He leaned toward her to emphasize his answer. “She gave me away when I was a couple days old because she didn’t like the color of my skin. What more do I need to know?”
“I can’t imagine…” With a shake of her head, she let the words trail away. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she opened the ice chest and began unpacking their meal. It probably did come naturally to her. The well-bred Southern belle, raised to be the perfect wife, the perfect hostess, gracious in all situations, was a stereotype, he knew well. But stereotypes had to come from somewhere. If there hadn’t been generations of lovely young Southern women raised in just that way, the stereotype would never have come into being.
She removed plates and cloth napkins wrapped around silverware from the tray balanced across the top of the chest. “Are you an environmentalist?” she asked, her long fingers unrolling the cloth, catching the silverware before it tumbled, folding the napkin with a flourish. He was so caught up in watching her hands that her question barely registered.
Realizing that she was waiting for an answer, he blinked, then lifted his gaze to her face. “Why do you ask?”
“Most people use paper and plastic. But most people care more about convenience than the earth’s resources or its garbage dumps overflowing with non-decomposing products.”
“Would it make you think better of me if I said I care a great deal about the earth and the way we take care of it?” He grinned at the flush that tinged her cheeks pink. “Truth is, I was running late and I didn’t have time to stop at the store. It was either real plates and cloth napkins or paper towels and…well, paper towels. I do recycle, though, and I do believe we should take better care of our environment than we do. Our kids deserve a place as beautiful as this to visit, don’t they?”
She glanced around before unwrapping the foil that held their sandwich. “Who owns this property?”
“I do. I’m going to build a house here when I get married.”
“It’ll be a long drive to work.”
“But worth it to come home to this every evening.” And maybe to her. She could belong here, could belong to him, if she wanted. If she would trust him. If his instincts were right—and his instincts were almost always right. “We’re on the back porch right now. This is the view I want from the living room and from our bedroom. The kids’ bedrooms will be upstairs, and the front porch will face east, so we can watch the sun rise with our morning coffee.”
“You have a lot of plans. Don’t you think your prospective wife will want a say in things?”
“I’m sure she will. And she can do whatever she wants with the rest of it. Those are my only requirements.”
After fishing out canned drinks, a bag of chips and a bag of cookies, she closed the ice chest lid, then positioned it between them for a table. The sandwich—meats, cheeses and vegetables, all thinly sliced—filled a wide loaf of French bread slathered with creamy dressing. He’d cut it into small sections before he wrapped it. Now he watched as she helped herself to the smallest portion.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, until she reached for the next smallest portion. “This is good, and the bread is wonderful. Where did you buy it?”
“I picked it up at Arlen’s kitchen.” When she looked puzzled, he went on. “That’s my dad. He’s the best baker in the state.”
“Is that what he does for a living?”
“Nope. He raises cattle, horses and kids. The baking is for fun.”
“So you’re not an only child.”
“I was when it counted. I was in college before Dad married Amy. I’ve got four half brothers under the age of ten.” Since he hadn’t asked her a personal question all morning, he decided he was due. “Are you an only child?”
“To my disappointment and my parents’ great dismay.”
“They wanted a big family?”
“No. They intended to have only one child. They just didn’t intend for her to be such an embarrassment.” Realizing that she’d said more than she’d meant to, she made a brittle, apologetic gesture. Then, as if she figured she might as well get it over with now rather than later, she explained. “They thought they had the perfect daughter who would grow up to make the perfect marriage, provide them with perfect grandchildren and make them perfectly proud. Instead they had me.” Her voice was unsteady there at the end, and her hand trembled when she reached for her soda. Leaving it alone, she laced her fingers together and hid her hands in her lap.
If he knew her better, he would put his arms around her, hold her tight, soothe her without words. But he didn’t, so words were all he had. “What did they think was so wrong with you?” he asked quietly.
She looked up, tried to smile as if it didn’t matter, but the smile was really a grimace, and her voice was taut with anger and deep hurt. “I was different. I saw things no one else saw, heard voices no one else heard. All they wanted was a pretty little girl, and all they got was a pretty little freak.”
Abruptly she pushed her plate away, jumped to her feet and walked away. Restlessness lengthened her stride, and embarrassment, he suspected, made her shoulders hunch and her head bow.
His appetite gone, Sloan repacked everything but the cookies. Taking the bag along, he walked upriver a hundred feet to where Crystal had finally settled on a boulder at the water’s edge. Though space was tight, leaving only inches between them, he sat beside her and offered a cookie. When she hesitated, he gently nudged her with one elbow. “I have it on good authority that cookies are always good for what ails you.”
She took the cookie, then delicately bit a chunk of chocolate from the edge. “Whose authority?”
“My grandmother’s. I’ll take you to meet her sometime. She’s eighty years old, four-foot-nothin’, and can still keep us all in line with nothing more than a look. I think you’d like her. But I have to warn you. She thinks Ravencrest men lose their wits around pretty white women.”
Taking a bigger nibble of the cookie, she glanced sidelong at him. “Is that true?”
