Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(36)
Author: Hope Ramsay

Clay watched Jane sleep. The light in the little room faded from black to gray with every breath she took. Dawn was breaking outside the windows, and he ought to be getting up and heading home to take a shower and do battle with Tricia, Ricki, and the entire legal system of South Carolina.

He checked his watch. It was after six.

Clay curled a lock of Jane’s hair around his index finger. Suddenly, evicting the ex-girlfriends and rescuing Ray didn’t seem all that important. He looked down at this remarkable woman and felt the change inside him, right there in the center of his chest.

Jane had captured his heart. There were no two ways about that. Still, on some level, his brain was screaming that things were happening too fast. There were still lots of things he didn’t know about her.

But he didn’t care right now. Right now, she made him feel like a real man. A man in every possible way. And he didn’t want to give that up.

Clay leaned forward and pressed a little kiss to her forehead and watched her sleepy eyes flutter open. She’d been through hell, and somehow it hadn’t touched the goodness in her soul. He watched her come to full consciousness, knowing that he was the first thing she would see today.

Miriam Randall was so right. She wasn’t at all what he had been looking for, or even what he had expected. She was so much more. And it was amazing, really, how close he’d come to missing out.

Now, looking down at her, he found himself mentally filling in the cells in Ray’s stupid spreadsheet. On the plus side, Jane had a voice like an angel and a body made for sin. She saw the positive in every situation, and she was great with kids.

On the negative side, there was that little matter of why she had turned up in Last Chance with only the clothes on her back and five dollars in her pocket. But aside from that, Clay was hard-pressed to find anything wrong with Jane Coblentz. He had a pretty good idea of some of the things she probably had done in the last seven years—just to survive. He was pretty sure he could forgive her for just about anything.

He was a forgiving man, at least when it came to Jane. He wasn’t feeling magnanimous toward his ex-girlfriends. But the difference was that Tricia and Ricki had hurt him. Jane hadn’t hurt anyone.

Jane Coblentz had to be the first woman who had ever called him a Boy Scout at the beginning, as opposed to throwing that label at him like an epithet on the way out the door. And that made him feel so good he could hardly contain his joy.

“By that canary-eating grin on your face, I guess you had a good time last night,” Jane said in a sleepy voice.

“Yes, ma’am.” He placed a kiss on her forehead.

“I guess it’s time to come back down to earth, huh?”

“I’ve got a better idea.”

“A better idea?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Marry me.”

“What?” The smile on her face disappeared. It occurred to him that, perhaps, the disappearing smile was a danger sign. But he was committed now, so he forged ahead.

“Yeah. I thought we could throw some clothes in my Windstar and head for Vegas. Find ourselves one of those chapels where the judge dresses up like Elvis. I figure if we drive straight through, we could be husband and wife in a matter of days.”

“You want to get married by an Elvis impersonator?” Jane rolled away from him and sat up. The blanket fell to her waist and gave him a killer view of her br**sts. His body responded in a completely adolescent and predictable manner.

“Yeah, well, if you prefer we could get Reverend Ellis down at Christ Church to do the job.”

“You’re teasing me, right?”

Clay sat up beside her and pulled her into his arms. She didn’t come willingly. “No,” he said to the top of her head. “I’m not teasing. I want you to be my wife, Jane. And besides, if we’re going to sleep together in this town, being married is practically a requirement.”

She pushed away. “For heaven’s sake. Please don’t.”

“What?”

Jane stood up, turning her back to him. By the set of her shoulders, he got the impression that she wasn’t too pleased with him. This was not going the way he thought it would. Maybe he’d missed something. Maybe he’d been thinking with his pecker and not his head.

Jane headed off in the direction of the bathroom. “You’re insane. You don’t even know me. I met you less than a week ago. Getting married right now is not going to happen.”

Clay followed her, but he wasn’t fast enough. The bathroom door slammed, and he heard the snick of the snap lock. Shoot, she’d managed to lock herself in the bathroom after all.

He got up and leaned into the door frame. “Jane, let me in.”

She didn’t say anything, but a few moments later, the toilet flushed. He waited until the water quit running.

“Jane?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said through the door. He wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling he’d made her cry.

“Open the door.”

“No.”

“I really do want to marry you.”

“Yeah,” she said in a voice that sounded lost and unhappy. “So I guess I got myself on your list, after all.”

He stood there blinking at the door and realized his mistake. He’d forgotten to tell her he loved her. Instead he’d started with the marriage part, and then he’d justified it in a pretty stupid way, too. “Uh, Jane, open the door, would you please?”

“No.”

“I’m not going to leave until you open the door.”

