The Perfect Outsider

by Loreth Anne White

  “What do you mean, ‘a place in your life’?” Her voice came out hoarse. She felt shaky. Her shoulder throbbed. Part of her suddenly wanted to flee.

  “June—” His hand tightened around hers—large, calloused, capable, protective. And threatening. Her pulse quickened and her skin felt hot.

  “My name is Jesse—Jesse Grainger. I know weapons, wildlife, bears, because I work as a game warden in northwestern Wyoming. I came to Cold Plains because of a promise I made to my wife—”

  “So you are married,” she said flatly, not wanting to hear more.

  A muscle pulsed at his temple. Time seemed thick, slow. And June could see pain in his eyes. As exhilarated as he was in rediscovering who he really was, June could see the memories were not easy for him.

  “I’m a widower, June.”

  She stared at him, heart beginning to hammer.

  “My wife, Annie, died from injuries sustained in a fire.”

  “How?” she whispered.

  He glanced away for a moment, and swallowed. June’s heart squeezed and she slid her hand along the bed, tentatively touching her fingertips to his thigh, just making the barest of physical connections, yet afraid, still, of what he was about to say, afraid to dare to believe. And hating herself for the whisperings of exhilaration she was beginning to feel in the face of his loss.

  “I’d been doing some renos to our ranch house. I’d put in the wiring myself and there was a problem with the electrics. The wiring caught fire and the blaze spread very quickly through the house. Our son was sleeping in a room at the back of the house.” Jesse hesitated. “He…died in the fire.”

  Her heart began to pound, loudly, in her ears, images of her own son drumming through her mind.

  “Annie tried to save him, but couldn’t reach the room in time. Firefighters managed to pull her out of the house alive, but she succumbed to her injuries and died in the hospital two days later.”

  “What was your son’s name?”

  “Cameron. I was in the mountains when it happened. I was contacted via radio, and managed to make it back in time to be at Annie’s bedside when she passed.”

  Silence trembled thickly in the air.

  “I’m so sorry, Jesse.” June placed her hand on his thigh.

  He sat still for a while, his pulse throbbing at his neck.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Four months ago.” He inhaled deeply. “The worst thing, June, is the guilt I feel for not having been there. That’s the guilt that has been dogging me even though I couldn’t recall why. I feel bad because of it. If I hadn’t been out in those mountains, I might’ve been able to save them. And I’m weighed down by the fact it was my wiring that started the fire. I killed them, June.”

  “Jesse, you can’t blame yourself. You were doing your job—”

  “I can blame myself. June, listen to me—” He put his head back and stared at the ceiling, as if gravity might hold back some of the emotion suddenly gleaming in his eyes.

  “I had unresolved issues with Annie,” he said quietly. “I hadn’t found a way to love Cameron yet. I wasn’t even supposed to be in those mountains for so many days, weeks, months at a time. But I’d taken the warden job expressly to be away from Annie and the baby, from the ranch, to figure it all out. To find a way to deal with Annie’s infidelity and the fact that Cameron was probably not my child.”

  “Oh, Jesse.” June pushed herself higher onto her pillows.

  He leveled his gaze at her.

  “I needed the time to decide whether I wanted to go the DNA–paternity test route, or just to accept and love Cameron as my own. It wasn’t his fault, and he was a beautiful child. But this idea of never knowing haunted me. And I couldn’t help thinking of what Annie had done to our marriage every time I looked at ‘our’ baby boy—he was fair with green eyes. Annie had blue eyes, like I do, and almost blue-black hair.” He swallowed. “In fact, I realize now that Darcy reminded me of Annie. I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me looking at her, why her affection for Rafe seemed to cut at me so badly. Why I envied their obvious love.”

  “Tell me about Annie,” June said softly. “How did you meet her?”

