by Anna Jeffrey
His gaze held hers in a long, seething look, but gave no hint what he was really thinking. They were at some kind of crossroads. She waited for him to tell her a direction to go, but he only sighed and shifted into gear. They inched forward.
Silence. A few more miles, giving her time to consider how little she really knew of Luke and the way he lived. He seldom discussed what went on in his daily life, didn’t talk much about his kids. She knew every curve and plane of his muscular body, yet he had always maintained a peculiar distance. From the beginning, he had been a rugged mountain, wider and higher than she could reach across or see over.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought, so she cleared her throat and asked, “What did your mother mean by ‘I hope Flaggs don’t find out about this?’”
“Mom’s blowing smoke. Flaggs are neighbors. They join up with us on the east. They’ve been in Sterling Valley almost as long as we have.”
The evasive answer set off a hiss of jealousy, not just of the blond calf roper hanging on his arm at the Rusty Spur Saloon months ago, but of all Luke and the neighboring rancher’s daughter had in common. “Do you still date Lee Ann Flagg?”
“Date? Lord, I don’t date. You’re the first woman I’ve taken out in years.”
“But you took her home to dinner last week.”
His head jerked toward her, his eyes glowering. “I drove down to get the mail and she came by, on her way home from town.”
“Well, that’s convenient.” Dahlia winced again, wondering where this strange bitch inside her had come from.
“Up here, we can’t afford not to take neighboring serious, Dahlia. It was suppertime, so I asked her to eat. She’s a good friend. There’ll never be a time she’s not welcome at our table.”
Or in your bed? “Your mother must think you’re more than good friends.”
“That’s just Mom. I don’t like talking about this, Dahlia, but since I figure you’ve already heard it from that bunch of know-it-alls at the Forest Service, I’ll tell you. Lee Ann and I had something going on a long time ago. It didn’t mean as much to either one of us as it meant to our families. Mom’s wanted me to marry her since we were kids, but I guess I’m not cut out for marriage. I figure Janet and I drug that institution through enough dirt to last a lifetime.”
He reached across the bench seat and gripped her arm. “We don’t need to be arguing about Lee Ann or anything else, Dahlia. We’ve always got along. C’mon now. Don’t be ornery. Come sit close to me.”
No. He had mopped the floor with her feelings. Cynicism born of life with an abusive, unfaithful husband whose parents had thought her inferior wouldn’t let her scoot into Luke’s arms. She freed her arm and stayed put, leaning against the cool window ledge. “I’m okay.”
Clear thinking crept in without mercy, bringing a vivid depiction of how life at the Double Deuce must have been for Janet McRae. No doubt Luke’s mother had kept the peerless Lee Ann Flagg around in spirit if not in body. In those days, did Luke stand up to his mother on his wife’s behalf? Or did he leave her twisting in the wind while the Wicked Witch of the Double Deuce Ranch picked at her bones?
The question left Dahlia grim and overwhelmed as yet another truth sank in. She should have listened when she heard words like “old-fashioned” and “tradition.” And clan. McRaes were a clan in the old-world sense. A half-Filipina from Texas breaching such chauvinism was as no more likely than scaling the stone walls of an ancient Gaelic castle barefoot. His marrying Lee Ann Flagg would be a tribal union and after the face-to-face meeting with Luke’s willful mother, Dahlia didn’t doubt for a minute it could still happen.
She had been so blind. And stupid. All summer, she had let his activities be her clock and calendar, counting the hours between his visits. Her heart raced at his touch. The sight of his narrow hips and muscular thighs in his tight jeans filled her head with erotic imaginings. Happiness would be to spend the rest of her life at his side, in his bed. Having his babies.
Reality squeezed her heart one more time. She was too late. He already had babies with someone else. They were almost grown and he didn’t want any more. He had a life apart from her of which he hadn’t so much as hinted she would ever be a part. While she would recover from the embarrassment of being surprised in his bed by his parents, she might never recover from letting herself fall head over heels in love with yet another man who didn’t return her affection.
