by BJ James
Matthew accepted her anger placidly. No expression showed on his lean, hard face. His black eyes were unwavering, but not unkind. Annabelle’s guilt-laden irritation and frustration sparked in the air like an electric current, but he offered no appeasing remarks, no false apology for his incessant prodding.
Expecting contradiction, needing it to fuel her frustration, Annabelle faltered, her criticism fading like ripples from a stone thrown in a pond.
Matthew sat motionless and might have seemed cast of bronze or carved of stone, were it not for the slight rise of his chest with each slow, shallow breath. He was patient, a watcher, like his chosen people. In the muted light, with shadows falling over his features, the trappings of modern dress were not at odds with the inherent traits of his lineage. Nor with the flash of feather and stone on the band he wore at his nape, an alternative to the traditional headband.
Fierce pride of the N’de, the Apache, was reflected in his bearing, their restrained strength in his stillness. Intelligence and wisdom, and something beyond shone in his dark, slanting gaze.
Matthew Winter Sky would be an implacable enemy, but faithful beyond measure in friendship. It was the latter that commanded Annabelle’s compliance when he said simply, “Please.”
“All right.” Though she tried to cling to the farce of her anger, there was no heat in her reply. Carefully, as she had before, she recounted Ashley’s arrival at the gallery. His proud offering of the newest painting, his disappointment that Nicole was away for the day. “That’s when the old biddy came bursting in. A vulture riding hell for leather, bearing tales, looking for more. When she saw it upset Ashley that Nicole had gone sailing with Jeb, she made it sound as bad as possible.”
An apologetic glance at Nicole’s pale face halted her recitation. Then squaring her shoulders she addressed Matthew again. “Repeating what she proposed and surmised won’t find Ashley, so we’ll forget that part.”
“You showed her the door,” Matthew prompted, adding his tacit agreement.
“By the scruff of her skinny neck, figuratively, at least. And I invited her not to come back.” Another glance at Nicole, who stood as if she, too, were carved of stone, stripped the stridence from her. “I’m sorry. Even a good customer isn’t worth the trouble she causes.”
Nicole dared not trust her voice, and answered with only the smallest inclination of her head. But for the first time since Matthew had begun his inquisition, she relented as Jeb drew her back against him, letting his arms offer respite from the hatefulness and spite of an avaricious woman.
Leaning into his embrace, reinforcing her stamina with his, she savored the warmth that reached into her. Mrs. Atherton’s appalling insinuations didn’t matter. They never should have. What she felt for Jeb, and the time they’d shared on Eden, would be shameful and ugly only if she let herself feel shameful and ugly.
He’d made no promises, nor had she. Yet neither regretted an enchanted sojourn in the sun-scattered shade of a cabana on a perfect day in paradise.
It was enough, and she was content.
Ashley would be found, she’d known he would be from the moment Matthew Sky smiled at her and promised. Then she would make him understand, and all would be well. She would make it so.
“That’s it then? All he said, exactly as he said it?” Annabelle finished recounting her story, and Matthew was speaking, but Nicole had heard little of it. But there was something in Matthew’s voice. Something that made her belief stronger.
“I had forgotten, until this minute.” Annabelle scowled, she couldn’t believe her outrage had blocked this one small but important incident in the havoc Mrs. Atherton brought down on them. “Ashley said, ‘friend, best friend,’ then something about new best friends. That’s when he smashed his paintings.”
Matthew slid back his chair and stood. He was tall for an Apache, taller than Jeb, and far, far, taller than Annabelle as he offered his hand. “Thank you.” Her small white fingers were lost in his copper-skinned grasp. “Memory can be a capricious thing, particularly under stress. I know this was difficult for you, but you’ve been a lot of help. And whether you believe it or not, this saved us time.”
“Just like that, out of the blue, you know where Ashley is?” Her arched eyebrows mirrored the shape of her heart-shaped forehead.
“Just like that, but not out of the blue.” Matthew allowed himself one small grin, and his hard face was transformed into one of astonishing beauty. Not one inch of it anything but ruggedly masculine and perfect.
