Welcome to Paradise (29 page)

Mira stood in front of the bookshelf beside the giant fireplace in the big room that served as dining hall, lounge, and activity center for their little band of expelled homesteaders, looking for something exciting to read. It hadn’t been much of a surprise when she’d climbed into the van and found that they were headed back to the hunting camp. Where else could they have stayed so well concealed? She knew how important it was to keep the identities of those voted off a secret until the show aired. After all, she’d signed a contract promising not to reveal anything about her own performance, how long she’d lasted out here.

She’d spent most of the five days she’d been here with Hank and Zara, partly because she enjoyed their company, and partly to stay away from Scott. Had been for a hike with them earlier, in fact, but they were now back in their cabin for a “rest” that, Mira thought with amusement, probably wasn’t very restful. This adventure seemed to have given their marriage a new lease on life, and she was happy for them.

The problem was, there just wasn’t that much to do here. She’d taken her shower, changed into a skirt and sandals. That had taken all of half an hour. She could go into the kitchen where Alma was working with Lupe and Maria-Elena, but Alma tended to get grouchy when there were more than two extra people in her space. And although Mira had forged a tentative friendship with Melody during the blonde’s brief week on the homestead, Chelsea still didn’t have much use for her. Joining the two of them in their
mani
/
pedi
session, listening to their bored gossip about their lives in LA, wasn’t that enticing.

She bent down to look at the books on the bottom shelf. Maybe a thriller, she thought. Something to sweep her up and take her away. She’d been unsettled, even jumpy since her arrival, and it was getting worse. Partly, she knew, because the change was so sudden and complete. She’d gone from being busy every minute of the day, and exhausted every night, to inertia and inactivity, nothing to do but wait.

Being this close to Scott, too, had been even harder than she’d expected. She’d managed to avoid him most of the time, but ten people at a table still meant sitting within a few feet of each other at every meal. Another two days, she reminded herself, and another pair of contestants would join them. She forced herself not to hope it would be Gabe and Alec.

She’d idly wondered, before being voted off, whether the ejected contestants were kept updated on the happenings on the homesteads, beyond their weekly appearance at the Clearing for the vote. Perhaps, she and Kevin had speculated, they even got to watch some of the footage. Well, she knew the answer now. She had no idea what was going on. Maybe that was why she’d become so restless, had even started having trouble sleeping. Or maybe it was just that she missed Gabe so much, that she ached to see him and hold him again. Was he missing her too? Not as much as she was, she was sure. He had a whole lot more to do than she did, and he had his brother with him again.
Whereas she had . . . Scott.

As if she’d conjured him up by thinking about him, he appeared in the doorway, pausing at the sight of her. She grabbed a Tom Clancy novel she hadn’t read before.
All right, then.
Instead of relaxing in here on the couch, she’d lie on the bed in her cabin. Again.

“Running away?” he sneered as she waited for him to move out of the doorway so she could leave. “Can’t face me, can you?”

“No,” she said, trying to maintain her calm. “I’m not running. But I’m not interested in talking to you. Excuse me.”

He didn’t move, though. To get around him, she’d have to push past him, and she shrank from the idea of touching him.

“Too damn bad,” he said. “Because I want to talk to
you.
I have a few things to say, and you owe it to me.”

She didn’t think she owed him anything, but she wasn’t going to get out of this, so she braced herself and waited for what he’d say next, even as the tendrils of anxiety began unfolding in her chest.

“Let’s forget that you came on the show with me, and started screwing somebody else as soon as I wasn’t actually standing over you,” he began. “You think Daddy’s going to be proud of you? You think he’ll be thrilled to have his not-so-darling daughter looking like a slut on national television?”

“I didn’t have sex with anybody out there,” she said, trying to keep her voice firm. “You, or anyone else.” OK, she’d wanted to. And she’d done some fairly extreme making out. But Scott wouldn’t know about that until he actually saw the show. By that time, he’d be long gone from her life. “And I broke up with you, remember?” she added, reminding herself too. “That makes it absolutely none of your business what I do.”

