Sunflower Lane (10 page)

“Let’s get you outta here, boss,” the ranch hand muttered, but Tobe jerked away and rounded on Annabelle again.

“You damned dirty little slut—”

A fist shot out like a cannonball and sent him spinning downward. He crumpled to the floor and lay there, dazed and moaning.

Wes stood over him, his face dark with anger, his huge fist still clenched even as a gasp of shock circled through the room.

“You okay?” His expression grim, Wes glanced at Annabelle.

She couldn’t speak. She was shaking too hard. She felt like she was going to throw up.

Those words. Those lies. They lived on. Still.

Clay was still bad-mouthing her, telling everyone those bald-faced lies . . . repeating those ugly words.

Skank. Slut.

She’d thought she’d left them all behind. All those names she’d been called. The whispers in the hallway she’d hoped had withered into silence, like barbed arrows buried in dust.

“Annabelle?” Suddenly Charlotte was hugging her.

“Honey, are you all right?” Tess’s face was pale. “Don’t let him get to you. Come on back to the table and let’s all have dessert.”

“Char, Tess . . . I can’t. I’m sorry. . . .” She felt shaky. Sick. Forcing herself to look at her friends, she drew a couple of deep breaths, noting the anger in Tess’s normally gentle blue eyes, the tension in Charlotte’s face.

“Annabelle, honey, it’s over now.” Tim tried to calm her with his gentle smile. “Let’s all go back and sit down awhile.”

She shook her head, choked with fury, shame, disgust, and a sickening sense of déjà vu.

For a moment all the whispers and laughter and snide locker room glances from long ago collided in her brain again. Then a deep, lone voice broke through the ugly swirl of memories.

“Annabelle. You want to stay—or go home?”

It was Wes. Speaking quietly.

All of the other voices and words seemed to fade into a void.

Except for his.

Her gaze fastened on his face. “Home,” she whispered.

She needed to get away from here. As she met his eyes, she realized there was no hint of anger in his face now—only something that might have been concern.

“Sure, let’s go.”

Charlotte dashed back to the table and snagged Annabelle’s handbag. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked, rushing back to Annabelle and studying her worriedly.

“Positive. But I need to get out of here now. I need to be with the kids. Char, Tess, I’ll talk to you both tomorrow.”

Tess squeezed her hand, her usually gentle eyes flashing with anger. “He’s a jerk, honey. Don’t let him get to you!”

“He didn’t. Not so much. Hey, don’t be upset. It’s not good for the baby.”

Tess’s cheeks were pale and she looked a little shaky, even with John’s arm snug around her waist.

“Go sit down,” Annabelle ordered. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I just need to go . . . home.”

Big Billy, who always looked so fierce but had the soul of a gentle giant, took a big step forward. “Sorry about the trouble, Annabelle. Next time you come in, your meal’s on the house. The kids’ meals, too, if you want to bring ’em.”

“Thank you.”

And then Wes’s strong hand was at her waist, guiding her to the door.

Outside, in the glow of a luminous June moon, he turned toward her.

“You look kind of shaky. How about you let me drive your car home? I can always get a lift back to town tomorrow for my truck.”

Still in a haze of anger and mortification, she handed over her keys without protest, aware that her hands were trembling. Silently, she slid into the passenger seat of her Jeep.

Wes didn’t speak as they left the lights of the Double Cross parking lot behind—or even after the darkened shops on Main Street receded into faint blurs in the rearview mirror. Not until he turned onto Squirrel Road did he glance over at her.

Annabelle was staring straight ahead. He couldn’t see any tears on her cheeks, but he was pretty sure she was holding herself together by a few slender threads.

“Don’t pay any attention to what that asshole said. Any man who goes down from one punch and doesn’t get back up isn’t much of a man at all.”

“He’s a worm. And so’s Clay. Lower than a worm. Whatever that makes him. Them.”

“Amoeba, maybe.”

“Amoeba works.”

“Didn’t we study amoeba in biology that year?”

All she remembered about biology was how Wes had performed the frog dissection by himself. She knew he was trying to lighten the mood, distract her, but her heart felt like it was clamped in a bear trap.

Wes tried again. “You handled yourself pretty well back there.”

