When Night Falls

by Cait London

  When Dani slammed out again, he wondered how long it would be before she put two and two together and realized that he might be her “old man.”

  Clyde stroked his chin and watched Dani stalk out of the garage a second time. The girl was as willful as her mother, defying the good folks of Madrid. He would do the town a favor by getting rid of the pair of them—mother and daughter. Shelly, because she knew too much, and Dani—well, because Dani was evidence that threatened Clyde.

  After a week of working to rebuild her computer programs, getting the brochure electronically uplifted to send to the printer, meeting her Charis Lopez syndication deadline, Uma stepped out into the dawn. In a few hours, the sun would be high and hot, baking the streets. She began her warming up exercises for her regular morning run. Her body was stiff from too many hours in a desk chair, and her senses were still humming from Mitchell’s light kiss—and the tense dinner she’d planned to make peace among the three males. The dinner’s only reward was another Charis article, “When Men Bristle.”

  But Mitchell hadn’t. He’d been enjoying the tension, and the gold watch on his wrist proved that he had battled his way up to a fat paycheck. He knew how to handle himself in conflict.

  She lifted her hands to the gray dawn, spread her fingers, and let the light filter through them. With her father in Arizona, enraptured with the new Zuni pots his friend had acquired, the house was quiet. She’d never lived alone, and once the window’s glass had been changed and the repairman was gone, she enjoyed the freedom.

  A week without Mitchell had been peaceful—relatively—until she’d remember that devastating, tormenting kiss. Everett was traveling again, attending a tourism conference in Vermont. Uma gathered the morning around her, planning her day. While the last week of July baked the days in Madrid, mornings were perfect for gardening, and since the computer crash, she’d let her mother’s garden go far too long.

  And the mornings were apparently good for mole hunting, she added, as she noted Lars Swenson prowling across his yard with what looked like a harpoon. Periodically, he waggled the handles of the pitchforks that were stuck in the ground. The theory was that moles could be driven by the vibrations, and Lars had lined up the pitchforks to face Charley Blue Feather’s house. One by one, Lars moved the pitchforks closer to Charley’s yard, driving the herd back to their home base.

  Mitchell walked out to set his sun tea on the front porch, and Uma caught her breath. The dawn gleamed on his chest, and in his bare feet, he had that scruffy, just awakened look, his jaw dark with stubble. He glanced at her, scowled, and then walked across to Lars’s house. The old tomcat, tail held high, strolled across to join him, winding around his legs. It was all very neighborly and it didn’t concern her.

  She now wore a good support sports bra.

  Mitchell was not going to bother her with those hot, dark looks, she decided as that quivering, sizzling sensation began to warm her.

  Pearl’s stinging call of yesterday morning still rang in the quiet air. “Dozer has been my yard man since Walter and I got married. Can you imagine him quitting, just now, when my garden is in full bloom, and me with a garden party coming up next week? Dozer sold his business to that—that criminal, Mitchell Warren. He can’t possibly know anything about gardening. Yet here he comes, pulls up to my yard, and starts unloading the riding mower from his pickup. Well, I tell you, I went out there and fired him on the spot.”

  Later that afternoon, Pearl had called again. “I’ve called everyone in town I can think of. That Warren man has got all of Dozer’s business. No one else is doing yards. I’ll do it myself before I let him prune one bush or tree.”

  Uma started jogging easily, refusing to look at Mitchell’s house as she thought of Shelly, terribly frightened of what Roman might do—or if Dani would discover her father’s identity.

  Uma tensed as Mitchell nodded to her, the two men standing and pointing and apparently discussing the “mole herd.” She noted that his pickup was loaded with the riding and push mower and the open garage door gave her a full view of Dozer’s old business, from push mowers to insecticides and tree trimming gear.

  She sailed into a full, fast run, crossing the pink dawn striping the pavement. The Warren brothers had certainly stirred up Madrid; gossip said that Roman was going to open the old garage and that he was now living in it. And “gossip” knew that he’d gotten the money from big syndicate crime partners who were just looking for a small town to use as a hideout.

