by Cait London
“Did I misread that Tom tried to kill me that night he was out on bond, Jillian? Did I misread the revolver in his hand? Or his threats?”
“He said he was cleaning it and intended to show it to you because you were a hunter. He wanted to make friends with you, share something in common. Yes, you misread that entire scene. Tom was angry, of course, and I’m certain his threats came out of that anger. Any person charged with a crime they didn’t do is going to react.”
“Oh, he reacted, all right. He was still spewing threats when I had him tied to a chair and the sheriff arrived. That incident snipped away even more of my aunt’s life.”
“I don’t believe Tom stole anything or he was the kind of person you say he was! But he’s not alive to deny it, is he?” Jillian’s voice quivered with anger.
Then as though reclaiming her composure, taking time to deal with her anger, she slowly lifted the tea bag from the cup and methodically placed it on a tiny saucer. Jillian sipped slowly, studying him before she spoke. “I met Elspeth at a weaver’s fair—we share the same interest in textures and design. I created a small brochure for her work and she invited me to visit. I met her family, and she later wrote me about Liam’s missing brother, Adam. You were only three when your parents and Liam, then an infant, were in that car wreck. You were battling the end of a cold and stayed with your maternal aunt. What a shock it must have been to discover that your brother was alive.”
There was no expression in her tone, as though she were settling in to uncover his life’s rough edges, to use them against him. Adam had been stunned to discover that his brother Liam lived and hadn’t known his true identity until almost two years ago. Liam had been a widower with a small son. He had come to Amen Flats to give his boy the richness of the family’s history. “You know a lot.”
“I know that you ran through the inheritance your aunt left you. From the looks of you, you must have. You have no visible means of support, and you can’t stay in one place long enough to hold a job. You hitched a ride here with a friendly farmer and arrived at Liam’s gas station with a worn duffel bag and a backpack. That doesn’t say a whole lot for your life’s success, does it? You can’t blame that on my family.”
“Your opinion of me isn’t exactly high, but it doesn’t matter, does it?” Adam smiled briefly. Jillian’s assumptions were wrong. He was the successful creator-owner of Sam the Truck toys and products; he simply preferred to travel lightly through life. No country or setting or community could reach into his heart long enough to capture it, and he traveled restlessly. Maybe he was hunting for something that just never appeared; maybe he was waiting for just this moment. “What did you plan to do?”
Her answer rang true, those amber eyes almost golden as they burned through the shadows to him. “To hurt you somehow.”
“Through my family.”
“I didn’t know how. I thought it might come to me along the way. You don’t know them, Adam. You may share the same bloodline, but you don’t have the heart. Yours is a cold lump, and from the looks of you that hasn’t changed. I fell in love them, with Liam and Michelle’s little boy, J.T., and they’re expecting another baby now. I’ve only been here since January, but in these three months, I’ve come to love this family. I’ve quite simply changed my mind. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want the Tallchiefs to know all this, and they’re certain to see problems with you if I stay. So I’m leaving. End of story. You can go now. When I complete this project, I’m leaving. I suggest you do the same as soon as you can make your excuses.”
“Now that interests me. Why should I leave?” He wanted to see her without the shadows between them, and moved across the room. She looked up at him, her head tilted just that bit in defiance, her anger barely shielded. He reached to turn her face to the window’s soft light. The rain-snakes shadowed her fine skin, so warm and silky to the touch. She lifted her head to jerk away, and he gently tightened his hold. “I’ve only just discovered my missing brother and the whole Tallchief family. So again, I ask you why should I leave?”
She frowned at him. “All right. If you can step into my life, I can step into yours—and you asked for it. You’re a drifter. I heard you came into town wearing pretty worn clothes. And look at those boots, the laces knotted and retied. I bet they’ve seen plenty of highway road when you were hitchhiking. You look like you haven’t been to a barber in a while. You told Liam that you don’t have a job right now, and you’re not looking for one. My guess is that you’re looking for a warm spot to settle before you move off, taking whatever you take. The Tallchiefs are a close family. You can’t use them. How long were you planning to stay? Long enough to get money for the road? What about your little nephew J.T.’s heart? He’s terribly excited about you arriving. He’s only four, Adam, and the more he is attached to you, the more it will hurt him when you leave.”
