“I was never going to mention the Titanic. You gain those ten pounds the doc ordered, then maybe I’ll bring up the Titanic.”
“I was up to 107 pounds on the scales this morning.”
“Wearing a winter coat and boots?”
She took the Kit Kat. “I take it you like your women with a little meat on their bones?”
Cole leaned back on his elbows and closed his eyes against the glare of brilliant desert sun. “Like I told you before, I’m not fussy. I never met a woman I didn’t like, whether she was age four or ninety-four.”
She poked his ribs. “But that’s liking. Don’t you believe in love at all?” The question was no more than old stomping grounds. Cole usually thrived on subjects like this—topics with a little sexual innuendo that gave him an excuse to tease her straight moral values. Shepherd loved to tell her that he had no morals beyond expedience and self-preservation.
“Sure, I believe in love. Everyone believes in love. I love flying. Horses. Old rock and roll, good sex, black cherry ice cream, mountains, Meg Ryan, hot bagels dripping with cream cheese—”
“Would you quit being obtuse? You know very well I’m trying to pry. The least you could do is be a gentleman about it and let me.” That won her a rich, throaty chuckle. “Haven’t you ever been in love, tempted to get married, have kids, share your life and all that good stuff?”
“In second grade, I proposed to Joanie Bennett during recess. She kicked me in the shins.”
“I had in mind more adult experiences,” Regan said with utmost patience.
“Well, abridged for your idealistic ears—yes. I’ve been in a messy situation a time or two, mostly when I was young and naive enough to believe that the worst thing on earth was loneliness. There are lots worse things than making it solo.” For an instant his eyes seemed to darken to smoke, but his tone stayed teasing. “I don’t like being hurt, and I don’t like hurting people. And that’s where marriages seem to end up these days. I know you haven’t noticed, princess, but couples in the last decade ran short on steam on happily ever afters. If the courts weren’t so stuffed with divorce cases, we could probably put a lot more criminals away.”
“Don’t change the subject. And not everyone gets divorced.” She finished the Kit Kat and stuffed the crackly papers in his shirt pocket because she didn’t have a pocket herself. He didn’t move when she touched him. For the past three days he’d never moved when she touched him. “You must know some couples who are happy together.”
“Not many.”
“One. Come on, come on. You must know at least one.”
He scratched his head as if needing to search an encyclopedic memory to come up with a single case. “Maybe one.”
“Who?” It wasn’t meant as a loaded question, yet Regan saw the lines draw near his eyes. His gaze fixed on a spiny hedgehog cactus a hundred yards away, and he hesitated before answering lightly. Too lightly.
“My parents were hot for each other until the day my dad died. They used to tell us kids that they needed to discuss the family budget. Growing up, I can’t remember a single Sunday morning that their bedroom door wasn’t locked so they could ‘discuss the family budget.’ My dad was also known to come home for a quick lunch, or the two of them would disappear for a few minutes if they thought we were all installed in front of the TV. They had the best family budget I ever saw in a couple of any age, any time.” He turned his head. “Of course, my ma overdrew every time she tried to add up the checkbook.”
“They were happy?” she whispered.
“My dad wanted forty-seven kids. My ma wanted more like an even twenty-two. They couldn’t afford more than the three of us, but other than that...yeah, they were happy. So storybook happy that they couldn’t live without each other.”
For a moment Cole sat totally still, frozen like a statue. Then he suddenly vaulted to his feet and glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eleven. I can feel the heat starting to build. If we don’t start back, we’re going to bake like brownies. Let’s hit it.”
Regan pushed to her feet and dusted off her jeans, stunned by the angry pain in his eyes. He rarely mentioned his family, yet now she recalled his defensive edge the last time he’d brought up his father. There was no way, nohow, slugger wanted to be anything like his father.
So that's what your emotional wall is about, is it, Shepherd? Grief? You're not gonna love anyone like your dad loved? No storybook marriages for you. You're not going to open yourself up to that kind of loss.
