“He seemed genuine when he said his interest in Stanton was centered on my boss.” She fiddled with the strap of the food carrier still sitting on the table. “I can’t help but wonder if maybe Otis is Gage’s father.” The notion had been percolating ever since Otis admitted knowing Gage’s mother.
“That’d be convenient, wouldn’t it? Your boss would get the mountain without the heavy price tag. And don’t pretend you didn’t think about that already.”
She folded her arms, wishing she hadn’t said anything. “If you want me to go, just say so. You don’t have to resort to insults to accomplish it.”
He didn’t apologize. Didn’t say anything. He just drank the coffee. And when the cup was empty, he took a piece of the fried chicken she’d set out and bit into it. A minute later, he scooped potato salad onto his plate.
Satisfied that he was at least consuming something besides coffee and—presumably—scotch, she went to check the fire. The log was burning well and she adjusted the venting. She suspected the interior would warm up in short order. The cabin didn’t sport a lot of square footage.
She went down the short hall to the bathroom and opened the wooden cupboard above the washer and dryer. She was hoping to find a first aid kit. All she located amid the congestion of stuff—everything from rusty tools to a can of peanut brittle and a copious supply of kitchen matches—was a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide that looked as old as she was. She took it down anyway and twisted open the lid to pour a small measure of the clear liquid into the cracked porcelain sink. The peroxide bubbled, which was good enough for her.
She capped it again, then poked through the rest of the cabinet, finally finding some bandage strips inside a silver metal box that looked like it had once held jewelry.
There wasn’t anything remotely like a handy stack of clean washcloths. So she took the peroxide and bandages and went back to the kitchen.
He’d eaten two chicken legs. The potato salad was gone. She set the bottle and box on the counter and poured more coffee carefully into his cup. In general, the grounds tended to rest in a clumpy mess at the bottom of the pot, but she was also used to pouring through a little strainer. Which she doubted existed in this particular kitchen.
Then she sat back down across from him. “How are you doing? Really?”
He pushed aside the plate and leaned his elbow on the table, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m fine. This wasn’t unexpected. It just—” He sighed and dropped his hand. “He sat down in his chair and took a nap. He didn’t wake up. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone.”
She closed her hand over his. “I wish—” She broke off, shaking her head. She moistened her lips. “I wish there were something I could do.”
His fingers slowly curled around hers. “You’re doing it.”
Her throat tightened and her chest ached even more. It was either start crying right then and there or do something. She slid her hand from his and got up to grab the bottle of peroxide and the metal container of bandages. She pulled the rest of the cloth napkins from the carrier and then crouched in front of him. “Give me your hand.”
His eyebrows pulled together. But he put his hand in hers. She cradled it with one of the napkins. “I don’t think this will hurt.” She dribbled peroxide over the scrapes and scratches and then dabbed them dry with another clean napkin. “When was the last time you got some sleep?”
He let out a rough sound. “You saying I look like I need it?”
She raised an eyebrow, giving him a look.
He made a face. “It’s been a while,” he admitted grudgingly.
She could well imagine. She rinsed the scrapes on his other hand with the peroxide, then fit the adhesive strips over the worst of them. “I wish I had some antiseptic cream,” she fretted as she carefully smoothed the edges of the bandages with her fingertip. “I hope it helps. That it didn’t hurt too much.”
“It’s killing me.”
“I only meant to help.” She curled her fingers lightly around his hand and looked up with dismay.
His gaze caught hers and her mouth dried.
He cupped her cheek. His hand felt warm. The bandage cool. The look in his eyes stole her breath.
And then he let out a muffled curse. “Sorry.”
He stood abruptly, stepping around her and pushed out of the kitchen through the back door.
She hovered there, still kneeling on the ancient linoleum floor. Maybe she was crazy. Coming here at all.
She cleared away the bandage wrappers and covered the food and stacked the containers on the metal shelves in the old refrigerator. She checked the woodstove and closed down the air control to let the fire burn low and very slow.
Then she went out the kitchen door he’d left open.
She told herself she was going to leave. Jed clearly didn’t want company. At least not hers.
But instead she looked up at the ridge where he’d buried Otis.
And her footsteps started that way.
The hill angled sharply upward, but there was a path of sorts worn into the long grass whipping around in the breeze and she followed it. Within minutes, she could look down onto the roof of the cabin. Jed was nowhere to be seen.
She looked up at the sky where white clouds skittered across the blue, blue expanse. She looked out over the valley beyond. It was so beautiful. And for all of these years, Lambert had kept it to himself.
She drew in a deep breath and started up the path again. The distance really wasn’t that great. Yet it was still no small hike by the time she reached the grave situated in a narrow passage. There was no way to miss it. Sharp-edged boulders pushed aside. A small patch of freshly turned soil. A flat, rectangular piece of stone planted in the ground at one end, a sheer drop-off from the cliff at the other.
