Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho) Read online

  ALSO BY ROSALIND JAMES

  THE PARADISE, IDAHO SERIES

  Book 1: Carry Me Home

  Book 2: Hold Me Close

  THE ESCAPE TO NEW ZEALAND SERIES

  Prequel: Just for You

  Book 1: Just This Once

  Book 2: Just Good Friends

  Book 3: Just for Now

  Book 4: Just for Fun

  Book 5: Just My Luck

  Book 6: Just Not Mine

  Book 7: Just Once More

  Book 8: Just in Time

  Book 9: Just Stop Me

  THE NOT QUITE A BILLIONAIRE SERIES

  Book 1: Fierce

  THE KINCAIDS SERIES

  Book 1: Welcome to Paradise

  Book 2: Nothing Personal

  Book 3: Asking for Trouble

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Rosalind James

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503935433

  ISBN-10: 1503935434

  Cover design by Eileen Carey

  For my sons

  Sam Nolting and James Nolting

  For soldiering through

  CONTENTS

  FLASH

  MEMORY LANE

  A WHOLE CROP OF STUPID

  A NOT-SO-CHANCE ENCOUNTER

  WELCOME TO PARADISE

  CONSEQUENCES

  PARTNERS

  BAD BOYS AND CAKE POPS

  FLOWER POWER

  MAGPIE HARVEST

  WATER AND CHOCOLATE

  HOLDING ON

  VISITORS

  ALL KINDS OF READJUSTMENTS

  PATIENCE

  SOME MAN

  DEDUCTIONS

  LOOKING AT YOU

  BAGGAGE

  BACK UNDER CONTROL

  BREAKTHROUGH

  HOW HARD COULD IT BE?

  GOING SLOW

  WAITING FOR PERFECT

  JUST A GIRL

  NOT SO SLOW

  THE WORKS OF SATAN

  CHOICES

  UPS AND DOWNS

  ONE HELL OF A RIDE

  STORM DAMAGE

  AFTERMATH

  DIGGING DEEPER

  A TWISTY MIND

  NIGHT OUT

  ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  CHANGE OF PLAN

  SURPRISE APPEARANCE

  NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT

  BY ACCIDENT

  THUNDERSTORM

  FOOTBALL AND FISHING

  FISHTAIL

  THE FIXERS

  A DANGEROUS PROFESSION

  ANOTHER MONKEY WRENCH

  COMPANY

  DIE TRYING

  WHAT’S WORTH IT

  FIXABLE

  CHOICES

  FALLING INTO PLACE

  THE BOGEYMAN

  SEIZE THE MOMENT

  ICE COLD

  THAT PERSON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FLASH

  It was all a series of flashes.

  Flash. Stacy was staring at a shower curtain printed with pansies. Purple blossoms, yellow centers. A shower curtain she knew so well. Except . . . not, because it was pink around the edges with mildew, and the bathtub it didn’t entirely conceal was brown with dirt. Nasty, and not familiar at all. Her hand groped for her phone in her purse, and she pressed a speed dial she hadn’t used much lately, but that her fingers knew all the same.

  “I’m so tired,” she told her sister. “You aren’t here. Why aren’t you here? I want to go to bed. I’m scared, Ro.”

  She listened and tried to focus, but Rochelle’s question made no sense. “Your place,” she explained, even though it was obvious.

  The pounding at the door made her jump, and she hurried to unlock it even as she shoved the phone back into her purse.

  “Get out here,” she heard. “I’m missing you.”

  Flash. Back to the party, and she was dancing. Her arms around him, her body sagging against his, and the room coming in and out of focus. She’d felt so good before, but now, she was tired. So tired. “Want to lie down,” she said.

  “Oh, you’re going to lie down,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  A disturbance, then, in the room. Shouting, a jumble of words, loud and hard. A girl’s voice. Shrill. It hurt her ears. “. . . pregnant. You son of a bitch.” And then, “All of you. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing to do with me,” she heard, and then an answering screech that made her wince. She was alone, swaying, finding the familiar couch and sitting down, closing her eyes against the noise.

  “. . . not going to keep my mouth shut . . .” It was the girl’s voice again. “. . . the cops.”

  She lay back against the arm of the couch and let the voices and the pumping background music wash over her.

  The deluge of hard words had ended, then another voice said, “Come on. Let’s go outside.” And then that was gone, too, and the music faded.

  Flash. The furniture was upside down, and her forehead was banging against something. Jeans. Why jeans? And somebody was laughing.

  “. . . like ’em that way. If they’re not conscious, they can’t bitch about what you do. Good times.”

  “Nope.” That voice was familiar, too, and coming from someplace very close. “Only woman that can’t bitch is a dead one.”

  That was the last thing she heard.

  MEMORY LANE

  Rochelle Marks was sleeping—or trying to—with all the windows open and the fan blowing semicool air across her restless form, which was covered only by a pair of blue bikini underwear and a white sheet. Being hot at night would have been just fine if she’d had anybody to be hot with. As it was, there wasn’t anyone around to appreciate that those underwear were a size six now instead of a seven. Well, there were people who’d appreciate it. Just nobody she wanted to invite over to appreciate up close.

