by Diana Palmer
He hesitated, then went on. “It was a long commute for me, and expensive because I had to fly there. And I had to stay in the dorm during the week. I had a scholarship, or I could never have managed it. My people were poor.” He watched the river, his eyes sad and quiet. “She got tired of staying in the little house all alone. She liked to party. She thought I was a real stick-in-the-mud because I didn’t drink or smoke.” He laughed hollowly. “I guess she understood the drinking part because my father was a drunkard. Everybody on the rez knew about him.”
She swallowed. “They say that alcoholism is a problem in some Native American cultures...”
“My father was white,” he said, and his voice was cold as ice. “He sold seed and fertilizer for a living. He met my mother at a feed store when he was restocking there. He flattered her, took her places, bought her flowers. She was crazy about him. They got married and he moved onto the rez to live with her. She didn’t know he was an alcoholic until she was pregnant with me. He started beating her then, when he lost his temper.” His eyes closed. “When I was six, and he was beating my mother, I tried to block him with a kitchen chair. He picked it up and laid it across my head. When I came to, she was lying on the floor, still and quiet, and he was gone. I ran for help. It was too late.”
She held her breath, listening. He’d told her some of this before, but not in such detail. She could only imagine the terror he’d felt.
“He went to prison and I went to live with my mother’s uncles, aunts and cousins in a small community on the rez. One of my uncles was a reservation cop. He formally adopted me in a tribal ceremony, so I call him Dad, even though he isn’t really. He’s great with livestock. He and my other relatives were good to me, but they were poor and we didn’t have much. I wanted more. I knew the only way to get out was to get an education. So I studied like crazy. I worked at anything I could get paid for, on ranches, in stores, on the land, and I saved every penny. When I graduated from high school, I was second in my class. I got scholarships and commuted back and forth. I graduated with honors and went on to grad school. But then, suddenly, there was Jessie. I couldn’t really afford to get married, but I was conventional in those days. My people were religious.” He let go of Carlie’s hand and folded his arms across his broad chest. His eyes had a lost, faraway look. “Things were good the first two years. But we were drifting apart. I still had a long way to go to a profession and I was away a good deal of the time. There was a man on the rez who wanted her. He bought her stuff, took her to dances, while I was at school or working after classes to help pay for the tuition. I came home one weekend, just after finals, and she was gone. She’d moved in with him.”
He drew in a breath. “I tried to get her to come home, but she said she loved him and she was carrying his child. She wasn’t coming back. I was sick at heart, but I couldn’t force her to leave him. I went back to school and gave up the house. No reason to keep renting it just for weekends, anyway.”
“I was getting ready for the graduation exercises when one of my cousins came to see me at school. Another relative back home told him that she’d lied. The child she was carrying was mine. The man she was living with couldn’t have children. And worse, he was beating her. She’d just come back from the hospital. He’d beaten her so badly that she had a concussion.”
His face hardened. “So I went home. I had a beat-up old car parked in Rapid City that would hardly make the trips back and forth from my house to the airport, and there were heavy floods, but I made it home. I went to see her. I told her that I knew about the child and that if she wouldn’t come back to me, I’d have her boyfriend put in jail for beating her. She looked ancient,” he said, his face twisting. “What she’d endured was written all over her. But she loved him, she told me. She was very sorry, but she loved him. I could see the child when it came, but she wasn’t leaving him, even if I refused to give her a divorce.”
He swallowed. “He drove up. We exchanged words. He said no way was she leaving him. He grabbed her by the hand and dragged her out to his car. I tried to stop him, but he was a big guy and I had no combat skills at the time. He wiped the floor with me. He threw her into his car and took off. I picked myself up, got in my own car and chased after him.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought I could do. She wanted to stay with him and he wasn’t going to give her up. But I knew if she stayed he’d kill her one day, just as my father had killed my mother. And my child would die with her.
“He speeded up and so did I. His car was all over the road.” His eyes closed. “If I’d had any sense, I’d have stopped, right then, but I didn’t. He went onto a bridge that was unsafe. There was even a sign, but he didn’t pay it any attention.” He looked away, hesitated. “The bridge collapsed. They fell down in the car, into the river below. It was deep and in full flood.” His eyes closed. He shuddered. “They found the bodies almost two days later. If they’d been found sooner, the child might have lived.” He bit his lower lip. “It was a boy...”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Her eyes were wet. “So sorry.”
He turned, pulled her to him and held her. Just held her. Rocked her. “I’ve never spoken of it, except once. Dalton Kirk’s wife, in Wyoming, sat at a table with me and told me all about it, and she’d never met me or heard anything about me. It was a shock.”
“I heard about her.” She savored the feel of his jacket. It was leather, but soft and warm from his body, fringed and beaded. She’d never seen anything so beautiful. She closed her eyes. He’d frightened her earlier. Now she began to understand him, just a little.
He smoothed over her dark, wavy hair. “I would never have hit you,” he whispered at her ear. “I know too much about brutality and its result.”
