by Beverly Bird
“Satellite dish working okay?” she asked conversationally.
“Fine.”
“Great.”
“I guess you two ate already.”
There were wordless grunts.
“You know, we really should think about getting back to the canyon to pick up the trucks.”
“Two more innings,” Mac said.
“Ernie’ll run us into Shiprock to get yours. He had to go home, but he’ll be back in an hour,” Jericho supplied. Then they both fell silent again.
Shadow made herself a sandwich and carried it back to sit on the floor beside the sofa. “You never said you liked baseball,” she murmured to Mac.
There was so much she didn’t know about him, she realized. He was almost unfolding before her eyes, layers peeling back, revealing a man inside who was inherently the one she knew, yet so much stronger somehow.
Not quite an emotional mess, she allowed. Had this man been there all along, waiting inside to come out? Or was he someone new, someone love had brought about?
He flashed a look at her and finally answered. “Only in September and October. The rest of the season is like watching grass grow. Now shut up and let us watch this.”
There was the man she had first met. Shadow leaned back against the sofa to watch the game. But she couldn’t keep her eyes on the television. She watched Mac as he muttered and argued with Jericho, and her mouth alternately gaped and smiled.
* * *
It was four o’clock before they made it back to the canyon. They dropped Jericho at his Land Rover, then sat with the engine idling after her brother turned his vehicle around to speed eastward again.
“Well,” Shadow said finally.
Mac didn’t answer. He was looking up at the mountain.
“How do you want to go about this?” she asked after another moment. His truck was on the western side of the range. They could drive around, or he could hike over. Either way, it would take several more hours to get to it.
She wondered if she would spend them with him or alone.
“Let’s camp here one more night,” he said suddenly.
Shadow’s heart spasmed. If only it could be that easy. “I can’t,” she said softly. “I have to work tomorrow.”
She had called the powers-that-be and had set the wheels in motion to try to get Diamond Eddie’s job. It was what she had always wanted. So why did it suddenly feel like an intrusion?
She risked a glance at him. Mac only nodded.
He was stalling anyway. He knew it, and on some level he was pretty sure she did, too. Once, a lifetime ago, he would have kissed her soundly and said goodbye. Once, a lifetime ago, he might have suggested that she come back next weekend. But they had gone so very far beyond that point now, and he knew there was no way in hell he was going to be able to sleep without her again. Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Not ever.
He didn’t want to.
“I called the Smithsonian this morning. Before you got up,” he said suddenly.
Shadow wasn’t sure if he was changing the subject or not. “What about?”
“Diamond Eddie’s treasure has thrown them into a hell of a tailspin. Nobody knows quite what to do with it. To their knowledge, a pot hunter has never stored his finds against a rainy day before. They tend to grab what they can in the dark of night and sell it immediately.”
“So what do they want to do with the stuff?”
Mac shrugged. “I had their grant to work here. I found it—in a roundabout way of speaking. So they’ve technically got the rights to it. I guess they’ll filter it all into their Anasazi collection.”
Shadow nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Some of the lesser pieces might be sold off through the New York auction houses,” he went on. “It all needs to be sorted, cataloged. I told them I’d do it.”
Her heart thumped. “How long will that take?”
“A month maybe, to get through the pots. I have no expertise with the rest—it’s not really my area. When I get through the shards, I’ll let them send a team to go through the other stuff.”
“You hate working with a team.”
He chewed his lip, still looking at the mountain. “I’ll be out of here by then,” he said finally.
“Will you try to put the life of She Who Waits back together?” She felt herself holding her breath as she waited for his answer.
“I’ve lost interest in that,” he said carefully, “since I know she can’t tell me where the Anasazi went.”
“So what will you do then?”
“There are over a thousand other sites sprinkled across the Colorado Plateau.”
A single hard shudder moved through her. Most of them were on the Res. “I’ve heard that.”
“Maybe something in one of them can solve the mystery.”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll take a lifetime to go through them all.” Finally, suddenly, he looked at her. “You said that it didn’t make any sense not to ever see me again. Can I take that to mean you’ll visit my sites occasionally?”
His voice was so cautious, so wary. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to make it easier for him. But she couldn’t heal him. Not completely. She had finally, really accepted that. Only he could heal himself.
Of course, she could keep prodding him in the right direction.
“I don’t think I can do that without tearing my own heart out,” she answered quietly.
His face changed, a million emotions flashing across it. Wariness almost settled there, but then there was only pain. It took her breath away, almost made her relent. Her hand seemed to move to him of its own accord, then she deliberately brought it back.
“What are you saying?” he asked neutrally.
“That walking away once almost killed me. I don’t think I can do it over and over, Mac, leaving you, wondering if and when I’ll ever find you again. I know I can’t. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe I am rigid and bossy and there’s something lacking in me, some...some spontaneity. But I need more than that. And if I can’t have it, then I think I’m better off not having anything at all.”
His expression seemed to settle. But his eyes closed down as he looked away. “Is that what you were coming to tell me in the Baja?”
She let out a shaky breath. “More or less. Before everything happened with Diamond Eddie, I thought I’d take a leave of absence from the museum. I have some money saved. I thought I could pretty much follow you around—if you’d let me—until it ran out. I wouldn’t have to walk away from you. For a while.” I could postpone the inevitable. But was it inevitable? She watched his eyes lose a little of their shuttered look and something in her heart dared to hope.
“You were going to give up your job?” he demanded. She would have given up her precious stability? Her family and home? That staggered him.
Shadow gave him a thin smile. “It wasn’t much of a job. Three days a week, the same thing I’d been doing for seven or eight years.”
