Читать книгу All The Way - Beverly Bird - Страница 9

Friday, September 9

Jerome, Arizona

“What on earth possessed you?” Kiki Condor, Liv’s partner and cook, actually yelled at her for one of the few times in their long, long friendship. She grabbed Liv’s wrist and pried the remainder of a sourdough roll from her fingers.

Liv let it go reluctantly. Without the distraction of the roll, she knew she was in trouble.

Liv was a master at diverting conversations—six years of running a bed-and-breakfast and having various strangers troop through her home asking personal questions did that to a woman. The exceptions to the rule were Kiki and Hunter Hawk-Cole.

“When you tempt fate,” Kiki continued, “you have to be prepared for it to jump up and bite you in the—”

“Hush,” Liv warned quickly, automatically, but Vicky was out in the barn. The girl idolized her aunt Kiki, and she was never shy about repeating her words verbatim. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it had Liv trooping down to the school for parent-teacher conferences.

Liv tried again to change the subject. “You know, something about that recipe needs work.”

“And why are you just telling me now?” Kiki demanded as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ve been home for five days!”

Because she’d dreaded just this sort of reaction, Liv thought. She licked crumbs from her fingers. “Nothing has happened since we ran into each other. I haven’t heard from him.”

Dig a hole over there, child, and dump the problem inside. Cover it up and walk away. It’s yours no more. More wise words, Liv thought, from her grandmother. She’d dug a hole when she had come home from Delaware, had kicked Hunter in there and had heaped dirt on top of him, and true enough, he’d stayed put.

So far.

Kiki jammed the rest of the roll down the garbage disposal. “I want every specific detail.”

Liv gave up. She went to the butcher block table and folded all 5’8” of herself into a chair there. Like their entire inn, the kitchen was done in western tones with an occasional Victorian touch—just as the place had been in its heyday. The floor and one wall were all aged brick. There were pretty rose-colored shutters on the windows instead of curtains. Old copper pots and utensils were strung across the ceiling. But the appliances were modern and state-of-the-art. Kiki had insisted that if she was going to cook for strangers, she was going to do it right. And though it had been Liv’s own inheritance that had funded the inn’s renovation from 1890’s brothel to twentieth-century bed and breakfast, Liv hadn’t tried to argue with her.

Liv scraped her long hair off her forehead and held it there. “Well, you already know that it happened at the trade show in Wilmington. Not at it exactly, but while I was there.”

“I told you not to take Vicky to that show. Do you remember? Didn’t I say I’d baby-sit while you were away?”

“She wanted to go and it seemed like a nice treat for her right before school started again.”

Kiki planted her oven-mitted hands on her narrow hips. “You knew there was a NASCAR race in Delaware that weekend and you took her anyway. Are you crazy?”

“The race was in Dover! And the trade show was in Wilmington! These are two separate cities. No, wait, hold on a second.” Liv held up a hand when Kiki opened her mouth one more time to berate her lack of judgment. “I got us a room fifty miles away from Dover in Millsboro. Our motel was way down near the southern border of the state. I took precautions. Vicky and I got up extra early every day of that show to drive all the way to Wilmington. What were the odds of Hunter coming to Millsboro the night before the race—for dinner? What were the odds of him suddenly deciding to mingle with his fans?”

“I’d say they were pretty damned good.” Kiki shoved another tray of biscuits into the oven, apparently not impressed with Liv’s assessment of them, either. “You took your daughter—his daughter—to a state the size of a postage stamp knowing that he would be there on the NASCAR circuit that same weekend. Did you want to run into him?”

“Oh, please.” But the pain that flared inside her was every bit as unimaginable as it had been eight and a half years ago when she had sent him away. “It was a calculated risk.”

“You always did stink at math.”

It was true enough. Kiki handled all of the inn’s bookkeeping for just that reason. Liv concentrated on what she was good at—charm, hospitality, service, and an uncanny knowledge of her state’s history. Between the two of them, the Copper Rose had prospered.

