“Hey, tango lady.”
Somehow the day was brighter when she was talking with him. “Hey, yourself,” she said, grinning like an idiot. “You worked late last night, huh?”
“The beer waits for no man. Hope you didn’t stay up. I was hoping to make it by but brewing took a lot longer than I expected.”
“No, I crashed,” she said lightly. And if she’d lain awake in the darkness listening for a knock, that was her problem.
“How’s our champion hiker?” he asked.
She reached down to Darlene, who’d jumped to her feet and was wiggling happily at the sound of Brady’s voice over the phone. “I think she’s recovered and ready for further punishment.”
“How about you? You up for a bike ride?”
“A bike ride?”
“Sure. It’ll be fun. Fresh air, exercise, change of scenery. And I’ll feed you lunch,” he played his trump card.
“Lunch?” It was tempting, but…“Robyn’s bike has a broken chain.”
“You can use one of mine. I’ve got an extra. The trail’s about fifteen miles, cutting up through the Columbia River Gorge. You’ll like it.”
She glanced down at her pad. “I’m in the middle of working on your opening night stuff,” she protested.
“We can talk about it as we ride. Anyway, there’s time. A couple of hours won’t make or break.”
“It better not be too many hours. My classes start at four. And anyway, you’ve got to be at work, don’t you?”
“The beer’s fine and I’m leaving the theater right now. I’ve got some comp time coming. Come on,” he wheedled, “play hooky with me. It’ll be fun.”
“Okay,” she said, abandoning her protests.
“Great. See you in five.” And with a click, he disconnected.
That was Brady. He had a disconcerting tendency to pop up and try to persuade her to set any plans aside—and an even more disconcerting tendency to get her to agree. Maybe it was the laughter that was always lurking in his voice. Maybe it was the way fun followed him.
And she knew she was going to miss him when she was gone.
The phone rang again. “What do you want now?”
“You have a helmet?” Brady asked.
“I’ll use Robyn’s.”
“I bet you’ll look cute in it. See you.”
“Not if I see you first,” she said.
“Feisty, huh? I like ’em like that,” he said and disconnected.
The phone rang again and she snatched it up without looking. “Jeez, stop calling me,” she said with a grin.
“What the hell kind of way is that to answer the phone?” The words hit her with the force of a slap; then again, conversations with her father usually did.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice went flat. “I thought you were someone else.” Rude shock. It was like having a bucket of ice emptied over her.
“Just because you’re all grown up, doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want to people. Particularly your parents.”
She massaged the bridge of her nose. “Again, I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”
“Get rid of that smart mouth, for starters.”
“Hello, Father. How are you?”
“Good enough. Your mother’s not doing so well, though. You’d know that if you ever bothered to call.”
Betty Mitchell hadn’t “been herself” for the past fifteen years. Given the way Thea’s father had treated her—not significantly differently than he’d treated them all—it wasn’t a surprise. Not that he’d ever admit it. Hoyt Mitchell was never at fault for anything.
“You know her, alway whining,” her father continued, now that he was rolling. “She’s found a doctor who wants her to have heart surgery at the end of the month.”
“Heart surgery?” She blinked.
“A bypass. She doesn’t seem any more wheezy than usual, but they want her in pronto. So you and your sister had better get down here for it.”
The end of the month, Thea thought, trying to remember the date of Robyn’s return. “I’ll try. I’m on a special job up in Portland right now. I don’t know if I can get away.”
Her father’s voice rose. “I don’t give a damn what you’re doing. You’ve never had a job worth spit in your life. Now, this is your mother. You find a way to get here to take care of her, do you hear me?”
Translation: so Hoyt wouldn’t have to. But it was heart surgery, Thea thought.
“I’ll figure something out,” she said. “Is there a hotel near the hospital?”
“You’ll be right here in case your mother needs you. Your old bed will do fine,” he snapped impatiently.
And, nauseated with herself, she found herself caving.
It wasn’t worth the fight.
Thea let out a breath. “Is Mom around so I can say hi?”
“She’s asleep. You can call her later, if your dialing fingers aren’t broken. Now here are the dates of the surgery.”
Obediently, Thea wrote them down.
“I want you here two days before that,” her father concluded. At that, there was nothing further to say and mercifully, he disconnected.
She was shaking, she thought, staring at her hands dispassionately. That was always the way of it. Hoyt Mitchell, autocrat, clinging to bitterness and hostility as though it were a holy calling. It was one thing when she called them—she was prepared for it. To get smacked by it out of the blue, though, that was worse.
She’d grown up with his constant verbal abuse. It didn’t matter that a dozen years had passed since she’d lived under the same roof as him, more than a dozen years since she’d been under his control. She was no better than Pavlov’s dog—when she heard his voice, eighteen years of conditioning kicked in and she found herself knuckling under.
I’ll be seventy-five and he’ll be eighty and he’ll still be acting like my big brother.
Some habits you couldn’t outgrow.