  She’d just drifted off to sleep with the help of a nice fantasy about a rodeo rider who didn’t actually have chlamydia, thirty-second staying power, or a wife in Wyoming, because that was the point of a fantasy. And then the phone rang. She groped for her cell, knocked her water glass right smack onto the mattress, and said something very unladylike.

  The phone was still ringing, though, so she sat up, edged out of the way of the rapidly spreading pool of water—at least it was cool—shoved the hair out of her face, and said, “If you’re a telemarketer or my drunk-dialing ex, I will kick your ass.”

  “’Lo? Ro?”

  The voice was slurred, but she recognized it. Her youngest sister. She sat up straighter. “Stacy?”

  “So . . . tired . . .” More mumbling, and then, “I’m scared.”

  Rochelle was already up, yanking the dresser drawer open and pulling out the first thing her hand landed on: her cutoffs. “Where are you?”

  “Wha . . . Your place.” At least she thought that was what Stacy had said.

  “What? Where?” Rochelle asked, but there was no answer, just some kind of pounding in the background, then a male voice with a dark edge. Something else in the background, too. Music—the raucous, angry shriek of heavy metal. And then silence.

/>   She pulled on a bra and a tank top, thought about her hair and forgot it, grabbed her purse and keys, and took off out the back door, not bothering to lock it behind her. Paradise, Idaho, wasn’t generally a hotbed of crime. She climbed into her Toyota, buzzed the windows down for the rush of cool night air, and headed toward downtown and the university.

  Your place. Didn’t make any sense. She must have misheard. It had been January when she’d moved to her duplex, where Stacy most definitely wasn’t, and it was August now. Her cramped Main Street apartment had been rented within days of her leaving it. But just in case, she swung by it on her way to campus.

  The narrow front window was dark. Of course it was. Stacy wouldn’t have been there anyway, but Rochelle still got out to check.

  It was Sunday night, the school year hadn’t started quite yet. Which meant a knot of fancy-free college students standing across the street outside Jake’s Bar, thinking they were funny but actually only being drunk and loud. She didn’t miss living here one bit, especially on a hot summer night.

  She headed across the sidewalk to check out the apartment. Her first postseparation place. Her first place of her own, period. Crappy, but at least it had been hers. The front window was open six inches for air, and she heard a fan whirring inside, but that was all. She thought about knocking, and abandoned the idea. Stacy wasn’t there.

  Your place? Near your place? She crossed the street, registered the “Whoa” from the guys still hanging around outside the bar without any interest at all, and opened the door to the familiar scent of beer and disinfectant and the sight of a few slumped forms on bar stools hanging around until the bitter end for last call. She scored a drunken invitation that she ignored, but certainly no Stacy.

  Back to the car again, where the clock on the dash ticked over to 1:43 a.m. as she bumped across the railroad tracks, turned left on Harding, and stopped in front of the three-story block of student apartments. She pulled out her phone and called her sister again. No answer.

  She put her finger on the doorbell and kept it there until a hostile blonde in a shortie robe with her hair straggling out of a ponytail pulled the door open with a “What the hell?” Stacy’s roommate, Mandy.

  “Is Stacy here?” Rochelle asked. She couldn’t explain the urgency driving her, or what she’d heard in her youngest sibling’s voice—and in the sounds she’d heard after that—that had her here at two in the morning. But she knew it was real.

  “Uh . . .” The girl glanced behind her, toward the single bedroom. “No.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Party, I think. Something like that.” The door was closing, and Rochelle shot a hand out to hold it open.

  “A party where?” she demanded.

  She got a shrug for that. “I don’t know. Not a frat, because I didn’t hear about it. With some guy. Do you mind? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “With what guy? It’s already Monday. Doesn’t she have to work tomorrow—today?”

  The girl’s expression sharpened, and something Rochelle couldn’t identify flitted across her face. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask her. And could you leave? I have to work tomorrow, anyway.”

  “When she comes back,” Rochelle insisted, “call me, OK?” She pushed past the girl into the apartment, flipping on the light along the way to the accompaniment of an outraged “Hey!” from Mandy. After a quick scrabble for a pen on Stacy’s desk, she was writing her own cell number on a piece of notebook paper and shoving it at Mandy. “Here. You have no idea? Who’s this guy? A student?”

  A shrug from Mandy. “I don’t know. Hardly met him. Hot.”

  “Nice. Love the way you’ve got her back,” Rochelle said, and got another blank stare. There was nothing else here, so she left, then sat in her car with her hands on the steering wheel and thought.

  Your place. Not the house they’d grown up in, the house where their parents still lived. That would be “our house.” Only one place Stacy could have meant, and Rochelle swore at herself for not thinking of it first, however unlikely it seemed.

  Heavy metal. She knew that sound all too well. The music she’d always switched off the second she’d walked in the door. She picked up her phone again and dialed a number she’d long since deleted from her contacts, but couldn’t erase from her memory.

  Four rings. Then voice mail.

  “It’s me. You know what to do.”

  She swore again and started up the car. Memory lane, here she came.