“I’ve made it a point to understand this stock car racing,” she said. “Hunter shouldn’t have been fifty miles south of Dover that night. The drivers keep Winnebagos on the track property from Wednesday through Sunday. They qualify on Fridays. On Saturdays they have two or three practices before the race the next day. They do…I don’t know…stuff to their engines. Adjustments. They spend all day Saturday priming those cars. Why would Hunter drive so far south for dinner with all that to do and a driver’s meeting two hours before race time on Sunday?”

“Because he’s Hunter and he’s never played by the rules.”

No one who had ever known the man could argue that one, Liv thought helplessly.

But she had never believed that Hunter could buck the rules, either. In a sport dominated by good ol’ boys from the south, he had come out of the west—a half-breed Indian raised on a northern Arizona reservation, an intense young man with something of the devil in his eyes and in his soul. When he’d gotten the crazy idea to drive race cars, Liv had never believed that he’d be able to break into the NASCAR network.

She clapped a hand over her mouth as though to hold in the pain of the memories. It had always been something with Hunter, some new idea, some wild hair, taking him off again to a new challenge. She’d thought driving was just more of the same. He’d driven the truck series at first, then the Busch series, finally bursting onto the Winston Cup level four years ago. He was a natural behind the wheel of a car. Now, to Liv’s reckoning, he had one Winston Cup somewhere in his possession because he’d topped the point standings last year. He did television commercials for his sponsors and he navigated the talk show circuit. The very thing that should have barred him from a sport filled with Dales and Bobby Joes and Beaus had turned out to be his magic. He was a dark, simmering, laconic American in the most original sense of the word, and he could make a stock car purr like a satisfied animal.

He’d found the one thing he could dedicate himself to…and it hadn’t been her. So she had married someone else. Someone who would stay with her. She had never told him about the baby—his baby—that she had been carrying at the time.

Liv folded her arms on the kitchen table and slowly lowered her forehead to them. “I just wanted a real home again.”

“We all wanted more than hogans and desert, Liv.” Kiki banged a cookie sheet into the sink. “That’s why we left.”

“I never fitted in there, on the reservation. I know it was my birthright—a little bit, anyway—but I was always an outsider there. I spent six years there, craving what I’d lost when my sister and my parents died. I just wanted it back.”

“And that is precisely why you shouldn’t have gone anywhere near Dover on race weekend. Because Hunter wouldn’t give it to you, and you never forgave him for it.”

Liv looked up. That dull, hard throbbing came back to her chest, the same feeling that had pressed in on her all week since she had come home from Delaware. After seeing him just once, so briefly, she could taste him, smell him, feel him with every breath she took, all over again.

She didn’t want him back—that was outrageous. She would never risk Vicky’s stability that way. But she dreaded the thought that he would turn up, anyway. And she’d be easy enough to find. She’d never tried to hide.

He’d threatened to find her, after all. He’d promised.

Kiki wiped her hands on a dish towel. “We’re going to turn on the cable sports channel right now. We’re going to keep an eye on what Hunter Hawk-Cole is up to all weekend, at least as much as they’ll tell us.”

“The circuit takes him to Michigan this weekend.” When Kiki looked at her sharply, Liv flushed then she defended herself. “I checked. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close by. He can’t wander in for a say-hi if he’s in the Midwest.”

“He could call. The TV will still tell us what he’s up to while he’s there.”

Liv threw up her hands. “Do you think they mentioned on television that the bad boy of racing was going to have dinner in Millsboro last weekend?”

“No. But they might have said that he had a top-notch car and that he was confident. From that you could have deduced that he’d have some free time on his hands, that he wouldn’t have his guys poking at that engine all night. If I had been there with you, we would have ordered pizza into the motel room.”

Kiki had always been able to think practically in any fix. Liv wondered again, as she often did, why her friend wasn’t a doctor or a geneticist. While Liv had been learning the hospitality trade in Flagstaff, Kiki had attended the University of Arizona, majoring in obscure scientific challenges. She’d earned a doctorate. Now she co-owned the inn with Liv, and she was as content at the oven and with their books as she’d ever been over test tubes.

