Ramona and the Renegade

The sunlight hurt her head.

Sunlight?

Her eyes popped open and she jackknifed up into a sitting position. The pain doubled but she valiantly struggled to ignore it as urgent messages telegraphed themselves to her throbbing brain.

The incessant, heavy rain had stopped. As had the moaning wind. The world was still.

She was on a striped, bare mattress that smelled as if it had been used every day for the past two centuries, all without being cleaned.

She’d gotten drunk, she suddenly recalled.

Drunk with Joe. Joe! Omigod, Joe!

Shock raced through her aching mind as bits and pieces of last night came back to her, jumbled and completely out of order. The only thing she specifically remembered was throwing herself at him.

Hard.

And then nothing.

She covered her mouth in growing agitation. She couldn’t remember what happened after she’d hermetically sealed her mouth to his.

Had he—

Had they—

“Oh, God,” Mona groaned more loudly this time as her distress mounted. She dragged her hand through her hair. The roots hurt. Her skull hurt.

Did that mean that she…?

That he…?

“Oh, God,” Mona groaned again, confused, embarrassed and absolutely, unequivocally miserable.

“He’s busy. Will I do in a pinch?” Joe asked.

The sound of her groaning voice had drawn him in. The expression on her face as she looked up at him told him everything he needed to know. She remembered last night.

That made two of them.

“You—you—” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, hoping against hope that nothing had happened. Afraid that it had. And worse, not knowing how to bluff her way through this to get him to tell her the details—or the lack of any—without admitting that there was a huge void in her aching brain.

“It stopped raining,” Joe informed her mildly as if he hadn’t noticed her sudden inability to form a complete, coherent sentence. “Hell, it looks as if it never even rained at all.” There were only a few small puddles to hint at the rising waters that had encroached around the cabin yesterday. “I can get you into town now.”

And then, because he wasn’t entirely a plastered saint and because he couldn’t resist teasing her just a little, he stood in the doorway of the tiny bedroom where he’d deposited her passed-out body last night and grinned wickedly at her.

“Unless, of course, you’d rather stay here for a while longer….” His voice trailed off, leaving the rest to her imagination.

Mona instantly stiffened. Something had happened last night. “No, I don’t want to stay here a second longer,” she informed him woodenly, scrambling off the sagging, weathered mattress. “Not one second longer.”

Feet planted firmly on the floor, her head still throbbing like a war drum pressed into use, Mona raised her chin pugnaciously, ready to go toe to toe with him in order to get at the truth.

“What happened last night, Joe?”

The wicked grin remained. “You weren’t yourself,” he answered.

There were so many different ways to take that, and from where she stood, none of them were good. “Exactly who was I?” she demanded.

Enjoying himself, Joe played it out a little longer. He turned on his heel, ready to leave the room and the cabin. “Maybe we’d better leave that to another time.” He kept his voice deliberately vague.

He figured she owed him, seeing as how he’d been the personification of honorableness last night. Turning a deaf ear to the demands that his body fairly shouted at him.

Stunned that he wasn’t answering her, Mona launched herself at the doorway, making it half a step before he reached it. Hands on either side of the doorjamb, trying not to wince from the pain in her head, Mona blocked his way.

“Maybe we better not,” she countered. Damn but her head was killing her. Any sudden movement on her part just intensified the crushing pounding. “What happened?” she asked again, enunciating each word slowly, her teeth clenched.

Silent, Joe watched her for a long moment. She didn’t remember anything. Hadn’t witnessed his superhuman struggles with himself to finally separate her lips from his and hold her at arm’s length. Didn’t remember that she’d pushed his hands away and snuggled up against him again, her soft, inviting body promising him a time he wouldn’t soon forget—and she wouldn’t remember.

That had been just the trouble. Whether it was just the liquor talking, or the liquor dissolving the inhibitions that kept her from him, he didn’t know. What he did know was that if he made love with a woman, she would damn well be conscious of her decision to meet him halfway, not slide to meet him on a slick path of mind-numbing alcohol.

“Nothing happened,” he finally said.

If it was nothing, then why had it taken him so long to say the word? And why couldn’t she remember anything beyond—

Oh, God, she’d kissed him.

Kissed him? She’d all but swallowed his mouth up whole, she realized as the memory came vividly crashing back to her, heating her blood at the same time. Heating all of her.

Embarrassed, Mona could feel her cheeks suddenly blazing. It took everything she had not to try to cover them up with her hands.

She tried diversion. “Don’t lie to me,” she snapped angrily.

His eyes captured hers, making a soul-to-soul connection, the way he used to back when he would walk her home from school and dreams were cheap.

“When have you ever known me to lie?” he asked her quietly.

Mona shrugged, struggling to recapture the dignity she felt she’d forfeited by allowing her old, and secret, girlhood crush on Joe to come out last night.

“For the most part, I’ve been gone these past eight years.” Although she had come home almost every summer. “I don’t know. You could have changed.”

But even as she said it, Mona knew she didn’t really believe that.

“I didn’t,” he replied flatly.

“So what did happen after I glued my mouth to yours?”

“You passed out.”

Mona froze inside. This was worse than she’d thought. No wonder she didn’t remember anything. She wasn’t conscious for it. “And then what?” she asked in a quiet voice.