She’d always figured she would, though. That she’d leave and never go back, that she’d never wind up around someone like him. And she’d gotten involved with men who stirred her. But like a slow motion horror movie scene, there was always that moment in any relationship when the guy she thought was so wonderful suddenly morphed into Hoyt and she realized that she’d walked right into it again. Boyfriends in high school. Boyfriends in college.
Derek.
Thea glanced out at the street, waiting for her stomach to stop roiling. It was a neighborhood for families. Pretty yards, neat houses. How many of them were really window dressing to cover up fathers who twisted their children’s minds and hearts and emotions? Not all abuse involved fists and bodies. Sometimes words were destructive enough.
When she saw Brady drive up, her first thought was that she wasn’t ready. She needed space. She needed time to let the effects of the conversation bleed away. She needed to not be around any guy just then. But he got out, grinning in his ballcap and sunglasses. Darlene was up and barking happily before he even reached the gate. Thea rose.
“Hey, where are your clothes?”
“On my body,” she said as they met on the porch.
“That can be rectified if we go inside,” he pointed out and reached for her. When she shifted slightly, he took a better look and frowned. “You okay? Did something happen?”
Thea shook her head. “No, nothing. I’m fine. Call from home, that’s all.”
“Everything okay?”
Was it ever? “Yeah, sure, fine. I’m thinking I might skip the ride, though.”
He studied her a moment. “I think you should go. Do you good to get out and get your mind off whatever. All those endorphins, and lunch. Not to mention my undeniably charming self.” He slipped his arms around her. And somehow against the heat of his body, she found herself agreeing.
Once they got on the road, she was glad she had. Life was too short to spend the time brooding, and brooding was what she would have done. No point, she decided. It wasn’t like it would change anything;
she was better off focusing on the good stuff.
So instead, she pedaled down the road. At first, she was too busy getting used to the shifters and the brakes on Brady’s nifty eighteen-speed road bike to notice much of anything. As they left the city, though, traffic and noise fell away and they rode side by side, taking their time. Her father’s influence ebbed with the traffic. Finally, she could breathe. And she mentally blessed Brady for understanding intuitively what she needed.
“You know in L.A. it takes at least an hour to get out of the city any way you go, unless you’re diving into the ocean,” Thea said idly.
“Hard to bike under water.”
“You said it.”
“Never been to L.A.,” he added.
“I don’t know that it’s your kind of place. There’s nothing you can get there that you can’t here, except maybe sun. Portland’s amazing. So much to offer and yet it’s still small, at least compared to what I’m used to.”
“Part of what I like about it.”
The road wound through a forest of mostly evergreens. The wood stretched out around them, tree after tree, tall, short, broad, narrow, in a thousand shades of brown and green. Beneath, the fallen needles formed a rust-colored carpet that looked soft and yielding.
“What are all these, pines?” Thea asked.
“The ones with the black trunks are Doug fir,” Brady said as they rode.
“Lot of them.”
“They’re good at competing. Where they do well, they do really well. Otherwise, you’ve got some maple, alder. That one with the reddish trunk over there is a Ponderosa.” He flashed a smile. “My favorite tree.”
He would have a favorite tree, she thought. Brady might seem slapdash but she’d begun to realize that he took nothing in his world for granted.
And when she saw the redwood sign, she understood. It was big, with a nineteen fifties flavor. At the bottom, a stylized sketch showed a sprawling lodge. Over the top arced the words Brimfield Farm.
“Brimfield,” she exclaimed. “This is you guys.”
“Last time I checked.”
As they wound down the secondary road, the forest fell away to expose a broad valley bracketed by hills. Ahead, she saw the parallel rows of a grape vinyard marching up the hillside overlooking the patchwork green of a truck farm, complete with tall, latticed windmill. In the midst of it all stood a collection of Craftsman-style buildings that had her thinking of CCC structures built during the Great Depression. It felt like a refuge, it felt hours away from the city. Above all, it held a sense of peace.
She could feel more of the tension easing away.
“Oh, Brady, this is wonderful.”
“I thought you might like it. Let me show you around.”
They got off their bikes and walked them up to a rack before the main structure. The building wasn’t ornate like the theater, or imposing like the Lincoln School. It was just unpretentious, open and comfortable.
They’d carried through the Depression-era theme in the wide halls with WPA style murals, the themes simple, the colors vivid. In contrast, the rooms provided soothing havens in tones of oatmeal, stone gray, raffia. She felt as if she should check in and stay for a few days, then she’d be back to her old self.
“This seems like a great weekend getaway,” Thea said as they walked back out into the hall.
Brady came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “If we didn’t have to go back to work, we could stay.”
“Mmm. But we do.”
“Slave driver,” he accused and moved away.
And Thea’s mouth dropped open. “Did you just grope me?” she demanded, her breast still tingling from his squeeze.
“Who, me?” Brady blinked at her guilelessly.
“Yes, you.”
“I’m sure you must be mistaken.”
Her lips twitched. “I don’t think so. I distinctly felt a grope.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
He checked the empty hallway, thought for a moment. “The ghost,” he said quickly.
