Running Wild

by Susan Andersen

  “Yes.” And if that sounded particularly heartfelt, well, it was—on so many levels. On the taken-at-strictly-face-value level alone, caffeine was always a much-appreciated perk. She didn’t even worry about it keeping her up all night. Their sleep had been so sporadic, so hit-and-miss the previous night, that she was pretty sure she could drink an entire pot and still sleep like Dracula in the daylight.

  Finn tossed the dregs of his own coffee into the fire and it hissed and sent a small shower of exploding sparks above the flames as he reached for the pot he’d placed on a little wire grill straddling the edge of the fire. He refilled the cup and handed it to her. “Careful. It’s hot.”

  She took a cautious sip and moaned at the rich flavor. “Oh, my God. That’s heavenly.”

  “Yeah, a good cup of coffee is hard to beat,” he agreed. He lounged back on one elbow and smiled at her, all easy and relaxed. “Tell me about being shipped off to boarding school in the States when you were thirteen.”

  Shock sizzled bolts of lightning through her veins, and she froze, her hands tightening their grip on the cup. “What?”

  “I blew you off when you tried to tell me yesterday, but I’ve been thinking about what you said and I’d really like to know. Do you really believe your folks shipped you off to the States so they could concentrate on other people’s kids?”

  Oh, God. The last thing she wanted to do was spend her relaxing moment before the fire limping out the reasons her parents didn’t love her to Finn of the large nosy-because-we-adore-you Family Kavanagh.

  Well, you can always steer the conversation back to the sex that may or may not have happened if you didn’t possess a pea-sized bladder.

  An-n-nd, put like that— “Yeah. I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I was born in El Tigre,” she said slowly, staring into the fire. “My folks are Baptist missionaries in a primarily Catholic country, which makes living and working on a shoestring a fact of life. But it never even occurred to me that we were poor. As far as I was concerned, running fairly wild with the boys and girls of the families my folks ministered to was the best of all worlds, whether it was in poor villages in the Amazon or in the some-ways-poorer inner-city neighborhoods up north.” She fell quiet for a moment, remembering, and her lips quirked up. Because those had truly been some of the best times of her life.

  Rolling her shoulders, she drew up her knees and hugged them to her chest. “Then out of the blue, midway between my thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays,” she said, her voice hardening, “my parents packed me up and shipped me off to boarding school—no warning, no discussion.”

  “No discussion at all? They didn’t give you so much as a hint why?”

  She laughed bitterly. “They said it was for my own good, that it was for my safety, for pity’s sake.”

  “Maybe, darlin’,” Finn said gently, “that was exactly what it was.”

  “Please. So, what had been perfectly safe the previous thirteen years was suddenly a minefield I was no longer intelligent enough to pick my way through?”

  “You said your mom is dangerously outspoken. Maybe they were threatened by someone like Munoz.”

  It gave her pause, because that had never occurred to her. After reassessing her long-held beliefs in silence for several moments, however, she shook her head. She was strangely reluctant to abandon the comforting possibility that Finn’s suggestion opened up. And yet—

  “No,” she said. “We discussed everything as a family in those days and I pretty much knew the good, the bad and the ugly of what was going on in our lives. So I think if that had been the case, they would have just said, ‘We want you safe because so and so is making threatening noises.’” Turning her head until her cheek rested on her kneecap, she looked at him, noting the rough stubble that had grown on his lean jaw since shaving the night before last. “But they didn’t, Finn. They didn’t say a damn thing, just dragged me to the airport and put me on a plane.”

  “Thirteen can be an impossible, bratty age.”

  “Yet most parents don’t throw their kids away because of it. Besides,” she said flatly, “I wasn’t bratty or impossible then—that came later, in boarding school. I was Magdalene then—I was a good girl. Not that they gave a rat’s rear end. They just wanted me gone so they’d have more time to devote to everyone else’s kids.”

  He was staring at her, arrested. “What do you mean you were Magdalene then? That’s your name now, right?”

