by Kim Law
“And I will not talk about that day on camera.” Her voice rose. She forced herself to face Patrick. “We discussed that beforehand. It isn’t open for negotiation.”
“I’m not asking for specifics,” he countered. “More about the aftermath. We know that sometimes the people who are left behind . . .”
Blood roared in her ears.
“Sometimes there’s ‘survivor’s guilt,’” Patrick continued.
Cal stepped around the corner of his house then, and as she fired a glare in his direction, he stopped as if sensing her anger. With boxes balanced on both shoulders, he rotated to face her, and she didn’t even think. She couldn’t have if she’d wanted to.
She simply screamed.
Chapter Seven
“Protect what matters to you. Always.”
—Papaw Reynolds
“Whoa!” Cal dropped the boxes of pipe fittings at the sight of Jill running toward him, fists raised, and took an automatic step back. Rage contorted her face.
“You son of a—”
Without thought, he stooped as she closed in, and rammed his shoulder into her stomach. Jill’s upper body pitched forward with an ompf, allowing him to pick her up fireman-style, and he immediately turned for his truck. She thrashed against him as he ate up the space, screaming curse words with each bounce of his steps and pounding her fists into his back.
He ignored all of it. There were at least four cameras on them, and though he didn’t have a clue what had happened to set her off, he knew enough to get her out of there.
He tossed her across the front seat of his truck and had the vehicle in motion before she clued in that she could have escaped out the opposite door. As he pulled away, he looked in his rearview mirror. The cameras were still positioned on the truck, and it seemed as if everyone who’d previously been inside the houses had poured out. Heather and Trenton stood off by themselves, worry clear in their body language, as their glances alternated between him and the crowd behind the rope. There was no way anyone had missed any of that.
“Stop this truck and let me out,” Jill yelled. “Right this minute!”
He slammed his fist on the “Door Lock” button and returned her fervor. “Not on your life.”
“I’m warning you.”
She reached for her door handle, and he pressed down on the gas pedal, shooting them away from the last of the watching eyes and tossing her against the back of the seat. “And I’m saving your ass,” he growled out. “So sit there and shut up.”
Surprisingly, she shut up.
And thankfully, she didn’t open her door and go careening out.
He turned onto the main highway and sped down the road, his focus on getting them as far away as he could, as quickly as possible, and it was several minutes before he realized that Jill wasn’t the only one in the truck who was breathing hard. They were both worked up and angry, and he didn’t even have the pleasure of understanding why.
But he—like her—wanted to yell about it.
“That was quite impressive back there,” he snarled out. “Way to shine, Jill.”
He took a turn too sharp, flinging her against him.
“At least I didn’t kidnap someone.” She scrambled to the other side of the seat and strapped herself in, then seared him with a holier-than-thou look. “And don’t even think I’m going to have sex with you!”
He damn near missed the next curve. “What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted. “Of course we’re not having sex. Have you lost your mind?”
His tires squealed as he slammed on the brakes—he’d forgotten there was a one-lane bridge on this road—then the truck bumped, still going too fast, over the rickety bridge.
“Good Lord. Don’t kill us.” She gripped the loop hanging from the ceiling of the truck and once again turned a glare in his direction. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing!” This woman could drive him insane. “I’m getting you out of there, that’s what. What were you doing? Why did you run screaming at me like that?”
“Because you—”
She bit off her words, and Cal glanced at her as he made another turn, this time at a more reasonable speed. She’d lost some of the steam, but pain was carved deep over her face.
What had happened?
“I can’t believe what you did.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. She stared out through the front window, no longer looking at him, and he wracked his brain trying to figure out what he could possibly have done. He hadn’t even spoken to her in days.
“Jill.” He forced his breathing to slow. One of them had to be rational. “You’re going to need to give me more to go on here. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“How could you?” she whispered. She still wasn’t looking at him, and Cal decided to let up on the gas. They were in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t another car in sight.
“Tell me,” he said. “Because I can’t help if I don’t know.”
She let out a sad laugh. “You’ve already helped enough.”
She glanced at him then, her eyes seeming too deep in their sockets, her gaze masked with both hurt and loss, and he thought about the afternoon when she’d been only fifteen. After they’d had sex, she’d cried in his arms for twenty minutes. Her eyes had looked exactly the same that day.
“Jill . . .”
“You told them about me,” she said softly. “About my mother.”
He reared back. No words could have surprised him more. “What?”
She’d looked away again, her head now seeming to hang from her shoulders, and Cal stopped the truck in the middle of the road. He shifted on his seat so that he faced her, and reached for her hands. They were icy.
“Jill.” She still didn’t look at him. “Jilly. Honey. I told them nothing about that day.” He squeezed her fingers. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“But you did.” She peeked at him. “They asked me about it. They know.”
How could they possibly know?
He tilted his head, trying to figure it out. He didn’t want to suggest the thought that crossed his mind, but . . . “Heather or Trenton?” he asked, his voice as unsteady as hers. “Could they have mentioned—”
“No.”
