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“What do you think?” The pedicurist glanced up at Megan as she put the finishing touches on her toenails. Megan held up her feet, wiggled her toes, which were still held apart by a twisted paper towel while everything dried.
“Love the daisies.” Blue polish, white daisies, yellow centers. She thought Jason would like them, too—if he ever saw them.
The deflating thought made her shoulders slump as she paid her tab.
The previous evening, which had started out so well, had ended early because of Jason’s estranged brother. The instant Jason had seen the guy, he’d started withdrawing, slipping away even though, for the first time ever, he’d offered up some information. An abridged version of what was going on, but he’d done it voluntarily. That was a good sign—right?
And then, when they’d arrived at the ranch, Jason had kissed her and said that he’d see her in the morning. Again she explained it away. It was late. They were tired. Jason was dealing with crap, which he wanted to deal with alone, as he always dealt with everything. She could accept that, but what she’d learned from living in the moment was that she liked having Jason in that same moment with her. She couldn’t help herself. She took pains not to project into the future, but the fact of the matter was that she did love him. Yet she would not force him to be anything that he couldn’t be. Which left her in a situation...because she suspected Jason was still finding out what he could and could not be.
Frustrating to say the least.
Meg stopped by FlintWorks for lunch and, as she’d hoped, found Whitney there. It was early, with only a few patrons in the establishment, so she ate at the bar and talked to her cousin. They compared sister stories and it seemed that Whitney’s twin, Kristen, was the Meg of their family and Whitney was the Jo. That fact made them feel even more comfortable with one another.
“We should all get together the next time Kris gets back home,” Whitney said, leaning her elbows on the pristine bar. “We could meet somewhere on Flathead. Have a girls’ weekend.”
“Sounds great to me. I think Jo and Alex would be on board. We’ve always been curious about you guys.”
“That went both ways. I still don’t know exactly what divided the family. My parents never talked about it, and I kind of wonder if they even know.”
“The grandparents had to have known.”
Whitney swiped the rag over the bar. “Had to be a woman. It’s always a woman.”
“A woman, water or gold,” Meg said. “It’s usually one of them. The way I see it, we can’t change what happened before, but we can work on bringing the family back together again.”
Meg was smiling as she left the bar, but as soon as she walked out the door, the heavy feeling came over her again, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that when she rounded the corner to the parking lot, she was stunned to see Jason’s brother leaning against her car, his red hair hidden beneath a dark blue stocking cap pulled low on his forehead. There was something about the guy that instantly put her on edge. How in the hell could this malevolent-looking man be related to Jason?
It was broad daylight. There were people within shouting distance, so Meg tamped down her instinct to run and calmly approached her car.
“Hey, can I help you with something?”
“Yeah. You can give my brother a message.” His voice was gravelly. Nasty sounding.
“What’s that?”
“Tell him, ‘Nice try last night.’”
Meg looked at him blankly. “That’s it?”
“No,” he said, his voice dropping. He took a step forward and Meg drew herself up, set her jaw, held his gaze, then sent up a prayer of thanks when he stopped a couple yards away from her. “Tell him he still owes us.” He smiled malevolently. “If I can’t get what I want from him, then I’ll get it from someone else. Someone close to him.” The smile broadened. “You want to repeat that back to me?”
“You want to go screw yourself?” Meg’s heart was hitting her ribs, but the words came out of her mouth sounding like a pleasant question.
He gave a nasty laugh. “Not today. Pass that along, okay? Tell him I’ll be in touch.”
Then he turned and strode away, leaving Meg to stare after him, heart still slamming inside her chest.
The guy was scary.
The guy explained a lot.
She got into her car and turned the key. When she got back to the ranch, Jason was going to explain even more.
Jason was at the corrals when Meg got back from town. He glanced up as she approached, and instantly knew something was wrong. It took only a matter of seconds for her to fill him in.
“I ran into your brother.”
His chin snapped up. “Where?”
“He was waiting by my car when I left FlintWorks. He had a message for you.”
He muttered a curse, then climbed through the rails and took her by the shoulders. “He didn’t—”
“Do anything but talk to me.” One corner of her mouth tightened. “And threaten you. He said that if he didn’t get what he wanted from you, he’d get it from someone else.”
“Son of a—fuck.” His fingers tightened briefly, then he dropped his hands. “Meg...”
“I kind of get what you’re up against now.”
He gave a short laugh. “No. You’ve seen the tip of what I was up against for most of my life.” He yanked his phone out of his shirt pocket and as he brought it up to his ear, Megan saw that the screen, which had been fine when they’d left the bar, was now shattered.
He stepped a few feet away as he said, “Yes, hello. I have information on a person with outstanding warrants. He’s recently made threats to me and someone close to me...”
Meg paced in the other direction, giving Jason privacy when she very much wanted to listen.
After Jason hung up the phone a few minutes later, he stared out across the property in the general direction of Marietta, as if planning to jump into his truck and start driving. Meg came to stand in front of him, reached up and put her hands on either side of his face.
“Tell me what’s going on.” When he finally looked back at her, she said, “I think I deserve to know, because I’m pretty sure he was threatening you through me.”
“Oh, yeah. He was.”
Jason looked toward town again, then took hold of Megan and wrapped her in his arms, holding her tightly against him. “I’m sorry this happened. I thought...shit.”
“Stop cursing and tell me what’s going on.”
He pulled her away from him, swallowing as he stared down at her, his expression a mixture of pain, anger and regret. Then he took her hand and together they walked past the barn to his cabin. He opened the door and she stepped inside. His bed was unmade and last night’s clothes were kicked into a heap next to the bed.
