by Lilian Darcy
Then they emerged over a rise and she gasped with pleasure. A valley appeared to be filled with gold. Brilliant yellow leaves quaked in the breeze, seeming to shimmer and almost emit a light of their own.
“Wow!” No word could adequately describe her reaction to the beauty nestled in this valley. “Just wow!”
“I used to love to take leave in the autumn when I could just to come up here and see this. Want to get out and walk a bit?”
“Absolutely.”
Surrounded by the darker green of the firs, the valley made her think of a guarded treasure chest. It was as if the firs coiled around it, like a dragon protecting its hoard.
Fanciful thoughts, strangers to her usually, danced through her mind as they parked near the edge of the aspens then started strolling among them.
The breeze ruffled the leaves, and it almost sounded as if the trees whispered a conversation. She drew deep breaths of the fresh air and felt a smile start to grow throughout her entire body.
“This is incredible,” she said.
“Will you be offended if I take your arm? The ground is so uneven.”
She gave it a moment’s thought. “I don’t want to fall,” she admitted. “That could be catastrophic.”
So he slipped his arm through hers and hugged it to his side. A warm, hard side. Truth to tell, she doubted there was a human on the planet who was any harder physically than a SEAL. All planes, angles and well-honed muscles.
“Do you still work out?” she asked.
“I have to. After all these years, I feel awful if I don’t. You?”
“I can still do most everything. No warnings. I’ve stopped running, though.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t seem to have the lung capacity I used to.” She laughed quietly. “My friends say I’m carrying high. Which I guess means Junior is taking up some lung space. So I take brisk walks instead. But I’ve known some women who keep right on running.”
“Some of my sisters did. A couple of them gave it up, though. I don’t know why. Maybe for the same reason you did.” Then he asked, “You call him Junior?”
“That was the first time. Why?”
“I don’t know. All I’ve heard you call him is the baby and the kid.”
She flushed faintly. “I guess I’ve been objectifying him.”
“It takes some getting used to” was all he said.
She availed herself of a tree, while he headed back to the car to get some bottled water. “I don’t need to tell you about staying hydrated at altitude. We’re about eight thousand feet here. I’ll be right back.”
She had just finished straightening her clothes when he returned carrying a couple of liter bottles. He passed her one and she was surprised to realize that she was truly thirsty. She drained most of it in one draft.
When she lowered the bottle, she found his smiling green-brown eyes on her. “I’m glad I thought of that.”
“So am I.” She dabbed her lips with her sleeve. “That was good.”
“There’s plenty more.”
They continued their walk, her arm tucked through his, then came to a place where a brook tumbled down a rock face and carved its way back through the forest. There were a couple of good-sized boulders and he suggested a brief rest.
Eight thousand feet, she thought as she perched on one of the rocks. She was feeling it, too. She wondered if that was good. “Could I get altitude sickness here?”
“Not usually at this height, but it can happen. Just don’t overexert and keep drinking.” He passed her his unopened bottle.
She finished hers and then started on his. “What about you?”
“I’m acclimated. I spent a lot of time hiking up here over the summer. The mining town is lower, so I’d recommend lunching there.”
She nodded and looked around at this little piece of heaven. “The aspens are gorgeous. Like bottled sunlight. They’re going away?”
“Unfortunately. Each year more die, and they’re not spreading. We never had that many to begin with because the climate here is more suited to firs, but I hear they’re losing them in Colorado, too.”
“And the maples in New England,” she added. “I read about that somewhere.”
He acknowledged her words with a moment of silence. “Let’s get you back to the car. While the altitude isn’t that dangerous, I’d feel better about you if we were lower.”
So would she, when she thought about it. Seth kept them to a slow pace, but even so she was aware that she was beginning to feel as if she’d run more than a few miles.
She was growing amazingly sleepy again. It happened more often now, and she was resigned to not having her normal level of energy until after the baby was born, but every so often it chafed her. She was used to being active physically, and these new limitations irritated her.
They drove back down winding, hilly roads until at last Seth pulled off onto a narrow, rutted track. “We can’t get too close. We had to rope the area off a few years back because some of the old mining tunnels are collapsing. The worst of it is, we’re not sure where all the tunnels run.”
“What about a ground-penetrating radar?”
He cocked an amused eye at her. “Costs money and the county budget is tight. We’re asking the forest service to take over the place, but so far they don’t seem eager. Understandable since a decade or so ago they took over a big chunk of ground on and around Thunder Mountain. They’re overtaxed. So in the meantime, we just have to be careful and not get too close.”
The tumbledown mining site interested her with its echoes of a distant and different past. She would have loved to get close to some of those sagging buildings, to look inside and imagine the kinds of lives people had lived here, but the barriers were up all around, the warning signs plain to see...as were the collapsed mine tunnels, deep pits in the earth. Having the ground give way would have been a dangerous, if not deadly, experience.