“The ghost?” She did her best to raise an eyebrow.
“Yeah, we have a ghost here, a worker who, uh, died in a tragic fruit-picking accident and ever since he flits around the place.”
“Groping the guests.”
“Checking for ripeness.”
“A tragic fruit-picking accident?”
“Why don’t we go outside and see the grounds?” he said hastily.
“Get away from the groping ghost.”
“Maybe,” he said, giving her ass a surreptitious squeeze as she stepped out the door.
“Was that—?”
“What?”
“Never mind,” she muttered.
It had turned into one of those idyllic summer days, Thea thought, warm, lazy and quiet. If she held still, she swore she could hear things growing. In the farm, zucchini and summer squash ran wild. The pepper and tomato plants looked as if they were hung with red, yellow and orange jewels. Behind the garden wound the rows of the grapes, and past it, a field of pale green.
Thea pointed. “What’s that?”
“Canola. We run biodiesel out here. It’s not much good without the bio part.”
“Why not use regular power?”
“This way, we make our own.” He shrugged. “I kind of like the whole idea of sustainability. It took a while to talk Michael into it, but it pays off eventually. We grow our own vegetables and fruit. We get our beef from a rancher who uses the mash left over from our brewing as cattle feed. It all kind of comes full circle.”
“It’s beautiful.” She looked around to see the Cascades, snow still on the shoulders of some of the peaks. “So which mountains am I looking at?”
He squinted, then got behind her and pointed over her shoulder so she could sight along his arm. “That’s Mount St. Helens.”
“As in the one that erupted?”
“As in. And that one over there is Mount Adams. I tried climbing it once.”
“I didn’t know you were into climbing.”
“A buddy took me up in the winter. Trust me, freezing my butt off for a week was enough to cure me of it. Give me rock climbing, any day.”
That was where he’d developed his strong, tough hands, she realized.
Trees, mountains, roads and plants. She gave him a sidelong glance. “Is there anything you don’t know about this area?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like it’s your backyard, you know it so well. I like it.”
Brady looked flummoxed. “Why wouldn’t I? This is where I grew up. It’s where I live.”
“A lot of people don’t care. In L.A.? You’d be lucky if they could identify a eucalyptus, even if it is in their own backyard.”
“In L.A., there’s not that much to identify. Maybe you should give up and move here,” Brady said, keeping his voice casual.
“How about the stuff on the trellises out there?” Thea asked as though she hadn’t heard him.
“Hops. For the beer.”
He’d planted them on slanting frames that rose a good three feet higher than his head, each vine twining vigorously up the cables. They were going to be ready soon, Brady saw in satisfaction, leaning in to finger the papery yellow cone of the fruit and crush it between his fingers.
“Watch out. The owners will get you for that.”
“I’ve got official dispensation.”
“Official?” She gave him a skeptical look.
“All right, I’ll ’fess up. I said I was playing hooky but I really wanted to come out and check to see if we’re getting close to harvest.”
She watched him inspect another plant. “You could buy them like other people do. Save yourself some trouble.”
“Who wants to be like other people? Besides, this way, I get the kind I want. Plus, I know that no one’s chemical crud is going to get into my beer.”
“A purist.”
“About the stu
ff that counts,” he agreed.
BRADY REACHED OUT and caught her hand. The bees and cicadas set up a somnolent buzz in the background. As he walked with her down between the rows, the heady scent rose around them.
“I’m glad you came out with me. I wanted you to see it,” he said. And he’d wanted to be the one to show it to her. Sure, he could say the snap decision to go for a ride was because he’d been stir crazy, but he hadn’t just wanted to get out, he’d wanted to get out with Thea.
That had been before he’d gotten to her house and seen the shadows in her eyes, the somberness that hovered around the corners of her mouth.
“It’s so beautiful around here, the way everything’s green and growing. Where I came from, the only way anything grows is with irrigation.”
“Blythe? What do they grow around there?”
“Cotton, winter vegetables.”
“Did your family farm?”
She gave a short laugh. “Uh, no. My dad’s not the farmer type.” And that quickly, the shadows were back.
“What does he do?” he asked as they neared the end of the row. His voice was casual; his eyes, as he watched her, were not.
“He’s a mechanic.” She made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He’s good at making things do what he wants them to.”
To ask or not?
“He was the one you were talking with, wasn’t he?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Something wrong at home?”
Thea took a few more steps in silence, then tugged her hand loose and walked out to the open space beyond the end of the row. The grapevines curved across the hillsides. The canola flowed with the breeze like water. She stood there, staring out over the valley.
“Look at it,” she said as though she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t think you could ever be unhappy living with a view like this.” She turned to face him, eyes unnaturally bright. “So, I seem to remember someone promising me lunch.”
He started to protest. Something told him to let it go.
For now.
“We could go get some lunch.”
“Good.” She stepped in close to him, close enough to skim her lips over his. As though released by the summer sun, her scent whispered around him. And her secrets. “So you’re one of the owners here, right?”
Hot Moves Page 13