CHAPTER 1
As the ominous clouds of a summer storm gathered on the horizon, Juliana “Gillian” Armstead-Bancroft—former valedictorian, queen of the Neewollah festival, summa cum laude graduate of an almost-Ivy, and once-perfect wife on the arm of Thomas Bancroft of the Maryland Bancrofts—flew over the potholes on County Road 85 in her best friend’s huge, flame-red Ford Fairlane convertible.
The woman known in Freedom, Kansas, as the “Pride of the East Side” dug her demure French-manicured nails into the red-leather-wrapped steering wheel as she shoved the pedal to the metal. The big American classic car bucked and roared beneath her sensible suede loafer. The rain-soaked wind raced through and ravaged her perfectly straightened hair.
Maybe I should just embrace being bad, she’d whined into her margarita during her first night back in town while she floated in her best friend’s pool. It’d taken three margaritas to say such a thing, even to Cynthia Madsen, who’d known her since grade school. Having known her since grade school, Cynthia had laughed so hard she’d fallen off her float. Gasping and clinging to the side, she’d ticked off Gillian’s options for being bad: Tattoos. Biker bars. Streaking. Skinny-dipping. Join a cult. Break a heart.
Gigolos. So many gigolos.
That wasn’t what Gillian had meant by being bad. She’d meant being bad like being a failure. Like being cursed instead of blessed. Like being incompetent at successfully steering the course of her life and, instead, crashing it into her two innocent children.
Right now, with those two innocent children safely tucked away on a weeklong Disney World trip with Gillian’s parents, Cynthia’s version of bad was as good as any. Head pounding but resolute, Gillian had pointed to the Fairlane this morning as the car she wanted to borrow while she waited for her Lexus SUV to arrive from D.C. Cynthia, owner of Freedom’s only remaining manufacturing facility, had an entire garage of classic cars collected by her father and grandfather and didn’t bat an eye.
Now, Gillian urged the Fairlane faster as she rocketed past rusted barbed-wire fencing and bullet-holed speed limit signs. She wasn’t worried about traffic. County Road 85 connected Freedom’s ten thousand souls with the next town over only if those souls were too young, drunk, or horny to use the old highway or the new gleaming interstate that barely acknowledged either town. The pitted two-lane road was prone to flooding thanks to its long stretch beside the Viridescent River, which marked Freedom’s eastern border. State and county officials had thrown up their hands at trying to keep the two apart, just like parents had given up trying to keep teenagers out of Old 85’s abandoned fields and foreclosed farmhouses.
People—non-horny, non-young people—also avoided Old 85 because it was haunted. Whether it was the ghost car, the Jersey devil, the victims of the first serial-killing family on record (Freedom kept that quiet in its history books), or the ghostly wails of La Llorona on the riverbank, Old 85 had enough terrors on it to maintain its empty, angry disrepair.
This haunted failure of a road on the eastern edge of her dying hometown was the perfect place for the Pride of the East Side to get good at being bad.
Gillian gripped the steering wheel tight against the punishing wind as she raced toward the molten-gray edge of the storm. Her weightless ring finger felt like it could flap up and rip off. When she signed her divorce papers a month ago, she told Thomas she’d lost her wedding ring set.
Selling a 2.12-carat emerald-cut Tiffany engagement ring she’d worn for ten years had to be one way a good mom went bad.
She could also stuff her face with chocolate. She’d denied her lifelong sweet tooth for a decade, even tossing away the packages of chicles her grandmother slipped into her palm when she visited, but now it was roaring back with a vengeance.
If there was anyone who was going to have a bad-for-you candy bar lying around, it was Cynthia Madsen.
Gillian unhooked her lap belt and leaned over to push the chrome button of the glove box. She glanced at the endless lane of straight and empty before she looked inside, praying for a giant Snickers. She saw registration and insurance papers, a gold tube of lipstick, a strip of condoms...
She reared back, then felt ridiculous. Of course Cynthia would have condoms in the glove box.
Finding condoms in a single woman’s take-no-prisoners muscle car wasn’t the same as finding them on the floor of her husband’s Mercedes when she was taking it into the shop. There was no reason her stomach should turn over queasily now. She wouldn’t have to take this strip of condoms into her home and then throw them away several hours and one massive blowup later, wondering how she once again became the bad guy.
