by Nora Roberts
She let out a long breath, as wary as he now. “Some. I’m not used to it…not like this.”
“Neither am I.”
She nodded, watching the cars breeze by. “I guess we’d both better take it easy then.”
“Sounds logical.” And next to impossible, he thought. Right now he wanted to gather her close, forget where they were. Just hold her, he realized. It was all he wanted to do. With an effort, he drew back. “No complications?”
She managed to smile. Rule number one was the most important, after all. “No complications,” she agreed. Again she reached for the key. “Read your paper, Colby,” she said lightly. “I’ll drive until dark.”
CHAPTER TEN
They took a slice out of Tennessee—Nashville, Chattanooga—caught the eastern corner of Arkansas—mountains and legends—and headed up through Twain’s Missouri to Kentucky. There they found tobacco leaves, mountain laurel, Fort Knox and Mammoth Cave, but when Bryan thought of Kentucky, she thought of horses. Kentucky was sleek, glossy Thoroughbreds grazing on rich grass. It made her think of long-legged foals running in wide pastures and wide-chested colts pounding the track at Churchill Downs.
As they crossed the state toward Louisville, she saw much more. Tidy suburban homes bordered the larger cities and smaller towns as they did in every state across the country. Farms spread acre after acre—tobacco, horses, grain. Cities rose with their busy office buildings and harried streets. So much was the same as it had been to the west and to the south, and yet so much was different.
“Daniel Boone and the Cherokees,” Bryan murmured as they traveled down another long, monotonous highway.
“What?” Slade glanced up from the map he’d been checking. When Bryan was driving, it didn’t hurt to keep an eye on the navigation.
“Daniel Boone and the Cherokees,” Bryan repeated. She increased the speed to pass a camper loaded down with bikes on the back bumper and fishing poles on the front. And where were they going? she wondered. Where had they come from? “I was thinking maybe it’s the history of a place that makes it different from another. Maybe it’s the climate, the topography.”
Shade glanced back down at the map, idly figuring the time and mileage. He didn’t give the camper rolling along behind them more than a passing thought. “Yes.”
Bryan shot him an exasperated smile. One and one always added up to two for Shade. “But people are basically the same, don’t you think? I imagine if you took a cross section of the country and polled, you’d find out that most people want the same things. A roof over their heads, a good job, a couple weeks off a year to play.”
“Flowers in the garden?”
“All right, yes.” She gave a careless little shrug and refused to believe it sounded foolish. “I think most peoples’ wants are fairly simple. Italian shoes and a trip to Barbados might add in, but it’s the basic things that touch everyone. Healthy children, a nest egg, a steak on the grill.”
“You’ve a way of simplifying things, Bryan.”
“Maybe, but I don’t see any reason to complicate them.”
Interested, he set down the map and turned to her. Perhaps he’d avoided digging too deeply into her, leery of what he might find. But now, behind his sunglasses, his eyes were direct. So was his question. “What do you want?”
“I…” She faltered a moment, frowning as she took the van around a long curve. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He thought she did, but they always seemed to end up fencing. “A roof over your head, a good job? Are those the most important things to you?”
Two months before, she might’ve shrugged and agreed. Her job came first, and gave her whatever she needed. That was the way she’d planned it, the way she’d wanted it. She wasn’t sure any longer. Since she’d left L.A., she’d seen too much, felt too much. “I have those things,” she said evasively. “Of course I want them.”
“And?”
Uncomfortable, she shifted. She hadn’t meant to have her idle speculation turned back on her. “I wouldn’t turn down a trip to Barbados.”
He didn’t smile as she’d hoped he would, but continued to watch her from behind the protection of tinted glasses. “You’re still simplifying.”
“I’m a simple person.”
Her hands were light and competent on the wheel, and her hair was scooped back in its habitual braid. She wore no makeup, a pair of faded cut-offs and a T-shirt two sizes too large for her. “No,” he decided after a moment, “you’re not. You only pretend to be.”
