lock of her hair, then bent to kiss Cilla’s cheek as she crossed the threshold. The two men shook hands.

  Following Jewel’s own greetings, she glanced around their small circle. “Please make yourselves at home. Can I get anyone coffee, tea, something stronger?”

  Cilla hesitated, then said, “I’ll help you in the kitchen. I think coffee and tea would be great.”

  Jewel led the way, trying to suppress a new flutter of nerves. “What did you two do today?”

  “I finally got around to finishing the clean-up from the housewarming party,” Cilla said. “You?”

  “I…well…” She shrugged. “This and that.”

  They put together a tray in a few minutes, but as Jewel began to lift it from the countertop, she hesitated. “I didn’t think. If this is something between just the two of you and Beck…”

  “We would have ambushed him on his own. No, I think this involves you as well.”

  “Wow.” Jewel tried laughing a little. “Way to make a person worried.”

  “It’s more weird than worrisome,” Cilla said. “Frankly, we don’t know what to make of it. But Ren had the distinct feeling that he needed to talk to Beck. And you.”

  Stomach jittering, Jewel made it to the living room where she passed out cups and saucers—coffee for Beck, tea for the other two and herself. Then she perched on the sofa, Beck a cushion away. The other couple arranged themselves on the loveseat on the other side of the coffee table.

  Nobody looked interested in the homemade chocolate chip cookies she attempted to distribute. They all just eyed one another and took first sips of their desired hot beverages.

  Finally, Beck set down his cup and saucer with a clack. “You guys are creeping me out. What the hell is going on?”

  “Sorry, man,” Ren said, and ran a hand through his hair, disordering the dark, shoulder-length strands. “It’s just…where to start?”

  “The beginning?” Jewel suggested.

  “That’s just it,” Cilla said. “We’re not sure what is the beginning.”

  “Enough of the rabbit hole,” Beck said. “Just start somewhere.”

  Ren looked at Cilla. She nodded at him and reached for her purse. She withdrew two photos from it and placed them carefully beside the tray on the coffee table, right side up for Beck and Jewel.

  “Oh, it’s Soul.” She reached for one.

  “No, it’s not,” Ren said.

  Her hand froze. She looked more closely and noticed the clothes the child was wearing weren’t like any in her daughter’s closet. The shoes were wrong, and there was just something off—

  Puzzled, she looked up at Cilla and Ren. “I remember Obie saying yesterday he found pictures of her. But those are not Soul.”

  “Right,” Ren said. He set down his own cup. “They’re two of a group of photos Gwendolyn Moon left me when she died—some loose, some in albums. The oldest go back more than thirty years.”

  “So who is the child?” Jewel asked. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “We thought you might know…or have a guess,” Cilla said.

  Jewel put her hand to her forehead. Yes, it looked like Soul, but—

  “I know who it is,” Beck suddenly put in, his voice hoarse. “Well, I don’t actually know her name, but someone brought her to a party at the compound one night. And while she was there…”

  “While she was there?” Ren prompted, his focus lasered on the other man.

  “While she was there, I…I was responsible for her death.”

  Cilla and Jewel gasped together.

  “I knew I should never have come back,” Beck muttered, rubbing his eyes. “I knew no good would come of it.”

  Jewel ignored the little pain those lines delivered and directed her gaze to Ren, who had gone preternaturally still.

  “I remember…” he began, then he shook his head slowly. “It’s so damn hazy. Fuck.”

  “Don’t remember,” Beck said quickly. “You don’t need to.”

  Jewel turned her head to stare at him. Had he actually said something about killing a child? He looked pale beneath his tan, and she reached out to cover his hand with hers. The unresponsive fingers felt corpselike and cold.

  Cilla picked up one of the photos. “The resemblance to Soul is so strong—”

  “Because,” said someone new. “That’s a photo of Soul’s mother.”

  Jewel’s grandmother stepped into the room, dressed in a thick robe, her silver hair pillow-mussed. “I heard voices.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma.” Jewel hastily stood, thinking the older woman was caught in the middle of a dream. “Let me take you back to bed.”

  Instead, Grandma kept moving forward, then bent to scoop up the remaining photo. “Jewel, darling, this is you.”

  Beck shoved to his feet. “No.” He massaged his temples with his fingers. “I saw the car. She’d escaped through a door someone left open, and I was running after her to get her back into the house. Then came the car speeding up the driveway. I saw it hit the child.” His finger shook as he pointed it at one of the pictures. “That child.”

