Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap Read online

  Dedication

  To every bookseller and librarian

  who ever put a book in a reader’s hand

  and said, “You will love this.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  Hellcat Canyon Series

  About the Author

  By Julie Anne Long

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Avalon Harwood nudged the wheel of her BMW with her forefinger and it did exactly what she wanted it to do. Which officially made it unlike everything else in her life.

  The speedometer quivered on up to fifty as she eased it into the first S turn.

  She’d passed a 40 MPH sign a while back.

  But she knew this network of back roads that laced through Hellcat Canyon, California, as instinctively, say, as she knew how to get to the bathroom in her apartment in the pitch dark when clothes and shoes and books were strewn in her path. Which was all to the good, because for the past three hours she’d been preoccupied by the images crashing and pinging inside her skull like a handful of change circulating in a hot dryer.

  For some reason, she kept coming back to the sparkly orange toenails.

  This time she imagined the gas pedal was her boyfriend Corbin’s windpipe.

  The speedometer quivered up to fifty-five.

  Threaded through all those ghastly images were important philosophical questions. Such as: What would her life be like if she didn’t always wonder things?

  Like that time when she was nine years old and she’d wondered whether her big toe would fit up inside the faucet of the bathtub.

  And as it turned out, it could.

  It just wouldn’t come back out again.

  She’d panicked and shrieked and her brother Jude had called the paramedics, mostly because he’d always wanted a reason to call the paramedics, and when they arrived something like five minutes later Jude had run out the door to greet them screaming, “Get the paddles!” because he’d seen it on a TV show. (To this day, “Get the paddles!” was family shorthand for any emergency.)

  And then there was: What would her life be like if she didn’t always feel as though she had something to prove?

  Like the time when she was twelve and she’d built a ramp and proceeded to jump her bike over the narrowest part of Whiskey Creek. Because back then she would have done anything to impress Mac Coltrane, and when she was twelve, jumping Whiskey Creek on a bike seemed the logical way to do it.

  That jump, however, had been worth it for two reasons.

  For those three glorious seconds during which she was fully airborne.

  And for those three seconds after she came to: flat on the ground, dazed but unbroken, half in the creek, half out, bike half on her, half off—Mac Coltrane kneeling next to her, saying her name.

  And she knew that even if her heart had stopped for good, the expression in his hazel eyes would have jolted it back into pounding, joyous life again.

  Sometimes she thought it had never quite beat the same way again.

  But then she’d always kind of experienced Mac as a series of jolts. Every summer between the ages of ten and sixteen, her heart was a pinball in her chest, pinging whenever she saw his bike thrown down in front of someone’s house or chained to the newspaper rack in front of the Variety Store downtown where everyone went to buy candy, or when she caught a glimpse of a dark-haired boy of a certain height in the grocery store or library or anywhere, really.

  Right on cue around the next S turn, she caught a glimpse through the trees of the old Coltrane summer home at Devil’s Leap. It was what her dad called a Victorian pile, but it had starred in her fantasies from the moment she’d laid eyes on it when she was about eight. How could it not? It had a turret, for God’s sake. The turret was shingled in curving tiles like the body of a dragon, and the whole thing was painted a sort of deep, dusty rose, a singular color that glowed like something you’d find at the end of the yellow brick road when the sun hit it at this time of day. It had seemed entirely reasonable when she learned that Mac Coltrane lived in it, because she’d never before or since seen anyone like him.

  The one and only time she’d been inside it occupied a unique fixed point on the graph of her life: it was the best and the worst day to date.

  Though in light of today’s events, she might just have to review the rankings.

  Three hours ago she’d been all but airborne with happiness. An old friend from her San Francisco State teaching program days, Rachel Nguyen, had invited Avalon to tell an audience of a hundred-some-odd young entrepreneurs in San Jose her story: how four years ago, she’d been an exhausted full-time student who paid for classes by working full-time as a cocktail waitress at a bar frequented by Ivy League computer nerds. Then came the night she’d wistfully wondered out loud to the nerdy-cute Dartmouth computer science grad who kept hitting on her: What if there was an online game or app that gave you the full college experience—football, the student union, part-time jobs, dates, competing for the classes you wanted—and made it all fun and no work?

  Five years later, GradYouAte had eight full-time staff members, a couple of interns, a dozen-some-odd contractors, a few investors, a little board of directors, and shareholders and was closing in on actual, albeit slim, profits. SilliPutty, the Silicon Valley news and gossip site, had recently run a photo of her perched on a desk in a vintage slit pencil skirt, a funky orange pump saucily dangling from her toe; that Dartmouth grad, all curly hair, too-big-but-somehow-just-right nose, hip-nerdy glasses, and dimples, had his arms looped around her from behind. The headline read GradYouAte’s Avalon Harwood and Corbin Bergson Talk Success, Vision, and How They Make Mixing Love and Work Look Like Child’s Play. She had a title (CEO), a nice chunk of cash in the bank, an adoring live-in boyfriend, and life, for the most part, was like skipping, la la la, through that pleasant green meadow where the Teletubbies lived, apart from the challenges of parking in San Francisco, maybe. And the expense. And maybe that one time she’d been mugged at gunpoint.