J.T. had loved the present Adam had given him, a special collector’s issue of Sam the Truck with his friends. Adam was already in love with the boy, and half in love with Liam’s wife Michelle. Just staying at their home for a day and a night had told him that his brother was well loved. The warmth of their love permeated their home. An expectant mother, Michelle fairly glowed—a beautiful thing to see. Liam and Adam had lost a childhood together, but as men, they would build a solid friendship. It would be no easy task for Adam to leave his brother’s family. Jillian’s assessment of his wandering life raked at his pride; he’d been able to keep fresh, to establish a profitable toy company while traveling.
He studied Jillian’s face. That fierce, rigid, simmering anger that ran through her tone, visible in her features, as well. He wished his fingertips hadn’t just caressed that smooth, warm skin. He wondered if he had unconsciously compared the women he’d known to her. Had he really hunted for a woman like her all his life? Why hadn’t he known until just now how badly she’d haunted him?
He glanced at her left hand, locked knuckle-white to the counter. Those fine slender fingers had once brushed his cheek, her eyes asking him to take her—and she’d worn his silver ring. Now they were bare. “What happened with your husband? The family run him off, too?”
He damned himself for slashing at her, for wanting to know everything at once, and maybe, to just see if she tasted the same, to kiss those luscious lips firmed now with anger. Once they had trembled and begged him to take her with him, to marry her. In exchange for recanting his original story and keeping his silence, he could have had Jillian and money and the Greens’ financial support.
At sixteen Jillian had been the Greens’ sacrificial lamb—they’d been a family set on freeing their only son, the family’s male heir valued more than his female sibling. He remembered her father’s less-than-concealed offer of his daughter…a girl. A girl raised to please her family. The perfect daughter. He remembered, too, her frantic pleas. She’d known what they wanted—what she wanted. She wanted to protect her brother, and she wanted Adam, the high school leader in scholastics and sports, the potential All-American success.
“Stand back from me,” she said, her voice low and uneven.
Her order reminded him of others issued long ago. Leave town. Don’t testify against Tom or his friends. Forget you saw anything, knew anything. It will be worth your while. But if you go ahead, you’ll be sorry.
“Am I making you nervous? Or don’t you like remembering what your family did? That when I was set to testify against Tom, they and their friends controlled the town and everyone in it? How they used that power against me and Aunt Sarah? Don’t you think it hurt her to see her longtime friends fear for their jobs? To move away from her on the church pew? To exclude her from their social circles? The gardening club?”
His anger built and stormed and burst then. “Aunt Sarah had a bad heart, Jilly-dear.”
Adam threw her teenage name at her, a reminder that the past lay between them, raw and brooding. “Aunt Sarah raised me, all by herself, and she could have had a few more years without the pressu
re put on her when I testified against Tom and his friends. But she said I should do what was right for me, and never wavered from that. She died before I graduated high school.”
He ran his hand across his heart, where memories of his maternal aunt Sarah ran close and warm…Sarah, a woman on her own, doing her best to raise a child that wasn’t hers. She’d never complained, and loved him without restriction. “She wasn’t well, but she could have lived a few more years without all that stress.”
He’d never told another person that, and guilt now nagged at him. He questioned again for the thousandth time if he should have testified.
Jillian’s gaze softened, searching his. “I am very sorry about Sarah. I liked her very much. I did spend some time with her at the last. She called me and asked me to come over.”
“She called you? One of the Greens? Why?”
“She had her reasons.” Jillian’s pressed lips said she wouldn’t explain further.
Adam slapped the flat of his hand on the counter. Then he turned from Jillian, closing her away from his grief. “But you didn’t like her enough to do anything to help, right?”
The silence grew and throbbed, before Jillian said with quiet elegance, “We both lost people we loved. And I think we’ve said quite enough. It was a long time ago, and it would suit me to never see you again. Goodbye, Adam.”
