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“Don’t you ever check the condition of your spare?”
Her eyes narrowed beneath her soggy bangs. “Somewhere between studying for my finals—and the examination for my vet license—and juggling a part-time job to pay for little incidentals like food, it must have temporarily fallen off my ‘immediately to do’ list.”
He ignored her sarcastic tone and answered matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s a shame,” he told her. “Because your spare’s flat, too.”
Mona closed her eyes. It figured. All things considered, this had not been one of her better days. Opening her eyes again, she looked at Joe. “As flat as the one on it?” she asked.
You just didn’t substitute one flat tire for another. Flat was flat. His dark eyes would have pinned her to the wall—if there had been one around. “You know better than that.”
Yes, she did. She was just desperate. And really, really annoyed. With both tires for being flat and with herself for not noticing that the spare had slowly lost its air. And most of all, right now she was annoyed with Joe for pointing it out.
Hands fisted at her waist, Mona swung one booted foot at the right front tire and kicked it.
“That’s not going to make it come back to life,” Joe commented.
She glared at him. “I know that.” The hood she had on provided next to no protection for her at this point and when it slid off her head, she didn’t bother to try to pull it back up. “Now what?”
The weather seemed to be getting more hostile by the moment. He turned so that the rain was at his back. Because he was taller, he provided a little shelter for her, as well.
He gave her options, although only one was really viable. “Well, I could call Mick and you could wait here for him to come with his tow truck—if you don’t wash away first. Or I could give you a ride into town and you could talk to Mick yourself, face-to-face.”
Mona was in no mood to share a car ride with him, even though she knew it was her best bet. “No third option, huh?”
“Sure.” Joe raised his voice again, competing with the increasing sound of the wind and the rain. “You could wait here for the tire spirits to come and perform the miracle of the reinflating tire.”
His expression was so serious that anyone not knowing Joe would have thought that he actually believed in the spirits he’d just invoked. But she had grown up witnessing displays of his deadpan sense of humor.
With a sigh, Mona resigned herself to her only real alternative. “I guess I’ll have to pick option number two.”
“Good choice,” he answered.
Turning on his heel, he started to lead the short distance back to his parked vehicle. It took him less than a minute to realize that Mona wasn’t following behind him. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. She was still next to her Jeep.
“Change your mind?”
Crawling into the rear of the vehicle, Mona hauled out a large suitcase. She had no choice but to set it down in the mud.
“No,” she told him, “I don’t want anyone making off with my clothes.” She didn’t bother looking at him as she leaned into the back and grabbed a second suitcase. This one, lodged behind the driver’s seat, proved to be less cooperative and she struggled to get it out of the vehicle.
Joe shook his head at the woman’s unadulterated stubbornness. He crossed back to her in a couple of long strides. Firmly taking hold of her shoulders for a second time, he moved her out of the way and easily pulled the large suitcase out. Instead of putting it down next to the first one, he held on to it, keeping it out of the mud.
Mona squared her shoulders. “I could have managed,” she protested.
Arguing with her served no purpose. “No one said you couldn’t,” he answered. Still holding one suitcase, he deliberately picked up the other with his free hand. “This it?” he asked. “Or are there more?”
She’d never been one to be careless with her hard-earned money, but she had accumulated a few things in the past eight years. “The rest are being shipped,” she told him.
Something small and hopeful zipped through him. He banked it down quickly, giving absolutely no indication of its momentary existence. Instead, he asked in what passed for a disinterested voice, “You moving back?”
She wanted to. But there were things she needed to work out. Not to mention that her brother had said he had other plans for her, plans that included having her move to a large city. She didn’t want to disappoint him, but Forever was really the only home she ever knew. The only place she’d ever felt she really belonged.
“For now,” she allowed.
Joe weighed her tone and made a judgment.
He was forced to raise his voice yet again as he walked to his vehicle. The wind grew louder, the rain more harsh. He felt as if his words were being snatched away even as he uttered them.
“Set your sights on somewhere else?” he asked.
She had nothing to carry but the shoulder bag that had seen her through both college and veterinarian school. Holding it tightly against her, Mona moved quickly to keep up. At this point, she wanted nothing more than to get out of the rain and curl up somewhere warm and dry. In lieu of that, Joe’s car would do.
“Not me,” she told Joe, then repeated the words when he looked at her quizzically. Satisfied he’d heard her, she added, “Rick.”
Reaching his vehicle, Joe loaded first one suitcase, then the other into the backseat. When he turned to look at Mona, she had already scrambled into the passenger seat in the front.
He opened the driver’s-side door and got in. “You want to explain that?”
