She was making it irresistibly easy. “Really?”
“So long as you don’t leave me naked and hog-tied for housekeeping to find in the morning.”
Rhianna giggled. She wasn’t sure if her reaction was from nerves, discomfort, or excitement.
“I’ll even help,” Jules said matter-of-factly. She detached herself and got out of bed. A few seconds later she returned with some nylon stockings.
“Do you wear those?” Rhianna asked.
“Sometimes. For work. Think they’ll do the job?” She looped one untidily around her wrist. All the while her gaze devoured Rhianna, a predatory glint calling into question who was really in control.
Rhianna sat up and took the stockings from her. “Lie down on the bed,” she said. “On your back. Spread your legs.”
*
Many hours later as Rhianna located her clothing, Jules asked, “Where do you live?”
“Near Vegas.”
“I’m based in L.A. but I work for a national firm. They send me all over.”
Although she sensed Jules intended the disclosure as an opening, Rhianna didn’t ask about her job. She didn’t want to start down that getting-to-know-each-other track. They were done, and in a few hours’ time she would be driving back to Oatman, “mission accomplished.”
She glanced toward the windows they’d opened during the night, when the hot tangle of the sheets was too much. The chill of the desert morning made her shiver, and she pulled on her panties and shorts, then looked around for her bra and realized she hadn’t worn one. Her breasts felt full and her nipples incredibly tender. She was sore, too. Every time she took a step her panties teased her still-swollen sex, and she could feel the imprint of Jules’s hands and mouth all over her body, smoldering reminders of the night before.
The sensations unsettled her. She had expected to wake up this morning with her sense of self at least partially restored. She had thought she would fully “own” her body once more, that she would feel inviolate and in complete control. Instead, she was aware of an unwelcome connectedness to the woman languidly watching her from the bed. Unable to separate memory from craving, Rhianna averted her eyes, feeling exposed.
“I’d like to see you again.” As if taking agreement for granted, Jules continued, “I was thinking we could come back here since it’s pretty convenient for both of us. Once a month, maybe, for a long weekend. I could probably make that happen.”
“I’m not looking for anything ongoing,” Rhianna said.
Jules elbowed her way up the bed until she was sitting back against the pillows. She was even more striking in the watery light of early morning. A little crumpled, her mouth slightly swollen and her eyes bedroom-heavy. She ran a hand over her hair, and Rhianna couldn’t help but recall the feel of those blue-black strands gliding silkily between her fingers the night before.
“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Jules said. “But I thought we were pretty good together.”
“I thought so, too,” Rhianna conceded. “And I appreciate the offer.”
“But this is good-bye?”
“It is.”
Jules seemed confused, then her eyes hardened with a flash of comprehension. “You have someone?”
Rhianna supposed she could just take the easy way out and let this woman believe she had cheated on a partner. But the idea was somehow unpalatable. “No, I don’t. And to be quite honest, I prefer to keep it that way.”
“I understand. Look, I don’t have time for commitment either, so we’re on the same page. And life’s short. Why not enjoy?”
“I’m sure there are plenty of women who’d be thrilled to take you up on an offer like that,” Rhianna said.
Jules studied her closely as if she found her responses puzzling. “Frankly, picking up women in bars is getting old.”
“Then maybe you ought to bite the bullet and get a regular girlfriend.”
“Is that an offer?” The arrogant charm of the night before was still in evidence, but it was tempered with a softness that surprised Rhianna and complicated her feelings.
She made a show of looking around for her room key. She felt awkward for all kinds of reasons, and she needed to terminate this conversation. The idea of seeing Jules again was far too tempting. Already she was rationalizing the possibility, thinking like a crazy woman. They could meet for another long weekend and get to know each other better. Maybe she could even invite Jules to Oatman sometime when the Mosses were away.
“You’re very determined,” she said.
“So I’m told.”
“And not used to a woman saying no?”
Jules laughed. “I don’t run into it too often.”