“But now that you’re going to have a better one, you’re not willing to follow me?” he pushed.
She would, she realized. She would do it in a heartbeat. Instead she said, “That depends entirely on why you came back to the canyon.”
He could have told her that it occurred to him that their thief had to be someone she knew. That he was concerned for her safety. That he had figured it out and was rushing to protect her. He could have told her that a Mexican bartender with the wisdom of a sage had talked him into it.
And none of that would really be true. All his time for excuses had run out now.
“Because I fell in love with you,” he said roughly. “And unless I found you, nothing was ever going to be right again.”
He looked up again to see that she was crying. Crying? Shadow? “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, panicked.
“I love you, too.”
His heart was moving hard. He reached out to clumsily wipe her cheek. “Just like that?”
�
��It really doesn’t have to be complicated.” She managed a watery smile.
“It’s the most complex thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“That’s because part of you still thinks I’m going to go.” She hesitated. “I won’t, you know. I’m nothing if not persistent.”
He knew. Yet he still wanted to touch her, if only to reassure himself of it. He raked a hand through his hair instead. It seemed important that they get the talking out of the way first. This was too...vital.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
She shrugged. “You dig. I run the museum.”
“Will they give you the job or hire from outside?”
She was on steady ground now. “I’ll get the job,” she said confidently.
One corner of his mouth kicked up into a grin. “Yeah, but do they know it yet?”
“They’re about to.” Suddenly her smile faded. “I can come and go from your digs, if I know I’ll always be able to find you, that you’ll be waiting for me to come back.”
He didn’t want to think of all the nights there would be in between. Then he knew that it only made sense.
“One of the first things that drew me close to you was the sharing,” he mused. “Doing things together. Balancing life. I’d hunt, you’d cook dinner. I’d look down the east rim for footprints, you’d take the west.”
Shadow felt her heart surge. For the first time she truly started to believe it could work.
“The museum’s closed every Monday,” she interjected. “Eddie used to take weekends off, too. He’d leave me and the guides to run things.”
He slanted her a look. “Eddie was a busy man.”
“I could be a busy woman.”
“I usually take a few weeks off between digs,” he went on.
“And during those times we could be together all the time.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Not to mention the rest of the body.”
He laughed outright. “We’d have some wild reunions.”
“Once a week. We’d only be apart four, maybe five days some weeks.”
“And sometimes not at all.”
“Yeah.” Then, suddenly, he thought of something else. He looked at her sharply. “Seven years?”
Shadow frowned, not understanding what he was getting at.
“There was no way you could have known what you were going to tumble into in that canyon,” he continued. “It’s not like you were going to Acapulco or Palm Springs.”
“I thought I’d find a big, bad pot hunter,” she said cautiously. “I’d slay the beast and go home.”
“So can I assume that you weren’t protected—that you didn’t...you know...”
Suddenly she understood. Her jaw dropped. “I never thought about that.”
“And I sure as hell wasn’t expecting you to fall at my feet. I wasn’t prepared.”
She put a hand to her tummy. Her touch trembled. “I never thought,” she repeated, whispering. “I never...I didn’t make a habit of...” She trailed off. “Oh, my God, Mac.”
But she wasn’t half as rocked as he was. She saw it in his face, dawning slowly, a look half of wonder and half of terror, and she could read his mind as easily as he always seemed to read hers. Family.
“Would it be so bad?” she asked softly. “Would it be terrible if I was pregnant?” Once again, she held her breath, waiting for his answer.
He swallowed slowly, deliberately. “I guess not, if Hopi doctrine holds any water.”
“Hopi—oh.” Her heart started beating hard. “You said it didn’t.”
“Not in my book. I want more.”
Her pulse thundered. “I think you’ll probably have more. Like two for the price of one.” Somehow, impossibly, she was sure of it. It would have happened. They had been in the canyon, in an ancient place of legends, a place where the philandering Kokopelli had finally turned into his own mate’s arms and had given her a child.
How many times had she thought she would be like She Who Waits? She gave a little, high-pitched laugh that was both overwhelmed and entirely happy.
“Oh, Mac,” she breathed again. “I want this. I want it to be true so badly.”
“How long before we know?”
“I...a couple of weeks, I guess.”
“No sense waiting.”
“Waiting?” she whispered. “For what?”
He finally let himself touch her hair again. It hadn’t escaped him that she hadn’t tied it up that morning. They had both changed, he realized, in subtle ways, in huge ways...together, sharing that, too. He tunneled his fingers all the way through its length, spreading the ends out in the palm of his hand.
He wanted to be able to do this forever. He wanted it to endure. He needed that as he had never needed anything before in his life. Maybe that was why his throat closed again, why suddenly he had to grope for words.
They came out hard, fast, without any of the finesse he’d spent days envying other men for. And she didn’t seem to care.
“Marry me,” he began.
“I already have.” She put a hand to her belly again. “Where it counts.”
But he shook his head. “I want it carved in granite. I need that. I need something I can touch, something that I can always look at and know it will last. That’s something my father never had.”
“You will,” she reassured him. “I promise. Here, now, or in front of any shaman or justice of the peace you want.”
He looked alarmed. “Uncle Ernie?”
“He takes some getting used to,” she conceded, “but he’s family.”
Mac took the word gingerly to his heart. He held it there, testing it, and found it had weight and strength. Finally he reached out and gathered her all the way to him.
“If he’s yours, I guess that makes him mine, too.”
She nodded against his chest. “Until the end of time, Mac. You’ll always have a home, a family, a haven, until all the sands run out.”
* * * * *
ISBN: 978-1-4592-8722-8
A Man Without a Haven
Copyright © 1995 by Beverly Bird
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share