  “I think now we need the something stronger than tea or coffee,” Ren said to Jewel, his expression grim.

  She hurried off for it. How come she didn’t recognize herself? But her mother had not kept baby photographs of her. Grandma’s collectio
n began when Jewel moved in at age ten.

  Upon her return to the living room, she found Grandma sitting beside Beck. He took the glass filled with a couple of fingers of whiskey from her hand and downed it automatically.

  “You can never speak of this,” Ren suddenly said. “You can never speak to each other about this.”

  Beck jerked, and his gaze shot to the other man’s. “Yes.”

  “They told us that, the night of the accident, Hop and Bean, our dads. Those were their words. I hear them in nightmares.”

  “Yes.” Beck looked at the photo in Grandma’s hand, then up at Jewel. “I thought she was dead. I thought you were dead.”

  Another goose wandered over her grave, scattering a chill across her skin. “I’m alive. I’m right here.”

  “She was hit by a car that night, though,” Grandma said.

  “My accident happened at the compound? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, your mother took you to that party.”

  “Christ,” Beck said, forking his hand through his hair.

  Grandma turned to him. “And I don’t know whose vehicle hit Jewel, but your father and the others wanted it hushed up. Maybe to save the driver, maybe to save themselves from charges of endangering children. My daughter told me to stay out of it, and that she wasn’t going to the authorities. I suppose she would have been in trouble too, for bringing a child there.”

  “Money oiled the way, I’m sure,” Ren said, his tone bitter. “Beck, how old were we?”

  “I was six,” he said, staring off into space. “You were five. Day of the Dead.”

  “Damn. I just can’t get the pictures in my mind to focus. I have vague impressions, the sound of voices.”

  “We were told to forget about it,” Beck said.

  “But you never did.” Cilla moved to perch on the arm of the sofa beside him. She touched his shoulder.

  “I thought she was dead,” he said again, with no emotion. “They left me in charge of her, and I thought the accident was my fault.”

  “You were six years old,” Ren ground out. “For fuck’s sake, Beck, it’s all on the Lemons.”

  “And my mother,” Jewel added, her stomach lurching at the thought of little boy Beck, taking on such a huge burden. Living with this misplaced guilt for all these years.

  Now the man stood, and she could tell he’d been shaken to his very core. He looked around the room as if not understanding how he’d come to be there.

  “What can I get you?” Jewel asked. “What do you need?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t talk to you right now.” Like an automaton, he headed for the front door.

  Jewel and Cilla both looked at Ren.

  “I’m on it,” he said, and dropped a kiss on the top of his fiancée’s head as he made to follow.

  Through the window, the women watched the two men begin walking up the street toward the compound. Before the shadows swallowed them, she saw Ren put his arm around Beck’s shoulders.

  He didn’t shrug it off—and that seemed vitally important.

  Yet sadness washed over her all the same as he continued moving away. The wonderful day was definitely over.

  “Beck told Ren that they used to be inseparable, and I guess now we know the day that came to an end.” Cilla shook her head. “Beck distanced himself because they weren’t supposed to talk about what happened.”

  Jewel thought of that and she thought of the two men side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. Maybe Beck could find something good coming out of his return to LA. When he left this time—and the uncovering of all this guilt and pain made it more certain than ever that he’d want to escape the place—he might at least go with the renewed connection with his oldest friend.

  And, unbeknownst to him, with her heart.

  Chapter 11

  Beck’s boots were dusty with Canyon dirt, and the spring sun burned hot enough to make a line of sweat trickle down his back. Sweat stung his eyes, too, and he used the back of his wrist to blot it away.

  He felt grimy, but he was used to dirt and healthy sweat. What he wasn’t accustomed to was looking back and picking at the threads of his past. As a matter of fact, he’d been superb at doing the very opposite of that ever since he left the compound fifteen years prior. Then, he’d moved on to a new life and immersed himself in new adventures and cultures, new faces and new foods.

  Almost until he didn’t know who he was anymore.

  That had been fan-fucking-tastic.

  Then came the damned concussion. It had unbalanced him, making him vulnerable to Cilla’s wheedling that he must attend her wedding to Ren. Aware that the hole in his memory was that time he’d spent in LA, he’d agreed and booked a flight to LAX.

  LAX…

  A thought feathered around the edges of his brain. What was it?

  Pausing, he lowered to his haunches and closed his eyes, trying to make it crystallize. More than twenty months back—

  No. Well, it was a memory from twenty months ago, yes, but it had floated briefly into his consciousness yesterday. His pulse sped up. Was this it? The moment his memory would choose to return?

