by Robyn Carr
“Oh, I dunno,” Midge informed them all between big bites of scrambled egg, “I just dunno what to do. Maybe I should get a full-time job. Get my own place, not have to listen to Mother anymore. But then, higher education has always been my dream. Without a college degree, how will I ever really make something of myself?” She gulped down more egg and fluttered her skimpy lashes at Sin. “What do you think, Mr. Riker?”
He said something neutral.
She started babbling again.
The red-haired cook spoke up the next time Midge paused to shovel in more food. “So, how long will you be staying in town, Mr. Riker?”
Beside him, he felt Sophie go very still. She’d asked him that question herself once, the first night he came here. He had evaded. And she hadn’t asked again.
“Mr. Riker?” the cook prompted, reminding him of a disapproving schoolmarm who’d waited too long for a response from a student she didn’t much like anyway.
“I’ll be here another week. Maybe two.” Idiocy. Pure and simple. Things couldn’t go on this way for another two weeks.
But even as he admitted the impossibility of the situation, he knew he planned to carry on with it—and with Sophie—for as long as the lie lasted.
“Sophie says you’re here on business.”
“Yes.”
“And what kind of business is that?”
Sin caught the warning glance Sophie sent Myra’s way, but Myra kept her sharp green eyes right on him.
“I’m in real-estate acquisition.”
“You’re buying property here, in Nevada County?”
“I’m…checking out the situation.”
Caleb joined the interrogation then. “What does that mean?”
“Caleb, please.” Sophie jumped to the rescue. “Sinclair is our guest.”
Sin put his hand over hers. “It’s all right.” He looked at Caleb—and began dishing out more half truths. “What I mean is, before I would buy property here for potential development, I would have to thoroughly investigate the climate for such a project.”
“The climate?”
“Would the community be open to it? Would local government stymie us at every turn—or make the thousand and one permits we’d need easy to acquire?”
“We don’t want another shopping mall around here anyway,” Caleb said sourly.
Now it was Myra’s turn to shoot the big man a quelling look, after which she started in on Sin again. “So, you’re here to find out if you want to do business in Nevada County. Is that it?”
“You could say that, yes.” Though it wouldn’t be true.
“And that could take two more weeks?”
“It could.”
Right then, someone tapped on the door that led out to a small back porch. All heads turned that way. Sin knew a shameful moment of total relief, to have the inquisition over—at least for the moment.
Myra pushed back her chair. “That’ll be the campers.” She went to the door.
Two thin, shabbily dressed older men stood there, bedrolls and packs slung over their shoulders. “Good morning, Myra.” One of them tipped the sweat-stained felt hat he wore.
“You just hold it right there.” The cook bustled off toward the pantry.
The man in the felt hat caught sight of the rest of them and tipped his hat a second time. “Howdy, folks—Sophie B.”
Sophie gave him one of those smiles of hers, a smile bright enough to light up the whole room. “Hello, Edgar. And Silas, how are you?”
“Just fine, ma’am. Beautiful day.”
“Yes. It certainly is.”
“Come on in,” Sophie said.
“No,” the one called Edgar shook his head. “We got to be going.”
Myra emerged from the pantry carrying two small brown paper sacks. “Just a little something. It’ll be lunchtime before you know it.”
“We surely do thank you, Myra.”
“That we do. A bite always comes in handy.”
“You boys take care of yourselves now.”
“You know we will.…” They went off down the walk and Myra closed the door. She returned to the table.
Sin looked at Sophie. “Bag lunches for the homeless?”
Midge piped up again. “Edgar and Silas aren’t homeless. Well, not exactly, anyway. They’re prospectors. They dredge the South Fork. But they never made a big strike. So they kind of ended up living day-to-day.”
Sin held back a chuckle over that one. His grandfather had worked in the mines, after all. And his father had been an expert on the history of the area.
Silas and Edgar had chosen the wrong business. Though some hard-rock mining concerns still operated in the gold country with reasonable success, no dredger he’d ever heard of had made a big strike in the past hundred years or so.
Midge went on. “But they do drink, I heard—Edgar and Silas, I mean. They both got a liquor problem, like a lot of miners. It’s sad. It comes from busted dreams, the way I see it. If you got no dreams left, you got to soothe yourself with something.”
Sin hardly heard her. He was looking at Sophie, remembering how it had irritated him the other night when she’d sent those kids out to sleep on his land.
Today he felt differently. Today he felt…admiration. Yes, admiration was the word. Admiration for a woman who didn’t have the money to put a decent kitchen in her rundown resort, but still let her cook pass out food to every down-and-outer who knocked on the back door.
Admiration.
It wasn’t like him. Not like him at all.
Sophie smiled at him, reached for her coffee cup and drained the last of it.
Midge went on, “But still, I gotta say, it might not be so bad. To live free in an old van like Silas and Edgar. And in the summertime, to sleep out under the stars. To have Myra give me bag lunches when I got really hungry. It might be better than my life, for instance.