  “No.” Her heart pounded unaccountably, but when he gave her a puzzled look she gave him a terse nod. “Okay, yes, technically it’s my legal name. But Magdalene is the sweet compliant girl I once was.” She gave him a long, unsmiling look. “She’s gone, Kavanagh. I’ve been Mags for a long time now.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FINN WAS CONFUSED, but he had no trouble seeing Mags was dead serious. So much so that a metaphorical lightbulb went off over his head as he recalled the consistent, emphatic way she’d corrected him every time he’d called her Magdalene. Which, he had to admit, had been pretty damn often since he genuinely dug her name.

  Swiveling on his butt in the sand to face her profile rather than the fire, he burrowed his bare feet into the still-warm sand near her hip. Mags’s head was tilted downward, the fall of her hair hiding most of her face. “Tell me about that. When did you change to Mags? And more importantly, why?”

  She glanced at him then, but looked as if she might balk, as though the last thing she wanted to talk about was this. But he merely sat quietly, leveling a steady gaze on her. He had all night.

  She must have realized it, too, because looking away once more, she gave him the big sigh women were so good at and hitched the shoulder nearest to him. “As far as I’m concerned, my folks threw me away,” she finally said in a tone more resigned than the sulkiness he’d half expected. “And getting hit with the parental expiration date left me in no mood to turn the other cheek. So, I reinvented myself.”

  “How does a thirteen-year-old reinvent herself?”

  “By dumping Goody Two-shoes Magdalene. I became Mags, and she was a whole lot tougher, let me tell you, than little Miss Mealy Mouth.”

  He tried to envision an unsophisticated girl from the poorer areas of South America reinventing herself in the boarding school she’d been sent to a world away from everything she’d known. His brain threw up a wall against the mere idea. “How did that work for you, overall?”

  She grimaced. “I admit the transition wasn’t mistake-free. I was angry for a long time and got myself kicked out of three boarding schools before I decided to buckle down enough to graduate so I could get the hell on with my life.” Head bent again, she looked down at the sand between her feet and added flatly, “It worked out in the end.”

  “Yeah?” Why did he get the impression that was less than the truth? Or at least that a lot of shit had rained down on her head before she’d gotten to that point? “What did your folks think of the transformation?” Her hair still mostly blocked his view and he reached out to scoop a hank of it behind her ear, leaning in to see her expression more clearly. “You did still see them occasionally, didn’t you?” Because leaving a kid that age in boarding school year-round was a concept he could not wrap his head around.

  “Sure. I went home summers.” She gave him an insouciant smile. But her eyes were remote and her energy muted, as if she’d slid behind the Wizard’s curtain.

  “And...?”

  She gave him a cool look. “And what?”

  “What did they think of your transformation?”

  She shrugged. “They didn’t have a clue what to do with the Mags who’d replaced their little girl and their response was to get stricter and stricter.” She looked directly at him, and for the first time since they’d started this conversation he caught a glimpse of the real Mags in the indignation that turned her eyes a hotter blue. “Can you believe that? They sent me a thousand miles away so they wouldn’t have to bother with me, then they’re surprised when
I don’t fall in with their stifling rules for the few stinking weeks I do get to come home?”

  She flashed him a sudden smile filled with genuine, if self-mocking, humor. “To be fair, in the early years I went out of my way to shock them. I generally landed on their doorstep with my hair dyed black, or pink or whatever my mood was at any given moment. And for a while I wore temporary tattoo sleeves and spirit-gummed a gem to my right nostril and a safety pin to my left eyebrow.” She poked the inside of her cheek with her tongue. “Fun times, those.”

  Her sudden self-deprecating humor grabbed at something deep inside of him. He’d give the woman this: she was far from a whiner. He hadn’t heard her complain once, even with a cartel hot on their heels, and he’d go out on a limb and posit she hadn’t back when she was a kid, either. “You’re such a balls-to-the-walls kind of chick, I’m surprised you didn’t get inked and pierced for real.”