Abruptly wary, she shook her head. Since her outburst in Mississippi, Bryan had managed to keep herself level, and to keep herself, she admitted, from thinking too deeply. “You’re a complicated person, Shade, and you see complications where there aren’t any.”
She wished she could see his eyes. She wished she could see the thoughts behind them.
“I know what I see when I look at you, and it isn’t simple.”
She shrugged carelessly, but her body had begun to tense. “I’m easily read.”
He corrected her with a short, concise word calmly spoken. Bryan blinked once, then gave her attention to the road. “Well, I’m certainly not full of mysteries.”
Wasn’t she? Shade watched the thin gold loops sway at her ears. “I wonder what you’re thinking when you lie beside me after we’ve made love—in those minutes after passion and before sleep. I often wonder.”
She wondered, too. “After we’ve made love,” she said in a tolerably steady voice, “I have a hard time thinking at all.”
This time he did smile. “You’re always soft and sleepy,” he murmured, making her tremble. “And I wonder what you might say, what I might hear if you spoke your thoughts aloud.”
That I might be falling in love with you. That every day we have together takes us a day closer to the end. That I can’t imagine what my life will be like when I don’t have you there to touch, to talk to. Those were her thoughts, but she said nothing.
She had her secrets, Shade thought. Just as he did. “One day, before we’re finished, you’ll tell me.”
He was easing her into a corner; Bryan felt it, but she didn’t know why. “Haven’t I told you enough already?”
“No.” Giving in to the urge that came over him more and more often, he touched her cheek. “Not nearly.”
She tried to smile, but she had to clear her throat to speak. “This is a dangerous conversation to have when I’m driving on an interstate at sixty miles an hour.”
“It’s a dangerous conversation in any case.” Slowly, he drew his hand away. “I want you, Bryan. I can’t look at you and not want you.”
She fell silent, not because he was saying things she didn’t want to hear, but because she no longer knew how to deal with them, and with him. If she spoke, she might say too much and break whatever bond had begun to form. She couldn’t tell him so, but it was a bond she wanted.
He waited for her to speak, needing her to say something after he’d all but crossed over the line they’d drawn in the beginning. Risk. He’d taken one. Couldn’t she see it? Needs. He needed her. Couldn’t she feel it? But she remained silent, and the step forward became a step back.
“Your exit’s coming up,” he told her. Picking up the map, he folded it carefully. Bryan switched lanes, slowed down and left the highway.
* * *
Kentucky had made her think of horses; horses led them to Louisville, and Louisville to Churchill Downs. The Derby was long over, but there were races and there were crowds. If they were going to include in their glimpse of summer those who spent an afternoon watching races and betting, where else would they go?
The moment Bryan saw it, she thought of a dozen angles. There were cathedral like domes and clean white buildings that gave a quiet elegance to the frenzy. The track was the focal point, a long oval of packed dirt. Stands rose around it. Bryan walked about, wondering just what kind of person would come there, or to any track, to plop down two dollars—or two hundred—on a
race that would take only minutes. Again, she saw the variety.
There was the man with reddened arms and a sweaty T-shirt who pored over a racing form, and another in casually elegant slacks who sipped something long and cool. She saw women in quietly expensive dresses holding field glasses and families treating their children to the sport of kings. There was a man in a gray hat with tattoos snaking up both arms and a boy laughing on top of his father’s shoulders.
They’d been to baseball games, tennis matches, drag races across the country. Always she saw faces in the crowd that seemed to have nothing in common except the game. The games had been invented, Bryan mused, and turned into industries. It was an interesting aspect of human nature. But people kept the games alive; they wanted to be amused, they wanted to compete.
She spotted one man leaning against the rail, watching a race as though his life depended on the outcome. His body was coiled, his face damp. She caught him in profile.
