Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(4)
Author: Hope Ramsay

His ears got red. The big, tough guy was blushing. He looked down at her things, picked up her makeup case, and put it back into her purse without rifling through it. Jane scored that as one small victory.

“You know,” he said, eyeing the mass of coins that remained, “you probably have close to ten dollars in silver here. You might want to lighten your load.”

“Such as it is.”

He looked up. “Had to leave Fort Myers in a hurry, huh?”

She didn’t answer. It disturbed her to think he’d already figured out half of her secrets. She looked away and heard the sound of change jangling as he pawed through her things.

“Hey, what’s this?” he asked a moment later.

She turned, and he was holding up the little necklace that Woody had given her the day before yesterday. A rush of pure hatred ran right through her. “You can have it,” she said.

He chuckled at that. “Honey, you should always hang on to your jewelry. No matter what. That’s what my momma always says.” He squinted down at the little green charm on the gold chain. “What is that, a camel?”

“Yeah. It’s a stupid dollar store jade camel, okay? It’s not worth anything. I’ll bet the chain isn’t even gold.”

“Uh-huh. He did you wrong, didn’t he?” One of his eyebrows arched in question.

“I don’t wish to discuss this. I thought this was going to be, you know, kind of quick and anonymous.”

“Me, too. But then you decided to steal from me.”

“Look, I wasn’t stealing. I was just…” Her voice faded out as it occurred to her that if she had wanted something quick and anonymous she would never have looked through his wallet.

“Uh-huh. Like I said.”

“Why don’t you give me my purse, and I’ll leave, okay?”

He didn’t respond. Instead, he reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet. Then he placed the little necklace into the change section. He snapped the snap on the change purse and then dropped her wallet back into her handbag. She watched as his big, capable hands scooped up pennies and nickels and dimes and dropped them back into the bottom of her bag. He had almost completed the task when he stopped.

“Well lookit here, isn’t that lucky?” He picked up a tarnished coin and angled it toward the light.

“You know the only luck in the Universe is the luck we make for ourselves,” Jane said. If only she had believed that before she had come with this guy to a no-tell motel.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t believe in rabbits’ feet?”

She shook her head. A girl with her unlucky track record couldn’t afford to believe in charms and such.

“Too bad, because this is a lucky penny,” he said.

“What’s lucky about it?” she asked.

“It’s a wheat penny.”

“A what?”

He handed the penny to her. “Look on the back. It doesn’t have the Lincoln Memorial on it.”

She turned the penny over, and sure enough, it had an unusual back with the words “One Cent” spelled out and encircled by a crossed sheaf of wheat.

She turned it over in her hand and read the date—1943. “So what’s lucky about it?”

He continued to scoop up change and return it to her purse. “Well, nothing, really. It’s just old. They haven’t made wheat pennies since the 1950s.”

“Is it valuable?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, it’s probably worth one hundred times its face value.”

Happiness swelled up inside her until she did the math in her head. “Right. A dollar.”

He shrugged. “That’s valuable for a penny.”

“Yeah, well, it won’t buy me a Coke at Dot’s Spot.”

“You know, the value of things can’t always be measured in their price.”

She blinked up at him. Was he trying to send a message? After all, if she wanted to be negative about things, he had purchased her for the sum of ten dollars plus the cost of this hotel room. The thought made her heart ache.

“By that look, you don’t agree with me.”

She shrugged and tried not to feel cheap and dirty. “I’m just blown away that a negative person such as yourself would even consider the possibility of luck as a force in the Universe,” she said in a breezy tone.

“Yeah, well, I guess you got that right. So it’s not a lucky penny. It’s just an old one. Don’t you think it’s cool that something sixty years old was hiding out in the bottom of your purse waiting to be found?”

Temptation tugged at her insides. Clayton P. Rhodes was a piece of work. But she was not about to let herself fall for his line—even if it was a good line. Maybe one of the best lines she had heard in her life.

“Look,” Jane said. “As a gesture of regret for having rifled through your wallet, I’ll let you have the penny if you think it’s so cool.”

“Uh, no thanks, you keep it, since you believe in luck.”

Well, that was predictable. “Right,” she said, as she slipped the penny into the pocket of her jeans. “So are you going to let me go, now that you’ve finished humiliating me?”

“I probably should turn you in to the police for attempted robbery.”

Fear settled into her belly. “Look, I wasn’t trying to steal from you, okay?”

“But then again, explaining stuff to the police might prove a little embarrassing.”

She stopped and thought about things for a moment. It would be embarrassing—for both of them—since she was new to town and they had spent the night with each other before exchanging names.

