She was with him all the way, her breath a fierce urging in his ear, then on his lips, then whirling him along into a wild ride that swept him into regions of the heart he had never known existed. Her name was on his lips at the height of their passion, and his name escaped from hers, the words blending as their bodies convulsed as one.
In the breathless moment when he collapsed against her, spent, he still felt at one with her. He did not feel the immediate loneliness that had always overtaken him after making love. He felt connected, resurrected, at peace.
They spiraled together down off that incredible high, capable only of sighs and whispers.
“Brooke?”
“Mmm.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” The word was a sibilant syllable against his throat. Her hand curved trustingly amid the hair on his chest. When he looked down at her, he saw that her eyes were luminous, and he wanted to sink into that calm blueness and be lost forever. “Make me believe in love, too, Brooke,” he whispered. For an answer, she lifted his hand to her lips and kissed the palm.
He cradled her close, aware of every curve, every bit of flesh that pressed so tightly against his. And then they slept, plunged into a deep and dreamless sleep that enclosed them in each other’s world, where he wanted to be for the rest of his life.
She had said that she wanted to make love to him in a way that he would remember after she had gone. His last thought before sleep was that she had made love to him in a way that made him sure that he never wanted her to go. He never wanted to be without her. Never, as long as he lived.
WHEN THEY AWOKE it was morning and the storm had ended. Self-consciously they dressed, pretending not to look at each other, and emerged from the cave into a world washed fresh and new by the rain.
“I’ll stroll up to the Jeep and see what food’s left in the picnic basket. I think there’s bread and more fruit,” Cord said. He dropped a light kiss on her cheek before he headed up the path.
Brooke found a pool of water collected in a hollow of a rock and used it to wash her face. There was no mirror, but she thought she must look different this morning. After making love with Cord, she certainly felt different. She felt washed as clean and new as the world this morning, ready to start life afresh.
Cord brought bread, salad and the thermos of cider. They toasted the bread on sticks over the remains of the fire, ate and then carefully quenched the fire.
“There’s one fire that can’t be put out,” Cord said. Then he pulled Brooke to him and kissed her thoroughly, recapturing briefly the passion of the previous night. She clung to him, unsure what he expected now. Last night he had asked her to help him believe in love, too, but her request could have fueled the intensity of the moment. She’d always believed that a real relationship took time to develop, and the one thing they didn’t have was time. She would leave Rancho Encantado to return to L.A. soon, and he was moving somewhere else. For a moment a scene flashed before her: running into Cord somewhere, sometime. She would introduce him to her baby daughter, and he would make a napkin mouse to amuse her. It wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen.
“We’d better get back,” she said.
He kept his arm around her shoulders. “If you like, we could go over the next ridge and take a look at the caves there,” he said. “If what Jerusha wrote is correct, they could be the real location of the Tyson party’s shelter.”
“Don’t you need to get back to work?”
His laugh was tinged with irony. “Justine told me to show you around, didn’t she?”
Brooke didn’t want to be parted from him. She wanted to be with him as much as possible. In the difficult days that were to follow, she would have these moments with Cord to remember, to cherish, to sustain her through bearing a child and raising it alone.
She smiled at him. “Okay,” she said, and he took her hand as they headed up the slope back to the Jeep.
She gave up trying to figure out what was going on between them. Maybe, as Cord had said, comfort in the night was enough.
CORD FELT GOOD riding beside Brooke up the mountain, knowing that his absence was, for once, sanctioned by his employer and that Pearsall, his heir apparent, was capable of managing crises. He didn’t even try to stop himself from glancing over at Brooke now and then and marveling at what had passed between them last night. He hadn’t dreamed that she could be so passionate, so spirited a lover.
He reached over and placed a hand on her knee.
“It was good, you know,” he said.
“Last night?”
“What else?”
She smiled, and he saw a momentary shimmer of sadness in her eyes. “Comfort in the night?” she said, and he understood what she meant.
“More than that,” he said quietly.
He thought she wanted to say something, and he knew what it would be. She wanted to ask, “How much more than comfort?” But she didn’t and he knew why. Self-preservation demanded that she not put her emotions out there to be trampled on. He was sure that she didn’t have a clue about his deepening feelings for her, and he knew he’d better make them clear before long.
But now they were drawing near to the second group of caves. “See up there?” he said, removing his hand from Brooke’s knee and pointing toward the shadowed openings in the cliff ahead.
“How could anyone get up that high?”
“There’s a path.”
“How far away are we?”
“A few miles, but this location would have been pretty remote before the railroad blasted out some of the rock.”
“I didn’t know a train ever came through here.”
“The railroad was going to build tracks so they could haul borax to the coast, but they abandoned the project when the old mine near Rancho Encantado closed.”
He pulled the Jeep into the shade of the cliff and turned off the ignition. “From here we hike,” he said.
Their walk took the better part of an hour, and when at last they stood before the cave openings, Brooke said, “Are you sure we can get up there?” She studied the openings in the wall above them.
“Yes, and with minimal danger to life and limb. Are you feeling okay?”
