All Fired Up (Stardust)

by Riser, Mimi

  A metallic thwap sounded. Earl must have just discharged his entire tobacco plug. That meant he’d decided on a course of action. Slo hoped it was a good one.

  “I know what you boys should do then, and I don’t think the sheriff will fault you for it either,” the old man said. “Since Slo is safe put for now, why don’t y’all go next door and talk to Roxy Sinclair. You’re gonna have to take her statement about last night anyway. While you’re doing that, I’ll call the Bullfinch boys and offer them a deal on their insurance if they’ll drop charges. With a little luck we can get this all sorted out before Slo even wakes—”

  “Hello,” someone called – a new voice in Ina Lorene’s yard – and the conversation crashed around Slo’s ears.

  Lydia Jones?

  Something was very wrong. Lydia never left her own property. Never. She hardly ever even left her house.

  Slo finished dressing while he listened, an ominous chill crawling over his flesh.

  Lydia was asking if anyone had seen her niece. She had gone to wake her for breakfast and discovered Roxanne was gone. So was some of the family’s old camping gear, a pup tent and sleeping bag…

  “…and Jil’s backpack and hiking boots. It appears she’s decided to experience the wonders of nature for a few days, but I do wish she would have discussed it with me first. Roxy has never been camping before,” Lydia said. “Sammy had to go to Lubbock today, so I haven’t been able to tell him yet, but I imagine he’ll be rather perturbed when he finds out.”

  Sam wasn’t the only one. But with Sam gone, Slo doubted there was anyone else in town with both the ability and the inclination to find Roxanne fast. Except himself.

  He didn’t wait to hear anymore. The girl was alone, on foot, and inexperienced. Also hearing impaired. That was all he needed to know – that and the weather report his grandmother had given him yesterday. There was scarcely a cloud in the sky. The professional forecasters had predicted a dry week, but Ina Lorene said thunder was on the way, and she was never wrong about things like that.

  Summer thunderstorms in West Texas came with driving winds, torrential rain, and sometimes killer hail – and let’s not forget the magnificent lightning show – one of the wonders of nature. But not the kind you’d want to experience in a pup tent.

  The deputies might have let him go, but Slo couldn’t be sure of that. Deciding not to chance a dash for his car, he darted unseen out the backdoor and took off running, sticking to the weedy back alleys of Star. The car wouldn’t help anyway. For this search he needed a…

  Horse.

  Groan.

  Slo hadn’t been on a horse in years, hadn’t been much of a horseman even when he’d lived in this cowboy town. He wasn’t the cowboy type. Yet another reason why he and Star clashed. But there was no avoiding it now. Roxanne would be hiking into open range, which meant horsey ride for him.

  Yippie-ki-yay.

  Skidding into Thompson’s Grocery & Gas on the edge of town, he dropped a few coins into the old-fashioned payphone, had a hurried conversation, then waited.

  Several minutes later, a hell-on-wheels honey of a hog screeched to a stop in front of him.

  Wow—

  Slo’s jaw dropped. His heart did a fast fandango. He almost drooled. For a brief mad moment he was crazy in love.

  There sat a vintage Harley Davidson Indian – one of the originals from decades ago, but so masterfully maintained it looked almost new. Stupendous!

  Its rider, however, wasn’t what Slo had expected. The man pulled off his helmet and dismounted. He was older than the bike, but in equally good shape – gray haired, but still straight and tall and muscular – a roguish, rugged figure with a leathery tan and a devil of a grin. Slo had been expecting his high school science teacher, a smart, trim woman in her early seventies, the ever-attractive Evangeline. This guy wasn’t her.

  “Are you Winslow Larkin?”

  “Who wants to know? Nobody calls me Winslow unless they’re lookin’ for a fat lip. The name is Slo.”

  “Testy little booger, ain’t you?”

  “Not so little I can’t knock an old fart’s false teeth out.”

