The Secret Sister

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Christy bit back what she wanted to say, which was that he was the one who hadn’t kept the promise, not her. She glanced at her watch.

  “In thirty—no, now it’s twenty-nine minutes,” she said, “I’m off to preview Peter Hutton’s new line. With any luck I’ll be back in three days.”

  “More likely three weeks,” Nick said irritably.

  She shrugged. “Whatever it takes. Just like your job.”

  “Oh, well, it’s only temporary,” he said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “Your job. We both know it will be a race to see whether you quit before Myra fires you.”

  Christy wanted to argue but didn’t bother. He was right. She picked up her bag and headed for the main security checkpoint.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, catching up. “I’ve got a better job offer for you. Have you given any thought to what we talked about last month?”

  She glanced sideways at him and tried to head off the inevitable.

  “Home, hearth, and heathens?” she asked lightly.

  He looked pained. “I’m serious, Christa.”

  “If I’m not on that plane, Myra will fire me. That’s as serious as it gets.”

  “No.” There was a hard edge to his voice. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t have done it together.”

  “That was business,” he retorted.

  “So is this.”

  Christy shut up and kept walking, hoping to avoid the discussion. But that was the thing about inevitability. It couldn’t be avoided.

  “I have no wife, no children, no real home,” he said. “In a week I’ll be forty. That’s serious, Christa. The rest of it is crap.”

  “Then why did you fly off to London after promising me—”

  “I told you,” he interrupted impatiently. “It was business. The deal couldn’t wait.”

  “But I could?”

  “Bloody hell, are we going around this track again? I make a hundred times as much as you. Quit and we’ll spend a lot more time together.”

  “You’re right. This is the wrong time and the wrong place. Let’s not go around this track right now.”

  “I can support you. Hell, I can support twelve like you out of petty cash.”

  “Well, hurry along, darlin’. You’ve got a week to find twelve like me to support. But if they’re really like me, they’ll support themselves.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “You’re so damned touchy about your work. It’s just a job. I’m offering you a life!”

  Christy stopped at the end of the security line.

  Nick pulled her stiff body closer and kissed her forehead. “I’m tired and jet-lagged and I want a home to go home to. Make me a home, Christa.”

  Guilt snaked through her. She liked Nick, had even thought she might love him, but she no longer believed they had a future together. It wasn’t simply the broken promise or his eighty-hour weeks and long absences overseas. It was something more. Something fundamental that no amount of talking would overcome.

  He just wasn’t…passionate.

  The realization startled her. Nick’s cool, unruffled style had been much of his attraction for her. But the weeks alone on Fire Island had given her a lot of time to think.

  Nick was the wrong man for her.

  She was the wrong woman for him.

  The security line moved forward quickly. Soon she’d have to leave him behind. She faced him, frustrated that there was never time to do anything properly with Nick.

  Even break up.

  “I can’t pass up this assignment,” she said. “It involves my sister.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.” His expression was one of mild surprise and total lack of interest.

  “I haven’t seen her in twelve years.”

  “So what’s the rush? A few weeks more won’t matter.”

  “Apparently she’s on a tight schedule.”

  “Another career girl?”

  “She’s Peter Hutton’s signature model.”

  Nick’s jaw literally dropped. “Jo? The Jo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Incredible! Fantastic! I can’t wait to meet her.”

  Christy looked at him coolly. “Jo-Jo and I haven’t spoken in twelve years.”

  Nick stared at Christy, but she knew he wasn’t really seeing her. He was comparing her to Jo-Jo.

  Suddenly Christy’s temper flared. The speculation and comparisons in his eyes were why she never mentioned her relationship to the screamingly sexy model in the Peter Hutton ads.

  “She takes after our mother,” Christy said flatly. “I favor the McKenna side of the family.”

  “Your mother must have been gorgeous.”

  “She was. Like Jo-Jo. And like Jo-Jo, she was a user.”

  “Jo could use me anytime.” He grinned.

  Christy looked at the briskly moving line.

  “What did you do to make Jo angry?” he asked.

  What makes you assume it was my fault? Because I’m not outrageously beautiful like she is? But all Christy said aloud was, “I got a scholarship. When Jo-Jo found out I wasn’t going to stay in Wyoming, she seduced her boyfriend’s father, got pregnant, and talked him into running off with her. On the way out of town, she stole Gramma’s gold necklace. The scandal broke my grandmother’s health. She died of a stroke.”

  “Was the necklace valuable?”

  Christy grimaced. Trust Nick to be curious about the money rather than the emotions. “At most, the necklace was worth a few hundred dollars.”

  “So how did Jo end up in the big time?”

  “I don’t know. She refused to talk to me and never answered my letters. All I found out is that she had an abortion, traded up in men, and was a cover model before she was twenty-one.”

  “No surprise there. A face and a body like hers come along once in a century. Did you call her while you were on vacation?”

  “No. She called me.”

  “Why?”

  “Good question. I don’t have an answer. Good-bye, Nick.”

  She showed her ID and e-ticket to a guard, leaving Nick standing on the other side of the security line.

  She didn’t look back.

