*
BAREFOOT, SHIRTLESS, ZEKE led the way. Mattie followed, trying to keep her eyes to herself. It was hard. Each step he took made the muscles shift and ripple in his long, strong back, in his hips below the snug-fitting jeans, in his thighs.
The shower stunned her. She’d been expecting a little building, like the outhouse. This was just a small wooden platform, built about a foot off the ground with wide slats to let the water pass through to the ground beneath. A pipe led from inside the wooden building with the sauna to a shower head on the wall. “This is it?” she asked.
Zeke looked uncomfortable. “It works pretty well—I’ve got it rigged to draw water from the pool inside. It’s not gonna be real hot, but it’s warm enough.” He showed her how to make the water run. “Short bursts work best. Get wet, then soap up and shower off.”
Mattie nodded.
“I won’t peek this time,” he said. “Promise. I’ll get breakfast going.”
“Thanks.”
He left her, disappearing around the building. He wouldn’t be able to see her from the cabin, that much was sure, and it was very private land. No one but the deer and birds as audience.
Still, she hesitated, standing next to the platform in the warm morning sunlight, her towel and fresh clothes hugged close to her chest as if in protection. She looked around, gnawing the inside of her lip.
The vista of the valley was visible over the top of the trees from the shower, the same view as from the back porch of the cabin. She was sure Zeke had positioned it here deliberately, but all that scenery made her feel even more vulnerable.
Maybe she could just wash up a little, forget about the shower. Except she itched all over from yesterday’s dust and sweat and rainwater.
Slowly, she put her things down and stood up, taking one more quick glance over her shoulder to see if there was anything or anyone around. There wasn’t, of course. Just Mattie and the open vista.
She took a breath and shed her tank top, then her shorts. A ripple touched her skin and all the parts that had never seen real, live daylight felt extraordinarily exposed. She stepped onto the platform.
Standing there nude, with a soft breeze blowing over her, with that panorama before her, something happened. It wasn’t shameful as she’d thought it might be. Nor was it arousing, though there was something empowering about shedding everything this way.
A burst of something holy and wild and real filled her, and with great reverence, she gazed around her, feeling no longer an observer of the landscape, but a part of it. Without knowing why, she lifted her arms and tipped back her head to the sunlight, letting wind and sun touch her breasts.
Had she ever been aware of her body like this? Had she ever known the comfort of her body, the wonder of having arms and legs and breasts and hips?
Thank you, she breathed, but didn’t know to whom she breathed it, Zeke or God or the mountain. As if in reply, a mountain bluebird flitted nearby, whistling, and Mattie laughed.
Following Zeke’s instructions, she showered, and it was a delicious experience, as well. Going back up the hillside, dressed and clean, she found herself humming a song from the Song of the South, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”
Zeke crouched on the porch, putting something in two little bowls. One held water, the other sliced canned peaches. “What’s that for?” Mattie asked, rubbing a towel over her hair.
“Rocky,” he said, enigmatically. “You’ll see. Come on inside. Breakfast is just about done.”
A smell of baking greeted her as she stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her. Zeke bent and took a heavy cast-iron muffin tray out of the oven, and the scent of the oversize muffins made her mouth water. “Poppy seed muffins?” she said lightly. “I’m impressed.”
“Well, don’t be.” He put the tray down on top of the stove and lifted his chin to an empty package of muffin mix. “Add water and pour.”
She smiled as she helped herself to coffee, still humming with the powerful sense of well-being that had engulfed her at the shower. “They smell good.”
“Go ahead. There’s no butter, but you kind of get used to it without.”
Mattie took a steaming muffin from the pan. Holding the coffee in one hand, the muffin in the other, she wandered the room, her gaze snagging on a trio of snapshots stuck with thumbtacks to the wall by the bookcase. She’d missed them earlier, for they were somewhat hidden by the shadows. Now she leaned forward to examine them, munching her breakfast.
