Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4)

by Rosalind James

  College, she’d thought every time. Seattle. Just a little bit longer, and my life is going to start. She had a postcard with the University of Washington logo pinned to the bulletin board over her desk, and every night, she marked an X on the calendar page, traced that W with a finger, and said the name of the city out loud. Seattle. Where her father wouldn’t see what she did, and wouldn’t know. She might have to major in business, but she didn’t have to be a geek anymore, not if she could get the guts not to be.

  “Take us home,” she said again when the deputy pulled up outside the low brick building, and he didn’t even answer. Instead, he made her walk in ahead of him while he led Jim inside with a hand on his arm, and then she was put into a bare little room with a table, four chairs, white walls, and a mirror, and was left there.

  Walk out, she told herself. Just leave. Go see if the door’s locked. Leave. But she couldn’t leave, even if they’d let her, if they still had Jim. If they were—what? Arresting him? But why? It wasn’t a crime to have sex, and it couldn’t be a crime to have sex in the woods. People did it all the time.

  She thought about it for half an hour, her thoughts circling endlessly as she longed to get up off the chair, stayed on it instead, and knew she was doing it because she was a coward. And then a different deputy, a woman, opened the door to the little room, and her father walked in, and she knew why she’d kept her thoughts circling. Because she hadn’t wanted to think about this.

  “Let’s go,” her father snapped at the deputy, barely looking at Hallie.

  Another ride, then, in another police car to the hospital, in the backseat this time beside her silent father, and then she was being examined and questioned by a doctor and the deputy while her father stood outside the curtain and she tried not to think about him hearing her answers. And every time she asked about Jim, they cut her off.

  By the time she was driving home with her dad, she felt bruised and humiliated, violated in a way she hadn’t with Jim. Her father treated her to the icy silence he specialized in, until finally, as they approached the house, she said, “Did they arrest Jim? Tell me, Dad. I’m not going to get out of the car unless you tell me.”

  Her father drove fast up the driveway and into the garage, jerking the car to a stop in a way that banged her back against the seat. “You’ll get out of the car,” he said. “You’ll get out if I have to pull you out, drag you to your bedroom, and lock you in there. He told them you asked for it. He said you begged him to do it. And you didn’t say anything different, did you?”

  The hot flood of shame rose together with the nausea, and she had to swallow. “He wouldn’t . . . he wouldn’t say that,” she managed.

  Why not, though? It was true.

  “No? He said you were always coming around the job site, trying to talk to him, throwing yourself at him. And that tonight you were at some party, drunk, and you asked him to take you out of there, told him to park in that clearing, then begged him to pop your cherry. And with you saying the same thing, what could they do?”

  Hallie winced, and her father saw it and said, “If you’re going to behave like trash, you’re going to get treated like trash.”

  It was true, but it wasn’t. But at least Jim hadn’t been charged with anything. Whatever he’d said—he’d had to say it, surely. She’d made him say it, practically. And she had asked him to do it. She had begged him. So she stumbled out of the car and through the door into the house, and was heading back to her room when her father said, “Come into the den.”

  “I want to . . .” she said, gulping in a breath. “Take a shower.”

  “In the den,” he said. “Stand there.” So she stood in the middle of the floor, disheveled and sticky and sore inside, while he went to the bar and fixed himself a bourbon on the rocks.

  “If you feel dirty,” he finally said, looking her up and down with so much contempt, she shriveled, “that’s because you acted like a whore tonight. You told me you were spending the night at Anthea’s. You were lying. You went out drinking, and then you spread your legs for that loser. On the hood of his car. In public. You think that makes me proud? Because it doesn’t make me proud to get a call from the sheriff to come down and pick up my daughter, because she’s been whoring around on Paradise Mountain, getting screwed by trailer trash out in the open where anybody could see her. So you tell me, why should I send you to college if you’re going to behave like a tramp? What kind of decent man do you imagine is going to want a woman who throws herself at a lowlife like Jim Lawson? You think he’s in love with you? He’s not. He thinks you were an easy piece of tail. He got to screw the boss’s daughter on his goddamned car, and he didn’t even have to buy her a drink first. He’s laughing at you right now, and so is every deputy in the county. Everybody else will hear about it soon enough, and they’ll be laughing at you, too. Which is what you deserve, because what you did was pathetic. But they’ll also be laughing at me.” He slammed his glass down on the bar, and Hallie jumped.

