Wild Card (North Ridge #1)

"Hey, boy," Mav says to him, bending down to scratch him behind the ears.

"Do you still have a dog?" I ask him. Growing up, he had a cattle dog, as all the boys did, but he was never the best at taking care of him. I think Jeanine had to feed him on more than one occasion. Maverick definitely had something close to ADHD as a teenager.

"I do," he says. "Believe me, I know, I'm the last person that should have one. But my cousin, I'm not sure if you remember him, he runs a rescue shelter off of Vancouver Island and asked if I wanted to foster a dog that was in the area. And then I met her and it was love at first sight. She's a pitbull mix, though, so herding cattle is not one of her interests. Lying around in the sun like a sack of potatoes is."

The look on Maverick's face is adorable. He's so handsome and rugged and manly, and yet talking about his dog, you'd think he was completely in love.

“What’s her name?”

“Chewie.”

I laugh. “Because she chews on things or she sounds like Chewbacca?”

“Both.”

"Rachel!"

I look over to see Delilah coming toward us from around the house, waving her hand in the air at me.

If Maverick has grown into an even more powerful man, Del has become quite the stunning woman. Even though she was always tall and athletic, she now carries herself with a sense of grace, like she's gliding across a dance floor and not wiping her hands on dirty ripped jeans as she walks through dusty brown grass and white wildflowers.

"Hey you," I tell her, giving her a hug. I'm only five foot five and she's at least five inches taller than me. "Did you grow even more?"

In the past she was always self-conscious about her height so the moment I say that, I regret it.

But she just smiles and shrugs. "If I have, it's needed to keep the drunks on their toes. How have you been? You look great!"

"Thanks," I tell her. "Sorry I haven't kept in touch."

"That's fine. I know you've been busy. You don't even have a Facebook account, do you?"

"No, I erased that shit when I left. Started over."

"I don't blame you."

Maverick is watching us curiously. I know I can be real about things with Del, because even though she's almost like a sister to the Nelson brothers, she's still a girl and she understands. Maverick, on the other hand, is pretty protective over Shane and probably doesn't want to hear me slamming him, even if it's totally understandable.

"Come on, girls," he says to us, heading to the back of the truck and picking up a box. "You can chat and work at the same time."

Except that's a lie. While the three of us move the boxes into the worker's cottage in no time, the air makes it hard to chat and breathe and move heavy shit at once. Luckily, Del made some lemonade, so when we're done, we take a seat on the rocking chairs on the small porch of the worker’s cottage and relax. Since this will be my mother's house, I don't want to put any of her stuff away without her input.

Maverick leaves to take his dog for a walk, and as he disappears around the main house, Del turns to me and says, "On a scale of one to ten, how much do you hate being here?"

I can't help but smile. She has these dimples that throw you off while she never hesitates to ask the hard questions.

"Actually, it's not so bad," I admit slowly. "Well, the view is nice." I raise my glass to the scene in front of us, the gentle sloping hills, the barns, the river and the town and mountains behind it. "It costs a fortune for a view in Toronto, and even the best ones over Lake Ontario can't compare to this." I give her a sheepish look. "When I first stepped foot here a week ago, I would have said ten. There's no place I hate more. But since then...I don't know. The town isn't so bad. Neither are the people. It's just..."

She nods, giving me a quick smile. "I know. It's just one person."

I sigh. "Honestly, I don't want to hate him anymore. And I really thought I let go of it over the years. That's why I started over. I wanted to erase this life from my memory because he was my life. But seeing him again…I just don’t know if I can get past it. You know? I should. I really should. We were young and he broke my heart, and so what? Life went on. I went on. I’m happy now, really I am, and I have a boyfriend who’s great and what Shane did shouldn’t matter.”

“But it does,” she says, her eyes kind. She sips her lemonade, the ice cubes rattling in the glass, and leans back against the chair. “I think the real problem is that you never got closure. You just…left.”

“I know. But I had to. You know how badly I wanted to leave—I was always begging Shane to run away with me. But he could never leave this place, even though he said he would. And now, well, I have to wonder if it was all a lie. If he never intended to leave, if it was just something he said to shut me up. He broke me, Del. How do you go from telling someone you want to grow old with them to telling them that you never loved them? I still don’t understand.”

“You need to talk to him.”

I make a growling noise. “That’s the last thing I want. I tried the other day, but…I just yelled at him.”

“You have a right to yell. And Shane’s a good man, despite what he did. He knows he deserves your wrath, so let him have it. Tell him how you really feel. Get it off your shoulders and then you’ll find your closure. You’ll move on.”

“I thought I had moved on.”

Her lips quirk up into a wan smile. “No, honey. You never did. You can tell yourself that a million times, but if you had, this wouldn’t matter so much. And I know it matters because I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. Time may have changed you in some ways, Rachel, but you’re still the same girl I know, and I knew you pretty damn well. You’ve done what you could to move on, but you’ll never be free until you confront him.”

That sounds terrifying. It shouldn’t be, but it is. And Del is totally right, of course. I’ve done the things that look good on paper all in an attempt to move on, but the fact is, I haven’t. Shane still dominates my heart. I need to get it all out so he no longer has that hold on me.

There was something pained in Del’s tone, though, that has me studying her curiously. Like she knows exactly what I’ve gone through. “How are you? I heard you got engaged.”

She rolls her eyes. “Nothing is a secret here. Yeah, I did. Remember Bobby Barrett? Well, we started dating and everything was going great and we got engaged and I said yes, because, well, when you have a nice guy that you love, that’s what you do, right? But then the closer we got to wedding plans, the more I started to get cold feet. And he’s smart, so he picked up on it. We called it off. It was pretty much as mutual of a breakup as you can get, but…I don’t know, it still smarts.”

“And how is Fox?”