“Still no morning sickness,” she said. “Maybe all this fresh air agrees with me.”
Cord led the way as they climbed to a narrow road that was little more than a ledge. He was glad that Brooke was so surefooted and confident as they began to ascend, but he held tightly to her hand as they made their way along.
When finally they stopped outside the first cave, Brooke turned and looked back. “Whew,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t look before we made it to the top.” They could see the Jeep where they had left it, from this distance as tiny as a toy.
Cord had already sized up the entrances to the caves. He heaved and pushed aside a pile of rocks so they could enter the nearest one. Once inside, they realized that this was a large cave, but they saw nothing of interest but a couple of broken dishes.
“These don’t look so old,” Brooke said after picking up some of the shards and inspecting them.
“Campers,” said Cord. “Maybe vagrants.”
The next cave was a little harder to enter because the opening was in the roof. This meant that they had to lower themselves inside, which wasn’t difficult due to a flat projection of rock below the opening. Cord went first, then turned to help Brooke as she skinned through the narrow aperture.
This cave was larger than the last one and had a rock platform bordering the back wall. The remains of what appeared to be an old ladder lay at its base.
Brooke peered up into the gloom, where Cord’s flashlight picked out drawings on the rock.
“Indian petroglyphs,” Cord told her dismissively.
Brooke disagreed. “I could believe that if one of them didn’t resemble a prairie schooner.” She moved in for a closer view, but then her eye was caught by a faint scrawl at eye level on the rock wall directly in front of her.
He trained the flashlight beam on the rock and saw that these weren’t only words; they were names. He could barely make them out. James Privette. Annabel Privette. Melissa Privette. Jody Privette. Lucy Privette. Frank Taggart, Jerusha Taggart, Nathan and Teensy Taggart. Then came the names of another family, the Cokeleys, followed by those of Willis Tyson and three single men, Jarvis Wagner, Melvin Stone and someone referred to only as Albrecht. “We live here,” it said.
“‘We live here.’ If I needed proof, here it is.” Brooke’s eyes were glowing with the thrill of discovery.
Cord did not feel Brooke’s exhilaration; instead, he felt an aversion to reading the names, especially that of Willis Tyson.
“Brooke, let’s go.”
“Go? Go now? Don’t you see what this discovery means to me, Cord? My great-great-great-grandmother lived in this cave and probably died here. To me this is hallowed ground.” She stared at him for a moment, but he was unable to summon even the slightest enthusiasm for this place. It made him feel uncomfortable.
Her eyes beseeched him. “Cord, now that I’m here, I want to see all of the cave. I grew up hearing about Annabel Privette. Reading Jerusha’s diary has made me realize how the women Forty-niners had dreams of making life better for their children. Annabel and other women like her died in the attempt to attain those dreams, and few people know or care about their sacrifice. I realize now what the slant of my book should be. I want to write about the women of Cedrella Pass.”
Cord thought that the world could do without one more line of print on what had happened here. But there was no holding Brooke back.
“I’m going up there,” she said, pointing to the platform.
“Not so fast. The ladder may not be safe.”
She jiggled it experimentally. “I think it will bear my weight. Will you hold it for me?”
Cord let out a long breath. To deny her anything when she was in this mood was impossible. “All right, Brooke.” He handed her the flashlight. “You go, but you go alone. I’ll wait for you here. It wouldn’t do for the ladder to break behind us, leaving us both stranded up there with no way down.”
The ladder remained stable as Brooke climbed it, but he held his breath when she had to scramble up the last few feet of the rock face because the ladder was so short.
“Is everything all right?” he called up to her.
“Fine. Don’t worry.”
He stared up at the glow of light overhead, wishing he’d brought two flashlights. Down in the cave’s lower level, he was alone in the dark, alone with his thoughts. Alone with his memories of his childhood, a miserable time that he’d rather forget, and alone with the boy he had once been, a boy called Bucky Tyson. He’d been sure that he’d left that boy behind, but now, just when he was getting his life together and hoping to make a difference to boys like the one he had been, Bucky turned up.
Would he ever get over being Bucky Tyson? Would he ever be able to leave that name and all that it meant behind?
At the moment, he didn’t think so.
ONCE BROOKE REACHED the platform, she lay quietly for a moment while she regained her breath. Then she stood and focused the beam of the flashlight around the wide chamber.
“Brooke, let’s make this quick.” Cord’s voice drifted up from below. He sounded annoyed.
“I haven’t even seen anything yet,” she called back. Water dripped somewhere in the shadows, and a musty smell hung oppressively in the air. She located a shallow pool fed by a runnel that seemed to originate in a crack in the cave wall, and tasted the water. It was sweet, not salty. The Tyson party could have drunk it. Would have had to drink it, considering the lack of streams around here, she realized as she swung the flashlight beam slowly around her.
This upper region of the cave was a long and spacious chamber divided by an outcrop of stalactites near a pile of rubble. As she edged around this obstacle, a flash of color amid the gravel and debris caught her eye.
“Brooke? What the hell’s going on up there?” Cord yelled, exasperated.
