by Wind, Ruth
Damn. He searched for his fury. She’d hidden from him for eight years, not only herself, but her daughter. There should be nothing but fury in him.
He had loved this woman once with an almost scorching intensity. Seeing her again so suddenly unnerved him, tangled him up inside like a can full of rubber bands.
How could anyone remain so unchanged? She was as beautiful as she had been the first time he’d seen her, almost twelve years ago. It was a beauty as wild and tender as the stubborn roses that grew by the sea in her father’s California garden. Her skin was pale and pure, her hair a rich chestnut that spilled in abundance over her shoulders, catching around the rise of one breast as if in a caress.
But it was her eyes that had bewitched him the first time, so many years ago, the same extraordinary eyes her daughter had inherited—eyes the color of the first golden fingers of morning sunlight. They bewitched him again now.
“Come on, Giselle, let’s go,” she said, and turned.
Luke was on his feet instantly. “Jessie,” he called in a harsh voice.
She whirled, ready to battle. He could see it in her stance, in her fisted hands, in the blaze of her eyes. She was scared stiff and as unsettled as he, but battle she would. “What?”
“You can’t just walk away.”
Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “Can’t I?”
That brought his fury rushing back, clean and pure as a mountain stream. “Well,” he said quietly, “I guess you can. You’ve done it before.”
She just looked at him.
He crushed the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, exhaling in an effort to curb his anger. “I’m asking you not to.” He touched Giselle’s hair in wonder, and she looked up at Jessie with hope, a hope and pleading that broke his heart.
Jessie saw it, too. Luke saw her swallow—and for an instant, he felt pity for her. He and Giselle had nothing to lose, everything to gain. For Jessie, quite the opposite was true. “Giselle,” he said quietly, “give me a minute with your mother, all right?”
“I don’t want a moment with you, Luke,” Jessie whispered fiercely, but Giselle had already skipped away.
He set his jaw. “Looks to me like you got caught red-handed, me and her in the same place at the same time.”
She refused to look at him.
“Look, Jessie, we can let sleeping dogs lie or we can have a bloody, screaming fight in the middle of the street. I don’t really give a damn about the past, but you can’t expect me to just walk away from my only child without a second glance.” He crossed his arms. “Be fair.”
“Fair!” She spat the word.
Light glowed like wine in the rippling fall of her hair, danced like moonlight over her nearly translucent skin. Luke could smell her perfume, a deeply exotic mix of frangipani and sandalwood and something he couldn’t name. It made him dizzy. “Well, maybe fair is the wrong word,” he admitted.
Her gaze, frightened and wary, met his. Luke felt the impact as a fist to his gut and he glanced away. “I’m sober now, Jessie,” he said, looking at a piece of mica caught in the sidewalk just beyond the toe of his boot. In his ears, his voice was rough.
She didn’t say anything for a long time, and in the silence between them Luke felt a rush of things spring and whirl like dust devils. “I can see that.”
“Just come with me now for a little while,” he urged. “We’ll get a hamburger or something. You’ve had a long time to know her, Jessie. Give me an hour or two.” He licked his lips. “Please.”
For a moment, he thought she would refuse. Her chin jutted stubbornly toward the mountains. Suddenly, she capitulated. “All right. But only an hour.”
He found his gaze on the curve of her cheek, at once intimately familiar and completely strange to him. A sword of that old, familiar grief stabbed his gut. In a harsh voice, he asked, “You want to go in my truck?”
“We’ll just follow you.”
In the instant before she turned, Luke thought he glimpsed a tear.
Chapter Two
Jessie had experienced some very strange moments in her life, but the first half hour sitting with Luke and his newly acquired daughter in the worn booth of a downtown Colorado Springs café counted among the strangest.
There were, after all, few guidelines for her to follow. Dear Miss Manners, she imagined writing.
I wonder if you might offer a few rules of etiquette for coping with the unexpected reappearance of the love of one’s life who’s also the father of one’s child—a child he didn’t know existed, by the way—after an eight-year separation.
