Did he think he could welsh on their deal just because they’d had a fight?
“Where are you going?” she called out the window as she drew alongside him.
“Go back to the ranch, Mariah.”
“Without you?” The last time he’d visited the sheriff’s office, someone had tried to kill him when he left. Did he really think she’d leave him there? “Eric?”
Leaning across the seat of the truck as she drove, she tried to get a better look at him. With him staring straight ahead, she couldn’t see much of his face. But the ticking muscle at the back of his jaw served notice enough that something wasn’t right.
A semi horn blared a warning behind her. She jumped upright in the seat, seeing she’d drifted into the oncoming lane, and instinctively yanked the steering wheel back on course.
Her frayed nerves wore through. “Would you get in the truck before we cause an accident here?”
If anything, he walked faster.
Her fingers gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers went numb. “What is wrong with you?”
He turned to her then, his eyes bleak. “What did Shane tell you?”
“Nothing, except to stay away from you,” she admitted reluctantly.
“Maybe you should take his advice.”
“Why?”
“As if this morning wasn’t reason enough, maybe because being seen with me is putting you in danger. It’s escalating whatever is going on here. That’s why they burned your equipment barn.”
“You can’t just quit.”
He stopped walking and she stepped on the brakes, lurching to a standstill beside him.
“The sheriff thinks there’s a connection between what happened to Mike and what happened to your parents.”
She drew a sharp breath. “And you believe him?”
“I don’t know. But something about the way he said it...”
“All the more reason for you not to quit.”
A muscle quivered at the back of his jaw. “I’m not quitting, but my laying low should take the heat off of you. I’m not going to put you at risk any longer.” His voice gentled. “I’ll send someone to the ranch, though. Protection.”
“I don’t want to be protected by a stranger.”
“Then leave. Go to St. George, or my place in L.A. When this is done, I’ll come for you. I’ll take care of you.”
She stopped breathing, shocked. “I—I can’t. We have to go back to the ranch—”
“The ranch.” His face twisted, a profile of rage. “Is it really worth it, Mariah? Is your precious ranch worth dying for?”
He marched away, his body rigid.
Pulse pounding in her throat, in her toes, under her fingemails, Mariah stepped on the gas. Bessie’s tires squealed as she ripped ten yards up the highway, then jerked the truck diagonally across the shoulder, blocking his way. Sliding across the passenger seat, she leaped out the door and waited for him.
“Is that what you think this is about?” she yelled as he approached. “The ranch?”
He stopped in front of her and rolled his head back.
“Get out of my way, Mariah.”
He could easily go around, she knew. But a step aside on her part would be symbolic. Defeat. She wouldn’t do it.
Silent, she stood her ground.
“What are you going to do, fight me?” he asked.
“If I have to, you big jerk.”
As always when his dark eyes drilled into her, a low hum started in her core. This time it quaked with an angry resonance, as if in sympathetic vibration to his fury.
Mariah had run out of options and she knew it. She had only one choice left if she hoped to save what they had between them. She would have to open her heart completely and hope he didn’t let her hemorrhage too long.
“The ranch is not my dream. It never has been.”
A flicker of emotion passed across his features. The first sign of anything other than anger she’d seen since this morning.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s my security blanket, like your job. When I was released from the youth home, I told myself I had to come back here because the Double M was the only home I’d known, because it was safe, but that wasn’t the real reason.”
She paused a long time.
“I’m listening,” he prompted gruffly.
“I came back here to find the truth. I talked to everyone who was around then, read the old case files. I even went back to the cabin a few times just to see if it triggered anything, but it never did, at least not until I went there with you. I can’t give up now. I have to know the truth, now more than ever.”
“Why?”
“Because until I do, I can’t go anywhere with anyone. I can’t be with anyone. Do you understand?”
“No.”
His pain, his confusion, sliced her as deeply as she could see it slicing him. She bled with him, for him. Did love always hurt this much? Oh, God, was that it? Did she love Eric Randall? Her pulse went thready just thinking about it.
She felt naked, totally exposed and vulnerable. “It’s not about the ranch. It’s about having a life. My right to have a life—a family of my own—without wondering if I’m worthy of it. Without being afraid—” she nearly choked on the words “—afraid of what I might have done. Of what I might do again.”
Eric’s mask crumbled, revealing his grief. He took her very gently, very loosely in his arms. “Oh, Mariah! Is that why you’re all alone up there? Because you don’t think you deserve a family of your own?”
“I’m scared, Eric. Scared to get close to anyone. And it has nothing to do with what Mr. Carson did to me. I need to know what happened to my parents, and to Mike. I have to know if I was responsible. I need your help.” She raised her head from his shoulder and looked deep into his troubled eyes. “I need you.”
Chapter 12
She needed him. Eric wondered if she’d ever said those words to anyone before. He doubted it.
Even as he drove up the winding road to the Double M, he cursed himself for giving in to her. He should turn the truck around and whisk her to St. George whether she wanted to go or not. But he didn’t.