A good mom noted this reaction and the associated negative emotions so she could discuss it later with the therapist she’d responsibly started seeing a year ago right after she’d asked for the divorce. A bad mom stepped on the gas.
She slammed the glove box closed, swearing to buy one of everything in the candy aisle when she passed a convenience store.
She glanced at the road.
Her bullet of a car was aimed for a man walking on the shoulder.
Gillian stomped the brake.
The tires screamed and skittered as she double-fisted the wheel. The back end fishtailed, dark clouds and tall weeds blurring in the windshield, and she spun the wheel to correct it, fought to keep control of this one thing when she’d lost control of everything else. The ravine down to the river yawned wide in front of her. Padre Nuestro, que estás en el cielo, a blessing as lifesaving as her removed seat belt, rolled through her brain before she remembered that God wasn’t listening anymore.
She would sail into the river, sink under the Viridescent, and finally join La Llorona like the beautiful and terrifying fantasma had always wailed for her to. That was a better end than hurting one more innocent.
Everything stopped with a hard lurch.
The Fairlane grumbled its irritation. It had miraculously landed parallel to the road and on the opposite gravel shoulder. Rubber stung the air. Still clutching the steering wheel at two and ten, Gillian dropped her head between her arms as far-off thunder gave a warning.
“Hey, sweetheart.” His low voice, next to her door, sounded like the soft side of those storm clouds. “You okay?”
What a thing for him to ask when she’d almost killed him. With her tangled hair protecting her face like blinders, she convinced her cramped fingers off the steering wheel to turn off the car. “I’m fine,” she said, breathing to calm her galloping heart. “Thank you for asking.”
His gentle laugh surprised her. “Darlin’, you look like you’re anything but fine.”
Sweetheart? Darling? This was some smooth-talking redneck she’d almost obliterated. Her middle sister, Alex, would’ve told this guy to go fuck himself before she’d gotten married and become so nauseatingly happy. Gillian, having molded herself into the picture of dignity and self-possession, was an anomaly in her emotionally volatile
family. She would apologize and suggest that this sweet, simple hick hurry himself along before he was drowned in the oncoming storm.
Gillian lifted her head and let the protective covering of her hair slide away. “I am so...”
Sorry got lost in the warm, rain-choked air as she saw him through her sunglasses. Dark eyes fringed in thick lashes stared, astonished, back. Black hair, thick and shiny, was finger-combed out of his face the way it’d never been before. His mouth dropped open in surprise. Those full and soft and so well-known lips were a perfect complement to his strong, defined nose, high, sharp cheekbones, and the hollows beneath that pointed back to his mouth like neon, good-time signs.
“Nicky?”
It couldn’t be. The last time she’d seen Nicky Mendoza was on this road thirteen years ago, when she’d hugged and kissed him goodbye, already focused on the three-hour drive to Kansas City and the flight back to Boston to begin her sophomore year in college. Had he been here all this time?
“Nicky, is that you?” He had an afternoon scruff he hadn’t been able to grow the last time she’d seen him and slight rays around the corners of his eyes. She reached up like he wasn’t essentially a stranger on a deserted road and brushed her thumb over the familiar teardrop scar beneath his right eye. His hand covered hers as he stared back in disbelief. His hard, hot touch was shocking. He turned his head and smelled her wrist.
The tiny movement made her clench between her legs. He used to do that, inhale her, down her sternum, behind her knee, in the bend of her thigh.
Peaches, he would sigh against her skin.
He pulled off her sunglasses with the same instinctive right to touch, tossed them to the seat, then gathered her face in calloused hands that smelled like leather and turpentine. She couldn’t believe he smelled the same.
Without the filter of her sunglasses, gazing at Nicky Mendoza was like trying to stare into the sun. He looked like a fallen angel. He looked like a heaven-sent fantasy against a threatening sky.
His thumb brushed the tip of her nose.
She’d had cosmetic work to slim her wide bridge since the last time she’d seen him, and her eyes had been a contact lens-assisted green since the moment her income had merged with Thomas’s. She’d believed, when she’d made the changes, that they were decisions she’d made on her own. For herself.
She tried to pull out of his hands.
“Wait,” he said through his teeth, his hands firming on her jaw. “Just...let me look at you. I can’t believe...” His forehead clenched like she’d hurt him. “You’re too beautiful to be real, hechicera.”
