All the Way

by Beverly Bird

  His lips claimed hers fully. “I can’t wait that long.”

  “Then maybe you should stop going away.”

  She hadn’t meant to say that, either. Maybe it was just hormones making her shaky. Or maybe it was just that night after lonely night, she watched her friends with their men, aching inside for her own as Hunter chased wild dreams a continent away. He’d spent the past month in New England on a fishing boat. And she’d slept by herself, and sometimes she’d cried with frustration. Why couldn’t she just have a normal relationship? Why couldn’t he love her enough?

  Unconsciously she put a hand to her tummy, wondering if a baby would make the difference. She pulled out of his arms.

  “Let’s go. I can’t be late starting my first night.”

  “Liv, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just wish I wasn’t working tonight, now.” She managed to grin for him. “Why didn’t you write that you were coming back?”

  “Because I didn’t know until two days ago, and then I just hit the road. I figured I’d get here before the mail could.”

  “There’s always the telephone.” She scowled at him. “Did you get fired?”

  “Actually, I quit.”

  “You didn’t like fishing?”

  “I found something I might like more.”

  Her heart lurched. Please, please, please let it be me.

  “It’s a long story,” he continued. “I’ll tell you when you get home tonight. You’re going to be late, babe. Better get moving.”

  Liv had no choice but to agree. Her shift had started one minute ago.

  They went to the kitchen and she gave him her key. She kissed him goodbye at the back door and somehow she got through the night. She didn’t learn much about the bar business, but then, she hadn’t expected to under the circumstances. Everything inside her tugged her toward the door, toward home and Hunter and whatever it was he had finally found. Only a tiny corner of her mind was on the patrons, the bar, the tips she shoved relentlessly and absently into the pocket of her gruesome petticoated skirt.

  At 12:45, she fairly burst out the bar door. She jogged to her car and drove home faster than she should have. Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, her mind chanted. He would tell her he was going to stay this time—he had come home unexpectedly, after all, and in the rest room he had hinted that he’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He would stay, and she would tell him about the baby. Her period was a month late. The test was only a formality, after all.

  When she parked her car outside her apartment building, her palms were slick with perspiration and her heart felt as though a riot of microscopic beings was going on in there. She pressed her hand to her tummy again as she raced up the stairs to her second-floor unit. He was asleep on the sofa when she let herself inside.

  For a moment Liv just stood, watching him. How could a man be so beautiful? He made something ache inside her. Most of it was loving him, but part of it was pure appreciation. Even in repose, one arm tossed back over his head, the other dangling over the edge of the sofa, he looked as arrogant and magnificent as the hawk his mother’s family was named for. Liv went to kneel on the floor beside him. She kissed his mouth to wake him.

  “You look just like those ancestors you used to talk about all the time when we were kids,” she murmured. “You look like a warrior.”

  “Maybe a dead warrior.” He sat up. “I was out cold, wasn’t I?”

  Liv chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to pass the time until you could see me again.”

  His eyes narrowed on her as she stood. “That is the ugliest outfit I’ve ever seen.”

  She cocked a hip. “Then get me out of it.”

  Her gasp turned to laughter when he leaped off the sofa, caught her about the waist and tossed her over his shoulder. A moment later they were in the bedroom, and the pieces of her uniform were strewn all over the floor. And finally, as her hands flew over his skin and she arched up to press herself against him, her nerves were gone and the only thing that ached for him was her body.

  When they were spent and wrapped around each other, Liv decided to tell him about the baby now, right now, while her heart was still thudding from their lovemaking. They were so close, skin to skin, heart to heart. It was perfect.

  “Hunter.”

  “Hmmm.” His fingers played absently with her hair. “Hey, you cut it.”

  She frowned, impatient. “I do that every fall. Listen to me. There’s something—”

  “I know,” he interrupted. “The thing I started to tell you about at the bar. You sidetracked me with all that white frou-frou there under your skirt.”

  Liv set her teeth. “They’re petticoats.”

  “They’re still ugly.”

  “Well, I’m not wearing them now, so—”

  “Come here.” She’d started to sit up, but he pulled her close again. “There really is something important I need to tell you.”

  Okay, Liv thought. He could go first. “Spill.” She laid her cheek against his chest.

  “I’m heading for California tomorrow.”

  For a moment she lay perfectly still. She wasn’t sure she could move. “What’s so different about that? Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine…now California. You’re always heading somewhere.”

  “I have a chance there, Livie, a great chance. I met some guy in Bangor. He’s got a garage in Anaheim.”

  “A garage?”

  “Stock cars.”

  “What’s a stock car?”

  “Pared-down, fast-as-lightning, zoom around the race track.”

  “Zoom,” Liv repeated.

  “Livie, I was talking to him. He thinks I have the right stuff. This could be the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.”

  “Chasing alligators was the one thing you always wanted to do.”

  “This is different. I can’t explain it.”

  “Try.”

