Another week? Chase couldn’t wait that long. She could ignore his text messages, but maybe if he tracked down her parents’ number, he could get her on the phone.
“Vermont, right? Do you know what town?”
After a moment’s thought, she said, “Putney. I think it’s near Brattleboro.”
Chase gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re the best! And keep answering that door—your Prince Charming will be knocking any day now.”
She looked surprised, but then she smiled. “Good luck with Rayne,” she said. “You’re gonna need it.”
Chase went straight home and googled Putney, Vermont, and anyone with the last name Michael but got nothing. He called 411, but they had no listing. It was possible that her parents didn’t have a landline or didn’t live right in Putney, so he looked at a map and tried some other towns nearby. Nothing.
He ate a bowl of cereal for dinner as he pondered what to do. Then he called his mother.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. “Would you mind if I borrowed one of your cars?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I rarely use the Sentra so you’re welcome to take it for the day. Do you have errands to run? I could help if you’d like.”
“Actually, I was thinking of taking a road trip to Vermont.”
There was a puzzled silence at the other end of the line. “Why Vermont?” she finally said. “Don’t you think you should be taking it easy for a while?”
He hadn’t even given any thought to making up a story. And this was his mom anyway. She had a way of seeing right through him.
“There’s this girl... uh, woman....”
“The same woman you worked on the gala with?” she asked, her voice brightening. “Rayne, right?”
“I screwed up, Mom, and she’s gone off to Vermont and I really need to talk to her.”
“Have you tried calling her? How do you know she’ll even be there when you get there? You might drive right past each other on the highway.”
“I’m out of options, so I’ll have to take that chance. She’s supposed to be staying another week. And she’s not responding to my messages.”
“Chase, honey, maybe you should just let this one go. If she’s not—”
“No! I mean, I tried, but I just can’t,” he said. “We had a misunderstanding and now she thinks I’m a heartless womanizer and maybe I was but I’m not anymore. And I drove her right into the arms of Brian Walrus, and all I know is that I have to try to fix it.”
“Sweetie, you’re not making any sense.”
He ran his hand through his hair, eyes bleary, heart hammering. “Can I please just borrow the car for a few days?”
“I’ll make you a deal. You can have the car, but only if you come to the house tonight and stay over. I want to make sure you’re fit to go off on a trip alone.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Mom, I’ve gone on dozens of trips to way more dangerous places than Vermont on my own.”
“Don’t remind me. But you’ve been very sick, and I don’t think you’re thinking straight. I’ll send a car to pick you up in an hour. Will you have your things packed by then?”
“I’ll be packed in five minutes,” he said, smiling. “And thanks, Mom. For the car and the concern.”
“You’re my son,” she said simply. “And I love you.”
When Chase got to the house, his mother had fixed a turkey sandwich for him with cole slaw and potato chips on the side. She sat with him in the kitchen while he ate, his appetite slowly coming back.
“I met Rayne at the gala,” she said. “Beautiful girl. And very sweet.”
“That’s her,” he said. “Did you and Dad buy any art that night?”
“Your father didn’t go. He had to work at the last minute. I was going to stay home, but Jeremy Banks had sent me those lovely flowers and it seemed rude not to go.”
Chase grinned. “Jeremy is quite the draw.”
She gave him a playful swat. “I’m a happily married woman.”
He almost said, “Really?” but stopped himself in time.
“Colin says the event was a big success,” Chase said.
“Yes, all that hard work you and Rayne did really paid off, and she did a lovely job setting everything up. The house was just beautiful. They exceeded their fundraising goal, and some man named Brandon Wallace bought all your photographs.”
“He did, huh?” The thought gave Chase a creepy feeling, and he wondered if he had the option of refusing to sell to him.
“Maybe you should send him a note,” his mother said.
“Yeah, maybe I should,” Chase said. But if he did, it wouldn’t be about photography.
His mother made him go to bed as soon as he was done eating, and Chase couldn’t deny there was something soothing about sleeping in his childhood room. He shook his head at himself and chalked it up to the lingering effects of malaria.
The next morning when he came downstairs, his mom was waiting in the kitchen. She handed him the keys to the car and said, “I’m not thrilled about this, but since you seem to be so determined to go, I won’t stop you.”
He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll call you from the road, OK?”
“Please do,” she said, handing him a thermos of hot tea and a sandwich.
“Gee, where’s my Spider-Man lunch box?”
She smiled. “You’re a grown-up now, remember?”
Chase drove out of the city and into Maryland. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and traffic was light. He had a GPS app running on his phone, which sat in the cup holder between the seats, and he listened to NPR on the radio until he got out of range of the city. Then he turned it off. He didn’t need the distraction because his mind was whirring. He had no idea how Rayne would react to him just showing up. But he hoped the effort would be enough to convince her to listen to what he had to say.