  The sleepy town was stirring, fierce arguments in the barber shop and the cafe and at the gas station. Bred from Native Americans and homesteaders, cowboys and frontiersman, half of Madrid knew they would endure whatever came their way. Those wanting to stimulate Madrid’s cash flow recalled Bonnie and Clyde days, how the lawmen, reporters, and tourists had piled into the city. For a town built in one day during the Land Rush at the turn of the last century, anything seemed possible. But the “civilized” element, the society class in which Pearl moved, were outraged.

  Gossip also said that Everett and Mitchell had shared a booth at Shirley’s Ice Cream Parlor the morning after her make-peace dinner. Whatever could they have been discussing?

  She ran down Main Street, cool and quiet in the morning, before the stores opened. Then, at Tabor Street, Shelly swung into a run beside her. Since Shelly’s energies were necessary to her house cleaning and laundry work, Uma was surprised.

  The two women ran in stride down Main Street, and then Shelly said between breaths, “Roman is at my house, fixing something, every day. Dani is furious, but she’s not telling him why. She thinks he’s interested in me, and she wants him. Him…interested in me. I could kill him. Dani thinks it is a trade-off, an exchange—my laundry and patching for his house repair. He’s already fixed the air conditioner and he’s starting on the flooring. I do not like having him around. He’s making me feel as if I can’t take care of anything!”

  Uma frowned slightly; Shelly wasn’t a person to complain, but the Warren brothers could excite even the most placid temper—and clearly Shelly was frustrated, using running to work off her early morning mood.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she continued. “But I haven’t lived with a man around the house—you have. They leave the toilet seats up. That is unnerving, and so is the way Roman looks at me—let alone if I tell him I can’t afford the work that he is doing—ironing and laundry just won’t cover it. The whole town is lit up and gossiping. It’s only a matter of time before someone—you’ve always got good advice. What can I do?”

  Just then Mitchell’s black pickup cruised slowly by Uma. “’Morning, ladies,” he said, and Uma unconsciously picked up speed, nudging Shelly down a side street.

  Shelly looked at Uma and shook her head. “Roman’s garage is down Maloney Street. I’m not going down there. What’s wrong?”

  Uma shook her head, preferring silence. “May I help you, Mitchell?” she asked finally, politely, pointedly as she looked at him.

  “Dinner at my place tonight, Uma. Just a neighborly payback for dinner the other night at your house,” he said, with a narrowed smile she didn’t trust. Mitchell didn’t wait for an answer, pulling forward on the street.

  When his pickup slid onto a side street, enveloped by the cool shadows, Shelly studied Uma and noted, “You look as if you’re going to give him a very nasty hand sign.”

  Mitchell’s invitation wasn’t sweet, and ran more to the dictation of a powerful man expecting his orders to be obeyed. “I wouldn’t. I’ve never done anything of the kind. But that man can really get to me.”

  “Excuse me,” Roman said as Shelly stood at the sink, wiping the counter. He leaned close, his arm went past her, his bare chest warming her back as he turned the faucet and let the water run cold enough to drink.

  She didn’t move, feeling Roman’s body close to hers, his breath against her cheek. He turned off the water and both his arms came down on the counter to frame her. “Problems?” he asked too softly.
r />   Problems? Roman was too close, and whatever leaped within her all those years ago was threatening to do the same now.

  After a week of him hammering and running a power saw, putting in new windows, and putting in new pipes in the kitchen and bathroom, she had a definite problem that stretched into her sleepless nights, her tense days—Roman. She was apt to find him anywhere, lying with his tools on the kitchen floor, head and shoulders beneath the sink, grinning at her from on top of the roof, at a window he was repairing from the outside, caulking the tub—

  The lowered intense look of those gold eyes could stop her like a doe caught in headlights. She’d argued with him logically, fought with him, and yet just there, riding on the edge, was a sensual pull she didn’t want.

  She looked down at her hands near his, white knuckled as they gripped the counter. His thumb slowly cruised over the back of hers. “I’ve told you that I don’t have the money for the repairs, for the materials. You’re making me feel as if I can’t cope, and it’s only a matter of time before Dani discovers that—”

  He blew on her nape, shifting the tendrils that had come free from her ponytail. “What are you doing running early in the morning, Shelly, when you’ve got a full day of work ahead of you?”

