Merry with a Ranger (Love Beach Holiday Collection)

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

B ONNIE

Nash Mercer hadn’t changed at all. I mean, he’d grown a bit bulkier, added on about three tons of muscle, and there were more tattoos peeking out from his rolled up shirt sleeves and from his collar than when I left him more unmarked back in high school in our senior year. But other than that? He was still the same Texas boy with the sharp eyes who missed nothing and saw enough to land me in a whole lot of trouble.

Which was probably why it was a really good idea to turn tail and run as far away from him as I could right now.

I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t running, like I did back on the beach. But right now, I didn’t want to run. The last time I left Nash Mercer, I regretted it for the next few years until that, like all my other memories, numbed with time.

Or maybe I lied to myself, and nothing really numbed at all.

Not missing prom with the boy I hoped I might marry one day, have the whole picket fence, and all. Except in our world it was more likely a mansion than a picket fence. Or it was supposed to be. Two rich kids, neither of us from the wrong side of the track, who fell in love one summer and never got our happily ever after.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t work. Back then we had everything going for us. Before the world knew who his family was, and before my life…disintegrated.

One night, and everything changed. A simple dream of attending college together, getting married and living a stress-free life. What a joke. Nothing was stress free, but then kids think that way. At least, some do, for a short time. My over-entitled childhood was stripped away alongside my happy dreams that left me as cold and lifeless as the dim, ground floor resort corridor I traversed before Nash caught me up.

He walked along behind me for two floors, neither of us speaking. Ten years of non-history stood between us. I didn’t know who he’d become in that time, and I couldn’t tell him anything about myself. Whatever I said tonight would be a lie on top of more lies.

My eyes closed briefly as his fingers grazed my elbow, the flat of his blade still slightly sticky with the dragon fruit’s pale pips from the sweet slice he offered me before.

And I took it straight from the knife that he slid between my lips, eating it with my eyes locked on him. This boy makes me as mad for him as I was back then. Before everything shattered. Our dreams, my sanity. My…everything.

But Nash Mercer wasn’t a boy anymore. Hadn’t been one for a long time, by the looks of him.

He flashed me a sideways glance without a smile, eyes dark, his face cast in sharp relief beneath the resort’s bright overhead lighting that left him half brightly lit, the other half of him lost in shadows of his own making.

I was wrong. He had changed. I didn’t know him anymore than I knew myself.

“What’s Little Bonnie drinking tonight?”

He held the door to the bar for me, taking us from the bright white and blue downstairs halls to the darker lit, wooden based interior of the dining and bar area. I studied the giant Christmas tree—a real one, not plastic—trimmed within an inch of its life with crystalline snowflakes, hand painted, glittery baubles and perfectly tied burgundy velvet bows, lit from within with tiny, muted lights.

They glow on a strange frequency, not quite on and off, more a three on, one off, two on…it was an odd pattern. I stood beside him in the doorway, transfixed as I try to figure it out.

“I can see your brain working, love,” Nash’s low voice brushed my ear as he tucked my hair back. Rough knuckles grazed my skin, eliciting a shiver I wanted to hide from him. Dangerous . My mind screamed at me, but it was too late. I tried to twist away, but my feet rooted to the spot as his heat enveloped me, the door closing gently at our backs. “It’s always been one of my favorite parts of you.”

I forgot what he was talking about, and took a moment too long to catch up as he folded his body around mine like he was always supposed to be there. “Not that I ever got to use it.” I clamped my mouth shut. “Sorry, that was stupid.”

“Nothing about you is stupid.” The hand that touched me glided lower to settle at the small of my back. “Drink?” That he ignored my faux pas and didn’t ask questions was a relief. Like we’d fallen back into old patterns.

I closed my eyes and let him propel me gently to the bar. This is Nash. I can trust him. But also, this was Nash. I couldn’t trust him because of who he was. Where he comes from.

Home.

I never got over leaving Texas. I’d also never been back. My last request that night was to push the driver to go back past the school, past the kids all gathered out the front for prom. My first mistake. My last, there. Because Nash stood apart from everyone, his brow furrowed, phone in his hand. Mine would have been pinging, back at home, but I wasn’t that girl anymore, and she couldn’t answer him.

His face raised, worry written all over the youth in him that died that day.

And some other part of me that I managed to salvage, that I held on to tight…that part died that night with him, too.

“What are you having, ma’am?” the bartender asked politely in that sort of tone that said it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.

Nash’s fingers flexed my back, and his sharp, indrawn breath said he was about to rescue me with an order he pulled out of his ass, as always. But I had my big girl panties on tonight, and I could save myself.

“Um, that one. Please.” I poked blindly at a drink name I didn’t recognize, and pasted a fake smile on my face.

My big girl panties were a silky white thong that matched the dress, and they were slipping.

“Doing good,” Nash muttered under his breath, rubbing my lower back in a way that drew shocks along my spine. Literally no one had touched me that way, not since…

Well, him.