  Secretly, no one was more bemused about all of this than she was. There were days, in truth, when it felt more like something that had sort of happened to her rather than something she’d actively engineered.

  After she’d soaked up the applause and basked in the light of all those inspired faces, Rachel told her, “Damn, girl, you knocked that presentation out of the park. Any time you want to do any workshops, say the word. I’ll set you up.” While Avalon had quit the teaching program to create GradYouAte with Corbin, Rachel had gone on to build a leadership training business so gloriously successful she was now looking for the perfect North State headquarters for seminars and retreats.

  Somewhere on the road between San Jose and San Francisco Avalon became aware that her happy glow was shot through with a sort of restless wistfulness. She found herself putting off returning to GradYouAte’s offices on Van Ness and Market for the same reasons she might not want to immediately follow up, say, an
excellent chicken piccata with a bag of Doritos (though both had a place in her culinary repertoire). She’d stopped instead and impulsively bought a tiny jar of limp flowers an ancient Russian woman purloined from yards around her neighborhood and sold off a blanket on the sidewalk near her apartment, and she decided to go upstairs to her apartment to drop them off. Corbin would love them because they had a quirky origin story. “The only thing I’m allergic to is the mundane,” he’d told that SilliPutty reporter the day of their interview. He was probably saying things like that in a marketing meeting right now over a cutthroat game of ping-pong in their offices. Corbin often refused to like something if he suspected even one other person had liked it first.

  She trotted up two flights and was about to slide her key into her door lock when she paused.

  And laid her ear against the door.

  Bam . . . Bam. Bambambam. Bam . . . bam bam.

  The muffled sound was a little like a shoe going around in a dryer, or a loose shutter slapping the outside of a house in a storm. Except that they didn’t have shutters and it wasn’t even drizzling.

  Which led to the next philosophical question: What if she wasn’t the kind of person who moved away from mysterious thumping noises, instead of toward them?

  She gingerly turned the key.

  Gently, gently poked open the door with a fingertip.

  She left the door open a crack in case she needed to flee. But surely a burglar would have left the door open, too?

  She delicately put one foot in front of the other all the way down the soft hall runner. Along the way she discovered the sound wasn’t coming from the kitchen . . . Or the bathroom . . . But it was growing louder.

  She stopped at the threshold of her bedroom.

  And . . .

  It was like the time she’d been mugged. A guy had materialized out of nowhere on Oak Street, pointed a gun at her, and said, “Give me all your money.” She’d looked up at him half smiling because . . . surely this was someone’s idea of a practical joke? Surely this wasn’t actually happening?

  But no, as it turns out, she really was being mugged.

  And no, the white butt bobbing up and down on the bed really did belong to her boyfriend, Corbin.

  Ten orange toenails sparkled at the base of his spine.

  They were attached to the feet which were attached to the legs which were locked around him.

  In the middle of those ten toes were little white blobs. Avalon knew those white blobs were meant to be skulls, because she’d squealed over the adorableness of the Halloween pedicure at the office just a day ago. Because, you know, sisterhood.

  In short, Corbin was banging their intern, Grace.

  Not only banging her, the intermittent headboard bamming meant he was attempting to be fancy about it.

  And to think, for all his evangelizing about originality, Avalon could never even really get him to do it in a mirror.

  She was mesmerized. She couldn’t feel her limbs or her face. It was as though shock had squeezed her consciousness from her body and she was watching the whole thing from overhead.

  She finally jumped when Corbin suddenly yelled, “Holy shit!”

  As this wasn’t what he normally shouted when he came (though he’d once shouted “Wow oh wow oh wow!” in wonderment, like a dying person moving toward dead relatives in that proverbial bright light), Avalon figured he must have caught her reflection in the bulbous chrome base of their (artisan) bedside lamp.

  He shot upright, yanking fistfuls of the sheet with him like a magician attempting that tablecloth trick, and Grace spooled like a rotisserie chicken right off the side of the bed and landed with a dull thud on their lovely, thick Flokati carpet.

  And all was silence.

  Apart from . . . was that some sort of car alarm outside?

  Avalon realized the ghastly high whine was in her own ears.

  Corbin pulled the sheet up to his clavicle. His fist was clenched white over it. This struck her as the second uncharacteristically stupid thing he’d done today (the first being banging an intern in their bed). She’d seen him all the way naked plenty of times before.

  Absurdly, he looked the way he did when he’d just showered after racquetball. His curly hair was glued to his forehead with sweat.

  Corbin always looked peculiarly unfinished without his glasses.

  Suddenly knowing all of these little intimate things seemed intolerable.

  As she stared at his blank white face she could almost see the thought balloon over his head filled with his own unfortunate realizations: yep, that really is my girlfriend of five years standing in the doorway.

  “I’d give that dismount a six,” she said, brightly.

