Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  Stacy’s eyes slid away, but when Rochelle didn’t move, just kept staring at her, she finally said, “At the casino, all right? When I went for my twenty-first birthday last month. I was with five other girls, and he could have gone after any of them. He’s super hot. But he went for me, because he said I had the sweetest face. So that proves it.”

  “Proves what? That he was looking for somebody he could sweet-talk into bed? Bet you had the biggest boobs, too. And he didn’t get you help last night.”

  “Nice. Thanks. And yes, he did. He brought me home, didn’t he? He must have, because I sure didn’t get myself there. And nothing happened to me. Seriously, Ro. I’m OK.”

  Rochelle wanted to say that guys you met in casinos weren’t necessarily the best bets, but she didn’t have much room to talk. “So he does have a job? He’s not skipping that rung?”

  “Yes. He’s got a really good delivery job, picking up lab samples from all around here, plus Union City. All right, he isn’t all the way up the ladder yet, but he’s going to get there. He invests. He’s got a plan. He’s got a great rig, too. And you know, sarcasm is the lowest form of humor.”

  “Thanks. I’ve made a note. Oops. I did it again.” Rochelle grinned at her sister, and Stacy smiled back. Reluctantly, but still.

  A driver would be facing random drug tests. Maybe it had just been a one-time deal, or the wrong party. Besides, Stacy had a point that she’d gotten home safe. Rochelle had made sure the hospital checked her out to make sure nobody had messed with her. That had been a relief. A guy who was all the way over onto the Dark Side wouldn’t have passed up that opportunity.

  “Yeah,” Stacy said. “Don’t worry, Ro. I’m sorry you had to get up and everything. I don’t know why Mandy even called you.”

  That made Rochelle pause in her packing. “Wait. You don’t remember calling me?” The suspicion that she’d been glad to set aside last night came roaring right back. “Stace. You called me. You said you were scared, and you asked me to come get you.”

  “I did?” Stacy looked truly rattled at last. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You said you were at ‘my place.’ At least I think that’s what you said. You weren’t too clear. I was out there looking for you when Mandy called, and it looked like Lake had been having a party. Is that where you were?”

  Stacy shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  “And you don’t remember who gave you the pills?” If Stacy had been at Lake’s . . . but Lake hadn’t even been there.

  Her ex had done plenty of drinking and smoked plenty of weed, but he’d never taken anything harder. At least as far as Rochelle knew. That would’ve cost even more money, though, so she’d have known. She had a feeling that those kinds of pills didn’t come cheap.

  Stacy took a cardboard box into the bathroom, and her voice came drifting back to Rochelle. “No. I don’t remember. Anyway, it was one time.”

  By nine thirty, Stacy was moved in, Rochelle had sacrificed a few too many dollars and a few too many calories on burritos for dinner, and she was back in her bedroom, the fan trying in vain to cope with today’s ration of hot air. She picked up the phone. She didn’t want to, but she had to know what was going on.

  Again, she dialed the number from memory. Two rings, three, and she was wondering if she could manage to leave a civil voice mail message when she heard the flat, “What.”

  “Hey, Lake.” She tried for brisk and matter-of-fact. “How you doing?”

  “How do you think I’m doing? It’s harvest. Unless you’re calling to tell me you want to come over, get naked, and show me you remember what else that mouth of yours is for, I don’t want to hear it.”

  She held the phone away from her ear at that. “Wow,” she finally said. “That’s classy. Thanks.”

  “No, that’s what you get when you come barging into my house in the middle of the night without an invitation.”

  “Yeah,” she said, swallowing her anger, because there was no point. This was the man who’d promised to love and cherish her. Well, she didn’t love him anymore, either, so that made two of them.

  This was the worst part of ending a marriage. The bitter taste it left in your mouth, and the bitterness you sensed in his. “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” she said. “Was my sister there last night? She came home in pretty bad shape.”

  “I don’t know. It was a big party.”

  “You didn’t notice if my sister was there,” she said flatly.

  “I don’t keep track of your sisters and who they run around with. Just like I don’t care what you do, or who you do it with. You want to hang around with those stuck-up Jacksons and their bitch wives? You go right on ahead.”

