Last Chance Rebel (8 page)

When the women exited, she was left alone with Gage again, who was still standing resolutely at the counter.

“She liked me,” he said.

“She doesn't know you.”

“Neither do you,” he pointed out.

She gritted her teeth. “And, I'm never going to. Fine. I'll help you with this. I'll help with whatever. And then we'll call the money you gave me even. And you can carry the loan on the store and I'll continue to pay you monthly what I already pay in rent. I won't fight you. Or work myself to death.” The words exited her mouth in a rush, and she knew that she was probably going to regret it.

“Works for me,” he said, his dark brows lifting in clear surprise.

“What?” she asked, bristling. “What's that face?”

“I'm just surprised that you agreed to anything without fighting me.” He lifted a shoulder. “Although, I suppose that isn't entirely accurate since you've been fighting me every step of the way. I guess I'm just surprised you stopped.”

“I'm not fighting you for the sake of it.”

“Yes,” he said, “you are. But I get the feeling that's what you do with everybody.”

“How dare you? How dare you come in and comment on how I do anything? The way that I conduct my relationships is my business. And, largely formed—”

“Around that big chip on your shoulder.”

“Who put it there?” she shot back.

“Maybe I did. But, everyone else in your life didn't. So if you're going to try and pretend that you only act this way with me, and it's because I deserve it, go ahead. But I watched you with your friends back at Ace's.”

She snarled. “What did I say about acting the part of the creepy teenage vampire?” She moved from behind the counter, stomping across the narrow store to one of her seasonal displays, fiddling with a garland of autumn leaves and blowing out one of the candles she'd lit upon entry. She moved it, bringing out a candle that was in the cabinet that housed the display and lighting it. “I was doing just fine without you here. Everything in my life was going well. Yeah, I have to kind of grit my teeth to pay your dad, but it isn't as bad as dealing with you.”

“Why is it so bad to pay my dad?” She could tell the question was leading, and she found that obnoxious.

“Because you're all awful. Don't think I don't know that. Don't think it doesn't bother me that your dad gave my family a massive payoff to keep our mouths shut. Because protecting you was so important, but screw everyone else.”

He laughed, a hollow, humorless sound. “It was never about protecting me, Rebecca. It had everything to do with protecting himself. He's a master at that. He always has been.”

“Next you're going to tell me that you're not bad, you're just misunderstood. Because you have daddy issues.” She gritted her teeth, resolutely adjusting a small display of scarecrows.

Suddenly, she found herself being hauled backward, pushed until her back was pressed against the wall. And in front of her, six foot plus of hard, angry man. She wasn't afraid. Instead, she felt exhilarated. This was what she wanted. She wanted a fight. She wanted the chance—the excuse—to haul off and hit him.

Tension swirled inside her chest, begging for release. Physical release. She just wanted to throw herself at him. To fling herself against the hard wall that was Gage West and inflict as much damage as she possibly could. To make him bleed, like she had done. She wanted him to feel even a fraction of the uncertainty, the pain, that she had spent the past seventeen years dealing with.

“Is this what you do with everyone? You push them away with your bad attitude, and then you blame everyone else for the fact that you don't feel like you can get close to people? Is it my fault that you're like this? Or is that just what you tell yourself?”

She planted her hands on his chest, momentarily shocked into immobility by the feel of his hard muscles beneath her palms. But then she shoved him back. When he didn't budge, she was infuriated.

“You don't get to come in here and comment on my life.”

“What would happen if you stopped fighting for a second, Rebecca? What would happen if you used a little bit of common sense and accepted some help?”

She didn't like that question. She didn't like it at all. And it had nothing to do with the fact that she thought he was terrible, and that he had no right to know anything about her life—though, those things were true. No, it had everything to do with the fact that it scratched at the door that she kept locked tight, concealing all of the strange and terrible vulnerable things deep inside.

“I can accept help,” she lied. “I just don't want to accept it from you.”

“We went from an agreement to this pretty quickly.”

“Oh, you mean to you manhandling me again?”

As soon as she said the words, she became incredibly conscious of the fact that her hands were still planted on his chest, that he was still so close to her she could feel the heat radiating from his body. That she could feel his breath fanning over her cheek, and that it wasn't off-putting or disgusting in any way.

How long had it been since she'd been close to someone? Anyone? Gage. It had been Gage these last few days. Why was it that this man seemed to just crash through all the walls that she had put up around herself? Everyone else respected them. Leave it to him to knock them down. To get right up in her face, where no one else ever dared to get.

He didn't pity her. That was the weird thing. He should. Of all the people in Copper Ridge, Gage should pity her. It was his fault. All of it was. From her scars, which he was directly at fault for, to the abandonment of her and Jonathan's mother after all of the hush money from his father had gone through to their bank account, which he was indirectly responsible for.

But that look on his face wasn't pity. It was hard as granite, uncompromising and anything but sympathetic. She had gotten pretty good at keeping people from being invasive. Either through her prickly behavior or the way she relied on them not wanting to retraumatize her by pressing for anything.

Gage didn't seem to mind retraumatizing her at all.

Jackass.

But, right in that moment, the anger inside her turned like an hourglass, the sand suddenly running an entirely different direction. The flip side seemed to be no less intense, but certainly less sensible.

She couldn't stop staring at the hard lines of his face. The deep grooves on either side of his mouth, the sharp, hard angle his jaw created, emphasized when he was like this, all tense and angry with her. As if he had any right to those emotions. She tried to remind herself who he was, why she was justified and he wasn't.

Her throat was dry, though, and her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it was going to drill a hole straight through the front of her chest and tumble out onto the floor, right in front of him. So he could see just how he was affecting her.