She’d sucked him back in, and he’d hardly put up a fight. He would do anything for her, and she wouldn’t even have to look at him to get him to do it. All it would take is the sound of that proud, desperate lilt in her voice. He was lost, and he knew it.
“Do you think Shane’s right, that there is some connection between what’s happening now and what happened over a decade ago?” Her eyes were wide, intensely violet and trusting against her pale face.
“I don’t know.”
“If he’s involved in what’s going on, why would he tell you there was some connection?”
“I don’t know that, either.” His fingers clenched the steering wheel.
“I’m the only link. If there is some connection, then it has to be something to do with me.”
“Or the mountain itself. Mike’s death and your parents’ have that in common, too. If there is something up there that someone doesn’t want found, that could be why they moved the bodies. Even accidental deaths draw a lot of attention. Cops, the coroner, reporters—a lot of people would have been traipsing around the mountain.”
She frowned down at her lap, and then her head popped up. “The pictures. The ones that were stolen from Mike’s. Do you think that could be why they took them? Could they have shown something on the mountain that they shouldn’t have?”
“You never saw them after they were developed?”
“No. Except that one we found. But I didn’t see anything in it that looked out of place.”
He sighed heavily. “But the pictures are all gone.”
“No,” Mariah said. “Not all of them.”
Eric followed Mariah through the woods behind her house, his fingers lightly trapped in hers. No longer worried about who might see them together, they’d stopped for supper and to pick up some supplies in town. By the time th
ey’d gotten back to the Double M and fed the horses, the day was nearly gone. Mariah still hadn’t told him what she’d meant about not all the pictures being gone. She said she wanted to show him.
Though it was still too early for the stars to be out, they had no trouble seeing their way through the wood. The quicksilver rays of the rising moon sliced through the boughs overhead in odd-shaped shards. The play of light and shadow lent itself to fairy-tale visions of nymphs and wood sprites.
Mariah led him to the edge of a large clearing where, like magic, a cottage appeared. Behind the building, the ground had been plowed as if for sowing.
“Whose place is this?”
Mariah pulled him forward, onto the stoop. “No one’s. It’s just my gardening shed.”
It didn’t look like a shed. It looked like an oversize dollhouse, complete with gingerbread molding and real cedar wood siding. A fantastical green light set the bungalow’s windows aglow. “Who’s here?”
“Nobody. No one ever comes here but me.”
Mariah swung the door open and stepped inside. Eric followed, his eyes drawn automatically to the strange light. On the far side of the room, a panel of thin bulbs shone down on a tabletop covered by trays of seedling plants.
As far as Eric could see, that far corner of the room was the only space dedicated to gardening in Mariah’s “garden shed.” The rest of the interior matched Eric’s initial assessment of the place—a cozy little bungalow.
Gingham curtains fluttered over the windows. A tufted settee jutted out diagonally from one corner of the room, a floor lamp with a fringed shade standing over it. On the couch’s peony-print cushion lay a book, spine up, as if spread to mark the reader’s place. An heirloom quilt was draped over one arm. In the opposite corner of the room, a potbellied stove stood guard like a fat little soldier. The whole outfit looked more like a romantic hideaway than a gardening shed.
“Looks like you do more than garden down here,” he said. He fingered an old turntable on a stand next to the door and the stack of LPs next to it.
“Sometimes I like to come here when it storms and just listen to the music the rain makes on the roof.”
Eric had never thought of rain as musical. He’d never thought of it as much of anything except a good way to ruin an expensive suit. But then, he’d never thought of a lot of things the way Mariah thought of them.
He continued his perusal of the room, intrigued. A wrinkled tarp, splattered with a rainbow of colors, covered the floor on the far side of the shed. Tart chemical smells—turpentine and acrylic, maybe—wafted over the earthier peat odor.
Mariah reached for another bank of light switches, and a small attached room lit up. Everywhere inside were colorful canvases—on the walls, stacked against the windows, propped on easels in the middle of the floor. They were beautifully expressive paintings. Some depicted angry sunsets, slashed with red and black and orange. Some hid almost obscure wildlife, hunted eyes peeking out through tangled scrub. All were equally elegant. Evocative. And in their backgrounds loomed a dark mountain. Always the mountain.
He studied each one in turn. “If you can paint like this, what are you doing working a horse ranch?”
“I happen to like working this horse ranch.” She ambled up beside him, some of her nervousness seemingly waned. “Besides, I don’t think I could stand to have strangers gawking at my pictures.”
“Why not? You’re very talented.”
“I couldn’t show them in public. They’re too...personal. It’s like opening up and letting someone see what’s inside you.”
He looked at some of the sunsets, almost violent in their intensity, and frowned at what must have been inside Mariah to inspire her to paint them.
“You know what they say, ‘paint and brush are a poor woman’s therapist,”’ she said, as if he’d spoken his worries out loud. “I started painting when I was in the youth home, at first with tubes of acrylic with nothing but a dab left in them and brushes I found in the trash. Painting helped me work through things.”