“Okay.” Liv flattened her palms on the table and pushed to her feet. “At least we’ll know we can’t hear from him when he’s actually on the race track.”

“Not unless he has a cell phone in his car.”

“They’re moving at better than 180 miles per hour!”

“Do you honestly think that would stop him?”

Liv winced at another onslaught of memories. “No.”

“Okay, then.” Kiki found the remote control to click on the television that was shelved against one corner of the kitchen ceiling. “But just for the record, I’m tying you to your desk all weekend in case you get any nifty ideas to go have dinner in Michigan.”

Liv was in the stock car with him.

Hunter felt her there beside him as he warmed up in Saturday’s practice session. There was no passenger seat, just empty space that wouldn’t weigh him down, framed by a lot of metal bracing. She sat there, anyway. Sometimes she was a teenager again. At other times she was the woman he had met in Delaware.

“I’ve thought about it,” the teenage Liv said. “I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter. I’ve found someone who can give me a home, a family, everything I’ve always needed. You said when that happened, you would go away.”

“I’m your family,” he told her.

He’d been her family from the first time he’d seen her, Hunter thought now. She’d been living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation. He’d met her on his first day at the district school there and he’d followed her home after classes to find her tending to Dinny Sandoval and her sheep. He’d been fascinated by her, enthralled by her, so different from all the others with her Irish-Navajo blood and her incredible, exotic face. So he’d kept coming around.

She’d only been twelve then, but the ache in her eyes had been as mature as a full-blown rose—for the life and the parents and the sister she’d lost in a freak accident that had exiled her in an alien land. She’d talked incessantly of babies, a family, and a white house with blue shutters in a city where a symphony played. As soon as she was old enough, she’d told him often, she was going to go and grab that dream.

They’d lain on their backs on the rocky ground and talked about it, the star-strewn desert night etched above them, passing a coveted bottle of ginger ale back and forth. The nearest store had been forty miles away, and neither of them had had access to a car, so they took care not to spill a drop.

Liv Slade didn’t belong on that reservation any more than Hunter did—and except for one grandmother, he was pretty much Native American down to his bones. He’d landed in that school because of an ill-fated eagle hunt. It had been one adventure too many. His old man had packed him up and had shipped him off to live with his Navajo mother.

That clan hadn’t particularly wanted him, either. He and Liv had both been strangers in a hostile country, and then they had found each other.

After high school, he’d escaped. He disappeared from northern Arizona for weekends at first, then for up to a week. Weeks turned into months sometimes, but he always came back eventually to check on Liv. He’d done passably well with the rodeo, could have been better, but the money wasn’t there and it lacked the elusive something he needed. He joined the Army and found the restriction and discipline intolerable. She’d turned fifteen, sixteen, then seventeen while he was away. Her grandmother had died that last year while Hunter was in Louisiana, poling boats through alligator-infested bayous.

Liv had kept up the old woman’s sheep on her own after that because if the authorities found out she was a minor living alone, they would come and whisk her off again. The reservation had never been home for her, but Liv was determined that she wasn’t going anywhere else until she could do it on her own terms. She kept up the charade for almost a year, and the Anglo authorities never caught on.

That was the way he had left her in January that year, in Dinny’s winter hogan alone, the old woman’s clansmen close enough for comfort. Then he came back one day in June to find that the girl had gone and a woman had taken her place.

Hunter had driven up in his rattletrap pickup to find her wrestling in the dust with a lamb.

Already the heat had a dry, pressing weight, though it was barely midmorning. The lamb bleated in distress as she chased it, both of them kicking up red-brown dust that hung in the thin air. She had a syringe in one hand, held high as though it were a sword and she was about to plunge it into stone. Hunter stopped the truck and got out to watch her, enjoying the spectacle.

“Hey, you!” he called.

She didn’t hear him. She pinned the lamb, straddling it, then she came up on her hands and knees. Her bottom was thrust in his direction, cupped in frayed, hacked-off denim. A horse might have kicked him in the chest for the impact the view had on him.

Sometimes the need to love her actually burned inside him. It was why he never stayed home too long.

He wasn’t her dream. He was a man who needed to keep moving. He wasn’t what she needed.

