by Jane Toombs
Bram kept his mouth shut. No gain in jumping in when they both had made points he could live with. After a time he spotted what looked like a good place to camp and made a decision.
"We'll stop, set up the tent and the extension and get in out of this rain," he said. "It'll also give the pack horse a chance to rest his leg."
Davis looked unhappy but he didn't protest.
When the necessary chores were taken care of, including setting up the tent and attaching the extension, the three of them ducked inside and dried off as best they could.
"Bummer," Davis said gloomily. "We're so close to the treasure."
Vala put her arm around him and he leaned against her for a few minutes before putting away. "Hey," he said, "I just remembered it's Mom's turn to tell a story."
"My turn? How come?" Vala protested.
"'Cause I told one about Coyote at Pauline's and after we saw the rattler Bram told about Mokesh being the Guardian of the Ndee. So you're next."
"But I don't know any Native American stories," she said.
"Didn't Grandpa or Grandma ever tell you any stories when you were little?" Davis asked.
Vala shook her head. "My father read stories to me and so did my mother."
"I don't mean stories out of books. I guess you'll just have to make up one, then."
"I'm not good at making up stories. It'd have to be a real one. Wait, something's coming to me my grandmother once told me. It's about when she was a little girl. Will that do?"
"Sure!"
"It's sort of sad."
"That's okay, 'cause this is sort of a sad day."
Bram thought Davis was more right than he knew. The day was sad. Not because of the rain or the lame horse or the fact they'd had to stop short of their goal. Time would take care of those things.
He felt sad because he'd faced the fact that this trip wasn't going to last forever. All too soon they'd be back in Phoenix. Then only he would be left in Phoenix. Vala and Davis would be gone.
He supposed he'd forget them eventually, as the memories faded and disappeared. But that might well be a long and painful process, one he didn't care to contemplate. His own fault for letting it happen, for identifying with the kid because of his own childhood. As for Vala....Bram sighed. There was no accounting for Vala.
Chapter 10
Inside the tent, Vala eased into a more comfortable sitting position on her sleeping bag. The gear in the extension smelled not unpleasantly of wet leather and horse, while outside the rain drizzled down.
She let her gaze drift from Davis to Bram, and back.
The coziness of them being close together like this gave her a warm feeling.
"My mother's mother's name was Ella," she began her story. "Davis, she'd be your great-grandmother. When she was a little girl of six her parents took her with them on a trip from Iowa where they lived to visit her mother's parents in Southern California."
"My great-great grandparents?" Davis asked.
Vala nodded. "In the olden days, Ella said, Los Angeles wasn't the huge metropolis it is now. The parks had carousels and ponds with boats and swans. Eastlake Park was near where Ella was visiting and every day her grandfather would walk down the hill with her to that park. He'd give her some change and tell her she could ride the merry-go- round until the money ran out. Of course, if she caught the gold ring, she'd get a free ride.
"Ella loved riding the carousel horses and every time she went by the ring dispenser, she grabbed one. But it was never the gold one. As she went round, she could see her grandfather sitting on a bench attached to a picnic table where he was playing cribbage with a friend. She knew it was cribbage because her parents played the game at home. Every once in a while he'd look at her and wave."
Vala went on to tell how Ella finally found out her grandfather's friend had to bring the cards and cribbage board to the park because her grandmother thought cards were the devil's playthings and didn't allow them in the house. Ella didn't know if that was true--her mother said it wasn't--but she was solidly on her grandfather's side, so she never mentioned what he did at the park while she rode the merry-go-round.
"One day, the magic happened--Ella reached out while going around and caught the gold ring. She was so excited she failed to keep a good grip and she dropped it. An older boy jumped off his horse, grabbed the gold ring and wouldn't give it back. When the ride ended, Ella told the man who took care of the carousel, but he said whoever had the gold ring in his hand won the free ride."
"That was mean," Davis said. "What'd she do?"
