A Man of His Word

by Merline Lovelace

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “The piece that broke off…or was pried off…is still lying in the middle of the road. If you can get one of your men to haul it down to the Arizona Geological Survey Center in Tucson, I’ll call ahead to let Dr. Kingsley know it’s on the way.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Martinez rose, dusting his hands on his pants. His boots clattered on stone as he inched his way back down to the road. Once on level land, his black eyes rested thoughtfully on Reece.

  “Are you thinking the same person who slashed Ms. Scott’s tapes last night might have tried to keep her from making them in the first place?”

  “The possibility occurred to me. Did you talk to Sebastian Chavez this morning?”

  “I talked to both him and his son. Mr. Chavez had dinner at home with his son and daughter-in-law last night, then put in some late hours in his office.”

  “Anyone see him during those hours?”

  “Jamie didn’t. He was out in one of the barns with a sick horse most of the night. Mrs. Chavez… Arlene…said she saw the lights on in Sebastian’s office when she went up to bed.”

  “So none of them really has an alibi.”

  “As yet,” Martinez pointed out, “none of them needs one. We matched the prints I lifted from the bathroom window to Martha Jenkins, and those on the videocassettes to Ms. Scott and her camera operator. We have no witnesses and no evidence that one of the Chavez family perpetrated the vandalism.”

  “Just Sydney’s gut feel,” Reece muttered, un-amused by the irony.

  Martinez hitched up his holster and slid into the driver’s seat of his dust-streaked vehicle. “I’ll see that rock gets to Tucson this afternoon. In the meantime, you might advise Ms. Scott to keep her eyes open.”

  “I already have.”

  Reece would do more than just offer advice. Between them, he and Henry Three Pines would do their damnedest to make sure she didn’t meet with any more unexpected accidents. He’d talked to the Hopi headman at some length last night, learned more about what happened ten years ago. That debacle had cost Sydney her pride and her father his job. Reece intended to see that it didn’t now cost her her life.

  His overdeveloped sense of responsibility had kicked in again, big-time. His brothers would have recognized the signs immediately. The slashing frown. The white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel when he climbed into the Jeep. The square angle of his jaw. Only Reece knew that responsibility had gotten all mixed up with something that went deeper than mere attraction, zinged right past lust, and smacked up against want. Or need. Or whatever the hell it was that twisted around inside him whenever he thought about Sydney.

  Putting the Jeep into reverse, he made a cautious three-point turn and headed back along the rim road. The deep gorge, empty of the waters that had filled it for the past ten years, stretched for miles on his right. Red cliffs crowded the road on the left. Reece kept a careful eye on the twists and turns, but his mind stayed fixed on Sydney and those gouges in the stone.

  He’d talk to her tonight at the motel, he decided. Tell her about the marks, about his talk with Henry and Joe Martinez. His stomach tightened at the thought of the hurt and fear that might come with this latest threat.

  As if Reece needed anything else to add to the tension building in him more with each passing hour, storm clouds started piling up just after two that afternoon.

  He didn’t see them until he walked out of the administration building with the prime contractor, who planned to start blasting tomorrow. The moment they stepped outside, the wind whipped at the rolled schematic in the contractor’s hand.

  “The front’s coming in from the north,” he observed, eyeing the bank of black clouds. “Hope it blows through without dumping too much rain in the mountains, or we’ll have to work around a gully-washer tomorrow.”

  “I hope so, too,” Reece muttered.

  Automatically he leaned over the parapet to check the floodgates. Newer dams were constructed with floating, roller-type caissons that moved up and down to control the water flow. On older structures like this one, the gates were simple up-and-down mechanisms.

  They now stood fully open, as they had since the reservoir began draining. Reece’s men could drop them quickly if necessary to control flooding, but that would cause a buildup behind the dam and subsequently drown all the equipment the contractor had positioned at the base of the structure in anticipation of beginning repairs.

  It could also flood the area behind the dam…up to and including the Anasazi ruins.