But, God, he cherished her.

She hooked her left arm around the animal’s neck and raised her right hand again, armed with the needle. Then the lamb wriggled out from beneath her. Liv went after the animal at a fast crawl, her dark hair caught in a ponytail that streamed down her back until it finally splayed over each hip with her movement. Then she got to her feet in one fluid motion that had his twenty-year-old tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. She leaped at the little beast, going airborne.

“Jeez, Livie! You’re going to kill yourself!”

But she didn’t. She came down on top of the lamb, rolling with it, both arms wrapped around it now. She’d lost the syringe, and she swore a blue streak that had his jaw hanging. Still holding the animal, she groped in the rocky dirt for the needle. Just as he moved to get it for her, she found it and finally got it buried in the animal’s flank.

When it was done, she let the lamb run off. She flopped over on her back, staring up at a sky that the heat had baked the color out of. She laughed, a woman’s throaty chuckle of triumph that almost brought Hunter to his knees.

In all the time he’d known her, he’d never wanted her as much as he did in that moment. It took Hunter a moment to find his voice.

“My money was on you.”

Liv sat up slowly enough that he had the sudden, uncanny feeling that she’d known he was there all along. “You didn’t have any money, pal, not the last time I checked.” Her eyes were too dark. They were usually a deep, chocolate brown, but temper could turn them to the charred color of fired wood. “That’s it for the herd. As for you, fish or cut bait.”

He knew what she was talking about, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t, even if it made something roar suddenly in his head and sent his heart galloping.

Liv stood, then she leaned over to brush the dust off her legs. “Here’s the thing, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here. Are you part of it, or are you my future?” She straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want me or don’t you?”

He thought that if he answered that honestly, he’d probably be damned to hell for all eternity.

But Liv didn’t seem to want words. She walked toward him with that long, leggy stride of hers, then she yanked her T-shirt over her head before he could reply and tossed it aside into the dust. It was the reservation. There wasn’t another hogan for fifteen miles. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts—and oh, how he had fantasized about them over the years—were as full and ripe as the rest of her. Her shorts rode low on her hips. She stopped three strides from him.

“I love you, Hunter. And I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up.”

He almost choked. “For me to grow up?”

Her voice dipped, losing some of its force. For a moment she sounded almost as lost as she had been the first time he’d met her. “I want to be with you. I want to take at least one good thing away from this place when I go. I want it to be you.”

“Babe—”

“I don’t want promises from you, Hunter. I can take care of the rest of my dreams on my own.”

She leaped at him suddenly then, her arms around his neck, her lithe legs wrapping around his waist, her mouth clamping on his. She gave him no chance for finesse, no time for it. Something inside Hunter broke.

His hands found her bottom, holding her to him. Then they were both down in the dust while his tongue dove for hers hungrily, an agony building inside him too fast. He dragged off her shorts, then his own clothes, then he found his way inside her in one desperate thrust. She cried out, then she made a mewling sound in her throat and clung to him, riding with him fast, fiercely, crying out his name. And all Hunter could think was that this time he’d really come home.

A voice squawked in his headset, startling Hunter out of his reverie. It was his spotter, a guy who stood on top of the grandstand with radio in hand and an eagle’s view of the track. He warned of pile-ups around the next curve and unseen cars traveling in his blind spots.

This time there was panic in the man’s voice, and Hunter’s vision cleared to see the turn-two wall in front of him. He pulled hard on the wheel, swerving around toward the apron of the track again.

“What the hell are you doing?” the spotter bellowed. “Man, you’re all over the track!”

“Car feels a little loose.” It was the term that described how—at killer high speeds—the back end of a car could fishtail and try to catch up with the front. “I’m just playing with it to figure out how much we need to adjust.”

Then he glanced at the nonexistent passenger seat one more time. The grown-up Liv was there now.

Her perfect face was framed, not by straight, waist-length hair, but by long layers, brown streaked with russet and tipped by gold at the ends. She’d wanted him once. She had said she loved him. Then she’d found someone else in four short weeks, and she’d sent him away.

