Renegade Man by Parris Afton Bonds Read Free Book Online

pillow, as if staking his claim to her bed. “Pa would come home drunk on
Christmas Eve and pass out. He’d come home drunk practically every day, so why
would Christmas be any different?”
    She dished out
two plates of stew and made a couple of chicken salad sandwiches. “Your father
might not have been a good provider, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good
man.”
    “My mother
wouldn’t have argued that.”
    His mother had
died of some “female disease,” as Mrs. McLeod had put it at the time, and Jonah
had rarely mentioned her after that. Feeling awkward, Rita-lou set the plates
rather unceremoniously on the card table. “Lunch.”
    He wedged
himself into one unsubstantial chair. “Forks?”
    With his hair
rumpled from the Stetson, and that disreputable mustache, she decided that all
he needed was an eyepatch and he’d look like a buccaneer. “In the grub box.”
She set out two glasses and poured milk without asking his preference.
    After she seated
herself, he began to eat, almost wolfing down the stew. He caught her watching
him and grinned. “Great stew, Ritz. Your ma teach you how to cook?”
    “She hated
coming home to cook after cooking all day for the Kingsleys. Grandpops taught
me.”
    “You still miss
him, don’t you?”
    “Very much.” Her
grandfather had worked at the mile-wide, mile-deep open-pit Kennecott copper
mine until an accident had confined him to a wheelchair thirty years earlier.
    After her mother
had run off with Kennecott’s corporate pilot, Rita-Iou had dropped out of the
tenth grade to support her grandfather by working at the Kingsley mansion. “The
one thing that saddens me the most about the whole episode that summer was that
Grandpops died before he could find out about his great-grandson.”
    “Is that the
Trace you’ve mentioned?”
    “Yes. He’s a
marvelous boy, Jonah. He’s tall, with hair just about your color, and warm
brown eyes. He’s intelligent and sensitive and concerned about everything and
everyone.”
    “Is that what
you saw in Chap, Rita-lou, that you didn’t see in me?”
    She forced
herself to swallow and raised her eyes to meet Jonah’s hard gaze. “You and I
were never serious about each other, Jonah.”
    “Maybe it was
the Kingsley money, then.”
    She stiffened.
“Maybe it was because Chap was solid and dependable, not a will-o’-the-wisp.”
    His mouth
tightened in a hard, unfriendly line. “Dependable? Where was he when you were
having labor pains? Where was he when you were having his kid?”
    “And I suppose
you’d have been there?”
    “I would never
have let it happen to you in the first place.”
    “If you’ve
finished eating, Davy Jones, I think you’d better go.”
    “That’s Jonah
Jones.” He rose, his body seeming to completely fill the confines of the tent.
“I think you’re right. We were at odds twenty years ago, and things haven’t
changed, have they?” He grabbed his hat and clamped it low over his forehead,
then gazed down at her from beneath its brim. “Just keep any old bones you dig
up out of my way.” He paused, and his expression grew even grimmer. “And you
with them.”
     
     
     
    Chapter 4
    Jonah spat into
his face mask, the best prevention against fogging.
    He had just
primed the gold dredger’s engine, and now the dredger made a loud humming noise
in the quiet of the hot afternoon. Readjusting his regulator, he checked his
air intake valve to see if it was working properly. His years of SEAL experience
had taught him too well that it was the one little detail you overlooked that
would get you. A SEAL member might get a little cocky, and the next thing you
knew he’d get the bends, or incinerate himself trying to dispose of a bomb.
    Looking like some
terrifying movie monster, Jonah waded into the river where it broke up against
the boulders in a rainbow mist. Without the wet suit and gloves he would have
been numbed by the chilly snow runoff. His fins slapped through the water,
making