The Reasons to Stay (Harlequin Superromance)

by Laura Drake

  Apparently that line of conversation was over. Good.

  After dinner, Adam and Daryl tossed a football around with the boys. Well, with Tanner, anyway. After ten minutes, Nacho wandered off to hunker down next to Penny, playing in the flower-bed dirt with a toy shovel.

  Carley and Priss watched them through the window over the kitchen sink where they washed dishes.

  “You’d never met your half brother before you came here?” Carley handed Priss a stainless-steel bowl to dry.

  “No. My mother and I were...estranged.”

  “I can’t imagine not having family. My parents had ten siblings between them, and I’ve got four sisters and a brother. Honestly, I’ve lost count how many shirttail relatives I’ve got scattered across the country. We’re like rabbits.”

  Priss placed the bowl on the counter then reached for the glass baking dish Carley held out. “I can’t imagine having that much family. Gives me the willies just thinking about it.” Remembering her vow to work on being more politically correct, she smiled to soften her words.

  “Yeah, Adam told me that you were kind of a loner. Independent to a fault.”

  Apparently I’m not the only direct person in this town. Priss focused on the dish, but not because it was fragile. “It’s the ‘fault’ part that he stressed, I’m sure.”

  “On the contrary. He admires the hell out of you. Says you’re the—” she looked at the ceiling, searching for the words “—bravest, scrappiest, most steadfast person he’s ever met.” Her hands stilled in the dishwater. “And though you’re as far from his type as humanly possible, I think you’re good for him. I’ve seen changes in Adam lately. It’s like he’s finally coming to life. And I think you’re the cause.”

  Priss flushed under Carley’s studied regard.

  “Please don’t hurt him.”

  Priss opened her mouth to explain—to tell Carley she’d been up front from the beginning. Then she closed it. Well-intentioned or not, she didn’t owe this woman an explanation.

  But for the first time in years, Priss wanted to.

  Part of the reason she’d always rested lightly on whatever branch she settled on was to avoid explanations. She didn’t need others’ judgments and opinions. Especially someone she’d just met. Priss locked her jaw to keep the words in and took the next mixing bowl from Carley’s wet hands.

  It was good that she and Nacho were leaving. What was it about this town that made her wish to be different from the way she was? The lessons she’d learned at a young age had kept her safe for all these years.

  And they would keep her and Nacho safe for years to come, wherever they landed.

  A half hour later, they all stood in the living room saying their goodbyes. Adam’s arm felt right around her waist, as did his hand resting on her hip. It was almost as if she and Nacho lived here and were saying goodbye to their dinner guests. Then she and Adam would finish cleaning up, see that Nacho had a bath, and they’d walk arm in arm to the master bedroom....

  “I’ll see you at practice on Wednesday night, Adam. We’ll be ready for those Pismo Punks on Saturday.” Daryl lifted his car keys from the little antique table next to the door. “Now that’s odd.”

  Carley, who was herding her kids out the door, turned. “What?”

  “My Peace Dollar. It’s gone.”

  “Your what?” Priss asked.

  He stood staring at his key chain. “My dad was a coin collector. He gave me a 1921 Peace Dollar when I was a kid. I drilled a hole in it, and have carried it on my key chain for years. It’s not worth anything except the price of the silver, but it means a lot to me.” He looked up. “I know it was there when I came in, because Penny noticed it, driving over here.”

  Priss scrutinized Nacho’s expression.

  He glared back. “I didn’t do it.”

  His face was closed and sullen but she glimpsed truth behind the mask. He hadn’t done it. This time.

  Adam said, “Nacho, if you were looking at it, and—”

  “He didn’t do it, Adam.” She couldn’t say what had changed. Maybe she was developing that mother’s instinct—but she knew she was right. She put her hand on Nacho’s shoulder.

  No one moved.

