by Jennie Jones
Goddamn his good-mannered grandpa.
Molly cleared her throat. “Look,” she said tilting her head in a confirmatory manner. “Me, too—I mean about the manners thing. Momma would hate it if I went”—some place beautiful—“some place good with you and then simply snapped my fingers and sent you on your way when I was done with you.”
He smiled so tenderly, the charm of it so bright Molly couldn’t help returning it with a smile of her own. One that was full of embarrassment which meant she was probably blushing.
“When you were done with me?” he asked through his bold, questioning smile.
“I can be brutal when I have to be,” she said, trying to control herself. “I’m the sort of woman who makes a stand.”
He gave a low, throaty laugh. “I’m currently the sort of man who’s trying to figure out what you’d be doing with me in that good place before I was sent on my way.”
“Stop it. I’m not the sort of woman who stands for being teased, either.”
“This is kind of weird,” he said, amusement slipping from his features and his voice. He inched forward, and the fraction of space between them disappeared. “You’re teasing me, Molly, not the other way round. If I wanted to kiss you I’d do it anyway. You know that.”
Molly didn’t reply but her mouth watered and she had trouble with her inner thighs which were now trembling.
“I think you also know I won’t do it unless I think you want me to.”
Her heart bounced and the quiet atmosphere of the night fell over her like a shawl.
“Molly. That woman I was talking to on the phone.”
Molly blinked. She ought to stop him from saying more, but she really wanted to know. “What’s her name?”
“Sally-Opal. She’s giving me a bit of trouble and I’m trying to work my way around it.”
“By dumping her?”
“No!” He grimaced. “Well, maybe it looks that way. Maybe I am, a bit—but I was never with her, like in a relationship. I don’t think she’s very stable. She’s lonely, or something.”
“What happened?” Molly asked.
“I pulled her out of a rolled vehicle one night on duty. She’s been overly grateful ever since.”
“Chasing you.”
He nodded.
“Did you come here to hide from her?”
He reddened a little. “I suppose so.”
That hurt a bit. “I bet you can’t wait to get it sorted with her, then move on.”
He shook his head. “I’m glad I found my way here.”
“So am I,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be getting my roof. Anyway, best of luck with this woman. Hope you get it sorted and if I can help in any way, just yell.”
“I’ll let you into a secret,” he said. “I’ve been shunned before, and I didn’t like it. I dealt with it but I put out feelers these days, and I make certain I’m not going to be played—mostly I make certain. I had my heart broken once and once was enough.”
Molly licked her now dry lips and tried to keep her eyes on his.
Then he smiled and the sudden brooding mood left him. “Just so you know what you’re getting into, should you decide to tease me into that good place.”
He’d had his heart broken. So had she, but somehow she knew for sure that Saul’s heartbreak had been tougher and deeper than hers. That he’d had to fight hard to overcome it. “No breaking of hearts from me,” she promised. “Although,” she added, a smile creeping onto her face regardless of her attempt to stop it. “I’m happy to know you think I’m so gorgeous I might break your heart.”
His smile deepened, matching hers. “That’s not the kind of heartbreak I meant. As gorgeous as you are,” he finished. “Now. Why Colorado?” He took his seat on the deckchair next to hers.
“Don’t know,” she answered, sitting, and accepting the change in conversation as though it was the most natural thing in the world. They didn’t need preparatory words between them in order to inch from one conversation to the next. It was that friendship thing. No matter whether they wanted it or not, they had it. “It was a pull or something. I’d planned on Arizona where my cousin Pepper lives now, and right up until the week I booked my ticket I was heading to Tucson. Then I changed my mind.” She hadn’t thought about it for a long time. “I wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to Arizona?” she said, almost to herself.
She wouldn’t have met Jason. She wouldn’t have bought an engagement ring and lost twenty thousand dollars. She might have made it big as a photographer long before now—and she might not have come home to the valley.
“I thought about Arizona once, too,” he said. “Then I changed my mind.”
“Really? Why did you leave Colorado in the first place?”
“I didn’t have any plans to leave,” he said. “But suddenly I had to.”
Ah, the heartbreak issue.
“I don’t know why I chose Texas. Just a pull.” He pinned her with his eyes, which were so blue, even in the softened evening light. “A bit like you. Following fate, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe in fate.” If she did, she’d be cowering under her blankets, hiding from the GGs.
“Hell, neither do I. I don’t know why I came here. Maybe I shouldn’t have left.”
Something in his now downcast demeanor suggested he knew exactly why and wasn’t about to open up about it. Maybe not even to himself.
They were silent for a while, sitting peaceably beneath the cool night sky and the bright stars. Molly contemplated the porch rules and why life had sent either of them the way it had.
“You’ve got problems in the towns,” he said at last, breaking the moment.
Molly inhaled. She’d wanted to keep him off this track for as long as possible, but he was turning out to be more intuitive than she’d reckoned on. “Developers are hoping to buy the land and turn the valley into a fashionable hideaway, renting out their glorified exclusive holiday homes to tourists with a lot of money and a love of golf.”
“I hope you’re not going to let them.”