  Trying to figure out how to deal with you. “I like the fresh air,” she said, and regretted the trembling of her body.

  He blew those tendrils again. “Tell Dani that I’m your boyfriend. Let her get used to the idea before this all breaks and someone says the wrong thing to her about me. Putting dates together is easy enough with all the gossip in this town.”

  “No.”

  He shoved back from her and Shelly pivoted around to face him, her hands behind her, locked to the counter. Roman served her one of those hot leveling looks at her faded shirt, cut-off shorts, and tennis shoes, and walked to the refrigerator. He jerked it open and took out a can of soda, popped the top, and lifted it to drink.

  Raw and masculine, the appealing package was all there—the shaggy sweat-damp hair, the gleam of tanned sweaty skin over his arms, his lean and powerful chest, and that flat plane of his stomach and lower where his jeans sagged just a bit. From there on down to his bare feet, he was all long and strong.

  Shelly breathed uneasily; life in close quarters with Roman set her on edge, her senses clanging with big warning bells.

  He tossed the can into the trash, braced a hand on the refrigerator, and leveled one of those dark, burning looks at her. “I’ve got a bum knee and no money to speak of. I got into that fight the first night I was here because of a woman. But that’s not happening again, not unless the woman is you. I can’t make it up to you, but I can help you with Dani now. You don’t have a clue about the darker side of life and that’s where she’s headed—I’ve been there.”

  What might happen to Dani terrified her. She’d read of girls who’d run away, but Roman in their lives now wasn’t possible. More than once those honey-colored eyes had ripped down and up her body, leaving a tingling path. “I’ve managed this far—”

  “Deceive yourself, if you want. You need help on this one, honey. Call me a dreamer, but I’d like her to know that I’m her father.”

  “You didn’t come back because you knew that. You might not have come back at all.”

  His hand slapped at the refrigerator hard enough to shake it, rattling the apple-shaped cookie jar on top. “Well, I’m here now and the kid is making moves on me. I’m not leaving. I had a mother who ran out, and I wasn’t here for you or for her. I know what a kid feels like, all torn up inside because a parent didn’t care enough to stay around and see her grow up. I’m staying, honey. Get used to it, and I’m going to talk with your mother, too. She’s Dani’s grandmother, for God’s sake.”

  Shelly’s secret had been her own—with the exception of Uma—for all those years. She couldn’t bear to reopen the past, the heartbreaking arguments, the venomous accusation that her “whoring” was responsible for her father’s death. “You can’t just come in here and—”

  “Try me.”

  The words hung in the air. Roman made his way to the back door, never taking his eyes from Shelly. Horrified at what he might do, she couldn’t move—then she heard him say, “Hi, Dani. I’m just leaving—going out for a ride.”

  Panic drove Shelly to the door; Dani wanted more than anything to ride behind Roman on the Harley. “I’ll be with you in just a minute, Roman. I’ve never had a motorcycle ride.”

  Their stunned faces did look alike, the same light brown eyes, the same turn of their parted lips—father and daughter. Roman stopped drawing on his T-shirt, almost comical as it paused above his stomach. Then Dani frowned. “Maybe you’re too old to hold on, Mom,” she stated nastily.

  “Nah,” Roman said easily, jerking his T-shirt fully down. “If you want a ride later, kid, that’s okay, but I’d already asked your mother. See if you can’t fold those towels on top of the dryer while we’re gone. If there’s one thing that makes a woman look bad, it’s not carrying her share of the work. Work hard, play hard.”

  Dani blinked, and Shelly caught the subtle taunt—Dani already thought she was a woman. “I carry my share,” she tossed back and slammed into the house.

  “Hurry up, honey,” Roman said, watching Shelly. “Or would you rather not finish what you started?”

  EIGHT

  “I really shouldn’t. I need to make canapes for Pearl’s dinner party tomorrow night. Some caterers are coming in, but Pearl—I don’t know what to do. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before,” she said honestly as Roman carefully fitted the extra helmet to her. She didn’t know what to do about anything—Dani glaring at her through the kitchen window, the music blasting loudly enough to disturb the elderly couple next door, the man who wanted to be a part of Dani’s life.

