by Tara Janzen
Five
Blue stood in the middle of his living room, her mouth agape, staring at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror. She had one hand wrapped around her pack strap and the other holding on to her dog.
“You wh-what?” she stammered.
“I memorized it and burned it,” he repeated, leaning back against the moss rock mantel of the fireplace. He shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, carefully watching her from what he hoped was a safe distance. “You’re stuck with me. We either work together, or we both end up with nothing.”
Stuck with him? Nothing? Blue took a long, trembling breath, trying to control the anger she felt building inside. He’d burned her map. Burned it! Despite her assertive declaration to the contrary the previous night, her life had been up for grabs in the icy black waters of Lake Agnes.
“Do you . . . have . . . know . . . what I—” she sputtered, words failing her. She needed to sit down before her knees buckled. The backpack fell to the floor with a thump, and Trapper backed off. She made her way over to the couch and dropped into the corner, clenching her fists in her lap. Frustration lowered her chin to her chest.
Leaving was out of the question. Everything she needed, everything she’d worked for had disappeared inside his head. His pretty head, she thought, silently daring him to read her mind and do something about it.
Walker shifted uneasily on his feet, moving his weight from one hip to the other, more than a little amazed at her ability to make him nervous. He’d never known a woman to do it with such unsubtle skill, but if looks could kill, she’d have him on his knees.
“Of course, you do have one other option,” he said, trying not to grin at himself or, heaven forbid, at her. The lady was in no mood to be teased.
“Forget it,” she snapped, knowing full well what he meant. She’d be damned if she gave him the starting mark. For one night, and given no choice, she’d trusted him with her map. During all those hours in jail she’d convinced herself she’d be able to get it back from him. Well, the mountain lion had outsmarted her, but he was a long way from finding Dalton’s Treasure . . . from finding Lacey’s Lode.
The thought came out of her subconscious, pushing her anger aside with the glimmer of a new plan. She slowly raised her gaze, measuring him from the toes of his boots to the golden-brown depths of his eyes. He was big, and he was too good-looking by a long shot with his rogue’s face and tawny mane of hair—as if God had decided just once to try for perfection in a mortal man—but Walker hadn’t won, not yet.
“Ill give you half the gold I find if you’ll give me the directions from the map,” she stated her double-crossing proposition without a shred of guilt. Treasure hunting had never been a game for the fainthearted.
“Well, that’s a helluva deal, Blue,” he drawled, the lazy gleam coming back into his eyes. “I’ll make you the same offer and do you one better.”
Blue blushed under his assessing gaze, and her voice took on a wary tone. “What do you mean?”
“If you’ll tell me the starting mark, I’ll give you all the gold I find, every ounce, every gram, every fleck of color.”
She held his eyes, ignoring the jump in her pulse, and slowly said, “That’s an awful lot of gold to be giving away.”
“It’s an awful lot of nothing. There isn’t any gold, and you know it.” He gave a careless shrug of his shoulders, releasing her by glancing away, and pushed off the mantel. “Now you know I know it too.”
Impossible, she thought. He was bluffing. There was no way on earth he could know what lay somewhere beneath the high country of the North Star. The existence of Lacey’s Lode was information shared solely between her and the lawyer who had read her father’s will. No one else knew the name or the Bible reference Abel had instructed her to find, and not even the lawyer knew what she’d found tucked between the yellowed pages of the King James. Every man who’d ever dogged her trail had been looking for gold, piles of it, pounds of it.
Every man except this one, Blue. Every man except for the one who caught you.
Walker knelt by the hearth and picked up a few sticks of kindling, giving her a minute to absorb his words. He’d accomplished his main objective; he’d stopped her from leaving. The rest was details.
Of course, she wasn’t going to like the details any better than she’d liked him burning her map. He stopped stacking and stared at the small pieces of wood in his hand. She probably wouldn’t believe him even if he did tell her everything, but he didn’t see any other way; as it stood, she thought he was a thief. He finished off the pile of kindling with a couple of logs, then struck a match up the thigh of his jeans.
