And there, on the floor between the landing and the bathroom door, lay my shirt, a crumpled pile of green cotton triggering the memory of how it got there. Images and sensations roared over me as I remembered Marc pressing me against the wall while he pulled the shirt over my head. The memory was still powerful enough to send tremors down the length of my body. My stomach clenched in dread and confusion. What the hell am I going to do about Marc?
The sound of running water came from the bathroom, and I froze, three steps from my shirt. Someone else was up.
The door opened, and I tensed. Jace stepped out. I stopped breathing. Completely.
At first, he didn’t notice me. The hallway was dark, and—like me—he’d probably thought everyone else was asleep. He smiled when he saw my face, but his expression wilted as his gaze traveled over my tousled hair and down the front of Marc’s shirt, to my apparently bare legs.
“Jace…” I began, desperate to explain, but no words came to follow his name.
He knelt to pick up my halter top. “You lost something,” he said, and the cold quality of his voice made it clear that he didn’t just mean the shirt. He threw it at me.
My shirt landed on my head, covering most of my face. I couldn’t bring myself to pull it down until I heard his bedroom door close.
Faythe, you coward. My shirt hanging limp from one fist, I glanced at Jace’s door, then at Marc’s room. I’d made a mistake. It was understandable, and a good one, as far as mistakes go, but nothing had changed. At least not for the better. I wasn’t home by choice, and I couldn’t stay to be with Marc any more than I could stay to be with Jace. One round of consolation sex wasn’t enough to change that, no matter how well it had worked. Or how good it had been.
My bladder pleaded with me to go into the bathroom, but I couldn’t do it. I had to get out before Marc woke up and wanted to talk. Or do anything else. I dropped my shirt on the floor and took the stairs two at a time.
Ethan’s obnoxious snoring greeted me on the bottom step. He lay sprawled on the couch, one arm dangling over the side. Great. There was nowhere for me to sleep. It didn’t matter, though, because I couldn’t have stayed in the guesthouse anyway. But I had to go somewhere.
My mind grasped at possibilities while my eyes roamed the room, and I knew what to do when I saw what lay unattended on the counter, amid a jumble of empty bottles, lime rinds, and sticky glasses: Jace’s keys. I hesitated for a moment, my fingers hovering over the Kentucky Wildcats key chain. Then I grabbed it and ran for the door. The keys were mine. I’d earned them.
I had a brief moment of doubt in the driver’s seat of the new Pathfinder when it occurred to me that Jace would never forgive me for taking his car, in spite of our bet, because I’d promised both him and Daddy that I would wait. But he’d never forgive me for sleeping with Marc either, so what did it really matter? Besides, I wasn’t running away. I just needed to drive around and think. I’d be back before anyone woke up, and with any luck, they’d never know I’d left at all.
As quietly as possible, I pulled past the house, relieved when the headlights shone on Owen’s truck, parked in his usual space. He’d made it home safely.
At the end of the driveway, I rolled down the window to push the button on the automatic gate opener. But then I hesitated again. Beyond the gate, a narrow paved road separated our property from a small patch of forest. Several miles down, the road intersected a highway, and from there, I could go anywhere I wanted. Anywhere at all.
I looked in the rearview mirror, watching the main house as I contemplated what to do. I’d taken that road before. Twice. Both times had been in the middle of the night, in a stolen car. Both times I’d been running away. Both times I’d been caught. But I couldn’t run this time, even just to think. I’d spent every moment since my homecoming trying to convince my family that I’d changed, that I was older and wiser. Sitting at the end of the driveway, freedom within sight, I realized that I couldn’t blame them for not believing me. If I wanted them to take me seriously, I’d have to prove I’d changed.
Leaving would only prove that I hadn’t.
Quickly, before my nerve failed me, I slammed the car into Reverse and stepped on the gas with my bare foot, backing carefully toward the main house. I was through running. I would face the consequences of my actions like the adult I’d claimed to be.
But as the front gate grew smaller in the windshield, my resolve began to falter. I was still determined to confront my fears—just not yet. I still needed to think. I couldn’t face Marc again without knowing what I was going to say to him. Not to mention Jace.