  Once again he recalled the sense of disquiet that he’d experienced upon stepping onto the plane that would take him on the first leg of his trip to Africa. It had presented as a physical load on his shoulders and a tight knot in his gut. Though he’d tried to ignore it, the notion couldn’t be shaken—that he was making the wrong move, that he was heading in the wrong direction.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Had some sixth sense told him that danger awaited him on the Nile? He had colleagues who swore that listening to an inner instinct had saved them—a bad feeling had prompted Joe Girard to change his flight at the last minute, and the original plane destined for a remote spot in Russia had gone down. A tickle at the back of Larry Stein’s neck had made him twist aside and avoid a mugger’s blade at a bazaar in Kabul.

  Too bad Beck hadn’t been smart enough to heed his own intuition.

  Now, jabbing his fingers into his scalp, he tried digging deeper…but nothing more really came to him, except a brief moving picture. In his mind’s eye he could see his boots. He could see them hesitating in the aisle and then his knuckles turning white where they gripped his pack. But then another passenger bumped his shoulder, knocking him out of his strange state, and he’d dropped into his first class seat.

  “Hey,” a voice said.

  Beck looked around. Striding down the narrow track that he’d just been hiking was Ren Colson, in black jeans, a ragged black T-shirt, and his usual heavy motorcycle boots.

  “You can hike in those things?” Beck asked.

  Ren, his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, grinned. “I can do anything in these boots.”

  “Spare me the details,” Beck grumbled as he rose to stand. “What the hell are you doing here? And how did you find me?”

  “The gardeners at the compound pointed me in the right direction.” He lifted a hand, dangling a six pack of beer cans from their plastic holder. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

  “We’re going to drink beers in the Canyon like a couple of teenagers hiding from the authorities?”

  “When did we ever need to hide hitting the booze?”

  “True,” Beck conceded. “But are we going to squat here in the chaparral?”

  “Not at all,” Ren said, brushing past him. “Come along to my office.”

  The other man led the way to an area Beck had yet to explore. “Where the hell are we going?”

  They skirted a stand of eucalyptus, their menthol scent strong enough to clear his sinuses. Then he saw it, the remains of a low-lying treehouse built in the crotch of a gnarly oak. “One of Brody and Bing’s?”

  Ren nodded, continued toward it.

  “Wait—is that thing safe?”

  “Only one way to find out,” his badass old buddy said, his free hand reaching for the “rungs” of a “ladder” that had been nailed to the trunk. He began to climb.
“Don’t just stand there. I’ll have to start calling you insulting names.”

  “I’m not afraid so much of that dilapidated structure as of what Cilla will do to me if you get a scratch on your hide.”

  Ren laughed. “She loves me no matter what. With scratches and sins. Love’s understanding that way.”

  Oh, shit. “Is this some sort of weird intervention?” he said, but began following Ren up into the tree.

  “A conversation, pal. Just a conversation.”

  The structure seemed solid enough and was more “deck” than “house.” They sat on the edge, legs dangling, the lookout providing an excellent view of the vegetation-congested slopes and furrows. At the bottom of one, a creek ran like a silver snake.

  Ren handed over a cold can, took another for himself, and then each top was popped with a gusty sputz. Beck downed a long swallow, and then his gaze caught on the top of a makeshift, obviously boy-constructed roof in the near distance. Not far beyond it he detected another deck built amongst branches, this one less sound, because he could see that some of the planks were missing. To the right of that, he saw even less intact remains of another tree dwelling.

  With his beer, he gestured toward those signs of Bing and Brody’s early construction efforts. “It’s like standing on the top of El Castillo, the step pyramid at Chichen Itza,” Beck said. “As you look off into the jungle you can spot traces of temples and other ruins, almost entirely engulfed by trees and vines.”

  “Quite the life you’ve chased,” Ren said, drawing up one knee.

  “Chased?” Beck frowned. “I’m not sure I’ve been in pursuit of anything.”

  “Not even peace?” But instead of waiting for a reply, Ren continued. “I had the nightmare again last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For shit’s sake,” his friend replied mildly. “If you’re going to feel bad over things out of your control, why don’t you take on the blame for the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.”

  “I kind of like seeing the orange orb slide into the Pacific Ocean from our coast.” Beck took another swallow of his beverage.

  “Good to know. Maybe you’ll stick around a while to see it do that very thing.”