Amanda

by Kay Hooper

  “you’re being evasive, dammit.”

  She sighed. “And you’re being a lawyer. The only thing I’m feeling right now is a bit of leftover panic. It’s what I feel when I smell horses. I just … I want to run, that’s all. I want to get away. It’ll pass.”

  “Amanda—”

  “Who’s going to tell Jesse about Victor?” she asked quickly.

  “I’ll call him when I get back to the office. Probably catch him before he leaves his meeting.” Walker frowned down at her. “Come into town with me. I’ll bring you back after lunch, and if the dogs still aren’t here, you can look for them then. A couple more hours won’t make much difference.”

  She hesitated, but finally nodded. “All right. I need to go change first.”

  “And I need to go get my car.” He smiled at her. “No reason to make you face the stables again.”

  “I hate being a coward,” she confessed as they walked out to the garden’s main path.

  “Sounds to me like you can’t help being afraid of horses,” Walker told her.

  “Maybe, but I hate it. It’s bad enough to be afraid of something; being afraid and not knowing why you are is enough to drive anyone crazy.”

  Walker thought that would indeed make it worse, but all he said was, “Give yourself a break. And time.” He thought she was a bit less tense now, and her hand was no longer rigid in his.

  “I’ll meet you out front in—fifteen minutes?” she suggested when they stood on the main path.

  “Done.” Walker released her hand and watched her walk toward the house, then turned himself and began to retrace his way to the stables.

  It was almost two o’clock when they stepped out onto the sidewalk, both blinking at the shock of bright summer light and intense heat after the dim coolness of the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, and Amanda shook her head bemusedly as she looked at the two enormous dragons—seemingly stone, but surely something less weighty—flanking the front door.

  “I can’t get used to them. And why does it strike me as peculiar for Daulton to have a Chinese restaurant?” she asked Walker.

  “Probably because dragons look strange on Main Street, USA,” Walker replied with a slight gesture at downtown Daulton.

  It was a postcard-perfect scene, Amanda agreed silently. A grassy town square, complete with two magnolia trees and a fountain. A town hall with a clock. A barbershop with a striped pole outside. Several clothing stores that would never call themselves boutiques but nonetheless boasted higher prices than the mall out on the highway.

  There was a church with bells at one end of Main Street and a Ford dealership at the other, two banks, a post office, the sheriff’s department, and a fire station —and a drugstore that still had a soda fountain.

  While they stood under the shade of the Golden Dragon’s awning, Amanda looked at Daulton and smiled.

  “I think you like this town,” Walker told her, taking her hand.

  “I think you’re right.” She tucked her purse underneath her free arm and added, “You don’t have to take me back to Glory. I’m meeting Kate and Maggie at Conner’s for some shopping, so I can ride back with them.”

  “I don’t mind taking you back, Amanda.”

  She smiled at him. “I have some shopping I need to do, really. But you can walk me to Conner’s, since it’s on the way to your office.”

  She was much more relaxed, Walker thought as they began strolling down the sidewalk. She had even laughed once or twice. They hadn’t talked about anything serious, by tacit consent avoiding all the touchy subjects between them.

  Walker had found himself reluctant to tell her of his suspicions about Victor’s death, though he couldn’t have said exactly why. Perhaps because he had only suspicions without proof, or perhaps because she had been clearly shaken by the trainer’s death—if only the violence of it.

  Not, of course, personally shaken. Judging by what she had said last night—admittedly in anger—she had known Victor well enough to have received a blunt or at least obvious proposition from him. Which was to say that they had met. However, since Victor had left Glory only a few days after Amanda had arrived, Walker doubted they had had more than one or two encounters.

  “Am I boring you?” Amanda asked politely.

  Without hesitation, Walker replied, “You’ve made me mad as hell and driven me half out of my mind, to say nothing of giving me sleepless nights, but You’ve never bored me.”

  “Just wondering,” she murmured.

  He smiled down at her as they paused on the corner, waiting for the light to change before they crossed. “Proud of yourself?” he wanted to know.

  “Well, a woman likes to know she’s had some effect on a man.” Amanda was smiling just a little.

  “Rest assured—you have. I may never be the same again.” He lifted the hand he was holding, her left, and added more seriously, “By the way—did I do this?”

  Amanda didn’t have to look to know he meant the faint bruises on her wrist—which had darkened a bit since morning. “I just bruise easily,” she told him. “Besides, as I remember, I was on the point of scratching your eyes out at the time.”

  “I didn’t hurt you? Tell me the truth.”

  “You didn’t hurt me.” She looked up at him steadily. “I know I look like a frail flower, Walker, but I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”

  “Promise?” he asked a bit whimsically.

  “I promise.”

  He nodded, then lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her wrist.

  Amanda cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t do that on a public street,” she murmured.

  “Why not?” His green eyes were burning.

  Because I’ll look undignified melting into a puddle at your feet, dammit!

  “Because … Oh, dammit, Walker—there’s Preacher Bliss. Maybe we can—”

  But they couldn’t, of course. And since Walker refused to let go of her hand, Amanda had the bemusing experience of watching a slightly worried preacher trying to find out—without actually asking the question—if she had done anything to jeopardize her immortal soul.