  The only place left to look, and the last place she wanted to go. The little car ate up the miles of dark highway, the route as familiar as breathing after years spent driving it back and forth to work every single day. Only a few sets of headlights flashed by along the way, and once she’d turned off onto the side road and begun to wind up the hill, she saw nothing at all until she was pulling into the long gravel driveway.

  Three rigs stood in the yard despite the hour. Not Lake’s, but his would be parked behind the shop, as usual. Her sinking heart told her that her instincts hadn’t been wrong, because there were both light and noise streaming from the open windows and door. No neighbors to complain, not way out here. Lake was having a party.

  Your place.

  She headed up the dusty wooden steps of the porch, avoiding the loose board that Lake still hadn’t bothered to fix. No porch swing, because she’d taken it. No flower baskets, because ditto. Not that anything would still have been alive by now.

  No Lake, either. She walked inside to find Dave Harris lying in Lake’s plaid recliner, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, with a couple more guys sprawled on the couch. Beer bottles and plastic cups littered the coffee table, a couple half-empty pizza boxes stood open on the dinette along with more plastic cups, and the whole place stank worse than the bar. Same beer, no disinfectant.

  “Hey, Rochelle,” Miles Kimberling said, lifting his bottle in a lazy salute. “Couldn’t stay away, huh.” Beside him, somebody she didn’t know said nothing, just stared at her.

  Rochelle ignored them and nudged Dave on his booted ankle. “Wake up.”

  He opened his eyes. “Rochelle? Huh?”

  “Is my sister here?”

  “Which one?”

  “Stacy. And where’s Lake? Is he with her? Is she . . . upstairs?”

  Oh, no. Lake wouldn’t do anything to Stacy, though. Or let anybody else do anything to her, either. He’d known her since she was six.

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “I was asleep. And you don’t live here anymore, remember?”

  She blinked at that. She’d never liked Dave much, but now his voice was . . . hostile. Her phone rang in her purse, and she fumbled for it. She could have set her purse down to look, but there was no surface in her formerly pristine home where she wouldn’t have been afraid of catching something. So she didn’t.

  “She’s back,” came Mandy’s laconic voice over the phone.

  “Oh.” Rochelle closed her eyes in relief that was surely out of proportion to what had happened. She was overreacting for sure. Must be the heat, or being back here. “She OK?”

  “Passed out, that’s all. I only called you because otherwise you’d be waking me up again. I got up because I heard the front door, and somebody had just woken me up anyway. I went out there, and she was on the couch, and a guy was leaving. Making a ton of noise, just like you.”

  The alarm bells were ringing again. “Passed out? Wake her up. I want to talk to her.”

  A gusty sigh came down the line. “She’s drunk, that’s all. And it’s the middle of the night.”

  “Wake her up. Right now.”

  Another sigh. “Hang on.”

  She waited a few minutes with Mandy’s voice faint in the background, then Mandy was on the line again, sounding more awake this time, and scared, too. “I can’t.”

  Rochelle’s heart was pounding, and she wasn’t aware of the mess anymore, of Dave’s hostility, the other men’s stares, or even the sad state of her fo
rmer home. “Did you shake her?”

  “I did everything. I can’t wake her up.”

  “Call 911.”

  “She’ll get in trouble.”

  “I don’t care if she gets in trouble.” Rochelle’s voice was rising now, and she didn’t care about that, either. “If she dies because you didn’t call, you’ll get in trouble. I’ll kill you myself. Call 911 right the hell now, and call me when they come. I’m on my way.”

  The three men in the living room listened to the sound of Rochelle’s car crunching over the gravel, then the engine noise receding.

  “What do we do?” Miles Kimberling asked. He wished he’d left an hour ago. He had to be at work at seven the next morning. And anyway—he wished he’d left.

  “Nothing,” Dave said. “So Rochelle came by. So what? What did she see? Some guys partying, that’s all.”

  “What about what her sister saw?”

  That got a laugh from Dave. “Stacy? Too out of it to even notice. And, damn, she’s turning out fine. Not as hot as Rochelle, but not too bad. Not too bad at all. And the shape she was in?” He sighed. “Yeah. That’s what I call party time.”

  Miles shifted his feet. “Better not let him hear you say that.”

  “Why?” Dave said. “He didn’t exactly mind tonight, did he?”

  “Sure he did,” Miles said. “You heard him.”

  “Why, that he didn’t want her here?” Dave shot him a look of contempt. “That wasn’t out of his deep feelings. It was because she’s Rochelle’s sister, and he knows Rochelle has the biggest mouth in Paradise.”

  A WHOLE CROP OF STUPID

  Four in the morning, and Rochelle still wasn’t sleeping. Instead, she was standing in a curtained-off cubicle in Hillman Hospital’s ER, looking down at Stacy with a tube in her arm and talking to a doctor who was the furthest possible thing from George Clooney. Hard featured, balding, forty-five, and with no bedside manner whatsoever.

  “We’ve finished running your blood work, Stacy,” he said. “You really mixed it up tonight, didn’t you?”

  Stacy’s eyes shifted back and forth once, and then she closed them again. “Too sleepy,” she moaned.

  “What do you mean?” Rochelle asked. “Mixed it up how?”