Crossing Nevada

by Jeannie Watt

  Zach turned Roscoe off the road and onto a trail which led to a stretch of grass next to a wide, shallow stream. He dismounted and waited for Tess to do the same, then led the horses into the shade of a grove of white-barked trees, where he tied them before pulling an insulated carrier out of Roscoe’s saddlebags.

  He carried the lunch to the grass and Tess followed, taking a seat as he silently unpacked the food—sandwiches, chips in plastic bags and beer.

  “I have water, too,” he said, looking up at her. “I didn’t know if you liked beer since you said no the last time I offered.”

  “I like beer,” she said with a slight smile.

  Zach opened a bottle and handed it to her and she took a drink before picking up a sandwich. When was the last time she’d eaten anything a guy had made for her?

  Never. Until the assault had changed her life, she’d had to watch her weight so closely that eating had never been a big part of going out. Drinking, yes, but even then, she’d had to watch the calories, sticking to lower-cal drinks and club soda.

  They ate in silence and it was, for the most part, relaxing, but the mood between them reminded Tess of a calm lake. Lovely and still, but at any moment something could happen to ripple the water. She wasn’t yet ready for ripples.

  After they’d eaten, Zach stowed the remnants back into the saddlebags and then stretched out in the grass. Tess sat near him, nerves humming as she wondered what was going to happen next.

  Did they talk? Sleep in the sun? Ride back home?

  Or...

  Zach reached out and took her wrist in a loose hold. Tess’s eyes shot to his at the unexpected contact, and he gave her a lazy smile. “Relax so I can relax, okay?”

  “You aren’t?” she asked, frowning down at him. “Funny, but you look relaxed all stretched out in the sun like that.”

  “As I’m sure you know, appearances can be deceiving.” His thumb moved over her wrist, slowly, caressingly.

  “Why aren’t you relaxed?” she asked.

  He gave her a wry look. “This is the closest I’ve come to a date in over a decade.”

  “Zach—”

  “And I’m trying to figure out how to walk the thin line between asking questions you don’t want to answer and just accepting the here and now.” Tess pulled in a deep breath. She understood his position and was about to say so, when he added, “I like spending time with you,” as his thumb continued to caress her wrist.

  “That goes two ways,” Tess conceded. A small insect climbed over the toe of her shoe and she brushed it away. “I wish things could be different.”

  “How so?”

  She met his eyes candidly. “I wish I could be more up-front with you.”

  “Have you committed a crime?”

  She drew back, genuinely shocked. “No.” She pushed back her hair as she turned to stare off into the distance. “Wow,” she murmured. “Did you really think I had?” But why wouldn’t he think that, the way she’d been acting?

  He shook his head. “I think you’re very afraid of something that you won’t talk about.”

  “It wasn’t a crime. At least not one where I was the perpetrator.”

  “How about the victim?”

  She turned back to him. “For not asking questions, you’re asking a lot of questions.” But there was no sting to her words, because he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t obvious to someone who’d given the situation some thought.

  “Come on,” Zach said, getting to his feet, his fingers sliding from her wrist to her hand. “Let’s check out the water.”

  Conversation done, dicey issues put on hold. Tess was good with that.

  “With your boots on?” she asked, allowing him to haul her to her feet.

  “I guess not,” he said on a heavy sigh before he let go of her and reached down to pry off first one boot and then the other. His socks followed. Tess wondered if he was going to stop at the socks, thinking she could come up with worse things to do than skinny-dipping with this guy—except that the creek water appeared to be about four inches deep. There wouldn’t be a lot of dipping going on. Zach rolled up the legs of his jeans, exposing his muscular calves and answering her question.

  No skinny-dipping. Too bad, because she could deal with the strictly physical. It was what she needed, what she wanted. It was the emotional that gave her pause.

  Tess loosened her laces and pulled the shoes off her bare feet, leaving them next to Zach’s cowboy boots.

  Zach led the way into the shockingly cold water, which rushed over Tess’s feet and splashed against her calves as she followed him across the stream to the smallish granite boulders near the center of the streambed. He held out a hand and once again Tess took it and she scrambled up out of the frigid water onto the rock.

  “Did you know it was that cold?” she asked, dancing a little on the sun-heated rock, trying to bring some blood flow to her calves.

  “I suspected,” he said with a crooked smile, pointing at the snow-topped peaks behind them.

  “I’m a city girl and didn’t realize.”

  For a moment they stood balanced on the low granite boulder, the light breeze blowing over her damp feet, chilling her. She shivered and Zach closed his arms around her from behind, steadying her, warming her.

  “Maybe this was my plan,” he said.

  It was a good plan. Tess closed her eyes, allowed herself to lean into him for a moment. He smelled so damned good. More than that, he felt so damned good.

