Raising the Stakes

by Sandra Marton

  “Shhh,” he said. “Shhh, sweetheart, it’s all right. I won’t hurt you. Nobody will hurt you, ever again.”

  A raw, primal sound burst from her throat. She sagged against him and pressed her face to his shoulder. Gray slipped his other arm around her, let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding and buried his face in her hair as he held her in the light cradle of his arms. She shuddered, her breathing grew even, and he knew the storm was over.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Dawn, I’m so sorry.”

  She nodded. He could hear the sound of her swallowing. She put her hands against his chest and drew back. He didn’t want to let her go. He wanted to keep holding her, comforting her, but he knew that would be a mistake so he gave her some room, let go of her so she would see that he wasn’t a vicious bastard out to inflict pain.

  No, he was just a hungry-for-her bastard, already wanting her in his arms again. Any other time, he would have laughed at the self-deprecating truth but right now laughter would have stuck in his throat. Instead he put a knuckle under her chin and lifted her head so her eyes met his.

  “All right now?”

  She nodded against his finger. Tears still glittered on her face and without thinking, he brushed his thumb gently over them. She jerked back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I never meant to hurt you. I only—”

  “I don’t like to be touched.”

  She said it with an iciness that was all the more meaningful, coming as it did from such a delicate-looking woman.

  “I understand.”

  “No.” Her voice trembled, but she didn’t. “You don’t.”

  Like hell, he didn’t. He almost told her that he did, that he’d met her husband, but then she would surely turn and run. Besides, why would he admit he knew Harman? Then he’d have to tell her the rest of it, either that inane story about a music box or the blunt truth, that she might be in line for a fat inheritance. He wanted her but that didn’t mean he trusted her fully. Not yet. So he nodded in acceptance while she went on looking at him, her face pale, her eyes glittering with resolve.

  “Yeah. Well, as I said, I’m sorry. What happened was…” He left the apology hanging in midair, cleared his throat and searched for something ordinary to say. `So, I guess the gas station’s closed, huh?”

  That wasn’t just ordinary, it was absurd. But it was safe. Apparently she thought so, too, because she grabbed it like a lifeline.

  “Yes.”

  She turned away and walked toward the station and her car. He suspected she wasn’t looking at it any more clearly than he was, but that was okay with him. They both needed time to pull themselves together. Need for her still burned inside him. He’d wanted women before but not like this—and how could he want her at all, considering what he knew?

  “The car just quit,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” She put her hand on the hood as if the answer to the question might rise up under the warmth of her palm.

  “Well, let’s take a look.” He forced a smile. “Maybe I’ll see something under the hood that means something this time. You want to get inside and release the latch?”

  She did, and he peered into the engine like a soothsayer reading chicken entrails. After a couple of seconds, he shook his head.

  “Nothing seems out of place or broken.”

  “I don’t suppose you have your cell phone with you…?”

  He didn’t. He could almost see the damned thing lying on the sofa in his suite, right where he’d left it, but he slapped his pockets just to make sure.

  “No such luck. How about I get behind the wheel and try the engine?”

  She nodded and stepped out of the car. He got in and turned the key. The engine stuttered, coughed and died.

  “Come on,” he muttered, “catch.” But it wouldn’t, and as soon as he checked the gauges on the dashboard, he knew the reason. “Well,” he said, sitting back and slapping the heels of his hands against the wheel, “I know the problem.”

  “The ballast resistor thing? That’s what it was the other day.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing so complicated. You’re out of gas.”

  “What?” Dawn leaned past him and stuck her head in the window. Her hair brushed his cheek. It smelled of sun and of the desert, and he closed his eyes as he inhaled the scent. “That’s impossible! I filled up—I filled up—”

  Today, she’d almost said. But it hadn’t been today. It hadn’t even been yesterday. She’d filled the tank just before her world started to come apart, the day she’d had drinks with Gray and he’d asked that terrifying question about her liking children.

  Of course she was out of gas. She’d been back and forth to Rocking Horse Ranch since then; she’d gone straight there from the Oasis bar. She’d phoned first, to make sure Tommy was okay. Mrs. Wilton assured her that he was but she’d driven there faster than she ever had before because she needed to see for herself. He was asleep when she arrived and she didn’t wake him. Instead she made up a story about a custody fight to explain her presence to Mrs. Wilton, who nodded and sighed as if she heard such things all the time.

  “From now on, no one’s to be allowed to see Tommy except me,” she’d said, and Mrs. Wilton had nodded again and said she understood.

  Everybody understood, or thought they did, but how could they when they didn’t know Harman, or what he was capable of? If he found her, there would never be a legal fight over Tommy. Harman would just take him, and if he had to beat her to death in the process, he’d do it.

  Dawn had thought about that while she drove a couple of miles down the road, to a motel that reminded her of the one in Queen City. In the morning, she bought a pair of stiff blue jeans, a white sweatshirt and a pair of too-large sneakers at the little general store nearby. Then she’d gone back to the ranch and when Tommy came into the dining room for breakfast, she’d swept him into her arms and kissed him until he squirmed and whispered that all the other guys were watching and would she please put him down?