“I think it might be. My mother certainly made a fool of my father, and I’m feeling a bit foolish right now.” He felt her glance skim across him again, but this time he was looking out toward the mountains. “I really wouldn’t have told the Montgomery family anything about you. I knew you weren’t cooperating because you were afraid. I knew you’d been hurt. I was just trying—”
“To use it to your advantage.”
The truth sounded uglier from her point of view in her honeyed drawl. Even though he believed he’d done what was necessary, even though he would do it again if he had to, he felt himself flush with the heat of embarrassment. “To do my job,” he corrected.
“No matter what.” Though there was no inflection in her voice, that sounded ugly, too.
“Put yourself in the family’s place. What if Christina were your daughter, your sister, and someone out there knew something about her? Wouldn’t you want to know, no matter what?”
“Yes,” she admitted readily. “But I’m not in their place. I can’t feel their fear and sorrow. I can only feel my own.”
She finished the cookie, then took another when he offered. When it was gone, she pulled her knees up, rested her chin on them and stared off into the distance with him. After several long minutes had passed, she finally spoke again. “What I said back there… Just forget it, will you?”
Just forget that her parents had made her feel like a freak. That they’d blamed her for something she’d had no control over. That because they were narrow-minded bigots, she felt fear and sorrow.
Oh, yeah. And while he was at it, why didn’t he also just forget how much he wanted to get to know her, how much time he’d spent thinking about her, how much effort he’d expended to meet her?
“Just forgetting” was impossible. But if she wanted to pretend it wasn’t, he could play along. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll forget.”
And because he was willing to lie, she pretended to believe him.
After a t
ime she asked, “Why are they called Crazy Mountains?”
“Some people say it’s because the peaks are so jagged. Some say it’s because they’re geologically different from the other ranges around here. Most people prefer the story that a woman whose family died and left her alone on the prairie went crazy and wandered off into the mountains to die.”
“Why do they call the reservation Laughing Horse?”
“I don’t have a clue. But give me a minute and I’ll come up with something.”
She smiled then. It was small and fleeting, but it was a real smile, and it made him feel as if he’d accomplished something. But before his ego could swell too much, she stood up and dusted her jeans. “We’d better go. We’ve still got places to look at.”
The decided lack of enthusiasm in her voice chased away some of his pleasure. He caught up with her halfway back to their picnic blanket. “We don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind.”
“What happens if we find the place?”
Wariness stole over her again. “You’re the deputy. You tell me.”
“I mean, to you. For you. Will it affect you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you concerned that it might?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated, the words subdued. He knew the vision had been powerfully disturbing to her in the relative safety of the Stop-n-Swap’s back room. How much more disturbing could those sensations be if she was right in the middle of the clearing?
“I’ll be right there,” he assured her.
She gave no response.
Back at their picnic site, he carried the ice chest to the truck, then turned to watch as she shook out the quilt. At first, she started to fold it, but, with a noticeable shiver, she wrapped it around her shoulders instead. The blanket covered her clothing except where the edges flipped back around her ankles, and the vivid reds, blues and greens flattered her.
In that moment, as she made her way slowly across the meadow to him, he wanted her with an intensity he’d never felt before. His skin grew warm, his body hard, and every breath he took was shallow, raw. He should turn away, before she noticed. Or maybe he should take hold of that quilt when she was close enough and haul her against him for the hardest, greediest, neediest kiss either of them had ever known. Maybe he should seduce her right there, right then, and overlook the fact that she didn’t trust him, was pretty sure she didn’t like him, and for damn sure didn’t want him around.
In the end, he didn’t turn away, and he didn’t grab her, kiss her, seduce her. He simply looked at her, wrapped in that quilt of bright colors his grandmother had made for him, and said in a perfectly normal voice, “You should have told me you were cold.”
Perfectly normal…for a man who was incredibly aroused.
“I’m not cold,” she denied, then nonsensically explained, “I’m just admiring your quilt. Did someone make it for you?”
“My grandmother.”
“It looks new.”
“Not new. Just not used.” She’d pieced the intricate star pattern by hand and had spent countless hours quilting it by hand, too. All that work, all that love, in a quilt intended for use by one of her favorites among her grandsons and the woman he chose to marry. She’d warned him to choose well, but in the four years since she’d presented it to him, he hadn’t chosen at all.
Or maybe he had.
His fingers were itching to reach out and touch the fabric—to touch Crystal. It was only through greater self-control than he’d known he possessed that he was able to stop himself.
“It’s beautiful,” she said as she shrugged it off her shoulders, then began folding it. “Too beautiful to be using on the ground.”
On the contrary, laying it on the ground, and laying her down on top of it, was just about the best use he could think of.
She returned the quilt to its place behind the seat, then climbed inside the pickup. After taking a couple of deep, calming breaths, he joined her.
Crystal stared out the side window as they left the meadow. Part of her was glad to escape the intimacy of the place, but part wanted to stay there, to spend the rest of the afternoon right there next to the river and watch the sun go down. She wanted to avoid all other clearings, to keep that little knot in her stomach from growing, to keep for-the-most-part pleasant memories of a Saturday afternoon picnic from turning into her worst nightmare.