“Guess you’ll be stuck here for a while, then.”

“Jane, please, I have something important to tell you, but I’m not going to say it to a locked door.”

Silence beat like a ticking clock for several moments. But then the door opened, and she stood there wearing a pale yellow dressing gown. She had her arms folded across her chest, and a mutinous look on her face.

“Jane, I—”

“What about Ray?” she asked, interrupting his big pronouncement, bringing him back down to earth. “Are you just going to run off to Vegas and leave him high and dry? And weren’t you the one who said on Saturday that you can’t run away from your life? Because, excuse me, this proposal of marriage sounds a whole lot like a not-very-nice proposal from some guy who’s almost middle-aged and is terrified that his not-very-successful life is at a dead end.”

Wow. Low blow. Serious low blow. And it hurt because it was dead-on.

Clay stood there nak*d as the day he was born, looking at her, wanting her, needing her, and terrified that he was never going to actually get her.

“Honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I guess I got things kind of out of order. Because in case you missed it, the main reason I want to marry you is because I—”

At that moment, trouble came knocking on the door, like it usually did. And in this case, it took the form of his older brother. And Stony didn’t exactly knock.

“Clay, are you in there?” Stony bellowed as he banged his fist on the door.

Crap. Stone’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

Clay held up one finger. “Hold that thought one moment, honey, while I dispense with this interruption.” He turned his back toward her and snagged his boxers from the floor. He stepped into them and opened the door.

His brother stood out there on the landing with the glow of dawn over his shoulder. His nose was less swollen than it had been night before last, but it was never going to be as straight as it had been. His shiners had started to fade to green and yellow. Clay felt sorry about what he’d done. He was going to have to make it up to Stone one of these days.

But maybe not today. Because Stone was looking pretty serious out there. No doubt his big brother was not happy about finding him shacked up with a woman he thought was some kind of criminal.

Stony’s icy gaze missed nothing—not Jane standing at the bathroom door, or the tumbled sheets, or the condom wrappers on the carpet, or even the Oscar the Grouch boxers Clay had thrown on yesterday morning because he’d been at the absolute limit of clean laundry.

The boxers got a hint of a smile. Maybe because Stone remembered that the underwear had been stuffed in the toe of Clay’s stocking last Christmas. Or maybe it was because Momma had stuffed a pair of Grinch boxers in the toe of Stone’s stocking last Christmas, too. Momma had a way of getting her point across that was sometimes irritating as hell.

Stone’s smile vanished. “You’re in big trouble, boy, you know that, don’t you? And if you think for one minute I’m going to save your sorry butt, you better think again.” He leaned into the door frame and his utility belt creaked. Stony was not fooling around.

“Uh, what trouble would that be?”

“Shoot, Clay, did you think the authorities wouldn’t figure it out? My God, you left your ladder there for the forensics team to dust. I’d say the chance of finding your prints on that ladder are about one hundred percent.”

“Uh, you want to rewind that, Stony, ’cause I’m trying to figure out which ladder you are talking about and why the forensics team would be dusting it for my fingerprints. If this is your idea of a joke, or some lame attempt to save me from Jane, then you can think again.”

Stony blinked at him for a moment and then shifted his gaze to Jane, something changing in his face. “Has he been here all night?”

“It’s none of your business,” Jane said, and Clay could tell she was as pissed at Stone as she was at him. She had good reason, too. Boy, what a couple of losers they were.

“It is if you’re his alibi.” Stone shifted his gaze back. “Although I have to admit that she’s a pretty unreliable alibi, given her criminal past.”

“Alibi for what?” Clay asked.

“So you’re telling me you had nothing to do with Ray escaping from the halfway house last night?”

“He escaped?” A boatload of guilt hit Clay. If Ray had escaped on his own, then he was out there by himself, probably scared and lost. And what had Clay been doing?

“Get your clothes on,” Stone said, “because in about five minutes Sheriff Bennett is going to be here to haul you in for questioning. And I’m telling you, if the sheriff decides he wants to charge you for being an accessory to a jailbreak, there isn’t much I can do to help you out. But I can haul you in first and buy a little time.”

“You’re serious. You’re going to arrest me?”

“Nah, just bring you in for questioning. If you tell me where Ray is, I’ll go easy on you.”

“I don’t know where Ray is. Maybe you and the sheriff should be searching for him.”

“We are. Have been all night. You would have known this if you had been home. But you weren’t home, and that looks mighty suspicious. According to Ricki and Tricia, you haven’t been home since yesterday before church. And then we found your extension ladder leaned up against the halfway house up in Orangeburg.”

“My ladder?”

“Uh-huh. The one with your name etched on the third step.”