She stabbed a french fry into a pool of ketchup. Miss Manners would no doubt urge civility and ordinary courtesy. Unfortunately, Jessie thought, chewing the dredged fry, civil was pretty far down on the list of the things she felt.
It seemed a rather cruel trick of fate to send him at this late date. The life she had built from the ruins of her relationship with Luke Bernali was a peaceful one, free of the wild peaks and valleys she had known with him.
She’d finally forgotten him, if not forgiven. She had finally stopped dreaming of him, except once in a great long while. She had finally come to believe there might be a chance that someday, somehow, she might love another man.
One glance at him in the middle of the gallery had been enough to show her how foolish her illusions had been. One glance, and there was a quick humming in her veins...something strong and lusty and full of sex, but deeper than that, too. It was a lyrical sound, a song in her soul. As if she had known him always, as if—
She set her jaw and grabbed the ketchup bottle. Get real, she warned herself. Luke Bernali was just that kind of a man. Sleek and lean, with those rich, deep eyes. Eyes that promised he knew all there was to know about women—and he liked every single bit of it. No woman in her right mind could fail to respond to those signals.
The ketchup bottle, fairly cooperative a moment before, refused to release its contents. Aggravated, Jessie shook it. Three small drops fell from the mouth.
Across the table, Luke chuckled softly.
Maybe she could punch him. A good solid left to the jaw would probably do wonders for her mood.
Giselle seemed to be having no trouble with the rules of a first encounter with her father. Nor did Luke seem at all handicapped. They dove headfirst into the apparently unequaled joy of acquainting themselves. Giselle chattered about her second-grade class and her reading, divulged her preference for dogs over cats and the fact that she had just completed her first beadwork project. In his turn, Luke told Giselle about his carpentry business and his sister, Marcia, who was Giselle’s aunt.
After their hamburgers were finished, Giselle asked for quarters to play pinball. Jessie had taken a breath to tell her no when Luke passed a dollar bill over the table.
“We really do need to be going,” Jessie protested. “I need to talk to you,” he said. Seeing Jessie’s rebellious glare, he added, “About the project.”
“Fine,” she said to Giselle, who bounced away. As if Giselle had provided the strings of the surreal puppet show being staged, the conversation abruptly collapsed with her departure. From the window, cold gray light spilled between them. Jessie looked outside to watch fat snowflakes drift down toward earth, unable to bear the painful reality of Luke’s harsh and beautiful face.
“I can’t believe you kept her away from me all these years, Jessie.”
Sudden tightness clutched Jessie’s throat. If she let him lead her back to the past, she would be lost. “I thought we were going to talk about the project.”
A flash of anger tightened his mouth. “God knows we wouldn’t want to have three minutes to talk about all this.”
“God knows.” She lifted her chin defiantly.
He stared at her, his eyes filled with seething emotion. Then his jaw went hard and he shifted his gaze away, toward the light snow falling beyond the window.
Jessie wanted this over with. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on wi
th the project?”
“All right.” He looked at her. “I took Daniel’s place today because he was poisoned.”
“Poisoned? Like food poisoning?”
“Strychnine.” He slipped a toothpick into the corner of his mouth—an old habit that stirred up curiously painful associations. “He was lucky—he only ate half his meal. While he was eating, a snake spooked one of his horses and he went to check it out. The dog got his supper.” He looked at her. “The dog died.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jessie said. “Is he all right?”
“My sister said he was pretty sick, but he’ll live.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody knows right now.” He shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “The next day, Mary and her son lost their brakes on the way into Gallup. They found signs of tampering.”
“Are you suggesting some kind of conspiracy?” Jessie shook her head. “Don’t you think that’s a little paranoid?”
“Maybe.” He eyed her steadily. “There’s a lot of money at stake for these people. We’ve reached almost all the major dealers in the Southwest the last few weeks. Do you really think it’s surprising they’d try to find a way to push back?”
