by Terese Ramin
Only it wasn’t really her brain, it was her heart.
Janina sighed.
And reminded herself firmly that the side of I-40 in full view of the passing world was probably not the optimum place to remove her panties and straddle her husband’s lap and make love with him yet again—no matter how badly she, her heart, her brain and her body wanted to.
Were willing, ready and able to.
Shouted, screamed and cravenly longed to.
As if he read her thoughts, Russ’s smile deepened. He dropped his free hand lightly to her knee, drew idle circles into the crease that hid the back of it.
Janina bit her lip against the ready tension and unflexed her leg to allow his tickling fingers access. She suddenly caught her breath on an “Oh rats” and crossed her legs to trap his hand when she realized he’d successfully sidetracked her and said, “No you don’t.” Then glared at him when he laughed, thoroughly male, thoroughly pleased with himself for arousing her so easily.
Hand still trapped, he only wiggled his fingers against the back of her kn laughed harder when she tensed and whimpered and unintentionally eased closer to him, then gritted her teeth, uncrossed her legs and shoved him away—hard.
“Will you get serious?” she demanded. “We got married without thinking. We need a driveway. We need a plan.”
Already doubled over, Russ lost it entirely.
Janina studied him, mystified. “Thirteen years I thought I knew you. I felt sorry for you. Empathized with you. I thought you were the serious one, the lost one, the dark one, the intense one, the one who never laughs. Your brothers didn’t warn me. Jonah didn’t warn me. He just said, ‘Go find Russ, you’ll be good for him.’ Ha! I’ll kill him. And you! Clearly I don’t know you at all.”
“You married me because you felt sorry for me?” Laughter faded, replaced by curiosity and something far more vulnerable.
Janina quieted, suddenly aware of precarious ground, of an uncertainty she’d never before seen in Russ, wasn’t aware he was capable of.
She backpedaled, correcting misconceptions, fast. “That’s not what I said—that’s not what I meant. I married you because I wanted to. I’ve always wanted to. I’ve just apparently always wanted to under false pretenses—or rather misconceptions of one sort or another, which—” she held up a hand to forestall the baffled look V-ing his eyebrows “—isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just…unexpected. You are unexpected. I’m going to have to get used to you.”
He snorted and glanced at her, implying without words a similar fate for himself.
She grinned modestly. “Yeah, well. But that still brings us back to…”
“Driveways?” Russ suggested.
“The need for a plan,” Janina said firmly.
An unholy gleam came into his eyes. Janina had the rapidly sinking, and yet oddly secure, feeling she recognized it. She was sure the moment Russ opened his mouth.
“Trust me,” he said.
Then he checked for oncoming traffic and let the tires spit gravel getting them back onto the road.
It was too easy—his wedding, this not-quite-five-day-old marriage, his sudden ability to play with, laugh at and talk to Janina…all of it—and Russ knew it. In hours, minutes, seconds, he would revert to his former self and screw it up. Somehow, without meaning to.
But he didn’t do it.
He’d watched Janina long and well. He’d listened to her tell her dreams to Tobi—hell, to him—when they were both on the late shift and he was in search of a pick-me-up and the diner was slow and she was in search of company. An ear.
He’d always hoped she’d come looking specifically for him, his ear, not merely any handy and available company.
But whatever, he’d listened well. He knew what she dreamed, wanted, hoped foro his “trust me” held a wealth of meaning he’d never let her in on. She’d seen the devil, not the thought behind it.
Which was what he meant for her to see. Sucker for her though he might be, emotion was not the place he went to easily. Putting it on display was not so much his first choice of action to take.
He gave himself a mocking half grin.
So strong-arming away the sense that Winslow was closing in on them and their new relationship far too fast, Russ sped toward a few houses in town that Janina recently had mentioned liking the look of. He preferred acreage outside of town himself, room to spread out, expand the house as they needed to when the kids came along—land on which to keep a few horses, some sheep if she wanted to, since he knew that would go along with the textile, spinning, weaving and wool-dyeing classes she’d been taking, and a small garden. And he had the place already—thirty-five acres of ranch land outside of town, backed up against the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest and bounded by canyon on one edge. What putting in her driveway might entail… He grinned slightly. That might prove interesting.
But he was willing to go along with whatever Janina wanted in a home. She was the one who’d never actually lived in a house before in her life. He had—low-income reservation-style though his family’s home had been, it had still been a “house,” and it had certainly been “home.” He doubted that the trailer she’d shared with her mother ever classified as home. She’d left it the moment she’d graduated high school, as he recalled.
Which meant, he understood instinctively, that she was the one who needed to feel that what they built together was theirs and theirs alone, not his, not something he chose. But something, frankly, he supposed, that she did.
A place for her to…nest.
He wondered if she’d thought about the ghosts that came with living in someone else’s house. Breaking the news of their marriage to his family would be interesting enough without dealing with the phantoms of someone else’s family or history on top of it.
