When Night Falls

by Cait London

  There was no ignoring the rev of his bike as Shelly pulled to a stop. She swung off his bike and came to stand beside Dani, hands on hips, glaring up at him.

  Roman scowled down at her. Those green eyes cut through the distance up to him, burning furiously, her mouth tightly pressed with anger. Her condemning stare never left him as she and Dani helped Grace to her feet.

  The engagement sweetheart plan was not going well at all.

  Mitchell slapped the unopened letters from his mother onto the kitchen counter. He was sweaty from an early morning job and the need to see Uma curled around him, memories of last night haunting him. He tipped up the fruit jar of iced tea and drank deeply.

  The second week of August heat would be intolerable in the afternoon, and then he would come to Uma—if she wasn’t with Grace.

  The cat nudged his leg and Mitchell swiped a hand across his bare chest, dusting away the fine cuttings caught in the hair. He glanced at the scratches on his hands and ran water, soaping them, and wishing he could deal with the problem of his mother—and Uma’s attachment to her—as easily.

  The cat hopped onto the counter and settled next to the letters, and Mitchell had that odd sense of a woman’s softness curling around him. He could sense Lauren’s presence in the home she loved so much. Maybe she was a part of Uma, and by way of his love for Uma, Lauren was a part of him, too.

  He instinctively knew her pain when she was shot, that last fleeting thought before the world went black—“I love you all so much. I’ll always be with you.”

  He wiped his hands and face roughly with the towel. He wanted to hold Uma and know she was safe. He’d already called her twice, missing her as if she were a part of himself.

  The cat’s unblinking yellow eyes locked on him and inside him a chilling voice quietly said, “But she isn’t safe.”

  Mitchell frowned and pushed away that sense that Uma was in danger—in the daylight hours, when the prowler never struck.

  She was in her house, working desperately to meet a client’s ad layout for a magazine.

  Then later, she was showing Everett’s house to Grace. She was safe.

  If the threads and scraps he’d given Lonny for examination held any leads at all, maybe there would be an end to Madrid’s danger.

  Mitchell breathed deeply and hurled the towel away. His mother was another problem.

  The women were united—Uma, Shelly, and Dani—all determined that he and Roman talk to Grace.

  The cat leaped down and trotted into the room with Lauren’s things, and as if drawn by the animal, Mitchell followed, the unopened letters in his hand. Whatever Grace had written, he was going to throw it back in his mother’s face.

  “Hello, Virginia,” Grace said gently to the stone-faced woman staring out at the retirement home’s garden.

  Virginia Craig had always been a raw-boned, healthy woman, but now she sat slumped in a chair, a lap quilt over her legs. Her hair had once been auburn and sleek and neatly pinned, and she had moved with an elegance that Shelly now bore. She’d given birth to Shelly at midlife, and she and her husband had doted on their only child.

  Dani’s rundown on the situation was heartbreaking, and Grace felt she had to try to help. She took Mrs. Craig’s thin, cold hand. “Virginia, I’m Grace Warren. Do you remember me?”

  Virginia’s head turned slowly on her thin neck, her green eyes shadowed at first; then they brightened and warmed. “Gracie? Gracie Warren?”

  “I brought you a present, Virginia,” Grace said, placing a ribboned box on the other woman’s lap. She ached for the years of heartache between mother and child, daughter and granddaughter. “Would you like me to open it for you?”

  Virginia’s blue-veined fragile hands trembled over the box. “Yes, please.”

  Grace opened the box slowly. “You know we’re two old ladies now, Virginia, and we have to do our best.”

  Those bright eyes stared at her. “Is this about my Shelly?”

  “It’s about our granddaughter.” Grace took out the sweater she had carefully chosen for Virginia. It was green as Oklahoma’s rolling spring hills. “Let me help you put it on. It’s fairly cool in here. You like the gardens outside, don’t you? I remember the lovely garden you grew, how big those tomatoes were, and how many quarts you canned. Goodness. What you know and can teach a young person.”