He used to call her that—sorceress—when he showed her things she’d asked him to show her, taught her things she’d asked him to teach. Nicky Mendoza, who she’d known and trusted since the fifth grade, had been a practical solution to the problem of her virginity when she came home the summer after her freshman year.
Nicky stroked a thumb down her neck, making her suck in a breath. “Are you really?"
he asked, searching her eyes. He was the one who’d discovered how sensitive her neck was. “Or did I trip over one of your spells?”
He still thought she was that girl he’d known. He still thought she was powerful. He didn’t know that, even if she’d thought to make this impossible meeting happen, she was stripped of her ability to do so.
A bang of thunder knocked sense into her. Dark clouds churned over their heads.
“Oh my God, Nicky,” she said, yanking out of his embrace. “Get in the car.”
A bolt of lightning seared the sky.
He strode around the front of the Fairlane and she got to process the whole reality of him. He was still lean, about the same five-ten he’d reached in high school, but his shoulders were broader. He was half brown-Mexican and half white-American like she was, but darker, and dressed head to toe in dusty black: lace-up boots, jeans, and a T-shirt. His strong, striated forearms with leather ties around one wrist were magnificent.
Gillian turned on the car and pulled the lever for the convertible soft top, glad to have tasks to distract her from the astonishing sight of an all-grown-up Nicky opening the passenger door and getting in the car with her. If she’d had any doubt that this was her friend, the black, paint-splattered backpack he set at his feet erased it.
Rain began to patter against the roof as they each latched it on their sides. They sat back in the cloud-darkened daylight and marveled at each other.
“What are you doing out here?” Gillian finally exclaimed.
He was just as stunned as she was. “My Jeep broke down,” he said, flinging a hand at the windshield, sending his thick black hair sliding onto his forehead. The last time she’d seen him, he’d worn his hair long and face shadowing. “It just died. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.”
“Then call a tow truck! Don’t go walking down Old 85.”
Nicky knew better than anyone the dangers near the river.
The reality of what had almost happened caught up with her. “Nicky, I almost...” She put her hand to her chest. Her breath stuck like taffy.
“Hey, you didn’t.” He pulled her hand away then intertwined their fingers. “Take a breath.”
His touch felt so familiar, he could’ve been holding her hand yesterday. His command seemed to open up her airways. She inhaled deeply, breathing in the smell of him: road dust, good leather, an iron tinge. He was viscerally real and here.
He let go of her. “There’s still no goddamn signal out here,” he said, shoving his hair back. “I can get a signal in the middle of Joshua Tree but still I can’t get a signal on Old 85.”
“You’ve been to Joshua Tree?”
Her surprise was as loud as the rain plastering the windshield. He smiled. When he’d been a seductive rebel, that teasing smile had weakened knees
and spread thighs.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was doing a piece out there.”
It was getting stuffy with the top up. Gillian flipped on the AC and got a whoosh of heat. “A piece?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I paint for a living.”
She picked up her expensive sunglasses and put them in their case. “Really?”
He nodded, still giving her that shit-eating smile as he shifted so his back was partly against the door.
“Do you still live in Freedom?” she asked.
“No. San Francisco.”
She stiffened her jaw against it dropping open.
“By way of Manhattan,” he continued. His smile had grown into a full-fledged smirk. “I moved to New York after a couple of years of art school in Denver.”
It was like he could see the bubbles of shock and disbelief over her head.
The Nicky she’d been with that long-ago summer had made his living molding aftermarket fenders and grilles at the factory Cynthia later inherited, Liberty Manufacturing, and had little ambition besides keeping his baby brother out of juvie. When he’d said he hadn’t been able to find anything wrong with his Jeep, she’d assumed he was a mechanic. A muscle-shirted, gleaming-with-sweat, grease-on-his-high-cheekbone mechanic.
Thirteen years ago, he’d said he’d never leave Freedom. He’d said he couldn’t leave. The members of her large Mexican-American family, who had made Freedom home since the early 1900s, wondered why anyone would want to.
The AC was finally starting to cool down. Rain clattered fast and hard against the windows. She needed to put the car in Drive and get going before this June thunderstorm really let loose.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said. “A...friend of mine is a visual artist.” She actually was an ex-investment client, but Gillian didn’t want to talk about herself. “She paints pieces for the Pottery Barn catalog when gallery sales are slow. I can put you in contact with her, if you’d like.”
“Sure,” he said.