  He leaned close to her ear, his breath caressing the side of her face, and then he pressed a kiss to her temple. Tess shivered again. This time cold had nothing to do with her reaction, but Zach ran his hands up over her arms, trying to warm her. Oh, he was warming her all right.

  She turned in his arms, looped her hands around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers, kissing him.

  He leaned back, brushing the hair away from the injured side of her face, his touch butterfly soft. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you for not saying ‘still beautiful.’” He shook his head, as if the thought had never occurred to him—though she knew it’d had to have—then leaned down for another kiss.

  The sun disappeared behind a small cloud as a gust of wind came up, whipping Tess’s shirt around her, but she barely noticed as Zach’s mouth closed over hers.

  “Maybe we should go back,” he said against her mouth as another, stronger gust nearly knocked them over.

  “Maybe I don’t want to,” she said. Heat sparked in his eyes as the next gust swirled Tess’s hair up and around her face. “Okay,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes and conceding to Mother Nature, who was trying hard to knock Tess off the rock.

  Zach stepped into the water with a small splash. Tess took the hand he offered, gripping it tightly as she jumped down beside him. With the exception of William, whose kindness she could never repay, how long had it been since she’d depended on anyone for anything?

  The water didn’t seem as cold this time. In fact, it felt good on her heated skin. They waded back to the shore, hands still linked together.

  “I’ve never waded in the creek before,” she said as they crossed the grass to where their shoes lay in a small pile.

  “What kind of childhood did you have?” It was a rhetorical question, but Tess surprised herself by answering it.

  “The awful kind.” She said the words casually, avoiding his eyes as she picked up a shoe.
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  Zach didn’t ask for elaboration, but she’d suspected he wouldn’t after the previous conversation.

  “You seem to be giving your girls an excellent childhood,” she said as she pulled on a shoe. Hard to believe they were getting dressed instead of the other way around, but the wind was getting worse, not better.

  “I hope.” He sat down and started dragging his socks onto his damp feet. “There’s a lot of stuff I wish I could do for them—things I may never be able to do.”

  “You’re giving them a stable upbringing.”

  “Unlike yours,” Zach guessed, jamming his foot into a boot.

  She smiled slightly, wishing she could pour out her soul to him. “I had some good years.”

  Zach left it at that. When she finished tying her shoes and stood, he reached for her, smoothing her hair back with both hands, framing her face as he kissed her. Several times, the heat growing with each one. His hands left her face, skimmed down her sides, his thumbs moving over the curve of her breasts, and then settling on the curve of her butt, pressing her into his erection, making her insides go liquid.

  After he raised his head, Tess leaned her cheek against his shoulder, catching her breath as his hands moved soothingly over her back. She sighed deeply and then said, “I guess we should get back before we blow away.”

  The wind began to die, but clouds continued to build as they rode back home and by the time they got to Tess’s place a light rain had started to fall. Tess dismounted at her gate, her feet stinging a little as she made contact with the ground, and then she handed her reins up to Zach.

  “Next time,” he said with a half smile, rain sparkling on his dark eyelashes, “we’ll bring sunscreen.”

  Tess touched her hands to her cheeks. In spite of the rain, they felt warm—or at least the unscarred one did. Crazy. She never forgot sunscreen.

  “I’ll be cutting hay the next few days, and that eats up most of my time, but when I’m through...”

  “Give me a call,” Tess said, anticipating his question.

  He smiled, a heartbreakingly sexy smile, before he reined Roscoe around and headed off down the driveway, Snippy in tow.

  Tess watched him go for a moment before slowly walking to her door as the rain drizzled down on her new red hat. Her world had shifted. Again.

  * * *

  THE UNFAMILIAR SOUND of Tess’s cell phone ringing jerked her out of a sound sleep two days after the picnic. Heart racing, she jogged down the stairs. It had to be Zach—she’d given him the number after they’d returned from their last ride and no one ever called her cell.

  Sunlight was just beginning to streak across the kitchen floor when she came down the stairs and grabbed the phone off the top of the fridge. She answered with a quick hello.

  “Terese Olan?”

  Tess’s heart stopped for a moment. “Detective Hiller?” she asked, even though she instantly recognized his brusque voice. The detective had never called her cell phone—mainly because she’d always called him.

  It had to be something about Eddie. What had he done? Was he going back to prison?

  “Yes. I’m calling to tell you that your stepfather applied to have his parole transferred to Nevada.”

  “What?” Tess’s fingers went slack and the phone nearly tumbled out of her hand before she tightened her grip. “Why? When?” She inhaled sharply. “Can he do that?”

  “It takes time and approval from a board.”

  “How much time?”

  “A couple of months.”