A quick scan showed her a woman in a pale rose dress and summer hat. She watched the race idly, distanced from it the way an empress might’ve been from a contest in a coliseum. Bryan framed her as the crowd roared the horses down the stretch.
Shade rested a hip on the rail and shot the horses in varying positions around the track, ending with the final lunge across the finish line. Before, he’d framed in the odds board, where numbers flashed and tempted. Now he waited until the results were posted and focused on it again.
Before the races were over, Shade saw Bryan standing at the two-dollar window. With her camera hanging around her neck and her ticket in her hand, she walked back toward the stands.
“Haven’t you got any willpower?” he asked her.
“No.” She’d found a vending machine, and she offered Shade a candy bar that was already softening in the heat. “Besides, there’s a horse in the next race called Made in the Shade.” When his eyebrow lifted up, she grinned. “How could I resist?”
He wanted to tell her she was foolish. He wanted to tell her she was unbearably sweet. Instead, he drew her sunglasses down her nose until he could see her eyes. “What’s his number?”
“Seven.”
Shade glanced over at the odds board and shook his head. “Thirty-five to one. How’d you bet?”
“To win, of course.”
Taking her arm, he led her down to the rail again. “You can kiss your two bucks goodbye, hotshot.”
“Or I can win seventy.” Bryan pushed her glasses back in place. “Then I’ll take you out to dinner. If I lose,” she continued as the horses were led to the starting gate, “I’ve always got plastic. I can still take you out to dinner.”
“Deal,” Shade told her as the bell rang.
Bryan watched the horses lunge forward. They were nearly to the first turn before she managed to find number 7, third from the back. She glanced up to see Shade shake his head.
“Don’t give up on him yet.”
“When you bet on a long shot, love, you’ve got to be ready to lose.”
A bit flustered by his absent use of the endearment, she turned back to the race. Shade rarely called her by name, much less one of those sweetly intimate terms. A long shot, she agreed silently. But she wasn’t altogether sure she was as prepared to lose as she might’ve been.
“He’s moving up,” she said quickly as number 7 passed three horses with long, hard-driving strides. Forgetting herself, she leaned on the rail and laughed. “Look at him! He’s moving up.” Lifting her camera, she used the telephoto lens like a field glass. “God, he’s beautiful,” she murmured. “I didn’t know he was so beautiful.”
Watching the horse, she forgot the race, the competition. He was beautiful. She could see the jockey riding low in a blur of color that had a style of its own, but it was the horse, muscles bunching, legs pounding, that held her fascinated. He wanted to win; she could feel it. No matter how many races he’d lost, how many times he’d been led back to the stables sweating, he wanted to win.
Hope. She sensed it, but she no longer heard the call of the crowd around her. The horse straining to overtake the leaders hadn’t lost hope. He believed he could win, and if you believed hard enough… With a last burst of speed, he nipped by the leader and crossed the wire like a champion.
“I’ll be damned,” Shade murmured. He found he had his arm around Bryan’s shoulders as they watched the winner take his victory lap in long, steady strides.
“Beautiful.” Her voice was low and thick.
“Hey.” Shade tipped up her chin when he heard the tears. “It was only a two-dollar bet.”
She shook her head. “He did it. He wanted to win, and he just didn’t give up until he did.”
Shade ran a finger down her nose. “Ever hear of luck?”
“Yeah.” More composed, she took his hand in hers. “And this had nothing to do with it.”
For a moment, he studied her. Then, with a shake of his head, he lowered his mouth to hers lightly, sweetly. “And this from a woman who claims to be simple.”
And happy, she thought as her fingers laced with his. Ridiculously happy. “Let’s go collect my winnings.”
“There was a rumor,” he began as they worked their way through the stands, “about you buying dinner.”
“Yeah. I heard something about it myself.”
She was a woman of her word. That evening, as the sky flashed with lightning and echoed with the thunder of a summer storm, they stepped into a quiet, low-lighted restaurant.
“Linen napkins,” Bryan murmured to Shade as they were led to a table.
