The Secret Sister

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Cain guided her toward a small rock pool off to one side of the stream. At first the little pool seemed a part of the stream itself. Then she realized it was separate, although it was connected to the creek by a rock-lined channel that had been made by man rather than nature.

  The pool was twenty feet across and so clear it looked like a condensation of moonlight. Wisps of steam rose gracefully from the surface.

  “A hot spring?” Christy asked, hardly able to believe her luck.

  “This country is volcanic. There are lots of hot springs around.”

  He dropped to one knee, tested the water, and made a pleased sound. “I used to dream about this pool while I was in the hospital. Couldn’t wait to soak out the aches. Better than any painkiller out of a bottle.”

  He went to the head of the pool and added rocks to the gate across the channel from the stream. No more water flowed into the pool. The surface of the hot spring became very still, with only lazy swirls at the center to mark the slow upwelling of water from far below.

  “The stream is meltwater,” he said. “Starts with snowfields at twelve thousand feet. Doesn’t warm up much on the way down here, but we’ll be grateful for that once the pool starts heating up.”

  He stood and undid his shirt in a ripple of steel snaps popping open. He was too far away for Christy to see anything more than the vague gleam of moonlight on naked skin.

  There was a lot of it.

  “Cain—”

  “If you’re too shy to strip, use this as a bathing suit,” he said, tossing his shirt to her.

  She caught it automatically. The cloth was warm with his body heat. A shiver of sensation went through her that had nothing to do with the cold air.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “I’m about as shy around you as Moki is.”

  “He has a fur coat.”

  “So do I.” White teeth flashed in a grin that vanished when Cain turned his back to her. “I’ll wait to finish undressing until you’re in the pool. Don’t dawdle. It’s damn cold with that wind off the snowfield.”

  Remembering his earlier words, she looked at the gently steaming water and then at him: I’m a gentleman where good women are concerned.

  “Cain?”

  He made a rumbling, questioning sound.

  She hesitated. “Am I a good woman as far as you’re concerned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just like that? No qualifications, no questions about my past?”

  “Just like that.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll holler when I’m in the pool.”

  “Watch your step. It gets deep real fast. I built in some high-backed wooden benches underwater along the left side.”

  She undressed quickly, shivering when the air bit into her unprotected flesh. She paused over her bra and panties, then stripped them off too. Two wisps of black lace were more of a tease than a nod to modesty.

  Shivering in the breeze, she put on his shirt. The cuffs came over her fingertips and the tails dragged well below her knees. When she reached for the last snap, she discovered she’d fastened them crookedly in her haste to get into the warm pool.

  “Tough,” she muttered.

  She hurried to the pool and stepped in. It wasn’t rough, as she’d expected. Cain had covered a lot of the bottom with smooth river pebbles, all rounded and gentle on bare feet. The water was hot, but after the first shock it felt delicious rather than painful.

  The benches he’d warned her about were angular black shadows just beneath the silver surface of the water. The seats were set at different depths in the pool, where the rock shelved steeply down. She settled cautiously onto the closest bench. The water rose to her collarbones and stopped.

  His shirt billowed and floated around her like a tent. The sensation of liquid warmth against her naked skin made her feel weightless and free.

  “Ahhhhhh,” she groaned. “God, that feels good.”

  “Are you hollering, Red?”

  “I’m whimpering with pleasure.”

  “I’d rather hear you holler so I can come in out of the cold.”

  “Holler holler holler!”

  His laughter rang in the night. “Keep your shirt on. I’m coming.”

  “It’s your shirt, remember? But I’m keeping it on just the same.”

  Still smiling, he sat down on a rock and started to unlace his boots. She watched him in the moonlight as he pulled off his shoes and socks with quick, efficient motions. The play of silver light and dense shadow on his shoulders both revealed and then concealed his lean power.

  Like Moki, Cain was furry. Unlike Moki, the hair was concentrated on Cain’s chest before narrowing into a pencil width and vanishing below the waistband of his jeans. He stood and undid his jeans with the same casual efficiency he’d unlaced his hiking boots.

  As he started to peel off his pants, she realized she was staring.

  He knew it too.

  Chapter 18

  If taking off his clothes in front of a strange woman bothered Cain, it didn’t show. Jeans and underwear together slid down his body far enough that the pencil line of fur flared suddenly into a wedge.

  Hastily Christy looked somewhere else.

  Anywhere else.

  “You worked as a male stripper, did you?” she muttered.

  “Several weeks in a hospital. Close enough.”

  The distinct sound of metal buttons hitting stone came as he dumped his jeans on top of a boulder.

  “Catheters and bedpans and hundreds of sponge baths given by lots of different nurses,” he said. “After a while, modesty is just a word.”

  She studied the patterns of the current right under her nose. Random splashing sounds told her that he was wading into the pool. Then came a soft groan of pleasure and a swirling displacement of water as he slid onto the other end of the bench, an arm’s length from her.

  “Okay, Red. It’s safe to look now. I’ve got my back to you.”