  “Nah. I like to mix things up and my taste is constantly changing. Not even in my rebellious years did I wanna be stuck with holes or permanent art I might despise six months down the road. I’m much happier making temporary changes with my makeup.”

  “You have a real talent for transforming things,” he agreed. “How did you get to be so good at that?”

  “Dunno. It was just something I started experimenting with and found I had a knack for it. It was the skill that eventually helped me fit in at school.” She essayed a facial shrug. “Even the snobby girls who thought I was bug-ass weird sought me out when they had a special occasion or there was a costume party.”

  “Is that street-mime thing you did today how you make your living?”

  “Honey, please.” Even in the flickering light of the fire he could see that the look she gave him was indulgent in a you-really-need-to-get-with-the-program sort of way. “Mimes are those annoying white-faced jokers who get all up in your grill and mimic your every move or do their stupid I’m-in-an-invisible-box routine. I’m a living statue. Big difference,” she said, turning in his direction and giving him another of those self-deprecating smiles. “At least in my own mind. And yes, it’s one way I earn the rent.”

  “How the hell can you stay so still?”

  “Beats the heck outta me. Maybe it’s an only-child thing—I’ve just always been able to go to a place in my head where it’s quiet and still. And once I tune everything out, it’s fairly easy to stay there.”

  “I’d have thought for someone with your energy it would be next to impossible.”

  She looked at him with a crooked little smile. “You think I’m energetic?”

  “Hell, yeah.” And if he’d speculated once or twice—or, okay, a whole lot—what it would feel like if she applied all that vigor to some down-and-dirty sex with him, well, his mama didn’t raise no fool. He knew enough to keep it to himself. “I get the feeling sometimes that if it could be harnessed, you could single-handedly power a village. At the very least.”

  She laughed in delight. “That’s maybe one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.”

  It was? He had a sudden urge to haul her in for a hug, which wasn’t part of his usual bag of tricks. But, Jesus. If only one thing anyone had ever said to her counted as the nicest, shouldn’t it be a compliment of mammoth proportions? It seemed wrong that instead it had been something so small.

  He cleared his throat. “So, when’s the last time you saw your folks?” She acted as if reinventing herself as a wild child had made her impervious to hurt, but he was guessing that was far from the case. She was here now, wasn’t she, racing around determined to save her parents? He’d bet the farm she’d been coming home whenever she could since they’d sent her away.

  “Twelve and a half years ago.”

  Finn felt his jaw literally drop. But what the fu—? “Twelve years ago?” He leaned into her the better to see her face and unaccountably felt red-hot fury drilling a hole in his gut. “You haven’t been to visit your parents in twelve years?”

  “And a half.” That prideful little chin of hers ratcheted up, its shallow thumbprint dimple leading the way. “Not all of us have the lovey-dovey Brady Bunch family you came from.”

  “But twelve—”

  She whipped around to face him, kicking up sand with the ferocity of her movement. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” she snapped, “I heard you perfectly well the first and the second time. And as much as I appreciate all the girlie melodrama you invest in the word—”

  “Hey!” Girlie melodrama, his big swinging dick.

  “—after completing two semesters of college, I quit both the academic life and going back home during summer breaks. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t deal with Brian and Nancy’s disappointment in me. It was more that the having to do so every damn time I saw them wore me to a nub.”

  He tried to imagine calling his folks by their first names, but had a feeling his mom would consider that a washing-his-mouth-out-with-soap offense. He met her gaze and raised his brows. “So you just gave up on them.”

  “Yes. Is that what you want to hear, Kavanagh? Then yes, as you say. I just gave up on them.”

  Like hell. “Yet, here you are. Back in El Tigre, putting yourself at risk to find them.”

  She attempted the sulky facial equivalent of a shrug. “Well, I’m not the one who fell out of love with them, am I?” She drew in an audible breath and exhaled it through barely parted lips. Then as if someone had wiped the slate clean, her expression smoothed over and her voice turned brisk when she said, “Neither was I ever completely off the grid with them.”

