Place Your Betts (The Marilyns) (2 page)

Betts checked her watch. With any luck, she could be in Hollisville by suppertime. What she’d do when she got there…was anyone’s guess.

***

Gabe Swanson slammed on the brakes.

It wasn’t every day that a man came across an empty pair of high heels sitting smack dab in the middle of Farm to Market Road 449. He pulled up to the shoes and leaned out the window to get a better look. Fancy, black, pointy-toed things as tall as towers. The tag inside read Jimmy Choo. Who was she and why were her shoes in the road?

Gabe scanned the road looking for a shoeless woman—nothing but pine trees, barbwire fence, and tall grass. Either she was fast on her feet or space aliens had abducted her. It was hard to believe that beings intelligent enough to travel through the galaxy would have nothing better to do than snatch people right out of their shoes. Then again, Gabe had done his fair share of cow tipping in high school, and that had been pretty stupid.

Gabe eased his boot back on the accelerator, and slowly, the pickup worked its way back to highway speed. More than likely, the shoes belonged to the driver of the empty black Mercedes convertible that had taken a curve too fast and run up on the embankment about half a mile back.

“Superstar Betts Monroe just finished her American Sweetheart tour.” The disembodied voice from the radio sounded unnaturally excited.

“I caught the show in LA. It was amazing. I saw that her new single is on iTunes for preorder.”

Gabe jabbed at the radio’s power button and chewed on the inside of his cheek. All he needed today, of all days, was to hear about her. With his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, he rolled his neck, forcing himself to relax as the events of the day threatened to replay in his head. So what if the bank had foreclosed on part of his land? He’d get it back. He blew out a long, slow breath. God only knew where he’d find the money, especially with the property taxes coming due. He’d managed to keep the wolf at bay by dividing the ranch, transferring ownership of a third to his son, keeping a third, and mortgaging the remainder. It hadn’t mattered to the bank that he was only weeks away from getting his organic certification and that losing part of his land would mean starting the certification process all over again. Hell, he had a verbal agreement from Whole Foods to buy beef direct from him once he was running certified organic beef. Unfortunately, all the bank cared about was money…their money.

Failure isn’t in the Swanson vocabulary.
If his daddy had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. Unfortunately, his father’s only success had been losing the family fortune in a Ponzi scheme and then drinking himself to death. But Gabe’s grandfather, Ken Swanson, had been a tough cattleman who’d spent his life building up the ranch. The only silver lining in today’s disaster was that Papa Ken was dead and couldn’t see the mess Gabe had made of things. Disappointing his grandfather would have torn Gabe apart because Papa Ken had been Gabe’s measuring stick, and there was nothing worse than coming up short in the eyes of someone he loved.

Failure may not be part of the family motto, but regret was alive and well.

He slowed down, negotiating a hairpin turn. Most rural northeast Texas roads were asphalt slapped on top of old horse trails. Clearly the rancher who'd cut this trail had been blind. The only salvation for FM 449—besides being a deserted place to go parking—was the foliage in late October through early November. Instead of soothing his spirits, the autumn golds, reds, purples, and oranges glared down at him from scores of sweet gum, dogwood, and oak trees. How did he tell his son that a part of the ranch—his birthright—was gone? Gabe shook his head. The full weight of family pressed down on him.

As he drove, something on the side of the road caught his attention. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he leaned forward on the vinyl bench seat of his 1998 Chevy Silverado pickup.

A redhead in a tight black dress stomped barefoot down the shoulder of the road.

Gabe smiled. Jimmy?

Deep copper hair curling just past her shoulders, mile-long creamy white legs, and a nice, round ass barely covered by a tiny excuse for a dress were all fine distractions from his troubles. He’d been raised to help a lady in distress, and a shoeless woman on a lonely road certainly qualified.

Pulling up next to the redhead, he rolled down the window.

She sighed in relief. “Thank God. You’re the first person I’ve seen. I ran off the road, and my cell doesn’t work.”

Judging by the height of her hair and the huge, bug-eyed, sparkly sunglasses she’d hidden her eyes behind, she wasn’t from around here. Dallas. He nodded. It had to be.