The first was of a horse, beautiful even to Mattie’s untrained eye—tall and lean with a glimmering black coat and a long tail. The next showed Zeke astride the horse, a worn cowboy hat on his head, smiling. She glanced over her shoulder, but he was studiously ignoring her to gaze out the door.
The third photo pinched her. Zeke with his arm thrown around the shoulders of a tall, striking blonde woman. A man knelt nearby, holding a trophy of some kind. The woman looked at Zeke with the kind of hungry, worshipful expression on her face Mattie knew she’d often given him. In the background were the noses of three horses hanging over a fence like the one just outside. “Was this picture taken here?” she asked, pointing to it.
“No.” He didn’t look around.
Mattie lifted an eyebrow at the abrupt answer. The bear had a thorn in his paw, but she’d be damned if she’d try to pull it out. Not right now. “Who is the woman?”
“Somebody I used to know.” He still didn’t look at her. His shoulders held a rigid tenseness that spoke volumes of fury.
She tried one more time. “What did you win?”
He stood up. “Nothing.” The word was harsh, and he still didn’t look at her as he poured a second cup of coffee. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
Mattie smiled to herself as she walked away from the picture. Yes, sir, a big thorn. Going over to the stove, she took another muffin and peeled away the paper, settling in the single chair as she looked around her again with new eyes.
Through the window, she saw the empty corral. Even she knew what a corral was. It held animals of some sort or another, and she would bet money this one had been built for horses. It had been a while, though, since there had been any in there, if there ever had.
She touched the stallions on the blanket and glanced at Zeke. His tattoo was covered, but it did have the same stallion on it.
She glanced at the books. Horses. On the wall hung a calendar. Horses. She looked at his boots. Not the kind of drugstore cowboy kind of boots she’d seen so often in Kansas City, but the real thing, hardworking boots she’d guess he’d owned for a long time.
So what was a horse-crazy man doing on a motorcycle, flipping hamburgers in a nothing little bar in a nothing little town?
She didn’t have a chance to answer the question in her mind. At that moment, he turned around with a secretive smile. “Rocky’s here.”
Chapter 9
*
BRIAN MURPHY SHED his coat with a furious gesture. “She can’t just disappear like this!”
Vince, peeking out the curtains of their motel room in Albuquerque, said, “We’ll find her, Bri. Just a matter of time.”
“We don’t have much time,” Brian retorted, shoving his fingers through his red hair until it stood on end. “I’ve got work to do. If I don’t get that bitch out of my way, the cops will get me first. Without her, there’s no case.”
“I don’t know why you didn’t let me and one of the other guys take care of her. You could be home right now, drinking bourbon.”
Brian narrowed his eyes. “This is personal.”
“Yeah, well, I wish you’d mellow out. You’re making me nervous.” Vince flicked the curtain in place and picked up the phone. “I’m going to order something from room service. You want anything?”
Brian shook his head no, then thought better of it. “Bottle of bourbon.”
He paced as Vince placed the call, unable to quell the restless energy that was his trademark. In an effort to curb the rage th
reatening to engulf him, he breathed in slowly, then out, trying to find his center.
For a minute, it helped. Then he thought of Mattie again and the murderous fury returned. He’d outsmarted business partners, manipulated the law and the police and outmaneuvered some of the most powerful drug lords in the country—one naïve woman would not be his undoing.
It did not improve his mood to acknowledge the mistake was largely his own. He’d made the unforgivable error of underestimating Mattie O’Neal, seeing only a sweet, alluring secretary with a head full of simple dreams. He’d accepted her intelligence as his due, a necessary component in a wife, but his focus had always been on the nurturing end of her personality. What he’d seen in Mattie was an uncomplicated woman who’d make him an undemanding wife, and take care of their children. He’d never intended for her to find out that his fortune was built on shipping black-market guns and pharmaceuticals to profitable and illegal markets.
Breathe in, breathe out. Who would have guessed Mattie could steal a car? Disappear for weeks on end? His stomach burned with a sick, furious churning as he thought of the wild-looking champion who’d whisked her away. She hadn’t even given Brian a chance to explain—she’d shacked up with the first available man to come her way. It had taken him almost a year to get her into his bed. A lousy year.
