Sam grunted. "Stay out of it, Lilah."
"But, Sam…" Delilah's voice trailed off. A quick glance in their direction showed Jack that Sam had put his arm around his wife. The couple shared a look that managed to be both mutual challenge—and agreement.
Jack decided he had a lot of respect for Sam Fletcher, to be able to silence the bossy Delilah with a few words and a look.
Sam volunteered, "You two can go in the study, if you need some privacy."
"Thanks, Sam." Olivia was smiling, a wistful little smile that had Jack's heart acting up all over again. "But I think Jack and I will go for a walk." She gave Jack a questioning glance. "All right, Jack?"
"Fine." He made his voice flat, in order to reveal none of the jarring tumble of emotions that roiled inside of him.
She came down the stairs. He stepped back when she reached the bottom. Right then he didn't trust himself to be too close to her.
"I'll be back soon," she told the others as she turned toward the door. "Let's go, Jack." She led the way out. He followed, keeping back.
Behind them, Oggie couldn't resist a parting shot. "You give a holler, gal, if he bothers you!"
Jack shut the door before Olivia could answer the old scoundrel.
When they reached the street, she turned to him. "I think there's a river that way." She pointed the opposite direction from the way he had come. "I saw it from one of the upstairs windows."
"So?" He felt edgy. He wanted to touch her—to pull her against him and breathe in the scent of her. But of course, he wasn't going to do that. He wasn't going to do that ever again. He was here to see that she was all right. And that was all.
"So, shall we walk that way?"
He shrugged. "Fine."
She started off down the street. He fell in beside her, but not too close. Within minutes the paved road ended, and they walked on a rutted road of red dirt lightly blanketed with pine needles. The red dirt was soft and muddy, and the ruts were full of water after last night's rain. To avoid the puddles, Jack fell in behind Olivia, who seemed quite sure of where she was going. He tried not to watch the taut curve of her buttocks as she walked. He looked up, around, anywhere but at her slim back.
From the trees a blue jay scolded them. Some distance off he could hear the honking of geese. The sky overhead, which he could glimpse through the lacy fanwork of the pine branches, was a pure blue, like Olivia's eyes.
Soon enough the needle-blanketed road came to a dead end. Olivia didn't hesitate. She walked on to where the ground dropped off. Jack followed and saw the path she'd found that cut downward to the river's edge.
They descended. When they reached the bottom, the river lay crystalline in the afternoon sun. A little to the right of the trail was a rocky point, splashed with sunlight. Olivia went out and sat on it.
Jack stood in the shadow of a big, gnarled oak for a moment, watching the way the sun glinted on her hair. And then, with a low curse, he went to her and crouched a few feet away.
He looked out over the moving water, because he couldn't quite trust himself to look at her. He was fighting that urge to touch her again.
Hell, he always wanted to touch her. He feared he would be longing to touch her when they laid him in his grave.
And he wanted to shout at her that he hadn't slept more than an hour last night for worrying about her, for picturing her lost and injured or the victim of some unsavory character or other.
Instead he made his voice level and spoke of practical matters. "I've talked to your father." She surprised him. "So have I. Just a few minute ago."
"You called him, in Vegas?"
"Yes." She lifted her chin.
The fine curve of her white throat taunted him. He looked away. "Did you tell him where you were?"
"Yes, I did."
He shook his head. "So he's on his way here now, I suppose."
"No. He's not coming here now."
He shot her a glance. "You seem pretty sure of that."
"I am." Her voice was so calm, so assured. He realized he believed her. "It's finally happened, Jack."
"What?"
"I've finally managed to convince my father that I have to lead my own life." She shifted a little on the rock and drew her legs up, hugging them. "I guess I really scared him last night. He says he stayed up all night, talking to Mindy—you know who Mindy is?"
"Yeah."
"Well, the two of them talked all night. And he's decided to let me alone for a while. I mean really alone. He won't be sending anyone to, um, track me down, this time."