When the fire caught, he rested his forearm on his knee and glanced over his shoulder at her. Her eyes were downcast, her brow furrowed in thought. She’s a strange one all right, he thought, warier than the big bucks he tracked in autumn, more evasive than the trophy trout people paid him to find, wilder than both and prettier than either. She was a woman to be reckoned with, coming into his life at a time when he’d quit reckoning with anyone.
Her hair slid down the side of her cheek, and she brushed it back with an impatient gesture. She looked too young to be a worthy adversary, but in this case he knew looks were absolutely deceiving. She more than matched him in stubbornness, and she outmatched any woman he’d ever met in her contrary effect on him. He wanted her and didn’t want her at the same time. He understood the wanting. It was the holding back that had kept him awake half the night. In retrospect, he realized he could have convinced her to make love with him and also not to regret the decision. She was just naive enough to buy a good, solid line of persistence, or so he’d told himself in the dark hours before dawn when sleep had been elusive and the memory of her body moving over his hadn’t been nearly elusive enough.
Incredible, he thought, watching her, feeling the subtle changes taking place inside himself even though she was across the room. You better be damn careful, Walker, he warned himself. Or you’re going to end up in over your head. He stood up and brushed his hands together, removing the last traces of wood dust.
“Look, Blue, I think things will go smoother if we’re straight with each other.”
“What . . . things?” she asked, glancing up at him.
“Us working together.”
Blue looked at him long and hard, still not sure what to think about his last revelation. Seconds passed one after the other, until she came to the only sensible decision available.
“I’m not working with you,” she stated emphatically. “You stole my map and burned it, and unless you give me the directions, I’m going to call that lawyer back and have you arrested. We’ll see how well you like the new Jackson County jail.”
Walker didn’t put it past her, for all the good it would do her. “You’ll have better luck calling Sheriff Johnson. He’s always willing to think the worst of me. David, on the other hand, is my brother-in-law, and my sister, Janelle, would have him skinned and hung out to dry if he brought charges against me.”
Great, Blue thought, tightening her jaw in frustration. Her luck was holding true, and it was all bad.
He held her angry gaze for a moment, then headed for the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee while you’re thinking up your next move?”
Blue watched him disappear through the doorway, not bothering to give him the reply he hadn’t bothered to wait for. Coffee wouldn’t help her think her way out of his neat trap, and she never drank anything stronger.
Damn. She was running out of options. The chances of her calling Sheriff Johnson for anything were slim and none. He probably wouldn’t be any more inclined to help her than she was to ask him for help. What she’d said to Taggart was nothing compared to the names she’d called Johnson when he’d shoved her into her cell.
But who would have believed Walker’s sister had married into such wealth? Her gaze roamed over the well-worn furniture in his small cabin: the leather chair by the fire that looked as if three
or four generations of Evans’s had enjoyed its softly tanned comfort; the dining table next to the south wall, with its kick-scarred chairs conjuring up impatient little boys in cowboy boots; the handmade curtains hanging at the windows. His brother-in-law’s car cost more than the whole kit and caboodle, many times over.
“What have you decided, Blue?” His deep voice drew her head around. “Do we work together? Or do we call it quits?”
“I’ll find another lawyer.”
“You need a case first, and you don’t have one. You and I are the only ones who knew about the map.” He crossed the living room and sat down in the leather chair, very close to where she sat on the couch. He set her cup on the end table between them.
Not quite, she thought. “O’Keefe knows.”
She was going to wear him out, Walker thought, exhaling a deep breath. She was damn close to doing it already. Every time he thought he had her corralled, she came up with something new. The woman’s mind never stopped working overtime. Never. He relaxed back into the chair, not at all sure how much longer his luck would hold. Blue Dalton might well be the end of him. The lady pulled on him, with her dark eyes and fawn-colored skin, with her undeniable courage and the memory of her touch.