  Damn!

  He considered pulling Sydney and her crew out of the area. He even dug his mobile phone out of his pocket. Only the knowledge of how desperately she needed to remake the destroyed footage kept him from punching in her number.

  He would watch the weather reports, he decided grimly. Check the computer every half hour for updates from the various monitoring stations maintained by the Bureau on the water level upriver. That way he could allow Sydney as much time as possible at the ruins. He’d give her a heads-up, though, just in case.

  Her voice came over the airwaves, breathless, distracted, impatient. “Rain? What rain? I don’t see any clouds.”

  “They’re piling up in the north. Stick your head out of the cave and look.”

  He heard a thump, the sound of boots on rock, a muffled curse. A moment or two later she came back on, alive with excitement.

  “The wind’s picked up! Albert’s recording just the sounds I want.”

  “Sydney, the clouds…”

  “Listen!”

  She must have stuck the phone out the face of the cave. A low whistling moan sounded through the receiver, lifting the hairs on the back of Reece’s neck.

  “Can you hear the wail?”

  “I hear it. Sydney, the clouds. “

  “Don’t worry! I’ll watch them. The last time I heard that wail, I took a short slide down a long cliff. I won’t let anything distract me so much that I get washed down a river.”

  “I’ll call you when and if I think you should leave.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Let me know if you depart the area before that.”

  “Will do.”

  She snapped her phone shut, obviously eager to get back to her project. Reece did the same.

  To his relief, the rain held off upriver for an hour, then another. By the time he called it a day and sent his crew home just after six, however, the sky to the north had blackened ominously.

  He still hadn’t heard from Sydney. He didn’t doubt she was taking advantage of every hour of light, every shrill whistle of wind. Tossing aside his hard hat, Reece climbed into the Jeep. He could call her, tell her to come in. Or he could make a quick trek down the canyon to check on her progress and suggest she drive back to town with him. That would give him the opportunity to tell her about the marks in the sandstone.

  Or so he rationalized as he pulled up beside the Blazer fifteen minutes later. The absence of the van indicated Sydney had sent at least part of her crew back to town. With the black clouds whipping closer by the minute, Reece made his way down the cliffs to the riverbed.

  When he reached the film crew’s temporary base camp set up below the ruins, Reece discovered that everyone had departed except the earringed, earphoned Zack and Henry Three Pines.

  “Is he listening to the wind?” Reece asked, indicating the kid.

  Henry’s wrinkled face creased even more. “No. I believe he listens to one called Marilyn Manson.”

  Absorbed in the grunge rocker’s lyrics, Zack didn’t hear Reece’s approach. He jumped half a foot in the air when tapped on the shoulder. Ripping off the earphones, he spun around.

  “Geez, dude, go easy on the heart muscles!”

  “Sorry. Where’s your boss?”

  “Up in the ruins, retrieving the mikes. She sent me down to pack up the rest of the equipment before the rain hits.”

  “Better get with it.”

  A pierced e
yebrow lifted, but Reece was too used to giving orders and Zack too used to following them to argue.

  “I’ll have to make two trips,” he grumbled. “Albert was feeling punk and left half of his gear for me to haul back to the van.”

  “Load up what you can carry and head out with Henry. I’ll bring the rest and follow with Sydney when she finishes here.”

  “Thanks, man!”

  Sydney still hadn’t appeared when Zack and Henry trudged off. Reece waited another fifteen minutes before he lost patience and called out to her. His shout bounced off the cliff wall a couple of times before the now-howling wind caught it and whipped it away.

  Muttering, he headed for the aluminum ladder. She was probably lost in her creative visions again, or so determined to capture the wind’s wail that she hadn’t even noticed how dark the sky had grown.

  Reece noticed it, though, and the lightning that snaked out of a cloud when he was still a few feet shy of the cave floor. Cursing, he scrambled up the last rungs and threw himself clear of the metal posts a mere second before another flash zigzagged across the sky. Picking himself up, he dusted off and watched as the supercharged ions lit the clouds from the inside out.

