Last Chance Rebel (Copper Ridge #6)

by Maisey Yates

  But if he could fix this for her, if he had any part in doing something good for her, then he supposed it was worth it.

  She was a better woman, a better person than he would ever be. And if he had never damaged her, he wondered what she might’ve become. Where she would be now.

  She doesn’t blame you, so maybe it’s time you stopped blaming yourself.

  He didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all.

  Maybe that was the other problem with accepting her forgiveness. He would have to give some to himself. And God knew where that might lead.

  “Okay, I’ll go with you. Do you want me to drive?”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m too nervous.”

  “I can hardly imagine you being nervous.”

  “The man who took my virginity while I trembled can’t imagine me being nervous?”

  Her words were like a direct kick from a horse, straight to the gut. “We both know you were only trembling because you wanted me so much.”

  That made her smile, and it resonated inside of him. Another bit of warmth, an unexpected bit of happiness. Another cut on his soul. “Okay, it was a little bit of that,” she said.

  He put coffee in a thermos and they got into his truck, starting the drive down the coastal highway to the small town of Coos Bay, Oregon.

  Rebecca filled the silence with chatter, which was funny, because he had never taken her for much of a chatterer, but apparently when she was nervous she did a bit of it.

  She told him about her first horse, and her second, about learning to ride and doing it even when her injuries hurt because it was the only thing that had brought her some comfort in the months and years after their mother had left. In the large amount of time she had learned to spend alone while her brother worked and she rattled around a small, empty house. It was why she had preferred the outdoors.

  That made him wonder about something. He couldn’t remember the last time he had wondered about another person, but he wondered about her endlessly.

  “You love the outdoors, so why do you run a shop on Main Street? It seems to me like it’s a pretty claustrophobic choice for somebody who spends all of her free time rambling around in the mountains.”

  She paused for a moment, a stretch of silence and road passing before she spoke again. “Because it’s like a home. It’s every great holiday, warmth and spice. I had a friend for a little while when I was growing up, and her mom used to put spices on the stove, not for any practical reason, just to make the house smell good. She decorated for every holiday. I mean, meticulously. She kept it perfect. And it was so warm. To me, that was what home should be like. I had a house. Which, trust me I knew was lucky. Because if Jonathan wasn’t willing to work as hard as he did I wouldn’t have had that. But to have a home like that... I aspired to it. So, I guess I work in that home. My store is that slice of happiness I never had. And I want to give people a little piece of it. People who maybe don’t have it. Or people who want to.” She took a deep breath. “Other than the outdoors, it’s pretty much the perfect place as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Why doesn’t your house look like that then?”

  He had a feeling it wasn’t something he should ask. Had a feeling that he shouldn’t take things deeper like this, not when it was so difficult for him to give anything else in return.

  “I don’t know. It just never seemed like I could.”

  Silence lingered between them for a moment before Gage spoke. “Sometimes I wonder which one of us is really punishing themselves, Rebecca.”

  It was the last thing either of them said before he pulled the car onto a narrow, two-lane road that turned into dirt, leading to a small trailer park just out of town. “According to the directions you gave me, it should be here,” he said.

  He watched as Rebecca clasped her hands in her lap, twisting at them nervously.

  “Maybe nobody’s home,” he said.

  She nodded slowly. “Maybe. Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, putting her fingers on the passenger side handle. “Will you come with me?”

  An unexpected slug of emotion hit him in the chest. She had gone with him when he’d gone to the hospital to see his sister, and he had been happier about that than he would like to admit. All things considered, he supposed he needed to be with her now.

  “Of course.”

  They got out of the truck and the two of them walked up to the small, faded yellow house with metal siding that was peeling up and a porch that seemed like it might collapse beneath the weight of the two of them.

  She took a deep breath, raising her fist and knocking on the tin door, the sound hollow and unsatisfying.

  Then the door opened, and Rebecca took a step back, leaning against his chest as though he were the only thing keeping her on her feet.

  * * *

  FOR THE SECOND time in the space of a few weeks Rebecca was staring down a person she had built up to be much larger in her mind that she was in reality. Much like Gage, her mother had become something of a legend in her imagination. Not a real person anymore, not an accurate memory.

  The woman standing in front of her was, undoubtedly, her mother.

  But she was faded, shrunken. As if the years had taken pieces off of her, reducing her to something much less than she’d been. Roundness becoming hollows. The color had leached from her hair, all of the rich black faded into a tarnished silver. Her brown skin had the look of rawhide about it, her lips like wrinkled paper. A smile would tear them, Rebecca was almost certain.

  But the other woman didn’t smile anyway. Perhaps it was for the best.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice as thin and fragile as the rest of her.

  “I think so. I’m looking for Jessica Bear.”

  The older woman looked at her, her brown eyes cold, flatter than Rebecca remembered. “If you’re going to serve me papers, I’m not going to take them.”