"Good." He edged a little closer, though he knew he should stay back. "You don't seem so angry at me anymore."
She looked at him, her expression gentle and unbearably sweet. Then she curled her legs to the side and leaned his way. "I'm not, Jack. I've had a little time to think it all over. I realize now that you were as trapped by the whole situation as I was."
Conflicting emotions warred inside him. "You're too forgiving."
"Not in this case."
"I should have walked away the second time you caught me watching you, out in front of the casino, that first night."
"My father would only have sent someone else."
"Someone who wouldn't have hurt you."
She made a soft little sound in her throat. "You never wanted to hurt me, Jack. I know that." He looked at her freckles and her slightly parted lips.
He was leaning toward her, just as she leaned toward him. He knew he should get back. But he didn't get back.
He was thinking that if he leaned forward just a little bit more, his lips could brush hers. And now he was close enough that he picked up her scent. A warm, sweet, fresh-scrubbed scent.
"I should have walked away," he repeated and leaned closer still.
Her lips now curved in the most tender of smiles. "I'm glad you didn't. If you had walked away, our beautiful time together never would have happened." She blushed a little. He watched the warm color pinken the skin beneath her freckles. It was a thoroughly enchanting sight.
"Olivia." He said her name and nothing more. It was as if her name was the only word he knew.
"Yes?" She tilted her head a bit, lifting her mouth, offering it up to him, like she'd done all those nights in Vegas when he'd left her at her door.
But the difference between those nights and now was that now he knew what her lips felt like. He knew the honeyed taste of her. And he craved more.
He leaned that crucial fraction closer.
Like the brush of a butterfly's silken wing, her lips grazed his.
That did it.
With a low oath, he shot to his feet.
He heard her disappointed little sigh but ignored it.
He stared out over the sun-shimmered water and waited for the embarrassing physical signs of his arousal to fade.
When he thought he could trust himself to look at her, he turned and met her eyes. Her expression was quite calm, which irked him to no end.
"It was all a mistake between us," he said gruffly.
"No." Her voice was firm.
"I never should have made love with you."
"Please don't say that."
"It's the truth."
"No, it's not."
"It's over." He spoke through gritted teeth. "It never should have happened in the first place, and it will never happen again. You'll go back to your life, and I'll go back to mine. Understand?"
She said nothing. For the first time since he'd met her, he found he couldn't read her thoughts in her eyes.
As they looked at each other, a slight wind came up. The trees sighed, a sad, whispering sound. Olivia shivered a little in her thin, borrowed shirt.
Jack decided he should get on with this, so he broke the silence between them by offering, "Listen. I suppose you'll be ready to go home pretty soon. I'll be glad to drive you there. Or to take you to the airport in Sacramento so you can catch a flight."
She smiled up at him. It was an enigmatic smile, one he d
idn't think he liked. "No, Jack. I'm going nowhere. I'm staying right here. My father's going to have Constance, my housekeeper, close up the beach house. Then she'll go and work for him. Zelda, my father's housekeeper, is retiring next spring, and so it'll all work out just fine."
Jack wondered what she was babbling about. "You're what?"
"I said I'm not returning to Malibu. I'm staying here."
He stared at her, trying to fathom what in the world she was up to now. "What for?"
"I'm going to live here."
"But why?"
"I like it here. And Eden—one of Oggie's daughters-in-law?—has offered me a job."
Jack mentally counted to ten before asking quietly, "A job doing what?"
"Cooking. I told you I could cook, didn't I?"
This was getting worse and worse. "Cooking where?"
"At the Mercantile Grill, the restaurant adjacent to the Hole in the Wall saloon."
"You're going to be a cook … at a restaurant?"
"Yes, Jack. I am. I told you, if you'll only remember, that cooking is what I've wanted to do all my life. And I am trained as a chef, after all."
"But this is insane. You work for your father."