  Adam’s expression was as careful as his words. “Priss, remember outside the store that day? You said then that Nacho hadn’t—”

  “I know.” A timeworn weariness seeped into the hollow of her bones, weighing her down. “And you were right. Then. But I know Nacho better now, and I’m telling you, he didn’t do it.”

  “You wanna frisk me?” Nacho spit out the words and turned out the pockets of his jeans. He had to grab for the waistband when the pants slipped off his hips.

  Carley whispered to Tanner and they started looking, scanning the carpet, checking under the couch.

  “Of course not.” Adam flushed. “But I didn’t take it and Priss didn’t. It belonged to the Beauchamps, so...”

  Priss didn’t have the answer as to what had happened to the coin but she knew that Nacho wasn’t it. She sighed. “So, of course you blame the delinquent, right?” She held up a hand to stop Adam’s sputtering protest. “I’m not accusing you. Just stating a fact.”

  Carley shrugged and said, “It’s not in the living room. Maybe we can try the kitchen?”

  Priss slipped her hand around her brother’s shoulders. “Let’s go, Nacho. Nice meeting you all. Sorry the evening had to end this way.”

  The crowd parted for them when they headed for the door.

  Nacho didn’t shrug out from under her arm until they reached Mona, parked in the driveway with Adam’s bike in the backseat. When they got in, he turned to look her in the eye. “I didn’t take that guy’s dollar.”

  “I know you didn’t.” She sent a prayer skyward then turned the key. Thankfully Mona rumbled to life. She put a hand behind the seat to look over her shoulder and negotiate backing down the two concrete strips that constituted the driveway. “But are you surprised Adam thought you had?” At the bottom, she checked for traffic, pulled out and headed for home.

  Head down, Nacho mumbled, “No.”

  “Remember when we talked about being careful with your reputation? This is what I was trying to tell you. This is where you pay.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  They rode in silence, each to their own thoughts.

  Adam wouldn’t have looked at us if it weren’t for the problems at the very beginning.

  Realization hit and she braked at a stop sign hard enough for her back to leave the seat.

  Nacho looked over with a frown.

  She remembered Adam’s shuttered expression. His cool eyes.

  He looked at us.

  “Here I am, lecturing you...but I’m not clean, either. You’ve seen me lie, too.”

  The first time she’d met Adam, she’d lied. She knew he’d assume she’d be living alone in his apartment over the store. A lie of omission was still a lie. Then, that day when Nacho shoplifted that magazine, she’d batted her eyelashes and bullshitted her way out of trouble.

  Just like she always did.

  She turned left onto tree-lined Hollister.

  Sure, she’d needed those skills when she was young. But she still employed them when threatened—and she was an adult now. A role model to her brother.

  She thought back to Colorado, and farther back than that, seeing a chain of small deceptions, misrepresentations, manipulations.

  Dishonesty.

  Shame burned as if vinegar ran through her veins. Those skills were good for a kid who had no power, trying to stay safe in a harzardous world. Using them now was like using a kid’s toy wrench to try to fix her car.

  Adam should have been looking at them both.

  It was time to put away the old skills and deve
lop some grown-up ones. But how did one go about doing that when you hadn’t a clue as to what those skills were?

  She reached over, cupped the back of Nacho’s neck. “We both suck, dude.” She gave him a shake. “But we’re going to try harder, right?”

  He pulled away but with a small smile. “Yeah, okay.”

  Another truth smacked her like an unseen low-lying branch.

  You’re still doing it.

  Deep inside, something shifted. Light fell on the thing she’d been hiding from herself.

  A lie of omission....

  She had feelings for Adam. Caring, needy feelings that she could hardly admit to herself.

  Oh, they were still leaving come the end of June. The day after school released Nacho, they’d be in the wind. But she might as well admit it. This stop would leave a hole in her.

  She rolled slowly through town, watching the strolling tourists taking advantage of the stores’ later hours.