Now there was the matter of the child.

His child, Hunter thought. Not Guenther’s. What had she done? Why, Livie, why?

His spotter’s voice began crackling in his ear again, so loud now as to be almost wordless. Hunter focused on the track again. The turn wall was in front of him one more time. He corrected too fast, too hard. His reflexes were caught in the past.

The back end of the race car slid around and cracked into the concrete, crumbling like paper in a giant’s fist. Then he was diving nose first toward the infield, coming down off the embankment. Mikey Nolan, in the 42 car, had been coming up hard behind him. He tried to avoid Hunter’s skid, but he connected with his left-rear quarter panel, rocking Hunter’s car around one more time. Hunter slid up the track and straight into the wall with a full-frontal, jarring impact.

When he came to, he smelled gasoline and heard the deadly snap of fire.

Liv screamed.

The sound tore from her throat, raw and unwilling, as she shot up from the sofa in her private sitting room where she’d been watching the practice session. On the television, Hunter’s gold car with the number 4 emblazoned down the sides in black flames was smashed against the outside wall of the race track. Its hood was flattened, its rear end was destroyed, and real flames were licking out from behind the left rear wheel.

As she swallowed hard against another reflexive sound, a truck rolled up and suited men jumped out of the bed, armed with fire extinguishers.

Then the net came down from the driver’s side window, and she saw Hunter’s hand shoot out, giving a thumbs-up sign that he was okay. The TV announcer lamented that he’d qualified for the pole position in tomorrow’s race and now his car was more or less demolished. He’d have a back-up available, but changing cars now would put him at the back of the starting line.

“Oh, you stupid, insane fool!” Liv choked. “When is it enough for you? When? How damned far do you have to take it?” Her heart was rioting.

A fist thumped against her door. Kiki’s voice shouted through the wood. “Are you all right? I heard you scream.”

Liv went to open it. Kiki shot into the room, looking around both skeptically and a little wildly. Liv nodded wordlessly at the TV.

Kiki’s black eyes took in the scene there as Hunter levered himself out through the driver’s window. The stock cars had no doors. The seams and hardware would create drag. “So Michigan doesn’t agree with him,” Kiki muttered.

Then Vicky hurtled into the room.

Her knees were scraped and reddened as they usually were, and her long, black ponytail was falling loose from some hard play. “What’s going on? Somebody said you were all up here.” Then she, too, focused on the television screen. “Hey, isn’t that the guy we saw in the restaurant last weekend?”

Kiki was closest to her. She caught Vicky’s arm and turned her smoothly away from the TV. “What guy?”

“Mom knows who I mean. Some famous guy.” Vicky craned her neck around as Kiki steered her toward the door. “It is him. He said he drives cars real fast. He’s hurt.”

Kiki dropped Vicky’s elbow to turn back to the TV herself. Liv pushed between them to see. On the screen, Hunter bent over at the waist, in obvious pain. He did it slowly, as though the earth had suddenly produced an exorbitant amount of gravity and was tugging him down even as he fought it tooth and nail.

Liv felt light-headed. The announcers’ voices sounded anxious.

“Sit down,” Kiki said to her harshly. “You’re white as a ghost.”

“I’m fine. Vicky, go…do something.”

Kiki started angling the girl toward the door again. “Come on. I just made a new recipe for cranberry muffins. I need you to tell me what you think.”

“But I want to see what happens to this guy,” Vicky argued.

“We can watch on the television downstairs in the kitchen.”

Liv knew that Kiki would never allow the TV to go on downstairs until long after this coverage was over. She offered no resistance when the two went out, Kiki closing the door again smartly behind her.

Liv went back to the sofa and sat, fumbling blindly behind her with one hand to make sure the furniture was still there. Then she reached for the remote control and hit up the volume. She’d once seen his car do somersaults down the backstretch, nose to tail, nose to tail, and he’d walked away as steady as a rock. He would be fine.

“They don’t seem to be heading for the infield care center,” one of the announcers said as an ambulance loaded Hunter and drove off. “Looks like they’ll be taking him directly to a hospital.”