  “Dani…Danielle,” Virginia whispered as she smoothed the soft knit of the sweater over her chest. “Your boy came to see me with Dani. He’s got a sharp mouth, telling me off about how I treated Shelly and Dani.”

  Grace knew exactly how stubborn her sons could be, how abrupt, just like Fred. “I made a mistake with my husband. We had too much pride between the two of us, Virginia. Pride can be an awful, hurtful thing. It’s like a river that starts to flow and can’t stop or back up.”

  “Your boy was right.” Virginia breathed slowly, watching the garden. Then her eyes began to shimmer with tears that overflowed onto the soft green knit. “I liked your boy, Gracie. Someone should have told me off years ago. There was only Shelly, and then—then suddenly she was a woman carrying a child, and not more than a child herself. Once I started on her, I couldn’t stop. I loved her, but I couldn’t stop. It was wrong and prideful.”

  Grace took Virginia’s hands. “But we’re going to change that, Virginia. We’re going to be grandmothers. A little late for the both of us, but it’s time we acted like it, don’t you think? Dani may be leaving for college—”

  “Leaving?” The fear in Virginia’s voice trembled in the room. “I don’t want her to leave!”

  “I’m staying here in Madrid, Virginia, and you’re welcome to stay at my house, if you want. We’ll be grandmothers to Dani together. If you can put up with my sons’ arrogance—we still have trouble there—but for Dani’s sake, I think we should be good friends, like we once were. You taught me so much. Will you think about it?”

  “Your boy said he’d take me for a motorcycle ride. I’d like to show off to my friends here at the home that I’m still alive and kicking. About Dani…it’s hard to give over once you’ve set your path, you know.”

  “I know. Oh, how well I know. Dani wants to buy that Warren place when she can. She’s set on raising roses and horses and gardening. You could teach her so much about everything.”

  “It’s a hard land, Gracie. It can tear the heart out of a person. You know that better than anyone.”

  “Shoot, Virginia. A hard land can’t stand against you and me. We’ve been through the worst of times and the best, and we’re not done yet.”

  Mrs. Craig looked out into the lush, manicured gardens of the retirement home, the white-smocked attendants pushing the wheelchairs. “You bring Dani to me. I’ll try. She’s right pretty, by the way.”

  “She looks like your Shelly.”

  Mrs. Craig beamed and nodded. “That she does.”

  Shelly eased into the closed, shadowy garage, to find Roman crouched, a big man grimly working on the motorcycle he wanted to give Dani.

  “You’re here to give back that ring, right? I don’t blame you. I’m not a bargain,” he said quietly, without looking at Shelly. He dropped a wrench into his toolbox and the metallic sound echoed coldly, hollowly in her heart. “I should have put her crib together, oiled her tricycle, carried her on my shoulders. Instead, I was riding high on myself—the big racecar driver. Look at me now—a has-been.”

  The light cruised over his shaggy hair, gleaming on his hard features as he turned to her. “Dani wants a horse. She wants to buy that old place. She wants her heritage. Some heritage. She’s a rock-solid mechanic, an instinctive one for the sound of a motor. She won’t need a computer to tune her bike, she’ll feel it—and she wants a horse.”

  Shelly ached for Roman, for what he was going through, the years of pain to the present. “You can teach her about that, can’t you? You broke and trained horses with Fred.”

  “Those nags just about killed us. My backside was so sore most of the time t
hat I couldn’t sit down to eat. Not that there was any decent food.”

  “She has a dream. She wants to own something that came down to her. That’s not so bad, is it?”

  Roman rose painfully to his feet, his hands on his hips, legs braced hip-shot, favoring his injured knee. In black jeans and a black T-shirt and biker’s boots, he looked as if he’d seen the world and it had wearied him. “Dreams die,” he said, his body all angles and taut with frustration.

  “If you let them. If they aren’t worth fighting for. What are you going to do? Let Dani struggle to buy that place, work herself to death, and not help her? Not teach her what you know?”

  Roman’s hand slashed at the air, signaling the end of the conversation.