  Chapter 4

  Colorado

  Saturday morning

  Christy sat on the edge of her hotel bed and waited while the desk clerk checked for messages.

  “Christy McKenna?” the hotel clerk muttered.

  “That’s me. Room 308.”

  “No messages. Sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Christy said automatically, hanging up the phone.

  She checked her cell phone. Nothing new. Nothing old, either. In Remington, her cell service went without warning from barely usable to complete silence. She might as well carry around a paperweight.

  With an impatient motion she tossed the cell phone on the bed. It landed next to the laptop computer that she hadn’t found an Internet connection for yet. If she wanted one, she had to go to the local coffee shop and wait in line behind the pencil-neck townies, who then would read everything on her screen as fast as she did. Just one more of the joys of rustic life.

  The only good news was that it was driving Myra nuts not to be able to micromanage her reporter.

  The bad news was that Jo-Jo was nowhere to be seen.

  Well, I made it here in less than three days, but there’s no gold necklace waiting for me. Not even a “Hi, Christmas, got you again, huh?”

  Irritated at losing the old game, Christy checked her watch.

  Too much time.

  She wasn’t due at Hutton’s private prepress showing for several hours. Plenty of time to bathe. Plenty of time to change. Plenty of time to wonder why she was such a sucker for Jo-Jo’s games.

  At that instant Christy knew that she wasn’t going to wait around the phone like the carrot-topped teenager she’d once been, praying for a date.

  I’m too old for this.

  She grabbe
d her faded black blazer and clattered down the hotel stairs. When she strode out onto the sidewalk, the sun poured hot and clean through the cloudless sky.

  Leaving her rental car in the hotel lot, she headed on foot for the art gallery she’d seen advertised in the guest literature stacked by the phone in her room. She wondered if the gallery would be as pleasant a surprise as the hotel had been. She’d been expecting linoleum floors, knotty pine furniture, and wallpaper covered with fake western brands. What she got was elegant pseudo-Victorian decor.

  Halfway to the gallery, Christy realized that Remington itself was rather like an old frame home that was being made over one room at a time into an upscale bed and breakfast. Some of the storefronts were expensively refurbished, with beveled or stained-glass insets in the doors and hand-carved wooden trim freshly painted. And some of the stores hadn’t been painted for longer than Christy had been alive.

  Remington was a work in progress.

  The gallery wasn’t far away because the town didn’t cover much ground. There was only one stoplight and one paved road. The side streets were dusty, but the items in the Main Street shops were both expensive and surprisingly cosmopolitan.

  Christy stopped in front of a boutique whose windows offered French lingerie, Italian sunglasses, Ecuadoran weaving, and modern Navajo jewelry. The cultural mixture was subtly electrifying, a reminder of how small the world had become.

  She began to have real hope that Hutton’s line would be good after all. The most exciting styles had always come from cultural collisions, cultural tensions, cultural fusions.

  Without realizing it, she took a slow breath and put her Manhattan worries and do-it-yesterday pressures on a back burner in her mind. What she was looking at now was real, vital, and new. More relaxed, she glanced around the town with renewed interest, measuring both the old and the new. Glittering arty boutiques and a True Value hardware store down on a side street.

  It was the hardware store that brought back long-buried memories of her childhood. There was a woman who moved with the unmistakable sore-footed walk of a tired waitress. Three schoolgirls shrieked and giggled because they were still young enough to believe they wouldn’t end up like their mothers. Two working cowboys wore faded jeans, down-at-the-heel boots, and an arrogant tilt to their hats. There was a slight stiffness to their gait and a complete disregard for streetlights and any traffic that had wheels instead of hooves.

  There also were tourists—flatlanders, outsiders who were dressed more like California or New York than Colorado. There were some young men who wore the western look without much success. Their clothes were new and their bodies hadn’t been broken by bad horses, worse weather, and rotgut whiskey.

  Christy watched the drugstore cowboys with a disdain she didn’t bother to hide. Imitation might be a high compliment, but it was a sad excuse for individual style.

  The vehicles parked diagonally along the street were a mixture of visitors from the outer world and Christy’s memories of the insular West. A few exotics such as BMWs, Range Rovers, and Japanese baby pickups were sprinkled among the inevitable full-sized American pickup trucks with gun racks—and often guns—hung across the back window. The local vehicles were dirty and carried the dents and scars of ranch use. The exotics had out-of-state license plates and the sheen of good wax beneath recent road dust.

  In front of the Two-Tier West Gallery was a vehicle that didn’t quite fit in either the exotic or the local category. Intrigued as always by anything different, Christy studied it.

  It was a one-ton truck and it was American, but there were four doors instead of two. The truck bed was enclosed, giving it the appearance of an oversized, muscular station wagon with cargo doors instead of a tailgate. SUBURBAN was written in chrome letters on the black body.

  Oversized tires and high-lift suspension hinted at off-road use. Dings, dents, and parallel horizontal scratches along the body confirmed it. Everything was caked with dirt except the front windshield and side mirrors. They were spotless. The paint beneath the dirt had the gloss of good care. The license plate was local.

  Now, there’s someone who doesn’t fit in either tier of the West, old or upscale.