“Please don’t get impatient. I’ve found something.” She prodded the bit of color with her boot. It was fabric, faded and worn. She bent to pick it up.
It was the remains of a small doll. The china head was mostly intact, but its hair was gone, and the clothes were little better than rags. The doll was old, the clothes obviously homemade. This was the kind of doll that a child with the Tyson party might have chosen to accompany her on the long journey. Was it Teensy Taggart’s beloved doll, Eliza, mentioned in her mother’s diary? She padded the doll’s head carefully with her neckerchief and tucked it deep in her jacket pocket.
Further exploration revealed nothing more of interest other than a few rusty bits of metal that gave her no clue to their past. She nudged them with the toe of her boot, noticing that the flashlight beam had grown weak.
“I’m coming,” she called.
“Thank goodness.” Cord’s exasperation had turned to downright irritation.
She started to back cautiously down the ladder. “Careful,” Cord said. “You may have weakened some of the rungs on the way up.” His anxious face peered up at her.
“Don’t worry. I’m almost—” And then one of the rungs gave way, crumbling to dust beneath her boot.
With a little cry, she fell into Cord’s arms.
“Are you all right?”
She still held the flashlight, and the weakened beam danced crazily around the cave walls. “I’m fine.”
“We’d better get back to the ranch. It’s past lunchtime.”
He’d gone remote and stony, and she didn’t know why.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, putting a decent distance between them before brushing the dust from her clothes.
His face remained impassive. “Sure. I need to check on some things at the ranch, that’s all.”
His change in mood detracted from her elation at what she’d found. As they began the long ride back to Rancho Encantado, she tried to occupy herself with planning how to write the book she had in mind, but she kept wondering why Cord remained so uncommunicative. True, avoiding wind-driven storm debris and clumps of uprooted vegetation made driving difficult at times, but that wouldn’t account for his present mood. He had been cooperative and helpful until she’d discovered the names of the Tyson party on the rock wall in the cave. Then she had begun to sense a withdrawal on his part, a pulling away.
“Cord,” she ventured when they had reached the salt flats and left the mountains behind. “Is something bothering you?”
He kept his eyes front and clipped his words. “It has nothing to do with you.”
She hated it when he wouldn’t look at her. “All right, so what is it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” If she read his mood right, something was eating him up inside and she had no idea what it could be. His attitude so unnerved her that she subsided without saying anything more. Perhaps, she consoled herself, he would open up to her in time, but they had little of that left to them.
When they reached the stable, she half turned in her seat and asked him to drop by her place for a late lunch.
“I’d better check in with the guys at the barn,” he said.
“How about dinner?” she asked.
She was totally unprepared for what happened next. Cord drew a deep breath and took her hand in his. “Brooke, I need some space. I want to cool things down for a while.”
The words hit her with all the shock of being unexpectedly drenched with cold water. She was so stunned that at first she couldn’t speak. She felt her face flush, and she couldn’t breathe.
“Why?” she managed to ask, feeling like a fool as soon as the word had escaped her lips.
He paused and gazed off into the distance to where men were herding cattle into chutes near the barn.
“It has nothing to do with you,” he repeated. “In fact, it has everything to do with me.”
Her he
art sank, heavy as a stone, and seemed to lodge in her stomach. This had all the earmarks of the speech she had heard before, from Leo. The “You’re a very nice person but I’m not ready to commit” speech.
“All right,” she said, staring at him as though seeing him for the first time. He was a man, after all, like so many others. He was willing to emote and to listen and to exhibit all the other sterling qualities women wanted, until he got what he wanted. Then it was “So long, goodbye, farewell and I’ll see you around.”
She managed to insert the proper amount of chill into her tone. “Thanks, Cord, for taking me to the caves. You were an excellent guide.”
“Brooke, wait,” he said urgently, but she was out of the Jeep and slamming the door before he could say more.
She didn’t look back at him. She was sure he would be staring after her with a perplexed frown. They never knew, these guys. They never understood the pain their actions caused the women who had learned to care about them and trust them and yes, even love them.
The message light on her phone was blinking, but she ignored it and went straight into the bedroom, where she thought she’d indulge in a good cry, followed by a hot shower. Nothing like all that steam to clear up a stuffy nose after you’ve been crying over a man.
But as soon as she entered the bedroom, it became obvious that she couldn’t throw herself across her bed and sob out her pain after all. Mrs. Gray, the stable cat, was having kittens there.
Chapter Eleven
If anything could have diminished the pain of Cord’s dismissal, this was it. Brooke had never seen an animal giving birth before, and she was so astonished that she sank to her knees beside the bed to watch the proceedings.
“How did you get in here?” she murmured, but Mrs. Gray only blinked tolerantly before getting back to business. Brooke guessed that the cat had somehow slipped in as someone from Housekeeping had gone in or out.
One kitten had already been born, a tiny coal-black mite. It didn’t look like any cat that Brooke had ever seen; its eyes were tightly closed and its ears were no more than tiny flaps positioned way down on the sides of its head.
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