She propped her hands on her hips and looked around, her breath hard and hissing through her teeth. There was no room for a truck or digging equipment. It didn’t bear thinking how Jed had performed the task on his own.
Even if he’d been wearing work gloves, it was no wonder his hands had been so beaten up.
She decided the height was no scarier here than it was on that final curve in the road, and edged her way to the marker.
Despite herself, she smiled a little over the inscription. “Well, that says it all, Otis.”
Far, far below she finally saw black dots of cattle, grazing in a meadow that ran alongside the hook in a stream she hadn’t even known existed. She was almost surprised. Despite the notion that Otis Lambert had been a rancher, she’d wondered whether the cattle existed or not.
The narrow path kept going upward beyond the grave and she followed it for a while. She passed low-growing shrubs. Slipped around trees with trunks more than a foot in diameter. She leaned for a few minutes against a jagged outcrop to catch her breath. Then higher still, through a patch of wildflowers growing on a sunny outcrop.
She finally stopped, standing there in the midst of such beauty. It would be foolhardy to go farther. She couldn’t see the summit from here, but she knew it was still covered in snow.
Standing there on Otis Lambert’s mountainside, a person could think they were the only ones in the world. And one portion of her mind recognized the pricelessness of that particular sensation.
She shook it off and crouched down, grabbing a handful of wildflowers and worked them loose, roots and all, then started back down.
When she reached Otis’s grave, she knelt down and traced the letters on the marker with her finger.
Born here. Died here.
“I think I would have liked to have known you better, Otis.” Using her fingers, she scooped out a hole and planted the wildflowers. “I know they’re more likely to blow away than take root,” she said. “But there’s always hope.” She pressed the soil down. The surface was warm from the sun, but the coolness below was still evident. �
�Thank you for taking care of Jed when he needed it,” she whispered.
Then she stood and brushed the dirt from her hands and started back down the path. She reached the small shed first, finally recognizing it was really just a shelter for the horse. There was a water trough. Feed. No sign of the horse at the moment, though. There was no fence, so it wasn’t surprising. She splashed water from the trough over her hands and dried them down the sides of her jeans.
The other shed was more substantial. The door was open when she passed and she glanced in, expecting to see the usual kind of farm equipment.
She saw Jed.
Sitting on a footlocker. Head in his hands.
Her heart ached and she stepped quietly into what she realized was really a bunkhouse for one.
“Why haven’t you gone?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. Then she moved over to him and put her arms around his shoulders. Bent over him and pressed her lips to his head. “Tell me how I can help.”
His wide shoulders moved and she felt his arms around her. His fingertips pressed hard against her spine, but then moved away. “April.” He looked up at her but his eyes seemed to focus no higher than her mouth.
Heat slipped into her veins, warming her from the inside out.
Her breath was quick like it had been from her hike up and down the hillside, but she knew this time he was the cause. “Tell me,” she whispered again.
His eyes darkened.
He slowly reached between them and she went still as he slowly, slowly pulled down the zipper of her jacket. When it was loose, he tugged on the leather, pulling her down until she was at his level, kneeling between his legs.
His gaze searched hers. “Are you sure?”
She knew what he was really asking. Could read the truth of it in his eyes.
She leaned forward slowly, brushing her lips softly, gently across his. “Yes,” she whispered, and took his poor, worn hands littered with bandages and drew them around her waist, beneath the jacket. Beneath the stretchy knit fabric of her T-shirt.
Her heart was pounding, but so was his. She could feel it as she slid her fingers under the edges of his striped shirt. Pressed flat against the hard, hot flesh beneath.
She angled her head, running her lips along that square jaw. Down to his neck, where she could feel his pulse throbbing against the tip of her tongue. She slowly pushed his shirt over his broad, sinewy shoulders. Discovered another small scar. Older than the one on his chin. More jagged.
Thoughts of bar fights and knives were brief, pushed aside by the sheer gentleness in the fingertips he was drawing up her spine.
And then she was shrugging out of the jacket and the shirt. Fitting herself against him was so easy, so perfect. His mouth found hers and she could no more remain closed to him than she could stop breathing.
She was vaguely aware of the constant breeze pushing into the room, curling around them. But she wasn’t cold. Could never be cold. Not as long as she was in his arms.
When he drew her to her feet, she went with him. Brushed aside his clothes as he brushed aside hers.
He drew her down to the rough woven blanket covering the narrow bed, and she sighed his name and felt herself melting around him.
He rose over her, threading his fingers through her hair. Spreading it carefully out around her head. “You’re too beautiful for this place.” His voice was rough. Husky.
She ran her finger over his lower lip. Tears were blurring her vision, and she wasn’t even really sure why. “This is what’s beautiful,” she whispered, and raised up to kiss him. She slid her leg along his, arching into him. Taking him in. Catching her breath at the feel. At the perfect, wondrous feel of him against her.
