by Beverly Bird
“And that is precisely why you shouldn’t have gone anywhere near Dover on race weekend. Because Hunter wouldn’t give it to you, and you never forgave him for it.”
Liv looked up. That dull, hard throbbing came back to her chest, the same feeling that had pressed in on her all week since she had come home from Delaware. After seeing him just once, so briefly, she could taste him, smell him, feel him with every breath she took, all over again.
She didn’t want him back—that was outrageous. She would never risk Vicky’s stability that way. But she dreaded the thought that he would turn up, anyway. And she’d be easy enough to find. She’d never tried to hide.
He’d threatened to find her, after all. He’d promised.
Kiki wiped her hands on a dish towel. “We’re going to turn on the cable sports channel right now. We’re going to keep an eye on what Hunter Hawk-Cole is up to all weekend, at least as much as they’ll tell us.”
“The circuit takes him to Michigan this weekend.” When Kiki looked at her sharply, Liv flushed then she defended herself. “I checked. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close by. He can’t wander in for a say-hi if he’s in the Midwest.”
“He could call. The TV will still tell us what he’s up to while he’s there.”
Liv threw up her hands. “Do you think they mentioned on television that the bad boy of racing was going to have dinner in Millsboro last weekend?”
“No. But they might have said that he had a top-notch car and that he was confident. From that you could have deduced that he’d have some free time on his hands, that he wouldn’t have his guys poking at that engine all night. If I had been there with you, we would have ordered pizza into the motel room.”
Kiki had always been able to think practically in any fix. Liv wondered again, as she often did, why her friend wasn’t a doctor or a geneticist. While Liv had been learning the hospitality trade in Flagstaff, Kiki had attended the University of Arizona, majoring in obscure scientific challenges. She’d earned a doctorate. Now she co-owned the inn with Liv, and she was as content at the oven and with their books as she’d ever been over test tubes.
“Okay.” Liv flattened her palms on the table and pushed to her feet. “At least we’ll know we can’t hear from him when he’s actually on the race track.”
“Not unless he has a cell phone in his car.”
“They’re moving at better than 180 miles per hour!”
“Do you honestly think that would stop him?”
Liv winced at another onslaught of memories. “No.”
“Okay, then.” Kiki found the remote control to click on the television that was shelved against one corner of the kitchen ceiling. “But just for the record, I’m tying you to your desk all weekend in case you get any nifty ideas to go have dinner in Michigan.”
Liv was in the stock car with him.
Hunter felt her there beside him as he warmed up in Saturday’s practice session. There was no passenger seat, just empty space that wouldn’t weigh him down, framed by a lot of metal bracing. She sat there, anyway. Sometimes she was a teenager again. At other times she was the woman he had met in Delaware.
“I’ve thought about it,” the teenage Liv said. “I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter. I’ve found someone who can give me a home, a family, everything I’ve always needed. You said when that happened, you would go away.”
“I’m your family,” he told her.
He’d been her family from the first time he’d seen her, Hunter thought now. She’d been living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation. He’d met her on his first day at the district school there and he’d followed her home after classes to find her tending to Dinny Sandoval and her sheep. He’d been fascinated by her, enthralled by her, so different from all the others with her Irish-Navajo blood and her incredible, exotic face. So he’d kept coming around.
She’d only been twelve then, but the ache in her eyes had been as mature as a full-blown rose—for the life and the parents and the sister she’d lost in a freak accident that had exiled her in an alien land. She’d talked incessantly of babies, a family, and a white house with blue shutters in a city where a symphony played. As soon as she was old enough, she’d told him often, she was going to go and grab that dream.
They’d lain on their backs on the rocky ground and talked about it, the star-strewn desert night etched above them, passing a coveted bottle of ginger ale back and forth. The nearest store had been forty miles away, and neither of them had had access to a car, so they took care not to spill a drop.
Liv Slade didn’t belong on that reservation any more than Hunter did—and except for one grandmother, he was pretty much Native American down to his bones. He’d landed in that school because of an ill-fated eagle hunt. It had been one adventure too many. His old man had packed him up and had shipped him off to live with his Navajo mother.
That clan hadn’t particularly wanted him, either. He and Liv had both been strangers in a hostile country, and then they had found each other.
After high school, he’d escaped. He disappeared from northern Arizona for weekends at first, then for up to a week. Weeks turned into months sometimes, but he always came back eventually to check on Liv. He’d done passably well with the rodeo, could have been better, but the money wasn’t there and it lacked the elusive something he needed. He joined the Army and found the restriction and discipline intolerable. She’d turned fifteen, sixteen, then seventeen while he was away. Her grandmother had died that last year while Hunter was in Louisiana, poling boats through alligator-infested bayous.
Liv had kept up the old woman’s sheep on her own after that because if the authorities found out she was a minor living alone, they would come and whisk her off again. The reservation had never been home for her, but Liv was determined that she wasn’t going anywhere else until she could do it on her own terms. She kept up the charade for almost a year, and the Anglo authorities never caught on.