Cole had already taken off down the ridge, more or less as if he had a tiger nipping at his heels. Regan caught up with him at the bottom.
Apparently it was going to be a fast hike home. Just past the ridge was a rolling field of blue-velvet lupine that well deserved a strolling pace, but she doggedly kept up with his jog. A bedraggled strand of hair flopped out from under her hat. She let it flop. The sun beat down so hotly that a trickle of sweat tickled her nape. She let it tickle. A stitch in her side threatened to cut off her wind. She didn’t care if her lungs collapsed.
Cole wasn’t walking alone and that was that.
They were still a quarter mile from the desert house when he suddenly turned. There was no way she could have expected it. One minute he was hiking at that killing, stinging pace, and the next he was grabbing for her.
His hands framed her face, tilting it to him. His mouth latched on hers so hard that her hat fell off. She tasted dust. She tasted chocolate. She tasted his dry, sun-warmed mouth and a thirst so huge that a lake of water wouldn’t slake it. He seemed to think she would. He seemed to think she could.
A single match, given enough heat, could burn up a forest. She could have sworn—had sworn—that Cole didn’t want this. She was a woman in trouble. Slugger hated women in trouble. She would have walked a barefoot mile on nails to release him from the obligatory responsibility he felt for her. In how many dozens of ways had she tried to give him his freedom?
But he didn’t kiss her as if he wanted freedom. He kissed her...as if a man could snap with a need this great. He kissed her...as if she were part of his heartbeat, as if she were a precious link to his soul. He kissed her until she couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been kissing her.
Wild winds and summer storms and lightning. He invoked all of them in Regan. Somewhere else—in some irrelevant, inconsequential part of her life—there was a bag of five gems, danger and fear and sound rational reasons why she needed to be cautious. She didn’t feel cautious. Cole mattered. Not the rest.
Her mouth molded to the shape of his. She rocked closer, sealing the distance between them, an anchor for his storm. She felt his thundering heartbeat, the stab of his belt buckle, the ache and hardness of his arousal. She felt emotions hurling out of him like an escaped tornado wind. His kisses were rough. His kisses were winsome and tender and yearning. He kissed her as if he’d been empty forever and the touch of her filled him.
And abruptly, he tore his mouth free and it was over.
She closed her eyes. He closed his. He leaned his damp forehead against her damp forehead. “Dammit, Regan. I never meant to do that.”
“I know you didn’t, slugger.”
“You...provoke me.”
“This was all my fault?”
“Not all. But I know how you’re going to respond if I touch you. I know you’re going to look at me as if…” There suddenly wasn’t a sound in the entire Painted Desert.
She filled that awkward little pause. “As if I loved you?”
“Don’t joke.” He lifted his head. “Honey, this is not Monopoly. You pass Go, you don’t get two hundred bucks. You get me, and if you count on me, you’re gonna get your heart kicked. It took me ten years to close down on feeling and I’m not opening those doors again. Not for anyone. Not even for you.”
By three that afternoon, the temperature had soared to one hundred. Inside the library, it was a reasonably cool seventy-five. Cole had pulled the drapes, made a tall pitcher of lemonade and had a wais
t-high stack of journals beside him. So did Regan.
She was comfortably curled up in the red leather chair. Cole had originally taken the couch. Then switched to the floor. Then tried the desk. He was now back on the couch, where he noisily flapped open another journal. “Afghanistan, 1938. Is there any place the old man didn't go?”
“Not many.” Regan noticed he was on his second bowl of cashews. They weren’t settling him down, either. “If he’s in Afghanistan, he’s probably with Dorinsky.”
Cole thumbed a few pages. “Yes.” He glanced up. “Why do you always call the partners by their last names?”
“Old habit. When I was little, I called them by their last names because that was all I ever heard. Jake never corrected me. No one ever told me it wasn’t the proper form of address for a young girl. In fact, it was years before I realized I didn’t even know their first names, and asked Gramps. Reed’s first name is Archibald. Dorinsky’s is Francis, and Trafer’s is Louis.”
