Harvest Moon (Virgin River #15)(10)

“Drive carefully.”

With a strong arm around her waist, he stood her up and walked her out of the bar, but outside on the porch, her legs became noodles and he lifted her into his arms to take her down the steps.

“Wow, I don’t think anyone’s ever carried me,” she slurred. “Except maybe a paramedic—maybe he did.” She patted his chest. “You’re fun. I’m glad we met. What’s your name again?”

“Lief,” he said. “Lief Holbrook.”

“Very nice,” she said, laying her head on his chest.

He stood her up long enough to open the door to his truck. “I wish you’d try to help me get you into this truck, Kelly. It’s high. If you pull, I’ll push.”

“Shertainly,” she said, grabbing the inside.

Lief positioned her right foot on the running board, pushed her butt upward and landed her in the seat. She made a loud ooommmph when she was inside. “Good,” he said. “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting you out.”

Her head lolled against the seat all the way to Jillian’s, and she blubbered in a drunken, semiconscious state—she loved Luca. They took her away in an ambulance, yet not one person came to check on her! She was too embarrassed by how foolish she’d been to call her sister and confess everything that had happened to her.

Oh, man, he thought. A woman with almost as much baggage as me.

Courtney thought that sometimes Lief just didn’t get it.

She had all her beauty gear, for lack of a better word, spread out in her bathroom—mousse for the hair, eye-liner, lipstick. She was giving her short fingernails a once-over with the black polish.

Lief. She used to call him Dad. In fact, when he had married her mother and she was only eight, she had asked him if that would be all right—could she call him Dad? He’d said he would love that.

Of course that meant she had two of them, but since they were never in the same room at the same time, it wasn’t a great challenge. And she saw even less of her real dad after Lief and her mom married. She thought her real dad, Stu Lord, was relieved, and she knew the stepwitch was. Stu had been the first to remarry after her parents divorced; she’d been two. She had her visits with him and her stepmom, Sherry, whom she never offered to call Mom. Her dad and stepmom had a couple of kids together, boys. Aaron was born when Courtney was four, Conner when she was seven. Her visits with them became fewer and fewer.

Courtney didn’t mind that, her diminishing relationship with Stu. Stu and Sherry fought frequently, something that didn’t happen with her mom and Lief. And the little boys were wild brats who screamed, threw things, pulled her hair and messed with her stuff. She was happy with her mom and Lief. Her mom and dad.

Then, right at the end of the school year of her sixth grade, her mom died. Just died! Something they didn’t know she had exploded in her head when she was at work, and she went down, dead, never to come back. It hurt so bad, Courtney wanted to die with her.

Then there was a blur of shifting movements that she could barely remember, except that it always involved her suitcase, which seemed to stay packed. She went to live with Stu, where she didn’t even have her own bedroom. She stayed in the guest room unless Sherry’s mother visited and then she was shuttled to the toy room or family-room sofa. She visited Lief on at least a couple of weekends a month. Then, after six months of that, she went back to living with Lief and visiting Stu. Then after she cut and dyed her hair several colors, painted her fingernails black and wore black lipstick, Stu told Lief he could have her full-time, that she didn’t have to visit anymore. He actually said it way worse than that, and she’d been relieved. She’d heard her stepmother call her “that weird little monster.”

But Lief got furious that her father not only didn’t want her full-time but didn’t even want visits, so she got it—no one wanted her. Oh, Lief said he did, but he didn’t. If he did, he would have been happy with her father for giving her back, but he was not happy. There was a huge fight; her two dads were yelling and got real close to hitting and she wished they’d just beat each other to death.

She didn’t hear from her father again after that blowout. That had been months ago. The whole back-and-forth thing ending with Lief had started in seventh grade. And that was when she started calling him Lief.

She blew on her nails and checked them. They were dry. She applied the lipstick and gloss.

She had stopped growing then. She used to be a chubby little girl, and now she was a skinny short girl with a couple of bumps on her chest that were supposed to pass as boobs. Her Goth, biker-chick look meant no one would expect her to be all giggly.

She started looking up suicide clubs on the internet until Lief had caught her and taken her to a counselor who told her she was angry. Duh. She had to sit with that lame counselor every week, and on top of that, they did some stupid grief counseling with all grown-ups. She almost got back to liking Lief after he said he thought the counselor was lame, too, and that a grief group for adults was no place for her and refused to take her. She liked him for that.

They might still be in L.A. where she was born and had lived right up to ninth grade, if she hadn’t gotten in some trouble, and she might not have gotten in trouble if her friends hadn’t all disappeared on her. First it was because they couldn’t stand her feeling sorry for herself, then she wasn’t like them anymore with her black clothes and weird hair. So she found herself a few new friends who did things like get into their parents’ medicine chests, score a little pot sometimes, lift money from their moms’ purses and dads’ wallets—for the pot, of course—and, about the only thing she found any fun at all, snuck out after the folks were asleep. They didn’t really do anything; they hung out where they wouldn’t get hassled, smoked some cigarettes sometimes. Bitched about the rules. Courtney wasn’t into the pills and pot; she just experimented a little. She felt weird and bad enough; she didn’t like not knowing how she was going to feel. She pretended, mostly. She had to. She couldn’t stand the thought of being all alone again. If the good kids dumped her and the bad kids dumped her, who was left?