  Walker, not a particularly religious man, watched and listened with a tolerant smile.

  “You were no help at all,” Amanda accused when the preacher had finally gone on his way.

  “I didn’t want to interrupt.” Walker’s tone was innocent. “Besides, you did just fine alone. Especially since he wasn’t quite brave enough to ask outright about the state of your virtue.”

  Amanda chuckled. “Lucky for me.” Then she sobered suddenly. “He obviously hadn’t heard about Victor.”

  “No, word hasn’t got around yet.”

  As they approached the store where Amanda would meet Kate and Maggie, she said, “Kate told Maggie she felt a bit odd going shopping today, but Maggie told her not to be absurd.”

  “Maggie’s right,” Walker said.

  “I suppose.”

  “we’re all sorry it happened, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who actually liked Victor. So—we’re sorry and we go on.”

  Amanda glanced up at him. “You sound like a slightly impatient philosophy professor I had in college.”

  “Did he give you a hard time?”

  “Well, he couldn’t figure out what a business major was doing in his class—especially when her minor was computer science.”

  “What were you doing in his class?”

  “Trying to get a handle on life, I guess. And, before you ask, I’m as baffled as anyone else, so I assume the class didn’t do much for me.”

  Halting beneath the awning that shaded the doorway of Conner’s clothing store, Walker smiled down at her. “Remember what your fortune cookie said? ‘Today, you will discover a great truth.’ I’d say you just did.”

  “That life is baffling?”

  “It works for me.” He leaned down and kissed her, briefly but not lightly, and then said, “Remember, you’re meeting me on the path about seven.”

  Amanda n
odded. “I remember. Thank you for lunch, Walker.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He watched her go into the coolness of the store and then went on toward his office.

  He hadn’t taken three steps before his smile was gone. Just outside his office building, he never saw or heard the acquaintance who cheerfully greeted him, just as he didn’t notice the mailman who had to hastily sidestep to avoid running into him on the stairs. And when he passed by his secretary’s desk, she took one look at his face and didn’t venture a greeting.

  Walker went into his quiet office and locked the door behind him. He went to the big oak desk that had served three generations of McLellan lawyers, and sat down in the big leather chair that was usually so comfortable.

  Then he unlocked the center drawer, drew out a file folder, and opened it on the neat blotter.

  It didn’t take him long to find it. A neat and complete list of the college courses Amanda Grant had taken. There was no philosophy course. There were no business courses, no courses in computer science. Amanda Grant had majored in design, with a minor in architecture.

  Walker leaned back in his usually comfortable chair and stared at the file without seeing it. And his own voice startled him, low and harsh in the silence of the room.

  “Goddammit, Amanda … what’re you trying to do to me?”

  BY THE TIME AMANDA MADE HER WAY along the path to King High just before seven that evening, the unusually long day following a virtually sleepless night was beginning to catch up with her. She didn’t feel tired so much as peculiarly raw, and uneasily aware that her ability to hide her thoughts and feelings was becoming uncertain.

  Especially where Walker was concerned.

  He was waiting for her at a point less than halfway to King High, leaning back against the huge granite boulder that the path wrapped itself around. The sun had not yet set, and the dappled light of the forest painted his white shirt and his face with shifting shadows.

  When she first saw him, Amanda thought that his expression was a somewhat grim reminder of the way he had looked at her during her first days at Glory, but then he smiled and the impression of bleakness faded.

  “Hi,” she said casually as she reached him.

  “Hi,” he returned, equally casual. But then he put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her against him, and kissed her with an intensity that was a long way from casual.

  Amanda told herself it was her fatigued condition that made the kiss so overwhelming, but she knew better. Her body reacted as if to a shot of pure energy, coming alive and throbbing with sudden desire, and her mind was filled only with the awareness of him and her hunger for him. It was as if they had built a bonfire the night before and it was still burning, hotter than ever.

  She knew she was shaking when he at last lifted his head, and she knew he felt it.

  “I’ve wanted to do that,” he said huskily, “all day long.”

  All Amanda could think of to say was, “Good thing Preacher Bliss didn’t see that. He wouldn’t have had to wonder about the state of my virtue.”

  Walker kissed her again, briefly this time, and said, “Let him wonder. None of his business anyway.” He kept an arm around her as they turned and continued along the path to King High.

  Still trying to master the riot of emotions and sensations he, seemingly by magic, roused in her, Amanda said vaguely, “there’s a storm coming, you know. Hear it thunder?”

  “The thunder’s in the mountains,” Walker told her. “We’ll just get rain, probably.”

  “I heard somebody—one of the gardeners, I think —say this morning that we need rain. But he said it … uneasily.”

  “We should have had quite a bit of rain by now,” Walker explained. “That we haven’t usually means one of two things. Either we’re heading for a summer drought, with unrelenting heat and the danger of fires, or else July and August will be filled with very bad lightning storms.”

  “No wonder he sounded uneasy about it. Neither way sounds too good to me.”

  They walked for a moment in silence, and then Walker said, “The dogs turn up?”

