by Naomi West
“And what proof do you have that it’s mine?” Rascal followed suit, snatching his T-shirt off a low-hanging limb and yanking it on.
Vera had never felt so rejected and insulted in her life, at least not that she could remember. She gritted her teeth together as she wiggled into her jeans. “Look, I might not know a whole lot about myself right now, but I do know you’re the only guy I’ve slept with. Three times now, if you’re worried I’m not counting.”
“Yeah, and what about Donovan?” Rascal paused in fastening his jeans to point away down the hill in the general direction of Lorenna’s house. “How long has he been coming around and ‘helping you in the garden?’ I’m not stupid, Vera, and I saw the way he was looking at you.”
“Well, I didn’t. And I only just met him about half an hour before you arrived. I’m pretty sure I don’t work that fast.” She didn’t add that she had been terrified of Donovan as soon as she’d realized he wasn’t Rascal, but she certainly thought about it.
Rascal looked like he still wanted to argue that point, but there wasn’t much to argue about. “I still might not have been the only one.”
“I don’t appreciate what you’re insinuating.” Dressed and with her shoes back on, Vera headed toward the entrance of the clearing. She brushed past his bike and ducked under a branch. It would have been a much easier ride back straddling the machine behind Rascal, but the less she had to deal with him the better.
A strong hand grabbed her arm. “I don’t think I’m insinuating anything,” he growled. “I’ve been doing some research, and I think you ought to at least take a second to hear what I have to say.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and jutted her chin in the air toward him. “Fine.”
“Come sit down,” he said.
“No. You might think I’m a slut if I don’t cross my legs the right way.” Vera glared at him, hoping he felt the sparks of anger that she did behind her eyes.
Rascal gave a frustrated sigh. “All right. Fine. Lorenna mentioned that you’d been having nightmares, and she had a theory about where you might have come from. I’ve been doing some research, like I said, and I think I’ve got some of it figured out.”
Vera suddenly wished she had taken him up on the offer to sit down. Dizziness swirled in her head. She’d tried not to think about the nightmares or her missing past since she’d found out about the baby, because that on its own was enough to process. But it was clear she would never get away from it. “And what was this theory?”
“I think for the moment I should just stick to what I actually know. I don’t want to put anything in your head if it’s not right.”
“I’m sure I can make that decision on my own.”
A glimpse of pain moved across his face and was gone. She understood it; he didn’t think she really was capable of making decisions like that. But he started talking again anyway. “You told me that the bartender at the Jackrabbit gave you back your driver’s license and said you had been there the night before. You could say I had a little interview with him, and it turns out there’s more to the story. A man came into the bar looking for you, and he paid Vinny good money to slip some unknown drug into your drink.”
Vera’s hand went to her mouth as she absorbed this information. “Someone drugged me?”
“And it must have been pretty powerful stuff to make you forget everything up until that point,” Rascal pointed out. “The bartender says he doesn’t know what it was. But the man who paid him sat down at your table and talked to you for a while, and then the two of you left together.”
Flashes of imagery lit up behind her eyes, but they were so quick and unclear that she couldn’t make sense of them. It didn’t help her understand at all, which only infuriated her more. “Just because I left the bar with a guy doesn’t mean I did anything with him.”
“Nor do you have any proof that you didn’t!” His fists curled as he glanced toward her abdomen before bringing his eyes back up to her face. “There’s no telling just what happened after that, like how your dress got torn or how you ended up under the viaduct. But it’s a pretty fishy situation, if you ask me. I don’t see how you can really know who the father is.”
Vera’s hand reacted on its own, reaching up to smack him across the cheek. He took the slap without flinching, his only reaction the clenching of his jaw.
“Sounds to me like it was just a bad date.” Vera didn’t want to believe him. The information, if it was true, wasn’t sparking any real memories and wasn’t very pleasant. She didn’t like it, and she desperately hoped he was lying.
“There’s more. You had a brown dress with you, and Lorenna noticed that it’s the same kind the women in that cult in South Dakota wore.” He took a step closer, towering over her and forcing her to look up at that square jaw and terrifyingly blue eyes.
She remembered the dress clearly. It was the same one she was always wearing in those awful nightmares, and a spark of fear rippled through her body every time she so much as brushed a hand against it. Vera had asked Lorenna to burn it, and she’d found that being rid of the garment made her feel much better. “I don’t know anything about a cult.”
“I don’t know anything about it beyond what’s been on the news, and I don’t have proof that you were there. But the dress and the fact that you were running away from something tell me otherwise. Maybe that guy in the bar was from the cult as well.” He wasn’t as angry now as he had been when she’d first told him the news, his voice calmer and his movements less erratic. His eyes looked almost desperate for her to understand.