  “They’re real.” And a broad smile proved it. “I think you and I are gonna get along just fine, Slo.” He offered a rock crusher handshake. “I’m Harper Rourke. Evangeline sent me ahead to let you know the cavalry’s on the way. She’s got her nephew Cody loading the horse trailer. We figured it’d be best to start the search from town. Roxy can’t have got far.”

  The Harper Rourke? The man who had recently done the impossible by marrying Star’s longtime poster girl for Women’s Lib? This still wasn’t what Slo had expected. He could barely imagine Evangeline married at all, and then only to some academic type, like a college professor.

  “You’re Vangie’s new husband?”

  “I’m the luckiest man alive,” Harper said with an intensely satisfied sigh.

  For some reason that satisfaction bristled Slo’s backhairs. Maybe because he’d been feeling so unsatisfied himself lately.

  “You’re not good enough for her,” he drawled.

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Harper chuckled. “But don’t tell her that. It took me fifty years to corral that woman. I’m not about to lose her now.” He scanned their surroundings, a distant gaze in his dark eyes, like he was staring into the past, comparing it with the present, and trying to reconcile the two with the unforeseen future. “Town really hasn’t changed much,” he reflected. “I was raised around here, y’know. That’s how Evangeline and I met. We grew up together.”

  No, Slo hadn’t known, and didn’t care. He smelled the bittersweet fragrance of philosophy in the air – a scent he’d never much appreciated, and least of all when he was sizzling with impatience to begin with.

  “But I thought Star was too small for me, wasn’t sure I wanted to be tied to one place,” Harper rambled on. And on. “Then Evangeline and I had a falling out, and I decided maybe I didn’t want to be tied to one woman either. So I took off runnin’ – ran clear around the world chasing rainbows. It took me a long time and some hard falls to figure out I was just chasing my own tail.” He spoke as if he were merely discussing the weather or the price of feed. “Let that be a lesson to you, son. No matter how far or fast you go, you can never escape your own heart. It’ll always bring you full circle back home.”

  Home? Slo’s eyes narrowed. Had his grandmother enlisted the whole damn county to make him return? What had she been telling Evangeline, and what had Evangeline been telling her longwinded new spouse? Whatever. It wouldn’t work. It was none of this gray haired king-of-the-road’s business, and there were far more pressing concerns.

  “Thanks for the tip. I’ll try to remember it.” But not very hard. Slo glanced at the darkening horizon, then looked up the road, searching for some sight or sound of a pickup pulling a horse trailer. “Any idea how long it’ll take Cody to get here?”

  “Could be a while yet. The horses were in the big paddock. He’s gotta catch ’em before he can load ’em. But don’t worry, Roxy should be easy to find. Evangeline thinks she knows where the girl’s headed. The old gully between the ranch and town. She’s taken her there to hunt fossils and arrowheads. It’s a good spot for a campsite, and a place Roxy knows.”

  So did Slo, ironically. The gully was a refuge he had often used himself years ago. It lay a few miles away over rough terrain, a tedious trek by foot, and not much faster on horseback. He studied the horizon again, seeing storm clouds gathering, rolling in like billows of smoke. Ina Lorene’s thunder could be here even sooner than he’d thought.

  Damn. What had possessed Roxanne to run off? Slo was starting to fear he might never get the chance to ask her.

  To complicate matters, a high-pitched wail pierced the air. Huh. Juan and Mike must have discovered he’d eluded them, but how the hell had they eluded his grandmother? Their patrol car appeared at the end of the street, lights flashing and siren shrilling an alarm. Slo supposed he really could
n’t blame them. They got so little chance for action in this town. But the siren was a bit much.

  “Those guys must be having an especially boring week,” he said.

  “Friends of yours?” Harper asked.

  “Yeah.” Slo sighed. “I’m wanted for assault and battery. I rearranged Randy Bullfinch’s face for him last night. Did a little work on Andy, too, but farther south.”

  “I’m sure they both look a heap better. Anything would be an improvement.” Harper straddled his cycle and revved it to life. “Duck around back. I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

  Slo ducked.

  The patrol car braked.

  “Hey, Harp,” Mike called out the window, “you seen Slo?”

  “A slow what?” Harper replied.

