by Diana Palmer
She laughed again.
“I was apologizing,” Carson said heavily. “I jumped on her for something she didn’t even do.”
“Which was?” Cash asked, and he wasn’t smiling.
“Lanette said that Carlie insulted her and made her cry,” he returned.
“That wasn’t Carlie. That was my wife.” Cash smiled coldly. “I understand that she was eloquent.”
“Quite,” Carlie confirmed.
“Your friend has a rap sheet,” he told Carson. He smiled again. This time it was even colder.
Carson scowled. “A rap sheet?”
“It appears that she wasn’t always a stewardess. In fact, I don’t know how she got to be accepted in that type of job. Probably her lawyer helped her out more than once,” he said.
“What was she arrested for?” Carson asked.
“Assault with a deadly weapon. A smart lawyer got her off by pleading temporary insanity, acting in a fit of jealousy.” He pursed his lips, enjoying Carson’s discomfiture. “She went after another woman with a knife. Accused her of trying to steal her boyfriend.”
Carson didn’t show it, but he felt uneasy. Lanette had made some threats about Carlie, and he hadn’t taken them seriously.
Carlie’s face fell at the realization that the blonde might be more dangerous than she’d realized already.
“I’d watch my back if I were you,” Carson told Carlie somberly. “The rest of us will help. It seems you’ve got more trouble than we realized.”
“There was another phone call the other night, too,” she said, suddenly recalling the cryptic message. It was a male voice. He said to tell Dad he was coming soon. It didn’t make sense.”
“A male voice?” Cash asked at once.
“Yes.” She frowned. “Odd-sounding voice. If I ever heard it again, I think I’d remember it. Why is somebody after Dad?”
“I don’t know,” Cash said tersely.
“Rourke and I are trying to dig that out,” Carson said abruptly. “We have contacts in, shall we say, unusual places.”
“So do I,” Cash reminded him. “But mine were a dead end.”
“One of my cousins is a U.S. senator,” Carson said, surprisingly. “He’s using some of his own sources for me.”
“A senator.” Cash grinned. “Not bad.”
“Well, not quite in the same class with having a vice president or a state attorney general for a relative,” Carson retorted, smiling back.
Cash shrugged. “We all have our little secrets.” He glanced at Carlie, who’d reddened when he said “secrets.” His eyes narrowed. “You told him?”
She nodded.
He looked at Carson and the smile was gone. “I’ll tell you once. Don’t ever do that again.”
“I can promise you that I never will.”
Cash jerked his head in a nod.
Carson glanced at Carlie. “I tried to take him once, in a fight.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t pretty.”
“I was a master trainer in Tae Kwon Do,” Cash explained. “Black belt.”
Carson rubbed one arm. “Very black.”
Cash laughed.
“I was going to take her home, but we hadn’t had lunch,” Carson explained.
“Or dessert,” Carlie mused.
Carson glanced at her with warm, hungry eyes. “Oh, yes, we had dessert.”
She blushed further, and he laughed.
“Come on,” Cash told them. “It isn’t wise to be out in the woods alone with crazy people on the loose.”
“Did somebody escape from jail?”
“Nothing like that,” Cash said. “I was remembering Carlie’s phone call and your girlfriend’s rap sheet.”
“Oh.” Carson didn’t say another word. He helped Carlie into the passenger seat of his car and made sure her seat belt was fastened before he closed the door.
Cash drew him over to the patrol car, and he was somber. “You need to do something about that temper.”
“I had anger management classes,” Carson said quietly. “They helped, for a while.” He shook his head. “It’s the past. I can’t deal with it. I can’t live with what I did. I’m at war with myself and the world.”
Cash put a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. He knew about Carson’s past. The two were close. “I’ll tell you again that it was her time. Nothing could have stopped it. Somewhere inside, you know that. You just won’t accept it. Until you do, you’re a walking time bomb.”
“I would never hurt her,” he assured Cash, nodding toward the car. “I’ve never hit a woman.”
“The threat of force is as bad as the actual thing,” Cash replied. “She hasn’t gotten over what happened to her, either. We carry the past around like extra luggage, and it gets heavy from time to time.”
“You’d know,” Carson said gently.
Cash nodded. “I’ve killed men. I have to live with it. It’s not easy, even now.”
“For me, either.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t realize Lanette had started the trouble. She was so upset that it really got to me. She’s just someone to take around. Something pretty to show off.” He shrugged. “Maybe a little more than that. But nothing permanent.”
“Your past in that respect isn’t going to win you points with certain people around here,” Cash said.
“I’m just beginning to realize that. When I was in Wyoming, Dalton Kirk’s wife told me that my past was going to have a terrible impact on my future, that it was going to stand between me and something I want desperately.”
“It wouldn’t matter so much if you didn’t flaunt it, son,” Cash replied.
Carson drew in a breath. “I don’t know why I taunt her,” he said, and they both knew he meant Carlie. “She’s a kind, generous woman. Innocent and sweet.”
