there had been moments in her life when she got intensely, out-of-control lonely and had to do what she had to do to keep her sanity intact. These were past tense, of course. Still, they’d led to the smart-girl-doing-stupid-things someone had written the book about.
Like letting herself be flattered into her first romantic relationship with and then marrying that good-for-nothing bruiser Buddy Carmichael a couple years after high school just because she thought she’d finally gotten over Russ, lost her mind and fallen for Buddy, let him have her virginity and then thought he’d gotten her pregnant.
Which would have been a mistake of gargantuan proportions even if he had, which he hadn’t. Because not only had she not been pregnant, but Big Man on Northland Pioneer College’s Campus, Buddy Carmichael, had turned out to be a drinking-man’s wife beater with friends in high places and an ability to manipulate the system to his own ends.
And so much for doing what some desperate mutation of yourself thought you had to do to keep yourself from being lonely!
After the Buddy idiocy Janina had started hanging out with Russ’s brothers, almost exclusively. They were fun and they didn’t stray beyond boundaries they all knew existed but none of them mentioned.
True, they weren’t Russ by a long shot, but they shared minor similarities and were a fairly safe substitute for, not to mention a good source of information on, the real thing.
Foolish, but there she was.
Head high in refusal to succumb to the truly moronic things she knew about herself, Janina slung a pair of brown coffee mugs from a finger and sashayed out from behind the counter, hips swinging in her best “I don’t give a damn what you’re doing or with whom, Russ Levoie” style.
Not that he’d get it, but that wasn’t the point.
At least not entirely.
“Damn the torpedoes,” Tobi suggested helpfully, grinning.
“Shut up,” Janina retorted and, head high, huffed off.
“I don’t know how I can help you, Maddie,” Janina heard Russ say as she approached. She watched him run a hand over the back of his freshly shorn neck in a gesture of frustration with which she was all too familiar. He accepted responsibility for the world, and when the world didn’t cooperate, it got to him. “It’s not like—”
“I know you don’t have jurisdiction, Russ,” Maddie said, not quite able to keep the panic out of her voice. “I just thought maybe…” She swallowed, drew herself together. “Hoped maybe there’d be something…” Her voice trailed off.
Janina paused, watching.
Maddie’s face grew shuttered, her troubled hazel eyes clouded, and the perfect bow mouth took on the edgy shape of self-derision. “I don’t know what I hoped. Aside from—from…” She swallowed convulsively, clenched her fists and looked away, at the table, at the window, anywhere but at him. “Aside from the other stuff…m-my fath—Charlie getting out an-and coming for me…” She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Shrugged. “Other than that, I dunno. Maybe I hoped partly that you’d changed your mind about what I asked you. Or something.”
She looked at him, suddenly in command of herself again. “I’m sorry, this was stupid. What am I thinking? You’d think I’d have learned how to rescue myself by now, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe not from this,” he said quietly then eyed her directly, hard. “But is that what you’re here looking for, Maddie? A knight-in-shining?”
Maddie laughed without humor. “Wouldn’t that be a kick if I were. Why? You looking to joust windmills again, Russ?”
Russ shrugged. “We all need a little rescuing once in a while.”
“Even you?”
“Not by you, Maddie.” The comment was terse, accompanied by an unconscious, half-reflexive glance that skimmed the room and brought his gaze to rest for half a second on Janina.
She stopped dead in her tracks. He needed to be rescued, but not by Maddie. Not by Maddie! And he’d looked at her—her, Janina!—when he said it. So he did notice her—maybe. If she was reading correctly the signals he might not even be aware he was sending.
A frisson of—Janina wasn’t sure what—shimmied down her spine. Fear and anticipation, caution and recklessness, pure unadulterated and exhilarating hope.
In less than a heartbeat, hope changed the “I don’t give a damn” swing of her hips into a “come-hither” sway-and-roll, turned her step into a glide, sparkled her eyes, instinctively curved her mouth into its most welcoming and flirtatious “hey-how-you-doin’” smile, and focused her entire attention on Russ.
In just longer than that same heartbeat, and seemingly from out of nowhere, a large, booted foot shot out and tripped her, sent her sliding and sprawling across an empty table that tipped and dumped her, the burning-hot coffee, the mugs and the chair she smashed into, crashing to the floor.
Somewhere off to the right the air filled with raucous, full-bellied, hatefully familiar, cruelly delighted laughter surrounded by shocked silence.
Half-stunned, Janina lay in the middle of the mess, feeling the bruises gather and the coffee scald its way through her skimpy pink uniform. She couldn’t quite find her right wrist, and the left fingers that had carried the coffee mugs felt pinched and a trifle slick.
The spiteful laughter lasted for less than a moment longer before Russ jerked Buddy Carmichael out of his seat by the throat, slammed him backward into the wall, tripped him face-first onto the floor beside his ex-wife and handcuffed his beefy wrists behind him.
Oblivious of her expensive white designer sheath, Maddie knelt amid the debris beside Janina and gently began to feel for broken bones. Tobi arrived at Janina’s other side almost simultaneously to do the same.
Not far from Janina’s face, Russ gripped a hank of Buddy’s hair and lifted his head, forcing him to look at Janina. “This what you think’s funny, man?” Fury tightened Russ’s voice to a whip crack. “Seriously, man, you find this funny?”
Apparently unaware of who had him pinned, Buddy sneered, unrepentant. “Yeah.”
Russ dragged Buddy up farther, hard, by the hair. “What?”
Buddy’s smirk wavered hardly at all. “Yeah—sir.”
The chains on Russ’s temper seemed to snap. Even as the rolling whoop of sirens filled the air outside the diner, he dropped Buddy’s face onto the floor and hauled him up for another go.
Suddenly, Buddy was neither cocky nor smirking. He also no longer found what he’d done to Janina funny, and croaked that to Russ through bruised and bleeding lips. Hardly satisfied, but knowing it was the best he’d get, Russ removed his knee from between Buddy’s shoulder blades, released the man’s hair, jerked a nod in his brother Jonah’s direction as he came into the café and moved to squat beside Janina.
Casting a wry look at his oldest—and tallest—brother, young officer Levoie went to collect Russ’s prisoner.
Gently, Russ touched Janina’s cheek. “How you doin’?”
She
