by Gayle Wilson
Chase walked to the doorway, trying not to appear to hurry. Like at the church, however, when he looked out across the darkening square, there was no sign of the man. It was dark enough and there were enough people around that he spent a couple of minutes making sure of that.
Chase stepped out onto the sidewalk and walked a few feet down the street He stopped, allowing his eyes to scan the darkening square again. Then he leaned back against the adobe wall of the building, trying to present the picture of a patient husband who has seen the inside of one too many shops, but who is willing to wait for his wife, who apparently wasn’t yet through with her shopping.
Samantha came out less than two minutes later carrying a package. When she saw him leaning against the wall, she walked over to him, her eyes questioning.
“What happened?” she asked. “I looked up and you were gone. Did something happen?”
“I saw someone I recognized.”
“Who?”
“We didn’t exchange names. When we met down here before, it wasn’t a social occasion.” He looked back across the square, still hoping for another glimpse of the man.
“You mean…you saw someone who was involved in another kidnapping?”
He nodded, his eyes still on the street before him.
“He seemed surprised to see me,” he added.
“Would our kidnappers be?”
“I don’t know. It may have nothing to do with Amanda.”
“Just a coincidence?” she asked, but her voice expressed her doubt.
“Maybe. There have been a hell of a lot of coincidences, it seems to me, since the beginning of all this.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turned toward her then, studying her face. That had sounded sincere, and he couldn’t read any deception in the green eyes. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he acknowledged. “I don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan.”
“So what’s the plan now?”
Good question, he thought. Another one he didn’t have a very good answer for.
“If we aren’t contacted in the next couple of hours, I think we ought to think about finding a place to stay for the night. The shops will begin to close around nine.”
“I was afraid…” she began, her voice very soft, but when she went on, she had forced it to be stronger. “I thought you’d probably want to head back.”
“Maybe they had car trouble,” he said. He allowed himself to smile at her, hoping the lame joke would be reassurance. As much as he hated the uncertainty of this, he could imagine what she was feeling.
“I need to call Sam, I guess,” she said.
“Do that from the hotel. It’ll be safer.”
She nodded.
“Let’s walk some more,” he suggested, automatically putting his hand against her back. They had taken a few steps before he noticed the package she was carrying. “You got the cat?” he asked.
“I thought she’d like it. We have a calico at home. Not as colorful as this one, but nearly.”
For the first time today, her lips tilted upward. She was remembering, he knew. Remembering life before all this had happened to change it forever. He could empathize with that. He understood how much one event could change everything, could change what you had always thought your life would turn out to be.
“We’ll get her back,” he said. He had made these same easy assurances to her before, and all of them had turned out to be far from true. He didn’t know why she should believe anything he had to say anymore.
“Thank you for telling me that,” she said softly.
At her tone, he turned to look down into her eyes.
“I thought you’d given up,” she explained. “I’ve been afraid all afternoon that you’d want to get in the car and just leave. I’m glad you don’t.”
“I’ll get her back, Samantha. That’s my job.”
Something changed in the depths of those remarkable green eyes even as he watched.
“Of course,” she said, “a screwup like that probably wouldn’t look too good on your résumé, would it? Bad for business, I guess.”
She moved past him, increasing her pace until they were no longer walking side by side. For a moment she had seemed like the old Samantha, the one who had liked him, who had admired the man he was. Chase fought the sharp sense of regret that he’d destroyed that moment.
The best man for the job. The hired help. But that was all he needed to remember in his dealings with the Kincaids, he reminded himself. He just needed to remember his place.
“No,” SAMANTHA SAID, working at keeping her voice as normal as possible. She could see the surprise in Chase’s eyes. She was making a fool of herself. What he’d proposed was for her own safety. She understood all the reasons, but she still didn’t think it was necessary. Or a good idea. “I’m a big girl now, Mr. McCullar, and I’m not afraid of the dark, thank you very much.”
“There’s no way—”
“I said, get another room,” she ordered sharply.
It had come out wrong. Demanding. Rich bitch. That wasn’t a tone she normally used. She didn’t talk to people that way. But she wasn’t about to spend the night in the same hotel room with Chase McCullar. She didn’t stop to analyze why she was so opposed to that. She just acknowledged, to herself at least, that she was. Very opposed.
“I thought you weren’t ready to go back,” he said.
“Go back? Across the border? What does that have—”
“Because you’re going to be where I can keep an eye on you, or you’re going back to being Sam’s responsibility. There’s not an option here, Mrs. Berkley. Not about that.”
He wasn’t bluffing. She could read it in his eyes. Ice blue and cold, far colder than she’d ever seen them.
“And I’ll be glad to return your assurance,” he added.
She shook her head slightly, not understanding the comment.