“Thanks. I’ve had a little practice. Though right now I wish I’d taken him out with a knife hand to the side of his neck.”

In surprise, he glanced at her. “You’ve had training.”

“Some. Enough to do some damage and get away from an attacker if necessary.”

“Training for fun—or out of necessity?”

She looked straight ahead. Her voice was low. “Necessity. My ex-husband had a violent streak. He was the jealous type. When I finally left him, I knew I needed to learn how to protect myself in case he ever showed up.”

Wes scowled in the darkness. Driving down the deserted country road, he took in the enormity of what she’d just told him. “Sorry to hear that,” he muttered at last. “How long were you married to the bastard?”

“Less than a year. Eight months, maybe. The insane jealousy didn’t show up until a month after we got back from our honeymoon. Up until then, I didn’t have a clue.”

Shit, he hated to think of her with someone like that. He’d come across that type on the job, screwed-up bastards with sociopathic tendencies who wanted to own and control women.

“Has he given you any trouble since the divorce?”

“Some phone calls, the occasional threat. Especially if he was drinking. He showed up at my apartment once or twice when I still lived in Philly, before . . . before Trish and Ron had the accident and I moved back here. Luckily he’s still on the East Coast, and I’m not.”

“So, are you saying you feel safe?” He glanced over at her, and as she met his eyes, he read the mixed emotions there.

“Pretty much. Phone calls and text messages are easy to delete. And they stopped a while ago. So that’s good.”

Wes was an expert at reading body movements and voices. Despite her attempt at a casual tone, the tension in her shoulders was obvious and the undercurrent of pain in her voice unmistakable.

Steering around a jackrabbit crouching two feet into the road, he spoke quietly. “Did he ever threaten to come after you?”

“Not in so many words.” She hesitated. “He implied it once or twice. I think he’s bluffing, but after his last call about a month ago, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take some shooting lessons down the road. I’ve been meaning to get on that, not just because of him, but because we do live a fair distance from town, and we don’t even have any neighbors close by.”

“I’d be happy to give you some pointers.”

She turned to stare at him in surprise. “Th-thanks. I appreciate the offer. But . . . you’re doing enough. And I know you want time to visit your family, especially your grandmother. I’ll find someone to teach me—all I need to know is how to hit what I aim at. The trouble is, I’m a little nervous about having a gun in the house with the kids,” she admitted.

Wes wished he could get his hands on that ex of hers for about thirty seconds. She spoke calmly enough about what she’d gone through, but he knew that beneath her calm, steady exterior, there was an uneasiness that probably rippled just under the surface pretty much day in and day out.

Annabelle was plenty smart, and she had to know damned well that if that asshole ever showed up, she might have to protect those kids as well as herself.

“Sometime when the twins and Ethan are all busy at a friend’s house, I could give you a few lessons. Some target practice, if you’re interested. Of course, since we have a business arrangement, I’d want something in exchange.”

Her gaze flew to his face and she studied him warily. “What would that be?”

“Strawberry pie. A whole one.”

Her quick laughter warmed the darkness.

“That’s it?” she asked, sounding more relaxed than she had since they left the Double Cross.

“To help out a friend—you bet.”

A friend,
she thought.
Yes. That’s what we are . . . or are becoming, perhaps. Friends.

Silence ticked between them for a minute and then he spoke quietly. “I’ll have a word with Tobe when he’s sobered up. And I promise you he won’t bother you again.”

“That’s not necessary, Wes,” she said quickly. “It’s my problem. I don’t want him trying to cause any trouble for you.”

In the darkness she saw his grim smile. “I kinda hope he does.”

“Men.” She muttered the single word under her breath.

“Listen, Annabelle, Tobe’s not exactly the brightest bulb in town, but he was drunk tonight. Chances are he’ll be ashamed of himself by tomorrow. I doubt he’s going to try to cause trouble for either one of us. But what the hell is the deal with Clay? Maybe I should kick his ass. He still trash-talking you?”

She stared straight ahead at the dark curving road, illuminated by a silver moon.

“You know all about me and Clay. You two were friends.”