Rhianna slid her feet into the sandals she’d left near the bedroom door. “Well, don’t take it personally.”
Jules crossed the room to stand in front of her, tempting in a white tee and nothing else. She slid an arm around Rhianna’s waist and gave her a long, hard look. Then she kissed her like she mattered. “So, it’s good-bye.”
Rhianna leaned into her embrace, imprinting the feel of another body against hers. “Thank you for spending the night with me.”
“It was a pleasure.”
“For me, too.”
Rhianna drew back and studied Jules’s face. Close up, each feature was highly individual. Combined, they assumed an androgynous beauty that would turn heads, no matter who was looking. Rhianna committed every detail to memory. The gray-black eyes flecked with indigo. The sensual mouth. The strong chin and nose. The small vertical cleft in each cheek. A strange sorrow claimed her. She wished the numbness would recede from her chest so that she could feel more. It seemed wrong somehow that her heart insisted on beating no matter what. There was a moment the night before when she’d wished it would just stop, when her mind was washed clean by the tide of her senses and all she knew was bliss. She could have died in that instant and been happy.
She leaned in and rested her cheek against Jules’s. A hand slid over hers, clasping it gently. The eyes that sought her own were catlike in their unblinking calm.
“Take a chance and say yes to me,” Jules said very softly. “You never know what might happen.”
Rhianna could not find an answer that felt truthful or even honorable. She drew back, avoiding eye contact. “I can’t.”
Jules released her without further protest and Rhianna murmured a final good-bye. She could feel the gouge of Jules’s stare as she walked away, but she did not look back.
Chapter Three
Even if she hadn’t smelled the burro droppings as she drew close to town, Rhianna would still have known where she was from the sounds of hollering and gunfire. She had arrived back in Oatman just in time for the daily traffic jam. Someone’s Suburban was blocking the main street. The owners had probably fled at the sight of an armed gang approaching with guns drawn. Burros milled in anticipation, sticking their heads in car windows. A brawl between rival gangs meant traffic would remain at a standstill and passersby would linger to watch the drama unfold. For the wild burro population mayhem spelled one thing. Lunch.
Back in its gold-rush days, Oatman was a tent city jammed with miners who used the small, hairy beasts to haul their supplies. When the gold eventually ran out, they cut the overworked animals loose and left them to fend for themselves. Unlike their owners, the burros prospered, forming herds and successfully surviving in the wild. These days, their descendents roamed free in the hills around the town and wandered down each afternoon to beg for food.
Rhianna resigned herself to a long wait in the heat of the day while the male posturing went on. This afternoon one of the Bitter Creek boys had chosen to pick a fight with one of the Ghostriders. The rivals and their associates faced off in the middle of the traffic, cussing each other out.
Someone yelled, “You stole my woman!” and a volley of shots rang out. A man went down and all hell broke loose.
Uncomfortable in her stationary car, Rhianna opened the door and inhaled the
familiar scent of desiccated poop and gun smoke. A gray burro immediately sidled up to claim the rest of the sandwich she’d purchased during the four-hour drive from Palm Springs. As the animal munched, various gunfighters blew each other away and, after the requisite death dance, collapsed onto the dusty street. The crowd cheered and clapped.
A woman in Victorian saloon-whore chic kicked one of the fallen men in the ribs and yelled, “Get up you lazy, no-good, cheap drunk. You owe me two dollars.”
When he didn’t respond, she strutted past a group of visitors standing beside a minibus draped with a banner that read Ben Hur Shriners for Crippled Children Burn Unit, Galveston. Today’s charity, Rhianna surmised, fanning herself with the sandwich wrapper.
After a few minutes, the dust settled and the “dead” rose to pass the hat around and show off their six-guns to city slickers who had never seen a Colt Peacemaker. The tourists who kept Oatman solvent were lured with staged shootouts, panhandling, sidewalk egg fries, ladies strolling in 1890s costume, vintage cars, and a main street that looked like something from a Wild West movie, only it was the real McCoy.