  He was quiet for a very long time. “From the time I could walk, people were always putting me somewhere. My parents couldn’t stay together. I lived with relative after relative while they tried to sort out their own mess, until I acted up enough and the auntie or uncle of the week would call them home. You know that.”

  She nodded against his body, back in his arms again, waiting, praying…for something, some word that would make all this right.

  “My father always said I was trying to kill myself.”

  She knew that, too.

  “When they finally broke up for good, when Mom stayed on the Navajo res and Dad went back to Tuba City, she sent me with him because I was too much of a handful. Then he sent me right back for the same reason.”

  “Hunter,” she said, exasperated. “You went eagle-hunting, fell down a cliff, lay there with a broken leg for three days while the whole town frantically combed the mesas looking for you. Then you practically crawled home on your hands and knees and the Feds arrested you for poaching. You were a handful.”

  “I was just looking for…I don’t know, something that made me feel right.”

  Tell me it’s me.

  “I sort of feel that way when I’m driving. Complete.”

  Her heart couldn’t have fallen to her feet any quicker if she had been standing. “This guy let you drive a race car in Bangor?”

  “No, no. I gave him a ride home from a bar. But there was nearly an accident and I avoided it and he liked what he saw.”

  Liv was quiet for a long time. “You’re not coming home, then.”

  “Livie, you’re my home. Wherever you are. That’s all I need.”

  But I need more. She punched his shoulder as she sat up. “Home is a place you go to each night to lay your head on your pillow!”

  “I lay my head on dreams of you.”

  “That’s not enough!”

  “I want you to come with me this time. Can you?”

  Her heart staggered. “Where?”

  “I just told you. To California. You can find a resort to work at there.” H
e sat up slowly, watching her, looking both sad and confused again, maybe even a little angry. “Babe, you’re really off the wall tonight.”

  He didn’t understand.

  It hit her then, in all its enormity. She was probably pregnant. And he was going to run off to California tomorrow to try his hand at racing cars. When that failed, it would be something else. God help her, it would always be something else.

  She wasn’t—had never been—enough to hold him in one place. Whatever it was that he was looking for to make him feel complete…it wasn’t in her arms.

  She drove her hands into her hair. She slid out of bed, shaking. “I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  Raise a child like this, while you chase the wind.

  This time she didn’t say it aloud. She snatched her bathrobe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door. When was it going to stop? Never, Livie, never, and you always knew that. The voice in her head mocked her and scoured the life right out of her soul.

  She’d accepted him on his terms, and their crazy life together, apart more than they were in each other’s arms. She loved him with all of her heart. But how—oh, God, how?—was she supposed to explain his whereabouts to a child when he was gone for months, here for a day? How could they go with him? How could she tell this child, “No, baby, this isn’t home, but maybe the next stop will be?”

  How could she pawn off on this little one the same kind of upheaval her parents had destroyed her with when they had died?

  “I’ll have to learn the business from the ground up,” Hunter said from the bed, “and a lot of drivers have a head start on me. They cut their teeth in their daddy’s garages. And, granted, they’re all pretty much a bunch of Southerners, so I’ll break the mold. But this guy—his name is Pritchard Spikes—he says he’ll let me test drive at his track in Anaheim and he’ll see what I can do. If I really have the right stuff, he’ll give me a chance.”

  “What?” Liv turned to him vacantly, belting her robe. “What are you talking about?”

  “The stock car circuit. This chance. This is it, Livie, I feel it in my bones.”

  She stared at him. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Liv went to the bathroom to throw up.

  Liv found herself leaning against the bathroom sink now, fighting nausea again. Only this time she wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t been with a man since…that night.

  She’d done the test kit that weekend after Hunter had gone again. It had turned up positive. That had been in October.

  He’d written, once, to tell her that Pritchard Spikes had indeed liked the way he handled his cars. He was going to give him a shot in his NASCAR garage in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Not driving, not yet, but in the background, learning. Hunter told her that starting in February, he’d spend the next ten months in a different part of the country every weekend, on the race circuit.

  He’d said he would stop in Flag on his way to the East Coast. She’d told him not to bother. It was over for them.

  She had a child to raise. So she had married Johnny Guenther. He’d given her security, a home, everything she’d always needed. She had given him…nothing.

  What she had done to Johnny out of sheer desperation had been cruel and despicable. She’d never been able to be a wife to him. She’d ended up alone after all. But she’d raised her daughter in one place, in one home, if not conventionally.

  Shuddering, Liv went back to her bedroom and slipped out of her robe. She pulled on a pair of khaki slacks and a sleek, black top. Shoved her feet into black sandals.

  She was ready for the Spirit Room now. Hunter had made his choice. She had made hers. There was nothing left now but to say goodbye—for good this time.

  Chapter 3

  H unter wished he didn’t remember the look Liv wore when she entered the bar, but he had seen it before.

  Elegant, he thought. She’d always been able to look elegant, even in cutoffs and work boots, with dust coating her skin. It had been in the way she moved, in the dip of her shoulder when she would glance back with a cunning grin, in the way she tunneled her fingers through her hair, pulling it straight back from her forehead, then letting it fall. Everything about her said that she’d been born for a better life than the Res.