It was a measure of her guilt and worry that Annabelle didn’t notice. Any other day, she would have groveled, not completely tongue in cheek, at his feet. “How do you know? What did I say?”
“I’ll explain, I promise. But later. It will be dark in just a bit, and I’d like to go.”
“I’ll go with you,” Nicole and Annabelle said in unison.
Jeb said nothing. Years in The Black Watch, and countless assignments with Matthew had taught him the uncanny tracker tracked alone.
“Better you wait here,” Matthew explained. “He’s hiding. He’s been hurt, like a wild animal he’s gone to ground to salve his wounds. If he sees either of you, he’ll only try to run away again.”
“You’re right, I should have realized.” Nicole kept her voice low, holding back the anguish that Ashley would feel so badly toward her he would hide from her. “Where will you look?”
Matthew flashed a breathtaking smile as he was leaving. “The zoo, of course.”
“Of course,” Nicole echoed, and it all made perfect sense.
* * *
Ashley was dirty and unkempt. A bewildered mix of belligerence and contrition. He’d skinned a knee and lost what he called his picture bag with the art supplies Nicole had given him. That he trusted Matthew and no one else was made painfully clear by the way he clung to the darker man’s hand.
“Ashley.” At the sound of Nicole’s voice, he cringed behind Matthew, unable to understand that his bulk couldn’t be hidden by a more slender frame. “I’ve missed you. Are you all right?”
At the much awaited peal of the bell at the door, Nicole had practically leapt from her desk. She’d spent the hours of waiting trying to work, to occupy her thoughts, to hurry the time. Now pages of columns of figures that eluded her scattered over its surface as she waited and hoped for his reply.
Biting her lip to hold back tears, Annabelle watched from the window where she’d kept her vigil.
From his seat a little distance away, Jeb’s sole reaction was a long, appraising look at the childish resentment in Ashley’s face, and the remorse in Nicole’s. The only sound was the rustle of the journal he crumpled in his hand.
“Ashley, you promised,” Matthew scolded in the tone a parent reserved for a much loved child. “Remember?”
Ashley jerked his head side to side. Lower lip quivering, he hunched lower trying to avoid Nicole’s eyes.
“I’m sorry you’re angry with me. I’d like to explain that my friendship with Jeb isn’t like Mrs. Atherton said. It isn’t—”
“Bad.” Ashley pointed an accusing finger. “Do bad things.”
Color drained from Nicole’s face, her hands trembled, until she folded them before her. She should have been warned by Annabelle’s reluctance to repeat the vitriolic tirade, but she wasn’t prepared for this. “No, Ashley, Mrs. Atherton is wrong. You’re wrong.”
Her cry fell on deaf ears. Ashley stared stonily above her head. She’d seen him fall into this self-induced trance before when he refused to deal with something.
“All right, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.” She’d been so sure she could make him understand. Now Nicole wondered if she could reach Ashley at all, ever again.
“Maybe he doesn’t have to talk,” Matthew said as he turned, taking the huge man by his massive shoulders, shaking him, commanding his attention. “But he has to listen, because he promised. And Ashley never breaks a promise.”
Darting eyes found
Jeb, a pout drew down a dirty lip.
“Jeb’s here,” Matthew said firmly. “I told you he would be. I told you why. He’s a friend, and friends try to make you feel better when you feel sad. Nicole and Annabelle were feeling sad because you listened to a woman who wasn’t your friend or theirs, and ran away.”
“Matthew,” Nicole interjected quietly. “He can’t understand, it’s too abstract.”
“He understands and he’ll understand even more.” Taking a massive hand, Matthew led his charge toward the lounge. “I’m going to help you clean up, and bandage your scratches, Ashley. While I do, Nicole will collect some more paints for you, and maybe even a new bag for them. Then when we’re all done, you’re going to listen like you promised, and she’ll explain everything.
“Just remember that she’s your friend, she has been for a long time, and she always will be. But only you can decide if you want to be her friend.”