“We’re doing our best. Momma has a few ideas, and Davie went to Austin, where their base is, trying to work out why...”
“Why what?”
Molly scrunched her nose. He’d gone because he was trying to find out why they’d spread the rumour of Molly’s greed and what they intended to do next. “Oh, you know—rumors. They’re spreading rumors about the towns. About the Mackillops. Anything to make the valley residents sit up and think the time is right to sell their land.”
“The valley is unincorporated. I understand that’s the reason why it’s privately owned, but how come?”
She glanced at him. “Like I said earlier, it was either granted to us or we simply claimed it.”
He smiled. “And your great-grandmothers—daring and courageous souls—worked the land and built a community.”
Molly reclined further in her deckchair with a satisfied sigh and took a quick slug of her beer. “That’s us. Daring Mackillops.” Until it all went to pot because of the curse.
“I presume by getting your photography business off the ground you’re hoping to renew the tourist industry for all the towns.”
“It’s not going to be easy.”
“One business?” he asked. “Are you sure that’ll do it?”
She had plans for more businesses in the towns, if people wanted to take up the suggestions, but she didn’t want to tell him. She hadn’t got this first plan underway yet. “I’m going to have to try a whole lot harder than I currently am,” she acknowldeged.
He indicated the land around the hacienda with a lift of his hand. “Maybe you just need to chill, Molly. Let things happen as they happen.”
“Not sure if I’ve got time for that.” Not without her twenty thousand. Not without the roof fully restored and the hacienda ready to go with Through the Lens. “We do get some business trade. Momma’s a well-known hairdresser, and her sponge cake is famous.”
/> “I don’t doubt it.”
“The people in the valley are keen to stay—I’m sure they are.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
Molly accepted this with an intake of breath and a long drawn out sigh. “There’s a laziness about the valley people now. They just shuffle along. Some have employment in Amarillo or Lubbock. Some do volunteer work for the canyon. We do get the odd tourist who has lost their way while hiking, biking—”
“You get a lot of hikers around here?” he interrupted.
“Heaps of strays wander the valley. They either find themselves driving down the unsealed road from the west, or they get lost in the canyon backcountry and walk into the valley. Once they’re here, we look after them. There’s lots to do! Davie’s native art—that’s stunning. And the bar in Surrender does quite well, when there isn’t a fight going on. And Reckless...” Molly halted. Reckless didn’t have anything going for it at the moment, except for Mad Aurora and what she offered. “And the grandmothers,” she continued. “They’ve always brought people to the valley. People come for miles to visit the grandmothers.”
“Daring fortune-telling Mackillops?” he asked.
Molly straightened in her chair and met his amusement with forthright Mackillop backbone. “Not fortune-tellers. Don’t ever say that.”
“I’m sorry. What do you call Alice then?”
“She’s a soothsayer. She can see things we can’t. There’s nothing crazy about it.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“Alice and her sisters, they’ve got a gift. That’s all.”
“I understand.”
“So don’t go saying we’re crazy.”
“I didn’t say that, Molly.”
His gentler tone eased her out of her inbuilt rebellion at being called crazy. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound uptight...”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t thinking that. But I was thinking about the coincidences—you arriving in Colorado Springs the same day I left. The pull of moving on we were talking about, and where we went. I mean, why did you stay in Colorado if you didn’t intend to go there in the first place?”
How come his mind was so in tune with whatever was going on in hers? She’d just been thinking about Jason and her stay in Colorado, and why she’d felt the pull to go there instead of Arizona. “I’d been there four years and was almost getting somewhere with my photography work.” She shrugged her shoulders to her ears. “Then I was mugged.”
He straightened in his chair, a hand on the metal arm.
“Not hurt,” she said quickly. “But my purse and daypack were taken—along with my cash and credit cards.”
“When?” His voice had hardened.
She frowned, trying to remember the date. “The lease on my rental had run out. So I’d booked into a motel until I could find the time to hunt for another place.” How much information did he want and how much was she prepared to give? Not Jason, she didn’t want him knowing she had a cheating ex-fiancé. “It was summer. Two years ago.”
“When in summer two years ago?”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “I’d had a desperate six months with hardly any work, so it would have been—end of July. The twenty-second.”
Saul spluttered and coughed so hard that Molly got up and slapped him on the back.
“Jesus,” he said as he regained himself.
He looked up at her, his eyes narrowing and his consideration of her perplexed and shocked. “I found them,” he said in a tone that suggested he could hardly believe what he was saying.
While his features remained incredulous, Molly’s slackened in surprise. “No way. It couldn’t possibly have been the same bag. How come you’re saying it was?”
“Because I saw you. I saw your photograph in your wallet. I just stared at you. I couldn’t take my eyes off you—and that was unreal, because at that point I wasn’t in the mood for—”
“For what?”
He stared at her. “Jesus, this is weird. Why didn’t I see it when I met you?”
“I was blonde back then. I’d changed my hair color.” So she could change her whole crazy Molly persona. But she’d hated it and had the color washed out after she hooked up with Jason. “What were you doing back in Colorado if you left six years ago?”