“I don’t mean now. In the past. A friend, maybe. Not the producers.”
She just stared at him.
“That’s possible, right? They likely don’t even remember talking about it.”
“It’s not possible. I only told you about that day. And you know that. I told you that back then.”
“But I thought . . .” He pressed his lips together. She’d really only told him?
“Not even Aunt Blu,” she whispered. “Not that part.”
“And Patrick knew about that part?”
At her pause, he finally began to breathe again, and when she dropped her gaze to the seat, he bent down and got in her face. “Listen to me, Jilly. Whatever they know, it wasn’t me. You know I wouldn’t tell those kinds of secrets. To anyone. I’ll admit I’ve messed up plenty of times in my life, but this one—I swear to you—I didn’t do.” He could see the mixture of wanting to believe in him, but at the same time having learned personally that she couldn’t, in her eyes, and he once again squeezed her hands. “Tell me what they said. Exactly.”
“They said they knew I’d found her.”
He nodded for her to continue. That part was public knowledge, though Blu had threatened every police officer in town that they weren’t to breathe a word of it. No one had needed to know that Jill walked in on her mother’s lifeless body. That she’d fallen in the blood as she’d tried to get to her.
She’d had enough on her shoulders at fourteen without the whole town looking at her with even more pity. Knowing they wanted to ask how she’d dealt with it. What it had been like.
People could be horrid with their curiosity.
“They knew that I wasn’t home that afternoon,” Jill cont
inued. She closed her eyes as if seeing a different day and a different place, and Cal wanted to pull her to him. “That I’d left her there alone. He said that he knew I’d come home at six thirty . . . that some people have survivor’s guilt . . .”
Cal waited, but she didn’t say anything more.
“And?” he finally asked. “What else?”
She shook her head, and her eyelids fluttered open. It was the middle of the day, but in the cab of his truck, out on Caterpillar Road, there seemed to be no light filtering in on them. “I don’t know,” she said, so softly he almost didn’t hear.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I got mad and I ran.” She swallowed. “To you.”
“And that’s all he said? That you were out that afternoon, and that you found her?”
She nodded. “And survivor’s guilt.”
“Okay. Then we can deal with that. That’s not so bad.”
“How do you know?”
“Jilly, they could have gotten that from the police report, or by talking to anyone who’d been on the scene that day. But if that’s all they said to you—”
“I ran before he could say any more.”
“But you never told anyone else, right?”
She shook her head, her eyes a mix of blue and green as she stared back at him.
“And I’ve never told a soul,” he repeated. He let go of her hands and cupped her chin. “And I won’t. I promise.”
“But you once made other promises . . .”
He let his own head hang then. And dropped his hold on her. “I did. And I regret them.” He forced himself to meet her eyes. “I should never have said half the things I did back then. I meant them at the time. I swear. And it never crossed my mind for a second that my promises—that what we were to each other—wouldn’t so much as enter my consciousness when put to the test. But the truth is, Jilly . . . a twenty-year-old guy isn’t the smartest kid in the classroom. At least I wasn’t. And I’m sorry about that.”
“So would you do it differently if you had to do it again?”
His lungs felt as if all the air were being sucked out of it. “You mean how I left?” He nodded. “Yes. I’d do that differently in a heartbeat. But leaving in general?” It hurt to even look at her. It was as if they were eighteen and twenty all over again. He slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’d still leave. I had to come home.” His granny had needed him.
“I suggested she go with us,” Jill reminded him, even though he didn’t voice his thought, and finally, her voice began to refill. She no longer sounded like a lost little girl who’d come home to find her mother’s wrists slit.
“And we would have supported her how?” he asked gently. “I had a job here. I was going to buy into the business.”
But when he sensed the age-old anger firing back to life in her, he held up his hands.
“Don’t,” he said. “Just stop. It’s over and done. Not worth fighting about again.”
“We’re over and done.”
“Yes. We can’t go back, Jilly. Even if we wanted to.”
“Not that you’d want to.” Her sarcasm was heavy.
“Would you?” He studied her after he asked the question. She was suddenly brewing for a fight, but he knew fighting was her armor. And he didn’t want to fight with her anymore. He didn’t want to fight with her ever again. “Would you seriously change how anything happened?” he repeated. “Even the fact that we got together to begin with? We had each other for a while, and it was really good. I think we both needed that. But you had to go, right? Just like I had to stay? That’s what you said.”
“Yet I still failed.”
He pulled in a controlled breath. He’d been wondering that for years. “On all of it?”
She looked away. “I never found my dad, if that’s what you’re asking.”
That’s what he’d been asking. “And the acting?”
He didn’t know how else to even phrase that question. Clearly she hadn’t made it big. She was here fighting an uphill battle in what was traditionally a man’s world. Not in Hollywood schmoozing with the A-listers. And as far as he knew, she’d never even been in anything. He’d watched for her for years.
She put several inches between them. “How does it look like it went?”
And that was the end of the congenial conversation. She’d shut back down.