Mona felt around for the seat belt. Finding it, she secured it around herself. “Rick—” She realized she was still yelling and lowered her voice. “Rick has high hopes that I’ll move to the big city, open an animal hospital and be a big success.”
“And you?” He put his key into the ignition, but didn’t turn it just yet. “What are your hopes?”
Mona ran her hands up and down her arms, trying not to shiver. It was unseasonably cold for spring.
“To get dry again,” she answered.
She glanced out the side window. The rain was getting worse, but that wasn’t what was bothering her. She heard a distant muffled roar and it was getting louder. That could only mean one thing. She turned toward Joe. Now wasn’t the time for any false bravado or stubborn ploys on her part. They had trouble.
“Joe—”
Joe turned the key and after a what seemed like an unnaturally long moment, the engine caught and turned over.
“Yeah, I know,” he answered. “Looks like we’re in for it.”
They both knew what he was talking about. “It” was Joe’s loose reference to the flash floods that they were periodically subjected to when Mother Nature decided to be too bountiful with her supply of rain and drenched the lands far too quickly to be of any actual benefit to anyone.
Mona twisted around in her seat, looking back at her vehicle. She knew she had no choice, but she really hated leaving it behind.
“My car,” she protested.
“We’ll find it once it stops raining,” Joe told her with an assurance that defied argument.
She turned back around and sat facing forward again. Mona watched as his car’s windshield wipers vainly battled the downpour, losing ground with every stroke they spasmodically made. To her dismay, the man beside her slowed down and began driving at a speed that would have brought shame to an arthritic turtle.
The fearless daredevil she’d once known would have laughed at the rain and gone full throttle into the storm.
But that boy was gone now and in his place was a cautious man who thought things through.
She knew that any faster and they risked driving off the road and landing in a ditch.
Or worse.
Another thought suddenly struck her. She turned to look at his profile. “We’re not going to make it into town, are we?”
If this had been anyone else in the car with him, he might have uttered some platitude meant to be reassuring, doling out a spoonful of hope to someone he knew was silently asking for it.
But this wasn’t anyone else. This was Mona. Mona, who took every white lie as an affront, every sugar-coated fib as an insult to her intelligence. So he said the only thing he knew she would tolerate.
He told her the truth.
“Nope.”
Chapter Two
“‘Nope’?”
Stunned, Mona repeated the single-syllable answer Joe had just uttered. If they couldn’t reach town, that meant the oncoming flash flood would cut off access to Forever.
But she knew Joe, knew him as well as she knew herself and her brother. Joe was not the type to merely give up or surrender, even if his adversary was Nature itself.
Still, the seconds ticked by and he wasn’t saying anything beyond the one word he’d already uttered. Mona felt herself growing antsy, in direct correlation to the force of the storm.
If they couldn’t make it to town, they would have to find shelter somewhere. They couldn’t stay out in the open. Flash floods were known to sweep vehicles away in the blink of an eye.
“Say something, already,” she ordered, then immediately added a warning. “I swear, Joe Lone Wolf, if I hear you say, ‘Today is a good day to die,’ you are going to really, really regret it.”
He stole a quick glance in her direction, taking care not to look away from the road for more than half a heartbeat. Visibility was next to impossible, but at this point, he was searching for something very specific.
“So much for my one dramatic moment,” he quipped. “How about, ‘Let’s hole up in the old Murphy place until this passes’? Will that get me beat up, too?” he asked.
“The Murphy place?” Mona repeated uncertainly. She hadn’t realized that she’d gotten this disoriented. She squinted as she peered through the all but obliterated windshield. Visibility was down to approximately twelve to eighteen inches in front of the vehicle, maybe less. “Is that around here?”
The “Murphy place” was little more than a three-room cabin that by urban standards hardly qualified as a vacation getaway, much less a regular home. It was more in the realm of a shack, really. More than three quarters of a century old, it had once been the center of a dream—and a budding cattle ranch—until an outbreak of anthrax had eventually killed both. The cabin, which should have been the beginning of a sprawling ranch house, had stood empty for close to twenty years now, after the last descendent of Jonas Murphy died without leaving any heirs, just a mountain of bad debts.
Somehow in all that time, the building, a veritable feasting ground for vermin, had managed to escape being torn down or even claimed. No one cared enough about the unproductive piece of land to buy it and begin building something from scratch again. So the decaying cabin stood, enduring the seasons year after year and, like an aging octogenarian with osteoporosis, it grew steadily more and more frail.
The last time he’d passed this way and actually looked at the cabin, Joe had thought that the only thing keeping the building up were probably the termites, holding hands.
He sincerely hoped that they were holding tight for at least one more night.
Instincts that were generations in the making guided him toward where he had last seen the cabin this morning on his way into town.