“I’d gone back to talk to—it doesn’t matter why. I’d gone back for a visit.”
“So what did you do with my daypack?”
“I took it to the cops. I hung around. I said I wanted to meet you.”
Molly took a step back. “They called me the day you handed it in—I think the same hour you handed it in. But I said I couldn’t go and get it because...” She stopped as the ramifications of why she hadn’t been able to go struck her like a blow to the chest.
“Because of what?” he asked.
Unreal. Confusion still surrounded the story but... “Because I’d just met someone.” She’d met Jason that day. “I couldn’t pay the motel bill because my purse had been stolen, and I was so taken with this person’s kindness about it and the solution he offered, that I put off going to get my daypack until the next day.”
“By which time I’d gone.”
“Hot-beef,” she said, but her voice lacked any luster.
If it hadn’t been for Jason, she’d have met Saul two years ago.
He stood. “Three hours, Molly. I waited for you for three hours.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said insistently, hoping to match the intensity in his voice and on his face. “Why did you want to see me?”
“Because of your photo.”
“I don’t understand. Did you recognize me or something?”
He stilled. “No. Not in the way you mean.”
“So in what way?”
“I can’t explain it.” He turned, his mouth drawn. “It was to do with what had happened to me. Something about your photo pulled me out of my bad humor. I can’t explain it.”
“What had happened to you?”
“This is getting too complicated.” He picked up the beer bottles, the bowl of melon neither of them had touched, and glanced at her. “You go on to bed. I’ll clear up here and lock the hacienda.”
That was not what she wanted. She didn’t want him doing gallant things like washing up and tidying, but she still couldn’t speak. She was light-headed and felt sick. She’d probably paled, too, so it was a good job he’d moved away from her. Good job it was dark and the starry night had turned suddenly cold.
“I’m going to take a walk,” she said. “I’ll lock up the lodge when I get back.” She headed toward the courtyard, without looking at him, and made her way down the driveway and into the night.
Chapter Twelve
“You know I didn’t want to come here, don’t you?” Molly asked Alice as she sat on the earth in front of the pit fire.
“Here.” Alice flung a suede-fringed jacket at her. “You left so quickly you forgot your coat. It’s getting cold.” She waved a hand over the fire and the flames picked up in intensity.
“Is that rain I can smell in the air?” Molly asked.
“We’ll get rain, but not yet.”
Molly slipped her arms into the jacket and tugged it around her. “What’s going on?” She didn’t need to qualify her question. Alice would know Molly was here because of Saul and all the strangeness. Not to mention the unexpected tug of friendship she felt toward him.
“You need to get your thoughts right, Molly, and you need to do it soon. Or you’re going to be rained on from above in a very different manner.”
“Thoughts on what?”
“On how you feel about him.”
The air stilled, and the flames of the fire dwindled to low, translucent curls that indicated trouble. Molly had seen the flames do this too often in the five weeks she’d been home.
Alice lifted her face to the night sky, but she wasn’t counting stars.
“What is it?” Molly asked.
“The great-grandfathers.
”
Molly’s skin prickled as though she’d been zapped by the tail end of a lightning strike. “They’re coming?” she whispered. “Or are they here?” It no longer felt like a joke, it was too scary. “Is this why you contacted us at the start of last summer?” The grandmothers had told the cousins to rethink their decision about disregarding their gifts, and start nurturing.
This resulted in the start of the three-way telephone calls between Molly in Colorado, Lauren in California and Pepper in Arizona. There’d been some wine involved—always a necessity when they were forced to discuss Calamity Valley and the curse.
“We can’t stop what’s going to happen unless those involved are around and acknowledging the issue sent them,” Alice said.
“So there is a problem.” Why hadn’t they listened instead of rolling eyeballs and swilling wine? “Can the great-grandmothers stop the great-grandfathers?”
“They’re trying.”
If what they’d been told since they were knee-high to a grasshopper was true, the cousins were in trouble. “Trying?” she said. “That’s not near enough good news. Tell them to try harder.”
“Thought you didn’t believe.”
“I’m covering all angles.” Molly looked up at the sky, expecting to see the ghostly faces of the great-grandfathers materializing through the ink-black night, spitting tobacco and retribution down on Calamity Valley.
She’d left the valley as soon as she was able to, but that didn’t mean she didn’t hold a lot of respect for the towns. Or for the grandmothers. Or her darling mother. Plus, Molly wanted children. Not now, she was only twenty-seven and she had a lot on her plate, but in the future. When she was thirty-something. When she’d organized her life. When...
“He followed you again.”
Molly looked away from the orangey-glow of the fire and into her grandmother’s dark-green perceptive eyes. She resisted the urge to turn.
“Looks like he can’t come out of protection mode as easily as he thought he could.”
Molly inched closer to Alice. “We had a little moment this evening,” she said in a lowered tone. “It was... an unusual moment. Alice...” She paused. “Do you make things happen?” She was amazed at her boldness. She’d never questioned Alice or her cousin’s grandmothers before tonight. Hadn’t ever expected to have a need to do so. “Have you been pushing us together for the past six years?”