“Bourbon’s here,” Vince said, paying the waiter.
Brian poured three fingers straight and tipped it back. The heat burned clear to his belly and performed its miracle of clearing his brain. “What’d you get on this Zeke Shephard?”
Vince, sitting down to a sandwich and a beer, tugged a notepad from his suit coat. “Ran a horse-breeding operation west of her till two years ago when the business went bust. Not much else on him.”
“Partners? Family? Anything?”
Vince nodded. “Had a partner by the name of John Reese. He married some horse society type and took over Shephard’s business”
Brian nodded, unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ll shower and we’ll go see him.”
*
ROCKY, IT TURNED out, was a raccoon. He waddled onto the porch and paused cautiously, looking around, then eased up to the small bowls.
“Oh, look!” Mattie cried softly, clutching Zeke’s arm reflexively. “They really do wash things.”
“Yeah.” He covered her hand on his arm as if to hold it there. The word was soft. “So danged cute.”
The raccoon took a peach in his tiny black hands and dipped it in the bowl of water, swishing it around thoroughly, rubbing at the fruit until he seemed satisfied and sat back on his haunches to eat it. He made a little noise, a soft growl of satisfaction.
“Once,” Zeke said softly, his deep voice resonant even at such a low level, “I put some spare biscuits out there and he washed them until they fell apart. Liked to broke my heart seeing him try to pick all those sloppy pieces out of the bowl.”
He slipped to one side on the chair, and motioned for her to sit down on the arm. Mattie did. “Does he let you come out when he’s eating?”
“Sometimes. Not usually when I’ve been gone, though. It’s like he has to make sure all over again that I’m not gonna eat him.”
Mattie smiled. The creature was unbelievably precious. The slim black mask over his eyes, the alert little ears. Like a cross between a sweet dog and a clever cat. “He looks smart.”
“They are.” Zeke watched Rocky with a bemused expression on the handsome features, and the expression made her heart flip. “A neighbor used to have one when I was a kid. Caught it in the forest and brought it home. We used to take it pieces of banana and stuff like that. He was really cute.
“But people all over started having trouble with chicken coops and vandalism. One old coot went out to his garage one morning and found a huge mess, oil cans on the floor, sand scattered all over the place, the curtains shredded.” He chuckled. “For a while, the cops thought it was teenagers, but they found out it was that raccoon. He not only learned how to open his cage, but also how to keep his owner from knowing he could.”
Mattie laughed softly, but the animal heard her and paused, looking up from the peach with an alert ear cocked toward her. For long moments, they stared at each other through the open door. Mattie found herself gripping Zeke’s shoulder, felt his hand tighten over hers.
The raccoon dropped the peach he was eating, and Mattie thought with a pang that he was going to leave, that she’d chased him off. Instead, he plucked a new peach from the bowl and started scrubbing it clean.
Realizing how she gripped Zeke’s shoulder, she forced herself to let go of him. “I’m glad I didn’t chase him away.”
He nodded. After a minute, he said gruffly, “The woman in the picture, her name is Amanda Shaw.” He fell silent again, but Mattie waited without speaking, and he went on. “The guy is John Reese. He used to be my partner. They’re married now.”
Mattie watched his face carefully. His gaze was fixed on the raccoon, so she saw Zeke in profile. The sharp cheekbones with the hollows below, the firm, sensual mouth, the black fringe of long eyelashes above the troubled green eyes. His hair swept back from a forehead tense with remembered—what? Fury? Sorrow?
Regret. The small lines around his eyes looked taut, too, and she wanted to smooth the tightness away with her fingertips. Had he lost his love to his partner?
“And the horse?” she asked gently, lightly. “What was the horse’s name?”
He turned, looking up at her, the color of his eyes so clear, the emotion so cloudy, it made her stomach hurt to look at him. His gaze scanned her face with a sharp intensity, as if he didn’t know whether he could tell her. “Othello.”