"Ella went crying to her grandfather. He agreed it was unfair but pointed out there was nothing to be done about it. Even the mean boy had vanished by now. He comforted her until she stopped crying."
"By the time they got home, Ella had somehow twisted the unfair rule around to apply to her grandmother not letting her grandfather play cards in his own house. If she'd kept her mouth shut, everything would have been all right, but Ella, still upset about the gold ring, confronted her grandmother, asking why she was so mean to Grandfather."
"So then it all came out. Grandmother labelled Grandfather a back-sliding sinner and lectured Ella's parents about their wayward child. They got upset and left California sooner than they'd planned. On the way home to Iowa, they told Ella she had too big a mouth and let this be a lesson. Before they visited again, Grandfather died and Ella always wondered if it wasn't somehow her fault."
"Whoa, that's way sad," Davis said.
"Is there a moral?" Bram asked.
"Yeah," Davis replied. "Don't drop the gold ring."
"Life isn't always fair," Vala put in.
"I can go along with both of those," Bram told them, "but I have a different one. Don't let something that upset you in the past color your whole life."
Vala stared at him. "That's just what happened to my Grandmother Ella. She always blamed herself when anything went wrong. I never thought about it before."
"If she hadn't dropped the gold ring, she'd've been all right," Davis insisted. "Let's not talk about any more sad things. We could tell jokes. Me first."
Though Vala laughed in the right places and even told a few jokes of her own, her mind kept going back to her Grandmother Ella. Finally she realized why. Ever since she'd divorced Neal, she'd shied away from any kind of a meaningful relationship with a man. In effect, she'd done what Ella had done. After she "lost" her wedding ring by getting divorced, she had been afraid to take another chance. Why? It wasn't all her fault that the marriage had failed, Neal was as much to blame as she was. Yet he hadn't let it bother him. Look at him with another wife and another son already.
It wouldn't have helped to keep the damn ring, along with the marriage. She and Neal had been miserable together, they were better off apart.
So now what did it mean that she'd plunged headlong into involvement with another man? A hopeless involvement. Was it due to a twist in her defense mechanism? Bram was safe to fall for because there wasn't a chance for anything permanent between them? No wedding ring, no failure?
"Mom," Davis said, nudging her, "it's your turn to tell a joke."
"I think you'd better skip me this time," she said. "I'm all joked out."
As the day slipped into an early evening and the rain turned into a heavy mist, it became clear there'd be no sleeping under the stars tonight. Since their gear took up most of the extension, obviously they'd be bedding down in the tent's close quarters.
Vala tried to figure out a way to keep Davis between Bram and her but the configuration of the tent lent itself best to an arrangement whereby Davis, being shorter, slept behind their heads at the rear of the tent.
"I'll turn the sleeping bags around," Bram said, "so Davis will be at our feet instead. We're less likely to wake each other up that way."
"Yeah," Davis agreed. "Sometimes Mom snores a little."
"I do not!" Vala said.
"Want me to let you know in the morning?" Bram asked her, chuckling.
&n
bsp; She flushed, realizing he probably already knew whether she did or not. Tonight, she decided, was not going to be peaceful.
When they were settled into their sleeping bags, Davis said, "This is fun."
For you, maybe, she thought, lying rigid, unable to relax with Bram practically nestled against her.
"It's sort of like summer camp," Davis went on, "but more like we're a family camping in our tent."
His words fell painfully onto Vala's heart.
Bram tried to think of some quip to toss into the silence that stretched out after Davis's last remark, but he couldn't come up with a thing.
He knew what the kid meant. Often during one of his guide trips, the people who'd hired him, sometimes strangers to one another, developed a sense of camaraderie born of shared hardships on the trail. He'd always stayed aloof, friendly without making anyone a comrade.
This time he'd screwed up. For one thing, he rarely had as few as two people to guide. But what had really got to him was who the two people were. Vala and Davis. He'd gotten to know them so well it seemed incredible that they'd soon be more than half a continent away from him.