The town had been named in honor of Olive Oatman, a young woman kidnapped by Apaches and sold to the Mohave, with whom she lived for five years before being ransomed for a horse and blankets. Despite public pressure to denounce her “savage” captors, Olive reported that she had been treated kindly and was never subjected to “unchaste abuse.”
During the gold-mining boom, Oatman had a population of thousands, but when the mines closed in the 1920s a mass evacuation all but emptied the place, and the town’s demise was cemented thirty years later when it was bypassed by the new Interstate 40. Truly a ghost town, it struggled along like many on the old Route 66, until nearby Laughlin, Nevada, became a gambling success story and tourists flocked to the area.
Before long these visitors began showing up in Oatman on a quest for the Old West. The few mavericks left running the town were happy to oblige the heritage seekers with a dose of authenticity, and they didn’t even have to erect phony saloons, old-time general stores, or Western-façade dwellings. It was all here, and the ramshackle, forgotten-past glory of their town was virtually unmatched in the West. No one had spent a dime on maintenance for the past half century. Not on buildings and certainly not on roads.
There was only one way into town, and that was on a stretch of Route 66 infamous for its hazards. The blacktop road had seen a series of washouts that left RVs haplessly spinning their wheels in sand-filled potholes. These continued for about twelve miles and the intrepid motorists who made it past this obstacle course could then look forward to the Sitgreaves Pass, ten miles of shoulderless hairpin switchbacks, most of them blind, zigzagging through desert hillsides that routinely disgorged boulders onto the road. According to Rhianna’s employers, “flatlanders” were so petrified of this pass that they sometimes paid locals to drive their cars across it. Accidents were a regular event, adding to the excitement of the drive and ensuring the local tow-truck driver could afford to dress his wife in Versace.
Despite its treacherous access, Oatman was a thriving backwater with a few hundred residents, most of whom kept abreast of one another’s business. Rhianna had been made welcome when she arrived, but she was aware of a mixture of dubiousness and friendly resignation in her reception. New arrivals seldom stayed long, and no one made a big effort to befriend them until it looked like they might hang around.
When she’d first applied for the job she saw on Craigslist, her employers had warned her to expect the worst, describing Oatman as “a one-horse town, and that’s not just a figure of speech.” In case she harbored naïve illusions about the West, they had also pointed out that she was likely to be “bored to tears after a week” and the reason they paid well was because she would “need some compensation to live in the middle of nowhere and if you have a nervous breakdown, therapy doesn’t come cheap.” They’d already lost several nannies who could not cope with the isolation and lack of entertainment, and did not want to employ another one who would abandon them after a few weeks.
The Moss family had their spread just north of the town. Lloyd and Bonnie Moss were part owners of one of the smaller casinos in Laughlin and left their eighteen-month-old daughter at the ranch to be cared for by a nanny. When they took time out from managing the casino, they went traveling as a family. On those occasions the nanny served as a house sitter and had to make sure the ranch hands showed up for work. The job was about as easy as any job got, with employers who were so grateful that they gave regular paid vacations and even the use of a car so Rhianna didn’t have to damage hers driving around the area.
The Mosses were genuine people, nothing like the glitzy casino-millionaire couple Rhianna had expected once she found out who they were. Sometimes she was even tempted to tell them her real name and her story, but it was too soon to take that risk, and she didn’t want them to be needlessly concerned for their daughter’s safety.
Rhianna had seen to it that no one knew where she was, not even her own family back in Denver. To communicate, she used disposable cell phones to call them and a mail-forwarding service. When she needed to e-mail someone, she drove to Vegas and used public Wi-Fi locations. Only her lawyer knew where she was and he said, with all the precautions she had taken, no one would ever find her. Not even Werner Brigham.