  Well, admitting it to herself was going to have to be good enough for now. New resolution or no, this was one truth she was keeping to herself.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PRISS’S HEELS CLICKED on the industrial-tile hallway, the smell of antiseptic, bland food and impending mortality making her want to turn and run. But it was her day to visit Barney so she pulled open the glass door to the cardiac-care unit.

  The unit was set up like a big wheel, a nursing station in the middle, bristling with electronics measuring patients’ most intimate functions. Nothing in the CCU was private. Death and family drama played out separated from others only by a thin curtain that didn’t even reach the floor.

  Is this what it was like for Mom? An efficient, generic medical warehouse? A worm of guilt burrowed into her chest. Or was it regret? Nothing you can do about anything now. Priss shivered. No one deserved to die like this.

  Pasting on a sunny smile, she made herself reach for the curtain around Barney’s bed.

  He lay sleeping. The unkind afternoon light from the window fell across him, highlighting his grizzled hair, sallow, bloated skin, his awful disease. Cardiomyopathy. He’d told her the term, but she’d had to look it up on the library computer. Apparently years of drinking and neglect had hardened his heart to the point of inefficiency. She could see his edema-distended stomach from where she stood.

  She walked quietly to sit in the chair beside the bed. As if sensing her, his eyes opened.

  “Hey, Barn. How’re you feeling?” She took his paper-dry hand.

  “Like a lab rat.” He cleared his throat. “You shoulda just let me go, that day. This is no way to die.”

  “Now, that’s no way to talk. You’re gonna walk out of here.” She squeezed his hand. “How could you miss the Tigers win the pennant?”

  His jaundiced eyes were sad. “It’s okay, Priss. I’m ready to go. I’ve screwed up this life so bad. Maybe I’ll get the chance to come back and try it again.”

  What worried her more than his condition was his attitude. “It’s never too late to start again, Barney.”

  “Nah, I’m too old and tired.” A smile began, faltered, then faded. “The only thing I would like is to see what’s left of my family, to say goodbye.” He closed his eyes. “To say I’m sorry. But I even screwed that up. They won’t come see me.”

  Sorrow wadded her throat and pooled behind her eyes. She stayed, watching him sleep until the sun’s slanting rays reminded her she had to get home to Nacho.

  On her way out, she stepped into the empty CCU waiting room to call Barney’s son one more time but pulled up short just inside the door. Gaby sat in a chair along the wall, reading a Hollywood Star magazine. “Gaby?”

  She looked up. Her lips pursed like she’d eaten something sour. “Are you done in there? They only let one in at a time, you know.”

  Priss hadn’t realized the old lady had been visiting Barney. They hadn’t even thought to ask if she wanted in on the rotation. “Why didn’t you let me know? I would have let you—”

  “Oh, don’t you try to snow me.” She tossed the magazine. It skittered off the table and hit the floor with a plop. “You can act with the others, like you’re some good person who really cares.” She drilled Priss with a witch’s glare. “But I know what you really are.”

  “And what am I, really, Gaby?” Old lady or not, Priss had taken about all the contempt she could handle. “Are you going to finally tell me what put that bug up your ass about me?”

  The old lady stood and pointed a bony finger. “Don’t you swear at me. Your mother would be so disappointed.”

  The truth slammed into her. “You knew my mother.” She’d assumed Gaby had been her mother’s replacement.

  “I worked beside her for ten years. We were friends. And you know what I never saw, in all those ten years?”

  Priss opened her mouth.

  “Her daughter.” She straightened as much as the widow’s hump would allow. “Even when Cora lay in this very hospital, struggling for breath until she couldn’t do it anymore, her daughter never came.”

  “I didn’t know.” Priss’s voice caught on the razor blades in her throat, coming out shredded.

  “And whose fault is that?”

  An oily black wall of guilt crashed over her. “Mine,” she whispered, taking a step back.

  “Cora Hart wasn’t perfect but she did the best she could raising you. And as soon as you were able, you ran off. You went about your happy life and threw her on the trash heap.”