That was the way he had left her in January that year, in Dinny’s winter hogan alone, the old woman’s clansmen close enough for comfort. Then he came back one day in June to find that the girl had gone and a woman had taken her place.
Hunter had driven up in his rattletrap pickup to find her wrestling in the dust with a lamb.
Already the heat had a dry, pressing weight, though it was barely midmorning. The lamb bleated in distress as she chased it, both of them kicking up red-brown dust that hung in the thin air. She had a syringe in one hand, held high as though it were a sword and she was about to plunge it into stone. Hunter stopped the truck and got out to watch her, enjoying the spectacle.
“Hey, you!” he called.
She didn’t hear him. She pinned the lamb, straddling it, then she came up on her hands and knees. Her bottom was thrust in his direction, cupped in frayed, hacked-off denim. A horse might have kicked him in the chest for the impact the view had on him.
Sometimes the need to love her actually burned inside him. It was why he never stayed home too long.
He wasn’t her dream. He was a man who needed to keep moving. He wasn’t what she needed.
But, God, he cherished her.
She hooked her left arm around the animal’s neck and raised her right hand again, armed with the needle. Then the lamb wriggled out from beneath her. Liv went after the animal at a fast crawl, her dark hair caught in a ponytail that streamed down her back until it finally splayed over each hip with her movement. Then she got to her feet in one fluid motion that had his twenty-year-old tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. She leaped at the little beast, going airborne.
“Jeez, Livie! You’re going to kill yourself!”
But she didn’t. She came down on top of the lamb, rolling with it, both arms wrapped around it now. She’d lost the syringe, and she swore a blue streak that had his jaw hanging. Still holding the animal, she groped in the rocky dirt for the needle. Just as he moved to get it for her, she found it and finally got it buried in t
he animal’s flank.
When it was done, she let the lamb run off. She flopped over on her back, staring up at a sky that the heat had baked the color out of. She laughed, a woman’s throaty chuckle of triumph that almost brought Hunter to his knees.
In all the time he’d known her, he’d never wanted her as much as he did in that moment. It took Hunter a moment to find his voice.
“My money was on you.”
Liv sat up slowly enough that he had the sudden, uncanny feeling that she’d known he was there all along. “You didn’t have any money, pal, not the last time I checked.” Her eyes were too dark. They were usually a deep, chocolate brown, but temper could turn them to the charred color of fired wood. “That’s it for the herd. As for you, fish or cut bait.”
He knew what she was talking about, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t, even if it made something roar suddenly in his head and sent his heart galloping.
Liv stood, then she leaned over to brush the dust off her legs. “Here’s the thing, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here. Are you part of it, or are you my future?” She straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want me or don’t you?”
He thought that if he answered that honestly, he’d probably be damned to hell for all eternity.
But Liv didn’t seem to want words. She walked toward him with that long, leggy stride of hers, then she yanked her T-shirt over her head before he could reply and tossed it aside into the dust. It was the reservation. There wasn’t another hogan for fifteen miles. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts—and oh, how he had fantasized about them over the years—were as full and ripe as the rest of her. Her shorts rode low on her hips. She stopped three strides from him.
“I love you, Hunter. And I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up.”
He almost choked. “For me to grow up?”
Her voice dipped, losing some of its force. For a moment she sounded almost as lost as she had been the first time he’d met her. “I want to be with you. I want to take at least one good thing away from this place when I go. I want it to be you.”
“Babe—”
“I don’t want promises from you, Hunter. I can take care of the rest of my dreams on my own.”
She leaped at him suddenly then, her arms around his neck, her lithe legs wrapping around his waist, her mouth clamping on his. She gave him no chance for finesse, no time for it. Something inside Hunter broke.
His hands found her bottom, holding her to him. Then they were both down in the dust while his tongue dove for hers hungrily, an agony building inside him too fast. He dragged off her shorts, then his own clothes, then he found his way inside her in one desperate thrust. She cried out, then she made a mewling sound in her throat and clung to him, riding with him fast, fiercely, crying out his name. And all Hunter could think was that this time he’d really come home.
A voice squawked in his headset, startling Hunter out of his reverie. It was his spotter, a guy who stood on top of the grandstand with radio in hand and an eagle’s view of the track. He warned of pile-ups around the next curve and unseen cars traveling in his blind spots.
This time there was panic in the man’s voice, and Hunter’s vision cleared to see the turn-two wall in front of him. He pulled hard on the wheel, swerving around toward the apron of the track again.
“What the hell are you doing?” the spotter bellowed. “Man, you’re all over the track!”
“Car feels a little loose.” It was the term that described how—at killer high speeds—the back end of a car could fishtail and try to catch up with the front. “I’m just playing with it to figure out how much we need to adjust.”
Then he glanced at the nonexistent passenger seat one more time. The grown-up Liv was there now.
Her perfect face was framed, not by straight, waist-length hair, but by long layers, brown streaked with russet and tipped by gold at the ends. She’d wanted him once. She had said she loved him. Then she’d found someone else in four short weeks, and she’d sent him away.
Now there was the matter of the child.
His child, Hunter thought. Not Guenther’s. What had she done? Why, Livie, why?
