Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “That’s pretty forgiving,” Zora had said.

  “Hey,” Rochelle had answered, squeezing Travis’s hand, “forgiving is what it’s all about. Somebody helped me realize recently that when you hang on to the bitter, it doesn’t hurt anyone but yourself. I think Lake tried to protect Stacy, and he definitely tried to protect me. He was wrong, and he was weak, but he wasn’t evil.”

  And if that wasn’t forgiving, Travis didn’t know what was.

  Now, the woman herself was coming out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

  “Hi,” she said. “I thought you weren’t coming by until tonight.”

  “Surprise. I wanted you to go look at something with me.”

  She studied his face, seeming to read the suppressed emotion perfectly. “You’ve got that look. This isn’t the car again, is it? Because I have a car.”

  He sighed. “It isn’t the car.”

  She had a lousy car, that was what, a car she’d bought with the pitiful insurance money and too much of her savings. He’d tried to argue that he’d been in the whole thing with her, that it had been half his responsibility that she’d gone into the river, but she’d just looked at him, her eyes narrowed, and said, “Nice try, buster.”

  All of a sudden, he got the answer to that one, and almost laughed out loud. His next trip to San Francisco? He was tacking on another visit to the Imperial Valley, he was buying his mom something she’d actually like, and then he was driving back in Rochelle’s car. Which was a black Mustang ragtop with a black leather interior. A down-home flashy muscle car for a down-home flashy girl. It was the car of his teenage dreams, and since she was pretty much the woman of them? That worked.

  And her own car could go to Stacy. That worked, too.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said. “What are you cooking up?”

  He grinned. He couldn’t help it. “Take a ride with me and see.”

  She hesitated a moment longer, then flipped the dish towel to Stacy, who was sitting at the dining table, pretending to work and actually listening hard, because she caught the towel in midair.

  “Right,” Rochelle said. “This a surprise?”

  “You could say that.”

  “My birthday isn’t for two weeks.”

  “Call it an early present. Or a present for me, maybe. Whichever.”

  “If it’s black underwear,” she said, “you’ve got no imagination.”

  Stacy snorted, and Travis grinned again. “Seems like I asked you sometime or other,” he said, “if it didn’t get old to be in charge all the time. If you’d ever thought about giving somebody else a chance.”

  He got a toss of the blonde head for that. Damn, but he loved this woman. That tough, and that tender? Yeah, he’d take her.

  “I’ve given you a chance, buddy,” she said. “And thanks for the slutty talk in front of my sister.”

  “No,” Stacy said, not even pretending not to listen anymore. “You’re my role model, Ro. Totally. I’m just soaking it up over here.”

  Travis waited, because he was a patient man, and after a minute, Rochelle sighed and said, “Now you’ve got me all curious. OK. You win.”

  “See, baby,” he said, “that’s why I love you. Because you tell me what I want to hear.”

  Rochelle was still going for tough, maybe just because Travis loved it, but the attitude was getting pretty hard to maintain.

  She rocked to a stop on the walkway. “That’s a tree. In your truck.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Good eyes. That’s what it is, all right. It’s a sour cherry tree, in fact. I hear they’re messy, but you can make pie, so I thought, what the hell. Real’s always worth it.”

  “Is that the surprise?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “It’s winter, though. Ground’s frozen.” He’d bought her a tree? She’d been wishing, she admitted to herself, for something else. She’d been wishing for something ridiculous.

  “You can keep them in a container over the winter. I looked it up. And remember that in-charge thing I mentioned?” He pulled open the passenger door. “Hop in.”

  “We going to take it somewhere else?” she asked, climbing into the truck. “All right. I’m officially confused.”

  “Good.” He was slamming her door, going to his side, and jumping in. That air of excitement right there, so strong she could nearly touch it. “It’s not a long ride. And I’ve got this speech planned for while we take it, so shut up, please, and listen.”

  “Well, if you ask that nicely, how can I refuse?” She didn’t want to admit how short of breath she was. How much her defenses were being stripped away, every last one of them.

  Please, she thought. Begging it of her life, maybe. She took what she was given, and she made the best of it, but this . . . she needed it so badly. She needed him. Please.