“But that wasn’t all you did,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “You refused to follow my plan, even when I laid it out for you and reminded you of it every single week. You were over there with the group making the decisions, but did you work our alliances like I told you? Did you work on Melody and Martin, pull in Zara? Oh, no. That would’ve been too easy. No, you let all our best prospects go, left us out of options. That’s all on you. You’re the reason we’re here now, and not in line to win a million dollars. How strategic does that make you look? How
stupid
does it make you look?”

His voice had risen, and the cold tones he’d started with had turned to something much more heated. Mira glanced to her left, toward the kitchen door. She’d go out that way, she decided. Get Alma to walk her back to her cabin. Scott wouldn’t mess with Alma. She began to edge toward the door, Scott keeping pace with her.

“That alliance wouldn’t have worked,” she said. “Melody was always going to be out the first week. There was no other choice. Zara would never have gone along with anything else, and I don’t think even Martin would have. I would have made enemies for no reason.”

“You always think you know better, don’t you?” he sneered. “So why are we here, if you’re so
smart?
Tell me that!”

“Because your homestead hated you!” If he was going to abuse her, she was going to tell him the truth for once. “Because they were just waiting for a chance!”

“No,” he spat. “Because you
lost.
Because you don’t even know how to make a fucking
pie.”

“And how many challenges did you lose for your homestead?” she demanded, not even trying to get away from him anymore. “Every single one! That’s the only reason we stayed as long as we did, and you know it.
Because I did well, and they didn’t want to lose me.
Because I know how to get along with people!
Arcadia didn’t just want to vote you out
,
they wanted to
kill
you
. If you’d been on fire like I was, nobody would even have put you out!”

“That’s a lie,” he ground out, his expression darkening even further. “Alec hated me because he can’t stand the idea that anyone else might be better at something than he is. And he talked the others into voting us out.”

“You say that,” she said through trembling lips, “but it’s
you
you’re talking about.” She knew she wasn’t exactly making sense, but she didn’t have time to formulate her argument better. All the frustration and anger was rushing out now. “
You’re
the one who can’t stand anyone being better!
You’re
the one who lost the challenges! It wasn’t Alec, and it wasn’t me! It was
you!”

She was almost to the kitchen door now. And she was done. She wasn’t sure if it had felt good to say what she had, or horrible. But she’d said it, and now she was leaving. She turned to go, found herself yanked back again by Scott’s hand, tight around her arm.

“Let go! You’re hurting me!” She attempted to pull his hand off her, but he was standing over her now, almost spitting with anger, and suddenly, she was actually afraid.

“You’ve undermined me, and disrespected me, and tried to humiliate me since the day we got here,” he said, his voice raw, his face twisted with hatred. “You’ve made me look like a fool in front of millions of people. But you know what you’ve really done? You’ve shown what a piece of trash you are. Even your own parents don’t love you that much, do they? And you know why?
Because you’re not that loveable.
You don’t even know what it means to love someone, and to help
them
. It all has to be about you, every time, doesn’t it? Because you’re a selfish, whiny
loser.”

“‘Poor me,’” he mimicked savagely. “‘Everybody feel sorry for Mira, because she’s so, so pathetic.’ And when that doesn’t work, what do you do? You try to take down somebody bigger, just so you can feel better about yourself. Well, you’re not going to get away with it, not this time! You took on the wrong guy. I’ve never turned the other cheek yet, and I’m not about to start now. You are going
down.
”

Mira tried to pull away from him, fought the horror his words, the look on his face had aroused in her. She scrabbled for the doorknob, but his grip on her arm was too tight, and he yanked her back.

“I’m going to tell everybody,” he hissed at her. “I’m going to get on camera, and I’m going to tell the truth about you. You’re never going to get another job. You’re going to be a laughingstock all over the country by the time I’m through with you.”

