by Ruth Wind
Anna knew a little about Olan Forrest, by all accounts a real good old boy, a man's man who'd made a fortune in construction by working eighty hours a week and showing up at home only long enough to verbally assault his three sons. All three brothers bore the scars to some degree or another. "So what did you think of to say?"
His grin was rueful. "Oh, I was brilliant. I leaned over and pointed to the wolf and asked her if she knew that it was Canis lupus."
Anna chuckled.
"The thing is, she knew. She flipped open that notebook quick as a wink, and inside were all these pictures of mountain animals. Birds and foxes and bears and wolves. She knew all their names."
He talked for a long time, and Anna simply listened. The young Tyler and Kara had become fast friends, spending their afternoons and weekends bird-watching and catching insects—which they always let go after a decent period of examination.
By Christmas break, they'd been best friends. By the end of seventh grade, when everyone else was pairing off and breaking up with their first crushes, Tyler and Kara had been acknowledged to be the most mature and stable couple around.
By high school, it had been common expectation that they would be married, and they had been, two days after graduation. They had already started building this house, on the land Tyler had inherited from his grandfather.
He stopped. "I have some brandy. Do you want some?"
"Sure." She hopped up to follow him to the kitchen. "You aren't going to stop there, are you?"
From a high cupboard, he took the bottle and two glasses. For a moment, he seemed to hesitate, holding those glasses in his hands. Then he put one down on the counter in front of Anna and poured in a generous measure of plum-red liquor. "It isn't such a happy story after this," he said, and poured some for himself, as if for fortification.
"I knew it had to be sad at some point."
He gave a soft, humorless laugh, his head bent at an angle. In the low flicker of candle flame, his hair shone like moonlight, and Anna allowed herself one moment to admire it, and the long, strong column of his brown throat. "I guess that's plain enough."
Settling on a stool, Anna sipped the fiery liquor. "So what happened then?"
He took a breath, let it go. "Kara was a diabetic. She lost one kidney when she was fifteen, and they told her then she should never try to have children." He took a full draft of brandy and swallowed before he continued. Even after he swallowed, his face held a closed expression. "She didn't listen."
Anna felt tension radiating from him in great waves, and she recognized that he barely knew she was there now. He was lost in the past, in the relief of being able to talk.
"A friend of hers, who was also diabetic, had a baby with no trouble, so Kara got it in her head that it would be okay for her, too. She wanted one so badly." He shook his head. "I used to get upset with her for not just being happy with what we had—which was a hundred times better than what most people get. I told her we could adopt, but she was afraid of all those cases where the birth mother comes back to get her baby. So I suggested we could go to South America or China or someplace, but she wanted her own baby, our baby."
Anna saw signs that the story was knotting up inside him, and she sensed that it was somehow important that he say this part, too, that he remember all of it. "Did you give in?"
His jaw went hard. "No. I was with her when she lost that first kidney, and a baby wasn't worth it to me. But she lied to me about birth control, and got pregnant anyway."
"I'm sorry."
"I should have realized sooner that she would try that, that somehow it would be okay in her head. I should have realized she might try it." His jaw grew very tight. "It was terrible. She was sick all the way through, and went into labor a month early, and it was too late." Flatly, he said, "Her kidney failed and she died."
"So she didn't even get to be with her son."
"Yeah, she did. For three days. We were hoping for a transplant, but…" He sighed. "No organs were available."
Something clacked against the window, thrown by the wind. Both of them jumped, and Tyler leaned forward to peer out the window. "One hell of a storm tonight."
Anna could see the dark tops of pines swaying against the gales, bending and whipping against a night sky so bright with snow and clouds that it looked like twilight. Tyler whistled softly.
"I wonder if it's hitting Red Creek like this," he said.
"I hope not," Anna replied, accepting the change of subject. It was enough that he'd emptied himself. She would let him retreat now, to whatever world he needed now. "Your mother really hates storms."
"She was raised in tornado country," Tyler replied, without turning. "But she has Alonzo there now. That'll help."
He didn't look at her, and Anna stood up, realizing it was time to leave him alone. "I guess I'll turn in," she said. "Shall I just sleep in Curtis's bed?"
"Sure."
"Okay."
"Do you need anything?" He turned, finally, the polite host.
Anna smiled. "No, thanks. Good night, Tyler."
He said nothing until she was nearly at Curtis's door. "Anna," he said.
She turned.
Tyler crossed his arms. "Thank you."
"Anytime."
* * *
Chapter 4
« ^ »
After Anna went to bed, Tyler took his snifter of brandy back to the fire. Kneeling, he carefully fed the low, hot flame bits of small wood and two thick logs, poking the ashes to heat things up for a minute. It was going to be one cold night—he hoped Anna would be warm enough. He should check the fire in the stove there a little later, but first he'd give her a chance to fall asleep. He'd grown adept at doing it silently while Curtis slept.
Curtis. Tyler picked up the teddy bear from one of the chairs and clasped it to his chest as if it were a child. He missed his son tonight, and wondered how he was doing. Probably fine. And it would be nice for Louise to have the boy there if the storm really was this bad in the valley.