  “Did she say that?” The words came out all skinny, as if not wanting to know the answer had squeezed them flat.

  “Pah,” Gaby spit out. “She didn’t see you clear. She was proud that you went to ‘make something better of yourself.’”

  Priss took a grateful breath.

  “She tried to find you, you know.”

  The air left Priss’s lungs like a too-full balloon. She took another step back.

  “Yes, she did.” Gaby nodded, seeming gratified by something on Priss’s face. “She saved every free penny she could to hire a private detective. She spent hours at the library, trying to find some trace of you on the internet.” Gaby shuffled to the door on worn, misshapen slippers.

  “But you were having a great time, so I guess that’s okay.”

  Priss fell into the chair that was, luckily, at the back of her knees.

  * * *

  WHEN HIS PHONE blatted “Blood-Soaked,” Adam snatched it from the counter and answered it. “Dang it, Sin. Will you stop changing my ring—”

  “Love target at ten o’clock,” she whispered, and hung up.

  He scanned the empty soda fountain, glimpsing only the ends of Priss’s brown spiky hair over the Scholl’s display. His heart double-clutched from first gear to third.

  Get ready to eat crow. You earned it.

  Before he could chicken out, he stepped out of the drug room, locked the door, put the “Back in Ten Minutes” sign on the counter and strode to the front of the store.

  She sat hunched, elbows on the table, chin in one hand, the spoon in the other dripping melted ice cream as she stared out the window.

  “You’re going to ruin your dinner.”

  When she looked up, his heart ignored the clutch, ramming straight to top gear. Her green eyes, usually so full of life, were soulless. Haunted.

  “What is it?” He dropped into the chair beside her. “Is Nacho okay?”

  “He’s fine. At least he was last I saw him. Bear has to come to town later so he’s bringing him home.” She took her elbows off the table and looked down, as if surprised to see the melting hot-fudge sundae. “Want to share? I was just drowning my sorrows in ice cream.”

  “Does it work?” He reached for a spoon from a place setting on the next table. “It looks better than the crow I was going to
order.”

  “What’s that mean?” She dipped her spoon into the puff of whipped cream that perched like a drunken clown’s hat on the vanilla puddle.

  He pushed the words out. “It means that I owe you and Nacho an apology. A big one.”

  “You found out Nacho didn’t take that dollar.”

  “Yeah. Daryl called me this morning. Penny had it. She was going to speak up but when I got upset she was afraid she’d be in trouble, so she didn’t.” There, he’d said it but he still wasn’t brave enough to hold her gaze. “I’m sorry, Priss. I should have—”

  She squared her shoulders and looked down at the ice cream. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. I didn’t believe you. I falsely accused Nacho. He has enough problems without that.” Adam shoveled a heaping spoonful of hot fudge onto his spoon, hoping ice-cream therapy really did work. “I need to find a way to make it up to both of you.”

  Her smile was a sad one but he was glad to see it just the same.

  “This really smart guy I know told me that it doesn’t work that way. Relationships don’t always have to be an even exchange.”

  “And did he convince you?”

  “I’m working on it.” She took a spoonful.

  “So what’s wrong, Priss?”

  She stared out the window long enough that he started to worry it could be about him. Did she want to break up with him? Wait—were they even together? Maybe—

  “You know, I thought I had it all together before I hit Widow’s Grove.” She sighed. “Today I found out I’ve been flying blind for ten years.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re not the only one who misjudges people. Suffice it to say I’m learning that people deserve second chances. And third chances. And if they’re family, maybe even more than that.” She shook her head. “But I can’t do anything about that now. It’s the problem I can do something about that has me stumped.”

  He’d rather hear about the family part, but he knew her. That subject was clearly closed. “What’s the problem?” He took another bite of ice cream.

  “Well, I have this customer at work. A friend. He’s in intensive care and he’s giving up.” She laid her spoon on the table.