“Your virtue’s certainly safe with me. Even the first time, if you’ll remember…”
At least he had the grace not to finish it. He just let the brutal reminder trail away. She had been the one who had come on to him that night—undressing like she thought she was some exotic dancer, a stripper or something. A two-dollar whore was more like it, she thought bitterly. She could feel the heat of that memory flooding into her cheeks. That was the worst part of being a redhead—the damn blushing. She still hadn’t learned how to do anything about that.
“I’ve got a million dollars and Sam Kincaid’s daughter to look after,” he continued when she couldn’t get past the embarrassment to come up with a rejoinder. “I’m a hundred miles from nowhere, in a place where you make your own law. I’m trying to carry out kidnap negotiations that for some reason seem to have fallen apart. I signed on for all that, I guess, but I don’t intend to spend the night wondering what’s going on in your room. Wondering whether I’m going to have to be negotiating next for your release. I’ve got about all I can handle already, Mrs. Berkley, so we share this room or we go back to Texas.”
“You go back,” she said.
She didn’t know why she had said it. She couldn’t do this without him. She had known that from the beginning. She was just making a bigger fool of herself by arguing. Stubborn as a mule, Sam had always called her, but she didn’t have to be as stupid as one. For some reason, however, she didn’t take it back. She couldn’t seem to back down.
“Fine,” he agreed; “but just remember that the money goes with me.”
Along with any chance of getting Mandy back, she realized. “That’s not your money, Mr. McCullar.”
“And it’s not yours. It belongs to a man named Sam Kincaid, and my deal’s with him, not with you. I leave, I take Sam’s money with me. I stay, you, me and the money all stay together. In one room,” he added.
His eyes hadn’t softened. He wasn’t backing down either, she realized.
“All right,” she said. She didn’t know what she was afraid of. He had made his disin
terest obvious, starting about a decade ago. And she was certainly no longer the person she had been then.
“Good choice,” he said.
He fitted the key into the lock and opened the door of the room she had just agreed to share with him. She didn’t know what she had expected, and she guessed she should have been better prepared for the room after the fading, turn-of-the-century tackiness of the lobby downstairs. They had chosen the hotel nearest the heart of the small town, nearest the plaza where they had spent the day.
She spent a second wondering regretfully what the two on the outskirts of town looked like before she walked into the room and laid the canvas bag on the foot of the iron bed. There was a threadbare rug on the floor and an ironstone washbasin and matching pitcher on a stand. A small night table beside the bed held a shaded Victorian lamp and a decanter of murky water on a tray with two small glasses. There was nothing else. Not even a chair.
She turned around to find Chase still standing in the open doorway. His mouth moved slightly, only the smallest twitch at one corner, but she could have sworn he was fighting an inclination to laugh.
“Nice,” she said.
“It’s a place to sleep. That’s all we need.”
She put her hand down on the mattress and pushed, hard enough to provoke a rusty squeak. “Not much of a place. And probably not much sleep. You can have the bed,” she said. “I’ll take the floor.”
“Suit yourself,” Chase agreed. He closed the door, carried the two bags containing the money over to the bed and bent down to slide them underneath it. “You’ll probably have some company.”
“Company?”
“The crawling kind.”
Despite herself, she swallowed. Cockroaches? She wasn’t afraid of roaches. She might not like them. Who did? But she wasn’t scared of them. Or maybe that wasn’t what Chase had meant. The place was a little more primitive than she’d expected. Maybe…scorpions? she thought, and then she realized that she was doing exactly what he’d intended.
“I told you I wasn’t afraid of the dark, Mr. McCullar. I’ll take my chances with the vermin down there.”
Chase’s mouth moved again, but not in amusement. The muscles in his jaw tightened, but he didn’t respond in kind, and suddenly she wished she could take it back. No matter her bitterness over what had happened between them almost five years ago, her chance of getting Mandy returned depended on Chase McCullar’s skills. It wouldn’t help her cause to make an enemy of him because of what must be just a little bit of ancient history to him.
She walked across the room, a matter of maybe three steps, and opened the door of what she had supposed was the bathroom. It wasn’t It was a closet that, despite the climate, smelled of mildew.
“Down the hall and to the right,” Chase advised.
“Thank you,” she said.
When she stepped out into the hall, she realized he was following her. She turned around, abruptly enough that he almost bumped into her. She looked up. His eyes weren’t cold anymore. They were almost luminous in the shadowed hallway. Almost the way they had looked that night in the darkness of his small ranch house.
“I don’t need an escort,” she said, fighting that memory. “And besides, aren’t you forgetting that you left…something in the room. Something that you’re supposed to be guarding for Sam.”
“I’ll wait out here. Just don’t be long.”
He was still waiting, leaning against the wall halfway between their room and the bathroom, when she came out. She brushed past him, concentrating on the stained maroon-and-gold carpeting of the hall as she walked by him and then on to open the door of the room, which was just as depressing as it had been when she’d left it five minutes before.