  She had to stop and blink for a minute, her fatigued, fuzzy brain trying to process all that. Well, it made sense. The farmer Lake worked for wasn’t anywhere close to the Jackson brothers in the farming world, and as for Lake himself? He was on a whole different level. “I don’t care” was easy code for “It’s bugging the hell out of me.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me,” she finally said.

  “Bingo. If you’re through being smart, maybe you’ll hang up and let me go to bed. I’ve got a job to go to tomorrow that doesn’t involve sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office, and it starts early.”

  PARTNERS

  Wednesday. The man was thinking about breaking for a snack, considering his options, when the phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced at the number.

  “Yeah?”

  The voice on the other end was low, as always. “I heard you ran into some trouble the other night.”

  He stuck the phone under his chin and said, “I’m working. I’ll call you later.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ve got some girl threatening to go to the cops. You’ll tell me about it now.”

  “Who told you?” His hand clenched tight.

  “Never mind who told me. Just know that I’m checking up on you.”

  “We’re partners. Partners trust each other.” It wasn’t true, of course, and he filed the information away to deal with later. All his partner had to do was scribble notes on little pads, but people always had to get tricky, to think they should be in charge even when they didn’t have a clue how to be.

  The voice didn’t bother to answer that. “If somebody’s dropped a dime, we need to make a plan.”

  “So you know, it’s ridiculous for you to be saying ‘dropped a dime.’ You’re the respectable end of this operation. Don’t say ‘dropped a dime.’”

  “What. Is. Going. On.” The voice was flat. “Tell me, or our whole deal is over as of now. I can stop this anytime.”

  “You can. But you won’t. You’re too used to the money. And I’m not telling you, because trust me, you don’t want to know. You can take it that the problem’s solved.”

  “You sure?”

  “You could say it’s solved permanently. And I’ve got to go.” He ignored the quack at the other end and hung up.

  Another thing to deal with. Later. Well, nobody had ever said entrepreneurship was easy. Lots of people had ambition, and most people never made it, because you had to be strong and smart and ruthless to make the big bucks. Luckily, he was all three. It had taken him some years of wasted time to find his true calling, but he’d found it now.

  BAD BOYS AND CAKE POPS

  It was Saturday morning, and Main Street was closed for five blocks for the weekly farmers’ market. Rochelle had dragged Stacy out of bed at nine to shop, and her sister wasn’t one bit happy about it.

  “Great! Green beans,” Rochelle said chirpily. “And look! The pork guy’s here. Pork chops and green beans for dinner tonight.”

  Stacy stared at her, and Rochelle felt like a cheerleader. Give me a P! Give me an O! PORK!

  “Too perky, huh?” she asked her sister.

  “Just because I should still be in bed, and it’s already about ninety degrees, and we d
idn’t even drive? Oh, no. Not so much.”

  “It isn’t ninety. It’s barely eighty. And walking’s good for my thighs.” And you got in at three this morning, and you look like something the cat dragged in, she didn’t add. Rochelle handed the cashier a five and stuck the plastic bag of beans into her shopping bag. “Did you have a good time last night?” she asked, as casually as she could manage, moving over to the pork booth. “What did you guys do?”

  “He took me on a helicopter ride, and then we had a picnic in a vineyard,” Stacy said.

  “Sarcasm’s the lowest form of humor. I feel compelled to mention that. And, yeah. Right. He took you to a bar, and then you went back to his place. You know, if he really likes you, he should at least be feeding you. Just pointing that out.”

  Stacy heaved a sigh. “I don’t want a steady, considerate man who’s a good provider. I’m twenty-one, not forty. I’ve never had a really hot guy. I don’t look like you. I’ve got one now, though, and he’s so . . . exciting. Didn’t you ever like exciting guys?”

  Stacy’s mood zoomed up and down so much, it was like living with a yo-yo. Last night, before she’d gone out, she’d been bouncing off the walls, but not today.