Of course, she did have Alonzo now. Sort of. With his courtly manners and twinkling eyes, he was the man Louise should have had a long time ago. Although Tyler didn't think anything had really developed between them yet, he didn't think it would be long. And finally, maybe, his mother would have the mate she deserved.
Which would leave Tyler the odd man out. As he always had been, except with Kara.
He looked at the picture of her on the mantel. She had been his best friend for more than twenty years. With Kara, he had been free to be himself, as he never had been with anyone else.
Familiar melancholy descended, a hollowness he had finally realized would never go away. She had been more than his wife, more than his lover. She had been his best friend, the other half of him. He was thirty-one years old, and had spent more than half his life with her.
He lifted the brandy and toasted her picture. "To you," he said softly, and sipped.
But the ritual left him oddly cold. With a frown, he looked into the red-amber liquor in his glass and wondered why he'd felt numb about this all day. Usually, he awakened on this anniversary with a sense of anticipation, as if he would be actually seeing Kara again. In some vague part of his brain, he knew it was foolish, and he also knew he had to contain his ritual to one night a year or he'd end up as crazy as a rabid dog.
If Curtis had been here tonight, they would have played games, simple card games and board games such as Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. They would have had hot chocolate and maybe baked cookies, and Tyler would have had the comfort of that small, plump body next to his own.
Instead, Tyler had consigned himself to the habitual, now empty ritual, in an empty house, in a raging storm that would trap him with his melancholy, miles away from the rest of the world.
And who had the heavens sent to keep him company? A gypsy magpie with a Queens accent, who had more earnestness than good sense and a suspicious shine in her eyes when she looked at him.
He scowled. The l
ost prince. Right.
With a sigh, he got to his feet and extinguished the candles and lamps. Quickly he shed his clothes in the dark and climbed under the covers, thinking with some embarrassment of the way he'd spilled his guts tonight. She was a good listener.
But he'd left parts of the story out. He had left out the furious anger he had felt toward Kara throughout her pregnancy. It had been fury fueled by love, but it had seriously strained their previously solid relationship. To make matters worse, he had vowed that she would never trick him again like that, and had had a vasectomy in her third month. Kara had wept for days over it.
A knot of disgust settled in his belly. He'd been so arrogantly certain of his decision, so sure she had no say in the matter if she was going to be so foolish as to risk her life. There had been times through that pregnancy when they spoke only in the politest of terms for days and days on end. His mother had counseled Tyler to be more understanding, to have faith that things would work out.
Now he knew that Kara had hidden her worsening condition out of a desperate need to see the pregnancy end in a live child, because it was her only chance to have his baby.
He would live with that guilt the rest of his life.
He would also live with the time he'd lost by being angry all those months. The truth was, he just had not expected her to die. He was waiting for her to come home and take care of Curtis, and then they could get back to the business of mending their marriage.
But they never got the chance.
Guilt and sorrow welled up in him, an acid burn that seared away everything else. "I'm sorry, Kara," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."
Only then did he remember he had to check the fire in the stove in Curtis's room. Swearing mildly, he pulled a robe over his naked body and padded to the closed door. He knocked softly, and heard a faint answer.
"I just want to check the fire. Are you decent?"
He heard her laugh, throatily. "Come in," she called.
He opened the door, carefully ignoring the womanly shape on Curtis's little bed. A line of soft orange glowed around the edges of the stove door, and when he opened it, he saw that the fire was not quite out, but was burning pretty low. He stirred the embers vigorously. "Be right back," he said.
From the stack in the living room, he gathered a few healthy chunks of pine and carried them back to the stove. Wind clattered and howled around the windows, and a hard crack struck the west pane. "Damn," he said, kneeling to feed the fire, "I meant to cut that branch last week."
"Don't you worry that Curtis will get burned on that stove?"
His mother had worried about the same thing. "I think kids figure things out pretty fast if you don't overprotect them. Curtis put his hand on the one in the kitchen when he was two, and blistered himself pretty badly, but he hasn't touched one since."
She made a sound of pain. "How could you stand to let him hurt himself?"
Tyler looked in her direction. Cold pale light from the storm fell through the uncurtained window and caught in the tumble of black curls. Firelight made of her eyes two luminescent pools. One hand was tucked under her cheek. "We're not here to protect them from everything," he said. "We're here to guide them, give them the ability to think for themselves and make good decisions. Letting him burn himself once means he won't have to do it again. It works a lot better than me telling him over and over."
"Makes sense, I guess." She shifted to one elbow, and Tyler tried not to notice the way his too-big flannel shirt revealed the top of one round white breast. "But surely you have to protect him from some things. What about wild animals and getting lost in the forest and things like that?"
Tyler lifted a shoulder. "Sure I have to protect him sometimes, just like I have to feed him and love him and help him learn to keep himself clean." His leg was going to sleep, and he shifted to sit on a stool, carefully pulling his robe around himself. "Bears are a real problem around here, and kids think they're like Yogi, and Goldilocks and the three bears, so we've talked a lot about them. He knows what their tracks and spoor look like, and he knows you never, ever come close to a baby bear." With a distant part of his mind, he realized he hadn't spoken so many words to anyone in one day in literally years. "Not too many other animals around here would be dangerous. If he saw a wildcat, unless it was trapped somewhere, it would just run away."