And if tonight’s incident did nothing else, it made another fact clear as the hot springs pool. Even if tomorrow he said the three words she longed to hear, so long as his mother presided over the Double Deuce Ranch, a future together for Dahlia Montgomery and Luke MacRae was as improbable as a blizzard in Houston.
At midnight, Luke parked in the cottage’s driveway, slid out and headed around the front of the pickup, but Dahlia didn’t wait. She stepped down from the passenger seat, slammed the door and stalked across the skimpy lawn toward the front stoop.
“Dahlia, hold up—”
She stopped and faced him. Another time, she might have been inhibited by her tear-swollen eyes and the streaks of black mascara that must be trailing down her cheeks, but tonight, vanity seemed a shallow indulgence. “Hold up for what?”
His straw Resistol came off and he held it in front of him, working the brim. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but they don’t tell me what to do or who to see.”
“I agree. It doesn’t look like it.” She groped for the front door knob. If she didn’t get away from him, another fit of tears would destroy her.
“I know it’s hard for an outsider—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. She could scream. She and Piggy had been called outsiders a hundred times since arriving in this backwoods burg. Anyone whose great-great-grandpa hadn’t come here on a wagon train was labeled “outsider.”
He raised his head. “I wanted you to see the ranch, Dal. It didn’t turn out like I planned, but I’m not sorry you came. I hope you’re not either.”
Now she was filled with regret and close to breaking down again. “Your ranch is beautiful,” she said softly.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? You’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”
He stood there, hat in his hand, looking more helpless than she had ever seen him. In his eyes, she saw a plea, like that day in the service station when Jimmy had smeared chocolate on her skirt. Could he be in as much pain as she was?
She sniffed and shrugged. “You’ve got the number.”
“Right. I’ll call.”
She nodded, a deep ache in her throat. Turning into the doorway, she left him standing in the yard.
As Luke’s old Ford crawled up the main street, except for the lights and noise from the two bars, town was deserted. The saloons tempted him not the slightest. Though he felt lower than a snake’s belly, he had never been one to throw liquor on his sorrows, not even when troubles had him buried so deep he couldn’t see daylight.
Dahlia. Her name and her tears were a whirlpool in his thoughts. He guessed he should have done something different back in the cabin, but what? Anything he might have said would have made a bad situation worse. When his mother was pissed off, arguing with her was like squaring off with a grizzly. He had seen her gray glare and caustic tongue buckle slithery bankers and hard-bitten cowboys.
Leaving the lights of town behind him, he headed north. His truck had made the trip from town so many times, it performed by rote and that gave his mind much freedom. His life was too damn complicated for an outsider like Dahlia to understand. His mother, a smart woman who knew the cow and horse business inside and out, had been the hub of the Double Deuce since the day his father gave up that role. To Luke personally, she was more. She had been both gentle teacher and surrogate mother to Jimmy since infancy. Not even an exotic beauty who set his loins afire could make him throw a monkey wrench in that arrangement.
He had weathered many of Mom’s storms, so one more didn’t upset him much. What c
aused a knot in his chest was this whole thing with Dahlia. From the first, like a sorceress, she had drawn him and as if he were powerless, he had let her. The minute he left her he started plotting the next time he could get to town to see her. Hell, his gasoline bill had doubled.
And hadn’t taking her to the ranch for a weekend proved he was under a spell? He never, ever took women to the ranch.
Then he had compounded the error, taking advantage of his employee, Ethel, by asking her to watch Jimmy so he and Dahlia could spend time alone. He never, ever involved the ranch’s employees in his personal life.
By anybody’s definition, Dahlia was a distraction. And that he didn’t need—never, ever. He had no room for “relationships,” a dumb word anyway.