  “I’m not here to serve you papers,” Rebecca said, her heart twisting gently. “I just wanted to see you.” Wind whipped across the porch, blowing through brittle coastal grass making a sound a lot like broken glass. “I’m Rebecca.”

  What little color was in her mother’s face drained away, but the hard, stoic expression remained. “If you’re here for money, I don’t have any of that anymore either. I would think that was pretty obvious.”

  From the perspective of the child, Nathan West had given Jessica enough money to make a new start. As an adult, Rebecca could better understand how all of that could drain away in seventeen years. Though, the situation was a bit more dire than she had expected it to be.

  “I’m not here for money either. I really did just want to see you.”

  “Why?”

  If Rebecca knew the answer to that, she would give it. But, she wasn’t sure she possessed anything quite like deep insight at the moment.

  “Just to see you,” she said.

  “Well,” Jessica said, “you can come in if you like.”

  She moved away from the door, granting them admittance into a threadbare room that smelled like old smoke and firewood.

  Her mother lit a cigarette and took a seat on the green couch in the corner. Rebecca opted to stay standing. Gage stood behind her, a wall of strength that she was grateful for since she felt at the moment she didn’t have much of her own.

  She looked around at the fake wood paneling that seemed to close in around them, and the heavy curtains covering each window as a rebellion against any kind of light.

  Rebecca didn’t know what to say. There was too much to say, and really, not enough to say. She didn’t want to yell at her mother. Not now. Not because she felt sorry for her, not because life had clearly turned out nothing like she had imagined it would when she had run away from her children, from her bleak life, with the money that she had been meant to use to care for them. No, she didn’t feel sorry for her because of that. That, in Rebecca’s estimation was nothing short of karma.

  She just wasn’t angry.
And she couldn’t hate her.

  Standing there, looking at the woman who seemed so reduced, so dry, Rebecca couldn’t feel much regret that she had gone. And she couldn’t feel at fault either.

  Jessica Bear was immovable. As immovable now as ever. Stubborn. Tragic. Rebecca couldn’t have made her leave any more than she could have made her stay.

  “You doing all right?” Rebecca found herself asking, a question that her own mother hadn’t bothered to pose.

  But, she wasn’t really Rebecca’s mother. Not in any way that mattered. She had given birth to her, but Jonathan was the one who had stayed. He was the one who cared. Then there was Lane, and there was Alison and Cassie, Finn—who had been gallant, even while he was being a little bit of a cad.

  There was Gage.

  There were people in her life who mattered, who deserved to have more of her than this woman. This woman who had occupied so much of Rebecca’s soul for so long.

  Whose abandonment had dictated Rebecca’s every action and emotion. For too long. For far too long. She didn’t deserve it. And Rebecca was tired of giving it to her.

  There was no angry outburst, no grand reckoning that would ever restore what was gone. There was only moving forward.

  Realizing that the monsters were only monsters in her head.

  “I don’t need charity,” her mother responded, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I run a store on Main Street, in Copper Ridge,” Rebecca found herself saying. “Jonathan owns a construction company. He does very well for himself.”

  The words seemed to bounce off of her mother, like rain against hard ground. Too dry to absorb anything. To let anything in.

  “That so?” she asked, finally, no indication of whether or not she cared was reflected in that flat voice.

  “Yes. He did a great job of taking care of me.”

  “This your boyfriend?” Her mother asked, gesturing to Gage.

  Rebecca didn’t quite know how to answer that. He wasn’t her boyfriend, not really. And even if he were, that word wouldn’t seem like quite enough.

  “He’s a friend,” she decided to say.

  Because she was discovering what all her friendships meant to her. How much they had saved her. The degree to which they had supported her over all these years, even when she hadn’t given equally in return.

  Calling him a friend didn’t minimize him at all.

  Her mother nodded, taking a drag on her cigarette. “Yeah, I had a lot of those friends.”

  Rebecca gritted her teeth. “He drove me here to see you. To support me. I don’t know if you have any friends quite like that.”

  Her mother laughed. “Did you come here to make up?”

  “I can’t do that on my own,” Rebecca said.

  Her mother said nothing, crossing her leg over the other, jiggling her foot, rocking back and forth as she put the cigarette into her mouth again. “Guess not,” she said, talking around it.

  “I wanted to say that I forgive you. And I think I can do that without an emotional reunion. It’s not really about you. It’s just about what I want to hold on to now, and what I don’t.”

  Jessica Bear shrugged her bony shoulders. “You can’t forgive things like that,” she said, drawing more tightly in on herself. “I never forgave your father for leaving us. There’s no reason for you to forgive me.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Rebecca said. “But I’m doing it all the same.”

  “I don’t want you to.” Those words were full of spite, confusion.

  As if Jessica Bear needed her daughter to be angry at her.

  “I didn’t ask,” Rebecca said. “I need to do it for me. This has nothing to do with you. But I needed to come here. I needed to let it go. So I’m doing that. My store is called the Trading Post. If you ever want to come see me, you can.”