  She made a little yeah-yeah-I-know-what-you’re-thinking gesture. “I admit I don’t call them very often because it’s frequently beyond my budget and completely impractical since they spend most of their time out in the community. I have made it a point, though, to write regularly to keep in touch.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He relinquished the judgmental self-righteous shit—and promptly remembered previous conversations. “You said it was having your mom’s letters stop after she’d talked about her differences with Munoz that made you worry they were in trouble.”

  “And, boy, was I right on that front,” she said glumly.

  “Hey.” He reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Noting how warm and soft her skin was, he pulled his hand back and rubbed the feel of her away in the sand next to his hip. “We’re gonna find them.”

  “Yeah.” The word might be an agreement, but her tone demonstrated zero confidence. She pushed abruptly to her feet. “Well, listen, it’s been a long day. Could I talk you into heating me up some water to wash? I think I’ll get ready for bed.”

  And without waiting for a response, she turned on her heel and strode to the tent, patently ready for this day to be done.

  * * *

  FINN WOKE UP with the sun the following morning and rolled over to see if Mags was awake as well.

  And chuckled.

  She lay facing him, still sleeping soundly. Her hair tumbled across the top part of her face, covering her eyes and one cheekbone, and her hands were pressed together like a little girl in prayer.

  Except not quite. Sometime in her sleep she’d tunneled them beneath her cheek, perhaps to provide support. Whatever the original reason, their current position pushed her mouth into what would have been pursed kissy lips if it hadn’t somehow twisted them out of shape.

  He threw back the top of his unzipped bag, scratched his abs and gave his morning wood an absentminded pull. He picked his cargo shorts off the tent floor and tugged them on, lifting his hips to yank up the shorts over his butt. After zipping up gingerly, he rolled into a crouch and crab-walked through the tent’s doorway and vestibule.

  Rising to his full height outside, he stretched, gave his belly another scratch and headed down the beach before hanging a left for the foliage’s boundary line. When he returned moments later, he scooped some water out of the river and put it on to boil for the morning washups.

  He had sisters, so he knew Mags was going to make him
pay for seeing what she would no doubt view as her weakness last night. For that reason, when he heard rustling noises indicating she was awake fifteen or so minutes after he’d washed up and started the coffee, he braced himself. Wait for it.

  Waa-a-aait for it.

  When she emerged a few minutes later, however, the TP bag clutched in hand, she merely yawned hugely, mumbled, “Mornin’,” and trotted off down the beach.

  “Huh.” Okay, not a full-frontal snark attack, then. Maybe she was waiting for him to let his guard down so she could hit him with the sneaky just-when-you-think-it’s-safe-to-come-outta-the-water version.

  Half an hour later, after they’d downed their coffee and the skimpy breakfast he’d put together, and had cleaned up the kitchen stuff, he conceded he might have it all wrong. “Okay,” he muttered as he watched Mags put away her toothbrush. “Maybe it’s just a Kavanagh-chick thing.”

  “What is?”

  “Hmm?” Shit. Good going, there, bro. “Uh, nothing. I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Yeah, I got that part. What’s just a Kavanagh-woman thing?” Her slender brows drew together. “I assume it’s an attribute we lowly Delucas don’t have.”

  “Trust me, darlin’,” he assured her, “that’s a good thing.”

  If the still-furrowed eyebrows were an indication, he hadn’t assured her of a damn thing. He blew out a breath. “Fine. I thought you’d make me pay for the stuff you told me last night.”

  “What?” There was no doubting her genuine puzzlement. “That’s stupid—why would you be to blame for my crappy relationship with Brian and Nancy?”

  “I wouldn’t. But like I said, doll, it’s a Kavanagh-chick thing. Whenever my sisters demonstrated the least little thing they considered a weakness in front of me or my brothers, we always paid for witnessing it.” He gave her a pointed look. “Just another fun thing you’re missing out on, not having a big family, I guess.”

  “Oh, don’t be so thick. I’m not a flipping Pollyanna. I get that being part of a large family isn’t all roses all the time. What I can’t believe is that you have no appreciation for it at all.”