Yeah, okay, so maybe he was superstitious, sue him, he was Indian. The damn Jesuits hadn’t weeded everything out of him—and hell, because the Pai had precious little left of their own culture to weed out, he’d tried especially hard to retain what he could. So it was some blasted bit of uneasiness about other people’s ghosts that he might not even have actually gotten from his own culture but from someplace else, so what? He’d live with the damn specters if he had to.
On the other hand…
Perhaps he would just tour her by his land on their way back to Winslow, point out the fact of it, the convenience of it. Slip in the idea that they could get a trailer out there fairly quickly, set up a generator and be downright self-sufficient in a week, maybe ten days at the outside, especially with help from his brothers. But he wouldn’t pressure her in that direction if she was dead set on a house in town. No. That would be wrong.
Absolutely. Wrong.
Especially when simple coercion—er, make that subtle persuasion—would work as well.
“What?” Janina asked suspiciously, not trusting the in his eye for an instant. She knew better than to trust “innocent” when it came to a Levoie.
Russ merely grinned, squeezed his wife’s knee, winked at her and drove.
A community with a young median population, Winslow was like many smaller communities: looking to attract business and industry with prime development sites. Situated in western Navajo County in the Little Colorado River Valley, it was a place where water was precious and mention in an Eagles’ song had made it famous long after it was a minor way station along the Route 66—now I-40—corridor. It was a good community in which to live, work and raise a family—something Russ looked forward to but had never before seriously considered in his cards.
He’d participated in town events from the inside for years—you did that as a member of a small community police force—but he’d never had a chance to participate from the family side, as the parent of a marching-band member, athlete, equestrian club member, 4-H clubber. Never attended the parades with a kid on his shoulders, balloon in hand, wife at his side….
He looked forward to that side of town life, town celebrations, to life with Janin
a.
He glanced at her when he made the turn that would take them out to his property—make that their property.
Without thinking he caught up Janina’s hand and carried it to his mouth, placed a fervent kiss in her palm.
Heart in her eyes, Janina studied him. “What?” she asked again, breathless, worried…and falling heart over head in love all over again.
Russ offered her a half smile and shook his head, kissed her knuckles and folded her hand back around his arm. Then he drove steadily over back roads for about thirty miles, turned easily onto a beaten track for a rougher ten-mile jaunt and finally pulled up in front of a run-down gate with broken fencing trailing off on either side of it. A faint, nearly legible dirt track that Janina thought might charitably have been called a road at some point led away from the gate and into the land beyond it. Russ swept a hand at the view.
“There’re thirty-five acres. I—” He glanced sideways at her. “Make that we—” he emphasized the word and she stifled a smile “—own it. There’s water, I made sure. The land backs up to the Apache Sitgreaves. I figure we can sink a well, move my trailer out here and get another trailer with a generator to live in while we build. What d’you think?”
Janina stared from the land to him and back for a moment. And started to laugh. “This is your ‘trust me’?”
He shrugged. “We can go look at the ready-built houses in town if you want.” He sneaked her a sidelong peek.
“Very subtle.” Janina didn’t bother to contain her amusement. He didn’t fool her for an instant. This was what he wanted, and frankly, she’d only considered something small in town because the homes were affordable from her pocketbook. But with combined resources on land he already owned… “No—no, that’s okay,” she said magnanimously. It didn’t hurt to appear to compromise early in a relationship. Especially if you were getting exactly what you wanted anyway. “Far be it from me to ask you to live in a cracker box with no yard. I think we should consider getting a trailer and building first.”
“Hunh,” Russ grunted in disbelief, but let it drop. He’d thought she’d like the idea, and if she hadn’t…well, arguing about it wasn’t the first thing on his mind.
A well, a generator and a trailer with a bed in it, those were the first priorities.
After he came up with a place for them to stay in the meantime, where a bed was the center point with Janina the nucleus of his universe.
“You want a better look?” he asked.
She eyed the dirt track with misgiving. “It’s not going to tear up my car, is it? I need this car.”
His grin was wide and full of the devil.
“Yeah, yeah.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Trust you.”
He tipped his head. “There you go,” he said and left the car to pull the gate out of the way.
Janina had never thought much about owning land, any land, anywhere. Always before it had just been a place she rented because she had to make a home somewhere. And after growing up in her mother’s less-than-perfect trailer, she wanted the nicest home she could afford. This was different. This was beyond her imagination’s ability to comprehend.
When Russ parked the car, got out and came around for her, led her to a spot he’d staked out with flags and string, showed her “the front door” and turned her to face the view that would bring them each morning’s sunrise then bent to nuzzle the hair away from her ear and whispered, “So what do you think of our home?” She couldn’t speak, she could only show him what she thought with hands and mouth and skin touching skin.
And the hell with the dirt and the scrub and the grit. She wasn’t in the mood to notice it.
Neither was he. So they didn’t.
The man with the binoculars scrubbed his free hand over his balding, clean-shaven head. He was back, finally. That boy—the cop—the one who’d looked after Maddie. That was good. That meant they could get on with it now. He could get on with it.
The cleansing.
He turned at the sound of a whimper behind him, eyed the doe-eyed brunette he’d had to pick up yesterday when she’d run from the trailer where Maddie was staying.