  She had to fight for him, the man she loved. “You’re using Fred as an excuse, Roman. You act like him to back off from having to deal with logic that isn’t your own. Don’t you dare seal me off, not after all that hogwash about me being your Vargas and your Lamborghini girl. I didn’t believe you anyway.”

  Silence swirled around the shadows and a muscle in Roman’s cheek contracted as he scowled at her. “I may have said some things that weren’t true to women who knew they weren’t true, who knew how to play games. But not with you.”

  “All that bristling doesn’t scare me, Roman. Don’t try to intimidate me. It won’t work.”

  “Are you going to give the damn ring back to me or not?” he demanded.

  “You’ll have to ask for it back. You gave it to me, and it’s mine. I’m expecting everything that goes with it—but not some feeling-sorry-for-himself man who won’t face how really wonderful he is.”

  “I’m not asking for it back.”

  “I’m not giving it back.” Shelly pulled away the band that held her ponytail. She moved her head and the long burnished strands swirled and settled on her shoulders. The past still ate at Roman and she had to make him see that they had a future. Okay, maybe the woman that she was with him—alive and feeling her senses pound, thrilled by that dark, sultry look—loved testing him, pushing him, to find the man beneath. Maybe her time had come to play and laugh and rejoice in being a woman; she couldn’t let that slip away without a fight. “Just try and get it.”

  “Feeling saucy, are you? I suppose you’ve got backup coming—Dani and Grace and Uma, just in case you can’t handle me.”

  “Oh, I can handle you by myself…when you give me the truth about how you feel without words, and when I know in my heart that you will try to do your best by Dani—and me. That’s all I want.”

  She backed up a step as he moved closer, eyes narrowed, studying her. “I know how this goes. The soft sell, getting me to talk with Grace, and everything is going to be peachy keen, right?”

  “Wrong. I think it’s time you put up or shut up. Or at least, stop looking at me like you do.”

  He took a step toward her. “How so?”

  She moved backward again, lifting her foot to the first step of the stairs and standing up on it. “Like I’m special and you can’t wait to have me.”

  She took another step higher and following her, Roman eased onto the first step. “I guess that’s how I feel. I was trying to watch that. To try to give you more, but all this night prowler business has cramped my style.”

  He reached in his shirt pocket and removed a small box. “Here.”

  Lying in a cotton bed was a feminine gold locket, etched with flowers and vines and engraved with her name and his. The heavier weight chain wasn’t a match, looking as if nothing could break it. Inside the locket was a picture of Dani, clean and fresh and sweet looking as any teenager untouched by dirty rumors. Shelly braced herself against the heart-tugging gift. There was more that Roman had to give, and to take. If she stopped pushing him now, she’d just have to start all over, because she wasn’t giving up—“What’s this? A buy-off so you can ride on down the road?”

  She took another step higher as that scowl jerked between his brows. “You think I’d give any woman something like that?”

  “I don’t know what to think. You sat up on that windmill today and looked like some old lonely wolf aching for his cave—or his floozies.”

  She took another step as Roman moved up one more. “‘Floozies’? I didn’t know people still used that word. But sure, I’ve known some women.”

  “I don’t want to be ‘some women.’ How do I know exactly how you feel about me?” Shelly clutched the necklace tightly in her fist and tossed away the box. “I bet you have a drawerful of these—”

  His face hardened and he smiled coldly as he advanced another step higher. “Just two. I gave Dani one that matches it. I cut pictures out of Lauren’s high school yearbook, one of you and one of me.”

  Shelly backed up three more steps, digging in to make her point with Roman, who didn’t really believe in himself. She intended to push him to the edge, so that he couldn’t doubt how he felt about her, or about himself. “So you really don’t see yourself as a father, a married man, do you?”

  “I said I’d try, and I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  She backed up the steps until she stood at the top, looking down at him. “You’re going to have to show me just how you feel.” Shaking with her boldness, she moved back into his apartment. By the time Roman entered the spartan furnished room, she was wearing only her bra and briefs, and posed in front of his Vargas calendars.

  “You’re going to have to show me,” she repeated unevenly, as she leaned back and licked her lips, in what she hoped was a seductive pose. “I want to know how you feel about me before the wedding night—if there’s going to be one.”