  He rubbed the dark stubble on his jaw. “Some years back, before I ever considered the game-warden position, I used to guide hunting trips on horseback. I’d take time out from my cattle ranch in the Wind River foothills—leave the place in the hands of a manager—and guide a few high-end trips each season. Annie came with her father from New York one year, and she fell in love with the mountains, with me. I think it was more the whole Wyoming-cowboy image that got her, the romance of the open sky, the big ranch, which has been in my family for four generations… Whatever it was, her attention was intoxicating… We married a year later and settled on the ranch. She kept up her freelance editing business, flying back to New York for business once or twice each year, in addition to other travel.” He paused.

  “It worked well for a time, June—things were looking good. But then Annie met up with an old flame on a social-media site, someone she’d known from school who’d always had a thing for her. This guy flew down to see her, and they met at a town over, in a hotel bar. I learned from another rancher that she’d been seen there with a guy, and that they’d stayed overnight at the hotel together. I confronted her about it—it led to a terrible argument. Apparently they had hot monkey sex… She said it was a mistake, said she was sorry, wanted me to forgive her. She claimed it was a last-fling kind of thing, something she’d needed to get out of her system.”

  Jesse cleared his throat. “I took it hard, June. It wasn’t so much a blow to my ego as the fact I’m a one-woman kinda guy. Commitment is huge to me. We battled along for some months, sidestepping each other. She grew unhappy. I was unhappy.” He stared at June’s hand on his jeans and the brackets around his mouth seemed to deepen, as did the lines around his eyes. June’s heart broke for him.

  “I fell out of love,” he said quietly. “It was that simple, and that complicated. All the affection, the passion, just fizzled to nothing. It was a heavy time, and then came the news of her pregnancy. I figured the timing was such that it could’ve been from her night with her old flame. Annie said it wasn’t, but only a paternity test would prove either way. That’s when the job of game warden came up. It’s what I had trained for when I left school, back in the days when I was young and wild, and when I used to do things like steer-wrestling.” He smiled sadly, and June suddenly loved him, so wholly that it scared the crap out of her. She cleared her throat.

  “So you took the warden’s job?”

  He nodded. “Mostly because it took me away, out into the wilderness, alone, sometimes for weeks at a time. I wanted to think—just me, the horses, the mountains, the big skies. I wanted to find a way to forgive her, June. I wanted to love the baby as our own. But you know what really cut? I’d wanted kids, and every time I’d broached the issue, Annie had stalled, saying she wasn’t ready. And there she was, giving birth, caring for what was possibly another man’s son.” He swore softly. “It messed with my head.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t yours, Jesse?”

  “Deep down, yeah, I was convinced Cameron wasn’t mine. I think I was just afraid to do a test because it would just prove it with finality, drive it home, and I’d have to deal with it. We’d both have to make decisions. If I didn’t do the test, I could still believe. There was still a chance. And that’s what I was trying to work through when news of the fire reached me.”

  There was pain in his face, in the way he held his shoulders, in the corded muscles in his neck. And June understood—it was lack of closure. Because he hadn’t done the test, there would forever remain the chance his own son had perished in the fire. Closure was a tough nut to crack, and the need for it sometimes difficult to understand.

  “You didn’t want to do a test…after?” she said.

  He snorted softly. “Why? To make my grief worse? To mourn less for little Cameron because he w
asn’t my blood? Knowing doesn’t diminish the fact a baby died.”

  She placed her hand on his forearm where he’d rolled up his shirt. His skin was warm, his dark hair coarse, masculine.

  “Why’d you come to Cold Plains, Jesse? What was the promise you said you made to Annie?”

  He scrubbed his brow, then winced slightly as he connected with the stitches along his temple.

  “I sat with Annie at her hospital bed, until the end. She was in a lot of pain, badly burned. She pleaded again for my forgiveness, and I told her she had it, that I understood.”

  “Do you…understand?”

  “I’m old-school, June. I try to get it, to see myself in her shoes if the situation had been reversed—I can’t.”

  “So you lied. You can’t feel bad about that, Jesse. You told her what she needed to hear so she could pass peacefully.”