  The laughter in his voice irritated her. “I’m not a prude,” she said under her breath.

  He heard. “Who said you were?”

  “You did.”

  “Not me. It’s damned refreshing to find a female who can still blush.”

  “You’ve been chasing the wrong kind of women.”

  “More like vice versa. Ever since Hutton showed up, his high-priced whores have been going through the local men like grass through a goose. Especially Jo-Jo. She loves flat-backing with cowboys, Indians, and dangerous western trash like me. Fighting men.”

  The contempt in his voice was enough to chill the pool. Christy turned toward him, but the protest on her lips died when she saw the ragged, barely healed scar that gleamed between his spine and his shoulder blade.

  Cain eased down onto the next bench below and the scar vanished beneath the blackly gleaming water.

  “Oh, God,” he said in a low voice.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said through clenched teeth. “That just feels better than it should.”

  “What are you, some kind of closet Puritan? It feels as good as it feels.”

  “God help me, a philosopher as well as a reporter.”

  With that, he slid all the way under the water and stayed there for what seemed like a long time. When he surfaced and drew a deep breath, he sounded like a great sleek dolphin rising from a midnight sea.

  He stretched, arching his back as if trying to make supple the muscles that had been ripped by a bullet and were still healing.

  “You shouldn’t have been carrying me,” Christy said unhappily.

  He turned toward her.

  “You weigh a lot less than the iron I pumped to rebuild my right side,” he said. “You’re a lot more fun, too.”

  The lazy, teasing note was back in his voice. The white flash of his smile and the dense, water-slicked black of his beard were dangerously attractive to her. And the clear, still waters of the hot spring didn’t hide nearly enoug
h of him.

  The moon was like a searchlight.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on the delicious heat of the pool rather than on a more dangerous kind of heat.

  “Chicken,” he said.

  “Cluck cluck.”

  He laughed, took a breath, and slid beneath the healing water again.

  She sensed that he was more pleased than irritated by her retreat.

  “Cain?” she asked when he surfaced again.

  He made a rumbling sound that said he was listening.

  “Sheriff Danner said you weren’t supposed to come back up to the mountains. Is that true?”

  Cain took so long to answer that she thought he was going to ignore the question. She knew she should let it go, and she knew she wasn’t going to. She needed to know more about Cain with an intensity that went beyond her customary curiosity as a reporter.

  “Cain?”

  “Whoever shot me was used to killing mule deer,” he said after a time.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He used a soft-nosed slug. I lost some of my right lung. It collapsed.”

  She made a low sound and wished she hadn’t asked.

  “The pulmonary specialist said I’d run the risk of collapsing the lung again for a while,” he added. “He said I’d do better down on the flats for a year or two.”

  “Then why did you come back?”

  “I wanted to look around before the snows came.”

  “But—”

  “I haven’t had any problems so far,” he said, talking over her objection.

  “You were breathing hard when we were running down the creek bed.”

  “So were you.”

  “I haven’t been at this altitude since I left home,” she said.

  “A western girl, huh?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Land doesn’t come this high back East.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “Yes, I was raised in High Plains country.”

  “Wyoming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a city miss after all,” he said.

  The satisfaction in his voice irritated her.

  “I was born in Wyoming,” she said. “I chose Manhattan. I’m city all the way.”

  “Bull.”

  “Crap.”

  He laughed quietly. “Boyfriend waiting for you?” he asked after a moment.

  She made a sound that could have been taken for agreement.

  “A city man?” Cain persisted.

  “Very much so. An investment banker. Manhattan, London, Tokyo, Cali, Los Angeles, Bonn.”

  “Sounds like he spends more time in jets than with you.”

  “And vice versa.”

  “A modern relationship,” Cain summarized.

  “I suppose.” She yawned deeply, unraveled by the heat of the pool.

  He went underwater again. When he surfaced, the two of them sat quietly, letting the pool draw out the last of the adrenaline jag.

  Knots of tension Christy hadn’t even been aware of loosened. The hot spring was as comfortable as any European spa she’d ever visited. The only thing lacking was the chlorine stink of water that had to be chemically treated to be safe.

  She half closed her eyes and lay against the back of the bench, listening to the quiet night sounds and the liquid murmurings of the stream. Above her night flexed in an ebony arch that glittered with a million, million stars. Nearby the wind combed gently through the evergreens, making a long whispering sound, as if trees and stream were trading secrets.

  With a deep sigh, she arched her back and spread her arms, letting them float just beneath the surface. She was as close to perfectly comfortable as she could remember being. Ever. Jo-Jo and Peter Hutton and all the rest of her worries seemed a million miles away.

  And Cain was very close.

  It should have worried Christy, but it didn’t. She was too wonderfully unstrung to worry about Cain right now. Like Moki, his ferocity was more apparent than real.

  At least when it came to people.

  Cain had a very fierce love of the artifacts that filled his house. His words about Banditti of the Plains had been casual, but not his eyes. They’d held a combination of leashed excitement and unleashed hunger that reminded her of nothing so much as Howard Kessler, the man who had taught her about the tangled relationships between human emotion and human style.