  “Sorry,” she’d said abashedly.

  “How come you’re visiting during the day in the middle of the week, Mom?”

  It was the first time he’d called her Mom, not Mama, and something inside her chest had constricted. Her baby was growing up, and he’d be harder to protect than ever.

  She said she’d wanted to surprise him, and he grinned and gave her a quick hug before he sat down with his pals and forgot all about her.

  “Will you be leaving now, Ms. Carter?” Mrs. Wilton had asked politely.

  Dawn had taken her aside, embroidered the custody story just a little and said she’d hang around, if that was all right. Mrs. Wilton had agreed, but reluctantly. At night, she’d returned to the motel, phoned Cassie and asked her to say she’d come down with a virus if anyone asked about her. Then she sat in the middle of the sagging bed and gnawed on a fingernail while she tried to figure out what to do next. It was tempting to take Tommy and run but she knew what that would do to him. He’d made friends here. It was the first place they’d lived in long enough for that to happen.

  Maybe she’d overreacted. Gray hadn’t actually said he knew she had a child. His comment had been muddled; actually, she couldn’t recall it with any clarity except to know it had suggested she didn’t like children. Or had it? For the last four years, she’d lived in dread. She knew, from experience, that there had been times one word had triggered unnecessary panic. She’d fled Santa Fe because a man had shown up at the diner three evenings in a row and turned down tables she didn’t serve. She’d run, then, in the middle of the night, and only realized months later that the guy had probably just been working up his nerve to ask her out.

  By the time morning came around, she’d felt calm again. She’d driven back to the ranch, tried not to notice how Mrs. Wilton’s eyebrows had lifted at the sight of her, kissed Tommy goodbye and set out for Las Vegas. It was a long trip, first on a two-lane dirt road, then on the highway that led home.
She was tired; her eyes felt heavy, and she’d decided to keep herself alert by thinking about Gray.

  Yes, she’d definitely overreacted. If there was one thing she was convinced of, it was that Gray and Harman had nothing to do with each other. They might as well have come from different planets. Different galaxies, she’d thought, remembering the first part of the evening she’d spent with Gray, how nice it had been to see his face light up when he saw her. And that teddy bear. What a nice thing to have given her. She’d smiled at the memory…and that was when a car behind her began honking its horn. What did the driver want? He’d been right on her tail, which had scared her…and then he’d pulled alongside, and she saw that the driver was Gray.

  All the assurances she’d just fed herself evaporated like a desert mirage. Life had taught her there was no such thing as coincidence. She’d been almost blind with terror, especially when she fled him on foot and he caught her and spun her around…and then she’d looked into his eyes and what she saw had nothing to do with knowledge of Tommy and everything to do with the private hell she’d escaped four long years ago.

  Terror had closed over her like a giant wave, choking her, drowning her…

  “Dawn?”

  She blinked, forced herself back from the edge of that terrible chasm. Gray was trying to open the door and get out of her car. She stepped back and gave him room.

  “Come on. I’ll take you to the nearest—”

  “Why did you follow me?” The words spilled from her lips. She wanted to call them back, but it was too late.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Of course you did. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I think,” he said gently, “you have a very active imagination.”

  “How did you end up on this road, right behind my car? You followed me, and I want to know the reason.”

  “How could I have followed you? You’re heading for Vegas. I was heading away from it.”

  “Oh,” she said. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth in a gesture that was becoming increasingly familiar to him. “Oh…”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “Well, that’s okay. I get a lot of that.”

  “A lot of what?” she said. A delicate furrow appeared between her eyebrows.

  “Of women saying I followed them when the both of us know, with all due modesty, that it’s they who followed me.”

  Dawn stood up straight. “I did not follow…” She saw him grin again. “You’re teasing me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly between her slightly parted lips. A loose tendril of hair lifted on her forehead.

  “I guess I owe you an apology.”

  “You do, indeed.”

  “I thought… I don’t know how to explain…”

  “You don’t have to,” he said gruffly. “And, while we’re at it, I’m sorry I scared you.”

  She nodded. The day was warm, but he saw a little shudder go through her and she crossed her arms and clasped her own shoulders.

  “The breeze,” she said, by way of explanation.

  “Sure.” He cleared his throat. “Well. Let’s go find us a gas station that’s open.”

  He walked her to his car and opened the door. She hesitated before she got inside. I’m not the reincarnation of Count Dracula, he wanted to say—but he might as well have been. He was a liar and a cheat, and the need to come clean with her burned like a flame in his belly.

  “Seat belt,” he said with a quick smile.

  She put it on. He started the car, thought about the endless miles of nothing he’d passed and looked at her.

  “What’s behind us?”

  “Behind us?” she said stupidly.

  “Yes. Back where you came from.”

  “Another ten miles of dirt road, a little general store with a gas pump…and a sign that said Rocking Horse Ranch And Boarding School Five Miles Ahead…”

  The lie came easily. “Not much. A couple of side roads that don’t lead anywhere.”