His thoughts drifted to the story Vala had told about her grandmother. He'd picked up on what he saw as the moral to be learned from the tale because he'd been guilty of using his version of the past to color his world. What if, as he'd been slowly coming to realize, his version was skewed?
His father hadn't really neglected him, even if he wasn't around much of the time. When they'd been together, which seemed to be more often than Bram had once believed, his father had done the best he could to teach his son what he felt was important, to offer as much of his heritage as a kid could understand.
Bram sighed, belatedly noting his sigh was intermingling with Vala's. "Can't sleep?" he asked softly.
"Too many ghosts of the past hovering," she said. "I guess I shouldn't have told Ella's story."
If he moved even slightly, they'd be touching. Two sleeping bags made a lot of padding between them, but he decided not to risk it anyway.
"I know what you mean," he admitted. "Plus this intimate sleeping arrangement where we can't be intimate."
"That, too."
"Davis asleep?"
"His breathing sounds as though he is," she said.
"When we started on this trip," Bram said slowly, feeling his way along, "I didn't expect what happened to us to happen, if that makes sense."
"Neither did I. It was the farthest thing from my mind. For the first two days I was mad at you most of the time."
"Come to think of it, I was damned annoyed with you, telling me you could ride when you'd never been on a horse. But I have to admit you proved to be a quick learner."
"And I acquired the sore muscles to prove it."
"You might be a liar, Vala, but you proved you're a good sport."
"A lie told to help someone else doesn't count."
"As Davis would say--whoa. Some definition."
"Consider yourself warned."
All the warning signs had been there, Bram realized--the girl from his past, the old attraction reviving with the added spice of her now being an adult, the rising desire. He'd noted and ignored each and every one, plunging on like a desperately thirsty man heading for water.
Serve him right if he drowned.
"The kid saw us kiss last night," he said.
"I know. He figures we must like each other."
"Don't we?"
"I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me."
"Coward."
"Better safe than sorry."
"Is it?"
She didn't answer.
What did he want from her other than what he knew they had? He wasn't sure. This yearning he felt was something beyond his experience.
"Falling asleep?" she asked.
"Not yet."
"Tell me something about you that I don't know," she said.
She already knew too much about him. He searched for something innocuous to tell her and Sheba popped into his mind.
"My cat," be began. "I didn't pick Sheba out, she just happened to me. Showed up as a half-grown kitten yowling on my front doorstep a little over a year ago. No one in the neighborhood claimed her. The gal next door thought the kitten might have belonged to the people across the street who'd moved out a couple days before."
"Sheba was hungry and lonesome, equal parts of each. I'd never been around Siamese cats, didn't realize they talked to you. Or grew on you. Or were completely zany felines. After a couple of days we bonded and now we're stuck with each other."
"What becomes of Sheba when you're off guiding?"
"My friend Nick from across town likes cats so he takes care of her when I'm away."
"You said she had kittens."
"Sheba got it into her head that's what she wanted. You ever try to change a Siamese cat's mind? The people down the block had a Siamese male so we arranged a rendezvous. She hated him on sight but, after we left them alone together in my utility room overnight, Sheba changed her mind.
"The eventual result was five kittens. Believe me, after they're old enough to leave, Sheba gets spayed."
"Why? Did she get sick?"
He shook his head. "What she did was refuse to give birth to a single one of them unless I sat on the floor beside the box I'd fixed and talked to her while she had them. Hell, I was as nervous as a new father."
Vala chuckled. "So she didn't have any trouble."
"No, but I did. The third kitten she delivered was a lot smaller than the first two. Instead of washing it off like she'd done with the others, Sheba nosed it aside, delivered the fourth and proceeded to clean it up. Despite the fact I kept shoving the tiny one in her face, she refused to give it a single lick. Finally, when she'd cleaned the fifth, she decided I wasn't going to give up so she might as well accept the runt of the litter."
"Is it doing all right?"