I swallowed hard, certain the bartender heard, but Nash’s voice stayed low enough for only me to hear, apparently. I flashed him a grateful, if strained smile, and said the first thing that tumbled from my lips. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Professional surfer.” His mouth tightened a fraction, enough for me to read the lie in him without checking him for tan lines…and I already did that back on the beach in a half second glance.

The only tan line Nash Mercer sported was one involving a shirt and tie outlined over his lying heart.

Don’t know him anymore, my butt.

At least our deceptions matched.

“Surfer. Right.” My words had a flatness I couldn’t erase.

“Yeah.” He swallowed, taking the whiskey the bartender poured for him, a double shot, and downed it in one. We had the same goal tonight, apparently. “You?”

“Elementary school teacher.”

I took perverse pleasure in watching him choke on the overpriced alcohol and smiled innocuously as my own blue drink arrived, topped with an excess of cream, cherries, something that looked like sand from the beach, and a lackluster umbrella that refused to stay up.

From the look on his face, Nash knew just how that felt.

“Yeah?” He thumped his chest in an effort to breathe, his touch at my back wavering for just a second before he was back. His eyes zeroed in on me. “Happy with that career choice, Bonnie?”

The bartender made an excellent decision in heading up the other end of the bar to clean sparkling glasses.

I nodded and sipped my drink, failing in my attempt not to screw up my face with the excess of sugar. “Holy fuck,” I whispered, loud enough for the bartender to snort up the other end of the bar, polishing away with an ardency I was sure the hotel manager would have adored.

Nash leaned in. “Bullshit tastes fine in that filthy mouth, huh, Teach?” His fingers trailed along my side as he sighed. “You know, I promised myself I was gonna try to take it slow with you, not get involved, all the right things, but…” He swiveled me around to face him in full, and there was no disguising the unslaked need in his eyes that reflected Christmas lights in all the wrong ways I suddenly craved. “You’re making that damn hard.”

I licked the obscenely sweet liquor off my lips. “My tongue is numb,” I muttered.

He huffed, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me in close. “Got dinner plans, love?”

“My f– folks.” My tongue played hardball, but I got the F word out, eventually.

Nash’s face closed. “Your daddy’s here? I wouldn’t mind having a word with him.”

My hair whipped my face, horror settling as I realized what he meant, but his attention already shifted. “No, that’s a really bad idea–” Suddenly I was a seventeen year old girl with her life back in tatters, her arms around her legs trapped in a tatty t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans that felt too tight and too big all at once while the rest of her class was dressed to the nines and her date grew angrier, like he did right now. “Nash, no–”

He turned on the spot, right as the door to the dining room opened, and my mother walked in, dressed in the same pants suit she’d worn to dinner every night this week. Her hair was done in the same way it had been when I was a girl. Nothing changed about her but for the vague expression on her face when she looked past me like I wasn’t even there.

By now I was used to it. Nash, on the other hand, hadn’t experienced my mother’s mood swings where I spent the past decade growing used to them, after . They were my fault, after all.

My father, however—his sharp gaze lit on Nash and locked there.

“Good to see you again, son.” His tone implied anything but as he glanced at me for confirmation that he hadn’t started his own bout of hallucinations.

I nodded, detaching myself gently but there was no need. Nash’s hand lay limp at his side.

“Daddy. You remember Nash?”

The two men stared at each other, both as stiff as dead men reawakening after an eternity beneath unturned Texas soil.

“Of course.” My mother, so used to springing into action when needed though the brain cells long ceased to actually function, did so on demand as an automaton.

The shock of her Stepford wife-ish Mom-bot on his arm, her cheek upturned for her kiss, her blank expression, jolted Nash out of his stupor. A glance at me, and he leaned down to kiss her, murmuring soft, kind words to her ear though his flapping hand behind him gave away his freaked out reaction to the surreality of the situation.

I was the girl he should have taken to prom.

The girl who disappeared.

I had no idea what they all said afterward, but I read the hurt, the panic, the anger in his face that night. The abandonment.

I should never have asked the driver to take me past the school .

Daddy still didn’t know about that. The detective took one look at my tear-stained face afterward, cursed enough to provide me with an extended vocabulary, and took me straight to the station like we should have agreed to much earlier.

That was the last time I saw Nash Mercer until that afternoon at Love Beach a few days ago.

I didn’t know if fate brought us back together. I didn’t know if he could accept the person I’d become, but I did know one thing.

Tonight’s dinner would be an utter shitfight— if he survived the questioning my father put him through afterwards.

I managed a faint smile, less than reassuring and all the things he needed as my broken mother retracted and headed toward the table in the corner we occupied all week because it appeared to be the only one in the room she could find.

My father continued to stare at Nash. After a while he held out a hand for the boy who never got a chance to say goodbye to follow the woman he refused to abandon when another might have.

Nash looked down at me, his eyes fathomless. Unchecked fury swirled in their depths. Tonight, I’d have questions to answer about our shared past, even though he didn’t know that last part yet.

I didn’t glance at Daddy, but I did keep my hand laced through Nash’s as I followed him to our table.

Shitfight was absolutely the right term.

One of those words I learned from the detective that night.