“What does this do to his chances tomorrow, Hal?”

“I’d say they’re minimal at this point, Bud.”

He’d driven once with a broken wrist, Liv remembered, taping it for extra support, his jaw set visibly against the pain every time the camera caught him. He’d be in that race tomorrow.

There was another knock on her door. Kiki entered with a tray holding a decanter of brandy and two snifters.

“Where’s Vicky?” Liv asked, startled.

“I gave her two of the muffins and sent her out to harass Bourne.”

The retired cowboy ran their riding operation. “He’ll take the muffins and send her right back again if he’s busy.”

“Not if he wants to see another of my muffins in this lifetime.”

Liv almost smiled.

“Here. You need this.” Kiki poured the snifters and handed her one, then she gestured at the television with her own. “So what’s the latest? Did he live?”

“They took him to the hospital.”

Kiki nodded. “He’s too mean to die.”

Liv jerked up from her slouch against the cushions. “He’s not mean. He’s just…” She trailed off at Kiki’s expression. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

Kiki settled on the sofa beside her. “You’ve got to get over this. You were fine before you made that trip back east.”

Liv took a good swallow of brandy without answering. It burned going down.

“You’re the strongest woman I know.”

Liv jolted a little. “Me? Get off it.”

“I just don’t tell you very often because I hate being overshadowed by you.”

Liv could only laugh at that, though her voice was hoarse. Kiki was beautiful—tiny, barely five foot tall—with classic Native American looks. She was a dynamo. Liv generally felt pale, clumsy and befuddled beside her. They’d been friends since even before Hunter had entered the picture, from the first moment Liv had set foot on the Navajo reservation.

Kiki got up to move. Like Hunter, she was always moving.

“You made your decision when you cut him loose,” she said. “You never looked back—at least not that any of us could tell. You married Johnny and when that didn’t work out, we left Flag and came here to Jerome. We established the inn from a ram-shackle building that nobody else wanted but that you saw the potential in. You’ve built a life for your daughter. She’s happy, healthy, smart.”

“She lives with a bunch of strangers trooping through her home several times a week.”

“That’s your phobia, not hers. Don’t foist it off on her, Liv.”

Liv winced.

“You’re the one who was always hung up on the traditional nuclear-home thing. You were the one intent on grabbing back everything you lost when your family’s car went over that cliff and you were sent to the Res. So what if Vicky has a mother, a doting aunt and a lot of guests from all over the country instead of a mother, a father and a sibling or two? What does it matter if she’s thriving?”

Liv found that she couldn’t answer.

“My point is, you’ve got a lot to be proud of. So be proud of it. Don’t let Hunter Hawk-Cole rock your foundations again just because you made one mistake.”

“Which mistake are we speaking of here?” Liv asked dryly.

“Dover.”

“Ah, that one. And it was Millsboro.”

Kiki waved her hand, telling her what she thought of that particular split hair. “Don’t let him drag you down the way you were in those days after he left.”

“You just said I never looked back.”

“But your eyes didn’t see what they were looking at straight ahead, either.” Kiki put her snifter back on the tray and picked the tray up. “On that note, I’m going back to the kitchen. If you want to keep wallowing in angst, you’re going to have to do it on your own.”

Liv nodded absently, her gaze swerving to the television again. They were showing highlights of Hunter’s career on the screen now, while crews cleaned up the track from his crash. Liv watched and tunneled back in time, helplessly and without much resistance.

It was so blasted hot and she had one lamb to go. Without a sheep pen, it was almost impossible to catch the little critter. But her grandmother—the old woman she’d called Ama in the respectful Navajo tradition of “mother”—had stubbornly refused to touch any of the life insurance money her parents had left to make improvements to her land.

Ama had died in her sleep eleven months ago. By hook or by crook, Liv had managed to keep the authorities at the school from finding out. Ama’s clanswomen had signed her report cards and they had showed up at mandatory events in Dinny’s stead. Liv would graduate in six more days. It was over. Her exile here was done, and there was nothing to leave behind. Even Kiki would be moving to Flagstaff with her to begin college there late in August.