But Vera wasn’t sure she was ready to forgive him for the way he had reacted, nor did she want to listen to his alarming theories. “I’ll keep it in mind.” She turned away from him and started down the hill.
“Vera, where are you going?” he called after her.
She took several more steps before she paused to look back at him. He was a big man, but he looked even larger standing above her like that. He wasn’t pleased, but it was a different sort of emotion on his face, one that she hadn’t seen before. Pained? Rejected? Hurt? “It doesn’t matter.” She trudged off through the scrubby grass.
Chapter Twelve
Rascal
“Vera!” Rascal called through the trees as she shoved down the sphere of panic and abandonment that threatened to move up through his throat. “You can’t just walk back! We’re in the middle of the desert for crying out loud!”
But she continued on, carefully picking her way around rocks and plants as though she didn’t hear him.
“Damn it!” He turned back to his bike and leaned against the seat, trying to figure out what he was going to do now. He had thought he was doing the right thing by looking into what little of Vera’s past he had access to, but it was clear now that it had only made him more suspicious. And he might never have reacted to her news the way he had if he hadn’t known about the drugged drink and the man with the money.
Now that the chance was gone, he realized what he should have done. He could have simply accepted the baby was his and insisted that she go to a doctor. The way she felt about hospitals told him that she probably hadn’t done that yet, and a doc would be able to tell her how far along she was. That would have at least given him a better idea of whether the baby was his or not.
And did it even matter? Rascal pounded his fist against a nearby tree. He cared for Vera and wanted to protect her. Keeping her and the baby in the safety of his arms was part of that, no matter what had happened. He was such an asshole, and he couldn’t seem to keep from getting in his own way.
When he figured she had made her way back down to the highway and had probably had enough time to cool off a bit, Rascal fired up his bike and headed that direction himself. It was a steep ride, but nothing he couldn’t handle. The brushy trees parted to reveal the hot, black surface of the highway, but there was no sign of Vera. He paused on the shoulder of the road, squinting both ways to see if perhaps she had turned the wr
ong direction, but there was nobody around but him.
“Vera?” he called. Surely she hadn’t been able to walk that fast. It was a hot day, and she was pregnant to boot. Rascal turned off his bike and went back up the path, checking on either side of it in case she had fallen or collapsed somewhere, but again there was no sign.
“Shit.” Rascal roared back toward Lorenna’s house. He watched the sides of the road carefully as he went, still finding no sign of her. Donovan’s motorcycle was gone when he arrived.
The older woman met him at the front door and invited him inside. “What’s the matter with you?”
He told her what had happened without going into too much detail. Even Lorenna didn’t need to know what a dick he had been. “We got into it, and she just disappeared.”
Surprisingly, Lorenna didn’t look concerned. “She’s a smart girl, and she seems very comfortable in the wilderness. I’ve seen her take the trails behind here several times and stay gone so long I thought I was going to have to call Search and Rescue, but she always turns back up looking more refreshed than anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if she took a shortcut.”
“Then wouldn’t that mean she should already be back here?” Rascal demanded.
“Only if she wanted to be,” Lorenna pointed out. “She’s already having a tough time, and you hurt her feelings. I thought you were a better man than that, Rascal.” She took a sip of lemonade, raising an eyebrow at him over the rim of the glass.
“I guess I’m not,” he admitted. “I know I should have been more accepting of the idea. But holy shit, there’s enough going on already with the whole idea of that guy putting stuff in her drink. And then the idea of the cult.” He pressed his palm into his forehead, almost wishing he had taken a different mission on that fateful night just so he wouldn’t have had to deal with all this.
Lorenna had been casually stirring the ice in her glass, but she stopped and looked at him. “Did you tell her that part?”
“What I knew of it, yeah. I hadn’t really planned to, and at least not to tell her the way I did, but it all came out. And you know, when I was trying to find out what had happened to her, I thought I was doing the right thing. But when she told me about the baby, all I wanted to do was find a way for it not to be mine.” He couldn’t explain why he felt that way, and it was something he wanted to shove aside and pretend hadn’t happened, but it certainly had.
Folding her hands on the table, Lorenna gave him a hard and steady gaze. “Let me tell you something. Donovan’s father was a biker. He left me with two small boys to raise because he found a better, younger offer. He wanted to ride and be free from the burdens of a family. The joke was on him, since I can brag about having a wonderful son like Donovan, but you know as well as I do that I’ve paid a hefty price for it.”
Rascal gave a fleeting thought to the son Lorenna hadn’t been able to save and the stories she had told him of how she had struggled to raise her kids. “Yeah.”