  He lurched to his feet, began to pace the room. He reminded June of a caged mountain lion. At first he had been caged by his amnesia. Now that he remembered, the bars were his guilt. She understood guilt. She knew how it could pervade and darken one’s life—even if logic told you it was irrational. You might try to push the guilt down into the basement of your subconscious, but it was always there, lurking, coloring everything else, no matter what you did in an effort to assuage it…no matter how many people you rescued from cults. And June realized with a start she was thinking of her own guilt, of Matt and Aiden. And her own relentless drive to set right the wrongs of her past.

  “On her deathbed,” Jesse said, “Annie told me her younger brother, Michael, had been sucked in by a cult in Cold Plains. She said the cult was run by a man named Samuel Grayson and that his followers were called Devotees. I didn’t know until that day that it existed, or that Michael was even in Wyoming. Annie hadn’t mentioned it to me, or asked for my help up until then, because we were dealing with the problems between us, and she hadn’t wanted to impose her own family issues on me. But as she was dying, she begged me to try and get Michael out. Annie explained it would be difficult, and she was the one who told me about the D tattoos.”

  June frowned. “What’s Michael’s surname?”

  “Millwood.”

  Her pulse kicked. “Mickey Millwood? Early twenties, sweet, gentle guy, dark hair, big blue eyes?”

  “You know him?”

  “It’s a small town, Jesse, and I’ve made it my business to try and know the Devotees. Michael works at Samuel’s water warehouse where Hannah does the bookkeeping three times a week.”

  He stared at her, neck muscles, jaw, tight.

  “So Hannah has access to him?”

  “Yes, she does. She’s been looking out for Michael—she calls him Mickey. Hannah feels he’s…vulnerable.”

  “He’s dyslexic. And a little slow, yeah, I know. Annie told me he’d come to Wyoming because she was here, but before he could make it up to Wind River he came through Cold Plains, and he got sucked in by Samuel. Then he stopped all communication. She was worried sick about him, especially because of his disabilities.”

  Hatred for Samuel washed afresh through June and her blood began to pound hard, her old energy, her fire, returning, burning into her veins. “Samuel takes advantage of whatever he can,” she said bitterly. “A kid like Michael is especially defenseless—it makes me sick to the gut what Samuel’s doing.”

  “I came to get him out, June. I vowed to Annie I would, if it’s the last thing I did. That’s why I had such a sense of mission and a feeling that my presence here was somehow connected to the name Samuel Grayson. That’s why the words Devotee and cult felt somehow familiar to me. My plan was to hike in with nothing but my backpack, posing as a down-and-out ranch hand looking for work. I figured I’d let drop that I had a bit of a gambling problem, which I hoped might provide an opening for Samuel, make him sympathetic to me. I thought I’d attend his seminars, make it look like I was a potential Devotee. I had the D tattoo done, like Annie had described, in case I needed it as a way to get in—I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived.”

  He slumped back down onto the bed beside June and rubbed his hands over his face.

  “It took me three months after I buried Annie and Cameron to get my act together to come here. I had to hire someone to take care of the ranch and I had to sort out my finances. I packed up everything and resigned my warden’s position—I didn’t know how long it might take to get Michael out, or how long I’d have to be here. It didn’t matter. I had nothing else.”

  He paused.

  “And I didn’t expect to find you.”

  “Hey, it was me who found you down that ravine, remember?”

  A sad smile toyed with the corners of his beautiful mouth. “Good thing I picked the side of the mountain with a search-and-rescue expert and her K9, huh?”

  She laughed. It felt good, and it hurt, too—both emotionally and physically. Her hand went to the bandage on her arm.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Really.”

  I’m a widower, June.

  Those few words had tipped her world onto a different axis. But caution whispered through her. His loss was fresh. And she felt as though she was balanced precariously at the edge of a precipice—both exhilarating and terrifying.

