by Ann Charles
Yesterday had been a bust. Mac, Henry, and she had spent the afternoon nosing around the valley adjacent to her grandma’s valley, combing over the area where Henry had found the bone and she’d found the lighter. Not only had she been wound up cross-bow-tight with sexual frustration and not a cigarette in sight, but they hadn’t found a single atom of evidence to support her theory that the bone belonged to a murder victim.
Mac had continued to play dumb about his saboteur, hiding behind another one of his mental walls.
She didn’t believe the mine had caved in without human interference. There were too many facts that supported her theory, facts on which Mac refused to comment.
The stubborn, irritating, hard-headed, too-sexy-for-his-own-good man. Men like him made women cast aside their six-figure Wall Street careers and daydream about crocheting baby booties and canning tomatoes.
Okay, that was exaggerating a bit, but the thought of returning to her old life in South Dakota held as much appeal as eating a handful of tree grubs.
Mac had dropped her off back at the store late yesterday afternoon with nothing more than a peck on the lips. Then he’d dashed off to Yuccaville to “take care of some business.” One way or another, before this day was through, Claire was going to find out what “business” he was up to.
“Jessica Lynn Wayne,” Ruby yelled as she shoved through the curtain into the store. “Get your smartmouth down here right now, or I’m going to come up there and make you wish you’d never taken a breath of oxygen after you popped out of my womb!”
A crash rang from overhead, followed by a run of muffled curses.
Ruby dropped her purse on the counter and sighed. “I swear to God, I’m fixin’ to throw that child to the wolves and shoot the stork that left her on my doorstep.” Her left eyelid ticked as she stared at Claire. “We’ll be back around three.”
Claire nodded. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got Chester’s newest National Enquirer to read, and Manny gave me one of his vampire-romance books. I’ll just be sitting back and enjoying the cool breeze from the air conditioner all day.”
As if on queue, a loud rattling issued from the rec room.
Claire shook her head. That worthless piece of duct-taped scrap metal was flirting with execution via sledge-hammer if it didn’t perform up to par this afternoon.
“Manny reads romances?” Ruby asked.
“He says they enrich his love life. I think he studies the sex scenes, working on more ways to coerce women into bed.”
Ruby grinned. “Whatever works.” She dug her keys out of her purse. “Too bad they don’t make romances that get men all hot and bothered.”
Claire wondered if Ruby was referring to a certain crotchety, old man who’d told Claire she could use Mabel tonight if she agreed not to come home before midnight, because he was going to be busy. “They do. You can find them in the Forum section of Penthouse.”
“Ruby!” Jess yelled through the vent, making her mother wince. “Where are my yellow PRINCESS shorts? I’m not going to that stupid school with you unless I have those shorts!”
“They’re in your closet on the floor where you threw them last week.” Ruby hoisted her purse on her shoulder. “I’m tellin’ you, that girl was touched by the devil at the age of three.”
Claire followed Ruby to the door and onto the porch. “Maybe she’ll get to this school and see it’s not such a bad place,” Claire said, not believing that for a moment, but it never hurt to pretend the glass was half-full.
Jess wanted to stay with her mom, something Ruby seemed to be blind to. But on such a sunny, blue-skied day, it would take a hot poker to motivate Claire to step in and attempt to reconcile the two wildcats.
“Nice try,” Ruby smirked. “But we both know how today will go. I hope she doesn’t set the school on fire while I’m signing papers.”
The familiar sound of Mabel’s engine rumbling up the drive snagged Claire’s attention.
She watched as the blue beauty rolled by, while her chin hit the boards below her feet at the sight of someone with a beehive of silver hair and a familiar yellow sweater sitting in the passenger seat.
What in the hell was Gramps doing with Rosy Linstad? Is that why he didn’t want Claire home until after midnight?
Claire glanced at Ruby’s face. Her stomach tightened at the sight of the pained expression in Ruby’s green eyes.