"I worked for my father. Past tense." In one graceful motion, she stood. "Now I work for Eden Jones." She brushed off the back of her borrowed jeans.
"You don't even know these people. You can't just—"
She put up a hand. "Yes, I can, Jack." Her expression was utterly composed. "And I do know these people. I know this place. I know it in my heart." She touched her breast and looked up at him, her eyes bright as stars. "This is the place and these are the people I've been seeking all my life."
Jack looked at her and shook his head. It all was becoming painfully clear to him now. After all, he'd studied psychology in college.
She had not recovered from the series of crushing emotional blows that Cameron Cain, her father and then Jack himself had inflicted on her. She was mentally disturbed. There was no other word for it.
She'd driven out of Vegas going nowhere and ended up in this bend-in-the-road burg. And then, in a desperate attempt to create some kind of order in the chaos of her life, she'd convinced herself that fate had brought her here. And now she was unwilling to leave.
Which meant, of course, that he wasn't going to be able to leave, either. He felt too responsible.
He made himself ask in a reasonable tone, "You plan to live with the Fletchers, is that it?"
"No." For a woman who was mentally unbalanced, she sounded annoyingly decisive. "Delilah owns another house, over on Rambling Lane
. She lived there until she married Sam. It's vacant now and fully furnished. She's going to rent it to me."
Jack looked at her, trying to push down his feeling of irritation with her, trying not to grab her and kiss her, trying to remember that she was mentally a few cards short of a full deck and thus deserved to be treated with careful consideration.
But for all his good intentions, when he spoke, his exasperation came through loud and clear. "You sure as hell have got everything worked out in a damn short period of time."
Olivia lifted her chin proudly, a Mona Lisa smile curving her sweet mouth. "That's how it is, when fate takes a hand."
Jack felt his blood pressure rising. He wanted to grab her and shake her and make her confront the hard truth right now, this very moment. He wanted to force her to admit that there was no such thing as fate, to compel her to see that she'd slipped into some netherworld of delusion.
But somehow he controlled himself. He kept his mouth shut and his hands to himself. He didn't have the right to make her face anything. He'd done way too much to her already.
It was a time for patience, he knew. He must wait. Eventually she'd be willing to look at the harsh realities that were what life was really about. She'd give up her crazy fantasy that there was something special about these infuriating people and this nowhere town.
"Oh, Jack." She was looking at him so sympathetically, as if he were the one who required patience and understanding. For a moment, that spurred his irritation. But when she went on gazing at him so tenderly, his exasperation melted.
Damn. She was one of a kind, even in her deluded state. After all he'd done to her, she could look at him with tenderness.
Though he knew he shouldn't, he touched the side of her face. It was like silk, as he'd known it would be, only warmer. "Olivia, I…"
"Yes, Jack?"
Suddenly he felt as tongue-tied as a boy with a big crush. "I'm sorry, about everything."
She caught his hand and kissed the knuckles one by one. His skin burned where her lips touched. Then she held his hand to her cheek and met his eyes. "Oh, no, Jack. You mustn't be sorry. It's all working out just as it should."
God, he thought, she's really lost it.
And yet her appeal for him, even in her state of mental confusion, was as strong as ever. It took every shred of willpower he possessed not to hook his hand around her nape and ravage her mouth with his. Hell, it was worse than ever now, with the memory of their one night branded forever in his brain.
Swiftly, before he could do the unpardonable, he stepped back from her and pulled his hand free of her tender grasp. "Look. I'll be in town for a while."
Her face showed frank delight. "Oh. I'm so glad."
He had to clear his throat before continuing. "Yeah, well…" He collected his thoughts. "I passed a motel at the foot of Main Street
. Swan's, I think it's called. I'll check in there. If you need me, just call me."
"All right." That Mona Lisa smile was on her mouth again. "If you say so."