“You mean way back when?” There was a wry note in his voice. “I didn’t actually
have
friends back then. I wasn’t too interested in friendship in those days, didn’t really get what it was. I kept to myself, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Of course I noticed, but . . . you two hung out together. You were both on the wrestling team. A lot of the guys used to talk about me and I thought—”

She broke off. Had she ever seen Wes pointing or grinning at her in a group of guys? She couldn’t remember.

“I heard rumors,” he acknowledged, glancing at a fox lurking in the shadows beneath a tree. But his mind was on the past, those days in high school when he’d never had any close friendships. Those friendships hadn’t come until much later, until the DEA, when the bonds he forged with other agents in the field—life-or-death bonds, where partners and
teams depended on one another, trusted one another, had one another’s backs—had taken hold.

But in high school, he and Clay had hung out frequently, drinking and partying and looking for girls to pick up. They’d watched football games together, gone fishing in Sage Creek now and then with a couple of other guys, traded stories about girls they thought were hot.

And yeah, Clay had talked about Annabelle. He’d talked a lot of trash about her. And he wasn’t the only one. Annabelle Harper was easy—so most everyone said. She’d supposedly had random sex with Clay and Tobe and Matt, and oh yeah, Scooter—all on first dates. And with a couple of other guys, too, according to several who’d bragged in the locker room. You didn’t even have to take her to a movie, or buy her an ice cream cone at Lickety Split; all you had to do was get her alone, drive up to Cougar Rock or over to the drive-in, wait until the movie ended and the other cars were gone, and she’d get down and dirty in the backseat of a car or the bed of a truck in under a minute.

He’d never known whether everything or anything those guys said was true, but he hadn’t doubted much of it. Hadn’t really thought about it, either—it was just Annabelle’s reputation. And since he’d been dating Marissa steadily most of his senior year, Annabelle, with her long-legged, graceful beauty, slutty reputation, and lame attempts to keep up in biology class, hadn’t strayed very often into his thoughts.

“I didn’t pay a lot of attention back then to what Clay or anyone else said,” he admitted slowly. “I was sort of wrapped up in my own problems.”

There was silence for a moment before she spoke. “You mean your father?”

When he nodded, she felt her way along. “I knew there were issues. I heard some things about . . . all of that.”

His eyes were trained on the lonely road that had begun twisting upward at a steep angle as they neared the turnoff
to Sunflower Lane. “I can guess. That the two of us didn’t get along, that Hoot was hard on me, demanding, that he threw me out—”

“No. That you beat the crap out of him one night and then left home and didn’t come back.”

“Yeah. There was that.” Wes’s smile was grim. He shot her a quick glance. “Trust me, he had it coming.”

He sounded so cool, so calmly unrepentant. Her thoughts flashed to her aunt.

Aunt Lorelei’s affair with Hoot McPhee had finally been revealed years later and resulted in the destruction of both of their marriages. The mayor had filed for divorce from his cheating spouse and Diana McPhee had thrown her husband out of the family home.

Hoot had toughed it out and stayed on in Lonesome Way, while Aunt Lorelei had fled all the way to the East Coast, as far from Montana as she could get. But it wasn’t long before everyone in town learned that Lorelei Hardin wasn’t the only woman Hoot had been seeing.

There was a long list of others—both in and around town. And within a thirty-mile radius.

As Wes turned the Jeep onto Sunflower Lane, he had to ease up on the gas as the wheels bumped over the rough road. Through the Jeep’s half-open windows, Annabelle caught the scent of daffodils and larkspur from her garden, mingled with the scent of sage drifting down from the hills.

A night-light gleamed softly in the twins’ bedroom. Ethan’s room—once her mother’s sewing room—looked out over the back, with a view of the mountains, and she couldn’t see whether there was a light on there, but the lamp in the living room glowed.

Ivy Tanner was probably stretched out on the sofa, watching a movie or texting on her phone.

Everything was normal here, quiet. She drew a long breath, knowing she needed to compose herself before going
into the house. The mad spinning of her thoughts had eased, at least, and her heart had stopped racing.

Something about being here on Sunflower Lane always steadied her.

Megan, Michelle, and Ethan needed her. She was the only one left to care for them and she had to be strong for them. They were the focus of her life. She couldn’t let Clay Johnson or Tobe or anyone else distract her from being the best she could be for Trish’s kids.