Cole’s mouth split in a grin. “Dorinsky’s first name is Francis? That big beefy lout? Francis?”
“Reed isn’t too fond of being called Archie, either,” she said wryly. “Anyway...by the time I was grown-up, the habit of using their last names was too ingrained to break.”
That was it for that subject. Regan waited, certain that another interruption was coming, but Cole seemed to temporarily harness his restlessness. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, twice. But then his head bent over the journal.
It was quite a metamorphosis, Regan mused, from the lover she was with this morning to this fretful coyote. The change was so total that a woman might be inclined to believe that the wild and turbulent embrace they’d shared was no more than a magician’s illusion, something that had happened only in her mind.
Regan had been guilty of confusing reality and illusion before. She’d also been guilty, before, of believing Cole—that he wanted to be left alone, that he didn’t care, that he wanted nothing to do with love.
Her gaze wandered across the room, resting protectively on his rumpled hair, the familiar way he unconsciously rubbed the back of his neck when he was troubled, the crooked frown between his brows.
Cole cared. Deeply. About people, about life. About her. What he’d showed her in the desert that morning was love—the sticky kind, the tangling-and-involved, mesh-of-souls kind.
All afternoon Regan had been outwardly as calm and soothing as she knew how, but her heart felt as if it was riding the edge of a cliff. She was painfully aware that she could lose Cole before she ever had him. No relationship had a chance when one partner felt trapped and cornered. Slugger had been trapped into feeling responsible for her. And trapped, even more, by the emotional wall he’d erected around himself for so long.
There was a level where Regan knew she couldn’t help him. Cole had to be honest with himself about what he did and didn’t want. But she’d never wanted him to feel cornered because of her. Now more than ever, she desperately wanted her own situation resolved.
She turned her attention and whole concentration on the diary in her lap. The journal was dated 1946. Jake and Trafer were in Sri Lanka, rich sapphire country, prowling for uncut gems on a shoestring budget. Regan hadn’t thumbed many yellow pages before her stomach fluttered with excitement. Finally, the fates had turned kind! And the long passage covered two gems in the same kitty.
The partners had finished their buying trip, and were en route home when they came across not new gems but two antique ones. A slave’s diamond and a ruby.
As Regan knew well, ‘slave’s diamond’ was a gem dealer’s term for topaz. Jake had met a beautiful young girl trying to sell the rose-pink topaz in a street bazaar; she’d been desperate for cash in those war-torn times and had spun him a tale of the topaz being a magical love charm. The stone was as old as medieval times. All lovers who touched the topaz had been gifted with powers—the power to light each other’s nights with passion, to comfort each other’s pain, to bond together through laughter and heartache for all time.
Jake had believed in love charms the way he believed there was cheap real estate in Manhattan. Yet he’d bought the stone. And saved it.
And ultimately left it to her.
Regan’s eyes filmed, feeling a huge engulfing wave of love for her grandfather. This was the Jake she knew, the good and giving man who had raised her.
She read on. At the same street bazaar, the two partners had both been taken with another stone—the ruby. The lure for Jake had been the perfection and unique beauty of the antique gem. Trafer’s interest, though, rose from pure superstition.
No other gemstone, Regan knew, had more dangerous lore connected to it than ruby. The old crone peddling the stone apparently suckered Trafer in, claiming all the old stories. Ill fortune followed those who were drawn to a ruby and failed to possess it, where wealth and good luck were guaranteed to any who touched her ancient stone.
Jake thought the whole thing was poppycock, became disturbed with his partner’s obsessive fascination, and determined to purchase the stone himself. They’d argued, eventually flipped a coin to decide the matter. Trafer lost.
And that was it, Regan first thought. There was nothing else about Sri Lanka, nothing else about the two men. Toward the end of that year’s diary, though, Jake had scribbled a short entry.
That September, Trafer lost his wife and unborn son in a train accident. A month after that, his father had a heart attack. To add to his siege of bad luck, his house had caught fire.
Regan stared at the paragraph, a shiver of uneasiness chasing down her spine. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. But she couldn’t shake the fear that it did.