  Caught in the shadowy light slicing through the miniblinds on the windows, Roman’s hands gripped the hand railing on either side of him, his knuckles white. The bones of his face seemed to push against his dark skin, and his breathing seemed erratic, slow, dragging in and out, his nostrils flaring. The vein in his throat pounded slowly, the muscles of his broad shoulders bunched and hard, cords standing out in relief in his arms.

  He stepped into the apartment fully, slowly closing the old door, and the hum of the air conditioner ate at the silence.

  He stared so hard that she faltered, and wondered if she’d gone too far—sweet, shy Shelly, smalltown cleaning woman, trying to vamp a man who knew more about life than she even suspected. She had to know how fiercely he felt, and Roman’s protective shield was keeping her from the truth—

  She had to be bold now, her flesh shivering with Roman’s burning slow look, taking her in from head to toe. Hands shaking, but trying to move slowly, artfully, seductively, she placed the necklace around her throat.

  When she removed her bra, his indrawn breath hissed across the air conditioner’s hum, and the pounding of her heart. Taking her time, she shimmied out of her briefs and with her foot, tossed them aside.

  Roman still hadn’t moved, and Shelly feared she’d gone too far. Or far enough?

  She turned, and with her hands braced on her hips, her legs apart, she tilted her head. Her hair swayed to cover one shoulder as she looked at his beloved calendar girls on the wall. She’d had a baby, but she was lean and strong enough to fight for what she wanted—and she wanted all of Roman, to burn away the shadows hovering around him.

  Behind her, the silence was terrifying. Then Roman’s weight on the flooring creaked slightly, his footsteps nearing until the heat of his body burned her back, his lips warm against her ear. “What do you want?”

  “Proof.”

  His finger slowly prowled down her bare back and up to her shoulder, where he drew the letter “R.” His whisper was deep and raw, erotically warm as it swirled around her ear. “I wanted the sweetheart route this time, honey…taking it slow, giving you what you deserve…dinner, presents, that sort of thing. You’re pushing.”

  “That’s a sweet idea. Maybe later.”

  His teeth caught her lobe and he whispered, “You could be asking for more than you can handle. I’ll understand if you want to back off.” />
  She sucked in her breath as his open hand skimmed her side, curving to her hip and then rising to gently cup her breast, toying with her nipple until it peaked. Her voice came out low and husky. “Does a warning usually come with—?”

  Roman turned her quickly and his mouth came down on hers—hard, demanding, open and hot, fusing with hers. His open hands stroked the length of her back, finding her bottom, cupping it briefly and pressing her to his arousal before moving to her sides.

  She wasn’t letting him intimidate her. Shelly arched into the kiss, opened for it, burned with it, locking him in her arms. She was a strong woman, and stronger, now that she had Roman, the friction between them bringing life and joy. His breath was hers, mingling as they locked, battling, pushing each other higher.

  He pushed her away, quickly stripping his clothes away while he stared at her, eyes glittering, and Shelly couldn’t resist running a fingernail slowly down his chest, an instinctive provocative feminine reaction to the raw sensuality pulsing between them. She eased back against the wall, the calendars framing her, and lifting her foot, slowly placed it on Roman’s stomach. His hand wrapped around her ankle and held her there. “If you think you can use that bad knee as an excuse, think again,” Shelly whispered.

  Whoever she was now—not sweet Shelly, friend and daughter and mother—she reveled in her femininity, in the stark hunger in Roman’s expression. She tossed away a lifetime of good-girls-don’t and you’ll-be-sorry, and threats of gossip. She tore away fears of Dani and sorrow for Lauren, and settled into one goal—Roman, all of him.

  A downward look assured her there was plenty of him. She breathed heavily, feeling herself warm and soften as his hand slid from her ankle upward, caressing her inner thigh. She settled back against the wall, watching him, waiting, her body tensed for his next move.

  Testing them both, she pushed her foot gently against his stomach, and Roman reacted instantly, not allowing her the distance. He eased her foot aside and stood watching her, a hunter locked onto what he sought.