His breath came harder. His forehead pressing against hers. His thumb rubbing the moisture on her cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You aren’t.” She twined her arms around him, taking more. “You won’t, Jed. I promise you.” She found his mouth, only to tear away, gasping with promise as he pressed into her even more deeply. Until there was nothing between them but heartbeats and sighs. Until her blood sang and her name was a rough groan against her ear as he drove them both right off the edge of heaven.
And after, when she lay exhausted in his arms, he brushed the moisture from her cheek yet again. “Stay,” he murmured.
Just that simply, she felt her heart being stolen.
She nodded, pressing her head against that curve in his shoulder that seemed designed for her alone. He caught her fingers in his and kissed them.
And then he closed his eyes and exhaled so deeply, it felt like it came from the very center of his soul.
She watched him sleep until the light outside the open door of his little bunkhouse-for-one shifted and darkened.
She wasn’t cold. The heat radiating off his body could have heated the world.
When it was fully dark, she finally slid off the bed, careful not to disturb him. She went to the door and looked out. The sky was ink. The stars brilliant around a white moon.
Her bare skin prickled with chill.
She quietly closed the door and in the moonlight shining through the single window, she went back to the bed.
He didn’t wake. Not really. But his arm came around her waist as he murmured something and pulled her close again.
She exhaled carefully, that low, soft murmur ringing through her mind like the sweetest lullaby.
“Forever.”
Chapter Nine
When she woke, sunlight was filling the bunkhouse.
And despite the blanket tucked tightly around her and the big, shaggy dog curled against her feet as if they’d been lifelong friends, it was cold.
She pushed up on her elbow.
You could take in the entirety of the room in one glance. Jed was not there.
She exchanged looks with the dog. “Where is he, Samson?”
The dog licked her hand, then leisurely hopped down from the bed and went to the closed door.
Bemused, she slid off the thin mattress and opened the door for him. There wasn’t a lock on the thing. She half suspected the dog could have opened it all on his own if he’d wanted.
She closed the door and went into the bathroom. Equally as empty as the rest of the place.
She used the facilities and washed her hands and face while she looked in the mirror over the sink.
There was no logic to falling for Jed Dalloway.
But she knew she’d gone and done exactly that.
So fully and completely that she marveled why it didn’t show in her reflection.
She tugged on the mirror to look behind it and saw the usual stuff on the narrow shelves. Deodorant. Toothpaste. She squeezed some of that onto her finger and did what she could with her teeth. She didn’t find a hairbrush, so she had to make do with her fingers there, as well. Goose pimples were breaking out all over by the time she pushed the tube of toothpaste back onto the little shelf.
When she did so, she knocked something off, and she narrowly caught the ring before it could slide down the sink drain.
She held up the wide ring.
Gold metal in a distinctive, chunky weave.
It was large enough to slip all the way down her thumb. She slid it off her thumb and spotted the engraving inside the band. The letters were worn soft, but they were still distinct.
Forever.
She swallowed. A wedding ring, she realized. Sized for a man.
Forever.
It was a simple word.
And it had every singing cell inside her body going silent.
She’d been falling head over heels for him. But he hadn’t said that word to April when he’d pulled her next to him in that narrow bed of his.
He’d simply been thinking about his wife.
She pushed the ring
back onto the shelf and slammed the mirror door shut.
She felt an immediate and imperative urge to escape.
Fortunately, since the man was nowhere to be seen, she didn’t have any problems doing just that.
She pulled on her clothes and jacket and hopped around on one foot as she yanked on her boots.
Five minutes later, she was running down the road to her car.
She couldn’t wait to get off the mountain.
And she never wanted to return to it.
* * *
“What?”
Three weeks later, April stood in Gage Stanton’s high-rise office and stared at him. Alarm was congealing into a hard knot inside her. “I don’t want to go back to Weaver. I should never have gone in the first place. Cutting deals is your forte. Not mine.”
Gage merely leaned back in his chair and spun it to look out the tall windows at the downtown buildings of Denver. “And there’s still one to negotiate.”
She flapped her arms. “I don’t know with whom! Otis told me he had a will, but none has been filed. If the thing ever really existed, no one is claiming to have seen it. No one who’s witnessed it has stepped forward. Lambert didn’t associate with anyone in town unless he had to. Archer still checked with every local attorney in case they helped Lambert draw one up and he turned up zip.”
Gage spun again to face her. “Snead is in Weaver, asserting he’s the rightful heir. The administrator assigned by the court has already determined there are no encumbrances against the property. Even intestate, it’s going to be straightforward. The estate should be settled with relative ease within the next few weeks and I want Snead on the hook by then.”
April pressed her lips together. She looked at the framed photos placed on his credenza.
His mother, Althea Stanton.
His brother, Noah Locke.
“Otis’s interest wasn’t in a real estate deal,” she said. “It was in you. I told you that.”
“So?”
She exhaled and twisted her fingers together. “Gage, Otis knew your mother. When he knew he was dying, he reached out to her son. To you. Don’t you wonder why?”
A Promise to Keep Page 10