  Well, hell!

  No way either he or Sydney were going back down that ladder until the storm had passed.

  Which is exactly what he informed her when she appeared a few seconds later, draped in black wire and assorted mikes.

  “You’re kidding!”

  He shoved a hand through his hair, raking down the wind-whipped spikes. “A lightning bolt peaks at about twenty thousand amps. That’s not something I’d kid about.”

  “Twenty thousand?” She threw the darkened sky a wary, respectful look. “Guess we’ll have to make ourselves comfortable and wait this one out.”

  Lifting the wires from around her neck, she started to settle in the shelter of a half-standing stone wall. Reece caught her elbow.

  “We’d better go farther back into the ruins, away from the ladder.”

  More than happy to put as much stone as possible between her and the potential to end up as stir-fry, Sydney wove past crumbled wall and ducked under a low lintel, plunging instantly into inky blackness.

  Reece followed more slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the gloomy interior as he picked his way over fallen chunks of shale.

  “Back here!”

  Her voice echoed through the ruins, luring him on. After the first few paces, the walls closed in. Ceilings dropped, crowding so low he whacked his head against lintels twice. The only light came from the occasional brilliant flashes that lit the narrow window slits. Even after three days in the sun, the village smelled dank from its long, underwater sleep.

  “This room’s relatively intact,” Sydney announced when he bent almost double to enter a small chamber.

  It was tucked away under the lowest portion of the overhang. A single narrow window looked out over the canyon. Reece stumbled and almost tripped in a smooth, oblong depression in the stone floor. The trough gave him a clue to the room’s use. It was probably a kitchen or a storeroom, he guessed. A place where the Anasazi ground and stored their maize.

  Wary of the low ceilings, he felt his way along the wall until he spotted the pale blur of Sydney’s face.

  “Didn’t you bring a flashlight up here with you?” he asked.

  “Several, but they’re in my backpack, which at this moment is sitting a few feet from the ladder.” She looked up at him hopefully. “I don’t suppose you have anything to munch on with you?”

  “Sorry.” He dropped down beside her, his back to the wall. “Don’t you ever eat regular meals?”

  “I don’t have time for them when I’m on location.” She thought about that for a moment. “Or when I’m at home. Food isn’t real high on my list of priorities.”

  “Except at moments like this, when you can’t work,” he guessed.

  Her teeth gleamed white in the murky gloom. “Especially at moments like this. That’s why I keep Zack on the payroll. He generally remembers to order in a pizza or go pick up Chinese.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what currency do you pay him in? Silver nose rings?”

  “That, and one-on-one instruction in the art of documentary filmmaking. Don’t let his appearance fool you. He’s an honors grad of UCLA’s cinematography school.”

  “He could use some work on his professional image,” Reece returned, stretching out his legs.

  “Couldn’t we all? Take you, for instance. When I first saw you in your jeans and straw cowboy hat, I didn’t connect you with an engineer.”

  “You mean the day you drove off the cliff? Your appearance was a little misleading, too. Anyone seeing you then might have mistaken you for a ditzy, artistic type.”

  “I did not drive off that cliff. And as I recall, that’s exactly how you thought of me.”

  It was the perfect lead-in to tell her that her accident might have been staged. Reece had set up the intro with deliberate casualness. He hated to frighten her or put that fierce, hurt look in her eyes again. Not that he could see her eyes at this moment, but he hadn’t forgotten the anguish in her face last night.

  He’d just opened his mouth to tell her about the gouges in the stone when nature accomplished exactly what he was trying to avoid. In one thunderous boom, it scared the bejebers out of the woman next to him.

  The sky split. Lightning cracked seemingly right outside the window. The tiny chamber lit with brilliant white light, causing Sydney to scream like a banshee and give a credible imitation of a badger trying to burrow inside Reece’s shirt.

  He wrapped his arms around her, soothing, stroking, wincing when her elbow augered into his hip-bone. After a long, booming roll of thunder, he gave her the all clear.