“You move so quickly,” she faltered.
“And for all the wrong reasons sometimes.” He sighed. “Dalton Kirk’s wife told me that my wife’s boyfriend was drinking at the time. I didn’t really notice, but if you drink something like vodka, others may not be able to smell it on your breath. She said that was why he went off the bridge, not because of me. I checked the police report. She was right. But it didn’t help much. Nothing does. I still feel like a murderer.”
“It isn’t fair, to blame yourself for something like that.” She drew back and looked up at him. “You aren’t a person of faith.”
“No,” he said stiffly. “I don’t believe in anything anymore.”
“I believe that things happen the way they’re meant to,” she said softly. “That sometimes God uses people to say things or do things that hurt us, so that we learn lessons from it. My dad says that we should always remember that events in our lives have a purpose. It’s all lessons. We learn from adversity.”
He searched her green eyes quietly. “You’re such an innocent, Carlie,” he said gently, and her heart leaped because it was the first time he’d ever called her by name. “You know nothing about the world, about life.”
“And you know everything,” she murmured with a flash of laughter.
“I do.” He traced a line down her cheek. “We’re total opposites.”
“What happened,” she asked. “After?”
He looked over her head. “I went to my own graduation, alone, and enlisted in the military the same week. I learned how to fight, how to kill. I took the most dangerous assignments I could find. For a long time, I avoided women like the plague. Then it became second nature to take what was offered and walk away.” That wasn’t quite true, but he’d shared enough secrets for one day. “I never got serious about anyone again. I met Cy Parks overseas. He and his group were doing a stint as private contractors for the military, teaching tactics to locals. I fell in with them and came back here to work for Cy and, occasionally, for Eb Scott. It’s an interesting life. Dangerous. Unpredictable.”
“Sort of like you,” Carlie mused.
He looked down into her eyes. “Sort of like me,” he agreed.
She drew in a breath. It was much easier to do that now.
“I am truly sorry for what happened this morning,” he said, searching her eyes. “I had no right to frighten you.”
“You’re scary when you lose your temper,” she replied.
“Sheltered little violet, under a stair,” he said softly.
“Not so much,” she replied. “It just seems that way.” Her own eyes were sad and quiet.
“You know my secrets. Tell me yours.”
She swallowed. “When I was thirteen, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She was in and out of hospitals for a year. During one of those times, her mother showed up.” Her face hardened. “My grandmother was a pig, and that’s putting it mildly. She had a reputation locally for sleeping with anything in pants. She had a boyfriend with her, a man who used drugs and supplied them to her. I had the misfortune to come home while they were ransacking my mother’s bedroom, looking for things they could sell. I’d hidden Mama’s expensive pearls that Daddy brought her from Japan, just in case, but they were trashing the house. I tried to stop them.”
She shivered.
He pulled her closer. “Keep talking,” he said over her head.
Her small hand clenched on his jacket. “Her boyfriend picked up a beer bottle and started hitting me with it.” She shivered again. “He kept on and on and on until I was on the floor. I fought until I was so numb that I just gave up.” She laughed. “You think you can fight back, that you can save yourself in a desperate situation. But that’s not how it works. You feel such...despair, such hopelessness. After a while, it seems more sensible to just lie down and die...”
“Go on.”
“Our next-door neighbor heard me scream and called the police. They got there just in time to keep him from killing me. As it was, I had a concussion and broken ribs. I spent several days in the hospital. They took my grandmother and her boyfriend to jail. She testified against him and got off, but our police chief—one of the ones before Cash Grier—had a nice talk with her and she left town very quickly. She didn’t even apologize or come to see me. I heard later that she died from a drug overdose. He was killed in a prison riot just recently.” She shook her head. “I’ve been terrified of violent behavior ever since.”
“I can see why.”
“One of our patrolmen brought a man in handcuffs in the office once to ask the chief a question. The man grabbed a nightstick off the counter and came at me with it. I fainted.” She sighed. “The chief turned that man upside down, they said, and shook him like a rat until he dropped the nightstick. Then he threw him into the patrol car and told the officer to get him to the county detention center right then. He took me to the emergency room himself. I had to tell him why I fainted.” She shrugged. “He isn’t what he seems, is he?” she asked, looking up. “I mean, criminals are terrified of him. Even some local men say he’s dangerous. But he was like a big brother with me. He still is.”
“I respect him more than any other man I know, with the possible exception of Cy Parks.”
“Mr. Parks is pretty scary, too,” she added.
He smiled. “Not when you get to know him. He’s had a hard life. Really hard.”
“I know a little about him. It’s a sad story. But he and his wife seem to be very happy.”
“They are.”
She searched his serious eyes. “I didn’t say anything to your...date,” she said quietly. “She was making fun of my dress and my old shoes.” She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t have a comeback. It was a bargain dress, and my shoes are really old. I didn’t wear a coat because this is the only one I have—” she fingered the frayed collar “—and I didn’t want to embarrass Robin by showing up in it.”