Cal didn’t immediately return to his side of the truck, though, because something about the look on her face kept him from retreating. It was more than just anger hiding in there. Or at least, more than anger at him.
But what else was she upset about?
“Did you ever come close?” he asked. Had he misread her desire to act back then? He’d laughed at her impassioned plea as she’d tried to convince him to go with her. He’d even accused her of trying out her so-called acting skills on him. But he’d known her leaving hadn’t been about building a career. LA had been her opportunity to run as far away as she could. Her wanting to be anything but her mother’s daughter.
The look on her face now struck him hard, though, and he couldn’t help but wonder if something else might have happened other than her not making it as an actress.
When he finally accepted that she had no intention of saying another word on the subject, he turned back to the wheel. “Mind if we drive around a bit before going back?” He needed a moment to reorient himself. Being this close to Jill shifted his equilibrium.
Plus, he simply wasn’t ready to return to the reality of reality TV.
“Whatever,” Jill tossed out. There was zero emotion in the word. “But don’t think this means we’re friends again.”
He chuckled without humor. “I’d never think a single conversation with you would equate to us being friends again.” He checked to make sure no vehicles were heading their way and put the truck into gear. “You don’t even have to talk while we drive,” he added, tossing his own sarcasm into the mix. “In fact, I’d prefer you didn’t. Let’s just . . . be.”
She nodded at that—still not looking at him—and he drove them around the back roads of the town where they’d both grown up. It was a beautiful time of year for central Texas. The bluebonnets were beginning to die out, but there was enough color left to make for a gorgeous backdrop on a middle-of-the-week drive with two people who’d once cared for each other. It was a shame, actually, that that’s all this was. He remembered his grandparents taking these kinds of drives on a regular basis. Papaw would have his arm thrown over the back of the car seat, and Granny would be scooted in next to him.
He smiled slightly at the memory. They’d take him and Rodney, and they’d pick out a tree along the river for a picnic. Or maybe one of the many bridges around the area. Red Oak River wound its way throughout the county, and there was never a lack of beautiful scenery.
He made a right turn, still thinking about his grandparents, until his thoughts were interrupted by Jill.
“You should have told me about being on the show.”
He glanced across the front seat. Her eyes remained on the road. “And how would I have done that?” he questioned. “You don’t talk to me, remember?”
“I would have talked to you about that.”
“Really?” He signaled and turned left. “If I’d just called you up one day? Or stopped you in town? Hey, Jill”—he mimicked himself—“guess what I signed up to do? And I heard you’re doing it, too! Won’t this be fun?” His bark of laughter rang harsh in the enclosed space. “You wouldn’t have let me get past your name, and you know it.”
She looked out the side window, her chin jutting forward. “Did you do it just to hurt me?”
Her question shouldn’t have surprised him, because she’d never been one to beat around the bush. Yet it packed a wallop. No. He hadn’t done it because he’d wanted to hurt her.
But at the same time, he’d known it would.
His papaw would have been disappointed in him.
“It’s
great exposure,” he finally answered.
She huffed. “Heather said the same thing. And you’re avoiding the question.”
“I am,” he acknowledged. And he also knew he’d taken perverse pleasure in agreeing to be on the show in the first place. He supposed that meant he hadn’t left all his childish ways back in Vegas twelve years before. But he could take solace in knowing that he’d changed his mind. The hurt he’d witnessed on Jill’s face in the café Monday morning had stung. She’d deserved to know what she was walking into. To not be ambushed.
The truth was, she probably deserved for him to have said no to the offer.
“I signed up because of you,” he admitted. “But I didn’t really think it through.”
She said nothing in reply, and a few seconds later, he once again flipped on his turn signal and slowed to make a turn. Then he jolted when he realized he was two seconds from pulling into his own farm. He straightened the wheel, intending to drive on past, his heart suddenly racing. But he changed his mind at the last second, and without looking at Jill, he turned onto the rutted gravel driveway and kept the truck moving steadily forward.
Jill sat up, one hand going to the dashboard, and her gaze darting around. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer. Just focused on the ruts.
Once he got through the line of trees, though, where the openness of his land could be seen, he struggled to pull in a breath. He still couldn’t say anything to the woman sitting next him, but he wanted to know what she thought.
“Cal.” She looked out the back window. “We’re trespassing. We just passed a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.”
When he still said nothing, she finally turned to him. He didn’t look at her.
“Do you know whose property this is?”
“We’re not trespassing.” He still couldn’t pull in a complete breath.
“Then hopefully that means no one will start taking shots at us. We are in Texas, you know.”
“No one’s going to shoot us.” He kept driving, the gravel no longer as rutted as it had been out by the highway, and didn’t slow until he topped a slight ridge. As he crested the hill, the twenty-five-hundred-square-foot log cabin he’d been renovating for the last year could be seen in the distance. It sat on another rise, its wraparound porch like wide arms hugging what was inside, while rolling hills and trees reaching high into the sky spread out as far as the eye could see.