So close. The light coming through the door highlighted every detail on his beautiful face. She saw a hint of whiskers on his chin, a sharp jagged scar at the edge of his right eye, another through his lip.
Impulsively, she touched the scar on the edge of his eye. It was slightly hollow. It must have been a bad one, when it was fresh, and she wondered how old he had been. Six, eight, ten?
He didn’t wince at her touch or look away, simply let her trace the old wound lightly with her finger, saying nothing. She wanted to know the history of this mark, and the one on his mouth, and the harsh puckered one on his back. She wanted to go back in time and be there for the child he’d been, bandage him and ease him, hold him so he could cry away the pain.
Something flickered in his eyes, something deep and long-buried, a wild flash Mattie responded to on some primal level. She opened her palm on his dark, hard face and traced the jutting edge of cheekbone, the smooth hollow beneath, the line of his jaw. Through it all, Zeke stared at her with a boiling emotion in his eyes she didn’t try to name.
Sitting so close to him, she felt again his odd, powerful heat, and that scent of warming earth that came from his skin, from his body, an almost unbearably seductive smell.
She touched his dark eyebrows, each one, and smoothed her fingers over his forehead. At last, bravely, she touched his hair. Coarse, thick, and somehow still silky, as if he’d washed it in rainwater.
“I miss the feeling of hair all around me,” she said at last, threading her fingers through the length of his on his shoulders. “The way it swishes and swirls on your skin and the way it feels when you brush it.” Lost in some strange place, driven by an instinct she didn’t question, she smoothed her fingers through his scalp, over and over.
“Mattie,” he said, lifting a hand to her arm, as if to stop her.
But he didn’t. His hand lit on her elbow and skimmed to her wrist, and Mattie smiled. The rigid lines in his face were easing under her touch, the tautness around his eyes relaxed. The lingering boil of emotion in his eyes hadn’t changed, but Mattie knew with certainty that it could.
Never in her life had she been brave or bold. She’d always waited her turn, waited to be asked if she needed something, tried to keep out of people’s way and not be a bother.
And time after time after time, she saw the best
coat go to another girl; was passed over for a promotion that should have been hers; lost out on seconds at the dinner table.
At that moment, sitting on the arm of the chair, with Zeke’s hair tumbling through her fingers and his eyes boiling with that dangerous lostness, Mattie leaned forward and claimed something. She kissed his cheek, gently, catching a tiny bristle of beard against her lip. His hand tightened on her wrist, almost convulsively, but he didn’t shove her away; just held on. For one brief instant, she pressed her forehead to his temple. “I’m sorry you lost your horse,” she said quietly, then forced herself to stand up normally, as if there had been nothing extraordinary at all in the moment they’d spent so closely unified.
For the space of a few breaths, Zeke didn’t move and Mattie saw that he was struggling on some internal level. He stared at her intensely, then looked away to the valley visible through the door.
Finally, he cleared his throat. “Why don’t we take that hike? I’ll show you around the land.” His voice betrayed nothing.
“I’d love to.”
“Don’t suppose you have a swimsuit in that mess of rags, do you?”
“Rags?” she said, and laughed. “No, I don’t. Is there a place to swim?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna swim in shorts. You can probably make do with that dowdy old tank top you wear to bed.”
“Okay.” Mattie took it from the pile.
He winced. “I’ve got half a mind to go to town and buy you some decent clothes, woman. I haven’t seen such an ugly collection in one hell of a long time.”
Unoffended, Mattie smiled. Aside from the jeans and T-shirt she’d purchased the first morning after she stole Brian’s car, and the dress she’d worn to play pool in, his assessment was on the money. “I couldn’t afford to be picky. I’ve never really cared all that much for clothes, anyway.”
“Is that right.” The phrase wasn’t a question.
Mattie looked up. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” she said.
“What’s wrong with my clothes?”
Bad Boy Heroes Boxed Set Page 111