“I mean, it’s not easy, worrying every day about my GPA, listening to my mother nagging and wishing that my boyfriend would either ask me to marry him or get his sorry butt out of my life. I just—”
Myra had heard enough. “Finish up. I want some help to get the breakfast on in the dining room. And then you’ve got vacuuming and dusting and a freezer to defrost.”
Midge let out a long, deep sigh. Then she picked up her fork and finished her second helping of scrambled eggs.
Chapter 7
Sin left as soon as he’d finished his breakfast. After all, he had to keep up the fiction that he had lots of work to do, checking out the local business climate, courting the county politicos.
Sophie walked him to his car. They stopped on the path before they reached the parking area under the pines.
“The theater’s closed tonight.” She swayed a little closer to him, turning her face up, so her sweet mouth was only inches from his. “And tomorrow night. And the next night, too. I only run it Thursday through Sunday. Did I tell you that before?”
He looked at her slim nose and her wide mouth and those beautiful eyes. He was like some adolescent with his first crush—he just couldn’t get enough of looking at her.
“Sinclair, did I tell you?”
“You might have.”
“Well, anyway, now you know. That’s three nights a week I have to myself.”
He knew what she was hinting at, and gladly played right along. “I hope you’re planning on spending those nights with me.”
She went on tiptoe and kissed him, a little peck of a kiss. “I would not spend those nights with anyone but you.”
A quick kiss was never enough. “Kiss me like you mean it.”
She cast a glance around. “Well, I don’t think anyone’s looking.”
“I don’t give a damn if they are.” He pulled her close and took the kiss he wanted—a long, slow, achingly sweet one.
Finally he had to take her by the waist and put her away from him. “I’d better go. I know you have to get to work.”
She let out a rueful little sigh. “And you, too.”
The conscience he wasn’t supposed to have jabbed at him. “Right.” He kissed the end of her nose, not daring to kiss anything else or he would scoop her up and carry her back to the guest house and keep her there all day long. “Tonight.” He backed away, knowing he had to go, but jealous of losing sight of her.
“Tonight.” She stood there in the shadow of the pines until he drove away.
That day went much like the day before. Sin returned to his hotel. He checked in with Rob. Then he went to that fitness club again to swim and lift weights.
A gray sedan pulled out into traffic behind him when he left the health club’s parking lot. Sin drove slowly, signaling clearly at every turn, making it easy for whoever it was to trail right along. Glances in his rearview and side mirrors told him little. The driver was male, of medium build. He wore a tan shirt, had a crew cut. Dark glasses hid his eyes. He might have been twenty or forty or anywhere in between.
Finally, about two blocks from his hotel, Sin put on his blinker and carefully pulled to the shoulder of the road. The sedan drove on by. Sin looked over just as the car passed him. The eyes behind those dark glasses were looking right at him. Sin waved.
The gray car sped off.
Sin sat there for a moment before pulling out again. Whoever lurked behind those dark glasses understood now that Sin had spotted him.
And why in hell was he being followed in the first place? What was there to discover about his visit here—beyond the fact that he was having an affair with Ms. Sophie B. Jones?
Could that information be of use to someone in some way? Offhand, Sin didn’t see how.
Sin had lunch at the hotel restaurant, then placed a call to his second in command at Inkerris, Incorporated. His associate said just what he expected him to say. The two projects they had in the works were running smoothly and he couldn’t think of any reason someone might put a detective on Sin.
“But I’ll be happy to check into it more thoroughly.”
Sin told him not to bother. “If it becomes necessary, I’ll handle it at this end.”
When he hung up, he found himself wondering about Sophie, remembering all the questions he saw in her eyes—questions he knew she was careful not to ask for fear she might chase him away.
Could she have decided to get some answers another way?
No. He couldn’t believe that. Not Sophie. She didn’t have a devious bone in her body.
Sin chose an orange from the fruit basket on the coffee table. Staring through a sliding glass door at the small garden patio outside his suite, he slowly began removing the peel.
He’d learned early that it didn’t pay to trust anybody. People did what they had to do to get what they wanted. If you put your trust in them, they would only betray you, one way or another. He’d seen it time and time again. It was how the world worked.
Yet, in spite of his very real and practical cynicism, Sin trusted Sophie Jones. He could find no deceit when he looked in her eyes. Though it went against all he’d trained himself to believe, he simply could not picture her hiring somebody to follow him around.
Besides, he thought wryly as he separated off a slice of orange, Sophie couldn’t afford to have him followed. She spent every cent she had trying to keep her precious Mountain Star in the black—and feeding every stray creature, human or otherwise, that wandered into her life.
No, whoever had decided to find out his business in Northern California, it wasn’t Sophie B. Jones.
Sin ate his orange. He made a few more calls.
And then he waited.
Until he could see her again.
That night went by like the ones before it—too swiftly, even though Sin and Sophie had more time with that impossible theater of hers closed. They walked down to the spot by the creek and sat there for an hour. Then they wandered back to her little house, where they stayed until daylight.
In the morning, as the sun rose, they rode out, taking a different series of trails than the time before, though they did cross the pretty little pasture where so many roses grew wild. He left her around eight and returned to his hotel to pass the day somehow.