That two-timing, cantankerous, son of a bitch! Unless Gramps had one hell of a good explanation as to why Rosy’s cheeks were planted in Mabel’s front seat, Claire was going to light the old man’s shorts on fire with him in them.
* * *
The Shaft pulsed around Sophy with cigarette smoke and patrons—cowboys and miners alike, along with the leather-decked bikers, who often filled the tables on warm spring and fall evenings. Tanya Tucker belted out “José Cuervo” on the jukebox while frothy beer poured from the tap.
Sophy sipped at the bittersweet foam rimming the lip of her glass and glanced at her watch—nine-twenty.
Old Dick Webber should be finished checking on his cattle by now. She’d run into him once, about a month ago, on her way up to Socrates Pit with a pickax and a flashlight in her hand. Lucky for her, he didn’t ask too many questions, just talked about his collection of petrified animal shit. But she didn’t need him seeing her heading up to that mine twice.
“So,” Billy Ray’s slurred voice cut through her thoughts. “How’s ‘bout you and me head back to my place for some rough ridin’, if ya know what I mean.”
Sophy looked into the red-rimmed eyes of the blond thirty-six year-old. She’d ridden Billy before. She had nothing but praise for the size and girth of his saddle horn, but the boy always stumbled out of the gate and had trouble reaching an even stride. And more often than not, he tended to keep chasing the rabbit long after the race was over, leaving her saddle sore by the time he returned to a canter.
Patting Billy on his stubble-roughened cheek, she winked. “Not tonight, sugar. I have—” The rest of her sentence stalled on her tongue at the sight of Ruby’s nephew walking in the door followed by Harley’s granddaughter. Her teeth snapped closed.
“You all right, Sophy?” Billy Ray squeezed her hand. He grabbed her chin, forcing her to face him. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Gulping down the panic crawling up her throat, she whispered, “I wish I had.”
* * *
“All I’m saying is if Sophy’s dirty glares could kill, you’d be pushing up daisies,” Claire told Mac, tapping Mabel’s brakes. “Why are you being so adamant about Sophy, anyway?”
From the moment they’d left The Shaft, Mac had been lecturing Claire about why she should treat the she-devil like a rabid coyote.
“Because I don’t trust her.” Mac said as Claire pulled off the dirt road leading to Socrates Pit and stopped on the wide shoulder. “Just promise me that you’ll stay away from her in the future.”
“Okay, okay.” Claire shifted into Park. “I promise I’ll try.” But she didn’t promise to stay away from Sophy’s shed.
She shut off the engine.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Parking.” Claire turned the key counter-clockwise until the glow of the dash lights flickered back to life.
The full moon peeked in through the front windshield.
She took a deep breath, trying to slow her pulse. Sitting alone in the dark next to Mac did funny things to her heartbeat. The smell of Mabel’s leather and his spicy cologne produced an olfactory nirvana that had Claire’s synapses sparking like firecrackers.
Leaning over his long legs, she popped open the glove box and dug through papers and napkins until her fingers brushed Gramps’s CD case.
“Do you mean parking, as in Chester’s version of backseat bingo?” Mac’s breath fanned her cheek.
She closed the glove box, and then flipped through Gramps’s CD collection. “Here we are.” She slipped the Conway Twitty CD into the player and skipped forward
to Slow Hand.
“Claire?”
She could feel Mac’s stare. “Who trapped you in that mine?”
“I already told you back at the bar—”
“And I said you were full of shit, and that I wasn’t buying your explanation.”
She turned up the volume. Conway’s husky voice filled the car.
Wrangling out from under the steering wheel, she scooted across the bench seat.
Mac’s eyes widened as she straddled his lap somewhat inelegantly, bumping the back of her head on Mabel’s roof. Her boot heels knocked against the dashboard and her elbow whapped on the window.
“Claire, what—”
She covered Mac’s mouth with her palm and sank down onto his thighs. “Since you refuse to tell the truth of your own free will, I’m going to resort to torture.”