He was very still. “She said that you insulted her.”
“Tippy Grier did,” she replied. She tried not to smile at the memory. “She was eloquent. She said that my dress looked nice on me and it didn’t matter where it came from.”
He let out a long breath. “Damn.”
“It’s all right. You didn’t know.”
His hand smoothed over her dark hair as he stared down at the river below. For a minute, there was only the sound of the water running heavily over the rocks. “She didn’t mention Tippy.”
“I just stood there,” she said. “I guess she was mad that I danced with you.”
His hand caught her hair at her nape and turned her face up to his. Black eyes captured hers and held them. “She was mad that I wanted you,” he said curtly.
“Wa...wanted me?” She hesitated.
He let out a rough breath. “God in heaven, can’t you even tell when a man wants you?” He burst out.
“Well, I don’t know a lot about men,” she stammered.
His hand slid down her back and plastered her hips to his. His smile was smug and worldly as he let her feel the sudden hardness of his body. “Now you do.”
She flushed and pulled away from him. “Stop that.”
He actually laughed. “My God,” he said heavily. “I’m dying and you’re running for cover.” He shook his head. “Just my luck.”
She swallowed. It was embarrassing. She tried to draw away completely but he held her, gently but firmly.
“Doesn’t your friend Robin ever touch you?” he asked sarcastically. “Or are you having a cerebral relationship with him?”
She wasn’t about to admit the truth to him. Robin felt like protection right now, and she needed some.
“He reads poetry to me,” she choked. Actually, he wrote poetry about Lucy and read it to Carlie, but that was beside the point.
“Does he now?” He brushed his nose against hers and began to quote. “When I am dead, and above me bright April shakes out her rain-drenched hair, though you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful when rain bends down the bough; and I shall be more silent and cold-hearted than you are now,” he whispered deeply, reciting lines from a poem called “I Shall Not Care,” by Sara Teasdale. “It was written in 1919,” he added. “Long before either of us was born.”
Her heart jumped, stopped and ran away. His voice was like velvet, deep and sexy and overwhelmingly sensual. Her nails curled against the soft leather of his jacket.
“Yes, I read poetry,” he whispered, his mouth hovering just above hers. “That was one of my favorites. I learned it by heart just before Jessie died.”
Her mouth felt swollen. Her whole body felt swollen. “D...did you?” she asked in a voice that wasn’t quite steady.
His lips brushed like a whisper over hers. “Are you sure you don’t know what desire is, Carlie?” he whispered huskily.
She was almost moaning. His mouth teased hers, without coming to rest on it. His body was close, warm, powerful. She felt the heat of it all the way down. She couldn’t get her breath, and this time it wasn’t because of the asthma. She knew he could feel her heartbeat. She could hear it.
“Your father is going to kill me,” he said roughly.
“For...what?”
“For this.” And his mouth went down against hers, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to possess.
7
CARLIE WAS DYING. Her whole body was pressing toward Carson’s, pleading for something she didn’t quite understand. She shivered as his mouth pressed harder against hers, insistent, parting her lips so that he could possess them.
Her arms reached up, around his neck. He lifted her, riveted her body to his, as the kiss went on and on and on. She moaned under his mouth, shivering, wanting something more, something to end the torment, to ease the tension that seemed bent on pulling her young body apart.
“Carlie,” he whispered roughly as his fingers tightened in her hair and he paused to catch
his breath. “This is not going to end well,” he rasped.
She looked up at him, breathless, wordless, shivering with needs she hadn’t even known she could feel.
“Oh, what the hell,” he muttered. “I’m damned already!”
He kissed her as if he’d never felt a woman’s mouth under his own, as if he’d never felt desire, never known hunger. He kissed her with utter desperation. She was an innocent. He couldn’t have her. He wasn’t going to marry her, and he couldn’t seduce her. It was one hell of a dead end. But he couldn’t stop kissing her.
Her mouth was soft and warm and sweetly innocent, accepting his, submitting, but not really responding. It occurred to him somewhere in the middle of it that she didn’t even know how to kiss.
He lifted his mouth and searched her wide, soft, dreamy eyes. “You don’t even know how,” he whispered huskily.
Her lips were as swollen as her body. “Know how to what?” she began dazedly.
The sound of a car horn intruded just as he started to bend his head to her again. She jumped. He caught his breath and moved back from her just as Cash Grier got out of his patrol car and started down to the river where they were standing, now apart from each other.
“Dum dum de dum dum de dum da da de dum,” Carson hummed Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” as Cash approached. He smiled wryly, through the piercing agony of his unsatisfied need.
Carlie chuckled.
“Your father was concerned,” Cash told Carlie. “He asked me to look for you.”
“I’m okay,” Carlie said, trying to disguise the signs that she’d been violently kissed. She pushed back her disheveled hair. “He bought me lunch.” She nodded at Carson.
“Did you have it tested for various poisons first?” Cash asked blandly.