Of the 256 people in their graduating class, Gillian—with her full ride to Brandeis and exclusive D.C. address and expensive vacations to far-flung destinations—had always believed she’d put the greatest distance between herself and Freedom. But Nicky had blazed his own way out with less support, fewer resources, and no trust-fund husband.
She looked down as she rubbed her hands over her thighs and saw the streaks she’d left on her white linen pants. It was a reminder that while she was looking at him, he was looking back. They were both thirty-two now, but while he looked like the fantasy hitchhiker you pick up in your dreams, she couldn’t imagine the state of her white, cowl-necked, sleeveless tank. Who wore all white when they went speeding down a country road in a classic convertible? Pampered East Coast moms trying to outrun their bad decisions, that’s who. She could feel the tangled mess of her hair around her face.
She must look pathetic. But the way he stroked her neck and called her hechicera hadn’t made her feel pathetic. Thirteen years ago, she’d asked Nicky to relieve her of the burden of her virginity in part because he’d had so many satisfied customers. Nicky had been a world-class
lover for a small-town guy.
“We looked for you at the ten-year reunion,” she said as a throb of lightning lit up the darkening outdoors.
“We?”
She shifted to also lean back against her door. “Me and Cynthia.”
His smile kicked up. “You two are back together? That’s trouble.”
The first day of school in the fifth grade, when Nicky had been the shy new boy everyone whispered about, Gillian and Cynthia had lured him onto the playground. From that day on, they played together most recesses and Nicky, trailed by his little brother, Lucas, would walk Gillian home from school. They’d all wandered apart in high school, and Gillian and Cynthia hadn’t connected again until the ten-year reunion four years ago.
“I guess that explains this car,” he said, grinning.
Gillian gave a huff of a laugh. She knew how ridiculous she looked, a stay-at-home mom in its stripper-red interior. It was actually getting harder to see in the gloom. The strength of the rain against the soft top was making her think they’d stay here and wait this storm out.
She searched around the steering column until she could pull the lever that turned on the headlights. A yellow glow from the instrument panel filled the inside of the car as the engine rumbled.
Nicky, who watched her with the corner of his plush bottom lip caught in his teeth, looked like an erotic fantasy against the red leather.
“When are you heading back to San Francisco?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“If I hadn’t almost hit you, I would’ve flown right past you,” she said, shaking her head.
Good women didn’t pick up hot hitchhikers. But bad ones...
What were the chances they’d fly from opposite coasts to land in Freedom at the same moment? What were the odds that they’d meet again on Old 85? And who could have forecast that her emotional turmoil would provide him safe harbor from a storm?
Who would’ve imagined that, once again alone in a classic car on this road with this friend she’d trusted to teach her everything, she’d be newly divorced and he’d be...
She glanced at his left hand. No ring.
Nicky could help her feel better. Nicky could help her feel good. She wanted to be bad.
The careful orchestration of a million chance events might have given her the opportunity to be downright naughty.
CHAPTER 2
Gillian licked thin, soft, wide lips as her peachy scent wrapped tentacles around Nicky in Cynthia Madsen’s pleasure cruiser. He couldn’t believe she was here.
“You in town visiting?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest and stuffing his hands under his biceps to prevent himself from grabbing her again.
He couldn’t believe she was real.
“Yes,” she said, her new moss green eyes dragging over his forearms before aiming out the window. Raindrops were bashing the glass and leaving little dripping shadows over the classy white top that showed off her toned arms and the white pants she’d curled up on the seat. Her makeup was smudged beneath her eyes, her honey-streaked dark hair was a mass of snarls, her nose had dirt on the new narrow tip, and her glossy nails were tapping against her thumb.
His girl looked like a Sèvres porcelain plate, a plate once licked by kings, teetering on the edge of a table.
“Where are you living?” he asked. He needed to turn this normal. The afternoon storm had wrapped around the car and it didn’t look like they’d be taking off soon. “What are you doing now?” He needed to open a window and let the rain wash away the magic that his hechicera said she had no part in.
If I hadn’t almost hit you, I would’ve flown right past you.
If he’d just skipped his urge to drive Old 85 one last time, he could have avoided all of this. He’d done almost everything in Freedom he was here to do: he’d cleaned out the last apartment he’d rented for his brother, settled Lucas’s debts around town, and buried Lucas’s ashes underneath a tree with a nice view of the property. Even when he completed his last task and convinced William to sell the farmhouse and move with him to San Francisco, he still wanted his brother to have a nice view. After fucking up in so many ways, he could at least do that for Lucas.