The door to the lounge had hardly closed behind them when Annabelle erupted in a quiet, deadly rage. A low stream of epithets and threats, some old, some just invented, poured from her. The mildest of which was stitching Mrs. Old Biddy’s mouth shut and making her spend the remainder of her life eating and drinking through a straw. The most violent, and to Annabelle the most satisfying, involved stripping her naked, hanging her upside down in the old slave market and leaving her for the world to see just how ugly she was, inside and out.
“I’ll bet her favorite pastime when she was a little girl was pulling the wings off butterflies.” Annabelle delivered one last salvo. “She must have been a horror in the barnyard.”
Nicole had said nothing. Now, as she fumbled for her chair and sank down in it, she responded absently. “I doubt Mrs. Atherton has ever seen a barnyard.”
“More’s the pity,” Annabelle grumbled. “She certainly belongs in one. And I know just the place. The pigpen.”
Jeb barely listened as he struggled with the dilemma of needing to go to Nicole, to comfort her, and knowing it would only make things worse. He’d been as angry at the rumormonger as Annabelle. But was he any better?
He hadn’t lied, but he hadn’t been honest. Not with Nicole. Not with himself. Now he’d brought even more disorder and misery to her life than he ever intended.
And still there would be more the day Tony Callison came to her. The day she discovered the man she had given herself to—heart, soul, mind and body, without reservation—was an opportunist. A dishonest man, a greedy man.
* * *
Nicole sat in the darkness, in a darker world. Even the moon and stars had deserted her. The surf lapping at the shore beyond her house failed to soothe her.
The last hour in the gallery had been a horror. Ashley wouldn’t listen. The entire time she’d spent trying to reach him, he’d sat staring into the distance. As immutable as stone, as unforgiving as the self-righteous.
Matthew, who had called heavily on the mystical rapport he shared with children and animals to find Ashley and bond with him, could not reason with him then.
Arguing brought little response. Pleading even less. Ashley was a child in the throes of a punishing sulk. Too young in mind to listen to reason, too mature in body to discipline. In the end she’d admitted defeat and, in language she prayed he’d understand, she’d given him his choices and explained their consequences. He could accept her friends and be her friend, or not. She’d been a part of his life for years, and he of hers. She would miss him if he continued as he was. Her one wish was that in denying her, he wouldn’t deny his talent. The rest she’d left to him, the final choice was his.
Against her every hope, Ashley left the gallery without speaking. Even worse, he left the new bag of paints and supplies.
Jeb had withdrawn as quickly. A sympathetic look, a compassionate touch, and he was gone, with Matthew a step behind.
Many sleepless hours later, she moped on the steps of her deck in a night as somber as her mood. A surrogate mother who had lost her jealous child.
A lonely woman without her lover.
“So much for that.” Rising from the steps, with her hands shoved deeply into the pockets of her jeans, she wandered the sand. She had no destination in mind, but her footsteps turned toward the ruin.
* * *
His report to Simon complete, Jeb sat with his head down, his hands lying limply on his knees. He’d delayed longer than he should to confirm that Nicole knew nothing of her brother, nor had she had any contact with him in years. That she’d offered the information without prompting made it more credible. The truthful sort of thing that could have come up in any conversation, anytime, anywhere.
The journey to Eden wasn’t necessary, it needn’t have happened. But it had. He was left to deal with it, and he had no idea how.
A radio beeped. Matthew was speaking before he lifted it from the table. “...walking toward the ruin. Shouldn’t be alone. Should I call Mitch?”
“No,” Jeb responded. “He should stay with the Gambler, we can’t be sure when we might need it. Simon’s convinced our quarry is moving again. The Merino family has stepped up the search for him, he’s down to his last option. The only one he ever had. Watch the house, Matthew. I’ll see to the lady.”
Under the cover of darkness he started down the beach. He knew he needn’t be concerned about Matthew. By rotating between two stations, every angle of Nicole’s house was visible. No one could approach without alerting the canny Apache. Mitch would be as responsible with the Gambler. That left Jeb and his responsibility.
