Ramona and the Renegade. Marie Ferrarella

already,” she ordered, then immediately added a warning. “I swear, Joe Lone Wolf, if I hear you say, ‘Today is a good day to die,’ you are going to really, really regret it.”

      He stole a quick glance in her direction, taking care not to look away from the road for more than half a heartbeat. Visibility was next to impossible, but at this point, he was searching for something very specific.

      “So much for my one dramatic moment,” he quipped. “How about, ‘Let’s hole up in the old Murphy place until this passes’? Will that get me beat up, too?” he asked.

      “The Murphy place?” Mona repeated uncertainly. She hadn’t realized that she’d gotten this disoriented. She squinted as she peered through the all but obliterated windshield. Visibility was down to approximately twelve to eighteen inches in front of the vehicle, maybe less. “Is that around here?”

      The “Murphy place” was little more than a three-room cabin that by urban standards hardly qualified as a vacation getaway, much less a regular home. It was more in the realm of a shack, really. More than three quarters of a century old, it had once been the center of a dream—and a budding cattle ranch—until an outbreak of anthrax had eventually killed both. The cabin, which should have been the beginning of a sprawling ranch house, had stood empty for close to twenty years now, after the last descendent of Jonas Murphy died without leaving any heirs, just a mountain of bad debts.

      Somehow in all that time, the building, a veritable feasting ground for vermin, had managed to escape being torn down or even claimed. No one cared enough about the unproductive piece of land to buy it and begin building something from scratch again. So the decaying cabin stood, enduring the seasons year after year and, like an aging octogenarian with osteoporosis, it grew steadily more and more frail.

      The last time he’d passed this way and actually looked at the cabin, Joe had thought that the only thing keeping the building up were probably the termites, holding hands.

      He sincerely hoped that they were holding tight for at least one more night.

      Instincts that were generations in the making guided him toward where he had last seen the cabin this morning on his way into town.

      “It should be close by,” he answered Mona, then spared her a grin and added, “Unless those pesky tire spirits decided to move it just so that they could annoy you some more.”

      She doubted that it was possible to annoy her any more than she already was, Mona thought. “Very funny.”

      The grin on Joe’s face softened into a smile and then that faded, as well. He found that he had to fight not just the rain but the wind for control over his vehicle. He sensed Mona’s tension. She was watching him.

      “Nothing to be afraid of,” he assured her quietly as he continued to stare intently through the blinding rain.

      Mona bristled. “I’m not afraid,” she retorted, stopping just short of snapping at him.

      She hated the fact that Joe could read her so well, that all he had to do was just look at her to sense what she was thinking. What bothered her most of all was that she couldn’t return the “compliment” and do the same with him. It just didn’t seem fair.

      “Okay,” Joe allowed. “Then why are you about to rip off my dashboard?” he asked. Without looking, he nodded in the general direction of her hands which were gripping the aforementioned dashboard.

      Mona gritted her teeth. Damn it.

      She was completely unaware that she was gripping the dashboard. Swallowing a curse, Mona dropped her hands into her lap, trying hard not to clench them.

      “Just bracing myself for the inevitable crash. You’re not exactly the best driver in the world,” she reminded him pointedly.

      He knew what she was referring to. At thirteen, he’d been angry at the world in general and specifically at the absentee father he’d never known and his mother, who’d died suddenly three years earlier. He’d been passed around from relative to relative and raised by committee, which compelled him to steal one of the elders’ cars just to thumb his nose at everyone.

      For the space of half an hour, he’d felt like his own man, free and independent. But the joyride ended when he lost control of the car and ended up in a ditch.

      Miraculously emerging unscathed, he’d wound up working the entire summer and half the fall to pay off the repair bill for the car. He figured the episode would always haunt him, no matter what he might go on to accomplish in life. He didn’t mind. He considered himself lucky to have walked away alive, much less without so much as a scratch.

      What amused him about the whole thing is that Mona had a similar incident in her past. It had happened when she was ten. Rather than a joyride, after an argument with her grandmother Mona decided to run away from home. She took her grandmother’s car to enable her escape. But the adventure was short-lived. Mona managed to go down only two streets before her grandmother had caught up to her—on foot. Even at that age, the old woman had been swift.

      The car sustained no damage. The same, he knew, couldn’t be said for Mona’s posterior or her dignity. She was grounded for a month.

      “I wouldn’t throw rocks if I were you,” he said, leaving it at that. When she frowned, he knew that she knew exactly what he was referring to.

      A second later, Mona sat up straight in her seat, suddenly animated. “I see it. You were right. The cabin is here.”

      “Nice to know you have faith in me,” Joe cracked, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It was getting harder to keep the vehicle from veering.

      “It’s raining horses and steers,” Mona cried, gesturing at the windshield and doing one better than what she considered to be the stereotypical comment about cats and dogs. “Anyone could have gotten turned around in this storm.”

      “Most people could have gotten turned around,” he allowed. Things like that never happened to him. He took his natural sense of direction for granted.

      She sighed, shaking her head. Same old Joe, she thought. “Despite what you think, you are not mystically empowered, Joe Lone Wolf.”

      Not for one minute did he think of himself as having any special, otherworldly powers, but he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I came to your rescue out of the blue, didn’t I?”

      “You were just on your way home and stumbled across me,” she corrected. “You’ve been taking the same route ever since you went to work for my brother as one of his deputies.”

      He turned the tables on her with ease. “Are you saying you took this path on purpose?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Just to run into me?”

      “No, I’m saying that you—I mean, that I—” This wasn’t coming out right. He was getting her all tongue-tied. Mona gave up. “Oh, hell, think what you want—but you do know better than that.”

      Yeah, he thought, he did. Had known it from the first moment that he’d laid eyes on Ramona as she walked into his second-period tenth-grade English class that February morning ten years ago. She’d been so beautiful to look at that it hurt him right down to his very core.

      And right from the beginning he knew that girls like Ramona Santiago did not wind up with guys like him. He was an Apache through and through and it wasn’t all that long ago that people regarded Native Americans like him as beneath them.

      Granted, Mona, like her brother, was one third Apache herself, but it was the other two thirds of her, the Mexican-American and especially the Irish side of her, that carried all the weight. And those two thirds would have never welcomed a poor Apache teenager into her life in any other capacity than just as a friend.

      So a friend he was. Someone for her to talk to, confide in if the spirit so moved her. Being her friend—her sometimes confidant—he’d long since decided is what made his life worth living. And what had, ultimately, made him abandon the wild, bad boy who didn’t play by the rules