  “Honey,” Rochelle said, picking through the cooler full of pork chops and selecting a package, “I was the bad-boy magnet. If there was a bad boy anywhere in the vicinity, he made a beeline straight for me, and I said, ‘Hi there, big boy. Come on in.’ That’s how I know. You’re getting the voice of experience here.”

  “But Lake wasn’t that bad,” Stacy said.

  “Before Lake. And trust me, Lake got bad enough.” Rochelle hadn’t felt the need to humiliate herself by sharing all the details with her sister. You could look strong, or you could look weak. She preferred strong.

  “Well, yeah,” Stacy said, “I know you got divorced, but . . . I don’t know. He was always sweet to me.”

  “Sure, he could be sweet. That’s the appeal of the bad boy. Not that they’re bad all the time, because who’d want that? Because they’re wild and crazy and rough around the edges, but they love you, because you’re special.”

  She ought to know. Lake had called her the night before. The old formula didn’t work on her anymore, but it had rattled her just the same.

  “Hey, Ro,” he’d said, sounding like the easygoing Lake she’d used to know. “I just wanted to say . . . hey, sorry about the other night.”

  That’s OK, she didn’t say, because it hadn’t been, and because apologies came too easily to Lake. Lashing out when he’d been drinking, then the rush of making up the next day. Which had once been exciting, and then had just been exhausting. Young girls, the kind of girl she’d used to be, might think it was dramatic and sexy, but who wanted to live like that when they were thirty? Not her, anyway.

  “I know,” he said. “It was over the top. What can I say, I’m a mean son of a bitch sometimes.”

  “Well, yeah.” Except when he wasn’t, like now.

  “It was a crappy day,” he went on. “The AC went out in the combine, if you can believe it. And the night before, everybody had been over at the place, like you saw, and it went too late and too loud. And you know . . . harvest.” The weeks when farmers worked fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, and their hired men did, too. “I didn’t even know you’d been there until the next day. You came by after I’d crashed, I guess. And I took it all out on you. Old habits die hard, huh?”

  “That’s gracious.” She knew she sounded stiff. Unless you’re calling to tell me you want to come over, get naked, and show me you remember what else that mouth of yours is for, I don’t want to hear it. You could only kick a person in the teeth so many times before they wised up, though, and she’d reached her limit a while back.

  “Maybe I’ve changed,” he said. “You might be surprised.”

  “That was the new you?” She knew she shouldn’t get back into it, but she couldn’t help it. “Then I’d say—you haven’t changed enough.”

  It hadn’t been a great conversation, and neither was the one she was having now with Stacy. “But you don’t really know Shane,” her sister was arguing, sounding exactly like Rochelle herself about six or seven years ago. “Just because you picked bad guys doesn’t mean he’s one. And maybe I don’t want to learn from your experience, anyway. Maybe I want to learn from mine. Maybe I need to make my own mistakes.”

  That’s good, because that’s where you’re headed. Rochelle bit her tongue on the words and got in line to pay for her pork chops.

  “Last year was awful,” Stacy said. “Is it so wrong to have some fun this year?”

  It was a good point. Her little sister had broken up with her boyfriend at the beginning of the school year, and Rochelle didn’t think her love life had gone too smoothly since then, either. To cap it all off, she’d taken a bad fall ice-skating in March and had suffered a broken ankle that had taken its sweet time healing. But it was also true that through all that, she’d managed to hang on to the scholarship that was supposed to get her through that pre-med degree. Stacy had always been smart, always on the right path.

  “As long as you keep up with school,” Rochelle said, abandoning the rest of her efforts for the time being. “And get a job.”

  Stacy shook her head irritably. “You’re worrying for nothing. I’m doing it.”

  Not yet, Stacy wasn’t. Besides, Rochelle had finally met Shane the night before, and he hadn’t done much to dispel her anxieties. Black hair, piercing blue eyes, a lean, wiry build, and a barbed-wire tattoo peeking out of the edge of his T-shirt sleeve. And then a “Hey, Rochelle. Nice to meet you,” a not-covert-enough sweep of her figure, and a slow grin that had made her want to slap him.