“And your father did the same thing to you and your mother. If nothing else, Rascal, think about her. Think about the way she felt when your father left, and the burden she had on her shoulders. There was nobody around to raise you but her. She had no help. She was alone in the world, and now Vera is even more so. She doesn’t have any family or friends to rely on. She’s only got you. Having a baby with her doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to put a ring on her finger and take the trash out every night, but it does mean you need to take responsibility for your actions.”
He tapped his fingernails against his glass, running his other hand through his hair nervously. “Yeah. I guess that’s true. But you have to admit this kid could still belong to someone else.”
Lorenna pursed her lips as she nodded slowly. “Yes. It could. But think about Vera. Think about what we know has happened to her, and what we suspect. Think about the way she’s constantly watching over her shoulder, like she expects someone to jump out of a closet and grab her. If she was with another man, do you think it was because she wanted to be? And do you really think that man would step up and do as he should?”
Rascal sighed. There was no arguing with Lorenna. Everything she said was undeniably true, no matter how much he wanted it not to be. Vera had fallen into bed with him fairly quickly, but she treated everyone else in the world like she was a rabbit and they were all foxes. “What do you think I should do?”
“Find her, first. I can’t make you step up and be the man you should be, Rascal, but I think you know how to do it.” Lorenna patted his hand and stood up, dismissing him.
But before he left, Rascal pulled Lorenna into his arms and gave her a hug. “You’re pretty special, you know that?”
She hugged him back before smiling up at him. “Yeah, I know. But so are you, and so is she. Now go get her before someone else figures it out.”
Chapter Thirteen
Vera
The desert sun was hot on her shoulders, but Vera didn’t mind. There was something about being by herself in the middle of nowhere that was comforting, despite the thoughts that swirled through her mind. Why did Rascal have to tell her all that? And why had he chosen such an awful moment? He could have waited until they were back at Lorenna’s, safe and comfortable at the kitchen table or even in the garden. That was some pretty heavy information to drop, and he had thrown it at her as though he’d expected her to catch it without any problems.
But she didn’t know anything about a cult other than the fact that the newscasters on the radio had mentioned it a few times. She had turned off the news more often than not, uninterested in hearing about the troubles of the world when she had plenty of her own. The fact that a man had drugged her drink only made things more unsettling. Vera had suspicions that she had been running away from someone or something. Had she been trying to get away from the mysterious man at the bar? Or had that been something completely unrelated? With her luck, she wouldn’t doubt it. She thought the whole world might be against her.
Vera turned off the side road Rascal had used to get up to the clearing where they’d had their tryst. She would have less time on the highway if she took a shortcut, and the heat was bound to be worse out on the black asphalt. Watching carefully for snakes, she made her way along a thin trail that looked as though it had only been used by a few wild animals before she finally stepped out onto the hard, manmade surface.
The air shimmered in the distance as she turned toward Lorenna’s house. The sun was just beginning to sink down in the sky, creating hues of gold and pink along the horizon. She wondered if Rascal would try to follow her. Part of her hoped he would, but the other part wanted to duck off into the brush if she heard anybody coming. Vera wanted so badly for something to work out with Rascal. She had truly felt that he was a good man, or at least much better than the rest of the world. But the way he had reacted told her she might have been wrong. “I’m sorry,” she said as she covered her lower abdomen with one hand. “I’m sorry I might be bringing you into a world where you have no father. It’s not fair, and I know that. But I’ll do everything I can to raise you right. Lorenna will help me. At least I hope so.”
A dark figure appeared on the horizon where the band of highway disappeared. The land was so flat that Vera could watch it approach for a long time, unable yet to hear the sound of the engine. But as it drew closer, she realized it was a motorcycle. It was coming from the wrong direction to be Rascal, and she was relieved when Donovan pulled to a stop next to her.
He pulled up his shades and squinted at her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She was glad she had been able to resist crying, even though she had wanted to. “Thank you.”
“Can I at least give you a ride somewhere? It’s awful hot to be walking out here.”
Vera opened her mouth to tell him no, but she thought better of it. She could continue walking a little way down the road to Lorenna’s house, where Rascal was sure to find her and where she could keep hiding from the world and from her pa
st. Or she could pursue her history herself. Rascal had done it, so there was no reason why she couldn’t. “Maybe. I don’t know exactly where it is, but there’s a canal near town with a viaduct going over it.”
He looked dubious, but he nodded. “Yeah. I know the place.”
“Could you take me there? I think I might find some of the answers I’ve been looking for.”
“Sure thing.” He scooted forward to make room for her.
Vera climbed on, finding that riding behind Donovan was a completely different experience than when she rode behind Rascal. He wasn’t as big or as muscular, and she wasn’t tempted to press herself against him and hang on tight. She did, though, feel as though she was safe around him. It was nice to know that maybe not everyone in the world was an enemy. She had Lorenna, and now she had Donovan. Whether or not she had Rascal remained to be seen.
