Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(2)
Author: Hope Ramsay

Clay turned away. “Hey, Ray, you got a minute?”

Ray ducked his head in that funny little tic that had been there ever since the accident senior year. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

Clay jerked his head. “In private.”

Ray turned toward the little gal. “You stay right here, April. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

The girl nodded, and Clay got the feeling that she was happy to be rescued. Like she had maybe figured out Ray was playing a few cards short of a full deck.

Clay pulled Ray down to the end of the bar and put his arm around his shoulder. “Listen, Ray, I’m your oldest friend, right?”

Ray nodded.

“Got you fixed up with my uncle Pete at the hardware store, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, Clay.”

“Bailed you out with my brother Stony that time when you busted up the place?”

Ray kept on nodding.

“Helped you out with Mr. Polk down at the bank when your momma got sick.”

“Yeah, Clay, I know all that.”

“So you know I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“No, Clay, you wouldn’t ever lie to me.”

“Look, Ray, that little gal isn’t April.”

Ray rolled away, then turned and squared up his body. “She is, too. Look at her.”

“April is a photograph of a girl. This isn’t her. This is a girl named Mary, who’s new to town. I’ll bet she came on the nine-thirty bus from Atlanta.”

Ray wet his lips. His fists curled up. “Don’t you say that, Clay. She’s April. Look at her.”

Clay shook his head. The last person in the world he wanted to fight was Ray Betts. He hated fighting in general, since it messed up his hands. But fighting Ray would be like fighting with one of his brothers.

“Look—” Clay started to say.

“Hey, Ray,” Dash called from his place by the bar.

Ray turned and relaxed his hands a fraction. “Yeah?”

“You wanna go down to the high school and shag some balls?”

“Really?” A slow smile filled Ray’s face, and Clay breathed a sigh of relief.

In Ray’s injured brain, this invitation from Dash Randall was like being asked if he wanted to go hang out with God. Ray loved baseball, and since Dash had once played it professionally, Dash had become one of Ray’s personal heroes.

Dash gave Clay a meaningful and surprisingly sober glance. Maybe the rumors were true, and Dash was on the wagon these days. Although why a man on the wagon would spend time in a bar was kind of a mystery. Well, even if it wasn’t true, he owed Dash a favor for this.

Dash leaned over and collected an aluminum cane. He stood up, favoring his bad leg. “Yeah, Ray, I mean it. But you’ll have to do all the running since my knee isn’t up to it, yet. C’mon, I’ll even put the top down, and we can cruise over to the Tastee Freeze afterward.”

“Gee, Dash, that sounds like fun,” Ray said.

Dash winked at Clay as he led Ray out of the bar. Disaster had been averted.

But when Clay turned back toward the little gal, his gut tightened up like a warning. Was she desperate or just looking for some action? He had a feeling it might be a little of both.

And he’d just sent his competition packing.

Two hours later, Jane picked up the little slip of paper and read her bar tab: Six dollars for three Cokes. It might as well have been a hundred dollars. She didn’t have the cash to pay it—unless she dug deep in her purse and found a dollar in change and added it to the five-dollar bill in her wallet. Then she would be officially broke.

She should have nursed a single Coke all night. She should have taken steps to get a credit card, years ago. But she hadn’t done either of these things. The first because it had been years since she had been this poor. The second because getting a credit card was risky, given her background.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and told herself she wasn’t going to cry. Her attempt to find someone seminice to buy her dinner had flopped. There was just the fiddler who had run all the seminice guys off like some kind of reverse bouncer.

That man had spent the last two hours boring a hole in her back with his silver-eyed stare. About an hour ago, she had given up trying not to look back.

Jane could parlay this into something, if she wanted to. But she had to remember that he was not going to rescue her from her current situation. She needed to fix her own life. And, right now, staying away from a bad boy seemed like a good first step.

But then all her other choices were worse. She couldn’t sleep in the public park tonight—assuming, of course, that Last Chance had a public park. But even if it did have one, the weather report on the television above the bar said a hurricane was bearing down on the South Carolina coast. It wasn’t a big hurricane by Katrina standards, but even so, everyone in the bar was talking about torrential rains starting sometime after two in the morning.

Jane had hoped they might have a hurricane shelter open where she could blend right in, like a refugee or something. But there wasn’t any kind of evacuation going on—no doubt because the hurricane was making landfall a hundred miles away near Hilton Head Island. She didn’t have many other options in a small town like Last Chance.

Jane stole a glance up at the fiddler, and heat sizzled through her. The Cosmos and her own hormones were against her. She shouldn’t do this. This was a mistake.

She turned away and stared down at her bar tab. Behind her, the lead singer signed off for the night. Someone punched up a bunch of songs on the jukebox.