The sound of the rain upon the roof and against the windows hammered at the silence as Adam fought the past and the anger that had simmered for years—and the newly recognized need to see Jillian again. He ran his hand across his jaw and tried to settle the hunger in his heart for a girl who had stolen his dreams; her secret place in his heart had denied him any other woman. “What happened to O’Malley?” he asked again, needing to know more about her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she answered slowly from behind him.
He turned slowly, eyes narrowed upon her, ready to catch the slightest indication of what had happened. “But it does. He would have been a perfect catch for you. Just what your parents wanted—an ex-senator’s son, a political career all laid out for him.”
She sighed and looked out into the rainy mist swirling in front of the window. “You’re going to gnaw on everything, aren’t you? I knew you would. You were always very good at putting pieces together. You’re not the captain of the debate team now, Adam.”
“This is a very private war, Jilly Green O’Malley. Your revenge against me is no small thing. I want to make certain that you don’t intend to hurt my family. If gnawing on old bones clears the table, then I will.”
“If you need that to leave me alone, then I’ll give you the answer—Kevin and I simply grew apart.”
The odd tremor in her tone drew him on. Was that a shudder passing over her body? Or just the shadows of the past stirring between them? And why should he want to hold her close and keep her safe as he had years ago?
Disturbed by that thought, Adam moved to her computer, and one light touch on the mouse brought it to life. He noted the advertisement she was creating on the screen. The vivid red cabbage roses surrounding a sleek, black perfume bottle contrasted the gray day outside. The logo was that of an exclusive perfume designer, Silver Tallchief, who, Adam remembered, was married to Nick Palladin. “I thought you were getting a business degree.”
“Please leave,” she whispered so softly that the sound of the rain on the roof and windows almost drowned out her words. She pushed a shaky, delicate hand against her face, and when it came away, her cheek gleamed damply.
He desperately wanted to hold her against him, to protect her. Adam mocked his emotions with a quick, grim smile. He hadn’t come so far in all these twenty-two years, he decided darkly. Jillian could still take his breath away with a look, with a word.
He slowly pulled on his jacket, sorting through his thoughts. “You came hunting me, Jilly, and now that you’ve found me, you want to run. It doesn’t work that way. Not until I’m satisfied. We’ll talk again.”
“I’ll be gone before that.”
“Then I’ll come after you.” A memory slithered through the shadows, nagging at him. With his back to her, he asked, “Do you still have the ring I gave you?”
“I can’t remember,” she said. Her careless tone implied that the ring was long tossed away. “Probably not.”
He nodded and pushed himself into the cold, gray mist that was safer than his emotions concerning Jillian.
After Adam had gone, Jillian stood very still, battered by the furious past moments.
At six-feet four inches, Adam Tallchief, dressed in his Scottish ancestral plaid and kilt was not an easy image to push away. He had stood in the doorway, carrying the swirling mist of cold rain with him. It had beaded his wind-whipped, shaggy hair and gleamed upon his dark jacket. The white-frilled dress shirt had contrasted his hard, tanned face and, bound by the Tallchief broach, the plaid had added to the breadth of his shoulders. The kilt had accentuated his masculinity, those strong legs braced apart in a fighter’s stance. Add his stormy temper to the mix and he was unforgettable, tearing into the quiet shadows of her home, slashing at them as surely as he would have held a sword in battle. In shadows, all angles and planes, his rugged face had caught the dim, soothing light in which she preferred to work. The color of steel, his deep-set eyes had flashed fiercely at her, ready to defend his family. The tight line of his mouth had said he’d do what he had to do to protect his family and that he wouldn’t forget the past.
Nor could she. Jillian sucked in air and straightened her shoulders; she fought for control, for the peace she’d had before he’d torn into her home. She hadn’t expected to see Adam, hadn’t expected the forceful impact of him—like a Scottish laird swooping down from his castle to waylay any intruders into his realm. His scents curled disturbingly around her—the angry male fresh from the rain and her past. Even the leaves of her large philodendron seemed to quiver, stroked by his anger.