Scrambling around in such a tight place while hopped up on pheromones had her overheating—and not the sexy kind of sweating. She rolled down the driver’s side window a couple of inches, and then did the same with the passenger side.
He grabbed her hips and adjusted himself under her weight. “So you’re going to sit on me until I tell you what you want to hear?”
“Something like that.” She shot him her most wicked grin—the one she saved for beefy firefighters and bronzed construction men—and reached for the button on his jeans.
“Whoa there, Speed Racer.” He caught her hand in the act and pulled it away, his lips curled in a sexy smirk. “Like the song says, no heated rushes. Only slow hands.”
The blaze radiating from his eyes melted the elastic in Claire’s underwear. Her earlobes started to perspire.
“If you insist.” Her voice came out sounding raspy. “But it will just drag out your torture.”
She moved to the buttons on his shirt. As she bared his skin, her feet began to tingle—whether from the anticipation of skin-on-skin wrestling with Mac or the lack of blood supply below her bent knees, she couldn’t tell.
His flesh felt hot beneath her fingertips. She rubbed her palms down his chest and brushed across the sprinkling of hair that arrowed down his abdomen and disappeared under his waistband.
Mac shifted under her again.
“Mac,” she whispered in his ear, licking a trail along his collarbone, tasting his salty skin.
“What?” He clamped onto her hips and pulled her even closer.
“Tell me what you know.” She dragged her fingernails up his ribcage, one by one.
“I know that I want you,” he said, his voice ragged as she squirmed strategically against him.
His palms skimmed up over the front of her T-shirt and covered Pink Panther’s chubby cheeks.
“So I gathered.” She tipped her head back, eyes closed, as he spread kisses down her throat, leaving a burning trail in the wake of his mouth.
“More than I’ve ever wanted a woman in my life.”
Claire’s eyes popped open, the pin-sized holes in Mabel’s leather ceiling blurring at such a close range. Her seductress role forgotten for a moment, she frowned down at the crown of his head. “Really?”
“Definitely,” he said, his focus on her chest. “You’re an amazing,” his hands slipped under her T-shirt, “intelligent,” he paused to pop the clasps on her bra, “beautiful woman.”
Claire leaned into his hands. Oh, man. If he never stopped, it’d be way too soon.
“And if you don’t finish what you’ve started here tonight,” his tone dropped to a sexy growl that made her skin ripple with goose bumps. “I’m going to have to join the Polar Bear club.”
The feel of Mac’s hands, caressing, rubbing, and stroking, zapped every notion of rational thought from Claire’s overheated brain. Even if her toes fell off from a lack of blood flow, she wasn’t budging from Mac’s lap until the hunger she’d been beating back for the last week had been satiated.
Grabbing him by the ears, she plastered her lips on his, exploring his mouth until they were both gasping for oxygen. She wiggled on his lap again.
“Damn it, Claire,” he whispered, unbuttoning her khakis and reaching for the zipper, “you’re killing me here.”
“Hurry.” She dug her fingers into his shoulders, clinging as each click of zipper teeth brought her closer to what she wanted more than anything right now.
“CLAIRE ALICE MORGAN!”
Claire jerked upright at the sound of Gramps’s voice blaring in her ears and whacked her head on the roof.
Heart hammering for reasons having nothing to do with Mac’s hands inside her waistband, she gawked at the driver’s window.
Gramps and Manny, faces pressed against the partially-open glass, peered back at them.
“What in the hell are you two doing in my car?” Gramps’s nostrils flared wide enough to fit a wine cork in each.
Manny chuckled. “Looks to me like he’s checking out her chassis.”
Chapter Nineteen
Saturday, April 24th
Mac rapped on the door of Harley’s Winnebago.
From the grove of cottonwoods down by Jackrabbit Creek, a woodpecker let out a high pitched laugh and then rattled out a steady drum roll against the bark, mimicking Mac’s knock.
Even the birds in this section of the R.V. park were a pain in the ass.
The door squeaked open and Harley stood there, grizzled with gray stubble, frowning. “Claire’s not here.”