"Bears don't run away?"
"Sometimes, but not like a lot of other wild animals. They're curious, and they're hungry, and with the development in the mountains, there are fewer and fewer places for them to hide."
"That's sad."
"Yeah, it really is." The fire behind him was quite warm now, as flames caught on the new wood. Tyler could go back to bed. He told himself he should.
But it was warm, and Anna was so pretty and earnest that he couldn't find the motivation to leave. "Bears and wolves pay a big price for humans falling in love with wild places."
She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, as if in thought, and narrowed her eyes faintly. When she looked back at Tyler, letting go of the lip to speak, it glistened with moisture, and the sight sent a hard, leaping life through his loins. He swallowed, trying not to think—
"I worried about that," she said soberly. "That maybe it would be bad for the land for me to come here, like everybody else running to Colorado. Another pair of feet to trample all over the forest, another body to drink the water."
It surprised him. "You really thought about it?"
"All the time."
He leaned forward. "How did you come to terms with it?"
She lifted one shoulder, and the gesture caused the shirt to slip off the shoulder on the other side. She grabbed it quickly, but not before Tyler saw the whole of one white shoulder, unbearably feminine and alluring, below the fabric. She wore no bra, which was only normal, since she was in bed, but the knowledge sent a new level of heat through him.
He needed to get out of there, but instead he stayed where he was, perversely enjoying the vicarious thrill of imagining her breasts naked beneath flannel he'd worn against his own skin.
"I didn't really solve it," she said, and Tyler was lost for a minute. Solve what? "Don't laugh, but I gave it to the saints. If I should go, somebody would give me a job. If I shouldn't, nobody would."
"The saints, huh?" He found himself smiling gently. "Does that mean you're a good Catholic girl?"
Her smile was not good. It spread sensually to show her even white teeth, and glinted wickedly in the limpid pools of her black eyes. "There is no such thing."
For one purely sensual moment, Tyler forgot everything as his blood heated and tingled, and lust as narcotic and forbidden as opium pulsed through him. It would be easy, so easy, to move forward and touch her. And she would be the kind of woman he had sometimes wanted, free and wicked—
He heard the traitorous thought and abruptly stood up, catching his robe around him so that she would not know what she'd done to him with that throaty laughter and wicked smile. "I'd better get to bed."
"Good night, Tyler," she said softly.
He backed out quickly and shut the door safely behind him, tugging the fabric of his robe around that ridiculous flesh that had tried to leap between the folds of fabric to freedom and woman.
He scowled. That was the trouble with biology. It was so damned undignified. With a sigh, he climbed back in bed and covered his face with a pillow, trying to blot out the past and the future, and the sweet curves of a woman who smelled like hope.
* * *
The storm intensified during the night. Anna awakened several times to hear the wind howling and screaming through the trees. It slammed against the little cabin with rocking blasts, rattling the windows and throwing things around. Twice she heard something hit the house with a fierce thump.
The second time, she listened carefully, wondering if it might be a bear, instead of the wind. Then she remembered that bears hibernated, and it was likely just broken tree branches and deadwood being tossed around in the fer
ocious wind.
It made her think of hurricanes, those storms that had sometimes swept up the Atlantic coast with fierce destructive power, and although she didn't know what a hurricane's Colorado counterpart was, it made her nervous. She had a little trouble going back to sleep. Surely they were safe enough here. Tyler knew these hills intimately, and he was acknowledged to be one of the best carpenters around. Anything he had built would be made to last. She drifted off again.
Only to be shattered out of sleep by a loud crash. She bolted upright, blinking, holding the cover to her neck in protection from a wild animal. For a moment, she stared at the mess without truly understanding what had happened, even when a sharp wind began to pile snow in drifts over her covers.
The door to the other room flew open, and Tyler swore. "Anna, are you okay?"
"Yeah." Blinking, she realized that there was a whole long pine bough on the floor. "What happened?"
"I told myself to get that branch cut off last week and didn't do it. The wind put it through the window. Don't move. Let me get some shoes."
Anna simply nodded. Shivering, she drew the covers around her and kicked off the snow collecting on the bed. The branch was at least ten feet long, and thick. The force of the wind had shoved it through the window and into the middle of the floor, amid piles of broken glass and the drifting snow. The torn, jagged edge of the bough rested against the demolished window frame.
In a moment, Tyler was back, clad in his thick, long robe and a pair of unlaced work boots. "Where are your things?"
"I have everything on." Which was not quite true, but she would deal with her underthings tomorrow. She did not think she could bear to have Tyler Forrest handling her bra.
"Okay. Grab the covers and pillow, and put your arms around my neck."
"You don't have to carry me!" she protested in alarm.
"I'm afraid I do, kiddo. There's a lot of glass on the floor." He bent and slid one hand under her knees and the other around her shoulders. A quick smile showed in the darkness. "Don't worry. I'm stronger than I look."