Читать книгу Ramona and the Renegade - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

“‘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.

She probably hadn’t had a clue, he thought now.

Just as she didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. About his feelings for her. And he intended for it to stay that way.

Resisting the urge to speed up just a little, Joe slowly drove the Jeep up to the rickety cabin that had once been home to an entire family.

Silently breathing a sigh of relief, he pulled up the hand brake as he turned off the engine.

Mona, he noticed, hadn’t undone her seat belt. “Something wrong?” he asked her.

“Is it safe?” she asked, eyeing the cabin uncertainly. There’d been ghost stories about the cabin when she’d been growing up. She didn’t believe those for a minute, but the cabin did look as if it was about to blow away in the next big gust of wind.

Joe knew that the cabin wasn’t as structurally sound as some of the newer buildings in town, but he really didn’t expect it to fall down around them—unless one of the termites sneezed, he thought, suppressing a smile.

“It’s standing and it’s dry inside,” he pointed out. “Or reasonably so,” he added, figuring that time had been hard on the roof and there had to be places where it would leak. “Right now, that’s all that matters.” Unbuckling his seat belt, he glanced at her, waiting. “Now are you coming, or are you planning on spending the night in the Jeep?”

The latter idea thrilled her even less than spending the night in the rickety cabin. With a sigh, Mona pressed the button and undid her seat belt.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered.

Opening the passenger door, Mona got out. As she stoically battled her way to the cabin’s front door, she suddenly shrieked as the cold rain whipped about her face and body, drenching her for a second time in a matter of moments and stealing her breath away, as well.

The next moment, a strong arm tightened around her waist and pulled her the rest of the way to the cabin.

Joe pushed the door open for her. The cabin hadn’t had a working lock on it for most of the twenty years it had been empty.

“I can walk,” Mona protested as he all but propelled her into the cabin.

“You’re welcome,” he replied after putting his shoulder to the door and pushing it closed again, despite the fact that the rain seemed to have other ideas.

Steadying herself, Mona scanned the area to get her bearings. The interior of the front room looked particularly dreary, like an old prom dress that had been kept in the closet years too long. The roof, she noted, was leaking in several different spots.

“So much for staying dry,” Mona muttered under her breath as she moved aside after a large splotch of rain had hit her on her forehead.

Rubbing his hands together to warm them, Joe gave her an amused look. “You just have to make sure you don’t stand under any of the holes in the roof.”

“Brilliant as always.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Did you figure that out all by yourself?”

Joe’s expression remained stoic and gave nothing away. He deflected the sarcasm with a mild observation as he pointed out, “I’m not the one getting rained on.”

Mona struggled with her temper. He wasn’t the reason she was in this mood. She’d planned on surprising Rick with her early arrival. He thought she was coming in a couple of weeks, just in time for his wedding. She had sped things up on her end, taking her license exam earlier rather than later, so that she could come and lend a hand in the preparations. Her almost-sister-in-law was six months pregnant and most likely not up to the rigors involved in preparing for a wedding.

Mona knew that a lot of the town was probably willing to pitch in and help, especially Miss Joan who ran the diner and knew everyone’s business. But Rick was her only brother, her only family, and she wanted very much to be part of all this. Wanted, she supposed, to be assured that even after the wedding, she would still be a part of his life.

It was all well and good for her to go gallivanting out of town for long spates of time as long as she knew that Rick would be there when she got back. But the thought that he might not be, that he could go off and have a life that didn’t directly include her rattled Mona to her very core.

Changing the subject in her attempt to get back on a more even keel, Mona frowned. She zigzagged across the small room and looked around at her surroundings in the limited light. There was hardly any furniture and what did exist was falling apart.

“Can you imagine living here?” she asked Joe, marveling at the poor quality of life the last inhabitants of the cabin must have had.

“I’ve seen worse,” Joe replied matter-of-factly.

Mona bit her tongue. She could have kicked herself. For a moment, she’d forgotten that he’d spent his early years living on the reservation where poverty and deprivation had been a vivid part of everyday life, not just for Joe, but for everyone there. More than likely, she realized, he’d grown up in a place like this.

She hadn’t meant to insult him.

Mona pressed her lips together as she turned to look at him. An apology hovered on her tongue.

“Joe, I didn’t mean—”

He didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to glimpse the pity he was certain would come into her eyes, accompanying whatever words would ease her conscience. He wasn’t proud of his background, but he wasn’t ashamed if it, either. It was what it was. And what it was now was behind him.

Joe waved his hand, dismissing what she was about to say. “Forget it.”

Turning his back to her, he focused his attention on the fireplace. Specifically, on making it useful. Squatting down, he angled his head to try to look up the chimney.

Curious, Mona came up behind him. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to see if the chimney’s blocked. Last thing you want, if I get a fire going, is to have smoke filling this room.” He leaned in a little farther. “Damn,” he uttered sharply, pulling back.

Mona moved quickly to get out of his way. “Is it blocked?” she guessed.