But she didn’t suggest a longer stay. She simply shuddered with foreboding as they followed the trail out of the meadow, as the forest closed heavily around them again.
Sensing movement behind her, she smiled faintly. “Don’t bother. I’m warm enough.”
After a moment’s unnatural stillness, Sloan asked, “How did you know?”
“Madame Crystal knows all, sees all,” she said in a spooky voice. Turning to face him, she watched him withdraw his hand from the quilt behind her seat and return it to the steering wheel. He had good hands—strong, capable, nails neat and trimmed, palms nicely callused from years of work. James’s hands had been weak, pampered. He’d visited his manicurist far more often than she had, and he’d never partaken in any activity that might leave calluses, not without protective gloves.
James had never taken her on a picnic, either, and he’d never, ever, fixed her something to eat with his own hands. She doubted he’d ever fixed himself a meal with his own hands.
What was the point, she wondered, in comparing Sloan to her former fiancé? Making note of all the ways they were different didn’t change the ways in which they were alike. James had been, as Sloan now was, in a position to use her, betray her, destroy her. She had trusted James with her life and her heart, and he’d done just that. Could she risk trusting Sloan?
Today was an incredibly ambivalent day for her. Part of her wanted one thing, part wanted another. She wanted to trust Sloan, and to keep him at a distance—to never see him again, and to hold tight to him and never let go. Back in the meadow, when he’d assured her he would be with her if finding the clearing triggered anything, she’d wanted to say something scathingly sarcastic, and to quietly, sincerely thank him.
They would find the clearing. That was what the knot in her stomach was about. She didn’t know if it would be the next place he took her to or if they would examine twenty other clearings first, but they would find the place where Christina Montgomery had suffered so terribly.
The idea of standing in the spot which she had seen in her violent vision filled Crystal with apprehension. She’d had only one such vision before, and there had been no reason to visit that site. Would the psychic energy that had given life to the vision in the first place remain in the area? Would it—Christina, her spirit, her essence—understand that Crystal was trying to help, or would it fill her mind even more vividly than before?
“Are you okay?”
She glanced at Sloan. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“You’re pale, and the tension is all but radiating off you.” Reaching across the truck cab, he fumbled for her left hand—fumbled, because at some point, without realizing it, she’d crossed her arms tightly and tucked her hands between her arms and body. “Your hand is like ice.”
His was warm when it closed around hers, so warm and strong. The heat seeped into her body, along with a vague sense of comfort and security. It allowed her to take a deep breath, to relax her posture and find some small bit of courage. “I’m all right,” she murmured. “Just…afraid.”
“You’ve never had a vision like this.”
She thought of the other time, the other girl, and felt a wave of sorrow as she lied. “No. Not like this.”
“Maybe we won’t find the clearing.”
A fresh stab of tension swept through her, curling her fingers tightly around his. “We will.”
He gave her a long, steady look but said nothing.
After a few minutes of silence he pulled over to the side of the road, released her hand and got out of the truck to come around to
her side. There were several faint trails leading up the hillside, as if people used the wide shoulder as a jumping-off point for a day hike. Maybe some family lived in isolation on the other side of the hill, she thought whimsically, and their teenage daughter used the trails to meet secretly with the boyfriend her parents didn’t approve of.
Whatever the purpose of the trails, she didn’t think they were in the right place. She would feel more distress if they were so close to the place where Christina had died. Still, she followed Sloan up the hill, past boulders and dry washes, into woods that offered shade and trapped the earth’s rich scents close to the ground.
When they reached their goal, she glanced around, confirming what she already knew, then shook her head. “Do you know every clearing in the county?”
Sloan grinned. “Maybe. We roamed all over the countryside when we were kids—my cousins and me. I’ve hiked most of the county, I’ve probably fished every body of water, and what I haven’t covered on foot, I have on horseback.”
“Your father gave you a lot of freedom.”
“Yes,” he simply agreed, then asked, “Did your parents give you any?”
“Not that I noticed. We lived in town. Even if I’d had room to wander like that, it wouldn’t have been allowed. Not much was.”
“So what did you do with your summers?”
“Took piano lessons. And ballet. Won the library’s award for reading the most books during summer vacation six years in a row. Learned to swim and ride horses and play tennis, and went to mother-daughter luncheons at the country club once a week.”
“Sounds like you were prissy as all hell.”
The good-natured insult surprised her. So did the laugh that escaped her. “I was, I suppose. And look at me now. Working in a junk store and living in a trailer in the godforsaken wilderness.”
“And traipsing around the countryside with a wild Indian,” he added. “Which part of that would upset your parents the most?”
“Everything about me upsets my parents.” Though true, her answer was evasive, because there was no doubt about it, the “Indian” would disturb her mother most. Marabeth Cobbs could turn the junk store into an antique shop, and describe the trailer in such a way one would never guess it was on wheels. She could even make Montana seem the most sophisticated place west of the Mississippi, but there wasn’t much she could do to transform Sloan.
Big Sky Lawman Page 5