Until he could see her again.
The day seemed to drag on forever. He didn’t see a single late-model gray sedan. His shadow had either given up—or become a lot more careful.
That night Sophie asked him if he had any family left at all.
“No. There’s no one.”
She was lying on her stomach, her chin propped on her hands. She rolled to the side and sat up, tugging on the sheet so it would cover those high, full breasts. “I used to be the same way.”
Since he had most of his mind on that sheet—and the tempting prospect of peeling it back—it took Sin a few seconds to really hear her words. Then he frowned. “Used to be?”
“Yep.” She wiggled around a little, pulling the damn sheet even higher.
“Sophie. That makes no sense. You either have a family or you don’t.”
“I don’t.” She was smiling way too smugly. “But I do.”
He thought he took her meaning then. “I understand. Caleb’s like a brother. And Myra thinks of you as a daughter.”
She wiggled around some more. The sheet slipped a little. She caught it, pulled it back up. “I do think of them as family—but I wasn’t referring to them a minute ago.”
“Damn it, you’re driving me crazy with that sheet.”
She went wide-eyed. “I am?”
“You know you are.”
Her lashes fluttered down. “I do?” She let the sheet fall. And she looked right at him.
He swore low with feeling. And then he reached for her.
Sometime later, she lay beneath him, the sheet all tangled around their feet. She sighed and stroked his back. “What I meant was…”
He made a sleepy noise of complete contentment.
She poked him in the shoulder. “Sinclair. I’m trying to talk to you.” She nudged him again. “Come on. Listen. Please.”
He let out a few grouchy groans, but then she whispered, so sweetly, “Please.”
He slid to the side and propped his head on his hand. “All right. What?”
She reached down for the sheet, found it and pulled it over them. “Remember, before you distracted me—”
“I distracted you?”
She giggled. “Well, all right. Before we distracted each other, I was talking about how I used to think I had no family, but I do, after all?”
“I remember.” Though it made no sense at all. He had paid well to learn all the facts about her. Those facts included parents long deceased and a beloved aunt who’d died when she was twenty-one—and that was it, as far as relatives went.
“Sophie, what are you driving at?”
“Well, I have an honorary family.”
“This is getting more incomprehensible by the moment.”
She smoothed the sheet, flipped her hair back over her shoulder. “If you’ll just listen, I’ll explain.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. I suppose you never heard of the family they call the Jones Gang.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No. I promise. This is for real.”
“The Jones Gang?”
“Well, that’s just what people call them. Most of them live in North Magdalene, up Highway Forty-Nine, between Nevada City and—”
“I’ve heard of North Magdalene.”
“Well, okay. Did you know that there are a lot of Joneses there?”
“No, I have to admit I didn’t know that.”
“Well, there are. A lot of Joneses. And they’ve kind of adopted me. Because I’m a Jones, too, though I’m not a real blood relation.”
He thought that over. “You’ve been adopted. By the Jones Gang.”
“Yes. That’s exactly right. I have been adopted…informally, of course.”
“Of course. Why the Jones Gang?”
“Why did they adopt me?”
“No, why
are they called the Jones Gang?”
“Because they’re a pretty wild bunch—or they were, until they all found love and settled down.”
“Wild?”
“Yes. Bad actors. Hooligans. One step away from being outlaws. You know?”
“I suppose.”
“I want to take you there.”
“You do?” The idea of driving up Highway Forty-Nine to meet a family of hooligans didn’t particularly excite him.
She must have seen his reluctance in his face, because she nudged him with her elbow. “Come with me. Tomorrow, in the afternoon. I think I can swing a few hours away from here, if I work like crazy all morning—how about you? Do you think you can manage to get away?”
From waiting all day until he could see her again? It shouldn’t be too difficult.
“Please?”
He couldn’t resist the appeal in those eyes. “I think I can find the time.”
Her smile took his breath away. “I’m so glad—oh, and maybe we could swim. In the river.” The Yuba River wound its way in and out of the canyons along the highway. “It’s the best time of year for it.”
“I’ll bring something to swim in.”
“Oh, I just know you’re going to love the Joneses.”
“We’ll see.”
“Sinclair. You’re so cautious.”
“Sophie. You love everybody.”
“Maybe so. But the Jones family is special. Just you wait and see.”
At two the next afternoon, they walked into a bar called the Hole in the Wall, which stood in the middle of Main Street in the tiny mountain town of North Magdalene.
Sophie had already explained to Sin that the bar—and the restaurant next door—were Jones-owned businesses. As were the gift shop across the street, the service station a few doors down, the one motel and the gold sales store up near the end of town—which was easily visible from the beginning of town, as North Magdalene wasn’t much more than a bend in the road. The sign at the foot of Main Street read, Welcome To North Magdalene, Population 229. Smokey Says Fire Danger Is High.
Inside the Hole in the Wall, Sophie bounced right up to the bar, towing Sin along behind her. “Hello, Jared,” she said to the tall, rangy character with the steel-gray eyes who stood behind the beer taps.