His spotter’s voice began crackling in his ear again, so loud now as to be almost wordless. Hunter focused on the track again. The turn wall was in front of him one more time. He corrected too fast, too hard. His reflexes were caught in the past.
The back end of the race car slid around and cracked into the concrete, crumbling like paper in a giant’s fist. Then he was diving nose first toward the infield, coming down off the embankment. Mikey Nolan, in the 42 car, had been coming up hard behind him. He tried to avoid Hunter’s skid, but he connected with his left-rear quarter panel, rocking Hunter’s car around one more time. Hunter slid up the track and straight into the wall with a full-frontal, jarring impact.
When he came to, he smelled gasoline and heard the deadly snap of fire.
Liv screamed.
The sound tore from her throat, raw and unwilling, as she shot up from the sofa in her private sitting room where she’d been watching the practice session. On the television, Hunter’s gold car with the number 4 emblazoned down the sides in black flames was smashed against the outside wall of the race track. Its hood was flattened, its rear end was destroyed, and real flames were licking out from behind the left rear wheel.
As she swallowed hard against another reflexive sound, a truck rolled up and suited men jumped out of the bed, armed with fire extinguishers.
Then the net came down from the driver’s side window, and she saw Hunter’s hand shoot out, giving a thumbs-up sign that he was okay. The TV announcer lamented that he’d qualified for the pole position in tomorrow’s race and now his car was more or less demolished. He’d have a back-up available, but changing cars now would put him at the back of the starting line.
“Oh, you stupid, insane fool!” Liv choked. “When is it enough for you? When? How damned far do you have to take it?” Her heart was rioting.
A fist thumped against her door. Kiki’s voice shouted through the wood. “Are you all right? I heard you scream.”
Liv went to open it. Kiki shot into the room, looking around both skeptically and a little wildly. Liv nodded wordlessly at the TV.
Kiki’s black eyes took in the scene there as Hunter levered himself out through the driver’s window. The stock cars had no doors. The seams and hardware would create drag. “So Michigan doesn’t agree with him,” Kiki muttered.
Then Vicky hurtled into the room.
Her knees were scraped and reddened as they usually were, and her long, black ponytail was falling loose from some hard play. “What’s going on? Somebody said you were all up here.” Then she, too, focused on the television screen. “Hey, isn’t that the guy we saw in the restaurant last weekend?”
Kiki was closest to her. She caught Vicky’s arm and turned her smoothly away from the TV. “What guy?”
“Mom knows who I mean. Some famous guy.” Vicky craned her neck around as Kiki steered her toward the door. “It is him. He said he drives cars real fast. He’s hurt.”
Kiki dropped Vicky’s elbow to turn back to the TV herself. Liv pushed between them to see. On the screen, Hunter bent over at the waist, in obvious pain. He did it slowly, as though the earth had suddenly produced an exorbitant amount of gravity and was tugging him down even as he fought it tooth and nail.
Liv felt light-headed. The announcers’ voices sounded anxious.
“Sit down,” Kiki said to her harshly. “You’re white as a ghost.”
“I’m fine. Vicky, go…do something.”
Kiki started angling the girl toward the door again. “Come on. I just made a new recipe for cranberry muffins. I need you to tell me what you think.”
“But I want to see what happens to this guy,” Vicky argued.
“We can watch on the television downstairs in the kitchen.”
Liv knew that Kiki would never allow the TV to go on downstairs until long a
fter this coverage was over. She offered no resistance when the two went out, Kiki closing the door again smartly behind her.
Liv went back to the sofa and sat, fumbling blindly behind her with one hand to make sure the furniture was still there. Then she reached for the remote control and hit up the volume. She’d once seen his car do somersaults down the backstretch, nose to tail, nose to tail, and he’d walked away as steady as a rock. He would be fine.
“They don’t seem to be heading for the infield care center,” one of the announcers said as an ambulance loaded Hunter and drove off. “Looks like they’ll be taking him directly to a hospital.”
“What does this do to his chances tomorrow, Hal?”
“I’d say they’re minimal at this point, Bud.”
He’d driven once with a broken wrist, Liv remembered, taping it for extra support, his jaw set visibly against the pain every time the camera caught him. He’d be in that race tomorrow.
There was another knock on her door. Kiki entered with a tray holding a decanter of brandy and two snifters.
“Where’s Vicky?” Liv asked, startled.
“I gave her two of the muffins and sent her out to harass Bourne.”
The retired cowboy ran their riding operation. “He’ll take the muffins and send her right back again if he’s busy.”
“Not if he wants to see another of my muffins in this lifetime.”
Liv almost smiled.
“Here. You need this.” Kiki poured the snifters and handed her one, then she gestured at the television with her own. “So what’s the latest? Did he live?”
“They took him to the hospital.”
Kiki nodded. “He’s too mean to die.”
Liv jerked up from her slouch against the cushions. “He’s not mean. He’s just…” She trailed off at Kiki’s expression. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”
Kiki settled on the sofa beside her. “You’ve got to get over this. You were fine before you made that trip back east.”
Liv took a good swallow of brandy without answering. It burned going down.