  “Not a what, a who,” Juan said. “Slo Larkin. Have you seen him?”

  “Don’t think I’ve ever met him,” Harper lied. Smooth dude. “What does he look like?”

  Mike described the culprit.

  Juan added a few embellishments.

  “Oh, him.” Mr. Smooth lowered his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Yeah, I saw him hot footin’ it toward the café about five minutes ago.”

  “Damn,” Mike cursed. The patrol car did a screeching three-point turn and roared off in pursuit.

  Harper grabbed his helmet off the handlebars, tucked it under his arm, and zoomed around to the back of the building.

  “Very cool,” Slo complimented him. He hated to admit it, but he was beginning to admire Evangeline’s taste in husbands.

  Harper grinned. “It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.” He handed the helmet to Slo. “Put this on.”

  “Why? We goin’ for a spin?”

  “Not we. You. No point waiting for the cavalry now. You’ll make better time on this anyway. Think you can handle her?”

  Slo stared at “her” in covetous admiration. “Are you kiddin’? I’ve seen Easy Rider at least a hundred times.”

  “That’ll have to do, I guess.”

  Chuckling, Harper climbed off, and Slo took his place.

  “Now this is what I call a mount,” he said as the big bike rumbled and vibrated beneath him. Hi-yo, Silver. If this couldn’t outrun the weather, nothing could.

  “Just don’t ride too easy,” Harper cautioned him. “Might be a storm on the way.”

  Slo cast him an incredulous look. “Really? I hadn’t noticed, but I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” He gunned the engine, braced himself, and shot out of town like a streak of black lightning.

  Chapter 5

  Why was it humping and twisting? That couldn’t be right, could it?

  Stepping back from her labor, Roxanne took a moment to size up the situation. Hands on hips, she stood staring and studying and thinking. Granted, she didn’t have much experience with tents – hell, she didn’t have any experience – but she was pretty sure that tents, in general, weren’t supposed to look like a camel suffering a seizure.

  She tried a few things to straighten it out.

  They didn’t help.

  Now it looked like an old swayback horse with a couple of empty sacks flapping off its sides. Sighing, she returned to the work, lengthening this, shortening that, tightening some lines, repositioning a few stakes… Then she stepped back again and nodded with approval.

  It had finally left the animal kingdom and was starting to resemble some sort of shelter. What sort was another question. She cocked her head to the side, considering.

  A beach umbrella? That might be it. A large open umbrella blown over and lying askew. An old, tired umbrella. An umbrella that had come down in the world, that had seen far better days. A sad, sorry hobo of an umbrella with broken stays and lots of odd puckers and sags. Poor thing.

  But this was probably as good as it was going to get. She was obviously doing something wrong, but hadn’t the energy to figure out what. She’d had a sleepless night followed by a grueling hike. With the weight of exhaustion pressing down, she felt flatter than a fallen soufflé, too flat to begin what she’d come here for – even if exhaustion was supposed to be part of the process. That was how the Native Americans did it apparently, chanting and fasting their way into altered states of consciousness.

  To each his own. Roxanne decided she needed a nap first. Then she’d start the inner search for control.

  Crawling into the tent, such as it was, she unrolled the sleeping bag, stretched out on top of it, and was dead to the world almost as soon as her eyes closed. An earthquake couldn’t have woken her. So neither did the bass rumble of the Harley that braked to a halt several yards away.

  -------

  Slo cut the engine and dismounted. He pulled off his helmet, raked fingers through his hair, and stared.

  What was that thing? A tent, or a parachute having an identity crisis? It looked like she’d left half its struts at home and put the remaining ones in every which way but correctly. Lydia had said the girl had never been camping before. No shit. Roxanne would have been in serious trouble out here even without the approaching storm. Slo wanted to tan her backside for doing something so dangerously dumb. Out here camping was no leisure time activity. It was hardcore wilderness survival.

  He grabbed up a rock and tossed it toward the tent. A six-foot rattlesnake, which had been moving in the same direction, changed course and slithered off into the scrub. Slo watched until it was out of sight, then covered the distance from the bike to the tent in several long strides. The sooner he got this babe-in-the-woods back to town, the better.