"He. Feisty little thing despite his size and original non-acceptance. Sheba treats him now just like she does the others. I did some research and found animals often push the runt of a litter aside and let it die. A runt is likely to have defects and somehow they sense that."
"Sounds cold-blooded, but I suppose in the wild it'd be logical to give the bigger, healthier ones a better chance."
"Something like that." It gave him a pang when it came to him that Davis's father had behaved in just such a way to his own son. He hoped the thought wouldn't occur to Vala. Davis was definitely not a misfit to be cast aside.
Vala was surprised by a yawn. She hadn't realized she was getting tired. "Good night, she murmured.
"Good night, sweet princess," he told her, "I promise you won't hear a single ribbet from me all night."
She smiled at the frog reference, but refused to dwell on what she knew had inspired it. She'd never get to sleep if she did.
I wonder if he realizes he completely melted my heart with that story about Sheba, she asked herself. How many men would be so caring? None she knew well. Not her father and certainly not Neal.
How wonderful it would be if she could fall asleep in Bram's arms. He was near enough that she could, very faintly, smell his essence. Breathing it in, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself snuggled inside the sleeping bag with him, her head on his shoulder while he held her against him....
A cry woke Vala. It took her a moment to realize where she was and that what she'd heard was Davis. As she struggled to sit up, Bram's flashlight clicked on, its beam centered on her son who was muttering unintelligibly as he thrashed around in his sleeping bag.
Before she'd extricated herself from her own bag, Bram reached Davis and gathered him into his arms, sleeping bag and all. Half in and half out of her sleeping bag, she sat up and watched them.
"Hush," he murmured. "Everything's all right. Bram's here. Don't fight me. I won't let anything hurt you."
As Bram continued to soothe the boy, gradually Davis stopped struggling and lay quiet again.
<
br /> "The pediatrician calls it a night terror," Vala said as Bram eased the boy and sleeping bag back down. "Davis has a bout every once in a while. It's something like a nightmare except the child doesn't wake up. The doctor said it can be related to sleep-walking but, thank heaven, Davis has never done that."
Belatedly she noticed that Bram wore a T-shirt and his undershorts to sleep in. A lot more revealing than her sweats.
"Will he have another bout tonight?" Bram asked.
She had to stop staring at him. "No, he never seems to do that. He should be okay till morning. Thanks for coping."
Bram, now focusing the beam of the flashlight up toward the tent roof, looked at her without speaking.
"What's the matter?" she asked, disturbed by his intent gaze.
"Never thought I'd find a gray sweat-shirt sexy," he muttered. "Better douse the damn light and crawl into my strait-jacket before it's too late." He clicked it off.
Her eyes dazzled by the light, Vala found the darkness in the tent absolute. The same thing must have happened to Bram because he cursed. Then he stepped on her foot. Even though her foot was protected by her sleeping bag, it still hurt and she tried to jerk her foot away.
This must have tipped him off balance because, the next she knew, Bram was sprawled over on her so that she was no longer sitting, instead she was lying half out of her sleeping bag. Without thinking what she was doing, she put her arms around him.
With a groan, he gathered her to him, settling his mouth over hers in a kiss that demanded even as it offered. His hands slid under the sweat-shirt and caressed her bare skin, setting her on fire.
She knew there was a reason she must stop, must stop him, stop them both--but the reason seemed just out of reach. The reality was Bram and the urgent desire sizzling between them, luring her on.
Bram was starting to ease Vala out of her sleeping bag, when enough sanity returned so he remembered Davis. He stopped, letting her go.
He heard Vala release a long sighing breath. She must know why he'd halted the love-making, but he figured she couldn't possibly feel as frustrated as he did. Damn, but he wanted this woman. Not at the risk of Davis waking, though. The poor kid--as if having a night terror wasn't bad enough. He didn't need to be confronted with adult reality besides. As he crawled into his sleeping bag, Bram shook his head. Doing the right thing could be damn uncomfortable.