“I guess not.”
For a moment he said nothing, and Jessie could see unease in the way he twiddled the toothpick in his fingers. Finally he asked, “Do you still want to go ahead with the appointment at the other gallery in the morning?”
“Of course. If we run at the first sign of intimidation, it’ll guarantee the situation won’t change.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Jessie, stung, looked at her paper napkin, crushed into a tight ball in her hand. “I knew what you meant,” she said quietly. “I’ll still go.”
“How did you get mixed up with this project?” he asked.
“I could ask you the same question. I thought I knew everyone involved.”
“My mother was a weaver, Jessie—that would be enough to catch my attention by itself.”
“I haven’t forgotten. It’s just that it seems I would have heard of you or something.”
“It’s Marcia who is really into the project. They couldn’t get ahold of you on the phone last night, so she called me and gave me a crash course.”
“Marcia—the Denver contact, right?” Jessie had heard Daniel speak of her, but never with her last name. “How is she?”
“Good.” His expression softened. “She’s a violin teacher—teaches Suzuki method to inner-city kids.”
Jessie found herself chuckling. “That fits. I bet she’s good at it.”
“She is.” He lifted a brow. “So, what about you? How’d you get involved?”
Jessie moved her plate out of the way so she could fold her arms in front of her on the table. “I met Daniel when I was pregnant with Giselle, and he sort of took us under his wing.” Carefully, she pushed a stack of breadcrumbs into a neat little pile in front of her. “It was important to me that Giselle have Navajo people in her life, so she’d know who she was. I couldn’t give her that, and Daniel—”
She chanced a peek at Luke’s face. He stared fiercely at his hands. A long muscle along his jaw stood out.
Jessie hurried on. “When Daniel started this project last year, he knew I was involved with a lot of other artists. He recruited me to get the support of the local art community.”
“You know,” Luke said, his voice oddly flat, “he used to be my best friend.”
“He was?” Jessie frowned. “He’s never said a word about you.”
Luke shrugged.
“He’s been a good friend to me,” Jessie went on. “And Giselle loves him.”
As if the knowledge pained him, Luke looked away from her to Giselle. An expression both hungry and joyful crossed his face. Jessie recognized it. It reflected the astonishment she still felt sometimes, watching Giselle at some ordinary task.
Nothing had prepared her for the love she felt for her child, something so deep and gripping and unfathomable Jessie couldn’t even define it. In loving Giselle, she found herself unable to keep even a corner of her heart aloof, as she’d always been careful to do with everyone else. Even Luke. Maybe especially Luke.
“I can’t believe it,” he said softly. “Look at her. She’s so beautiful and smart—she looks just like Marcia.” He turned a harsh gaze to Jessie. “Was it so terrible that you couldn’t have given me this small thing? Just to watch her grow?”
A vision of her alcoholic mother, drunk and incoherent, flashed across Jessie’s imagination. To spare Giselle that horror, Jessie would have done a lot more than simply leave Luke. “When I saw you last,” she replied quietly, “you were hardly father material.”
His lashes, black and straight, swept down. Dusky color stained his cheekbones and for an instant, Jessie was ashamed.
He cleared his throat and shifted, pulling a twenty from the front pocket of his jeans. He stood up. “I have some things I need to do before dark.”
Jessie nodded.
He paused at the tableside. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Maybe I’m still not what you think she needs.” His eyes, dark and luminous in the cold light, were somber. “Don’t run away again, Jessie. Please.”
Her throat tightened dangerously and she bit her lip hard. “No. I won’t.”
“I can’t make the past right, but I really am sorry things turned out the way they did.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry—” he shook his head “—that’s all. I’m sorry.”
On the way out, he paused to murmur something to Giselle, his graceful, long-fingered hand flat on her back. Then he ambled out, waving toward the waitress in a friendly farewell.
It was still a full sixty seconds before Jessie could absorb his words. Then she buried her face in her hands, fighting back tears of rage and loss and mourning.