But his desire to revisit his memories of the time he’d spent with this girl on this road meant that he was now stuck in a car with a woman he’d never wanted to see again.
She was still tapping her fingers to her thumb, a habit of nervous counting she’d had since they were kids, and he wanted to twine his hand around hers to make her stop. He wasn’t going to fucking touch her.
“I’m...uh... I was living in D.C,” she said.
Of course. Gillian had East Coast written all over her. But she was nervous, and he hadn’t seen his girl nervous since she’d said I have a favor to ask you thirteen years ago.
Like an idiot, he’d said Sure. Anything you need.
“My...my children and I—I’ve got two kids—” His girl was a mom. “We’re staying with my parents for the summer. I’m...uh... I’m divorced.”
Fuck.
“Girl, I’m sorry.” He wasn’t just sorry for himself, stuck in this big front seat with her in the dark of a storm. He was so, so sorry for her. He knew his hechicera. The failure of a marriage was not part of her plans for world domination.
She gave him a tiny, nerve-wracked, dangerous smile. “Do you want to help me celebrate?”
Lightning cracked right up his spine.
“I mean...” She swallowed and shrugged and raised her chin to show off her neck. Her priceless fucking neck.
Once, when she’d been sitting in a lilac dress in William’s borrowed GTO, he’d tipped her head back and done nothing but kiss and lick and nibble and suck her wildly sensitive neck until the slow slide of two fingers under her skirt and into her soaking panties had made her come, sobbing and shaking, all over his palm. He’d used his wet hand to get himself off and made her watch. He’d been a creative little shit back then.
“Doesn’t this feel familiar?” she asked, her voice full of tremors but her reasoning it out like a math problem. “We’re in a big classic car on the side of Old 85 and no one knows we’re together.” She tried to smile. “I’d love another lesson, Nicky.”
She reached out to touch his knee in slow-mo surrealness. He snatched up her wrist with thumb and middle finger before she could make contact and tried to ignore how soft her skin was.
“Girl,” he said as a boom of thunder rattled the car’s frame. “What’s going on?”
Nothing about this was familiar. Sure, thirteen years ago, they used the nooks and crannies
of Old 85 to take the long, meandering journey to the loss of Gillian’s virginity in the back of the GTO. Sure, because of Gillian’s insistence, no one had known he was touching her. Loving her.
But he’d known Gillian Armstead since the first day of fifth grade, watched her in high school when she didn’t know he was looking. When she’d asked him to teach her about sex, to teach her about pleasure and not tell anyone else because sex was all she wanted from him, she’d done it in her clear, cutting, matter-of-fact way. She’d never tried to seduce him. When Gillian Armstead didn’t come straight at a problem, the world was revolving backward.
Inside the car, it was as still as a held breath. She let him manacle her wrist, trap her, as she made some decision with the lifting of her sharp chin. “Can you keep a secret, Nicky?”
He’d always kept her secrets. He nodded once.
“I’m back in Freedom because...because I don’t have anywhere else to go.” He could feel her delicate bones. “I’m thirty-two years old and my only option is to move in with my parents for the summer.” Her mossy eyes went bigger like she couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth.
“Gillian...” He wrapped his whole hand around her wrist and rubbed his thumb over her warm pulse.
“I’m broke.” She shuffled closer on the bench seat and he lowered their hands to his knee, keeping hold of her. “D.C. requires you to be separated for six months before they grant a divorce and all that time I couldn’t—I couldn’t find a job.” She was as shocked as he was. “I’m a financial planner with a master’s degree and I’m broke.” She gave a sharp high laugh that pinged around the inside of the car. “Doctor, heal thyself, am I right?”
Her pulse rocketed against his thumb. He didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, but he had to. “Is your ex providing—”
She shook her head once, fast and hard, her hair dragging across the edge of collarbone he could see peeking out of her top. “I won’t do what the prenup demands to get alimony and child support. I thought I’d find a job and wouldn’t need his money.”
With the back of her hand resting against his dusty jeans, he let go of her wrist and wrapped his fingers around her palm. She instantly squeezed back. “He’s not helping at all?”
She leaned closer like she was afraid of being overheard. ...
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