by Harper Allen
The big animal turned his head slightly. Her awed gaze turned to shock.
“His cheek,” she whispered. “What happened to him?”
“The son of a bitch Del whipped did that to him with a knife,” Connor said huskily, his gaze fixed as hers was on the horrific gully of a scar running along the gelding’s cheek and just missing his eye. “He’s got other scars, too, but this one’s the worst. The veterinarian Del took him to when he found him said it had to have been done when he wasn’t much more than a colt. He’s got every right to hate people, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s—dammit, Tess!”
She felt no fear. She’d never felt any fear around horses, Tess thought, and her trust in them had never been betrayed. The only memory she had of her father was of gentle hands encircling her waist as he set her on a horse much like this one—the Appaloosa he’d raised and trained himself, the Appaloosa he’d been riding in a rodeo earlier on the day he’d been killed.
Warm breath blew from round nostrils. A soft whicker came from the massive throat. Even as Connor grabbed for her, she touched her fingertips to the straight nose.
“Yah-ta-hey, Chorizo,” she murmured, using the traditional Dineh greeting. “You and I, we know each other well, don’t we? And we’ve both known monsters.”
The gelding whickered again, dipping his big head as if in submission to her touch. Connor took her other arm.
“I’ve never seen him behave like this with anyone, not even Del,” he said quietly. “But let’s go now, Tess.”
He was silent as they walked back along the length of the barn. It wasn’t until they stepped outside that he turned to her with the question she’d known he would ask.
“Where are yours?”
His voice trembled with anger, but the anger, Tess knew, wasn’t directed at her. It was directed at a man Connor had never known, a man he would never now know. Shadowed gray eyes held hers as his hands framed her upturned face.
“Where are your scars, sweetheart?” he whispered unevenly. “And how old were you when the monster hurt you?”
Chapter Eleven
She was talking but she still hadn’t answered his question, Connor thought ten minutes later as Tess paused in her narrative to smooth at a small rip in the black leatherette of the couch she was sitting on. They were in the office and supply room attached to the barn; a more private location for their talk, he’d decided, than the stable area they’d been in. Private or not, the slim woman sitting in front of him looking down at her hands still hadn’t answered the questions he’d asked.
Or maybe she was answering them, he thought as her low tones resumed. He was Belacana, as she’d once said. But Tess Smith was Dineh. If she was to answer his questions at all she would do it in the unhurried way of the People, whose tradition of oral history had been handed down from generation to generation, keeping their past alive.
“My mother’s mother died when I wasn’t much more than a baby, but I’m sure I remember her. Her own grandmother had survived the Long Walk, and Nali—” Tess’s smile didn’t erase the darkness behind her gaze “—Nali is our name for Grandmother—passed on the story to Darla and me.”
Connor blinked, and in the brief instant while his eyes were closed he saw a ragged and endless trail of people stretching out along a black hilltop. He met Tess’s slight frown.
“The Long Walk,” he said huskily. “When the Navajo’s homes were burned, their livestock slaughtered, and they were forced to relocate three hundred miles away.”
“Eight thousand men, women and children,” she said softly. “When they were allowed to return home four years later, two thousand had died.”
She sighed and went on, her fingers moving unconsciously in her lap. It was as if she was spinning the thread of her story and then weaving it into a pattern for him to see and understand, Connor thought, resisting the urge to still those restless fingers, to press his own to those moving lips and tell her she didn’t have to relive this. She needed to relive it. And she’d chosen him to relive it with.
“So Nali passed on our history to those who would listen. And my mother made it her life’s work.” Amber eyes glanced up at him. “She was a Dineh storyteller. She spoke in libraries and schools to children, telling them of First Man and First Woman, Coyote and the other animals, the meaning behind the Moccasin Game. She loved what she did, and she was happy that her work allowed her to move from place to place with my father. He was a clown.”
This time her smile was real. “A rodeo clown, Connor. He distracted the bulls from goring the riders they’d tossed. But his real love was horses.” She looked down at her lap again. “He and my mother would have loved the Double B. They hoped to start a breeding ranch themselves one day.”
“When you found Darla’s photo in Joey’s backpack at the motel, you told me your father had died when you were young.”
It seemed a lifetime ago, Connor thought in faint disconcertion. Had he really only known her for three days? And at that first encounter, had he really been foolish enough to have seen her as a female, and slightly older, version of Joey? The short, boyish haircut revealed the delicately molded line of her jaw, and her T-shirt and jeans followed the curves and dips of what was indisputably a woman’s body. He felt sudden heat rise in him, and with an effort forced the inopportune response to subside as she continued.
“He was killed by a bull that was charging the front row of the spectator stands. I was only five years old at the time and Darla was eight, but we were both old enough to know that my mother was devastated by his death. She loved him so much, you see.” She shook her head, and at the small movement a feathery strand of dark hair curved along her cheekbone. “But she loved us, too, and that’s why she married again a few years later—because she felt we should have a father, and although Brad Turow wasn’t Dineh, he seemed like a good man and a good provider. Not eight months after she married him, she caught a cold that turned into a lung infection. It took her life.”