She went over to the bed and sat down on the edge and began to remove her boots. There wasn’t much else she could do in preparation for the night. She hadn’t brought a change of clothes, and although she had thrown a nightgown into her carryall, she certainly didn’t intend to put it on. She heard Chase open the door and come back into the room after a long enough delay that she knew he’d made his own visit to the facilities. She didn’t look up even as he closed and locked the door.
She pushed one of the pillows into a wad in front of the headboard and put her feet up on the bed, leaning back against the thin iron railings. The limp pillow didn’t do much to protect her from their discomfort.
Another iron bed, she thought. Chase McCullar and another iron bed. Five years. Considering the changes in both their situations, what had happened between them then seemed almost to have occurred during another lifetime. Somebody else’s lifetime.
“I was sorry about Mac,” she said, thinking about that awful time. It was the simple truth. In spite of everything else, she had always understood how Mac’s death would have affected Chase. “I never had a chance to tell you how sorry I was. He was a good man.”
Chase nodded and walked to the single window that looked out on one of the narrow streets below them. She wondered if that had sounded as if she were asking for an explanation of why he’d never contacted her. She hadn’ meant it that way. All of that was over a long time ago. Except, of course…
She raised her eyes. Chase’s profile was outlined against the rose-tinted glow that came through the thin curtains. A neon sign was shining into the darkness, touching the room with the tawdry splendor of the town’s cantina.
“I heard that you made sure Rio—”
“I don’t want to talk about any of that. It’s over and done with.”
She couldn’t blame him. She understood the need to put it all behind him. All the pain and betrayal. The silence grew, expanded, pushing them further apart.
“You ever see Jenny?” he asked finally.
She almost smiled, but even if she had, the darkness would have hidden it. “Occasionally,” she said.
“Sam said that she wouldn’t be…over Mac, no matter what she says. You think that could be true?”
Five years, she thought. How much do you forget about a man you were crazy in love with in five years? How many details do you manage to wipe out of your head? The way he looked? The way his body smelled? The way he touched you in the darkness? How his callused hands felt moving over your skin, evoking sensations you had never imagined your body could feel? Do you ever forget those things?
“She’s dating somebody,” she said instead of expressing any of that. The music had started in the club below, norteña from a jukebox, drifting upward like a memory. “That’s what I heard, anyway,” she amended.
Chase turned his head, looking toward the bed. She couldn’t read his features, despite the pink glow from the street that backlighted the strong line of his brow and nose and chin.
“Yeah?” he asked. And then he laughed. “I guess that shouldn’t really come as a surprise.”
“But it did.”
“Yeah, I guess it did. Somehow, I just thought that with Jenny…” He didn’t finish the sentence, although again she waited for a long time in the dark silence.
“You thought that she’d never stop loving Mac,” she suggested. “Never stop grieving for him.”
“Maybe.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Chase,” she said. “Not for most people.”
“Mac and Jenny weren’t most people.”
“Mac’s dead. He’s been dead a long time.”
He turned back to face the street, but he nodded. She could see the movement.
“Things change,” she said. “And people…just go on with their lives. They don’t have a choice.”
He nodded again. She wondered who she thought she was to try to explain that to him. What did she think she knew about moving on?
“What went wrong?” he asked softly.
“With Jenny?”
“Between you and Amanda’s daddy.”
Her eyes burned suddenly, sharply and so painfully that she had to fight the tears. Maybe it was the expression he’d used. Amanda’s daddy. What went wrong between
you and Amanda’s daddy? Maybe it was hearing him ask it, with something like sympathy in his voice. Or maybe it was because she didn’t have an answer. Not a good one, anyway. She had always wondered how she was going to explain it to Amanda when her daughter was old enough to need to understand.
“I don’t know. A lot of things, I guess. What goes wrong for most people?”
He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and the music filled up the silence between them, made it less threatening. A little less painful.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said finally.
“Thank you,” she said. She watched him for a long time, but he was still standing by the window, still looking out into the rose-tinged darkness, when she fell asleep.
THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR startled her, echoing out of the near dawn like a nightmare. She opened her eyes to find Chase’s blue ones directly in front of her, his head resting on the other pillow of the bed. She hadn’t even been aware of when he’d lain down beside her, and she couldn’t believe she had slept that soundly.
She had thought when Mandy was taken that she would never sleep again until she was holding her baby. And she hadn’t. Not really. Maybe three or four hours of exhausted, restless tossing over the course of the last three days. Then tonight, despite the fears and disappointments of the long day, she had fallen into an apparently dreamless sleep as if there were nothing frightening to keep her awake.
She wondered if finally being able to sleep might have had anything to do with the man who had stood vigil by the window. She had time to wonder about that before Chase spoke into the darkness in answer to the unexpected knock.
He had rolled onto his back, pulling a gun from beneath the pillow he’d been using and pointing it at the door, almost all of this done, it seemed to her, in one fluid motion.