She smoothed the leaves, running cool beneath her fingertips, a contrast to her seething emotions. Her brother died in prison because of Adam Tallchief’s testimony; her parents had died of heartbreak. She’d come for revenge, to somehow take as Adam had taken.
Jillian’s racing heart, the emotions she fought to keep under control, settled slightly. The reality was that she couldn’t bear to harm the Tallchiefs. She’d fallen in love with the family who had struggled to stay together. Left orphaned when the eldest was only eighteen, the five Tallchief children had used their Scottish ancestor’s journals to “add glue to the mix.” They’d hunted for Una’s lost dowry and reclaimed each piece with its legend. After only two full months, Jillian loved the family that had grown with each marriage. “Now how could I possibly try to destroy that?” she stated harshly to the shadows. “Well, Adam Tallchief certainly ruined my peace and harmony, just like he always did.”
She impatiently rubbed the headache brewing in her temples. “He’s got me talking to myself. I don’t want to think about Adam. I simply want to finish this contract and leave.”
Determined to forget Adam’s fierce expression, those slashing gray eyes, Jillian firmly sat at her computer. It hummed and waited to be fed, but Jillian’s mind had locked on Adam. He brought with him the sense of storm-tossed seas, of faraway exotic places, and a fresh painful lash of the cruel past.
She stared at the cabbage roses on the screen and couldn’t remember what she had planned, arranging the many layers of the graphic advertising collage. An image of Adam stalked through her mind, hacking at her creativity; she saw him as an eighteen-year-old boy, determined to testify against her brother, refusing both her offer to run away with him and the marriage she knew her parents would support. At fifteen, she’d adored him. A “mature” seventeen-year-old, he’d dismissed her. At sixteen, her feelings for him hadn’t changed and, for just that month before her world came apart, Adam Tallchief was her boyfriend, the high school senior dating a lowly sophomore.
Jillian turned to the windows, seeing past the rain, ba
ck to when Adam’s tender kisses turned to hot, hungry ones, his tall lean body shaking with desire against hers. He’d touched her gently, with reverence and never improperly, and filled with dreams, she’d known he would be her husband, her lover.
She slowly opened a desk drawer and removed a small box. The ring he’d given her the night of the prom was tarnished, just as was the image of how she had later flung it at him. The small silver circle had bounced off his cheek and had fallen untended to the floor. She remembered the pain in those gray eyes, the stiffening of his tall, rawboned body, the clenching of his fists at his sides as she had slashed at him, “I hate you, Adam. If you don’t want me, all I’m asking is that you don’t testify against Tom.”
“You don’t believe me,” he’d stated softly, as if she’d just knocked the wind out of him with a physical blow.
“Absolutely not. My brother is not a thief, and I believe him. He says he didn’t do any of those things,” she’d hurled at him.
Now, with the silence quivering after Adam’s departure from her home, Jillian settled into her thoughts. The silver ring on the tip of her finger was not costly, and represented just one dreamy month with Adam Tallchief. He’d been so tender and protective, and she’d dated him, despite her parents’ objections—that had been her first rebellion.
Looking back, she suspected that Kevin O’Malley was a handy fix-up for her parents’ shaky finances, and a rebound for her broken heart. Unfortunately, Adam’s tender treatment hadn’t prepared her for the rough marital sex that Kevin preferred. With a five-year marriage ending in divorce, Jillian believed that she was frigid, as he had claimed.
Twenty-two years ago she’d been a girl, loving Adam. Now she was a divorced, successful sales executive turned graphic artist, and she hated him. But not enough to hurt the Tallchiefs. Resting in the box was the reason Adam’s aunt Sarah had called her: two feathers—one each from a dove and a hawk. “Give these to him when he’s not fighting to survive,” Sarah had said. The old woman’s trembling fingers had smoothed the feathers lovingly, as though they’d reminded her of someone long ago, dear to her heart. Jillian had not been able to refuse the dying woman’s request to safeguard the feathers for Adam.