She’d tried to explain to Cole how some people developed an obsessive attachment for certain gems. Slugger was too practical to buy it, but Regan had been exposed her whole life to the unique relationship between truth and illusion. Superstitions could have enormous power, because what a man believed was the truth he lived. Although Trafer may never have blamed his bad luck on the loss of the ruby, the possibility was there.
First Reed. Now Trafer. Regan closed her eyes and leaned back her head. Her grandfather had hidden the ruby all these years, just as he’d hidden the tsavorite of Reed’s. Why, Jake? Why did you leave me those two stones? What did you want me to think? What did you want me to do?
Lord, she was tired of questions with no answers, and her heart was suddenly thudding anxiety. Slugger was already feeling trapped because of her. How could she possibly give him another problem?
Cole told himself there wasn’t a prayer in hell he would concentrate on the journals this afternoon. His mind wasn’t on Regan because he refused to think anymore about Regan, but he couldn’t sit, couldn’t settle, couldn’t get the jumping beans out of his nerves.
Yet as he forced himself to turn the yellowed pages, his attention caught in spite of himself. Although the old man’s handwriting was a bitch, the content was never dull.
Dorinsky had hooked up with Jake in 1938. It wasn’t a partnership then. Jake had been a young man, Dorinsky even younger—a dropout on the streets, trying to pay his groceries in a boxing ring. Dorinsky’s background suited Jake, who was looking for backup brawn, not brains. They initially trekked over to Afghanistan looking for lapis lazuli. Apparently the only lapis mines on earth were in the Badakhshan district. No roads led there. If you wanted lapis, you were stuck crossing treacherously fast rivers, climbing steep cliffs on foot and braving the threat of constant avalanches in killing cold temperatures.
It definitely wasn’t Cole’s cup of tea. Personally, he’d have opted to skip the lapis and stay home.
He turned another page. Apparently the two hadn’t had enough adventures in Afghanistan; they continued on to Burma—not the most politically stable country in 1938. Cole’s mood sobered as he read on.
Dorinsky may have hired on for rough work, but he got more than he bargained for. He’d been knifed in a street skirmish, getting the yellow sapphire for Jake.
Back home, he’d claimed a right to the stone. The two men argued about it. Jake promised him a partnership in ten years if Dorinsky stuck out an apprenticeship learning the business, and that he’d throw in the yellow sapphire as a bonus at that time.
That was the last entry for 1938. It should have ended the story.
Cole’s stomach turned over as he closed the journal. He’d seen the big yellow sapphire in Regan’s cache. Dorinsky had gotten his partnership, but he never got his promised stone. Had that festered all these years?
God, what a witches’ brew of implications and complications. He’d assumed she had one enemy, but now there were two partners who had a grudge against the old man. For all he knew, Dorinsky and Reed were in cahoots. His blood ran cold at the thought.
And he’d rather eat nails than tell the princess. A hundred times he’d teased Regan for her trusting idealism, but watching her valiantly struggle with disillusionment was tearing him apart. She’d loved that old man; she didn’t need to hear any more about Jake’s unscrupulous side. And Dorinsky was another of her Dutch uncles. Hell, were all her heroes going to let her down?
Including you, Shepherd, he thought. Because you haven’t done a damn thing for her but let her down yet.
“Regan—”
“Cole—”
They spoke at the same time. Cole heard her story first. Or enough of it to comprehend that Trafer, too, had a potential past with the old man. Enough to see her drawn white face and her plucky little smile when she tried to make light of her fears about Trafer.
It was the smile that made his heart feel shaved raw. She’d smiled just that way this morning—that same brave, stubborn little smile—when she’d been galloping toward him down that hill with her breath coming in gasps and love like a fire in her eyes. He’d never meant to touch her. He’d never meant to hurt her. How the hell did one small woman continually manage to tie him up in knots? All he’d ever wanted to do was protect her.
A job he was failing at. Badly. Christ, now Trafer was in the horse race, too?
Pink Topaz Page 17