“Any idea where she is?”
Harley shook his head and crossed his arms. His eyes narrowed, making Mac squirm in his boots. Claire’s grandfather was obviously still pissed about last night.
“What are your intentions toward my granddaughter?”
Oh, shit. Mac was already running late this morning. He should have been on the road to Phoenix a half-hour ago. This was a bad time to look into the future.
“His intentions are to get her into the sack,” Chester called from the window of his Brave.
“No,” Manny said from where he was shaking out a floor mat outside the shade of his Airstream’s awning. “Mac’s not a dog like you. He’s after her heart.”
Harley grunted and held the door open wide. “Come in. I need to talk to you for a moment.” He glared at his buddies. “Alone!”
Mac hesitated. He’d rather have marched into a grizzly’s den in the spring, playing a trumpet. He gulped and stepped into the R.V.
The smell of bacon greeted him as the door slammed shut behind him. Henry lay sprawled out on a green couch, his eyes drooping shut, his back legs twitching.
Mac scanned the place, searching for signs of Claire amidst the trophy fish hanging on the wall, the newspapers piled on the table, and the empty beer bottles in the sink.
“Have a seat.” Harley nodded toward the couch. Stiff-legged, he limped over to the radio and turned down Willie Nelson singing the original version of “On the Road Again.”
Mac dropped onto the soft, fur covered cushions next to Henry. The dog didn’t even flinch.
“Okay, let’s try this again.” Harley leaned against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed. “I’d have to be blind and stupid not to see that you are warm for my granddaughter.”
Warm? More like red hot. Mac nodded, waiting to see where this was heading.
“What I want to know is if you’re in it for the long run.”
“You mean marriage?” Mac weighed the feel of that in his thoughts.
“Not necessarily,” Harley answered, waving off the idea. “I mean ...” He wrinkled his brow, then sighed. “Let me put it this way. Claire has a small problem when it comes to men. She won’t let any of them get too close.” Harley stared at his feet, looking uncomfortable with the subject at hand.
“You mean she’ll dump me before things get too serious?”
“More like she’ll hike up her skirt and run for the hills like the devil is at her heels.”
“Oh.” Mac leaned back into the cushions, considering Harley’s words. To date, he had yet to receive a single brush-off from Claire. If anything,
she’d played the pursuer as often as he. At what point was she going to start running? “Why are you telling me this?”
Harley shrugged. “You seem like a nice kid, and you’re Ruby’s nephew. I wanted to give you a sporting chance.”
“Does that mean I have your approval?”
“Maybe.”
Mac grinned. This must be killing the old guy.
Harley snorted. “But don’t go getting all cocky. Just because you have a better understanding of your enemy doesn’t mean you’ll be the victor. If you want to keep Claire from running, you’re going to have to come up with a strategy.”
“A strategy?” Mac sat forward.
“Of course. You can’t win a battle with just wishes and dumb luck. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Claire is one smart girl.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed.”
Harley smiled for the first time. “It’s good to know you’ve looked beyond the surface. After last night, I wasn’t sure.”
Mac’s neck warmed. He kept his lips clamped shut. He had a feeling the ribbing about last night had only just begun.
“There’s only one way to get through her defenses.”
“What’s that?” Mac asked. Wine? Roses? Poetry? Moon Pies?
“You need to storm the beach.”
“Storm the beach?”
Harley nodded. “Barge in with your horns blaring and your guns cocked and take no prisoners.”
“Guns cocked?” Mac was beginning to feel like a parrot.
“Yep. Then you need to dig in, hole up, and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“The rumble of her tanks.”
“She’ll have tanks?”
“Of course! She’s not going to give up easily. When the tanks come, that’s when the real battle begins. She’ll stop at nothing to blow you away. But don’t give an inch. You hold firm, call for an air raid, and level her defenses. The rest is rice, lace, and wedding bells.” Harley paused, his eyes taking on a piercing glare. “You do eventually plan to make her an honest woman, right?”