Texas! Chase #2 (4 page)

"And wouldn't that have been a tragedy?" he asked sarcastically.

She stopped spooning in the custard. "Yes.

It would have been."

He looked ready to argue the point, but turned his head away instead and with annoyance, pushed back the bed tray. "Look,

Marcie, I appreciate—"

"What happened to Goosey?"

He looked her over carefully. The carrot-colored hair she'd had in kindergarten had mellowed to a soft red, shot through with gold. It was still naturally curly and had a mind of its own, but she had learned to arrange it artfully.

For years she had vainly tried to tan. She used to pray that all her freckles would run together. After several severe sunburns and weeks of unsightly peeling, she had eventually given up on that futile endeavor. She had decided that if she couldn't have the sleek, golden tan of beach bunnies, she would go in the opposite direction and play up her fair complexion to its best advantage. It now appeared almost translucent and was often remarked upon with envy by women her age who had basked in the sun for years and were now paying for their gorgeous tans with lines and wrinkles.

Eyeglasses had been replaced by contacts.

Years in braces had left her with a perfect smile. The beanstalk body had finally sprouted and filled out.

She was still strikingly slender, but it was a fashionable, not an unfortunate, slimness. The curves beneath her expensive and chic clothing weren't abundant, but they were detectable.

Marcie Johns had come a long way from the awkward bookworm all the other kids had called Goosey.

While the popular girls in her class had gone out for cheerleader and drum majorette, she had been captain of the debate team and president of the Latin club.

Her more curvaceous classmates had been crowned Homecoming Queen and Valentine Sweetheart; she had received awards for outstanding scholastic achievements. Her parents had told her that those were much more important than winning popularity contests, but Marcie was smart enough to know better.

She would have traded all her certificates of merit for one rhinestone-studded tiara and a crowning kiss from the president of the class,

Chase Tyler. Few realized that their class valedictorian pined for anything other than scholastic recognition. Indeed, who would have even thought about it? Goosey was Goosey, and no one had ever given her a second thought beyond how smart she was.

Chase did now, however. Summing up her appearance, he said, "Somehow the name Goosey doesn't fit a well-put-together lady like you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Now, as I was saying—"

"You were brushing me off."

Chase raked his hand through his unruly hair. "It's not like I don't appreciate all you've done, Marcie. I do."

"It's just that you want to be left alone."

"That's right."

"To wallow in your misery."

"Right again. Now, unless you're prepared to stand there while I come out of this bed with nothing more on than a bandage around my ribs, I suggest you say your farewells and leave."

"You can't be serious about leaving the hospital."

"I am."

"But the doctor hasn't even seen you this morning."

"I don't need him to tell me that I've got a few cracked ribs. Nothing a day or two in bed won't cure. I'd rather pass the time somewhere else, someplace where whiskey isn't so scarce."

He struggled into a sitting position. The pain took his breath. Tears sprang to his eyes.

He made a terrible, teeth-gnashing face until the worst of it subsided.

"How are you going to get to this 'place'?" she asked. "You can't drive in your condition."

"I'll manage."

"And probably kill yourself in the process."

He swiveled his head around and speared her with his eyes. "Maybe I should take a safe-driving lesson from you."

He couldn't have done or said anything that would hurt her more. She almost bent double against the assault of his harsh words. The blood drained from her head so quickly, she felt faint.

The second the words were out of Chase's mouth, his head dropped forward until his bruised chin rested on his chest. He muttered a litany of expletives. Beyond that, the silence in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife.

At last he raised his head. "I'm sorry,

Marcie."

She was nervously clasping and unclasping her hands as she stared sightlessly into near space. "I wondered if you blamed me for the accident."

"I don't. I swear I don't."

"Maybe not consciously. But deep down—"

"Not at all. It was a thoughtless, stupid

thing to say. I told you I'd make an enemy of you. I can't…" He raised his hands helplessly.

"Sometimes I get so furious about it, I

turn nasty and victimize whoever happens to be around me at the time. That's why I'm not very good company. That's why I just want to be left alone."

His emotional pain was so starkly evident, it was easy to forgive him for lashing out at her. He was like a wounded, cornered animal that wouldn't allow anyone to get close enough to help him. For the two years since Tanya's death he had been licking his wounds. They hadn't healed yet. Left alone they never would.

They would only fester and become worse.

Chase was no longer capable of helping himself.

"Do you insist on leaving this hospital?"

"Yes," he said. "If I have to crawl out."

"Then let me drive you home. To Milton

Point."

"Forget it."

"Be reasonable, Chase. Where will you go?

If you were staying with that clown and he's left for Canada, where will you go?"

"There are plenty of other rodeo folks I can stay with."

"Who might or might not take proper care of you." She moved closer and laid her hand on his bare shoulder. "Chase, let me drive you to Milton Point."

Jaw stubbornly set, he said, "I don't want to go home."

What he didn't know was that Marcie could be as stubborn as he. Her personality had an inflexible streak that few ever saw because she only exercised it when given no alternative.

"Then I'll call Lucky and discuss with him what I should do with you."

"The hell you will," he roared. He came off the bed, reeling from his weakened condition when his feet hit the floor. "Leave my family out of this. I'll manage just fine by myself."

"Oh, sure. You can barely stand up!"

Gritting his teeth in frustration and pain, he said, "Please go away and leave me alone."

Marcie drew herself up to her full height. "I

didn't want to bring up such a delicate subject,

Chase, but you leave me no choice. There's the matter of the money."

That took him aback. For a moment he merely stared at her blankly, then, drawing a frown, he growled,

"Money? What money?"

"The money it took to admit you to this hospital and get treatment. I didn't think you would want to be admitted as a charity patient, so I paid for everything."

"You what?"