“I went back to town last night.”
“When?”
“As soon as you guys went inside. I wanted to find my brother, settle things before he came out here.”
“I thought I heard a truck pull in during the night.”
“That was me.”
“Did you find him?”
“Yeah. And I thought I’d managed to get him arrested.”
Meg sat in one of the kitchen chairs, resting her arm on the oak table. “That explains his remark about ‘Nice try last night.’”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That, and he also said what I told you before: that if he couldn’t get what he wanted from you, then he’d get it from someone close to you.”
He muttered another curse, his expression going stone cold. “He saw us together last night. But why the hell is he still in town?”
“You aren’t going to go and see, are you?”
His mouth went flat before he said, “The thought had occurred to me.”
“No.” He frowned at her and she repeated, “No. He’s not worth it.”
“Trust me, I know he’s not worth it, but I won’t have him harassing people I care about.”
“Has he done this before? Tried to shake down your friends?”
He shook his head. “But I had a bad feeling it was coming the last time I said no to him.”
“Have you always said no?”
Jason’s expression shifted. “I gave him money the first times he asked, while I was in the service.”
“That might have been a mistake.”
“I owed it to him.” Meg gave him a sideways glance, knowing from his grim tone that there was more. “Quite a few of my family members supported themselves by dealing. When I was seventeen, I stole part of Adam’s take and left home. I used it to support myself until I turned eighteen and joined the military.”
“You stole drug money.”
“I did.” He gave a small snort. “Paid it back, too.”
“Dear heavens.” She reached out and put a hand over his, but for once, he didn’t turn his hand over so that they were palm to palm. “Did everyone in your family deal drugs?”
“Only my brother and two cousins. My dad...well, he worked construction during the days, drank and caroused at night. Occasionally beat the crap out of one of us. He broke my ribs once.”
Meg couldn’t help the gasp. Her hand tightened on his. “Why aren’t you more messed up?”
“You’re going to love this one—when I was fourteen, I got into trouble and got sent to a state-run boot camp for troubled teens. That’s where I learned to work horses. It changed me. When I was sent home at sixteen, I no longer belonged. I knew it. My family knew it. I went through six months of hell trying to keep myself out of trouble, which is no easy task when trouble surrounds you. Anyway, long story short, one of my cousins stole a car. They tried to pin it on me, so I took Adam’s money and left.”
“And paid him back later.”
“Every penny.” He gave his head a weary shake. “Seemed the easiest way to avoid him coming after me once I got out of the service. I figured if I paid him back, stayed away from the home turf, everything would be okay.”
“Didn’t work, did it?”
“My family never did have a sense of fair play. Adam hates that I got away and made a life, just like I told him I was going to do. He likes to harass people. Hurt them.” He met her gaze then. “And I won’t have him hurting you.”
“Some things you can’t control.”
“This I can.”
“How?”
“I’ll move on, if I have to.”
Meg leaned back in her chair. “So you keep moving and your family keeps finding you. What kind of a life is that?”
“The one I inherited.” He reached out to touch her cheek, his expression grim. “I can deal with these guys. I understand them and I’ve dealt with them before. You haven’t. And you shouldn’t have to.”
He was mentally packing it in, getting ready to leave. She wouldn’t have it.
“Zach needs to know what’s going on.”
“That was my next move.”
Jason wanted Meg there when he talked to Zach. She knew the basics now, and he wanted her in the loop. There were things she needed to understand, and right now she didn’t seem to grasp what he was dealing with—or why she shouldn’t be dealing with it.
They walked together as far as the barn, then Jason told her he’d meet her in the house. As she headed across the wide driveway, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and dialed the number he’d sworn he’d never dial. He’d come so damned close to deleting it more than once, but now he was glad he’d left it to remind him of everything he didn’t want to be.
His mother answered almost immediately, which meant she either hadn’t checked the screen or that she actually wanted to hear from him, which seemed unlikely, since they hadn’t spoken in eight years. And so begins the adventure in the Twilight Zone...
“Have you seen Adam?” she demanded in her pack-a-day voice.
“Yeah,” he said flatly.
“Where is that lying asshole?”
“He was in Marietta this morning.”
“Mari—what?”
“A place in Montana.”
“Did you give him money?” There was a clattering noise, which he assumed was his mom’s phone slipping out of her hand, followed by a low curse. “Did you?” He heard the deep intake of breath after she spoke, followed by a long exhalation, and surmised that she’d been lighting a cigarette when the phone took the header.
“No.”
“Good. Now he can’t run as far. Call the sheriff and tell him where he is. I want that bastard arrested.”
Adam? The chip off the old block? “Why?”
“Because he reneged on a loan from Neely, who just beat the living crap out of your father. Broke his leg. Bad. Busted an artery. They thought he was going to bleed out.” His mother actually had a note of emotion in her voice, but it sounded more like rage than fear. And, of course, his father had hung on.
Jason stared at his boots, processing the situation, the fact that nothing had changed in his volatile family. Adam had told a half-truth about the loan, but he’d forgotten to mention the part about being on the run. Probably the last thing he’d expected would be for Jason, who’d been out of communication with his parents for almost a decade, to call home.
“I don’t think you can have him arrested for Neely breaking Mike’s leg.” He could not call the man ‘Dad.’
“Yeah? Well, I can have him arrested for his part in burning down that warehouse two years ago.”
“He committed arson?” For pay, no doubt. The heavy feeling kept getting heavier, the shit his family was capable of weighing him down with.
His mother gave one small snort. “And I have proof.”