  Sometimes, in their last years together, he’d marveled that a half-breed troublemaker like himself could find her in his arms, skin to skin, that she was his. It had all been a mirage, but it had overwhelmed him while it had lasted.

  As Liv paused to look for him in the Spirit Room, she reminded him of an unbroken filly trapped in a corral for her first saddling. He knew that when she stepped closer, he’d see a certain wildness at the edges of her eyes. She’d tremble so imperceptibly that it would be little more than a hum in the air around her. Livie had known fear, but like a proud and wild horse, she would never let it show.

  He had trapped her tonight, Hunter thought, as surely as he had ever herded a mustang into a pen. He’d given her the choice of meeting him here or playing this out in front of her daughter. His daughter.

  She was right to be afraid.

  The mirrors behind the bar were smokey and bronzed. The whole room was brown and gold and dimly lit. Watching her reflection as she spotted him and approached, Hunter thought it looked a little like a tintype. He rolled his stool around to face her as she stepped up beside him and dropped one hip onto the neighboring stool.

  “Punctual, Livie. As always.”

  She’d already told him not to call her that. She wouldn’t give Hunter the satisfaction of protesting again. She scraped her hair back as the bartender approached and stared at the bar in front of Hunter. It was bare burnished walnut. She wondered how long he had been waiting. “Who’s paying for this little shindig?” she asked.

  “I am.” Hunter glanced at the bartender. “Remy. Straight.”

  “No more Boone’s? You’ve come up in the world.”

  “I’ve always burned it as fast as I earned it. Now there’s just more to burn.”

  “In that case, make it two.” She thought Hunter almost smiled, but his mouth was too hard to allow it.

  Liv felt dazed. She couldn’t believe she was here with him like this. In a bar. Again.

  She’d known he’d come to Flag even though she’d told him not to. Liv willed herself, schooled herself, to be cold when she saw him walk in the door. She could show nothing. Hunter was like a wild cat when it came to scenting doubt, fear, pain. And he’d always known what she was feeling.

  He couldn’t know it this time. Her baby’s future depended on it.

  She was still angry at him, so angry that it hurt with a physical pain. Maybe that was all he would sense.

  It had been a month since he’d left her bed for California, and Liv had already worked her way up from cocktail waitress to tending bar. No more frou-frou for her. She’d graduated to black trousers and a silk vest that nipped her waist and plunged down to her cleavage. She leaned forward when Hunter sat at the bar, giving him a good view of what he would be missing.

  If he let her go.

  “I told you not to come,” she said, her tone flat. Then her heart sank. He was watching her eyes. Trying to read them.

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t figure out why so I stopped to see for myself.”

  “North Carolina is a long way away from Arizona, pal. Better hit the road.”

  “After you tell me what’s wrong.”

  You won’t stay put. You won’t just stay put and love me! Liv straightened from the bar as someone gestured for another beer. She went to draw the draft.

  He was still waiting for her when she came back.

  All she could do was take a deep breath and plunge in. A lot had happened since he had left.

  “I’m getting married, 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. So go.”

  Oh, dear God, the pain on his face. It snatched at her air. She coul
dn’t bear to see it, so she went to wash glasses instead. But his voice followed her.

  “Not you, Livie. You were the only one who ever knew when I was gone.”

  She looked up from the sink and steeled herself. “Are you still here?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I just did.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter.” Fight for me. Oh, please, God, let him fight to keep me.

  His face went to stone. Any emotion there was just suddenly gone, as quickly as he blinked. He stood from the bar stool. Things screamed inside her.

  “I really wanted you to come with me this time,” he said.

  “I never had your wings. I just plummet to the ground again when I try to fly. It’s where I belong.”

  He’d gone. He’d moved on to North Carolina and a spot on one of Pritchard Spikes’s pit crews, and she hadn’t laid eyes on him again until the weekend in Delaware. Now he was back and he looked…dangerous.

  She’d never feared him before, she realized wildly, but she did now. Even that first day when he’d turned up on a piebald gelding in Ama’s grazing yard, his dark-blue eyes narrowed to slits against the sun, his long black hair tickling itself in the wind, looking as heathen as her worst nightmares. Even then, she hadn’t been afraid. He’d asked her if she wanted some help. She’d said sure. She had loved him. Instantly, childishly, with a wild excitement and an obscure yearning for things she didn’t yet understand.

  Now the golden light in the bar turned his dusky skin to amber. His hair was swept back off his forehead, but it was long enough in the back to nudge his collar. His cheekbones were still slashes, and his eyes were still narrowed against something, but this time it wasn’t the light. It was her.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked bluntly.

  His mouth didn’t exactly soften, but he grinned like a shark. “Once you wouldn’t have had to ask me that.”

  Heat slid through her. Liv gulped Remy and coughed a little. “That was then. I don’t know you anymore. Now you’re some kind of national sports icon, used to getting his own way.”