Nicole.
He saw her ahead, a shadowy form in the nearly unrelieved black of the night. Keeping a steady pace that wouldn’t alarm her, he reached the base of the ruin seconds after she scaled the slanting stones.
“Jogging this late, Jeb?” Her voice floated down to him, flat, without inflection.
“I came to see about you.” The truth, as far as it went.
“What about me?”
“Have you heard from Ashley?”
“No.”
“Do you expect to?”
“No.”
“Can you say anything but no?”
“Such as?”
“Such as come join me.”
“All right,” she said with the same apathy. “If that’s what you want to hear, come join me.”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
When he climbed the ruin with an enviable ease, he sat beside her. Her legs were drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her chin rested on her knees. She stared out to sea, at a flashing buoy.
“Tough day.” He touched her cheek, regretting the livid scratch.
“I’ve had better.”
Unable to stop himself, he stroked her hair. His hand wandered to her shoulders, finding the taut muscles. His fingers were skillful, soothing. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
“Don’t. Don’t be kind and don’t touch me.” Despite her command, she didn’t move from him.
“Why not, sweetheart?” A fingertip trailed down her spine.
She drew an unsteady breath. “Because I don’t want to fight you, or myself.”
He gathered her hair in his palm, turning her gaze to his. “Then why fight at all?”
“Because...”
His lips brushed over hers, warm, caressing. “Because?”
“Because...”
He kissed her again, his tongue teasing the sweet inner softness of her mouth and lifting away. “You were saying?”
“Was I?” He’d walked away from her a second time, but it didn’t matter. He was here now, and he cared, she heard it in his voice, felt it in his touch. Her arms crept about his neck, her fingers burrowed in his hair as she brought him back to her. “I can’t seem to remember.”
“Neither can I,” he murmured into her kiss as he drew her down with him to the marble of Folly’s Castle.
He hadn’t planned this, not consciously, but he couldn’t say he hadn’t wanted it. On another, primal level, he’d known from the moment he stepped
on the shore that he would make love to her.
Like a greedy man stealing one last taste of heaven, while fires of hell licked at his soul, he would make love to her.
If she would have him.
Her yielding body curling into his was his answer.
And the clock in his head ticked down to disaster.
Nine
“Anything?”
Nicole looked up from a small bronze, her eyes focusing on Annabelle as she rushed through the door. Her mind was a beat behind, assimilating the abbreviated question. “I’m sorry.” She frowned at the curio case with other similar bronzes arranged on its shelves. “What did you say?”
“I was asking about Ashley,” Annabelle answered. She hadn’t bothered with good morning, or how are you, because it wasn’t a good morning, and how Nicole was showed in the haggard lines on her face. “You haven’t heard from him, or had any news.”
“Nothing,” Nicole answered in a tight voice, though the latter was an observation, not a question. “Three days, and nothing. This time even Matthew found no trace.”
“For a while late yesterday, Harry thought he might have seen him down by the Ashley river bridge. He never got close enough to see for sure, but Ashley wouldn’t stray that far away from his familiar grounds. At least, not as a rule.” Nicole’s instant disappointment dragged Annabelle’s spirit another notch lower. “Anyway, turned out there were two of them. From a distance, looked like two old guys basking in the sun.”
“He was hiding before, gone to ground. I’m afraid he is again, even from Matthew. But for so long?”
Annabelle made a clucking sound and heaved her shoulders. “Who knows what the poor, confused man could be thinking.”
“More than that, Annabelle, how is he living? The few dollars he made shining shoes bought the little he needed, now he hasn’t been around to earn even that much. I talked with the grocer who helps him with his money and supplies, and even the barber who shaves him and cuts his hair. Neither has seen Ashley.”
“There’s something you need to consider.”
“I know, but not yet.” Nicole leaned her head briefly in her hand. A customer who browsed just out of earshot looked up, clearly aware of her distress though she didn’t understand it, then good manners got the better of curiosity and she turned away again.