“So I’m not going to turn you in. I think I’m going to reform you instead,” Clayton P. continued.

“Reform me?” Her voice cracked.

“Not interested in following the straight and narrow, huh?”

She drew herself up and squared her shoulders. “I don’t need reforming. Maybe you’re the one who needs reforming.”

This earned her a little half smile. “You’re right on that score. So I guess I’ll buy you breakfast instead. And after that, we’ll talk about where you go next.”

Just who the hell did he think he was, anyway? “What is it, Clayton P., you want to run me out of town like I’m some kind of undesirable? Well, let me tell you one thing, buster, I—”

“Is that what you think?”

“Look, I don’t need you to reform me. I may have ended up in this shabby room with you, but that doesn’t make me a—”

“I wasn’t talking about what happened last night, girl. That was just runaway lust. And I’m sorry I got caught up in it. I was talking about you stealing my money.”

“I told you, I wasn’t going to steal your money. Why won’t you believe me?”

“Because I make it a habit not to believe girls with only five bucks in their pockets who are carrying two forms of identification, each bearing a different name.”

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, nak*d as the day he was born. The runaway lust made a second appearance.

He was big, and he was built. In every possible way a man could be big and built.

Oh, well, it didn’t matter, because Clayton P. Rhodes was not the man the Universe had made for her, even if he was a dead ringer for Michelangelo’s David from the neck down. Come to think of it, he was pretty good looking from the neck up, too.

He headed toward the bathroom, her purse still clasped in his hands. “I’m taking a shower. Don’t try to leave.”

Well, of course she couldn’t leave. He had taken all of her belongings hostage.

“I mean it,” he said, stopping at the door. “There’s a category-one hurricane blowing outside that door. You’ll be soaked to the bone inside of a minute.”

She cocked her head and heard the sound of rain beating at the windows.

Good grief. The Cosmos really was against her.

Clay wiped the condensation off the mirror and gave himself a hard look. He didn’t much like the reflection.

That little gal—Wanda Jane—needed something last night, and he’d pretty much failed her. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know she didn’t do illicit no-tell-motel sex on a regular basis. She had not been faking it.

And she was way too young.

God help him. He’d treated her like some kind of two-bit tramp last night, when it was obvious the girl was in some kind of trouble and on the run. She had only five dollars in her purse.

Instead of helping her out, he’d put her in the place where stealing had seemed justified.

He’d taken something from her last night. He had consumed her like a starving man, and he hadn’t given her anything in return, except maybe a momentary thrill. He’d needed the sexual release last night. He’d needed it to find the trigger point for the stuff he’d been holding inside for way too long.

God, how embarrassing. He surely did hope she hadn’t heard him when he’d gotten up in the middle of the night. He’d come into the bathroom, taken one look at himself in the mirror, and broken down into tears. He’d cried for Uncle Pete, who was probably dying, and for Ray, whose life he had screwed up so long ago, and for the career in Nashville that lay in ruins. He’d turned on the shower and tried real hard not to make too much noise while he’d cried himself out like some kind of sissy.

He studied his puffy eyes. He surely did owe Jane a whole lot more than the eighty bucks she’d tried to steal from him. In a way, she’d been a kind of therapy.

Well, he’d make it as right as he could. He’d feed her breakfast and give her enough money to send her on her way once the storm blew itself out.

Then he needed to concentrate on making a change in his life. This encounter was a warning sign, pure and simple. He needed to put the past behind him and start making plans for the future.

He hung his head. He wanted a wife, not a one-night stand. He wanted commitment from a mature woman, not some stupid midlife tryst with a younger woman, even if she was hotter than a chili pepper. He needed to grow up. He needed to settle down. He needed meaning in his life.

He needed to refocus his music career, too, but maybe that was too much to ask. Right now, he just wanted an end to that hollow place in the middle of his chest.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” he murmured, looking back up. “Today, you’re going to get serious about finding a sane, stable, mature woman to be your wife. You are going to start moving toward the future, instead of wallowing in the past.”

He gave himself a hard stare. “You hear me, boy. Needy women are a weakness.”

Chapter 3

The waitress at the Kountry Kitchen Dinette wore a salmon pink uniform with a white apron and a little plastic pin that identified her as Betty. She filled up Clayton P. Rhodes’s coffee cup and looked down at him with a sweet, unfocused gaze. He missed the look entirely.

Betty didn’t give Jane anything like an adoring look. In fact, Betty inspected her the way a narrow-minded, small-town waitress would inspect anyone new—with a look that was one part curiosity and three parts get out of town. Jane recognized this look. Small-town people were not as friendly as the Hallmark Channel or Garrison Keillor made them out to be.