After paying her motel bill, she stopped in front of the newspaper bins outside. Even as her quarter dropped through the slot, she was staring in horrified shock at the morning headline:
Major Archaeological Find Outside Silver City
As she withdrew her newspaper, she could feel a trembling begin deep inside her. “Dear God... no!” Her heart felt as if it had frozen and would never again pulse with life.
All the way back to Silver City, tears glittered in her eyes, and she kept wiping them away. Her head ached, and she was agonizingly afraid. She wanted to believe that Jonah trusted her, that he would understand and believe her when she told him that she wasn’t responsible for the announcement.
When she turned onto the road to the site, she knew that the sightseers had already started coming. Three cars and an El Paso television truck were on their way back from Tomahawk Flats. Farther ahead, rising swirls of dust announced additional traffic. Tomahawk Flats looked almost like a stadium parking lot. A highway patrolman was trying unsuccessfully to direct traffic. She found a space to park and for a moment watched the people clustering around her excavation. Off to her left, a film crew was busy setting up lights.
She sighed, turned away and began to pick her way past the crowd descending on the site. It was as if she were trying to swim upriver, but at least she wasn’t alone. Magnum came bounding from the brush to lick her hand. Absently she patted him, then, once they got away from the crowd, she lengthened her strides. She was in a hurry to reach Jonah’s campsite. When at last she did, she could only stare at the empty spot where Jonah’s trailer had been.
Her heart felt as if something swift and sharp, like a vulture’s talons, was ripping it apart. She burst out crying. Not softly, not in controlled, contained whimpers. She buried her face in her hands and cried with great, shuddering gasps.
* * * * *
She really went for the jugular.
Jonah stared out through the salt-filmed window at the Pacific. That chilly September morning, the ocean was doing nothing to live up to its name. Turbulent waves crashed angrily against the Anchorage shoreline, almost drowning out his radio. He had wanted to find a place with few people that was wide open for adventure. Well, Alaska was certainly that. If he ran low on funds prospecting the Yukon, he could always work the innumerable commercial fishing boats.
He tunneled his hand through his rumpled hair. Man, he must have been out there in la-la land to have thought that Ritz didn’t have her own best interests at heart. Always had. She hadn’t been able to wait to hightail it up to Santa Fe and make the world aware of her discovery.
He turned away from the beach-house window. He wished to hell he had never let her back into his life. And wished he didn’t love her so much. She wasn’t weak, the way he was. She was strong. Like gold, she could be flattened, twisted, stretched by life’s cruel tricks, but she would never shatter.
And she was smart; she understood that he wasn’t cut out for the home-and-hearth bit. Could he really blame her for playing the odds elsewhere? If he hadn’t learned before, he sure as hell should have learned this time. Love made you weak. Love made you vulnerable.
Well, twice burned...
He would find his romance in a windjammer’s wind-whipped canvas and cool spray. Yet hadn’t she warned him once that though he had a girl in every port, she’d be the one he would never forget? How could he?
He leaned his forehead against the cold windowpane and closed his eyes. Behind him, he heard the radio deejay announce, “And now a golden oldie for those of you who have a few years on you, Roy Orbison’s ‘I’m Hurting’”
Then, with his emotions ripped raw, Jonah sat down on the bed and cried for the first time since his father died.
* * * * *
The nights were the worst. She spent the days traveling aimlessly—a day in Juarez, two in the Texas hill country of Goliad, three or four days in Port Isabel, walking the beaches. But the Gulfs foaming waves reminded her too much of Jonah, and she fled, at last returning home to Houston.
But in the heart of the night she would awaken, finding her pillowcase wet with tears. She would lie awake for hours, torturing herself with memories of Jonah’s mouth—of his sensuously shaped lips, that crooked tooth and that cocky smile.
Sometimes she would fantasize that he would come to her and take her in his arms and tell her that he still loved her. But fantasies were for fools. Jonah hadn’t trusted her enough to wait until she returned from Santa Fe to find out the truth. He hadn’t loved her enough to stand defiantly against treacherous appearances.