  “It’s okay. Sydney, it’s okay.”

  “That’s what you say now!” she muttered into his shirt pocket. “A moment ago you were talking twenty million amps!”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “Whatever.”

  He might have convinced her to dig herself out of his shirt if the rain he’d anticipated all afternoon hadn’t broken loose at that moment. It came down in sheets, driven by the howling wind, and blew sideways through the slitted window.

  With the tested reflexes of a man who’d grown up with four rough and ready brothers, Reece rolled away from the drenching spray, taking Sydney with him.

  She ended up in his lap. For the life of him, Reece couldn’t say whether that was intentional or not on his part. However she got there, she stayed right where she was, her shoulder pressed his chest, her hair damp and silky under his nose.

  He’d tell her about the gouge marks on the stone later, he decided. Right now he’d simply share his warmth and hold her until she lost the shivers generated by fright or by the chill brought in by the rain and the darkness.

  His good intentions lasted exactly as long as it took for Sydney to shift to a more comfortable position in his lap. Her body contacted his everywhere it shouldn’t. Reece went from loose and relaxed to hard and tight in two and a half seconds flat.

  She couldn’t miss his sudden stiffening. She shifted again and caused a sort of chain reaction. Her head came up, cracking Reece on the underside of his chin. Her elbow did its thing on his hip again. Her breast pushed into his chest, and he got even harder.

  Flattening her palms on his chest, she pushed upright. He couldn’t see her expression clearly in the darkness, only hear her quick, uneven breath. He was trying to think of some way to pass off the awkward moment when her voice came to him, soft and edgy and just a little breathless.

  “Reece?”

  “Yes?”

  “Last night, at the waterfall?”

  A charged silence filled the chamber. Reece had to speak carefully around the jagged shards of heat slicing into his throat.

  “What about last night at the waterfall?”

  “I wanted you to kiss me. Almost as much as I want you to kiss me now.”

&nb
sp; He resisted the driving urge to do just that. “I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

  She took his face in her palms, her own a pale blur in the darkness. “But I want to be honest with you. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t have to worry that I’ll repeat my mistake of ten years ago. I won’t tumble into love with you just because I…because we…” Her breath left on a long, determined sigh. “Because of this.”

  For reasons totally beyond Reece’s comprehension, Sydney’s earnest assurance that she wouldn’t fall in love with him scratched his pride. He didn’t want her to fall for him, for Pete’s sake! Until this moment his only thought was to lock her body to his, to slide her under him and hear her gasp and pant and cry out in a fever of delight.

  Now he wanted more, but with Sydney’s soft, moist lips and eager hands destroying his concentration, not to mention his control, he was damned if he could decide what.

  Later, he decided. He’d deal with this irrational response to her declaration later. Right now, the woman leaning into him, her mouth hungry on his, was all he could handle.

  He tumbled back, taking care that she landed atop him, cushioning her from the hard rock. Tongues met. Knees tangled. Hands slid, shaped, cupped. The cave’s darkness, split at intermittent moments by flashes of light, wrapped around them. Rain shot through the narrow window and sizzled on stone. Reece didn’t notice the damp, didn’t worry about the rain. Sydney filled his senses. Like a wild, powerful river rushing through giant turbines, she roared in his ears, churned his blood, set him on fire at every pulse point in his body.

  She was all long legs and soft breasts, hungry mouth and sweet, tart tongue. Reece stroked and nipped and sucked the skin of her jaw, her throat, the curve of her neck. Each taste increased his hunger, each glide of his fingers on her hips and waist sparked small fires. He rolled her a little to one side, found the soft mound of breast flattened against his chest.

  Stretched atop Reece, her legs tangled with his and her body fitted to his, Sydney marveled at the magic he created with every touch, every scrape of his teeth and tongue. She’d never burned like this. Never wanted so badly. The realization worried her enough to pull back for a moment, her breath almost as loud and harsh as the rain gusting through the window.