He knew that boy was the first person Maddie would run to; she always ran to him. And it wasn’t as if the boy had been hard to find. Small-town cops weren’t. The little brunette was out of the picture now. She couldn’t keep Maddie from seeing him anymore. She’d bring Maddie to him, in fact. That’s all he wanted. Maddie back.
He turned back to the binoculars and the cop below. Stood to reason from the looks of things that, should the need arise, the dark-haired woman lying atop that boy would bring him running, too.
If he wouldn’t come on his own.
The man scrubbed his head again, trying to hold on. Thold his thoughts in. A man had to do what he had to do in order to cleanse his soul before the time came to move on.
Sometime later, thoroughly disheveled, eminently pleased with themselves and each other, and in need of food and a shower, Russ and Janina went into town and took the Mary Colter Balcony Room at La Posada for a very short interim in order to prolong their honeymoon while they got things situated for the short-term move into Russ’s cramped trailer before they moved that out to the property.
Russ, frankly, had misgivings about the two of them moving into his trailer for any length of time, but Janina shushed them. As she pointed out with a sly smile and a timely wriggle, “living on top of each other” was pretty much what honeymooners did. Janina living on top of him was so not the problem but telling her what was…Russ didn’t know how to do that.
Because how did you tell the woman you’d just married—the woman you wanted beyond anything and had since always—that the reason you didn’t want her to move into your trailer with you was because your best friend—your best female friend—was already in residence?
When they were finished at La Posada they stopped by the walk-in clinic so Janina could have her stitches removed then went house-trailer hunting. Janina also wanted to run by the DMV, and the social security office to take care of the updates to her numbers, but they settled for a stop at the bank and another meal.
By the time they headed out to the Bloated Boar to collect Russ’s truck not long before twilight, the newest Mr. and Mrs. Levoie had a joint savings and checking account using the current location of Russ’s trailer as their temporary address, and they’d pretty much decided on a trailer to move out to the property. Things were going well….
Until the moment they arrived at the Bloated Boar to pick up Russ’s truck and all hell broke loose and their all-too-brief honeymoon came to an abrupt shotgun end.
Chapter 6
The problems began before Russ and Janina arrived in the Bloated Boar’s parking lot. In fact, they began a couple of days before.
“Damn it, Tobi,” Jonah said, attempting to avoid the pot of coffee Janina’s best friend and roommate threatened to upend over his lap. “There’s nothing I can do about it. You don’t know where Janina is and I can’t find Russ. So we’ve got to turn Buddy loose. Way it is. You see her before I do, tell her to get a restraining order so he can’t get near her again.”
“Yeah, well,” Tobi retorted, “you see that brother of yours, you tell him I’m lookin’ to clean his clock since he can’t show up to keep his assault prisoners where they’re supposed to be.”
“Get in line,” Jonah advised her. “Russ made a few other promises he didn’t keep.”
“Maddie?” Tobi guessed.
Jonah shook his head, not talking. “Just tell Janie what I said, huh?”
That had been two days and several hours ago.
Jonah flipped his left wrist so he could read the watch face. Damn it to hell and back. Where in thunder was Russ? He’d be damned if he’d stake out Russ’s unblemished classic vehicle for another fifteen seconds let alone until his never-before-wayward brother took it into his head to show up on his own. Buddy Carmichael was on the loose and hardly happy with Lieutenant Levoie, and Charlie
Thorn was out of prison with a major bone to pick with Russ as well. And nobody’d seen Jonah’s numbskull senior male sibling since…
Since Jonah had sent Janina after him in the wee small hours of the eighteenth. Which meant if somebody had them, they probably had them both.
“Damn.” Jonah whacked the dashboard with his fist. He did not do “still” well.
Maybe he should put out a call and have somebody check to see if Buddy Carmichael was alive. Just for the intellectual exercise.
Or the entertainment value.
Jonah was trying to decide which, when the near-distance crackle of tires over gravel drew his attention. A glance down the highway gave him a view of headlights on what looked like Janina’s station wagon. Two figures were silhouetted, features almost visible in the front seat. He didn’t need a clear sight line to recognize the bigger, taller of the two.
Jonah picked up his cruiser’s handset and called in his brother’s location to the department switchboard.
“Piper time, Russell,” he said quietly to the air.
And grinned. There were just some small sibling pleasures in life that were too big to pass up.
The moment he pitted the gravel shoulder with the front right tire of Janina’s car in preparation for the turn into the Bloated Boar, Russ’s spider sense started to crawl. He glanced sharply sideways at Janina, wondering if she felt it, too.
His spider sense came from the old knowledge inherited with his bone structure and eye color from some long-gone ancestor, some ghost who refused to take credit, or answer to blame. It came from the place inside that had connected wholly and completely with Janina, which was irrevocably tied to her, that recognized her dangers as his own.
Having just found her, he could not afford to lose her.
But she sensed nothing, felt nothing, but the enveloping euphoria she’d been wrapped in since the night she’d come to find him at the Boar and run off to become his wife. She proved that by leaning up to kiss his cheek and reaching over to caress his chest when she said, “I’m going to run by the apartment to pick up some clothes on my way back to the hotel, okay?”