He drove through the Double Deuce’s gateway at two a.m. Luck was with him—the Big House was dark. He headed for the cabin, hoping for some shut-eye before sunrise. His blue-eyed heeler, Frosty and his border collie, Bingo, began to bark from the front deck before he arrived. So much for not waking the household in the Big House.
Entering the bedroom, he saw Dahlia’s lacy pink panties on the floor beside the bed. He picked them up and rubbed the silky fabric between his thumb and finger. Muttering swear words, he took them to his dresser and tucked them under his own underwear.
As he slid into bed, Dahlia’s scent surrounded him, bringing back a memory of her body molded to his and he missed her.
Another worry cropped up. She had told him sex without a rubber was okay, but he wondered. Her monthly schedule had become almost as familiar to him as it was to her for he enjoyed making love without . . .
Whoa! At what point had screwing become making love?
Shit. He should have stayed away from her.
Chapter 15
Birds. A million of the shrieking little fiends lived in the trees surrounding the cottage. Once Dahlia’s ears tuned in to their chittering, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t go back to sleep. Dumb birds. She groaned, burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag and covered her head with her pillow.
With wakefulness came thought. Yesterday, she had expected to wake up today in Luke’s arms and they would spend a quiet morning making love in the pastoral setting of Sterling Valley. A far cry from waking alone on a cot in a bare bedroom of a tiny old house. What a difference a day, an hour, a minute, even a split second, could make in a life. Who knew it better than she? Irony was her old friend.
A memory from long ago eased into her thoughts—Filipino superstitions. As a child, if she went to bed unhappy, in a musical mix of languages, her mother told her to hurry to sleep because magic happened in the night. In the morning, the thing making her sad would be gone. Magic had not occurred while she slept. Last night’s scene in Luke’s bedroom had not been a bad dream. Opening her eyes wouldn’t erase the image of the tall silhouette standing in the bedroom doorway or the angry shrew waiting in the living room.
Dahlia pulled her sleeping bag tight around her, guessing the temperature to be in the forties. She loved these bracing mountain mornings and slept with her window wide open. The clean, dry air was addicting. August in Callister was nothing like August in Loretta, where the temperature and humidity often equaled each other.
Texas. And Home. She would be returning in two or three weeks. Would she long to come back here? Would she come back to visit Luke? After last night, would he want her to?
Pots and pans banged from the kitchen, clashing with a George Strait ballad in the background. Piggy cooking breakfast. Or lunch. Or who knew what?
Growing more awake, Dahlia remembered she was naked from the waist down. After she and Piggy had talked into the wee hours, exhausted, she had shed only her jeans and crawled into her sleeping bag. The skin of her inner thighs stung from having been chafed for hours by the damp seam of her jeans and she smelled. The flimsy fiberglass tub and shower in the tiny bathroom beckoned like a luxurious spa.
Throwing open the sleeping bag, she willed her feet to the hardwood floor and stripped off her shirt. She was sore all over. Besides not having been horseback riding in years, sex at the hot springs had been a workout—delicious, but a physical stretch all the same. And it had been performed without birth control at a marginal time of the month.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Oh, he’d had condoms—he always did. But ever since that first time at the ski lodge, he had relied on her to tell him when their use was necessary. Yesterday, they had both been so hot, he hadn’t even asked her if it was safe and she hadn’t cared if it wasn’t.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
She groaned her way to her feet, then padded naked to the closet for her robe. Kneeling beside the suitcase where she stored her underwear, she rooted beneath the clothing for the calendar on which she kept a record of her menstrual cycle. During her marriage, keeping the calendar had been more than birth control. It had been a record of the days she might be fertile, her own secret plan for an accident. She had been so lonely in those days. Even when her husband wasn’t absent in body, his mind had been off in some computer nirvana. She had thought a child would fill an empty corner in her heart. The planned accident never happened.
She had always chickened out.