She didn't even know how he was affecting her—how could he see it? She didn't know what this was. This gathering ball of tension at the center of her chest that wasn't comfortable, wasn't pleasant or easy to identify at all.

Of course, her feelings rarely were. Which was why she didn't particularly like having them. There was no choice now. Like he had torn layers off of her and exposed her without even trying.

“I haven't manhandled you,” he said, his voice rough.

“This?”

He had his hands braced on the wall on either side of her face, his body pressed so near hers that only her hands on his chest kept him from making intimate chest-to-toe contact with her. “Not manhandling,” he said, leaning a little bit closer.

Her entire world felt like it was pitched to the side then, everything she thought, everything she knew about herself, everything she had learned about self-protection over the years, had been burned straight through, and now he was burning through her too.

She found herself swaying forward slightly and she still didn't know why. Until, it hit her. Exactly what she had been about to do. Exactly what this mounting tension inside of her was. If it wasn't rage, and she knew that it wasn't, not right at this moment, then it could only be one other thing.

And oh, sweet Lord, there was no way he was thinking the same thing. If he didn't pity her before, he would if he'd realized exactly what she had been about to do.

So she shoved him again, and this time, he lost his footing, going back a couple of steps. “Close enough,” she said. “Anyway, I agreed to help you, I didn't agree to accept commentary on the way that I handle things, talk about things or engage in my actual relationships. We—” she gestured between them “—don't have a relationship.”

“I never said we did.”

“Sticking your nose in other people's business is just kind of your thing?”

“Actually, I don't normally get involved in anyone's business. Because I don't get involved with them at all.”

“So, I'm special?” She bit those words out, hard, hoping that they would hit him and sting.

“Yes. Whether or not you want to be, you are.” He didn't seem any happier saying it than she was to hear it. “You're one of the things that I need to fix. I don't give a damn about much, Rebecca—you have to believe that.”

“But you care about me?”

He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a firm, grim line. “I don't care about you. But I care about what happened. I care about dropping a little bit of the burden that I've been carrying around for over the past decade and a half. My motives aren't exactly pure, and it would do you well to remember that. I'm not asking you to trust me, not completely. But I am asking for you to stop snapping at me every time I come within a few feet of you.”

There was something about those words that deflated her. Which was silly. It shouldn't deflate her to hear him speak the truth. If he had said that he cared about her, she would have hit him anyway. She didn't want him to care about her. Still, hearing him say all this, unvarnished, completely honest—she knew it was honest—wasn't exactly heartwarming.

“Fine. What do you want me to do?”

“My house. Tomorrow night after you close.”

A vague sense of disquiet overtook her, and she shoved it down immediately. She was the one who had almost done something crazy. She was the one who was being slightly psychotic around him. She hated him. Absolutely hated him. Had without even knowing him for the better part of her life. The fact that she had thought, even for a moment, about closing the distance between their mouths...that just proved that she was under some kind of psychological duress brought about by his presence, no doubt.

There was no reason to feel disquieted. He wasn't going to do anything. He looked at her like some kind of score he had to settle. That was it. He didn't see her as a human, much less as a woman. This all had to do with some vague idea about soothing a conscience that she imagined was way too damaged to ever truly be soothed. But, that part wasn't her problem. Her problem was getting him out of her life, and getting final ownership of the store.

“Fine,” she said through her teeth.

“I'll see you tomorrow night then.”

He walked out, just as another customer walked in, and it didn't even give her a moment to breathe a sigh of relief over his absence. Didn't give her a moment to recalibrate, which was why—she told herself—she spent the rest of the day with her head churning. She had a steady stream of customers, and it kept her just distracted enough that she didn't brood, but wasn't quite able to ever calm down.

She felt restless, edgy, for the rest of the day, a strange kind of energy shooting through her veins that she couldn't quite put a name to.

By the time she got home, she just wanted to collapse. And she very guiltily ignored a couple of texts from the girls. Because she didn't want to go out, and she didn't want to talk to anybody. She didn't want to tell them about what had happened with Gage, but she had a terrible feeling that if she talked to any of them, she would end up spilling the beans.

She wanted to keep all of the dark, confusing feelings from earlier today locked up inside, but they were beating at the door, desperate to get out. She was confused, and she was restless. Those things were a very bad combination.

She was pretty accustomed to keeping her feelings and thoughts to herself when it suited her.

But she could tell this was not a well-behaved feeling. It was not going to sit in the corner until she told it it could be done. It was going to burst out of her at an inopportune moment unless she got a handle on it.

She wandered to the fridge, reaching inside and taking out a piece of pie that was left over from Alison's shop the other day. She hummed as she took a bite of the lemon meringue, wandering over to her couch and taking a seat with her feet folded underneath her.

She grabbed the remote that was next to her and turned the TV on, flicking it to a network that usually replayed old comedies. She didn't watch TV often enough to keep up with any shows, not because she didn't like it, but because her schedule was too haphazard.

But reruns were always a good bet.

It was an episode of a show that she liked, so she settled into the couch, taking another bite of pie. This was good. A little clarity. A little pie.

Except, the comedy took a slightly emotional turn as two of the main characters started fighting about their relationship. And then, when things hit a peak and the woman unlocked the door to the coffee place, letting the man back in so that they could kiss passionately, Rebecca's mind went completely blank of everything except what it would be like to kiss Gage like that.

What would've happened if she had leaned forward, closing that distance? If she had grabbed hold of his face and pressed her lips to his, pressed her breasts to his hard chest...

She set her pie plate down on the couch and jumped up, walking back behind the couch and trying to do something with the restless energy inside of her. She should not be thinking of him this way. She really shouldn't be thinking of anyone this way, and typically, she didn't. She had all that stuff under control. Her life moved in a series of predictable patterns and she liked it that way.