  “Christ . . . Avalon . . . I . . .” His words were frightened gasps. He stopped.

  “Wasn’t done yet?” she suggested.

  She didn’t recognize her own voice.

  For some reason Corbin glanced uneasily at her hands then. She remembered the little vase. She gently, gingerly put it down on the dresser, like it was a bomb and she’d just set the timer on it.

  In her peripheral vision Grace shifted very slightly.

  “Freeze, Grace,” Ava commanded, like she was Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer. She had no idea why she wanted Grace to freeze. It was just that giving interns orders had become a reflex.

  Grace obeyed like it was Simon Says.

  Corbin—glib, motormouth, brilliant witty blah blah blah Corbin—remained silent.

  And that was somehow the eeriest thing of all. It was like the deep silence of a power outage. A silence caused by a grave malfunction, like an earthquake or a nuclear attack.

  She wasn’t the sort to shove a stiletto into his sternum, even if they’d owned a stiletto. And if they had, it would have been an artisan hand-forged one-of-a-kind stiletto, because he would have insisted.

  But she did know how to cut him in the worst possible way.

  “I always knew you were a cliché, Corbin.” She’d never sounded so bored.

  She didn’t quite remember leaving the apartment and finding her car and getting in it. She only knew her inner GPS was taking her home to Hellcat Canyon as if she were a creature fleeing for its burrow. She hadn’t been there since last Christmas. Almost a year.

  Who would have guessed the smooth green Teletubbies meadow of her relationship had a tiger pit in it? FOOSH! Down she’d gone.

  Shouldn’t there have been some sort of trajectory of transgressions before she found him banging their intern? Some clue other than the sort of selfishness common to guys like Corbin—hypereducated Ivy League nerdy-cute guys who were charming and witty and casually brilliant and benignly certain that everyone would happily just enjoy the gift that was their mere presence, because that’s generally what people did?

  Her speedometer quivered up, up, up to sixty.

  She was just about to really gun it through the next set of delicious S turns, when from out of nowhere red lights flashed in her rearview mirror.

  “Fuck.” Her voice startled her: it was a dry caw, thanks to three hours of silence. She heaved a sigh so gusty it ought to have blown her doors open, slowed it on down, and pulled over to the next verge.

  She draped her arms across her steering wheel and tipped her forehead onto them. She drew in a long, hot, shuddery breath and sighed it out. This was going to be one monster of a ticket.

  She lifted her head, which felt so heavy it was like trying to jack up a car, and watched in her rearview mirror as a big, big sheriff’s deputy loomed and trudged over the verge toward her.

  The guy ducked down, pushed the sunglasses up off his face. “License and registra . . . Avalon? Avalon Harwood? What the hell? Why the hell you speeding?”

  Ah, small towns. Sheriff’s Deputy Eli Barlow had just gone from Cop Voice to Friend Voice in three seconds flat. He sounded worried and pleased and affronted all at once.

  “Oh, hey, Eli. So how are things?” She tried an apologetic, ironic littl
e smile. Eli was an old high school friend of her older brother Jude’s. He was always such a nice person, big and quiet. He knew all about her toe up the faucet and jumping Whiskey Creek and probably nearly everything else she’d ever done, because, well, small towns.

  Eli snorted. “Why the hell are you speeding on this road? BMW or no BMW, you know better. Everything okay?”

  “Such language, Deputy. I’m so sorry. I really am. I just . . . I got . . . I’m not . . . everything’s fine.”

  She wasn’t precisely a glib liar but she could usually do better than that.

  As it was, he was studying her with cop eyes: sympathetic laser beams. “I call bullshit on the ‘everything’s fine,’” he concluded.

  She twisted her mouth wryly. “Are those X-ray shades on your head, Eli? Because, you know, that’s what Google ought to be working on. Not Google Glass. They could issue them to cops. Shades that see right into the souls of transgressors.”

  This, quite understandably, resulted in his bemused silence. She wouldn’t blame him for thinking she was on some exotic big-city drug.

  “Where are you going?” he asked shortly.

  “Home.”

  He nodded once, thoughtfully. Mulling her fate, perhaps.

  “Seriously, how are you, Eli?” she said into the brief silence. More reasonably. “It’s good to see you, regardless.”

  “Well, I’m great. I’m getting married.”

  His words were evenly inflected, but they had a soft rosy glow all around them, just like the top of Whiplash Peak had right now.

  She’d never in a million years thought she’d be one of those people who would feel diminished by someone else’s happiness. But right now, the rays of his joy felt like heat on a sunburn.

  “Wow! That’s great! Congratulations.” That last syllable was cracked and delivered in a pitch probably only dolphins could hear.

  She meant it, and he really deserved to be happy. But she didn’t like realizing she was still a long way from being the person she yearned to be: invulnerable, evolved, serene as a nun.

  Eli was frowning in earnest now, thanks to her cracked dolphin squeak.

  She’d forgotten how fast the night happened here in the county. In just a few minutes, the sky would be full dark. The sky would explode with stars.