This morning, the calendar confirmed what she suspected, and she felt a stab of panic and guilt. Her hand went to her stomach and she sat back on her heels remembering yesterday afternoon. Aroused beyond sanity, she had wanted his seed released into her body with no barrier, latex or otherwise. It had been a driving desire, not the same as when she had wanted a baby with Kenneth. Then, it had been a goal rather than a passion, like going to a store to buy a coveted doll. With Luke, yesterday at the hot springs, it had been the most powerful craving she had ever felt, something emanating from the very core of her Self, something she might never feel again.
It wasn’t the first time they had pushed the envelope. All summer, the days her period was due had been nail-biting times. Besides losing all of her inhibitions when it came to making love with him, she lost her good sense, too.
Fear surged. Was life growing inside her at this very moment? Luke wouldn’t be happy. He might not even be supportive. She drew her hands down her face, closed her eyes and said a silent prayer, promising to be forever chaste if she were allowed to squeak by this one time. Then she re-hid the calendar in the bottom of her suitcase.
The alarm clock on the floor by her cot showed ten. Ten. And the phone hadn’t rung.
She pushed herself to her feet and plodded with head jarring footsteps to the bathroom. Dropping her robe in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet door, she saw her breasts rosy with abrasions. Whisker burns. Good grief! She touched her nipples, tender from Luke’s attention. Spotting a hickey low on her stomach, she recalled the moment Luke had put it there, how she had lain on a bench of rock at the pond’s edge, her thighs shamelessly open for his eyes to explore her most secret places and he…They had both been so carried away.
“God, Luke,” she whimpered, fighting back full-blown tears.
Don’t think, the swollen face in the mirror told her. Run. Far and fast. Until you drop.
Instead of showering, she went back to the bedroom. Pulled on her sweats and tied on her Nikes.
Luke returned to the cabin after breakfast at the Big House, which had turned out to be less silent and awkward than he had expected. His grandmother being present had postponed the inevitable. Then, after the meal, the sweet, little old lady, God bless her, had lingered to visit, so he had been able to make his escape.
As he closed the front door, the hinge creaked and he stopped for a moment, considered putting on the deadbolt. When Janet lived here, the doors had always been locked against his family members.
On second thought, he rejected locking the front door and went on into his office, which was really the converted front bedroom. The Big House had a real office, but it was his parents’ domain. He guessed it would be his someday, but he disliked its antique fussiness.
He preferred the simpl
icity of his own space he had put together himself after Janet left. Comfortable cowhide furniture fit the look of the cabin’s yellowed-with-age pine plank floor. On the walls hung photographs of some of his prize bulls and horses along with some original Western paintings—investment art. And on his bookshelves, alongside his eclectic collection of reading material, sat pictures of his daughters.
Here and there were Indian artifacts he had collected from all over the Double Deuce. They kept him humble, not letting him forget that McRaes were newcomers. His distant grandfather might have staked his claim more than a hundred fifty years ago, but the Sioux had preceded him by many generations.
He tried Dahlia’s number again. The line buzzed busy, so he tackled the week’s worth of mail he had let accumulate on the corner of his desk, slicing through envelopes with his pocketknife. He hadn’t finished before he heard a tap on the front door, followed by footsteps in the living room.
“Son?”
Luke made a mental sigh. An easy escape from the breakfast table didn’t mean he had dodged questioning from his parents. “In here, Dad.”
His white-haired father strolled into the office and eased down into the easy chair opposite the desk. “Shorty tells me you got more hay delivered while Claire and I were gone.”
Luke folded his arms on the desk, digging in for the first barrage. “I bought extra. In case we see a late spring.”
Nodding, his dad took his pipe from his shirt pocket and began to pack it, a process Luke knew could take a two or three minutes. He returned to slicing open envelopes.
Pipe lit, at last his dad spoke. “You and your lady friend caused a hell of a stir up at the house.”
Luke closed his knife and slid it into his jeans pocket. “No reason for it. I’ve never claimed to be a monk.”