The little girl who had left Silver City twenty years ago was a woman now. Her body and soul might be numb with agony, but she wasn’t destroyed. She wasn’t going to let herself fall apart over anyone, not even Jonah. She would survive.
The day after she returned home, Ben Schotsky called. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for a week now.”
“Roaming.” It was the best she could muster.
“Hey, Rita-lou,” he said, “I’m sorry about that getting out. Honestly, I had nothing to do with it. My secretary leaked it to one of the boys, and he talked to the governor’s assistant, and before I knew it, I was on the six-o’clock news.”
“It’s all right,” she said wearily. “I haven’t been losing any sleep over it.
“That’s good, because what I have to tell you next will have you pacing the floor for nights to come. Remember the mining claim you were protecting?”
“Yes?”
“Well, it held up. And you won’t believe—”
She listened apathetically to the news, muttered a few appropriate words of consolation and replaced the receiver. Schotsky’s talk of Jonah’s claim had resurrected all the memories she had been trying to exorcise. She faced another sleepless night, as Schotsky had predicted, but not because of the to-do over the claim.
Well, she’d put a stop to that. She’d go out more socially, find things to amuse her late into the night, burn her candle at both ends until she fell sleep on the bed still fully dressed.
It worked, too. Some evenings she played bridge with the neighbors, others she went to the movies alone or took in a museum opening. She had never needed a date on her arm to validate herself as a woman. Mostly she read, or turned her field notes into a final report, working until her eyes hurt and her lids drooped.
One evening Trace called her from Intercontinental Airport. The football team was on its way back from a scrimmage with Tulane and had a two-hour layover. Could she meet him at the airport for a late dinner?
“Be honest, you just want a free meal,” she told him, chuckling, but she was terribly glad he’d called and changed quickly into a teal-blue jersey sheath, one of her son’s favorite dresses.
Dinner at the airport turned out to be costly and quick and not terribly good, but it didn’t matter, because she enjoyed being with Trace so much. He had Chap’s shy smile, but he was more inquisitive about his world. His dark eyes brought laughter—a rare commodity for her these days—to her lips.
In turn, she told him about Magnum’s misadventure, making it sound more like an accident than deliberate cruelty. It would do no good to anger Trace long after the deed was done.
At one point she covered her son’s strong young hand with her own. “Tell me, did you miss never knowing your real father, babe?”
He paused for a moment, then smiled a little self-consciously. “I guess not. At least not very often. I figured he had to be a pretty cool guy for you to fall in love with him.”
She started to tell him about the past summer. About Silver City. And his father. But the plane had arrived at the gate and was boarding. Besides, she thought, I’ll leave it to old C.B. to tell Trace about Silver City and Chap and the Split P when the right time comes.
At that moment it occurred to her that her own time had come—that the only person she really wanted to prove her self-worth to was herself, not anyone in Silver City. And she had done just
that.
Unfortunately she was still wound up after she left the airport parking lot. It was too late to make other plans that late in the evening, and she returned home reluctantly. A warm shower might make her sleepy, but she realized that she had grown accustomed to those cold dips in the Renegade and missed them now that she was back among the comforts of home.
Briskly she toweled herself dry and pulled a faded, oversized T-shirt over her head. She padded back into her bedroom and stopped short: Jonah was lying on the bed, his hands behind his head, his cool green eyes watching her.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded.
“Well...” he began.
She held up a silencing hand. “I know, I know. Don’t tell me. The window screen.”
He said nothing more, and they stared at each other, neither one knowing how to behave. She could tell that he had shaved within the hour—and that he had spent a certain amount of time deciding to wear the trouers and dress shirt and blue striped tie he had on.
“What do you want?” she managed to ask at last.
Before she could move, he uncoiled his powerful body from her bed and pulled her to him. “You,” he murmured roughly in her ear.