  “Then it’s time you learned. You look about seventeen yourself just now, all steamy mad and frustrated. Only you were sweet back then and now you’re ready to fight for what you want. You learned plenty and you managed. You’ll learn this,” he said, tipping up her chin with his finger and smiling down at her.

  It was an intimate, heart-stopping smile, and though she knew he’d given it to many other women, it was still very dangerous. “Maybe I won’t.”

  He swung onto the seat. He turned to look at her, challenging her with that steady half-lidded look. “Hop on.”

  “You wear your helmet, too.” She wondered how she could sit on that seat without touching him.

  He shrugged and reached for his helmet. “Anything else?”

  She looked down Tabor Street and saw the elderly couples walking at sunset. They’d seen Roman’s motorcycle in her driveway for the past week. They’d seen him use Mitchell’s truck to haul boards and plumbing supplies to the house. “Heaven only knows what they’re thinking,” she muttered, as she eased into the narrow black leather seat behind him.

  He back-walked the bike with both of them on it, and ordered, “Put your arms around me.”

  She placed her hands on his waist, then gripped his shirt in her fists as he revved the motor. “Doesn’t this hurt your knee?”

  “Everything hurts my knee. But I’m not on painkillers any more. I’m not going through that mess again, if that’s worrying you.”

  The instant small lurch of the mechanical beast threw her backward, then Roman stopped it, only to jerk once more. “Told you to hang on. Put your feet on the pedals.”

  Shelly glanced at the newlyweds just down the street, the bride snuggling against her husband, as they watched. “You know what this looks like.”

  When he didn’t answer, but jerked the motorcycle again, Shelly eased her arms around him. He was hard, inflexible, powerful, the muscles rippling as he drove the motorcycle from Tabor Street on to Main Street, where the whole town watched them pass.

  She wanted to fly, to let the wind flow through her hair and over her body, to laugh with the pleasure and the freedom of the ride. Images of houses and trees and of Lonny sitting i
n his police car sped by her, then a green spread of pastures dotted with Hereford or Angus cattle.

  Glorious, mindless freedom. Shelly inhaled escape as though it were heaven, if only for a moment.

  She realized she was smiling, just a silly, pleased, mindless smile, when Roman drove onto the old Warren spread. She was still smiling when Roman parked the bike and she was still gripping him tight.

  “Off,” he said in the quiet of the sunset.

  Shelly realized that her escape to momentary freedom with Roman had landed her alone with him. She scampered from the machine and Roman eased off more slowly, favoring his knee and freeing his helmet.

  He reached to take Shelly’s and hang it beside his. When he turned to her, she couldn’t move, pinned by the dark intent in his eyes.

  “Let’s start all over again, shall we?” he asked huskily as the old windmill whirred and the stormclouds brewed and the wind rose to tug at her hair, licking at the ends.

  She couldn’t move as he bent to brush his lips against hers, gently asking, wooing…

  She found herself leaning into the kiss just as Roman stepped back, studying her. “You’re just as sweet, Shell.”

  Blushing, she turned away into the sunset and the rising storm and the wind. The contrast of beautiful day and incoming storm was as mixed as her emotions. “We can’t go back, Roman. And I’m not—”

  “What I’m used to? A fancy woman, if the other words are too hard for you to say?”

  “I was going to say, you’re very experienced. I have a daughter to raise, I can’t just—”

  “Our daughter, Shell. It’s time she knew.”

  The secret that only he and Uma shared shook violently within Shelly, trapped by years of silence.

  Roman looked off into the storm coming toward them, its furious dark churning clouds. The wind lifted his hair, pulling it back from his face, the bones stark and thrusting against his skin, the resemblance to Dani caught in the last gold of sunset. “I haven’t got anything to offer her, or you, to make it up. But I’d like to try. I’m asking you to give me a chance. To let me be in your lives. I’d like to get to know my own daughter, Shell. And I’m really sorry about what you went through. Just—please…”