  “Well, where were you coming from? A town?”

  “A wildlife preserve.” That, at least, was true. There was one, about forty miles from the ranch. She’d taken Tommy there several times. “No gas stations, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Gray nodded and pulled onto the road. “In that case, we might as well head back to Vegas. I seem to remember passing some kind of blur in the road about an hour back.”

  She looked at him and smiled. “A blur in the road?”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “You know, what passes for civilization in the middle of nowhere. A sign that says Home Cooking, another that guarantees you the biggest, nastiest looking rattlesnake heads…”

  “Yuck.”

  “And maybe a gas station.” He looked at her, a little smile on his lips. “You have something against home cooking? Wait. Let me guess. You don’t like rattler heads.”

  “I just think they belong attached to rattler bodies, that’s all.”

  “Wow.”

  Dawn shifted in the seat so she could turn toward him. “Wow, what?”

  “Wow, a lady who likes snakes. Never thought I’d get to see such a creature.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t say I liked them. Actually I don’t like them or dislike them. It’s just that there’s something, you know, kind of barbaric about killing them just so you can mummify their heads. Or whatever it is people do to get them to look like that. Do you know what I mean?”

  “To tell the truth, I never thought about it but—yeah. You’re right. It does seem wrong…unless, of course, you eat the rest of the snake.”

  Her eyes widened. “Eat it?”

  He grinned at the way her voice skidded up the scale. “Uh-huh. Cross my heart. Don’t look at me that way. It’s considered a delicacy.”

  “Rattlesnake,” she said flatly. “A delicacy.”

  “There’s this terrific restaurant in Boston…” Gray looked at her. “Tastes just like chicken,” he said, his mouth twitching as he tried not to laugh.

  “That’s what they said in Phoenix, at a place that served armadillo.”

  It was the most, hell, it was the only thing she’d ever told him about herself without being asked. He didn’t know what to say. Anything he could think of would probably close her down and he didn’t want to do that. He needed to learn more about her, didn’t he? For Jonas?

  “Armadillo.” He arched an eyebrow. “Did you ever taste it?”

  “No.” Dawn shuddered. “And I’ll bet that you never tasted rattlesnake.”

  “You’d lose.”

  “No. You didn’t. Rattlesnake?”

  “Yup.” He goosed the gas pedal just a little, torn between wanting to make the drive last and wanting what was the best of two worlds, a car speeding along an empty road with a beautiful woman beside him. “It was sort of a rite of passage.”

  “Were you in college?” Dawn eyed him suspiciously. “Was this one of those fraternity things you read about? You know, where some idiot drinks a gallon of beer and thinks he’s a man?”

  “My God,” Gray said innocently, “are you telling me there are universities where… No. I don’t believe it. Why would eighteen-year-old kids do such things?” He looked at her and laughed. “Actually, I was only about ten when I munched on roasted rattler.”

  “You mean, rattlesnake is one of the basic food groups in Texas?”

  “Now you’re hurting my feelings.” He eased back on the gas. “Nah. Only if you’ve got a pack of crazy cousins like mine. We hung around together a lot when we were kids.” His smile tilted as he thought back to those days with three of Jonas’s sons—Travis, Slade and Gage. Those memories were pretty much the only good ones he had of growing up in Texas. “They had this club. I’d always wanted to be a member, but—”

  “Why weren’t you?”

  “They were brothers,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “Huh.”

  The “huh” held a world of meanin
g. He glanced at Dawn. She’d folded her arms, lifted her chin and her eyes held a glint of irritation, as if she were angry at three people she’d never met for what they’d done to him. It made him want to pull the car over, take her in his arms and kiss her again.

  Jesus, he thought, and shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “And I wasn’t there. On their ranch. Neither were they, most of the time. We were all away in boarding school…”

  Gray frowned and cleared his throat. Great. Another few minutes, he’d be telling her all about his life, and Jonas, and a fortune she just might collect.

  “Anyway, it was summertime, so we were all back home. We got together one afternoon and Travis, I think it was, found a dead rattler in one of the paddocks.” He sent his mind back through the years, tugged a thread of memory loose, focused on it as it began to unravel. “It was sort of trampled.”

  “Double yuck.”

  “Exactly. Well, we looked at it, poked at it, picked it up with a stick, and Travis said Indians used to eat snakes, and one thing led to another, and—”

  “And,” Dawn said, with a little smile, “it tasted just like chicken.”

  “It tasted like an old boot that had maybe kicked a chicken once, but mostly it tasted like it had spent too much time in a horse paddock.” He chuckled. “But we were only kids.”

  “I know. Little boys can be such characters…”

  The words seemed to float in the air. Gray looked at her. She was staring straight ahead, hands folded in her lap, a wistful quality to her smile. A little while ago, she’d shown compassion for the child he’d been more than twenty years ago. How could she care about a stranger and not her own child? Was she thinking about her own son now? Questions buzzed inside his head like bees around a hive. The more he saw of Dawn Carter, the less he understood. It made him uneasy. More than that. It made him angry. Maybe it was time to confront her, and to hell with being subtle…