“Something to keep in mind,” Cash added. “You’d walk away and forget about it. She’d throw herself off a cliff. You know what I’m talking about.”
Carson seemed to pale. “Nothing so drastic...”
“You don’t know anything about people of faith, do you?” he asked. “I didn’t, until I came here and had to face living my life with what I’d done hanging over me like a cloud. I came to faith kicking and screaming, but it gave me the first peace I’ve ever known. Until that happened, I didn’t understand the mindset of people like Carlie.” His face tautened. “I’m not joking. Her faith teaches her that people get married, then they become intimate, then children come along. It doesn’t matter if you agree, if you disagree, if you think she’s living in prehistoric times. That’s how she thinks.”
“It’s radical,” Carson began. “She’s totally out of step with the times. Everybody does it—”
“She doesn’t,” Cash interrupted. “And everybody around here knows it. It’s why she doesn’t date. Her grandmother was the town joke. She had sex with a department store manager in a closet and they got caught. He was married with three kids. She thought it was hilarious when his wife left him. In fact, that’s why she did it. She was angry at the woman for making a remark about her morals.”
“Good grief,” Carson exclaimed.
“She was caught with men in back rooms, in parked cars, even once in a long-haul truck in the front seat at a truck stop with people walking by.” He shook his head. “It was before I came here, but I heard about it. Carlie’s mother was a saint, an absolutely good woman, who had to live with her mother’s reputation. Carlie’s had to live it down, as well. It’s why she won’t play around.”
“I didn’t realize that people knew about it.”
“We know everything,” Cash said simply. “If you don’t care about gossip, it doesn’t affect you. But Carlie’s always going to care. And if something happens to her, it will show like a neon sign.
Everybody will know. She won’t be able to hide it or live with it in a small community like this.”
“I get your point.” He grimaced. “Life is never easy. I don’t want to make it even harder for her,” he added, glancing toward Carlie, who was watching them curiously.
“No.” Cash studied the younger man. “The world is full of women like your pretty blonde, and they work for scale. Don’t try to class Carlie with them.” He smiled coldly. “Or you’ll have more trouble than you can handle. You do not want to make an enemy of Reverend Blair.”
“I do have some idea about her father’s past,” Carson confessed.
“No, you don’t,” Cash replied. “Just take my word that you don’t ever want to see him lose his temper. And you work on controlling yours.”
“I’m reformed.” Carson took his hands out of his pockets. “I suppose we all have memories that torment us.”
“Count on it. Just try not to make more bad ones for Carlie.”
“I’ll drive her home.” He hesitated. “Is her father there?”
Cash nodded.
Carson sighed. “There are a few unmarked places on me,” he commented wryly. “I guess I can handle some more. Time to face the music.”
Cash laughed. “Well, you’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.”
“Not going to arrest me?” he added.
“Not this time,” Cash said.
“Just as well. You can’t prove I’m me.”
“Why in the hell don’t you carry identification?” Cash asked. “Don’t you realize that if you were ever injured, nobody would know anything about you, right down to your weight or your medical history?”
Carson smiled wryly. “When I was doing wet work overseas, it would have been fatal to carry any. I just got into the habit of leaving it behind.”
“I know, but you’re not in the same line of work now,” Cash said.
“Certain of that, are you?” he asked with a vague smile.
“Yes.”
Carson made a face. “All right,” he said after a minute. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good man.”
Carson went around the car and got in under the steering wheel. Cash drove off as Carson was starting up the car.
“Look in the glove compartment and hand me my wallet, will you?” he asked Carlie.
She rummaged around through the papers and produced it. “Do you have a last name?” she wondered aloud.
“Look at the license.”
Curious, she opened the wallet. His driver’s license read “Carson Allen Farwalker.”
She handed it to him. He shoved it into his jacket while they were at a stoplight.
“No comment?” he asked.
“I’d be embarrassed,” she replied softly.
He laughed. “On the morning I was born, a man came into our small rural community, walking. It was driving snow, almost a blizzard. He said he’d come from Rapid City, all the way on foot in his mukluks and heavy coat, hitching rides, to see a sick friend who lived near us. It was a far walk. So my mother named me Far Walker.” He glanced at her. “Our names don’t translate well into English sometimes, but this one did.” His face tautened. “I refused to take my father’s name, even as a child. So I was known on the rez as Far Walker. When I got my first driver’s license, that’s what I put on it, Anglicized into one word. It’s my legal name now.”
“It suits you,” she said. “You walk like an outdoorsman.”
He smiled.
“I read about how native people get their names. We tend to distort them. Like Crazy Horse. That wasn’t his Lakota name, but it was what he was called by Wasichu—by white people,” she said, and then flushed. She hadn’t meant to give away her interest in his culture.
“Well,” he said and chuckled. “Hannibal and Crazy Horse. You have wide interests. Do you know his Lakota name?” he added.
“Yes. It was Tashunka Witko.” She laughed. “Although I’ve seen that spelled about four different ways.”
“And do you know what it really means, in my tongue?” he asked.