  The possibility she might not want to go never entered his head. As far as he was concerned, she didn’t have that option, bad weather or good. After seeing the evidence of her incompetence, his temper was rising faster than the air pressure was dropping. He assumed she was in the tent. Where else? But God only knew what she was doing in there. Sleeping? Hiding? Playing Tiddly-Winks? Did she know he was here? Did he care one way or the other?

  No.

  Stooping down, he whipped back the tent flap and ducked inside – then fell forward, cursing, as his abrupt entrance collapsed the whole damn thing.

  Struts snapped.

  The tent dropped down like a net.

  Slo landed full-length on top of Roxanne, trapped in clingy folds of green nylon. She shrieked and shoved at him. He rolled onto his side, inadvertently pulling her with him and dragging the tent folds tighter. Roxanne tried to twist free, but her struggles only made matters worse.

  He groped and grappled.

  She floundered and fought.

  And the hysteria continued until they were wound up in the tent, like two caterpillars snug in the same cocoon…two animals caught in the same snare. Two hearts pounding together like one.

  Time slammed to a halt.

  Suddenly there was only harsh ragged breathing and the electric scorch of primal instincts. Nothing but darkness and heat and the feel of another’s body crushed close. Resistance melted, minds clouded with steam. Lips touched – a feather light graze, that’s all it took – and mouth was devouring mouth in a wildfire blaze of hot, hungry need.

  Slo fancied he could actually hear the crackle of burning brush around them, smell the smoke. For all he knew the gully had burst into flames. He was sure that he was about to. God help him, this wasn’t what he had intended at all. He should stop – now – before this fire flared out of control. He should—

  Roxanne moved against him and moaned, sounding sexy as sin to his ears. Her thigh pressed into his groin…

  Aw hell, he should kiss her some more.

  His mouth claimed hers again just as the storm broke, hitting hard and fast, like someone had unzipped the sky. Lightning cracked, thunder boomed, and winds wailed. Rain poured down in torrents, dousing desire’s flame, plastering the tent fabric against them.

  Someone up there had a very warped sense of humor, and their timing sucked.

  Shit.

  Straining and swearing like a man in a sodden straightjacket, which was pre
tty much the case, Slo wrestled a penknife out of his pocket, thumbed open the blade, stabbed upward and sliced. With a raspy ripping of nylon, the cocoon split open, and he hauled to his feet. Then froze, forgetting the storm, staring in disbelief. All around the tatters of the tent lay blackened earth and charred brush.

  Fire.

  A genuine blaze.

  It must have been started by lightning right before the clouds burst; that was all he could figure. If the rain hadn’t begun when it did, they would have burned for real. They’d be toast. A creepy chill slid down his spin.

  Roxanne crawled out of the shredded nylon, biting her lip as though fighting back sobs.

  Slo’s gut clenched with concern. “Are you hurt?” Without thinking how the gesture might appear, he reached for her.

  She waved him off. “I’m fine!”

  He didn’t believe her – “fine” was the last thing she looked – but he didn’t waste time arguing either. In one quick series of moves, he swung her up in his arms, strode through the storm, and deposited her on the back of the bike before she could holler “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Mind you, she hollered it anyway. Slo wasn’t sure why he kept rushing to her rescue. She never showed the least bit of gratitude.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing? Playing Daniel Boone?” He climbed on in front of her and revved the engine. “I’m taking you out of here. Now shut up.”

  “You don’t have to yell!” she yelled. “I’m only deaf when I’m not wearing my hearing aid.”

  “Good. Because you and I have some serious talking to do.”

  Vroom—

  -------

  It was the worst ride of Roxanne’s life. The worst part being that it lasted barely a minute. To her, “out of here” had meant a trip back to town. To Slo, it meant racing down the gully a short way, then up a rocky incline and braking to a sharp stop in a cave. A small cave, just large enough to keep two people and a motorcycle out of the elements. But only if the people were on very friendly terms.