They walked around outside the barriers and Seth told her this had once been a favorite place for teens to come. “They could get out of the wind, away from parents. Or, a lot apparently came to get spooked at night. Stories of ghosts abound.”
She glanced at him. “You would have liked to grow up here, wouldn’t you?”
He shrugged. “I liked where I grew up. No point missing something that wasn’t there.”
He was right, of course, but she was sure he had to sometimes wonder how different his childhood would have been.
He found a place soft with pine needles a safe distance away and spread out a blanket. A few moments later he returned from the car with some big bags and more water bottles.
She still felt parched and drank thirstily before she even looked at the sandwiches he unwrapped.
After months of telling herself she didn’t care about him, didn’t care what he did, that she was going ahead with her life alone with a baby, she discovered she was full of questions. Questions she wasn’t sure she could ask. But getting to know him seemed important, especially when he’d made it plain that he intended to be part of their child’s future.
“I need to know you better,” she said lamely, leaving the questions alone for now. She decided to see how forthcoming he would be.
He crossed his legs, put his sandwich on the wrapper and wiped his mouth. “That’s reasonable, given the circumstances. What would you like to know?”
“Anything that hasn’t been redacted.”
He gave her one of those charming smiles that invariably made her heart skip a beat. How the hell did he do that? She supposed that was one question that would never have an answer.
“Well,” he said slowly. “I think I had an average childhood, mostly. I was raised by a lovely older couple. Well, they seemed older to me than most of my friends’ parents, let me put it
that way. But they were super. They never concealed the fact that I was adopted and told me they were luckier than most parents because they got to choose me.”
“That’s really nice.”
He shrugged. “For the times it was unusual. I guess it’s more common now, but I’m not exactly in tune with that part of the world. I’ve been spending too much time being redacted.”
That drew a laugh from her. She drank more water and took another bite of her sandwich.
“Even though I knew I was adopted, it didn’t seem like a big deal until after they were gone. Then I got this compulsion to find my birth parents.” He cocked a brow at her. “That could have been a big mistake. I was lucky.”
Edie nodded. “They seem like wonderful people.”
“Not only wonderful, but despite the fact that my appearance damn near shattered their marriage, they were very welcoming to me. The thing is, getting to know them seemed to fill in parts of me that I hadn’t realized were missing. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. It’s like you suddenly understand something about why you are who you are. I’m not saying it’s all genetics, because it’s not, but it answers some deep need of some kind. Best I can do.”
She thought about it for a few minutes. “I guess I can understand a little. I sometimes wonder how much I’m like my mother, and how much I’m like whoever my father was. My grandmother was able to tell me a lot about my mom, but telling and experiencing aren’t the same. And of course, my dad could have been anyone.”
“So you became a very self-reliant person.”
She tilted her head. “Maybe so. I don’t know how much that absence had to do with my choices. I don’t know how much my genetics played into it. How could I?”
“But I get the feeling you’re determined not to rely on anyone.”
She glanced down. “That’s true,” she admitted. “No more than I have to anyway. I like being in control.”
“I get that part. Totally.”
She gave him a small smile. “I seem to be a bit out of control now.”
He shook his head. “You made decisions. Nobody else made them. Now, unfortunately maybe, I’m mucking up the works for you.”
“I don’t know about that,” she admitted. Oddly, she was losing her appetite, but it had been a large sandwich. She began to wrap the remains. “I guess part of what played into my decision to tell you was not knowing who my father was. I didn’t want that to happen to this baby. If nothing else, I had to at least be able to tell him something about you. About the kind of person you are. And I sure didn’t ever want to look at him and admit I’d never told you about him.”
He surprised her by reaching for her hand and squeezing it. His skin was warm, dry, callused. She wished he’d keep on holding her, but he let go almost immediately. “I’m glad you made those decisions.”
“Me, too,” she admitted. “I don’t know how this is going to work, or even if it will, but I could just imagine the anger from him if I never even told you. He’d be right to get angry. Furious. I would have cheated him.”
“So now it’s up to me to decide how much he gets cheated?”
She flushed a little. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Maybe not, but that’s what it comes down to.” He must have read something in her face because he said quickly, “Don’t get mad. It’s just the bottom line. You were right to tell me. Now it’s my decision, at least to some extent. Inevitable. I’ve already told you I want to be part of the baby’s life. We’ll have to work it out, but we have to work it out for him.”
She looked off toward the mining camp, releasing the annoyance that had started to rise in her. He was right, she had thrown a responsibility directly on his shoulders. Would it have been easier to tell this child his dad wanted no part of him? Would it have caused fewer problems? Not likely.
She sighed and put the wrapped sandwich aside. “Whatever brought me to the decision, I did it.”
Her back ached a little, as it sometimes did now, and she stretched out on the blanket with her knees up, staring into pine boughs overhead, catching glimpses of a deep blue sky. It was so peaceful here she wished she could capture it in a bottle and take it with her.