He stopped around lunchtime at a rest area and ate his sandwich outside at a picnic table and called his mom to say he was doing fine. But he didn’t linger because it was cold and a little windy, and he didn’t like sitting still. He wanted to keep moving.
He drove through Brattleboro at dinner time and kept heading north. He saw the signs for Putney and followed Route 5 into town—which was small, and everything seemed to have already closed up for the night. He was starting to panic when he saw a feed store that was still open.
He parked and dashed inside. The place smelled of hay and sawdust. He was expecting the counter to be manned by a guy in a flannel shirt and a John Deere cap, but the middle-aged man at the cash register had a gold earring and long gray hair pulled back in a pony tail.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
“I hope so,” Chase said. “I’m looking for the Michaels. I understand they live around here.”
“Judy and Wesley?” the guy said.
“I guess so. I’m actually a friend of their daughter’s.”
The guy’s face brightened. “You’re a friend of Rayne’s?”
It didn’t surprise Chase that Rayne had already wormed her way into the community. “Yeah, but I forgot the address. Could you tell me how to get there, by any chance?”
Chase pulled out his phone, prepared to type directions into his notepad app.
“Their place is just up the hill. Go out here and make your first left, then go right when you come to a T-intersection and just follow your nose. Their farm is right before you run out of road. Can’t miss it.”
Chase paused with his thumbs poised to type. How the hell was he going to follow those directions? No street names, no traffic signals. He put his phone away and thanked the guy. He’d just have to go as far as he could and ask someone when he got close.
Chapter 22
For the past couple of day
s, Rayne had helped with the chores in the morning—feeding the chickens and bringing in firewood—and then her mom went to her job teaching English at the Putney School while her dad stayed home. He had a little side business repairing small engines, and she spent her first afternoon watching him fix the neighbor’s snow blower while they talked about nothing in particular.
The next day, she went with him to buy chicken feed and straw at the store in town then helped him replace some rotten boards in the barn wall as he told her what he knew about raising sheep and the best dog breeds for protecting them from coyotes and wolves. She had always loved helping her dad when she was a kid. Maybe he would have really liked a son, but she never felt like he treated her differently because she was a girl.
On Saturday morning, she and her mom visited the spinnery in town to see about having their future sheep’s wool spun into yarn. It was run by a cooperative, which pleased her mother, and the floor was dusted with bits of fluff and smelled like wet wool. Rayne browsed through the yarn for sale in the shop. It had a wonderfully nubby texture, and she wondered if she should take up knitting.
Saturday evening, they were feeding the chickens when her mother asked, “Do you feel like talking about it yet?”
“Talking about what?” Rayne said, though she knew what her mom meant.
“The guy who made you run away up here.”
“Not a guy,” she said, putting the chicken feed in the tray. Now she could maneuver confidently around the birds, aware of how they moved and no longer afraid of stepping on them. “There were two of them.”
Her mom raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I wasn’t dating them at the same time, Mom!”
“OK, so which one made you run away?”
Rayne sighed. “The first one.” Then she realized that, technically, Brandon came before Chase. “He’s the brother of the guy Savannah’s been seeing. He’s a professional photographer with a serious case of wanderlust and commitment phobia. He has a habit of booking gigs in remote corners of the world when he needs to get out a relationship. Everyone warned me about him, but I fell for him anyway.”
“I see. And where did he run off to?”
The way her mom emphasized the word “he” made Rayne look at her. “Nepal. And he was running away because things were starting to get good. Serious maybe. And he didn’t want that.”
“Maybe he was scared. Men get scared, too, you know.”
“Why are you defending him, Mom? You’ve never even met him.”
Her mother walked outside and Rayne followed. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping, but she was getting used to the crisp, clean air.
“You said people warned you about him,” her mother said. “Maybe you let everyone else decide for you. Maybe you didn’t give him a chance to do the right thing.”
The thought made Rayne uncomfortable, and she put the scoop back in the barrel of cracked corn and fastened the lid in silence.
“Have you heard from him at all since he left?” her mother asked.
Rayne shrugged. “He sent a few texts, but I’ve been ignoring him.” In response to the look her mother gave her, she added, “He was working with me on the gala, and then he took this assignment and wasn’t even there for the event. It hurt, you know? And how could I ever compete with the allure of Nepal or Timbuktu or anyplace else?”
Her mom latched the coop door shut. “You could go with him.”
Rayne looked at her, trying to process the notion.
“I know your childhood wasn’t ideal and you would have liked to stay in one place longer,” her mother said. “Someplace ‘normal.’ But you always managed to make friends and create a community. Remember how you organized the kids in Trumansburg, New York, to clean up that stretch of the lake shore?”
Rayne laughed. “Yeah. I think some of them were the kids who put the trash there in the first place.” She smiled to think of it now. That’s where she’d met Carol, who was all knobby knees and freckles back then, and they’d stayed friends all these years.