Rhianna stared out at the sign for Jackass Junction and allowed herself a satisfied smile. This was the very last place on earth anyone would look for her. And even if they did, who was going to link a nanny called Kate Lambert with Rhianna Lamb, the fashion buyer. Even her paychecks couldn’t be traced. She had arranged for the Mosses to make automatic transfers into a bank account her attorney had set up for her. She used a Visa debit card to draw cash and make payments. It was issued to a registered business name: Kate Lambert Enterprises.
Rhianna Lamb had disappeared off the face of the earth, and anyone who tried to locate her would find nothing but dead ends. She was safe, and if loneliness was the price she had to pay, she was fine with that. All she cared about was peace of mind. She would never have guessed how much that mattered until she had to live without it.
*
“You’re home!” Bonnie Moss collected Rhianna in a hug.
She was the cuddly type who wore her emotions on her sleeve. Her dog was exactly the same. Hadrian, an English mastiff, was too old and stiff to leap up, but he greeted Rhianna with a flood of drool and shoved his meaty brindle head into her belly, almost knocking her off balance.
“Lloyd’s at work, of course,” Bonnie said. “But he’ll be home tomorrow morning.” She waved at a long, lean ranch hand smoking a cigarette in front of the stables and called, “Percy, can you bring Kate’s bag into the house when you’ve had your break.” Barely pausing for breath, she walked Rhianna toward the front entrance, one arm loosely around her waist. “How was Palm Springs? See any movie stars?”
Rhianna smiled. Her employer lived in hope that she would run into a Hollywood celebrity wandering through Laughlin one day and invite them back to the casino, where they would sit down for a meal with her and Lloyd and overshare about clandestine affairs and scandals on movie sets. Copies of People magazine were piled high next to her bed, and she had installed a custom-built home theater that had made the front page of the local newspaper. This featured an art-deco lobby, popcorn machine, tiered seating for ten, projection room, and curtains in front of the screen.
“I thought I saw Bruce Willis,” Rhianna said, wanting to offer a near-thrill. “But it was just a bald guy trying to look like him.”
Bonnie sighed. “Well, guess what I scored? You know the original Goldfinger poster I’ve been trying to find. I got it on eBay for nineteen hundred dollars. Unrolled and unfolded with the NSS stamp and everything. I was dying. The bidding went nuts.”
“That’s great,” Rhianna said as they walked through the cool haven of the hallway, across the den, and into the kitchen. “I can’t wait to see it.”
>
“I’m getting a new showcase built for the James Bond memorabilia. I thought I’d put it between Hitchcock and the leading ladies’ wall.” Bonnie opened the fridge and pushed Hadrian’s big head aside so he couldn’t lick the front of the deli drawer. “Juice?”
“Thanks. I’m parched. I got caught in the gunfight coming through town.”
Bonnie groaned. “Yeah, I figured. They’re having them every day because those Shriners are in town.”
“Is Alice sleeping?”
“Yes, I had the Calloway twins playing here this morning, so she’s completely exhausted. And so am I. That woman just can’t shut up.”
“I guess she’s missing the city.” Rhianna picked up the tumblers of pink grapefruit juice and carried them out to the back patio.
The Moss residence was a sprawling single-level home built around three sides of an inner courtyard with a gazebo at the far end. Beyond this lay a gated swimming pool and a children’s playground. A private deck adjoining Rhianna’s apartment at the rear of the house looked out over the playground to the rugged purple peaks of the Black Mountains. She usually kept Alice and Hadrian back there when the Mosses were away; it felt safer and cozier than the big house. Bonnie and Lloyd seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement and had converted her second bedroom to a nursery so that Rhianna didn’t have to drag toys and a cot bed back and forth.
“Her marriage is falling apart,” Bonnie gossiped cheerfully. “I think he’s been seeing someone on the side. I don’t know why anyone thinks they can get away with adultery. The wife always knows.”
Rhianna sipped her juice and tried to look like she was interested. “Is it someone local?”
“No, there’s a woman in Vegas. What a mess. And two babies to think about.” Bonnie tugged the pink band from her ponytail and shook out her shoulder-length mahogany waves.
Dark Valentine Page 3