  “The last thing I ever wanted was to hurt you, June,” he said, his deep indigo gaze holding her. “And I never expected to fall so hard for you.”

  She wanted to tell him she’d fallen for him, too. Much too hard and much too fast, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “It’s why I tried to step away from what was happening between us when I recalled marrying Annie. But at the same time I didn’t feel married—I needed to figure out what it all meant, and I couldn’t do it here. I couldn’t hurt you. And I couldn’t be here without wanting to be with you.”

  He paused, took her hands. “Can you understand that?”

  She nodded. “I can,” she whispered. “It was my fault, Jesse—”

  He touched his fingers to her lips and shook his head. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to feel for you, June. But now I’m glad I did. And when I’ve got Michael out, I want you to come with me, back to the Wind River, where you can rest awhile.” His eyes were serious, sharp, his rugged features, resolute.

  “Eager would love it there,” he said very quietly.

  June swallowed. He was telling her that he was free to love her, possibly even make a life with her in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains, on his ranch, if she’d come home with him.

  Suddenly it all felt too fast. June began to panic at the thought of leaving what she knew—her mission. She was compelled to keep working for EXIT, saving victims from cults like Samuel’s.

  “How about it, June? Come back with me.”

  He was asking her to jump off the edge of that mental precipice upon which she so precariously balanced, and she honestly didn’t know if she could risk loving so deeply and wholly again, and losing again. A second time would kill her—she knew this in her heart. A raw and irrational kind of terror swelled inside June’s chest. Her mouth turned dry and the walls of the cave room suddenly seemed to press in on her.

  Worry crawled into Jesse’s eyes.

  “It’s beautiful country up there, June. Rolling hills. And in the distance, the jagged range of snowcapped peaks. It’s free, wild, open. I have land, horses.” He paused, concern deepening in his features. “Do you ride?”

  She fiddled with her wedding band, forcing herself not to glance toward the photo of Matt, Aiden and her on the dresser—to not think of the two ghosts that walked quietly and constantly at her side. But their presence was strong. They’d come to define who she was. They were the parameters of her life and she didn’t know how to separate herself from them, or how to live without the specter of them.

  Abruptly, June swung her legs over the side of the bed. She waited for a nauseating wave of dizziness and pain to pass, then got to her feet, a little wobbly.

  “What’re you doing
, June?” Jesse said, standing up beside her, steadying her with a hand on her elbow. She moved out of his reach, walking over to the dresser where her firearm lay in its holster beside the framed photo—she stared at the image, the past swirling into the present and blurring the future.

  “We need to go and get your brother-in-law out,” she said, reaching for the holster and strapping her weapon to her hips. “It’s time to pull Hannah out, too. It’s getting too dangerous for her—I’m worried that as soon as Samuel learns his henchmen aren’t coming back, and if Hawk arrests the mayor, this whole place is going to blow. Hannah is going to get hurt, or worse.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” His tone was brusque. “I promised Rafe I’d make you rest.”

  She turned to face him, could see the pain in his features, and her chest hurt. “Jesse, you can’t make me do anything. You’re not in charge here.”

  “You’re running, June. You’re running from yourself and you know it.”

  “I am not! This is triage. This is urgent. This is what I do!”

  “You’re afraid to let it go, aren’t you? You want to hold on to your past like a shield.”

  “Jesus, Jesse—Hannah’s and Michael’s lives could be in danger.”

  “So is yours. You’re going to kill yourself like this, June.”

  “Oh, please.” She grabbed a rain jacket from her closet and realized her hands were shaking. He was right, and she didn’t want to—couldn’t—admit it. Her arm hurt like hell as she pulled on her jacket.

  “June, I’m not asking you to give up your work for EXIT. Do you understand that?”

  She hesitated, then zipped up her jacket.

  “All I want is for you to rest, heal, and for us to spend some time together, get to know each other better. I thought you’d love it out there. It’s who you are—that wilderness. It’s who I am. We could make it work.”