  Then she turned, walking out of the trailer, the first breath of cold, fresh air like breaking the surface of the water after too long under the surface.

  She could feel Gage following behind her. She got into the truck, buckling herself, leaning her head against the cold window, willing herself not to cry. She wasn’t going to shed any more tears. Wasn’t going to let any more anger build inside of her.

  Gage got into the truck then, starting the engine. “Do you want me to wait a second?”

  “Just in case,” Rebecca said. They waited, but her mother didn’t come out of the trailer. Finally, Rebecca took a deep breath. “We can go.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Rebecca laughed. “I don’t know what I expected. You can’t really expect a woman who abandoned her children to receive one of them with open arms after seventeen years, can you?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, my own family didn’t exactly open their arms to me, but it wasn’t like that.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one that did the leaving. Not them. I know she doesn’t feel things quite the same way other people do. Or maybe she does, and she just doesn’t know what to do with it. I’ll tell you one thing—I think she’s angrier at herself than I’ve ever been at her.”

  He nodded slowly. “Accepting forgiveness when you know you don’t deserve it isn’t easy.”

  “If you’re talking about yourself again...don’t. You do deserve it. We both deserve to move forward.”

  “I do accept it. If only because I just saw what rejecting it looks like. And how little it helps.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” he said, his tone lighter, like he was trying to put a Band-Aid on the situation. For some reason that bothered her, and she couldn’t pinpoint why. “You want to go see a movie? They have a movie theater here.”

  She laughed, reluctantly. “I’m not exactly in a theatergoing mood.”

  “Fish and chips?”

  “That I would take.”

  This hadn’t gone quite the same as forgiving Gage had. She didn’t feel free or light, not immediately. But she felt like something was changing. Like something important had just taken place. Even if it hadn’t been a magic fix.

  She looked to the side, at the man she was sharing the truck with. The man who had driven her all the way down here, who had stood there and witnessed all of that. It hadn’t occurred to her to be embarrassed to expose that moment to him.

  He was the keeper of all her secrets, after all. She just wished that he would give her more of his. Pointless maybe, but something that was starting to make her ache.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for coming with me.”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I figured it was time I started giving more than I took.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SOMETHING ABOUT THE words that Gage had spoken in the truck dug at her all through dinner, and all through the ride back to Copper Ridge.

  She wondered if she was just feeling unsettled because of what had happened with her mother. There really was no guidebook for how to deal with that. A strange, unsettling reunion that had put so many fragmented pieces back into place, but had solidified the fact that there would probably never be a magical reconciliation.

  But it was more than that.

  I figured it was time I started giving more than I took.

  She turned those words over until they pulled into Gage’s driveway. It was unspoken that they would have sex again. The only question had been which house he would choose to go to. She imagined the fact he had chosen his made it less ambiguous. Made it clear that she was supposed to come in and stay a while.

  She wondered if he would want her to stay the night. In which case, she should probably get some things from her house. But, she didn’t want to broach that subject. She didn’t want to seem needy.

  Her thoughts kept on spinning like that as she walked up the steps and into the house. As soon as they closed the front door behind them, he turned, drawing her into his arms, up against his chest.

  “Let me fix it,” he said, kissing her on the neck.

  And suddenly, everything clicked into
place. Exactly why those words he had spoken in the truck hit her wrong. Exactly what was wrong with all of this.

  “That’s all you’ve done. From the moment you came back to town. Fix things. Whether I wanted you to or not.”

  He released his hold on her slowly, taking a step back. “I came with you today because you asked me. Are you really going to start pretending like you didn’t want any of that?”

  “Of course I did. I asked for it. But, then you go into this self-loathing space where you start talking about breaking things. About how you’ve broken me. I don’t know why you do it.”

  “It’s called owning up to my mistakes.”

  “No,” she said, slow realization dawning over her. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  “You think you know me? You think you know what I’m doing and why better than I do?”

  “I can’t answer that. You might know what you’re doing. You might even know why you’re doing it. But you’re not being honest with me. I would bet you aren’t being honest with yourself either.”

  “Is that what we’re going to do now? We’re going to have a therapy session? Because I was hoping that we could just fuck.”

  The words hit her like a stark slap. And as much as she wished that she could be angry about them, as much as she expected to be, she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. She realized then that this was what had to happen. He had walked back into her life playing the part of benevolent benefactor.

  The contrite and tragic figure that had ruined her life, come to set things to rights. He had cast her in the role of angel, put up on a pedestal, beautiful and tragic. And he had cast himself in the role of villain seeking absolution. But there was no nuance to that. No reality. And it helped no one.

  He was comfortable this way. Giving, and giving while taking nothing in return. Calling himself terrible at every turn while never once proving it to her.

  “Is that what you need?” she asked.

  She cared. She found that she cared desperately. She was on a mission. A mission to exorcise every demon inside of her. And he was keeping his locked up tight inside of him. It hadn’t gotten better since she’d told him that she’d forgiven him. It hadn’t changed anything for him. It had changed everything for her.