She turned to her mom. “I know I’ve been hard on you and Dad, but lately I’ve been thinking my childhood wasn’t so terrible. It was actually kind of wonderful in a lot of ways. I’m not saying I’m going to run off and join a commune, but all that traveling we did—I forgot how a change of scenery can give you a whole new perspective. I was lucky to have that.”
Her mom gave her a big hug. “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I’ve been worried. You never seem to want to visit us, and I was afraid you hated us. That’s also how I knew something was up when you asked to visit on such short notice.”
“You know me too well,” Rayne said with a laugh.
Her mom tucked a strand of hair behind Rayne’s ear. “And the other guy? You said there were two.”
“I don’t want to ruin your opinion of me. Let’s just say he was an old flame who came back around, and I lost my head.”
“OK, we can leave it at that,” her mom said. Then she put her arm through Rayne’s, and they headed up to the house.
Surprisingly enough, Chase managed to follow the guy’s directions. He had to go slow because his mom’s Sentra wasn’t made for rutted dirt roads, but fifteen minutes later, he pulled into a driveway behind a battered pickup truck.
He turned off the engine, and his heart was pounding. Then he saw her and was sure his heart would give out.
She was walking up from the hill in the fading sunlight with her arm around an older woman who must be her mom. They were laughing and bumping hips together. Rayne was wearing black leggings and boots and a long cable knit sweater with a colorful silk scarf wound around her neck. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, and her hair was tousled in that way he found so appealing. He took a moment to watch her, drinking in the sight of her felt like a tonic.
Finally, he got out of the car and stood beside it with his hand on top of the open door, suddenly shy and unsure of what to do next. Her mother noticed him first, then Rayne looked up and saw him.
She stopped, stunned to see Chase standing in the driveway. For a split second, she wondered if he was a hallucination. But she didn’t think her heart would have taken flight the way it did if he was.
“Why are you…How did…How did you find me?” she sputtered.
Her mother slipped away to the house and went inside. Rayne stayed where she was, and Chase found that he was frozen to the spot, too.
“Your roommate told me you were in Putney.”
Her roommate. Rayne wondered why he would refer to Savannah that way, and then realized he must mean Carol.
“I stopped at the feed store in town,” Chase said, “and the guy told me where your parents live.”
She stared at him, still trying to come to grips with his sudden appearance. “It’s a long drive,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. But I needed to talk to you.” He looked awkward, which wasn’t like him, and seemed to be struggling to find the words. “I needed to tell you I’m sorry.”
It was a start. “OK,” she said slowly, telling herself not to get swept away on this one grand gesture. “What are you sorry for?”
He stepped around the car door. “For missing the gala and going off to Nepal instead.”
She studied him for a moment. He certainly sounded sincere, and she didn’t think he’d drive nine hours to lie to her. “OK. Apology accepted.” She was trying to keep her voice neutral, but her stomach was doing somersaults as she wondered what else he’d come to tell her.
He took another step toward her, looking pale and thin, and her heart ached to think of how sick he must have been.
“And for not telling you how I feel.”
“About what?” Rayne asked, her heart starting to pound.
He stepped clos
e enough to reach out and touch her, but he didn’t.
“About you,” he said.
“What about me?” Her voice caught in her throat. It was taking everything she had not to throw her arms around him. But she had to hear him out, she had to be sure this time.
“That I want to be with you, all in, one hundred percent. If you give me another chance, Rayne, I swear I’ll never leave you like that again. I can’t breathe without you.”
“You seem to be doing all right,” she teased even as tears started to cloud her vision.
“Because you’re here,” he said, his voice rough. “Please tell me I’m not too late. Please tell me I can fix this.”
Before he could finish, Rayne had launched herself at him, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight against him as he buried his face in her neck and, for the first time since getting off the plane, finally felt like he was home.
“When I was delirious, I hallucinated about you and Brian Walrus,” he said, his lips grazing her hair. “And then Colin told me that you’d gone to dinner with him, and I was afraid that I’d lost you, lost the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Rayne pulled back so she could look him in the face. “Brian Walrus?” When she saw that he was serious, she smiled. “You really are terrible with names.”
Chase kept staring at her, and she realized he was waiting for an answer.
“You didn’t lose me,” she said, her voice low and full of emotion. “I never stopped thinking about you.”
Chase broke into a smile that lit up his eyes and warmed Rayne’s heart. He brushed her hair away from her face. “That’s good news, sweetheart,” he said in his Humphrey Bogart voice, which made her laugh. “Because I am hopelessly, head-over-heels in love with you.”
By the end of the sentence, he was back to his own voice, and Rayne’s expression turned serious. A feeling of panic flashed through him, but he was glad he’d said it. It felt good to be honest.
The Pursuit (Capitol Love Series Book 2) Page 20