“As for more about me,” he said, as if their conversation had become interrupted, “well, you know I’ve been married twice. The first time I should have listened to my reservations.”
“Reservations?”
“Darlene grew up here. She’d never been away from here. I tried to tell her how hard a navy marriage can be. I warned her she’d be in a strange place and I’d be gone for long stretches, that I couldn’t even tell her where I’d be or what I’d done when I got back. We actually argued about it more than once.”
“So what happened?”
“She told me she could handle it and that I had no right to make her decision for her.”
“Hard to argue with that.”
“Yeah. Too bad I was right. We didn’t make it quite two years. Nobody can imagine it until they’ve done it. I’d get a call, or get orders that I couldn’t even show her, and I’d be gone. I couldn’t even tell her when I’d be back. That’s a lot to ask of anyone.”
She nodded, feeling her eyelids droop a little. “So she couldn’t take it.”
“She wasn’t built that way. I don’t know about the air force, but I know navy marriages are tough, even when you know your sailor will only be at sea for six months. With me it was worse. No real information of any kind. It might be a week or two, it might be months, depending. The only things I could tell her had to do with when I’d be training. The only times I could promise to be home for dinner. That’s a lot to ask of anyone. But instead of listening to my common sense, I listened to my heart. I loved her.”
A simple, straightforward declaration that touched her. “But you did it again.”
He snorted. “Yeah, I did it again. Maria was much more mature, and retirement wasn’t that far away. Unfortunately...” He didn’t finish.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I lost her, but I’m not sorry we had the time we did. I wouldn’t exchange those memories for anything.”
She closed her eyes, for some reason feeling close to tears. “That’s beautiful.”
“It just is. The truth.”
She’d never really wished for love before. Career was everything in her life until lately. But just then she wished someone would say that about her someday.
She realized she was hovering on the edge of sleep, her breathing growing slower and steadier. She tried to open her eyes, but her lids felt weighted.
“Take a nap,” Seth said quietly. “It’s the perfect time and place.”
As if she could have done anything else.
Chapter Five
Seth stretched out, too, although he didn’t feel the least sleepy, and watched over Edie. Not that there was much here to protect her from, but it made him feel good.
He wondered if he were about to make another big mistake. He couldn’t deny that he still felt the same attraction to her that had led him to her table in the ramshackle officers club at the air base in Afghanistan. He’d told himself it was just because he wanted to thank her—that had been some flying job—but even now he could remember other things pulling him her way.
She sat alone, for one thing, as if she didn’t want to get into the sometimes juvenile hijinks that occurred when people were blowing off steam and adrenaline. She appeared to have surrounded herself in a cocoon of composure, the same composure she had displayed in the cockpit. As if she wanted nothing to touch her or ruffle her calm.
He could get that part, and that wasn’t what had pulled him. No, what had pulled him was simple sexual attraction. Gut male urges that he honestly hadn’t expected to act on. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy a beau
tiful woman’s company for the evening.
And she was beautiful, for all she tried to hide it with that ridiculously short haircut and behind cammies. Beautiful to him at any rate.
And she still pulled him in the same basic way. He wanted her again. Remembering how much fun she’d been beforehand...well, he could understand why she wasn’t feeling like a whole lot of fun right now. That didn’t matter. So far he liked her well enough. And he wanted her like hell. Still.
Wow.
He’d made love to her five months ago, yet he could still remember how she looked naked, how her warm skin had felt beneath his hands, how responsive she had been. He felt a twinge of guilt even now that he had been her first. Surely a woman deserved better than a hurried mating for her first time. But she had said she hadn’t regretted it. He couldn’t help wondering if she still felt that way. Really felt that way.
One thing for sure, he’d been the one with the greater experience and he should have known better than to indulge. However much he had wanted her, he had known exactly what it might be: a one-night stand. Yeah, he’d hoped she’d get in touch, but he hadn’t expected it. And while that was okay for some people, it wasn’t okay for all of them. He should never have given in to his hunger for her.
He felt a little ashamed of his own lack of control—after all, that was something he prided himself on—but he’d lost control because of a red-haired, blue-eyed witch.
He laughed silently as he folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the trees and sky. He somehow suspected she would hate him for thinking of her as a witch. But he meant that in the best way possible. She’d cast a spell of some kind over him, and he’d misbehaved.
Now there were consequences to deal with. Just how he was going to deal with them he couldn’t imagine. She probably didn’t want him to become a permanent fixture in her life, so he guessed he was going to be doing a lot of traveling to see his son, because he wasn’t going to allow that boy to grow up without him. No way on earth.
While he had no experience of being a father, he had been blessed with two good fathers as examples. And he supposed he’d get plenty of advice from Marge...and Nate, come to that, if Marge pressed him. Or if he asked.