“Need a ride?”

The woman froze. Slowly, she pulled down the sunglasses. Eyes the color of spring grass bored into his.

Holy shit. Every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for her to pounce, but he held her gaze, and by God, he wouldn’t blink first.

“The only thing I want from you is my son.” Betts Dittmeyer-turned-Monroe matched his stare for a few seconds and then looked down the empty road.

“Not gonna happen.” Gabe spat the words and rolled up the window. Betts could take care of herself. Any woman who sold her son to the highest bidder was tough enough to hike twelve miles into town. He owed it to his son to make her walk…barefoot…uphill…in the snow. But this was east Texas—the closest thing they had to snow was a cherry Icee from Manny’s Mini Mart.

“You’re going to leave me here? In the middle of freakin’ nowhere?” Betts pounded on the window.

She’d grown some curves in the last seventeen years, and that dress hugged every single one. The tops of her breasts showed along with a shallow valley of cleavage. How many times had his tongue explored that valley?

Betts glared at him. Those malicious green eyes were the same. Still looking down her nose at him like she was the princess and he should live to do her bidding. Back then, she’d used her body to get to his bank account. Now what was she willing to trade for a ride into town?

Gabe removed his eyes from her cleavage and rolled down the window half-mast. “Yep.”

“Typical. Just like you. Turn your back when someone needs you most.” Betts resumed her trek into town. Gabe imagined that Santa Anna and his troops hadn’t marched with that much venom and vigor on their way to the Alamo.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Easing his foot off the brake, he let the truck roll alongside her. As much as he wanted her to be a speck in his rearview mirror, he couldn’t let her get away with that one.

“You know what it means.” She kept her head down and power walked for all she was worth.

Sweat beaded on his upper lip. He deserved that. Back then, he’d had his reasons. None of which were any of her business.

“Happy walking.” Gabe stomped on the gas, crumbled asphalt spewing from his rear tires. He was justified in leaving her high and dry. She was bad news. His son came first. Gabe glanced in the rearview mirror.

Betts had her hands on her hips, her feet straddling the yellow line. She looked like a demented Wonder Woman. He sped up.

When he was seventeen, she’d been his world. He’d have traded his soul to make her smile, but she’d ripped his heart out and used it for target practice. All he’d been to her was a dollar sign.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stag jump from behind a tree. It was mating season, and deer were known to charge humans. Gabe chewed on the inside of his cheek. Just last week, a mountain lion had been spotted in the area. He gripped the steering wheel so tight his knuckles turned white as the first pink-gold rays of dusk broke through the clouds. Sun was going down. They’d had a good rain yesterday, so the snakes would be out.

Betts had given his son life.

Gabe slowed down.

He shook his head. What was he thinking? This was Betts. She could wrestle a rutting buck with one hand and bitch-slap a rattlesnake with the other. He stepped on the brake and squealed to a stop. This was a bad idea. He threw the truck in reverse anyway and rolled down the window as he came to a stop next to Betts.

She tapped her foot like his return was a foregone conclusion.

“Get in.” It was his best screw-you tone.

She reached for the handle, but Gabe hit the electric locks.

“In the back.” He couldn’t leave a damsel in distress, but he sure as hell didn’t have to cater to her. Betts had stopped being his princess the day she’d taken his father’s ten grand, hightailed it to Nashville, and slept her way to the top of the country music charts.

Gabe rolled up the window and revved the engine. Since his truck didn’t like waiting around any more than he did and it had a tendency to stall, he revved her again.

Betts must have taken that as a signal to hurry up, because she sprinted to the back and pulled down the tailgate. Just for fun, Gabe hit the gas. She made a not-so-nice hand gesture and hopped up. Balancing herself on the right wheel well, she positioned her glasses on her nose and held her head as high as the football princess during the homecoming parade.

This was a fitting end to a terrible day. He’d lost five hundred acres and two hundred head of cattle to the bank paying off debts that had started with his father. If drought hadn’t knocked Gabe on his knees three years in a row, he wouldn’t have gotten so far behind.

And to top it all off, Betts was back.

Gabe stomped on the gas, jolting him back against his seat.

