Ashley shivered. “There are some fast-food places at the next exit. We can cut through a lot of parking lots and circle around. I know a back road. We can hope to lose him.”
But he probably knew as many nooks and crannies of the mountains as she did, bolt-holes to keep him out of the way of the law. The Tahoe was big, but the truck was bigger. The Tahoe might maneuver better.
“Or we can wait for the sheriff’s department,” Hunter suggested.
“But I have to—” Ashley clamped her hands onto her knees and stared straight ahead. “I can’t do everything. If we keep going, we could lead this criminal right to them.”
Hunter exited the highway and pulled into a parking space in front of a gas station. “We don’t know that he’s following us. We don’t know if it’s even this Beau fellow. But we can’t risk it.”
“I was hoping to get there first and warn Rita.”
Hunter tugged off his glasses. “And I was hoping to be there with Racey Jean and Jeremiah when the sheriff picks them up.”
Their eyes met and held. Ashley read her own tension in his taut face.
“We didn’t make them do what they have,” Hunter said. “We can’t save them from the consequences, only help them get through them.”
Ashley nodded and reached for her phone. “Jason, don’t start yelling. I’m going to tell you where to find Racey Jean and Jeremiah Davis.”
CHAPTER 30
THEY WAITED FOR hours at the jail before the magistrate set bail. Hunter went forward to offer to arrange for the bond.
“What relationship do you have to them?” the magistrate asked.
“I’m their half brother,” Hunter announced.
Sitting on a bench, slumped and ragged, Racey Jean and Jeremiah straightened, their faces registering shock.
“What do you want to do with us?” For the first time, Ashley heard Racey Jean speak. Her voice was soft and sweet, and she was every bit as pretty as her mother had been at her age, or would be if she was cleaned up and fed a few thousand calories a day for a month. Despite her thinness, she looked remarkably well for a young woman whom Ashley feared would bleed to death. Ashley needed to ask her how she recovered.
Racey Jean caught sight of Ashley and took a step forward. A deputy stopped her. She needed to wait until bail had been met.
That took another two hours. Midnight had just clicked over on Ashley’s digital watch when the four of them walked out to Ashley’s Tahoe. Jason was no longer around breathing fire at Ashley. Rita, apparently, hadn’t been around her house. Beau had stuck with Hunter and Ashley until they turned into the municipal parking lot and then vanished from sight.
“Where are we going?” Jeremiah asked. It was the first thing he’d said.
“I think my house.” Ashley opened the back door for Racey Jean. “You know where it is.”
“Yeah, uh—” Jeremiah slouched in his seat beside his sister.
“We’re sorry about what we did to you.” Racey Jean’s gentle voice rose from the back as Hunter pulled onto the empty road. “We was scared of my boyfriend catchin’ us. He knew I was having my pains and was waiting for me at the hospital. If you hadn’t been there, I probably would have died or something.”
“I was afraid you had died.” Ashley turned as far around as she could. “You were bleeding badly.”
“It’ll never come out of the seat of my truck,” Jeremiah muttered.
“How—um—” Ashley sought for a delicate way to ask the burning question for herself in front of the men. “How did you recover?”
Racey Jean ducked her head. “There’s this old woman back in Gosnoll Holler. She gave me some herbs.”
Ashley cringed at how easily those herbs could have killed the girl as fast as the bleeding, if they caused clotting.
“I shoulda taken Racey Jean to her for birthing the baby.” Jeremiah sounded grumpy.
“But I wanted you.” Racey’s Jean’s smile fairly lit up the SUV. “Everyone says you’re the best.”
“I don’t know about being the best, but I’m glad you didn’t go to Granny Parrish. She’s not very sterile and—”
“Ashley,” Hunter said, “we have company.” He glanced back. “There’s our tail.”
Racey Jean shrieked. “Beau. That’s Beau Dell.”
“He wants to kill us,” Jeremiah said.
“Nice.” Hunter looked to Ashley. “We can’t turn around, so where do we go? I don’t know this road.”
“If you turn right at the next road, we’ll get back to I-81. I’ll call the sheriff’s office and tell them.”
“Sounds easy.” Hunter laughed.
Ashley called 911. The dispatcher gave them instructions to drive toward town, to get on I-81 as fast as they could.
“You got important work to do,” Racey Jean said. “You don’t need to be risking yourself with the likes of us.”
“You’re my patient first,” Ashley said over something twisting loose in her middle. “I don’t abandon my patients.”
Except that was exactly what she intended to do in less than a year.