“And you and Darla were left with Turow.” Connor couldn’t hide his anger. “When did he start showing his true colors?”
“Almost right away. He wasn’t happy about being saddled with two adopted daughters, and he let us know it. At first he just got stricter—sending Darla to her room for not finishing her homework fast enough, making me go to bed for laughing too loudly at a television show. But then he started using his belt on us. He used it on our backs so the teachers at school wouldn’t wonder why it was too painful for us to sit down.”
Something flashed behind her gaze. “He’s dead. He’s been dead for a long time. But I still can’t forgive him for what he did to two little girls, Connor. No child should live in fear the way we did. For some reason I seemed to set his anger off more than Darla did, and I know she was terrified that one day his violence toward me would turn murderous.”
“You were afraid to tell anyone?” he asked tightly. “Your teachers? Neighbors?”
“We told everyone.” Her tone was flat. “And no one believed us.”
“But if he used a belt there must have been proof. How could any reasonable person deny that kind of evidence?”
“Proof and reason, Connor?” She looked at him with hard eyes. “Most of the time he was good at leaving no proof. And our stories seemed unreasonable to the people we tried to tell. He was well liked, well respected, a pillar of the community. Most thought he was a saint for putting up with the obviously unbalanced children of the Navajo woman he’d married. In the end Darla found her own way to stop him from beating me.”
A young girl lying stiffly on a bed, her eyes squeezed shut. That same young girl floating above the bed, her mouth wide open in a soundless scream. He didn’t know how he’d gained the knowledge of what she was about to tell him, Connor thought sickly, but somehow he had. He’d been balanced on the thin edge of death, and perhaps that had been enough to enable him to see into the soul of the woman whose life force had brought him back.
It d
idn’t matter how he knew. What mattered was that a young girl had been violated in the most heinous way of all.
“He said he’d leave me alone if Darla let him do what he wanted.” Tess’s voice was a dry rasp. “And so she…she—”
Her eyes squeezed shut. The restless fingers in her lap stilled. The low cry that came from her parted lips seemed to be ripped from the very depths of her soul, and immediately Connor was on his feet, pulling her from the couch.
“Don’t say it,” he commanded unevenly. “You don’t have to tell me any more, sweetheart.”
He didn’t want to let her go, he thought fiercely as he tightened his hold around her, felt her tears soaking hotly through his shirt. He never wanted to let her go. He wanted to fight the monsters for her the rest of his life, change the endings of her stories, give her back the home that had been taken so brutally from her so long ago.
He wanted all that. Why in the world did wanting all that seem suddenly dangerous?
He frowned and pulled her closer, but even as he did she pushed herself slightly away. Her eyes met his.
“I have to, Connor—don’t you see? The ones who are left tell the story. That’s how the truth survives.”
“I know,” he said huskily. “I just can’t stand to see you hurting like this.”
She smeared away the tears with the back of one hand. “It hurt more all these years to keep it inside. It hurt more to feel ashamed that someone would someday see this.”
She moved out of his arms and turned her back to him, at the same time lifting the white cotton of her T-shirt up to her shoulderblades. Pain sliced through him, and for a moment he couldn’t speak.
The marks on her back weren’t as deep or as wide as those on the maimed Appaloosa, but they bore witness to the same agony and cruelty as Chorizo’s prominent scar. The thin white lines criss-crossing the otherwise smooth cinnamon skin would once have been open and bleeding, Connor thought. The physical wounds had healed, but the emotional ones were still visible.
She’d used the word ashamed. He could take that away from her, at least. Spreading his hands on either side of Tess’s rib cage, he brushed his mouth along the worst of the scars.
He felt the small shock that ran through her. He raised his head, gently pulled her shirt down and turned her to face him.
“Tell me the rest,” he said steadily.
Her eyes were wide and dark, her lips slightly parted. She swallowed and gave him a tiny nod.
“He went to Darla’s bed every night for two years, and then one night he tried to come to mine. She shot him with his own gun.” The quaver that had been in Tess’s voice a few sentences ago was replaced by sadness. “She killed the monster before he could get me, and after that night I never saw her again.”
“She ran away?”
“Took me to a neighbor’s, told the woman to call 911 and then disappeared into the night. She was only seventeen years old. It couldn’t have been easy for her, especially after she became a mother a few years later and Joey’s father deserted them, but I think if Darla were alive now she would be proud of the way her son turned out.”
“Her son and her sister,” Connor amended. He tipped her chin up. “We’re going to keep the monsters away from Joey, Tess. Even if Paula can’t dig up anything on Jansen, I’m hopeful she’ll find something in Quayle’s background that we can—”
“Del told me I’d probably find you—oops. Sorry, Virge, I should have knocked. Want me to go and come back in again?”
The man sticking his head into the room through the half-open door was of medium height. His features were pleasant, his grin apologetic and his expression as he met Connor’s gaze held genuine warmth.
There’d really never been any good reason to dislike him, Connor thought stonily. Not until now. He resisted the urge to slam the door on that billion-dollar grin.