“It should be close by,” he answered Mona, then spared her a grin and added, “Unless those pesky tire spirits decided to move it just so that they could annoy you some more.”
She doubted that it was possible to annoy her any more than she already was, Mona thought. “Very funny.”
The grin on Joe’s face softened into a smile and then that faded, as well. He found that he had to fight not just the rain but the wind for control over his vehicle. He sensed Mona’s tension. She was watching him.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he assured her quietly as he continued to stare intently through the blinding rain.
Mona bristled. “I’m not afraid,” she retorted, stopping just short of snapping at him.
She hated the fact that Joe could read her so well, that all he had to do was just look at her to sense what she was thinking. What bothered her most of all was that she couldn’t return the “compliment” and do the same with him. It just didn’t seem fair.
“Okay,” Joe allowed. “Then why are you about to rip off my dashboard?” he asked. Without looking, he nodded in the general direction of her hands which were gripping the aforementioned dashboard.
Mona gritted her teeth. Damn it.
She was completely unaware that she was gripping the dashboard. Swallowing a curse, Mona dropped her hands into her lap, trying hard not to clench them.
“Just bracing myself for the inevitable crash. You’re not exactly the best driver in the world,” she reminded him pointedly.
He knew what she was referring to. At thirteen, he’d been angry at the world in general and specifically at the absentee father he’d never known and his mother, who’d died suddenly three years earlier. He’d been passed around from relative to relative and raised by committee, which compelled him to steal one of the elders’ cars just to thumb his nose at everyone.
For the space of half an hour, he’d felt like his own man, free and independent. But the joyride ended when he lost control of the car and ended up in a ditch.
Miraculously emerging unscathed, he’d wound up working the entire summer and half the fall to pay off the repair bill for the car. He figured the episode would always haunt him, no matter what he might go on to accomplish in life. He didn’t mind. He considered himself lucky to have walked away alive, much less without so much as a scratch.
What amused him about the whole thing is that Mona had a similar incident in her past. It had happened when she was ten. Rather than a joyride, after an argument with her grandmother Mona decided to run away from home. She took her grandmother’s car to enable her escape. But the adventure was short-lived. Mona managed to go down only two streets before her grandmother had caught up to her—on foot. Even at that age, the old woman had been swift.
The car sustained no damage. The same, he knew, couldn’t be said for Mona’s posterior or her dignity. She was grounded for a month.
“I wouldn’t throw rocks if I were you,” he said, leaving it at that. When she frowned, he knew that she knew exactly what he was referring to.
A second later, Mona sat up straight in her seat, suddenly animated. “I see it. You were right. The cabin is here.”
“Nice to know you have faith in me,” Joe cracked, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It was getting harder to keep the vehicle from veering.
“It’s raining horses and steers,” Mona cried, gesturing at the windshield and doing one better than what she considered to be the stereotypical comment about cats and dogs. “Anyone could have gotten turned around in this storm.”
“Most people could have gotten turned around,” he allowed. Things like that never happened to him. He took his natural sense of direction for granted.
She sighed, shaking her head. Same old Joe, she thought. “Despite what you think, you are not mystically empowered, Joe Lone Wolf.”
Not for one minute did he think of himself as having any special, otherworldly powers, but he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I came to your rescue out of the blue, didn’t I?”
“You were just on your way home and stumbled across me,” she corrected. “You’ve been taking the same route ever since you went to work for my brother as one of his deputies.”
He turned the tables on her with ease. “Are you saying you took this path on purpose?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Just to run into me?”
“No, I’m saying that you—I mean, that I—” This wasn’t coming out right. He was getting her all tongue-tied. Mona gave up. “Oh, hell, think what you want—but you do know better than that.”
Yeah, he thought, he did. Had known it from the first moment that he’d laid eyes on Ramona as she walked into his second-period tenth-grade English class that February morning ten years ago. She’d been so beautiful to look at that it hurt him right down to his very core.
And right from the beginning he knew that girls like Ramona Santiago did not wind up with guys like him. He was an Apache through and through and it wasn’t all that long ago that people regarded Native Americans like him as beneath them.
Granted, Mona, like her brother, was one third Apache herself, but it was the other two thirds of her, the Mexican-American and especially the Irish side of her, that carried all the weight. And those two thirds would have never welcomed a poor Apache teenager into her life in any other capacity than just as a friend.
So a friend he was. Someone for her to talk to, confide in if the spirit so moved her. Being her friend—her sometimes confidant—he’d long since decided is what made his life worth living. And what had, ultimately, made him abandon the wild, bad boy who didn’t play by the rules and take up the straight-and-narrow path instead. The guy he had been would never have pinned on a badge and sworn an oath to it. But he’d done it for her, for Ramona.