She spoke against his shirtfront, so he wouldn’t see her tears. “It’s not that easy, Jonah. I’m not starting this over again. You and I aren’t suited for—”
Gently he anchored his hand in her hair and tilted her head back. She stared up into his face. Gone was the cocky smile. His eyes were open and vulnerable. “Don’t make me go, Ritz. I’ve been alone for so long. So damned long. All my life. I love you, Ritz! I’ll love you till the end of time.”
She wasn’t the only one crying then. It tore her apart to see him laying bare his soul like that, and she stood on tiptoe to press her tear-dampened mouth over his.
He crushed her to him so fiercely that she thought her ribs would crack. His mouth closed over hers in a desperate kiss that somewhere changed direction, taking on a sweetness that she had never known, never tasted. She reveled in that kiss and all that it offered her.
“Jonah, I didn’t sell you out,” she tried to explain, “I went up to Santa – ”
“I know, I know. I’m a little slow, sweetheart. It took me awhile to read the newspaper small print and learn the terms of the archeological discovery.”
At one point that past summer she had reached the conclusion that Jonah lacked real courage—the courage to face the mundane obligations of life for those he loved. But now she realized that he was indeed strong, indeed courageous. Courage came at different costs for different people. He had humbled himself, had put aside his pride to come to her.
When their breathing grew ragged, he set her away from him. She rubbed her face against his shirt, drying her tears, and he chuckled. “That shirt cost me—”
Before he could say anything else, she pressed her fingers softly against his mouth. “Jonah, I love you. I love you.”
“I’m not letting you get rid of me again, Ritz.” He grinned. “I’m not going to go away.”
She kissed his neck, inhaling his scent. “Who said anything about going away?”
“Then do you think we could start talking about a future—say, nine-to-five jobs and a two-story house with a fireplace?”
She lifted her head to stare up at him. “No. That would destroy you, Jonah. And destroy our love.”
She saw the pain in the strong lines of his face. “Don’t you think I have the courage to risk anything for your love? I’m tired of the shadows, Rita-lou.”
“Then how about the sunlight? The Pacific sunlight.”
He blinked. “What?”
She grinned impishly. “I’d like to prove that early man sailed across the Pacific to South America, then migrated north instead of the reverse—coming from Siberia via the Bering Strait and migrating south. I propose, sailor boy, that we purchase a sailboat, say a forty-five-foot yacht, and attempt the same crossing. There’s a site in Chile, in Monte Verde, that I think may be as old as—”
He silenced her with a quick kiss and said, “That’s a great idea, sweetheart. But where in God’s name would we get the money to make an expedition of that kind? Just the sails alone would cost a cool—”
“Oh? Didn’t I tell you?” She stroked his hair. “You won the right to your claim.”
“Great,” he said dryly. “A lot of good that will do now.”
“Oh, there’s more.” She stepped back to better watch his expression. “In all that digging the state boys are doing, they turned up a golf-ball-sized nugget of gold. Yours, Jonah. But any further mining will have to wait until they’ve rescued all the artifacts.” The pure joy in his eyes was worth all the waiting and all the agony.
“I have this powerful urge to see the open water,” he told her, sliding his hands up under her T-shirt and around her waist so that he could draw her against him again. “This time with you. How far away is it?”
She slipped her arms up around his neck and brushed her lips against his in a soft and teasing kiss. “Oh, fifty miles or so from here, mate.” She looked up at him and smiled. “But I think that will have to wait. 1 have something much more interesting in mind.”
The look in his eyes told her that he didn’t mind at all.
###
Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of thirty-five published novels. She is the co-founder of and first vice president of Romance Writers of America. Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of the three-best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the award winning Parris Afton Bonds has been interviewed by such luminaries as Charlie Rose and featured in major newspapers and magazines as well as published in more than a dozen languages. She donates her time to teaching cretive writing to both grade school children and female inmates. The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workhop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers. Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.
Connect with Parris at http://parrisaftonbonds.com
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