  “I didn’t—” she started to say. “I didn’t—” But she couldn’t go on. She knew her father thought tears were weak and manipulative. He’d told her so often enough. She could see the disdain on his face as she wept, but she couldn’t help it. She’d fought the tears back all night while she’d sat in the station, then later at the hospital, while she’d lain on a gurney, being probed and swabbed and asked all those humiliating questions. She hadn’t cried then, but she cried now. She was all out of resistance.

  She wanted to take a shower and scrub it all away. She wanted to crawl into bed, put her head under the pillow, and never come out. She wanted her mother. But her mother was on a silent meditation retreat, and she’d told Hallie not to break in, “unless it’s life and death, baby. I need this.” This wasn’t life and death, and Hallie knew it. It only felt like it.

  She couldn’t call Anthea, either, because Anthea would be so mad at her for getting Jim arrested. Besides, how could she tell? She’d be so embarrassed. So ashamed. It was all her fault. She knew it. She’d gone to the party, and she’d asked Jim to do it.

  She stood there under the harsh overhead light and the glassy stare of the moose on the wall, the hot tears trickling down her cheeks, her breath hitching with sobs she tried in vain to hold back, while her father told her that she was grounded for three weeks, until it was time to leave for college. That was if he decided she could still go.

  It had been a good night, and then it had been such a bad night.

  “That night,” she said now to Jim. She didn’t want to ask this, and she needed to, with fourteen years’ worth of pent-up urgency. “Why did you do it? Tell me the truth.” The truth might hurt, but she had to know.

  He sighed. “Man . . . why? Because I was half crazy about you. Or more than half. I wanted to get you out of that kegger, and then, when I started kissing you . . .” One broad shoulder lifted. “I was nineteen. Say that my impulse control wasn’t everything it could’ve been. You were so sweet, and so sexy, and so . . .” He put a hand to the back of his head in that gesture she remembered so well and took a deep breath. “Yeah. I was caught in that whirlpool, you know. All those teenage hormones, which is no excuse. Sucked down.”

  “No,” she said, “I think that was me. As I recall.”

  He turned his head and looked at her, startled.

  Nothing had changed, or maybe it had, because somehow, she was saying this. “You kind of messed me up in one way, you know. I thought that was how sex would be. It was ages before I found out I had to ask for what I wanted, and got the guts to ask. Before it was any good.”

  He was looking warier than ever. “I told you, I was nineteen. Sorry. I was pretty selfish. I just wanted to do it.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. Never mind.” She was back to “humiliated” again. He didn’t even remember. He’d been her shameful fantasy material for years. He still was, if the truth were known, despite everything that had happened later. It was as if she could see herself, the metal cold
against her naked back, the breeze playing across her heated skin, while Jim’s mouth and hands drove her relentlessly into an orgasm unlike anything she’d ever felt. Before he’d given her another one.

  If it had never been that way again . . . well, nobody was seventeen forever.

  She finally processed what he’d said. “But wait. If you were crazy about me, if you wanted to do it so much . . . why didn’t you ever call me again? You were leaving, and you didn’t even tell me. And what you told the cops . . .” She swallowed. “Why did you do that?”

  “What?” he asked. “Huh?”

  “That I . . .” She couldn’t look at him. It was fourteen years ago, and the shame burned as if it had been yesterday. “That I came on to you,” she finally said. “That I begged you to do it.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said we both wanted it, but I never said that. I wouldn’t have said that. I was the one pushing it, and we both know it. I knew I shouldn’t do it, and I did it anyway.”