She grinned. “‘His horse is crazy,’” she replied. “I read somewhere that the day he was born, a man on a restless horse rode by and his people named him Crazy Horse.”
“Close enough.” He smiled gently as he met her eyes. “You’re an eternal student, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. I might have gone to college, but I didn’t make high grades and we were always poor. I take free classes on the internet, though, sometimes. When I’m not grinding Horde into the ground,” she added without looking at him.
“Runed that sword, did you? We’ll find out how well it works on the next battleground we fight.”
“I can’t wait,” she said smugly. “I’ve been practicing.” She glanced at him. “What’s a mukluk?”
“Heavy boots that come up to the knee, made of fur. I have some at home. I bought them in Alaska. They’re made with beaver fur, with wolf fur trim and beadwork.”
“Your jacket is beautiful,” she remarked, glancing at it. “I’ve never even seen one that looks like that before.”
“You never will. A cousin made it for me.” He smiled. “He makes these from scratch, right down to the elk he hunts for them. He eats the meat and cures the hides. Not the wolves, however. It’s illegal to kill them in the States, so he buys the fur from traders in Canada.”
“I saw this movie with Steven Seagal, about Alaska. He was on a talk show wearing a jacket a lot like yours. He said the native people he worked with on the movie made it for him.”
“Not a bad martial artist. I like Chuck Norris best, however, for that spinning heel kick. The chief does one just like it. Ask him sometime how he learned it,” he teased.
“I already know,” she laughed. “He says it’s his claim to fame locally.”
“Feeling better?”
She nodded. “I never dreamed it was asthma,” she said heavily. She frowned and glanced at him. “But you knew right away,” she said. “You even knew what to give me...”
“I was a field medic in the army,” he said easily. “Emergencies were my specialty.”
“You must have been very good at it,” she said.
“I did what the job called for.”
He pulled up in front of her house. Reverend Blair was waiting on the porch, wearing a leather bomber jacket and a black scowl.
He came down the steps and opened Carlie’s door. He hugged her close. “You okay?” he asked tersely.
“I’m fine. Honest. I just overreacted.”
He didn’t reply. He was glaring at Carson, who came around the car to join them.
“It was my fault,” Carson said bluntly. “I accused her of something she didn’t do and I was overly aggressive.”
The reverend seemed to relax, just a little. “You take it on the chin, don’t you?” he asked half-admiringly.
“Always.” He sighed. “If you want to hit me, I’ll just stand here. I deserve it.”
The reverend cocked his head. His blue eyes were glittery and dangerous, hinting at the man he might once have been.
“He treated me in the office, took me to the emergency room, then the pharmacy and bought me lunch after,” Carlie said.
The reverend lifted an eyebrow and glanced at Carson. “Treated her?”
“I was a field medic in the army,” Carson replied. “I recognized the symptoms. But if you’re thinking I acted without a doctor’s orders, you’re wrong. I had her doctor on the phone before I opened my medical kit.”
The reverend relaxed even more. “Okay.”
“I was more aggressive than I meant to be, but I would never have raised a hand to her,” he added. “Violence is very rarely the answer to any problem.”
�
��Rarely?”
Carson shrugged. “Well, there was this guy over in South America, in Carrera. Rourke and I sort of fed him to a crocodile.”
The reverend glowered at him. “You’re not helping your case.”
“The guy cut up a young woman with his knife and left her scarred for life,” Carson added. His black eyes glittered. “He bragged about it.”
“I see.”
“It was an act of mercy, anyway,” Carson added doggedly. “The crocodile was plainly starving.”
Reverend Blair couldn’t suppress a laugh, although he tried. “I begin to see why you get along so well with Grier.”
“Why, does he feed people to reptiles, too?”
“He’s done things most men never dream of,” the reverend said solemnly. “Lived when he should have died. He took lives, but he saved them, as well. A hard man with a hard past.” The man’s pale blue eyes pinned Carson’s. “Like you.”
Carson scowled. “How do you know anything about me?”
“You might be surprised,” was the bland reply. He shook a finger at Carson. “You stop upsetting my daughter.”
“Yes, sir,” he said on a sigh.
“I’d invite you to supper but she might have some poisonous mushrooms concealed in the cupboard.”
“I won’t poison him,” Carlie promised. She smiled. “You can come to supper if you like. I’ll make beef Stroganoff.”
Carson looked torn, as if he really wanted to do it. “Sorry,” he said. “I promised to take Lanette out to eat. I need to talk to her.”
“That’s okay,” Carlie said, hiding the pain it caused her to hear that. “Rain check.”
“Count on it,” he said softly, and his eyes said more than his lips did. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“Stop apologizing, will you? You’ll hurt your image,” she said, grinning.
“I’ll see you.”
She nodded. He nodded to the reverend, got in the car and left.
* * *
“I HAVE TO see an allergist,” Carlie said miserably. “Asthma, can you believe it? I couldn’t get my breath, I felt like I was suffocating. Carson knew what it was, and what to do for it. He was amazing.”