  He pulled to a stop at the end of the street, then made a careful right on Fourth. Not rocking the tree in the back. “Sometimes,” he said, “you meet the exact right person at the exact wrong time. And there’s no help for it, because you aren’t in the right place. That’s what happened to us, and I think it messed you up, and for that, I’m sorry.”

  He was heading north. Five blocks. Six. Toward his house, in the good part of town.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not. If I hadn’t met you then, and I hadn’t walked off that dance floor with you? We wouldn’t be here. Sometimes, mistakes are the only way to get where you need to go, and you were the best mistake I ever made.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “But then, you usually are.”

  He smiled at her, and she said, “You remember that,” and did her best to maintain.

  “And maybe once in your life,” he went on after a moment, swinging his truck left onto the wide, stately, maple-lined quiet of D Street, “if you’re luckier than you deserve, you meet exactly the right person at exactly the right time. Maybe you’re even lucky enough, and smart enough, and ready enough, to recognize it. And that’s what’s happened to me. I’ve met exactly the right person, and I know it.”

  He pulled to a stop in front of the house Rochelle had told him once was her favorite, the blue one on the corner lot with the tower on one side and the huge garden surrounding it. The one that had belonged to the Stevensons forever and ever, where you could see Margie Stevenson working for hours every morning of the year. And never mind that Margie was over eighty, or that Harry couldn’t help her anymore, not since his back surgery.

  “I met that person,” Travis continued. “And I met her at exactly the right time, too. For me.”

  He was climbing out, and she was climbing out, too. And he was lifting his tree out of the truck and walking toward the front gate. “And if you tell me it’s exactly the right time for you and put me out of my misery,” he said, “then I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to show you that you weren’t wrong.”

  “You . . .” She was still trying to process. “Where are we going?”

  “I bought a house,” he said. “I’ve never owned a house, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m hoping you’ll help me figure it out. Probably needs remodeling or something. I don’t know much about that, either, but I do know this really competent woman.”

  He stopped, she opened the gate, he led the way through with his tree, and she followed him. Helpless.

  “But . . . this house belongs to the Stevensons,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Ah. Well, seems they decided to sell. I managed to hear about it early, because I had this deal with a Realtor, you see. And the minute I took a look, I thought, this is it. So I did something impulsive. You could say that I jumped off that cliff with my eyes wide open. You could say that.”

  “You bought a house,” she said again. “But . . . San Francisco.”

  “Yeah.” He’d reached the huge weathered brick patio, now, and he set the tree down, opened the back door, and led the way into a sun porch. A sun porch that could be fill
ed with flowering plants and wicker furniture. Maybe. Someday. “I thought about choices A, B, and C. Stay here with you and give up my dream. Try to get you to move with me. Or leave you and do a long-distance deal. And then I remembered.”

  “Remembered what?” She was barely managing to speak now.

  “Choice D. To be continued. I thought, it’s a brave new world out there. Who says I have to be in San Francisco? A house this big’s bound to have room for a home office, don’t you think?”

  “Didn’t you . . . didn’t you even look at it?”

  “Barely. Mostly, I looked at the outside. I figured you could help me get the inside right. Maybe. Hopefully. So anyway, I thought I could do some back and forth. And maybe I could convince you to go back and forth a little, too. You might like San Francisco. It’s a nice place to visit, even if you don’t want to live there. Although, you know . . .” His voice didn’t sound entirely strong anymore. It was downright shaky, in fact. “Maybe you’d do some real back and forth with me at some point. I do have a condo. It’s got three bedrooms. One of them could even be a nursery. If a person was taking maternity leave, for example.”

  “You’re . . .” She put a hand to her head and tried to think. “I have to say . . . I have to tell you.” It was the hardest thing she’d ever said, and she said it anyway. “I don’t know if I can have a baby. I’m turning thirty-two, and I . . . I had a miscarriage before.”

  She tried not to let it matter, tried to hope it wouldn’t matter to him, but she had to say it, because they had to tell the truth, no matter what.