She yelled, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. He glanced in the rearview mirror.

Something flew into her mouth, and she spat several times, but by golly, her regal pose didn’t slip one iota. He had to hand it to her because that level of pretension was hard to pull off with her hair flapping around her face as the world zoomed by at seventy miles per hour.

Gabe laughed.

On second thought, if Betts was sitting in the back of his pickup catching bugs in her teeth, the day wasn’t a total loss.

She’d done it again. Emotional decisions always got Betts into trouble. No shirt, no shoes,
big
problem. Why hadn’t she packed a bag before she’d left? Or at least thrown a pair of comfortable shoes in the car? And clean underwear would have been nice. Being carried off in a whirlwind of maternal love was noble, but as the last rays of sunshine disappeared behind a cloud, the temperature dropped rapidly. Tonight it would probably dip down into the fifties.

She shivered at the thought. Welcome to fall in northeast Texas.

And she wasn’t on the way to see her son. Gabe sure as hell wouldn’t take her. She tried to finger-comb her hair, but her hands snagged in her wind-tangled mess. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, she needed to pull herself together before she showed up on her son’s doorstep.

Betts stared at her grandmother’s gray, cinderblock house. Prison had to be more cheerful. Rows of tall, skinny pine trees stood shoulder-to-shoulder looking down their noses on the prim and overly pious square house that had held the town shrew. Next door, the Dairy Queen drive-thru was hopping. When Betts was eight, it had been the coolest thing that Gigi lived behind the Dairy Queen. Now, not so much. It was loud, and the view of the dumpster was less than picturesque.

Moist red clay and pine needles squished between Betts’s toes. She glanced down. Her coral-pink toenails were splattered with muck. Gabe hadn’t so much dropped her off as slowed down in front of Gigi’s house.

She adjusted the glasses on top of her head and filled her lungs with pine-fresh air.

If God were a woman, she’ d have given Clark Gable Swanson a beer belly.

Unlike his namesake, Gabe wasn’t suave or debonair. And the only way he’d carry her up a staircase was so he could drop her out of the second-story window.

He looked the same, damn it. Blond hair that was just a tad unruly and eyes too gray to be sky blue. After seventeen years, he still filled out a tee shirt with so many muscles he was a walking infomercial for exercise equipment while Betts had to work at being thin. There was her nutritionist, herbalist, two different personal trainers, and an energist…. Maybe the energist didn’t count. Holding a couple of crystals and chanting didn’t exactly work up a sweat. For that matter, unless she counted chewing and swallowing as aerobic exercises, the nutritionist and herbalist were off the list too.

Betts’s cell phone rang, and she jumped. Of course,
now
it worked but not when she had been stranded on the side of the road. She slipped her hand into her black Chanel bag and pulled out her iPhone. The face of Honey Jamison, Betts’s business manager, smiled up at her. Betts slipped the phone back in her purse and let it go to voice mail. No doubt, Honey was calling for the status on her new single. It should have been finished days ago, but the melody wasn’t right, and she didn’t know where to go with it. This had never happened before—music came easy to Betts. Usually, songs just poured out of her, but this one didn’t want to be born. And no amount of prodding from her agent would make the process go faster.

Unbeknownst to her, her record label had put it on iTunes for preorder. According to Honey, hordes of fans had preordered and were keeping vigil at their computers waiting for the song’s release.

Betts’s life was one deadline after another. And there were probably a hundred messages on her voice mail from her various handlers, but all those deadlines were gonna have to wait. Her son needed her. She’d just have to reprioritize until she figured a few things out.

Juggling schedules was what working mothers did, right? Her stomach flip-flopped.

Would her son ever see her as his mother? Did she have a right to hope he might?

The same old guilt settled in her gut—it wasn’t a wave of pain that crested and receded but a black, stagnant pool that grew deeper one day at a time. Giving up Tom hadn’t been the easy way out. Oh God—a hundred times a day, she told herself it had been for the best. Maybe if she said it a thousand times a day for the next hundred years, she’d believe it. This was her son. The child she’d carried inside her for nine months, and she’d let him go. How could he forgive her when she couldn’t forgive herself?