Be Mine(37)

So she drove away, deeper into nowhere, passing hardly anyone as she flew.

By the time she’d reached Idaho, she was too tired to think anymore. Too tired to decide what to do. Too tired to wind her way through any more mountains or high bluffs. She got a motel room and left her dead phone in the car and she slept.

Ten hours later, she opened her eyes expecting relief. That was the way she’d always felt before. Weeks of tension would precede her escape, but once she was gone, she felt new and happy and light.

But this time...this time she woke with shoulders knotted with stress and her teeth aching from the way she’d clenched her jaw all night. She didn’t feel relieved. She felt scared. And awful. She felt as though she wanted to go home.

Home. But not the home she’d been driving toward. Not Idaho.

She missed her place. And her job. And her friends. She even missed the ridiculous shit Rayleen was going to dish about Jenny’s brief trouble with the law.

Jenny didn’t care about the arrest. Hell, she was a career bartender. It gave her another story to tell. Another way to schmooze tips. Oh, you got into trouble? I got hauled in myself one time. Plus, now she had something scandalous in common with Grace.

Yes, she could handle the notoriety of being arrested. What she couldn’t handle was facing Nate.

She’d been helping Ellis, and she’d lied about it, and it turned out that he’d been growing pot. Worse than that, she’d been arrested in front of Nate’s friends and coworkers. The look on his face as he’d driven past...after what they’d done together...God. After the way she’d let him into her body. The way she’d taken him with complete abandon. If she had to look him in the eyes and see disgust, she’d die inside.

Because she knew that disgust intimately. She’d felt it a hundred times. A thousand. Every time she’d looked at her own mother. Every time she’d seen her mom high and glassy-eyed and vacantly ugly.

The hair rose on her arms. It had been like looking at a dead person sometimes. As if her mom weren’t even there. She’d been replaced. All her laughter. Her brightness. Her pride. Even her hot temper. It had all been replaced when Jenny was seven. First, with pain pills. Then sleeping pills. Then half a dozen different colors and shapes of tablets. Jenny had thought the lowest point had been when her mom, once a beloved first-grade teacher, had been fired from her school for drug use.

But that hadn’t been the lowest. Not by far.

And now Nate thought Jenny was like her. Like that. And she wanted to run.

But maybe she was finally growing up. Because she didn’t plan to stay gone. Maybe she was finally a stronger person.

Jenny got in her car and drove again, but this time she had a destination in mind. Her body knew the route by heart. It left her mind with nothing to do but take it in.

The little town where she’d grown up looked exactly the same. Amazing. Nothing had changed. She thought she’d forgotten it, but no. She’d forgotten nothing. There was the corner store where she’d bought jawbreakers and gumballs for ten cents every Saturday. And there was the tiny shoe store where they’d gotten new school shoes each August.

And there... God, there was the elementary school where she’d spent so many years, and where her mom had worked for a dozen more. The school that had held happy memories until her mom had been fired, and then it had been nothing but another site of humiliation.

Jenny turned her eyes to the road and drove past it.

Their house was only two streets away. When her mom had been sober, they’d walked to school together every morning, even on the coldest days.

Jenny felt a tickle on her cheek and found hot tears when she touched her skin.

She’d needed this. She’d needed to remember. To come back.

But she stopped short of her house. She could see it from the corner. This was close enough.

It looked the same. Still neat. Still perfect from the outside.

Her father had been the gardener in the family, and the lawn had been his escape. He must still need a good reason to escape, because from this side of the block, the grass looked perfect enough to be Astroturf.

Time had gone on without her. Had anything changed at all?

But Jenny knew the answer to that. She’d changed. She wasn’t running. Not anymore.

She picked up the phone and called Grace.

“Jenny, where the hell are you? We’ve been worried sick! Rayleen tried calling the sheriff, but you’re an adult, and they wouldn’t... Sweetie, where are you?”

Jenny smiled at the sound of Grace calling her sweetie. Grace, who’d likely never used that word once when she’d lived in L.A. “I just...needed to get away.”

“Thank God. But when you didn’t show up last night—”

“Oh, shit. The saloon! I didn’t even think about it. Am I fired?”

“Of course you’re not fired.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m awful. I’ve never done that before. I have to call Rayleen!”

“Oh, screw Rayleen. She’s fine. You can apologize when you get here. If... You are coming back, right?”

Jenny stared down the street and swallowed hard, overwhelmed with a thousand memories of this view as she’d walked home from school.

“Jenny?” Grace whispered. “Don’t be like me, okay? I didn’t know I belonged here, but you know you do. You know that. Don’t you?”

Jenny let her gaze fall to the sad little bag she’d packed. She’d spent five years in Jackson and this was all she’d grabbed on her way out the door. No pictures. No memories of the life she’d built. Just this small bag and the clothes on her back. Not because she was leaving everything behind, but because she knew she’d be back.

If there were bad things waiting—if Nate hated her, and Ellis kept hanging around, and things didn’t go smooth and easy—she could handle it. “I know where I belong,” she said. “I do. I’m coming back.”

“Thank God! When?”

“Now,” Jenny said, feeling the awful tension leave her shoulders. “I’m coming home right now.”

She hung up the phone and watched a flock of birds rise from the tree in front of the house she’d spent so many years in. Her family was still there. And her past. And that was okay. She could face it. Maybe she’d call her sister soon. Maybe she’d even come back and visit, knowing she had a better place to return to. But not today. Today was part of the future she’d built in Jackson, not this past she’d left behind.

Jenny put the car in gear and drove.





CHAPTER ELEVEN



NATE SAT BEHIND the wheel of his truck like a hunter watching for game. Eyes narrowed, he stared at the road, noting each vehicle that came over the distant rise.

She had to come this way. Rayleen had called to say they’d tracked her down in Idaho and she was coming back. She’d be at the saloon that night, working the bar like normal.

Jesus, when he’d walked in the night before, he hadn’t been terrified yet, only worried. But then Old Rayleen had looked up with a vicious scowl and barked, “It’s about time. That little shit said you weren’t coming.”

“What? Who?”

“The piece of crap I talked to at the sheriff’s department. He said Jenny was an adult and I couldn’t report her missing.”

That was when his heart had dropped into his gut with the weight of a locomotive. She hadn’t answered her phone. She hadn’t called anyone. Jenny was gone and she’d never even pass through Jackson again.

But no. She was coming back. His heart was racing for no reason. She was fine.

He glanced down at the box on the seat next to him, then back up to the road, and his eye caught on a flash of yellow coming on fast. Of course it was coming on fast. It was Jenny Stone.

For the first time in twenty-four hours, he felt his mouth stretch into a smile. “Jesus, you idiot,” he muttered, thinking he meant Jenny and her speeding, but realizing that he meant himself.

She flew past with a whoosh and Nate shook his head and pulled around to follow her. “Unbelievable.” He didn’t catch up at sixty, so he hit the siren and pushed the pedal to the floor. This woman was...she was...f*cking beautiful and maddening and alive and he couldn’t let her get away.

He couldn’t.

* * *

JENNY GLARED AT THE ROAD in front of her, watching for slippery patches and roaming elk and trying not to consider that she was taking a big step in her life. She was just driving home. She was just rushing to get into work. She needed to take a shower and dig out some clean clothes so she could get to the saloon on time, because she was determined to never be late again. It would take months to work off the embarrassment of having not shown up for a shift. Her stomach twisted with shame.

She’d been working since she was fifteen, and she’d never ditched a shift, or shown up drunk, and she’d definitely never behaved so badly that she’d been fired from her position of twenty years.