Well, first things first. She needed to pay the bill. She dug deep into her purse, drawing out a handful of pennies and nickels, and started counting. In the background, the jukebox played Tumbleweed’s new country single…

Feel the rush of my breath

Feel the heat of my hand…

Heat crawled up her backside as the words of the song suddenly made themselves manifest. The fiddler had snuck up on her. He put one of his ginormous hands on the bar, leaned his big body in, and slapped a ten-dollar bill down on top of her tab like he’d been counting the number of Cokes she’d drunk.

He turned toward her, his unreadable wolf eyes shaded by the brim of his Stetson. “You want to take this somewhere else?” he asked in a blurred drawl. Her insides clutched and burned.

She was close enough to see a network of lines at the corner of his eyes, and little threads of silver in his goatee. He wasn’t young. That scared her a little. He was more man than she was used to handling—older and bigger and more dangerous than anyone else in her past.

“Maybe I was mistaken,” he drawled in response to her slight hesitation. “I got the idea you might be interested.”

Jane looked up into his eyes. A hot, blue flame flickered there. An answering heat resonated deep down inside her. Was this wishful thinking, desperation, or real desire made manifest by her own weakness for guys like this? It was kind of hard to tell.

Her head screamed that going with this guy would be like repeating the mistakes of the past. Getting soaked on a park bench would be better than this. But her body wasn’t listening. Instead she gave the fiddler a smile and said, “Cowboy, take me away.”

“You drive a minivan?” The girl—Mary, he reminded himself—stood beyond the service entrance to Dot’s Spot with her hands fisted on her h*ps and a semisurprised look on her face.

“Yeah, well, it’s practical for hauling around sound equipment and guitars. Disappointed?” Clay said, as he opened the side-panel door of his ancient Windstar and hoisted his fiddle, mandolin, and guitar cases into the cargo space.

The question was rhetorical. She was disappointed. Women had a habit of mistaking him for someone else—usually some bad-boy jerk with a Harley who would do them wrong sooner or later. Ironically, most women wasted no time in doing him wrong, as if he were the punching bag for their collective disappointments with males in general and bad boys in particular.

He turned around and faced the girl. She had the wrong idea about him. And he wasn’t going to disabuse her of it. He was going to take her to the Peach Blossom Motor Court and become that bad boy she was looking for. He wasn’t going to apologize to anyone for it either.

He was tired of being a good man.

He was tired of living his life along the straight and narrow.

But most of all, he was weary of being alone.

The girl stepped forward, her body swaying in the lamplight, the gusty wind lifting her hair and whipping it across her face. She tucked the hair behind her ear and gave him a simple smile that curled up the dimples in her cheek. Desire, sweet and warm, flooded through him.

He opened the van’s door for her, and she stepped close enough for him to catch the blended scents of cigarette smoke and something spicy like sandalwood or jasmine. Awareness jolted him to full arousal. He felt like a sixteen-year-old with a killer hard-on—the kind that blinded a boy and made him do stupid things. He had to admit he liked that mindless feeling.

She turned in the corner of the door and glanced up at him. She stopped moving, her lips quirking in a clear show of interest. He leaned in, slanting his mouth over hers, pulling her lower lip into his mouth. He tasted cinnamon and the hopefulness of youth.

He fell hard into that kiss and knew he was a goner the minute she responded to him. He put his hand on the flare of her hip and pulled her hard against him.

He was headed straight to hell, with only a short layover at a no-tell motel before the Devil took him.

• • •

The sign said “Peach Blossom Motor Court” in flaming pink neon. Jane had hit rock bottom in her life. The fiddler had checked them in, and she watched through the windshield of his van as he returned with the key in his hand.

He was something, all right. A big man striding across the parking lot on a pair of the pointiest cowboy boots she had ever seen. Yessir, she would probably forget about this low-rent scenario the minute he put his mouth on hers again.

He opened the van door for her and looked up at her out of a pair of eyes that were as pale as a winter day on Meadow Mountain. The fire in those icy eyes burned so hot she felt the flame in the middle of her chest.

He gave her his hand, and she laid her fingers on him. His hand was huge, and warm, and rough, and male.

He helped her down and then shut the door behind her. He leaned his big-boned body against her, pushing her up against the van, his hand sliding down her rib cage and coming to rest on her hip. He was sturdy and hard, and so large that his body shielded her and made her feel safe in some inappropriate way.

How could she feel safe with a man intent on taking her without even giving her his name or asking for hers? But there it was. She knew the fiddler wasn’t going to hurt her. The Universe kind of whispered in her ear and told her this would be okay.

She found herself inside the shadow of his Stetson, caught up in the heat of his mouth. He lost his hat, then she lost her mind.

Chapter 2

Jane startled awake, panic folding over her as she struggled to place herself in space and time. Then she heard the soft, even breathing of a slumbering man.

And remembered.

The memories of her frantic trip from Atlanta brought unwanted tears. She squeezed her eyes shut, even before she remembered the fiddler. She had thought her days of running were over.