  She’d known a lot of Shanes. They were dark and dangerous, they raised your heart rate, and they were nothing but trouble.

  She wanted to say all that to Stacy, but she knew how effective it would have been if somebody had tried to say it to her. So instead, she said, “Maybe you’re right. Could be that everybody needs to make their own mistakes. I know I made plenty. Tell you what. Go grab me another pork chop. We’ll invite him over tonight, and I’ll be prepared to change my mind.”

  “He’s not going to want to have dinner with my sister,” Stacy said.

  “No? Maybe he’d be flattered to be asked to meet your family.” Or maybe he’d be thinking that this was his night for a sister sandwich. He looked like exactly that kind of guy. Rochelle would settle for him staring at her chest enough that even Stacy would notice. “Why don’t you invite him and see what he says? You’re telling me he’s not a bad guy. Give him a chance to show both of us he isn’t.” Maybe all it would take was one dinner. Maybe Stacy actually was smarter than Rochelle. She was going to be a doctor, after all.

  Stacy didn’t budge, and Rochelle added, “I promise to grill the meat and not him. I’m your sister, not your father.”

  “Yeah? Not how it seems,” Stacy said. “Anyway, he’s busy tonight.”

  “Really? Saturday night? How much do you actually see this guy?”

  “Every week, sometime. What does that matter?”

  “That doesn’t sound like a boyfriend.” Rochelle knew she shouldn’t say it, but she did anyway. That sounds like a fuck buddy. Or just a user, were the things she didn’t say, because she was at the front of the line, and she was trying for “classy” these days.

  Stacy had colored up. “You don’t know anything about him. Maybe you should worry more about your own love life and less about mine. I’d rather be in love and not have it work out than not have anybody at all. Ever.”

  The pork guy had obviously heard that, because he looked up sharply, then wiped his face clear of expression. He took Rochelle’s money and handed her the change, and she turned away, trying to ignore the stab her sister’s words had given her.

  Stacy muttered, “Sorry. But geez. You don’t know.”

  Rochelle considered explaining that a bad guy wasn’t actually better than no guy
, but Stacy was right. Some lessons, a woman had to learn for herself.

  She shook it off, though, and headed back out into the stream of pedestrian traffic along the crowded street. She had to step aside for a family—a mom pushing a chubby, solemn baby in a stroller, a dad with a three-year-old girl on his shoulders clutching two fistfuls of her father’s hair—and her heart twisted in spite of herself.

  “Well, hey.”

  It was Travis, right there behind the family. He was laden with plastic bags, sauntering along in Levi’s, a short-sleeved Western-style shirt, and a straw cowboy hat. She’d seen him in the office a couple times during the week, but she’d kept it ruthlessly professional, and he hadn’t pushed it. Which was probably proof that he hadn’t been that interested after all. She didn’t want to admit that she’d been a tiny bit disappointed by that. She was full of mixed messages, even to herself.

  Now, she cast an eye over him. She couldn’t help it, because his shoulders were still broad, his hips were still narrow, and his legs were still long. And he was still that thrilling eight inches or so taller than her five seven. Color her shallow. Stacy wasn’t the only one. And as proof that she wasn’t interested, her reaction was a dead loss.

  “You gone native?” she couldn’t help asking.

  She saw a quirk at the corner of that delicious mouth. “Now, why would you think that?”

  “Cowboy hat. Et cetera.”

  “It’s hot.”

  “You’re from California.”

  “Well, you got me there.” He looked at Stacy, who was, Rochelle realized, staring back at him with interest. “Hi. I’m Travis.”

  “Stacy Marks.” Sounding perkier than she had all morning. “Rochelle’s sister.”

  “Ah,” Travis said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Rochelle made a reluctant introduction and said, “We were just finishing up.” She ignored the outraged glance from Stacy and the muttered, “Oh, now we are.”

  Travis didn’t comment, just walked along with them past another booth crowded with students buying cake pops, something Rochelle was giving a big wide berth to. He gestured beyond the cake pops to a huge display of flowers in the next booth. “I just realized I never sent you flowers. Maybe now’s the time. What’s your favorite?”