Blue watched as he began shaking his head slowly from side to side, his mouth lifting in a disturbingly sensual smile. “You’re really something special, Blue,” he drawled. “For all the trouble you’ve been, I wouldn’t have missed tangling with you for the world.” He stretched his long legs out on the rug and lifted his mug in salute before taking a sip.
Blue stiffened at the mellow timbre of his voice and his smile. He was making fun of her again.
“Save your line of bull, pret—” She stopped herself in the nick of time, her eyes widening in awareness of what she’d almost said.
He acknowledged her quick reconsideration with a grin. “And you’re smart, too smart to think dragging O’Keefe into our personal problems is a good idea.” It was the only argument he had against her latest threat.
“We don’t have a personal problem,” she countered.
“Oh, I don’t know, Blue. By my figuring, we’ve got more than one.”
“Then you and I are figuring differently.”
“Probably,” he agreed, though his grin said otherwise. “But then I haven’t forgotten how you kissed me last night, and it’s real easy to see you’re doing your darnedest to try.”
He was much too close and much too confident to be saying such things to her. She doubted if she could control the confidence, but putting some distance between them was well within her abilities. She did it without even attempting to disguise the fact, moving to the other end of the couch and taking her coffee with her. His low chuckle followed her retreat.
“We’re going to have a hard time finding our fortune if you keep running away from me, Blue.”
“You’re being awfully generous with my fortune,” she muttered, keeping her eyes trained on the fire, thinking of how her map had disappeared in the flames, turning to ashes in the grate. She’d worked too hard, sweated out too many years in Texas to lose her inheritance to some no good, backwoods con man.
She flicked a hesitant glance at him. Impossible, she thought again. She couldn’t work with him, not when he rattled her concentration just by being in the same room, just by existing in her world. He was too . . . tricky, she decided, avoiding the other descriptive words crowding her brain, dangerous words like magnetic and intriguing.
And she was still thinking too hard, Walker thought. watching her worry herself into a hole from which he’d left her no escape. Two days ago he’d had no intention of sharing the treasure. Sometime last night, after they’d taken her away, well after he’d kissed her, he’d changed his mind. How much of his decision rested on their fathers’ ill-fated partnership and the information she had, and how much of it rested strictly on the mystery of Blue, he didn’t know, but the next time he kissed her, he intended to find out. She could run all she wanted; he was more inclined to face the facts. Maybe if she had a few more of those to work with, she wouldn’t be so skittish.
“How long have you been looking for your fortune, Blue?” he asked.
“Long enough to have gotten this close.”
“He didn’t make it easy for you, did he?”
She turned and looked at him, wondering what he was getting at. “He wasn’t an easy man,” she said.
“Disillusioned men never are, especially after they start drinking.”
Blue’s hackles rose at his insinuation. More than once, and usually in the heat of anger, she’d called her father a drunk. But she’d never let anybody else get away with it. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The subtle lift of his eyebrow called her a liar. “Haven’t you ever wondered why he went to so much trouble to hide what he found?”
Only about a million times. But what Abel rambled on about when he’d been drinking was a far sight different than what he’d admit sober. It wasn’t until she’d read his will that she’d finally been convinced there was something to his wild, vague stories. Five years of searching had strengthened her conviction, five years and five run-ins with men like Walker Evans. The others may have been wrong about the gold, but they hadn’t doubted the existence of something up there in the hills.
“If you haven’t, then you better start,” he continued, “and if you run short of answers, you can always ask me. I’ve got some real good ones when it comes to your father.”
“You didn’t know my father.”
“No,” he admitted. “But I knew my father, and he knew Abel better than was good for him.”
Riddles. The man was playing with her with his half-spoken intimations. “You’ve got a funny way of being straight. If you’ve got something to say, why don’t you just say it?”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, his hands wrapped around his coffee mug. “Okay, Blue,” he said softly. “You tell me when you’ve heard enough.”