  After a second glance, Christy went to see what the gallery had to offer. The Two-Tier West had genteel alarm wires around its plate-glass windows and a generic cardboard placard announcing that the gallery was open. A bell pealed sweetly at the top of the door when Christy pulled it open.

  Two people were inside. One was an Indian woman with the broad, serene features and solid build of an R. C. Gorman model. She dressed the part with a floor-length dark green velveteen skirt and a heavy maroon satin blouse. Her smile lit up the white-walled gallery space like a floodlight.

  The second person was standing at the counter. He definitely wasn’t a drugstore cowboy, but he didn’t quite look like a ranch hand. He wore a heavy, closely cut beard and a slate-gray Stetson with a low crown, medium brim, and the look of hard, sweaty use. There weren’t any pheasant feathers, conchos, or other decorations on the hatband.

  The hat was right for a local cowboy, but the beard wasn’t. The shirt was just right, blue chambray with steel snaps instead of buttons, and faded from long use. A gallery case hid his feet, so Christy couldn’t tell whether he was wearing cowboy boots or something more comfortable.

  If the man smiled in return at the Indian clerk, it didn’t show in his profile. Hawk-featured with hooded eyes, he looked proud and rather grim. He was somewhere in his thirties, dark-haired, tall, and long-boned. There was both strength and stillness in him.

  “Can I help you?” the woman called to Christy.

  “Just browsing,” Christy said automatically.

  “If you need me, my name is Veronica.”

  “Thanks.”

  Veronica turned back to the man who didn’t fit. He was carrying a cardboard carton, which he set carefully on the counter.

  Christy sensed the restrained excitement in the Indian woman and wondered whether the man or the carton was the source. Curious, she drifted closer to the two while she catalogued the contents of the gallery with eyes that had seen the best and the worst of many cultures and styles.

  “…long time,” Veronica said.

  The man’s reply was a low rumble of sound that could have meant anything.

  Christy strained to overhear.

  “Danner said you weren’t coming back ever.”

  “Danner is a horse’s ass.”

  The man’s voice was baritone, clear and faintly drawling. Either a native or someone with a good ear who had picked up local accents.

  Pretending to study a nearby necklace, Christy watched as he handed Veronica an envelope. Without another word he turned and went out the front door. He moved with the easy gait of an athlete or a hiker rather than a cowboy more used to horses than walking. And he was wearing scuffed hiking boots, not cowboy boots.

  She watched the man the whole way, conscious of staring but not able to look away. She’d seen more handsome men—Nick, for instance—but she’d never seen a man who appealed to her senses more.

  But she was damned if she could figure out why.

  He went straight to the black Suburban parked out front.

  Figures, Christy thought, oddly pleased. The man who doesn’t fit owns the truck that doesn’t fit.

  She turned back to the gallery’s offerings. A decent contemporary painting on the wall behind the counter caught her eye. The painting was a stylized neon-blue cowboy against a glaring crimson and black backdrop that could have been Times Square or the Las Vegas Strip. The cowboy radiated a masculine intensity and lean power that was much older and more enduring than the twentieth-century techniques of the artist.

  Stepping back, she studied the painting, drawn by it in a way she couldn’t name.

  The front bell rang again, announcing the man’s return. He was carrying another carton. He set it down on the counter across from Veronica and went to work on the fastenings. When he pulled so
mething out of the carton, Veronica set aside the papers she had been reading and gave a low whistle.

  “Did you take photographs in situ?” Veronica asked.

  “What do you think?”

  Veronica laughed. “I think you have a batch of them.”

  For a moment there was quiet while they admired the bowl cupped in the man’s long fingers.

  Christy watched from the corner of her eyes, intrigued both by the obvious excitement of the gallery owner and the way the man was holding the bowl. She’d never seen a man touch anything so carefully, like it was a butterfly or a woman’s breast rather than pottery.

  “Have you shown it to anyone else?” Veronica asked.

  “For sale? No. I had Mike over from Mesa Verde to look at it, though.”

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “That he wished he’d found it.”

  The front door opened with another cheerful peal and closed with a bang.

  A big, hard-shouldered man in white shirt and light straw stockman’s hat strode in. He wore a tooled gun belt with a white-handled revolver in the holster. Silver gleamed in his hair, and a five-pointed silver star glinted on his pearl-buttoned shirt. He was perhaps fifty and physically fit in the manner of a man accustomed to hunting game and riding rough trails on horseback.

  Christy had seen smaller bulls.

  “Afternoon, Sheriff Danner,” Veronica said. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can stop buying pots from that Moki-poaching, high-grading son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 5

  Christy was close enough to overhear Veronica’s unhappy hiss. “Shit.”

  Danner wasn’t.

  Nor could the sheriff see the change that went over the man who held the pot. In the space of a breath, he went from relaxation to predatory alertness.

  Instinctively Christy stepped back.

  The man returned the pot to its carton with great gentleness. Yet when he turned to face the sheriff, there was nothing gentle about his expression or his stance. His eyes were wolf’s eyes, pale amber, unemotional, unflinching, revealing nothing.

  “Danner,” the man said.