  A couple of months—if he did things in an aboveboard manner, which was not Eddie’s modus operandi.

  “Why would he want to do that?” Tess asked. “Unless...” She couldn’t say it out loud. Didn’t even want to think it.

  “He has an offer of employment from a mining company. As you can imagine, the pay is better than the car wash. His parole officer said it was an excellent opportunity.”

  “Well, bully for Eddie.”

  “There’s no guarantee the board will approve his transfer.”

  “But there’s a chance.”

  “Yes.”

  Tess realized she was now sitting at her kitchen table. She didn’t remember moving away from the fridge, sinking down into the chair. Propping one elbow onto the laminate wood tabletop, she pressed her forehead into her hand.

  “Do you think he knows I’m in Nevada?” she asked.

  “I have no reason to think that. Do you?”

  “No.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “I don’t think you have cause for concern—”

  “Yet,” Tess muttered.

  “I’ll keep you apprised of the situation,” the detective said. He cleared his throat. “Unofficially you understand?”

  She did. Because officially Eddie had not been implicated in her attack. The detective, who had so pissed her off the last time they’d spoken, honestly was trying to watch out for her. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Tess pushed the end button and carefully set the phone on the table—mainly because she wanted to refrain from throwing it across the room and watching it smash against the wall.

  She’d had a lovely vacation from the edgy, certain-that-Eddie-would-show-up-at-any-moment state she’d been in during her first month in Barlow Ridge and now here he was, back again. Front and center in her thoughts.

  Did she have to start running? Was she safe staying here?

  Was he even looking for her?

  There was no reason for Eddie to move to Nevada, because Tess didn’t believe the employment story for one minute—Eddie hated to work—so the only conclusion the very-paranoid part of her could accept was that he thought he could find her here.

  And if he did find her, what if he chose to hurt those she was close to?

  Tess shoved her hands into her pockets and started pacing the kitchen, trying to talk her paranoid side down.

  Right now Eddie was in California. There was no reason to believe he’d actually found her, only that he might possibly be looking in the correct state. A very, very big state. Detective Hiller would call her when there was information she needed to know. He’d keep her on top of the situation, as he’d just proven.

  For right now, she’d stay put. She would also take whatever steps were necessary to ease herself away from the Nolan family, because although she might take a risk with her own safety, guessing that she hadn’t been found, she wasn’t risking theirs. Just in case.

  It’d been stupid to allow herself to get involved in the first place. Stupid to think that she could start living a more normal life.

  Tess pulled in a shaky breath as she paced through her house, hands pressed so deeply into her sweatshirt pockets that she stretched the seams. Big deal. She owned a sewing machine and although she may still be learning the ropes, she could probably fix a pocket or two.

  Too bad she couldn’t fix her life so easily.

  Yanking her left hand out of her pocket, she scrubbed it over her injured cheek, tears starting to well up as she once again inventoried everything that asshole Eddie had stolen from her. Her mother, her face, her career, her sense of safety.

  And he’d now made it impossible for her to continue having contact with people she was beginning to care for.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Tess dialed Zach’s home number. He didn’t answer, even though it was early, so she called the cell number he’d given her after catc
hing the escaped calf. Best to end this now, when he’d think it was because she’d decided their relationship was too much, too soon.

  He answered almost immediately, his voice hard to hear over mechanical racket in the background.

  “Hi, Zach...” We need to talk. Can you come by tonight?

  No. She was doing it now.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and this thing between us isn’t going to work.” For a few seconds she heard only the sound of the machine, so she continued on, hoping he was still there. “It’s better if we stop now. Before...before—” she pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, cursing the way stress stole her words, her train of thought “—it gets out of hand. Trust me, Zach. This will be best for all of us.” Tess pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, thinking that this hurt more than it should have, or would have, if she’d followed her own rules and never gotten involved to any degree.

  “Tess—”

  “I’m serious. I’m done.”

  And then, coward that she was, she hung up the phone. A few minutes later she was dressed and loading the dogs into the car. If Zach was going to show up to discuss things, which he well might, then she was going to be somewhere else.

  * * *

  TESS SPENT TWO days avoiding her place. The first day she spent aimlessly driving, trying to talk herself down.

  Eddie may not be looking for her. She may be overreacting.

  But if that was so, then why in the hell would he want to come back to Nevada? He’d made no secret of hating the two years they’d lived in Reno.

  Not knowing was killing her, making her think in circles again, making it impossible to sleep.

  The second day she had a legitimate excuse to leave the house early—she had to take Mac back to Dr. Hyatt for one final checkup and while she was in Wesley, she’d also stock up on everything Ann’s mercantile didn’t have. Once again she resorted to dark glasses, hoods and hats, hid herself behind her pseudo-disguises because she didn’t feel safe not doing that.