“No,” he muttered almost grudgingly, “the chimney’s clear.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said gamely. “Why are you cursing?”

Disgusted, he rose to his feet for a moment. “Because I wasn’t expecting to be hit with big fat raindrops.” The last one had been a direct hit into his eye.

Mona laughed. “Especially dirty ones,” she observed. He looked at her quizzically. With a flourish, Mona pulled a handkerchief out of the back pocket of her jeans. “Hold still,” she ordered.

“Why?” he asked suspiciously. Mona was nothing if not unpredictable. Added to that she had a wicked sense of humor.

“Because I can’t hit a moving target,” she deadpanned, then said seriously, “Because I want to wipe the dirt off your face.” Doing so in gentle strokes, she shook her head. “God, but you’ve gotten to be really distrusting since I was last home.”

“No, I haven’t,” he protested.

Saying that, he took the handkerchief from her and wiped his own face. He told himself it was in the interest of efficiency and that reacting to the way she stroked his face with the handkerchief had nothing to do with it. Some lies, he argued, were necessary, even if they were transparent.

“I never trusted you in the first place.” He raised his chin a little, presenting his face for Mona’s scrutiny. “Did I get it all?”

“Why ask me?” she asked innocently. “After all, I could be lying.”

“True,” he agreed, “but seeing as how you’re the only one around this cabin besides me who talks, I have no choice. You’ll have to do.”

“You look fine,” she told him, playfully running her index finger down his cheek. “You got it all, Deputy Lone Wolf.”

He held out the handkerchief to her. “Thanks.” When she took it from him, Joe turned his attention back to the fireplace and getting a fire going. There was kindling beside the stone fireplace. It didn’t appear to be that old. Someone had obviously been here and used the fireplace since the last owner had vacated the premises. He shifted several pieces, positioning them in the hearth.

Mona went over to the lone window that faced the front of the house and looked out. The rain seemed to be coming down even harder, if that was possible. She shivered slightly, not so much from the cold as from the feeling of isolation.

“Think this’ll last all night?” she asked Joe, still staring out the window.

He hefted another log, putting it on top of the others. “That’s what they say.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. Turning away from the window, she addressed her words to his back. “You mean, we have to stay here until morning?”

Joe fished a book of matches out of his front pocket. He didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t for years now, but he still liked to have a book of matches in his possession. You never knew when they might come in handy—like now. He had no patience with the old ways when it came to making fire, even though, when push came to shove, he was good at it.

“Unless you want to risk being caught in a flash flood the way we almost were back there.”

She sighed, moving about restlessly. The cabin was sinking into darkness and although she’d grown up in Forever, this setup was disquieting.

“Not exactly the way I pictured spending my first night back home,” she told him.

“You mean, stranded and hungry?” he guessed.

“For openers,” she agreed. Mona ran her hand along her extremely flat abdomen. It had been rumbling for a while now.

He crossed to her. It might have been her imagination, but Joe seemed somehow taller to her in this cabin.

“When did you eat last?” he wanted to know.

“This morning. I skipped lunch to get an early start driving down to Forever.” It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She hadn’t bothered to listen to the weather forecast. She wished she had now. “I figured I’d be in time to grab a late lunch at Miss Joan’s,” she added. Miss Joan, the owner of the diner, had been a fixture around Forever for as long as she could remember.

Arms wrapped around her to ward off the chill, Mona glanced around the cabin’s main room again. “Doesn’t look as if there’s been food around here for a good long while.”

“Except for maybe the four-footed kind,” Joe interjected as the sound of something small and swift was heard rustling toward the rear of the room. A rat?

“I’ll pass, thanks,” she muttered. She wasn’t that hungry yet, Mona thought. She preferred meals that didn’t deliver themselves.

“You sure?” Joe asked, a hint of a grin on his lips. “I hear that squirrels and possums taste just like—”

“Chicken, yes, I’ve heard the same myth,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ll let you know if I get that hungry. I’m not there yet.” And hopefully never would be, she added silently.

He looked mildly amused. “Suit yourself.”

“What, you’re willing to eat a squirrel?” she challenged. He couldn’t be serious, she thought. Joe knew better than that. “They’re full of diseases. You won’t have any idea what you’re swallowing,” she insisted.

“Yeah, I will,” he said.

Was he just trying to bait her? And then she realized that Joe was walking toward the door. He couldn’t be going out—or could he? “Where are you going?” she wanted to know.

“To my Jeep to get the dinner I was bringing home from Miss Joan’s.”

“You had food all this time and you let me go on about the rodents?” she demanded.

“Never known anyone to be able to stop you once you got wound up,” he pointed out. “I figured I’d just wait it out, like the storm. Be right back,” he told her. He opened the door only as much as he had to in order to slip out.

He heard her muttering a few choice words aimed in his direction before the wind carried them away.

Making his way to the Jeep, Joe smiled to himself. Yup, same old Mona. There was a comfort in that.