"Yeah." He was backing up. Because he knew that if he didn't back up, he'd be moving toward her. She was like a human magnet for him. He had to get far enough back to get out of her force field. "Listen, let's go. I'll walk you back to the Fletchers' house."
Still smiling, she shook her head. "It's beautiful here. I think I'll stay a while." She looked at him from under her lashes. "You could stay, too."
"No. I have to check in at the motel."
She gave a little wave. "All right, then. See you later."
"Yeah. See you later." He kept backing up, until he stumbled against the old oak tree. Then he turned and forged up the path away from her, not daring to look back.
If he had, he would have seen that she was still smiling that enigmatic smile.
* * *
Chapter 12
« ^ »
Swan's Motel sat at the foot of Main Street
, the first sight to greet the weary traveler when he or she arrived in town. It consisted of two box-shaped buildings that faced each other across a tarred parking lot.
The office was paneled in knotty pine and furnished in overstuffed plaid. Above the plaid couch to the side of the check-in desk was a nicely framed colored-chalk drawing of a very pretty blonde. The blonde was looking over her shoulder and smiling a come-hither smile.
"I'd like a room," Jack said to the man behind the counter.
The man, who was reading a magazine, looked up and gasped. A fiftyish fellow, he bore a faint resemblance to the coy blonde in the drawing over the couch.
"What the hell?" the man exclaimed.
"A room," Jack said slowly. "I'd like a room."
The man backed toward the far wall, his hands up as if Jack held a gun on him. "Look. I don't want any trouble."
"Neither do I. Just a room. That's all."
"Fine. Fine." The man smoothed his thinning hair. "For how long?"
A nameplate nearby read Chuck Swan. Jack said, "One night at a time, Chuck."
Chuck coughed, then ventured, "You get a better rate if you pay for a week."
"One night at a time."
"Sure, sure." Chuck's hands were up again. "Whatever you say."
"Have you got a room at the back, on the second floor, away from traffic?"
"You bet." Chuck gestured over his shoulder at a pegboard with the room keys o
n it. "Room 203 or 206 is what you're after."
"Either one, then."
"Great." Chuck spun the registration book around and pointed at a blank line. "Sign here. Address, phone and license plate number, too."
Jack handed him a credit card and filled in the blanks in the book. He'd barely finished when Chuck twirled the register back around and peered at what he'd written. Chuck looked up. "Roper? I never heard of you. I thought you were one of the—"
Jack didn't want to hear the name Jones. He cut in. "I never heard of you, either, Chuck. Would you give me my key … and my credit card, too?"
"Yeah. Sure. Right." Chuck quickly took an impression of Jack's card and handed it over. Then he turned, grabbed the key to 203 off the pegboard and tossed it in the air.
Jack caught it neatly. "Thanks."
"Sure. All right. No problem."
Over the pegboard there was a stuffed deer head. The deer had big brown glass eyes and a wide rack of antlers. Somebody had stuck a cigarette between its lips. Jack saluted the deer and went out to get his bag from the car.
When he opened the trunk, he saw the bags he'd taken from Olivia's car last night. Damn. He'd forgotten all about them. Jack stood for a moment staring into the trunk, remembering Olivia in her ill-fitting borrowed clothes. The nice thing to do would be to drive back over to the Fletchers' house right now and deliver her bags to her.
But Jack Roper wasn't nice.
And he didn't feel like dealing with Olivia again right this minute. He'd had enough for one day. She might be the most adorable woman on earth, but she was also disturbed and refused to admit it. In fact, she acted as if she thought he was the one with the problem.
And besides, she knew where he was. If she needed her things right away, she could get in touch with him. Otherwise, he'd get them to her when he was damn good and ready to play delivery boy.
That decided, he shouldered his own bag and went to his room, which he discovered had been done up just like the office—in knotty pine and plaid, but minus the deer head and the flirty blonde. He put his bag on the rack in the tiny closet. Then he stripped down and showered, after which he stretched out on the bed.
A HOME FOR THE HUNTER Page 13