“Don’t bother.” He turned to Tess, and was caught off balance as he saw the tentative answering smile she was giving the interloper. His introduction came out in a curt growl.
“Tess, meet Jess Crawford. He was sent to the Double B fifteen years ago for hacking into his school’s computers—and he’s the only one out of the four of us who ended up proving crime really does pay.”
“ULTRALIGHTS. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t zip around in ’em. What a freakin’ rush, man.” A forkful of sirloin halfway to his mouth, Jess shot a suddenly guilty look across the table at Tess. “Uh-oh, my bad,” he muttered. He frowned at a wide-eyed Joey. “You heard ‘fudgin’,’ right? What a fudgin’ rush.”
Joey grinned. “Whatever you say, J-man.”
“C-man, dude. C as in Crawford. I guess C as in Connor, too, but I’ve always called him Virgil or Virge,” Jess added. He gave Connor an innocent glance. “Right, Virge?”
“Except for that time when I convinced you not to,” Connor said briefly. “You planning on eating those carrots, Joey, or just fooling around with them?”
“Fooling around with—” Joey caught the glance Tess leveled at him, and changed his answer in mid-sentence. “Eating them,” he mumbled, spearing two with his fork.
Tess hid a smile. A steady diet of Jess Crawford would have the same effect on her young nephew as snacking on candy bars for breakfast, lunch and supper, and although she had no trouble dealing with Joey’s natural exuberance, she wasn’t about to let him cross the line. But from what Jess had said when he’d walked back from the barn a few hours ago with her and Connor, he was only staying the night. Besides, she couldn’t really blame Joey for finding Jess’s bad-boy behavior amusing.
She did, too. He was outrageous and irrepressibly ridiculous. And after her cathartic outpouring to Connor this afternoon, she felt able to cope with a little ridiculousness.
It had been as if a crushing weight had finally rolled from her shoulders—a weight she’d been carrying for most of her life. Out of all the people in the world who might have taken that burden from her, it had been the man she’d first seen as closed-off and rigidly repressed who’d done it.
Except the way she’d first seen Connor was nothing like the man he really was, she thought. She wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if that had been the case. She’d fallen in love with the man she’d glimpsed behind that closed-off wall, the man whose emotions had been plainly written on his face as he’d listened to her, who hadn’t been able to hide his anger, his compassion, his—
His love for her?
She wasn’t sure of that last one, Tess admitted to herself with reluctant honesty. When he’d taken her in his arms, he’d gathered her to him as if he had finally found the woman, the place and the position he’d been searching for all his life, and intended to hold on to what he’d found. But a heartbeat later she’d thought she sensed a hesitation in him.
Maybe that had been her imagination. Maybe everything had been in her imagination. Or maybe she wanted too much from the man, too fast.
Because some part of Virgil Connor would always remain Virgil Connor—slightly boxed in, slightly reserved in certain situations, slightly too serious slightly too often. She accepted that, Tess thought with a slow smile. She’d witnessed at first hand that reserve falling completely apart at least once, and she fully intended to see if she could make it fall apart again when the opportunity presented itself.
Although Jess might beat her to it, if not in the same way. It was obvious Connor felt toward him as Chorizo would about a burr under his saddle, and equally obvious that since Jess had arrived, Connor’s hold on his self-control had been slipping.
She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed, she realized, as Del lifted one eyebrow in shared amusement with her before turning his attention to his newest guest.
“Last month you were saying everyone should try solar-powered snowboards, this month it’s flying around and risking your neck in an ultralight plane. You know what your problem is, Jess?”
Connor grunted audibly, and Del’s lips twitched upward. “Too much money, too many toy
s, no wife. You should start thinking about getting married one of these days.”
“Good idea. Who to?” Jess said with ungrammatical promptness. “You finally got smart and scooped up Greta after clinging to your bachelor ways for too long. For about three seconds after I met her last month I thought I might have a chance with Susannah Bird, but then I saw the way she looked at Tye and I knew I wasn’t even in the running. Until a few hours ago I thought all the good ones were taken.” He looked at Tess, one blue eye closing in a wink. “Now I’m not so sure.”
His leer was so absurd that she couldn’t prevent a bubble of laughter from escaping her. Laughing at foolishness felt good, Tess realized. Had she ever actually done that before?
“You finished, dude?” The empty plate in front of Joey seemed answer enough for Jess as he grinned at the boy. “I dumped my stuff in the last bedroom upstairs. On the bed you’ll find a couple of prototype computer games and a gadget to play them on that hasn’t been released on the market yet. Can you try them out and report back to me tomorrow morning on whether they’re any good? I think there’s a space-battle simulation and some kind of gnome-world-treasure-maze thingy.”
“Boy moves fast when he wants,” Del observed mildly as Joey, with an awestruck “Cool!” took the stairs two at a time, Chorrie as usual tucked under one arm. “Good thinking.”
“You made his evening, Jess,” Tess said, smiling at him.
“When Del told me on the phone there was a nine-year-old involved I tossed them in my duffel bag.” Tess shrugged. “Hey, I knew we had some serious business to get down to, and I figured Joey didn’t need to sit around listening to us talk about what we’re up against.”