  He paused a moment, and she waited and tried to breathe. “Well,” he said, “we’ll give it our best shot, how’s that? We’ll try our best. Because, you know, trying’s all we’ve got.”

  She never cried. Never. But the tears were there, and they weren’t going to stay inside. “Travis,” she said. “I just—I just—”

  “I know this isn’t a diamond ring,” he said, starting to smile. Starting to light up, exactly the same way she was. Because this mattered to him exactly as much as it mattered to her. “I wasn’t sure I could buy the right ring, though. I was pretty sure I could buy the right house.”

  He took her hand, and then . . . It was an old-fashioned thing, but he was an old-fashioned guy. He dropped to a knee, right there on the bricks, and she was crying for real now. Nothing held back, and no holds barred. She was his, and that was all there was to it.

  “So, Rochelle Marks,” he said, “I’m asking you to marry me. I’m asking you to hold my hand and jump off this cliff with me. Eyes wide open.”

  “Arms wide open.” Somehow, she got the words out. And then she was pulling him to his feet, throwing herself into his arms, laughing and crying and burying her face in his neck while he stood, solid and strong, and held her. Held her so tight, like he’d never let her go. Because he wouldn’t, and she knew it, like she knew him. All the way down to the bone.

  “And I’m answering you,” she told him. “I’m saying, you bet your life. You can bet your heart, because I’m betting mine. I’m betting it forever. I’m saying yes.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Abuse of prescription drugs can seem harmless—and that’s the issue. In fact, prescription drug abuse is second only to marijuana as the nation’s largest illicit drug problem, and is especially severe in the western states. Young people are particularly likely to abuse prescription drugs because they are easy to obtain from friends or relatives, whether knowingly supplied or taken from medicine cabinets. These drugs are seen as legal, “not that serious,” and “safer” than nonprescription drugs, and many teenagers and young adults, like Stacy, view them as study aids.

  Some facts:

  Safer? No. More people die from overdoses of prescription opioids than from all other drugs combined, including heroin and cocaine. These drugs are especially dangerous when taken with alcohol, or when two or more types of drugs are taken together—the kinds of things Stacy does.

  Opioid pain relievers (the kind Stacy takes) attach to the same cell receptors targeted by heroin.

  In 2011, 52 million people in the US age 12+ had used prescription drugs nonmedically at least once in their lifetime, 6.2 million in the past month. One in twenty-two people aged twelve and over had used prescription drugs nonmedically in the past year.

  The most commonly abused prescription drugs are painkillers (5.1 million abusers), tranquilizers (2.2 million abusers), and stimulants (1.1 million abusers).

  Idaho has the fourth-highest rate of prescription drug abuse in the United States. Seven out of the ten states with the highest rates of abuse of these drugs are located in the West.

  Source: National Institute on Drug Abuse; National Institutes of Health; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

  Learn more:

  http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/infographics/popping-pills-prescription-drug-abuse-in-america http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/prescription-over-counter-medications

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people helped with the research for this book. Any errors or omissions, however, are my own.

  My thanks go to, in alphabetical order: The Honorable Barbara Buchanan, Rick Dalessio, Jake Druffel, Shane L. Greenbank, and Erika Iiams, for their help with country life, farming, drug-abuse issues, and legal issues. Thanks especially to Erika for the lentils.

  As always, thanks to my awesome critique team: Barbara Buchanan, Carol Chappell, Anne Forell, Mary Guidry, Leslie Harlib, Kathy Harward, and Bob Pryor, for helping whip the book into shape.

  And to my editors at Montlake Romance, Maria Gomez and Charlotte Herscher, for their assistance.

  Finally, to my husband, Rick Nolting, and my sons, James Nolting and Sam Nolting, for helping me believe that I could and would write this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Shoey Sindel

  Rosalind James, a publishing-industry veteran and former marketing executive, is the author of contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels published both independently and through Montlake Romance. She started writing down one of the stories in her head on a whim four years ago while living in Auckland, New Zealand. Within six weeks, she had finished the book, thrown a lifetime of caution to the wind, and quit her day job. She and her husband live in Berkeley, California, with a Labrador retriever named Charlie.