He laughed in her ear as he pulled out her chair. “You’re easily impressed.”
“True enough,” she agreed, “but I haven’t seen a linen napkin since June.” Picking it off her plate, she ran it through her hands. It was smooth and rich. “There isn’t a vinyl seat or a plastic light in this place. There won’t be any little plastic containers of ketchup either.” With a wink, she knocked a finger against a plate and let it ring. “Try that with paper and all you get is a thump.”
Shade watched her experiment with the water glass next. “All this from the queen of fast food?”
“A steady diet of hamburgers is all right, but I like a change of pace. Let’s have champagne,” she decided as their waiter came over. She glanced at the list, made her choice and turned back to Shade again.
“You just blew your winnings on a bottle of wine.”
“Easy come, easy go.” Cupping her chin on her hands, she smiled at him. “Did I mention you look wonderful by candlelight?”
“No.” Amused, he leaned forward as well. “Shouldn’t that be my line?”
“Maybe, but you didn’t seem in a rush to come out with it. Besides, I’m buying. However…” She sent him a slow, simmering look. “If you’d like to say something flattering, I wouldn’t be offended.”
Lazily, she ran a finger along the back of his hand, making him wonder why any man would object to the benefits of women’s liberation. It wasn’t a hardship to be wined and dined. Nor would it be a hardship to relax and be seduced. All the same, Shade decided as he lifted her hand to his lips, there was something to be said for partnership.
“I might say that you always look lovely, but tonight…” He let his gaze wander over her face. “Tonight, you take my breath away.”
Momentarily flustered, she allowed her hand to stay in his. How was it he could say such things so calmly, so unexpectedly? And how could she, when she was used to casual, inconsequential compliments from men, deal with one that seemed so serious? Carefully, she warned herself. Very carefully.
“In that case I’ll have to remember to use lipstick more often.”
With a quick smile, he kissed her fingers again. “You forgot to put any on.”
“Oh.” Stuck, Bryan stared at him.
“Madame?” The wine steward held out the bottle of champagne, label up.
“Yes.” She let out a quiet breath. “Yes, that’s fine.”
Still watching Sh
ade, she heard the cork give in to pressure and the wine bubble into her glass. She sipped, closing her eyes to enjoy it. Then, with a nod, she waited until the steward filled both glasses. Steadier, Bryan lifted her glass and smiled at Shade.
“To?”
“One summer,” he said, and touched his rim to hers. “One fascinating summer.”
It made her lips curve again, so that her eyes reflected the smile as she sipped. “I expected you to be a terrible bore to work with.”
“Really.” Shade let the champagne rest on his tongue a moment. Like Bryan, it was smooth and quiet, with energy bubbling underneath. “I expected you to be a pain in the—”
“However,” she interrupted dryly. “I’ve been pleased that my preconception didn’t hold true.” She waited a moment. “And yours?”
“Did,” he said easily, then laughed when she narrowed her eyes at him. “But I wouldn’t have enjoyed you nearly as much if it’d been otherwise.”
“I liked your other compliment better,” she mumbled, and picked up her menu. “But I suppose since you’re stingy with them, I have to take what I get.”
“I only say what I mean.”
“I know.” She pushed back her hair as she skimmed the menu. “But I—Oh look, they’ve got chocolate mousse.”
“Most people start at the appetizers.”
“I’d rather work backward, then I can gauge how much I want to eat and still have room for dessert.”
“I can’t imagine you turning down anything chocolate.”
“Right you are.”
“What I can’t understand is how you can shovel it in the way you do and not be fat.”
“Just lucky, I guess.” With the menu open over her plate, she smiled at him. “Don’t you have any weaknesses, Shade?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her until she was baffled and flustered again. “A few.” And one of them, he thought as he watched her eyes, was becoming more and more acute.
“Are you ready to order?”
Distracted, Bryan looked up at the well-mannered waiter. “What?”