Silence fell inside the SUV. Everyone but Hunter kept looking behind them for headlights. They spotted them, growing closer on a road the driver probably knew well enough to take faster than Hunter could.
Just another mile to the highway. Another mile of snakelike pavement.
“You gotta go faster.” Jeremiah gripped the back of the seat.
“I’ll go off the road if I do.” Hunter spun the SUV around a loop in the road.
“We’re gonna go off the road anyway.” Racey Jean began to cry. “I give up my baby and almost die and he’s gonna catch me anyway.”
“I’ll kill him before I let him catch you.” Despite the claim, and whatever else he had done, Jeremiah’s caring for his sister was obvious, more so than Ashley had noticed the night they showed up at her house.
“Did you cut my phone lines so I couldn’t call anyone?”
“He’s got a police scanner.” Jeremiah twisted around to glare out the back window at the rising headlights. “He’d have heard where we was if you’d called the cops or an ambulance. Guess I’ll do time for that too.”
“If he don’t kill us.” Racey Jean’s teeth were chattering.
“He won’t kill us.” Hunter remained calm, holding a steady speed on the road.
A half mile to go to the interstate.
Mere yards to go before the truck caught up with them. A quarter mile and inches. The expressway lights flashed into view.
The truck slammed into their left rear panel.
The SUV was heavy. It didn’t go out of control. Hunter floored the gas pedal.
So did Beau Dell. He plowed straight into their rear panel again. At those speeds, the SUV spun out of control, sliding, spinning on gravel at the edge of the road, coming to rest with the right rear tire in a ditch and Beau Dell pulled up in front of them.
“Is anyone hurt?” Hunter asked.
Ashley’s heart beat too fast for her to answer right away. She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Maybe whiplash. Racey Jean? Jeremiah?”
Racey Jean was crying. “He’s coming. He’s going to hurt me.”
“Not with me here,” her brothers said together.
Hysterical laughter rose in Ashley’s throat. She swallowed it until she laughed, then fumbled for her phone. “Where’s a sheriff’s car?” she asked the dispatcher.
“Headed your way, but there seems to have been an accident.”
“I think,” Ashley said, “that’s us.”
It was them. Jason and two sheriff’s cars pulled up moments after Beau Dell stalked to Racey Jean’s window and began to bang on it. None of the officers were convinced by his claim he was just trying to help them all out. He was arrested for reckless driving. The drug involvement would be investigated with Jeremiah and Racey Jean’s help.
“Which will probably help the two of you get out of trouble,” Hunter pointed out.
“Will
it help me get my baby back?” Racey Jean asked.
Eventually, they had all gotten to Ashley’s house, where she scrambled eggs and Hunter made coffee. Racey Jean made the toast while Jeremiah sat at the table staring down at his plate.
Once the food was on the table and the blessing asked, Jeremiah raised his head and looked fully at Ashley for the first time. “I’m sorry I brung all this trouble on you by bringing Racey Jean to you.”
“I’m glad I was here to help.”
“If Momma were better,” Jeremiah said to his plate, “she’d tan my hide.”
“I think she’ll be too glad to see you to bother with that.” Hunter picked up his fork. “Let’s eat so Ashley can get herself some sleep.”
“No sleep,” Ashley said. “I have patients to go see in a couple of hours.”
Jeremiah and Racey Jean nearly fell asleep over their plates. Her own appetite diminished, Ashley went upstairs to prepare two rooms for them and hunt up pajamas from her own and her brothers’ rooms. She laid out towels and toiletries, then showed them their rooms and the bathroom in between.
“Miss Ashley.” Racey Jean stopped her at the door.
Ashley turned back. “Yes?”
“I don’t know how you can be so nice to us after what we done to you.”
Ashley smiled. “It’s what I’m here for—to take care of women.”
She descended to the kitchen where Hunter was loading the dishwasher. He stopped at her entrance and met her in the middle of the floor.
“I’ve been thinking tonight,” he began.
“Me too.” Ashley shoved her hands into her pockets to hide their shaking.
Hunter did the same, though she didn’t know if his hands were shaking or not. He looked calm, but then, he usually did.
“They’re going to need a lot of help,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll manage on their own. They’ll need lawyers and a safe place to live and jobs.”
“Racey Jean needs to finish her education.”
“And Jeremiah needs to learn how to do something that’s legal.” Hunter’s smile was rueful. “I want to stay here and help them.”
“Your job?”
“I can do most of it long-distance, and I may not need to travel as much as I had been. Justin, my business partner, says he likes being on the job and wouldn’t mind going more often. His girlfriend broke up with him, so he hasn’t as much reason to stick around home as he did. Whereas now I have a family who needs me.”