  She searched his face. Hard, urgent, strong. Could he be lying?

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It’s over. But it wasn’t over, and it did matter.

  “And you don’t know why I left,” he said. “You really don’t know.”

  “No.” She was shaking now, and she pulled her bare feet up onto the couch and wrapped her arms around her knees for warmth. This house was too cold, she thought irrelevantly. She was always freezing in here. But it was hers now. She could turn the air-conditioning right off if she wanted. “It sounds like I’m not going to like what I hear.”

  “The age of consent in Idaho is eighteen. I was nineteen, and you were seventeen. Technically, that’s statutory rape.”

  She couldn’t breathe. “No.”

  “Yes. They breathalyzed me, too. And I’d been drinking.”

  “But you weren’t even driving when he found us!”

  His mouth twisted. “Think that matters? Sheriff came to see me in my cell after about four long hours. Because, yeah,” he said when she looked at him in horror, “I was in a cell. He told me that you’d given a statement that I’d coerced you. That your father would be going for a charge of sexual assault on a minor, and pushing for that DUI, too—which was the least of my worries. That I was going to prison unless I got out of town and didn’t come back.”

  “But I would never have said that.” It wasn’t only her body shaking now. Her voice was shaking, too. “Never. I’d never have done that. I told them over and over that you didn’t. I told my dad. But he said—”

  “Sounds to me like he said a lot of things. And I couldn’t think what to do. Couldn’t tell my mom, my sister. How could I have told them what the charge was? What was I going to do, ask my mom to put up bail money she didn’t have for a rape charge?”

  “Anthea would have stood by you. Always.” She didn’t know about his mother, but she’d bet the same thing was true. Vicki Lawson had always been cool and remote when Hallie had seen her. Now that Hallie knew what had happened to Vicki, she couldn’t believe Anthea’s mom had let her into her house at all. It said something about her that she hadn’t lumped Hallie together with her father.

  “I couldn’t tell them,” Jim repeated. “Anthea would’ve been bad enough, but Mom . . . I knew I couldn’t. I know that even more now.”

  “But she’s going to figure it out,” Hallie said. “The thing in the will about the sexual relationship? She’s going to guess.”

  “She might guess,” Jim said, “but she’s not going to know, because I’m not going to tell her.”

  “You can tell her. You don’t need to protect me anymore. I don’t want to get in your way.”

  Jim laughed, and she was so startled, she jumped. “You’ve always been in my way,” he said. “No hope for it.”

  She wanted to ask what he meant, but she didn’t. “So what did you do?” she asked, instead. “Then? You were going into the Army anyway.”

  The laughter was gone. “No, I wasn’t. That was my can’t-think-of-another-answer solution. I told the sheriff I’d leave, and then I drove up to the Army recruiting office in Spokane and enlisted. I didn’t have any money or any connections. I worked for your dad. Think anybody would’ve helped me out?”

  “And when I saw you—” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  It had been at the grocery store. She’d been with her dad, because he’d carried through on his threat. She hadn’t gone anywhere for the next weeks that he hadn’t taken her, and that day had been one of the worst.

  She’d been in the meat aisle, listlessly picking out burgers and steaks, when she’d turned to toss the packages into her cart and had seen Jim. She’d stopped with the steaks still in her hand and stared at him, hardly daring to breathe.

  He’d looked right through her, his eyes as cold, dark, and bleak as a pond in winter. And then he’d turned around and walked in the other direction.

  She’d known, then, that her father had been right. That all Jim had wanted was to take advantage of her, and to score on her father. That she’d let him treat her like trash, and now she was trash to him.

  “I was home again, waiting to ship out for basic,” he said now. “Keeping my nose clean, terrified the whole time that your dad would change his mind and I’d be in jail, wishing I could leave but with no place to go. And, yeah, I blamed you, but not as much as I blamed myself. I guess we both thought the wrong thing, because he made sure of it. Did he give you a hard time?”

  “Yeah. You could say that. But at least I didn’t have to join the Army.”