Halfway down the driveway, I noticed the ruts Owen’s truck had carved through the grass on repeated trips to the barn. I stopped the Pathfinder, staring at the outbuilding in the middle of the eastern field. The barn. I hadn’t been in the barn in ages. We’d played there as children, all five of us. Six, if Jace was visiting. We didn’t have animals, but we always had plenty of hay until Daddy sold it as winter feed. So during the summer, we’d play in the barn, using the bales as forts, castles, wrestling mats, tables and anything else our fertile imaginations could envision.
Eventually, the others outgrew our hay bale playground, but I never did. In a houseful of boys, I’d needed someplace quiet to think and to read. Even years later, the smell of fresh hay brought to mind hours spent in the company of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. The barn had served as my refuge once, and it would do so again.
Using the side-view mirror for guidance, I backed past Owen’s ruts and shifted out of reverse, then turned onto the dirt path, already imagining the smell of hay. I pulled to a stop twenty feet in front of the barn, leaning over the steering wheel to stare out the windshield for a moment in silence. Nothing had changed. It was as if time stood still on the ranch, like we lived in some kind of weird warp zone of nostalgia.
I opened the car door and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition and the headlights on. I wouldn’t be able to see much of anything, otherwise, unless I wanted to Shift—which I did not. Serious thinking was best done in human form, with no feline instincts to get in the way.My hand was on the knob of the small corner door, about to pull it open, when my bladder gave me my final warning. If I didn’t find a restroom soon, or at least a clump of brush, I was going to embarrass myself and ruin a perfectly good pair of shorts.
Desperate for relief, I searched the dark for somewhere appropriate to relieve myself. Several yards away stood an apple tree, short but healthy and beautifully formed. It wasn’t my first choice but I no longer had the luxury of being picky. I headed for the tree in an all-out sprint, and almost fell twice as my feet slipped in the cool morning dew.
The thin tree trunk didn’t provide much cover, but with no one else around, I was only hiding from my own humiliation.
With the pressure on my bladder relieved, I took my time sauntering back toward the Pathfinder, mentally composing an apology to Marc. Goodness knows I’d done plenty of that in the past. Especially that infamous summer five years earlier.
Two years before that, when I was sixteen and becoming seriously interested in boys from school, my mother and father had begun to push me toward Marc. They pushed, and I resisted, and they pushed some more. Eventually, they pushed too hard, and I actually fell—right into his bed. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as they got what they wanted, they reversed course, telling us to slow down, that we had our whole lives to get to know each other that well.
From then on, they’d tried to keep us chaperoned, at least until I was old enough to get married, the summer I turned eighteen. But by then, as I watched my classmates apply to college and choose their future careers, I’d realized what I would be giving up for Marc: my entire life. So, the night before our wedding, I’d snuck out of the house with my savings and taken Ethan’s then-new convertible for a two-week journey of self-discovery, hunting when I was hungry, and sleeping whenever and wherever the opportunity arose.
They’d found me, of course, and because I’d still loved him, the apology I owed Marc was the single hardest thing I’d ever had to compose. But this new one came in a close second.
I was less than a foot from the double barn doors when the headlights flickered to my left. Concerned for Jace’s battery, I turned away from the barn, squinting into the bright light as I veered toward the Pathfinder.
Metal creaked in front of me, and the lights sank, then bobbed, blinding me all over again. Startled, I jumped, my hand moving automatically to shield my eyes. They focused reluctantly. I froze, my mouth suddenly dry.
A man leaned against Jace’s grille, his features indistinct in the wedge of darkness between the two cone-shaped beams of light. Had Jace heard me start his car? With my eyes crippled by the headlights, my nose came to the rescue. One whiff of the dew-scented, early-morning air told me exactly who I’d let sneak up on me.
Sean.
Cold sweat broke out behind my knees as I sidestepped to my right, out of the blinding glare. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I made out his face, confirming the identity his scent had already given me. Sean had a rather prominent nose and short, light brown hair, crowning a slender build that almost made him look frail. But he was a tomcat, and no cat was frail. Sean could probably throw your average muscle-bound creep through the wall and into the next room, and the creep wouldn’t realize his mistake until he was already airborne.