I need you too. Ashley pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling and speaking those words aloud.
“I’d like to keep seeing you, Ashley.” Hunter curved one hand around her cheek. “I’ll be around for at least six months, I expect, maybe longer. If you’re willing, we can maybe build the foundation of a relationship strong enough to survive med school.”
“It won’t need to.”
“I see.” He started to pull his hand away.
Ashley caught hold of it and pressed it to her face again. “No, that’s not what I mean. I want more between us than friendship. Maybe something permanent. But it won’t have to survive med school or wait or anything.”
She took her other hand from her pocket and stroked his beard-stubbled jaw with a rasp from steady fingers. “I’ve decided not to go.”
“You’re giving up med school?” He snatched his glasses off his nose and his eyes were a brilliant blue.
“My work here is too important to leave. My reasons for going to med school were all wrong. It was a pride thing I convinced myself was more. If I hadn’t been here, who knows what would have happened to Racey Jean and your brother.”
“And I wouldn’t have met you. Oh, Ashley.” He wrapped his arms around her. “I’m pretty sure I love you.”
She laughed and started to say she loved him too, but he was already kissing her.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How would you feel if everything you thought you knew about your family background was shown to be a lie?
2. How has Ashley sacrificed for her family? For her community?
3. Why do Ashley and Hunter initially deny that they are attracted to each other?
4. How would you react if you discovered your best friend had committed adultery?
5. What more should Ashley have done for Mary Kate, if anything?
6. How much of our identity is tied up in what we know of our family background? How does it affect our lives, if at all?
7. What is wrong with Ashley’s thinking about how she can better serve her community, if her thinking is wrong at all?
8. Why are Hunter and Ashley attracted to one another beyond their looks?
9. What compromises must Hunter and Ashley make to develop a solid relationship and future together?
10. What did you learn about the contemporary practice of midwifery?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY PEOPLE ARE involved in bringing a book to print, and The Mountain Midwife is no exception. First and foremost, I wish to thank and recognize one hugely special lady, Juliana Fehr, director of the Nurse-Midwifery program at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. When I first got interested in midwives while a graduate student at Virginia Tech, Ms. Fehr offered me considerable assistance with a teaching project about midwives I was working on as part of a History of Medicine course. Years later, her book, Diary of a Midwife, proved an invaluable source of inspiration and information for these pages. In addition, Ms. Fehr took time out of her busy schedule to talk to me, answering my sometimes naïve questions and giving me far more insight and information than I knew to ask for. Any error in these pages are most certainly mine. I also appreciate my friend Alice, who answered my rather personal questions about why she chose to use a midwife in a hospital.
Without my lovely agent, Natasha Kern, who talked me off the ledge more than once, and editor, Becky Philpott, who put up with my occasional lack of logic, along with the understanding of Daisy Hutton at HarperCollins Christian Publishing when I said I wanted to write this story instead of the one planned, this book wouldn’t be happening at all. In addition, I owe thanks to Kristi Ann Hunter and Becca Witham for their brainstorming help, and to my beloved husband for putting up with my moments—alright, weeks—of angst switching genres and writing styles. I certainly must thank my host of Facebook friends who prayed for me and held me accountable as I wrote this book under less than ideal circumstances such as an unexpected move and a bout with the flu. With your support, and knowing you were there, truly kept me going. Last but certainly not least, I wish to make a note in memoriam to Tangelo, a little orange rescue cat, who blessed our lives for far too short a time. He lay on the floor and kept my feet warm while I wrote this book in my drafty office.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EAKES HAS A charming way of making her novels come to life without being over the top,” writes Romantic Times of best-selling, award-winning author Laurie Alice Eakes. Since she lay in bed as a child telling herself stories, she has fulfilled her dream of becoming a published author, with a degree in English and French from Asbury University and a master’s degree in writing fiction from Seton Hill University contributing to her career path. Now she has nearly two dozen books in print.
After enough moves in the past six years to make U-Haul’s stock rise, she now lives in Houston, Texas. Although they haven’t been blessed with children—yet—they have sundry lovable dogs and cats. If the carpet is relatively free of animal fur, then she is either frustrated with the current manuscript or brainstorming another, the only two times she genuinely enjoys housework.
Laurie Alice loves to hear from her readers.
Find her on Twitter @LaurieAEakes
Facebook under Laurie Alice Eakes
Or contact her through her web site, www.lauriealiceeakes.com
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