Suddenly Blue wished she hadn’t asked. His smile had faded, along with the teasing warmth in his eyes. Firelight traced a pattern across his still features, catching a feathering of crow’s-feet she hadn’t noticed before, highlighting the uncompromising angle of his jaw and the dark stubble of a day’s growth of beard. Sable lashes shadowed the weariness in his eyes.
“Your great-grandfather followed the gold rush to Colorado back in the eighteen hundreds,” he began slowly, looking up at her. “Unlike most, the trip paid off for him. He struck it rich with the Sweet Mary mine way up in the Sawatch Range. Gold, more than most people can imagine, ran through his claim and through his fingers like water in a river. The only smart investment he made was in the North Star. Ranching has always been more work than payoff, though, and Sean Dalton had gotten used to the quick payoff of the mining camps. He ran the ranch into the ground, left it to your granddaddy Kevin, and disappeared back up into the mountains, looking for another Sweet Mary. Your grandfather held on to the ranch, worked it up into quite a spread, and left it to your father, who unfortunately had more of Sean’s blood in him than Kevin’s.”
“I don’t need a history lesson.” She cut him off and stood up abruptly. She didn’t need Walker Evans to tell her about her own family, and she sure didn’t need him to catalog her father’s shortcomings.
“Well, you’re going to get it, so sit back down . . . please.”
The command didn’t work, but the unexpected courtesy did. Blue perched herself on the edge of the couch, waiting for him to get to the end of his story and make whatever point he had in mind.
“In the forties Abel decided he’d had enough of mending fences. The Sweet Mary had brought the Daltons a fortune once. Why not twice? The claim was still in the family’s name.” Walker paused and set his mug on the end table, shifting his gaze away from her. “But your father, Blue, he wasn’t quite the adventurer your great-grandfather was; he didn’t want to go alone.”
Blue fe
lt her unease slacken and her confidence return. She had heard this story before, a couple of different versions from a couple of different men. She scooted deeper into the couch cushions and crossed her arms close to her chest and her legs one across the other. One booted foot swung in a tense rhythm. Walker Evans had run out of surprises.
“He took a partner, a legal partner with him into the—”
“Stop right there,” she said. “If I believed every partner I’ve ever heard about, we’d have to pull up a chair to fit them all in the room.”
“—mine,” he continued, ignoring her interruption. “They found more than they’d bargained for, but the glory was short-lived. You see, Blue, they both wanted something else more than they wanted riches. They both wanted Lacey Ann Wilson.”
Blue’s foot froze in mid-swing, and her next breath lodged in her throat . . . Lacey’s Lode.
“Whatever happened between the two men wasn’t her fault. The only blameless one in the group was Lacey. She may not have chosen wisely, but she followed her heart and married the man she loved.” His gaze strayed down to the floor, then back up again as he inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly. “She married Jack, Blue. She married my father.”
Storm clouds gathered in the dark eyes meeting his across the distance of the couch. He’d laid his claim, and she hadn’t liked it. He’d expected no less than anger.
“So you’re not a bastard after all,” she conceded, her voice tight with the fury choking her throat.
“Not legally,” he replied, ready to grab her if she decided to take off.
“Well, my father didn’t mention your mother, your father, or you in his will, so shove that into your legality.” She rose to her feet, and Walker stood up with her.
“Your father was a coward, Blue. That’s why he hid the damn stuff in the first place. He knew who it belonged to, and he knew he’d stolen Jack’s share.”
“So why didn’t Jack do something about it?”
“Guilt,” he said. He wasn’t taking any chances with her. “He’d gotten the true prize, why they’d gone looking in the first place. Abel got mean after the two of them ran off. He threatened them both with revenge, called my father out and dared him to come and get his half. My mom got scared, so Jack let it go. Forty years ago that wasn’t such a loss, but times change, things become rarer . . . and prices rise, Blue. Do you know exactly what they found in the Sweet Mary?”