Once she’d had to choose between the child growing in her belly and the love that had healed her. It had been the hardest struggle of her life. For years she had mourned him, tortured herself with “what ifs” that had no bearing on real life. What if she’d been stronger? What if she’d seen the signs of his alcoholism in time to help him? What if she’d given him a chance and he’d been able to kick his habit?
Now he appeared, sober and strong, a perfect fulfillment of her most fervent “what if”…
What if he stopped drinking?
She looked at Giselle, bent over the pinball game with intense concentration. Eight years ago, Jessie had chosen to be this child’s mother, alone. She had chosen to devote herself to motherhood the way her own mother had not.
Through the window, she watched Luke’s truck pull into the street and drive away, feeling a plucking sorrow. There was terrible irony in all of it, she thought. If she’d never known Luke, had never reveled in the unconditional love and support he’d given her, she would never have been strong enough to leave him the way she had. Without the healing of his love, she would never have known how to love her child, to be the mother she was.
But she lived with the irony. For Giselle, she could bear the guilt.
The thought made her feel much stronger. Briskly, she stood up, gathered her daughter and paid the bill. Then she took Giselle out to explore Colorado Springs.
* * *
In the still of the evening, Luke bent over a bureau he’d bought at a flea market. Below the chipped layers of paint, he’d seen the extraordinary beauty of it, and now he lovingly sanded the ridges of the carved drawers, gently so as not to mar the delicate grain of the maple.
The smell of sandpaper and dry wood eased the tension he’d been carrying with him all day, as did the repetitive motion and the simple beauty of the wood itself. At sixteen, he’d landed his first carpentry job and fallen in love with the profession. Over the years, he’d learned almost every aspect of it, from framing buildings to making drawers that moved smoothly on their rollers to this delicate kind of refinishing work.
Recently he’d found a huge market
for the work he loved best—recreations of Victorian-era woodwork for the stately homes built during the heyday of “Little London,” and now being reclaimed by up-and-coming young professionals. He made banisters and baseboards and wainscoting. On weekends he browsed flea markets and garage sales for pieces like this that would be sold to the same people who contracted reproduction spindles for their stairways.
Luke’s enormous black cat wandered into the room, meowing plaintively. Luke chuckled as Nino bumped his shin and scooped the animal into his arms. “What do you think, hmm?” he said to the cat. “I bet someone is going to pay a pretty penny for this one.”
Nino meowed loudly in answer, his Siamese blood showing in his protesting tone.
Beyond the cozy warmth of the kitchen, the storm that had threatened all day was breaking. Wind moaned around the corners, rattling the dry branches of a vine outside the kitchen window. The sound was lonely. It underscored Luke’s sense of being haunted—by Jessie, by old specters of himself, by the past.
Nino jumped down and meowed to go outside. Luke crossed the tiled floor he’d laid himself and let the cat out. His dogs, hearing the click of the door, bounded up, tongues lolling, ears alert in hopes of being let in. “Forget it,” Luke said with a scowl. “I’ve had enough of animals tonight.”
Tasha, a wolf-Malamute mix, grinned and leapt for Nino, who crouched with annoyance at the dog slobber dripping onto his ears. Nino then reached up with one massive paw and slapped Tasha’s nose. No claws, of course. There were rules to this game.
Shaking his head, Luke closed the door and fetched a can of coffee from the fridge. There on the shelf rested a single bottle of beer. It had sat there now for nearly four years, ready in case he chose to fall. For one aching instant, Luke wanted to finally break down, twist off the top, gulp it down. He wanted to take refuge in one ice-cold beer to blunt the memory of Jessie’s golden eyes, staring at him with such fierceness this afternoon.
Instead, he made a pot of coffee and rolled a cigarette while he waited for it to brew. He leaned against the counter and flicked a kitchen match with a thumbnail, watching the reflection of the flame in the window. Beyond, snow floated down from a sky as cold as the past.