  “No.” Amanda sighed, trying not to sound as worried as she felt. “This afternoon Maggie dug out the high-frequency whistles they were trained with, and we walked all over calling and looking for them. Even Kate skipped her volunteer work; she and Ben and a couple of his riders checked out some of the riding trails. No luck.”

  “they’re valuable dogs,” Walker noted slowly. “And valuable dogs are stolen every day. But I assume their training makes it unlikely they would have let themselves be carted off by strangers.”

  “Extremely unlikely. They’re guard dogs; Maggie says Jesse had to formally introduce them to all the gardeners and maintenance people who’d be working around the house because the dogs were specifically trained to be very protective of the house and yard at all times. Outside the yard, they wouldn’t attack a stranger, but they also wouldn’t get near anyone they didn’t know.”

  “They could have been lured into a trap,” Walker said.

  Amanda nodded, but said, “who’d even try that? This is private land, Daulton land, miles of it; who would want the dogs so badly they’d risk Jesse coming down on them if they were caught stealing his property?”

  “No one with more brains than a mushroom,” Walker admitted. “Jesse is a bad enemy, and everyone in these parts knows it.”

  “Still … I’m afraid something’s happened to them. They should have been back by now. They should have been back before breakfast.”

  The arm around her shoulders tightened, and Walker said, “One more bit of bad news for Jesse to hear today.”

  “he’s not due back from Asheville until later tonight, so I wondered—how did he take the news about Victor?”

  “Badly. Less because he liked Victor than because carelessness allowed a stupid accident to occur at Glory.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  Walker looked down at her sharply. “Is there any reason you think it wasn’t?”

  Amanda was tempted for an instant—but only for an instant. She couldn’t say yes, because if she did she would have to explain that Victor had had something to tell her about what had happened at Glory twenty years ago, and that she was afraid—not at all sure, but definitely afraid—that his “accident” had been arranged to keep her from hearing whatever he had to tell her.

  She had no proof of that, of course. No evidence at all, in fact. But that wasn’t why she found herself unwilling to offer the theory to Walker.

  As long as Walker mistrusted her—which he most certainly still did—offering her own trust would be stupid and possibly dangerous. He was the Daulton family lawyer, Jesse’s lawyer, and his first loyalty lay there; whether or not he believed her, if Amanda told him why she had come here, he was entirely capable of telling Jesse.

  And then Amanda would have to do a lot more explaining than she was ready to do.

  “No,” she said after a brief hesitation, “there’s no reason I think it wasn’t an accident. It just seemed so bizarre. But I guess bizarre accidents happen when people aren’t careful.”

  Walker continued to look at her for a moment, but then nodded, accepting her reply.

  They reached the footbridge then, and as they walked across it Amanda looked down at the flowing water, bright and clear in the light of day. Nothing sinister, nothing to make her uneasy as she’d been the night before …

  Bright light flashing off water … a stream—no, a gush of water where it hadn’t been before, the drain-age ditch swollen from the rain … small bare feet with muddy water squishing between the toes, and in the distance a light—

  “Amanda?”

  She blinked and looked up at him, realizing she had stopped dead in the middle of the footbridge. She didn’t know what her face looked like, but from the way Walker was frowning at her, the expression she wore must have baffled him.

  “I’m sorry.” She put out a hand almost instinctively to touch his chest
. “I must have been … day-dreaming.”

  Walker shook his head. “Must have been some day-dream. You look upset.”

  “Do I?” She attempted a little laugh and shrugged. “It was nothing, really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.” She looked past him at the gazebo that was visible from here, and asked, “Is that where we’re going to have our picnic?”

  Walker hesitated for a moment, but then nodded and, taking her hand this time, continued across the bridge toward the gazebo. “I thought so. If it’s okay with you.”

  “it’s fine.” Amanda wished he hadn’t spoken her name when he had, because she felt sure she’d been about to remember something very important. At least … she had been sure it was important. But even now, so quickly after, the flash of memory was fading from her, dreamlike.

  Vanishing like smoke through her fingers. Damn, damn, damn.

  “Watch your step,” Walker advised as they left the path and made their way over several of a giant oak’s sprawled-out roots to reach the gazebo.

  Amanda glanced to one side and, noting what looked like the crumbling stone foundation of what had been a small building once upon a time, said, “Something else used to be here?”

  “A gatehouse. Long time ago. This stream changed course when my father was a boy, and that changed the driveway to King High. The gatehouse gradually fell into ruins. I had the gazebo built a few years ago.”

  “So far from the house?”

  “I like it here.”

  Inside the gazebo, a thick quilt was spread out on the solid wooden flooring, and a couple of oversize pillows promised comfort. An imposing wicker basket waited to be opened, and a large thermos jug held, Amanda assumed, something cold to drink.

  “Tea,” Walker replied when she asked. “I would have brought wine, but since you seldom drink …”

  “Tea’s better anyway, especially in this heat.”

  “The heat doesn’t seem to bother you,” Walker commented as they made themselves comfortable on the quilt and he opened the wicker basket in search of glasses. “You always look so cool and … unwrinkled.”

  Amanda laughed. “Unwrinkled?”