  “Turned out all right. He did me a favor, if you want to look at it that way. I know that’s what I’ve thought. But I don’t think he did you one.”

  “No,” she said. “Or yes.” She dropped her feet to the floor and ran both hands through her hair, blowing out a breath and trying to let the tension go with it. It was all so long ago. It was over. “Maybe. Who knows. I might not have had the courage to go my own way if I hadn’t seen just how horrible he could be.”

  Anthea came back into the room with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels in her hands, looked at the two of them, and propped her hands on her hips. “All right, you guys. I’ve had enough. Somebody needs to, A, help me out with this disgusting job, and B, tell me what the hell happened. Right now.”

  Hallie laughed in surprise, sneaked a look at Jim to see his serious expression lightening and a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, and set the rest of this history lesson gratefully aside.

  That was enough. Not everything needed to be out there. Not if there was no point. Not if it was over.

  TACKLING THE BEAR

  Jim was rattled. No doubt about it. He looked at Hallie and said, “What do you think?”

  He knew what he thought. He thought he wanted to keep talking to her. He wanted to tell her how good it had felt to be her first, and how bad it had felt when that deputy had been shining his light all over her, looking at her body and loving her embarrassment, while Jim had stood there in handcuffs and burned to beat him blind. He wanted to sit here with a bottle of wine and two glasses, have Hallie curl up next to him, put his arm around her to keep her warm, and kill the past along with the bottle. He wanted to watch her run her hands through her hair again and mess up her curls. He wanted to look down that white shirt. And then he wanted to take it off of her, lay her down, and do it all again. Do it right.

  But he didn’t, of course, because she didn’t want that. For millions of very good reasons, and because they had too much history, and too much of it was bad.

  Anthea must have seen how distracted he was, because she sighed in exasperation. “You’re hopeless, Jimbo. Ever hear of the twin bond?” Before Jim could tell her what she could do with her twin bond, she was telling Hallie, “And here Jim told me he wanted to come over to help you clean up, and to talk this over. The family stuff. Hah.”

  “Oh,” Hallie said. “Family stuff.”

  “Yep,” Anthea said. “We’re sort of al
l part of the same one, looks like, which makes your obvious previous encounter even more awkward, if that were possible.”

  “Oh, no,” Jim said. “Hell, no. Do not be telling her that. Don’t be using that word.”

  “What word?” Hallie asked.

  Anthea sighed. “He means ‘sister.’ And if you’re thinking you’ll get in her pants again,” she told her brother, “even imagining you could keep it secret, which is a pretty big stretch all by itself—you’d have your work cut out for you.” She ignored Hallie’s gasp of protest. “I’m just saying. She’s hopelessly shut down.”

  “I am not,” Hallie said. “I have relationships.”

  Anthea huffed. “Yeah. With dickless wonders. And then you can’t figure out why they don’t work. Not that Jim’s been doing any better lately. At least you go out.”

  Hallie straightened up and gave Anthea a pretty good glare while Jim was still groping for a response. “Stop,” Hallie said. “Just stop. I mean, thank you for coming over to help me clean up, but—”

  Jim stood up and said, “Den. Give me that stuff.” He grabbed the Windex and paper towels out of Anthea’s hands.

  Anthea said, “Excuse me? Wasn’t somebody going to tell me the story?”

  Jim said, “Well, it wasn’t going to be me.”

  “You don’t have to clean it,” Hallie said. “I’ll do it. I need to face it.”

  “Nope,” Jim said. Time to take this situation right back. “I’m doing the den.” And when Hallie opened her mouth, he said, “I’m two seconds away from telling you to shut up. I’m doing the den. Not you. Not my sister. Me. It’s not going to bother me one bit to do it, it’d bother me like hell to watch you do it, and that’s it.”

  “I didn’t ask you to watch me do it,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to come over at all and start bossing me around, or either of you to talk about who’s getting in my pants. I’ve had a really bad day, all right? And I know you both have, too, but . . . stop. Please. Just stop.”