  Cain and Howard both understood that there was a connection between an artifact and the human being who once had made it. The connection was elemental, compelling, and intangible.

  It was the human connection that mattered, not the price the artifact commanded in the marketplace.

  It’s simple, Christa. Artifacts are reservoirs of human memory and emotion. Next to that, what is dollar value but something to amuse people who have no imagination? People who have money and no imagination follow fashion. People who have imagination and no money fashion styles.

  As Howard’s words echoed in her mind, she smiled. Cain and Howard had more in common than anyone would have suspected from just looking at the men.

  For one thing, both had been immune to Jo-Jo.

  At least, Cain said he was.

  Far above the hot spring, a jet tunneled with a faint roar through the night sky. Christy thought of Nick, a man who flew so frequently his body never knew when it was at home.

  Nick was a modern man, a man who never showed anger or passion or pain, a man who lived much of his life forty thousand feet above the rest of the world. No scars, no fears, nothing but the numbers on a balance sheet at the end of the month.

  And now, floating in the vast western landscape of her childhood, she finally understand what she’d known and never admitted.

  Nick’s the wrong man for me.

  I’m the wrong woman for him.

  Nothing personal. Just a case of mistaken identity. And the certainty that there was no going back.

  I should feel sad.

  What she felt was relief.

  Her thoughts drifted, wrapped in heat and the glitter of diamond stars. Slowly all thought drained away, leaving her utterly relaxed.

  “Unwinding?” Cain asked in a lazy, rumbling voice.

  “Unwound.” She yawned. “My brain is guacamole dip.”

  There was silence, another yawn.

  “What were you really doing in Hutton’s house?” Cain asked.

  The words were so casual that it took a few moments for her to understand. When she did, she felt like she’d been manipulated in a particularly unpleasant way.

  “So that’s what the kid-glove treatment was all about,” she said coldly. “You were just softening me up for another round of questioning.”

  “Red—”

  “My name is Christy,” she cut in, “and why do you care what I was doing?”

  “Because I think you know something about a connection between Hutton, the Secret Sisters, Johnny Ten Hats, and the slut who set me up to die.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Jo?”

  “The one and only.”

  “No. Never. She couldn’t.” Christy’s voice was flat, certain. She didn’t believe that Jo-Jo had any part in Cain’s shooting. Jo-Jo was self-centered and spoiled and wild, but that didn’t make her a murderer.

  “Yeah?” Cain looked at her intently. “So, how well do you know the great Jo?”

  Christy looked at the naked, powerful, and very intelligent predator who had neatly outmaneuvered her and was now watching her. The cold fires in his eyes were burning again. His bleak intensity poured over her like midnight.

  “Sheriff Danner thinks the shooting was an accident,” she said.

  “Sheriff Danner is full of crap.”

  “What about the rest of the town? What do they think?”

  “They think someone was after a little spring venison,” Cain said, “and I got in the way.”

  “But you don’t believe
that. You think Jo had something to do with it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? What reason would she have? It’s ridiculous.”

  Cain looked at Christy for a long time before he said, “That’s one of the things I wanted to ask Johnny.”

  “Johnny? What does he have to do with any of it?”

  “I told you. I think he was the trigger man.”

  “Why?” Christy asked starkly.

  “That was the other thing I was going to ask Johnny, just as soon as I got my hands on him.”

  “If you really believe Jo was part of it, why not ask her?”

  “That lying bitch? I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire. She knows it too. She’s made herself real scarce since I’ve been back.”

  Christy opened her mouth, then closed it. There wasn’t anything she could say to the man who hated her sister so savagely. A chill that no hot spring could banish sank into Christy’s soul.

  No wonder Jo-Jo is afraid of Cain.

  And no wonder she’s hiding somewhere. He blames her for a hunting accident that wasn’t really anyone’s fault.

  Cain was wrong about Jo-Jo, but there was no point in telling him that. What Christy had to do was convince him he was wrong. The quickest way to do that would be to tell him the truth.

  Except for Jo-Jo being her sister. If she told Cain that, he wouldn’t listen to anything else she had to say.

  So what? Why should I care?

  The answer made Christy flinch. She had to find Jo-Jo, and to do that she had to stay in Remington. But if Deputy Hammond had recognized her jumping over the balcony, staying here could be a problem. She’d need someone on her side. Someone who knew the territory. Someone who wouldn’t cringe at a little casual pistol whipping.

  Someone like Cain.

  God, what a mess. Thanks, Jo-Jo. Thanks all to hell.

  But all Christy said aloud was, “Kokopelli.”

  “What?”

  “He’s more than one of Hutton’s design motifs.”

  Cain waited.

  She took a deep breath. “Johnny told the guards he wanted to talk to Autry about Kokopelli’s sisters.”

  Cain sat so silently that she wondered if he’d stopped breathing. Then he let out a sound that was both a laugh and a soft curse.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “I was right.”