"You had no insurance card in your wallet.

We didn't find a significant amount of money there either, so I footed the bill."

He gnawed on his lower lip, his agitation plain. "The entry fee was several hundred dollars, but if I hadn't put it up, I couldn't have ridden in the rodeo. I was low on cash."

"Then it's lucky for you I happened along, isn't it?"

"You'll get your money."

"That's right, I will. As soon as we get to

Milton Point you can withdraw it from your bank account or borrow it from your brother."

"Marcie," he said, ready to argue.

"I'm not leaving you to your own devices,

Chase. According to sources who know you well, you've been drinking too much. How can your body heal if you take no better care of it than that?"

"I don't give a damn whether it heals or not."

"Well, I do."

"Why?"

"Because I want my five hundred seventy-three dollars and sixty-two cents back." Having said that, she marched to the door and pulled it open. "I'll send a nurse in to help you get dressed." She lowered her eyes pointedly, reminding him that he was indeed naked except for the white swathe of bandaging around his rib cage.

"What about my truck?"

Marcie kept her eyes on the road. Pellets of ice were falling intermittently with the rain.

"I took care of it."

"Are we towing it or what?"

He had refused to lie down in the backseat of her car as she had suggested. But ever since leaving the hospital, his head had been reclining on the headrest. Her car was roomy and plush because she used it to drive clients around in. Soft music' was playing on the stereo radio. The heater was controlled by a thermostat. Chase was surrounded with as

much comfortable luxury as possible. His eyes had remained closed, though he wasn't asleep.

They were only half an hour into a two-and a half-hour car trip. Morning rush hour was over, but the weather, deteriorating by the minute, was making driving hazardous.

Precipitation had increased, a nasty mix of rain and sleet that frequently plagued north Texas during January and February. The Fort

Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo always seemed to herald it in.

Marcie had her eyes glued to the pavement just beyond her hood ornament and kept a death grip on the steering wheel while maintaining minimum speed as she navigated the labyrinth of freeways that encircled downtown

Dallas. Unfortunately it fell directly in the path between their starting point and their destination.

"I hired someone to drive your pickup to

Milton Point later this week," she said in answer to Chase's question. "By the time you're able to drive, it'll be there."

"You hired someone to drive my truck?"

"Uh-huh," she replied, concentrating on the eighteen-wheeler whizzing past her at a speed that set her teeth on edge.

"Still competent, aren't you?"

"The way you said that leads me to believe you don't mean it as a compliment."

"Oh, I commend your competency. It's just that most men are intimidated by self-sufficient, overachieving women." He rolled his head against the cushion so he could look at her.

"Is that why you never got married? Never could meet your match in the brains department?"

She didn't feel inclined to discuss her private life with him, especially since she detected a derisive quality to his seemingly harmless question.

"You ought to try to sleep, Chase. You're fighting the pain medication they gave you before we left."

"What do they call that?"

"Demerol."

"No, I mean when a woman wants to be a man. Some kind of envy. Oh, yeah, penis envy."

Despite the traffic and glazed highway, she looked across at him. His smug expression was intolerable.

She longed to come back with the swift and sure retort.

Marcie turned her full attention back to the road. She swallowed with difficulty. "Actually, Chase, I was engaged to be married once."

His snide smile faltered. "Really? When?"

"Several years ago, while I was living in

Houston. He was a realtor, too. We worked out of the same office, although he was in commercial real estate and I was in residential."

"What happened? Who broke it off, you or him?"

She evaded the direct question. "We had dated for several months before becoming engaged.

He was very nice, intelligent, had a good sense of humor."

"But you weren't compatible in the sack."

"On the contrary. We were very compatible."

He tilted his head to one side. "It's hard for me to imagine you in the sack."

"What a nice thing to say," she remarked, her tone implying just the opposite.

"I guess because you didn't date much in high school."

"It wasn't because I didn't want to. Nobody asked me."

"All you were interested in was getting straight A's."

"Hardly."

"That's what it looked like."

"Looks can be deceiving. I wanted to be beautiful and popular and go steady with a super jock just like every high school girl."

"Hmm. Back to the guy in Houston, why didn't you marry him?"

She smiled sadly. "I didn't love him. A week before the wedding I was trying on my gown for a final fitting. My mother and the seamstress who was doing the alterations were fussing around me. The room was filled with wedding gifts.

"I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to relate that bride to myself. The gown was gorgeous. My parents had gone all out, but it wasn't me.

"I tried to imagine walking down the aisle and pledging undying love and devotion to this man I was engaged to. And in a blinding instant I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't be that dishonest. I was fond of him. I liked him very much. But I didn't love him.

"So I calmly stepped out of the white satin

creation and informed my mother and the flabbergasted seamstress that the wedding wasn't going to take place after all. As you can imagine, my announcement created quite a commotion. The next few days were a nightmare.

All the arrangements, flowers, caterer, everything had to be canceled. The gifts had to be returned to their senders with notes of apology."

"What about him? How'd he take it?"

"Very well. Oh, at first he argued and tried to talk me out of it, passing off my reservations as prewedding jitters. But after we had discussed it at length, he agreed that it was the right thing to do. I think he realized all along that… well, that I didn't love him as I should."

"That was a helluva thing to do, Marcie."

"I know," she said with chagrin. "I'm certainly not proud of it."

"No, I mean it was a helluva thing to do. It took real guts to break if off at the eleventh hour like that."

She shook her head. "No, Chase. If I'd had any guts, I would have admitted to myself, before involving an innocent man, that it just wasn't destined for me to get married."

They were silent for a while, which suited

Marcie fine since the road had gone a stage beyond being glazed and was now like the surface of an ice rink.

Before long, however, Chase moaned and laid a hand against his ribs. "This is hurting like a son of a bitch."