Reaching the corner of the room, Eric stopped walking. His heart stopped beating. On a crooked easel sat an unfinished work, the colors of the background bleeding into virgin canvas around the central image—the image of a motorcycle and rider soaring through the air, the streak of his yellow racing leathers caught midflight. The colors blurred into the background, giving the impression that the cyclist was actually moving, about to leap off the canvas. The sun behind him rained golden droplets of light around his shoulders. Lively hazel eyes laughed from behind an open face mask. Familiar eyes.
“Mikey?”
Mariah’s long breath stretched out behind him. “When I first met Mike and he saw me taking pictures, he asked what I did with the photographs. I told him I used them as models, mostly, so I could remember exactly how things looked, and paint them. I don’t know why I even told him that. I never tell anyone about my painting. But Mike had a way of getting me talking.”
Something in her tone made Eric look back. Mariah fretted her hands in front of her. This was difficult for her, he could see. But it shouldn’t be. You can talk to me, too, Mariah.
“When I told him, he asked if I would paint him.”
“Mike wanted artwork?” As far as Eric knew, culture hadn’t been high on Mike’s priority list.
“He said he wanted it as a present. For his family.”
Yeah, that would fit Their mother would love a picture like this. Mike intuitively knew what would make people happy. That was one of the differences between Eric and his brother.
“That’s why I went to take more pictures of him that day,” she said. “So we could find just the right scene.”
“But you were almost done with this one. Why take more pictures?”
“Done? No. That one was just practice. I’d never painted an action scene before. I wanted to make sure it would turn out okay.”
It had turned out more than okay, Eric thought. The image called to something deep inside him. Something he thought he’d forgotten. For a moment, he remembered. He tasted dirt between his teeth, heard the wind rushing around his helmet, felt the pull of gravity as he left the earth. For a moment, he knew the peace, the freedom, of flight. And for a moment, he had his brother back.
His eyes stinging, he turned to Mariah. “Is this the only one?”
“Yes.” She moved around until she stood squarely in front of him, but her eyes avoided his, fixing instead somewhere in the vicinity of his Adam’s apple. “Now I’ve told you everything. Shown you everything.” She lowered her voice. “What about you?”
He blinked, surprised, and still disturbed by the sight of his brother’s image, so alive. Would he ever see Mike like that again? “What?” He blinked, trying to remember Mariah’s question.
“What is the deep, dark secret you’re not telling me? And don’t say there isn’t one. I know too much about secrets, and other things deep and dark.”
For the first time he could remember, Eric, ruthless negotiator of billion-dollar corporate deals, lost a stare-down. He ripped his gaze from hers, only to have it snared by Mike’s. The irrepressible life force in Mike’s eyes latched onto him, wouldn’t let him run.
“It’s my fault,” he finally said, gravel grating in his voice. Mariah had shared with him the painful secrets in her life. She deserved as much in return.
“What’s your fault?”
“Everything. Mikey—” He swallowed hard, the old feelings stirred up and rising in his throat. If only Mike hadn’t insisted on riding motorcycles. He could have done more, been more.
“You can’t blame yourself, Eric.”
“Yes I can. He would never have even started riding if it wasn’t for me. When he was little he used to ride behind me on my homemade motorcycle and yell for me to go faster. And I would, because I liked to hear him laugh.” He paced the length of the room. “Then when he was old enough, I got him his own scooter so he could get around, and he used to race me and I’d let him w
in, just so he’d be happy.”
“You must have been proud of him, seeing him grow up to become a champion rider.”
The laugh that wouldn’t come ached in Eric’s chest. “You don’t get it. I never wanted Mike to ride professionally. We fought over it all the time. I’d made plenty of money by then. I could have put him through school, set him up in a good job, anything he wanted. But all he cared about was racing.”
“You wanted him to have a real job, with a regular paycheck and a pension plan.”
“Is that so bad?”
“There’s more to life than the size of your 401K.”
Eric flinched, feeling like he’d been sucker-punched.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to belittle what you did for your family—the way you’ve provided for them, the dreams you gave up for them—but you gave Mike something much more important than security. You gave him your love.”
Eric’s eyes drifted closed.
“I gotta go, Mike. My pager’s buzzing.”
“Yeah, well, I know how much that pager means to you.”
“I’m not so sure,” Enc said, opening his eyes. “I was always after him to make something of himself.” He looked over at Mariah. “More by my definition. To get his priorities straight. I guess I should have looked at my own priorities. He wanted me to come out here and ride with him. But I was too busy.”
“He knew you loved him,” Mariah said, her tone brooking no argument. “Whether you agreed with his choices or not. You were all he talked about. What a great brother you were. What a successful businessman. He was so proud of you. But he was worried about you, too. About all you were missing in life. All you’d given up on.”
He squeezed his eyes closed. Looking at that painting burned as if he were looking directly at the sun. He would never have a chance to show Mike he hadn’t given up. To show him he loved him just the way he was. “He really is dead, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly, compassionately. At least she hadn’t lied. Hadn’t tried to console him with platitudes or empty promises.
“We would have found him days ago if he was alive. Someone would have found him.”
Virgin without a Memory Page 17