“No,” she said, swallowing past the fear, the hurt, the anger, forcing the words out through the tightness in her throat. “No. That’s going to be you. You’re going to be the loser. You’re going to be the laughingstock. And the beauty of it is, I don’t even have to get on camera again for that to happen. Know why?
Because it’s already there for everyone to see.
You losing challenge after challenge for your homestead.
You refusing to listen to how to shoot a gun, and doing it wrong
,
every time.
Getting dumped on your butt trying to scare off some little deer. You getting drunk and getting thrown out of the dance after I dumped you.
And then, the crowning glory?
Your homestead voting you off.
All that’s on camera, and a whole lot more too, that I don’t even know about yet. But I sure will by the time the show airs, because they’re going to show all of it. And every single bit of that’s on
you.
It’s nobody else’s fault. It’s all you.”

She saw him raise his hand to her, tried to pull away, but couldn’t move, trapped by the hand on her arm, the wall against her back. Could only see the hand coming toward her face, and wait for it to hit her.

Gabe poured another bucket of water down the row of tomatoes, tried to fight back the surge of unease. He’d been restless all week, no matter what Alec said, how reasonable his arguments sounded.

“No news is good news, right?” his twin had said the evening before on their way back from the creek. “If anything had happened, we would’ve heard. And what
could
happen? There are eight other people with her.
Eight.
What do you imagine he could do in front of everyone?”

“I know,” Gabe said impatiently. “I know, I know. I keep telling myself all that. And it’s not helping. I’m worried.”

“Look, I know you’re all hot for her,” Alec said. “All right,” he amended hastily when Gabe glared at him. “You’re in love with her. Whatever. Same deal. But you need to chill.”

Gabe had had trouble sleeping all the same. He always slept like a log out here, the hard physical labor more effective than any sleeping pill known to man. But last night, he’d woken again and again, the sleep he had managed broken by dreams he couldn’t remember on waking. Just that he’d woken each time with a start, his heart pounding.

Now he went to the creek, refilled the buckets, carried them up again, trying to get a grip.

“I wonder what the challenge will be tomorrow,” Kevin mused, leaning on his hoe for a moment among the zucchini. “Something in here, I’ll bet. Some
kind of garden thing that men and women can both do
. Power weeding. Well, we’ve all had some practice with that.”

Gabe didn’t hear him. Stood stock-still, his buckets hanging from his hands, forgotten, and stared toward the house.

“Hey,” Kevin said. “You OK?”

Gabe looked
down,
saw the
goosebumps
forming on his arms. Felt the hair rising on the back of his neck.
 
Set down his buckets and walked quickly to the gate.

“What is it?” Kevin asked. He’d come along with him, Gabe realized, was looking at him with alarm.

“Alec,” Gabe got out. Started toward the cabin, broke into a run, outdistancing Kevin and Danny, hustling after them, his camera on his shoulder.

By the time he got to the cabin, Gabe was sprinting. He burst through the door, saw Rachel and Alec turning their heads towards him, their expressions startled.

“What?” Alec asked in alarm, potato in one hand,
paring
knife in the other. “What happened?”

“You OK?” Gabe asked on a gasp as Kevin came in behind him, Danny bringing up the rear.

“Of course I’m OK,” Alec said, exasperated. “Well, I cut my finger a little. Want to look at my boo-boo?”

Gabe tried to calm his racing heart. “I was sure . . .” he began. “I
knew
you were in trouble.” He stared at Alec in confusion, and his brother stared back at him, and each saw the truth in the dark-blue eyes looking into his own.

“Mira,” they said together.

“What about Mira?” Kevin asked.

“Something’s wrong,” Gabe answered. “Danny, we need to get out of here. Call somebody to take us out, right now.”

“Man, you can’t leave,”
Danny
protested. “It doesn’t work that way. You know that.”

“Call whoever it is
right the hell now
,” Gabe ordered in his best hospital voice. “Get me a ride. Something’s wrong back there, and I’m leaving.”

“No,
we’re
leaving,”
Alec
corrected him. “Call, Danny.”

“This is so against the rules,” Danny muttered. “I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

He asked a question over the two-way radio, turned back to Gabe. “Nothing’s wrong,” he told him. “Everything’s fine.”