When she turned eighteen next month, she could collect the life insurance money. Everything would be fine.

It scared her spitless.

Why was she suddenly frightened now that the time had come? She’d planned her escape from the first moment her heels had touched down on this arid, forsaken soil. It had taken Social Services and attorneys several days to sort out that she had only one living relative, her mother’s mother, an old Navajo woman on a high-country reservation. From the time she’d been delivered into Ama’s care, Liv had dreamed of the time when she could go again, back to the city where she belonged.

But she’d been on the reservation for almost six years now, and she worried that she had forgotten how to act in real, conventional society. If she ate in a restaurant, would she even remember which fork to use? She heard Hunter’s truck at the same moment the terrifying thought slid through her mind again, taunting her.

He was back. Something in her heart leaped, but she was too stubborn to let it show. He always left her as casually as though she were one of the lambs she was about to sell off. But that didn’t stop her from going giddy with pleasure whenever he returned.

Liv finally got the animal inoculated and she laughed with relief. The last one. She already had a buyer for the herd, so that was that. She finally sat up to look for Hunter.

“My money was on you,” he said, sauntering toward her, wearing that grin.

He was so handsome. Liv drank in the look of him. He still wore his black hair long. He revered his Navajo ancestors, the warriors who had once fearlessly taken on Kit Carson at Canyon de Chelly, though he’d always hated being shoved from his home and onto this reservation against his will. Now his hair shifted against his shoulders, more from his movement than the windless air. His cheekbones were arrogant slashes, and his eyes were an incredible blue.

She never got tired of looking at him, and she never stopped wanting to touch him. Sometimes she squeezed it in, a quick, friendly hug or a touch of her hand to his knee. But he always got so skittish whenever she did that. Kiki said it was because he wanted her, too, but neither of them could quite figure out why he never did anything about it.

She was nearly eighteen now, hardly a child any longer—especially after living on her own this past year since Ama had died.

“You don’t have any money,” she said, standing to brush the dust off her bare legs. She was going to fix this problem between them, too, before she went to Flagstaff. “Anyway, that’s it for the herd. You’re next. It’s time to fish or cut bait, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here.”

That fierce heat came to his eyes, the look she loved so much. Liv tingled inside. Now that they might finally be together, she found that she was also a little terrified.

She fought against the fear with bravado and started to move toward him. “I love you. I want to be with you. I want to take something away from this place when I go. And I want it to be you. You’re the very best memory of the Res that I have.”

She reached for the hem of her T-shirt. She was shaking, wondering if she dared to do it, to just yank it over her head and bare herself to him to find out what he would do about it. She looked up into those midnight-blue eyes, as sharp as glass now. “Are you going to stop me, Hunter? Don’t. I have a good head of steam up here.”

He made a choking sound but said nothing. There was only promise in his eyes.

She tugged the shirt over her head. The hot, arid air licked her skin. Maybe it was that, the kiss of the sun, or maybe it was the fact that she was being so incredibly brazen. Maybe it was everything tied into one, but she felt her nipples tighten, almost hurting. If he turned away from her now, Liv knew she would die.

She held her breath, waiting for an interminable time. Then he brought his hands up almost reverently and closed them over her breasts. She cried out, a sound of relief and release, then she flung herself at him. She jumped and wrapped her legs around his waist and found his mouth with hers.

Finally, finally. It was all she could think. Oh, how she loved him! She’d loved him since she was twelve years old.

They fell together into the dirt, ripping at each other’s clothing, and suddenly Liv was no longer shy or frightened at all. She was exhilarated, almost weeping with the joy of it. When he finally found his way inside her, she whimpered his name and rode with him, with every thrust, every glorious beat of his body connecting with hers. Then they lay together in the dust, spent and naked, their hearts rioting.

When she found her air again, Liv just came out and asked him. “How long are you staying this time?”

He hesitated for the barest beat. “I have to be in New Mexico tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why?”

“I’m joining the Army.”

Her stomach dove. “Write me as soon as you get there. Give me your address so I know where you are. Send it general delivery to Flag. I’ll pick it up there.”

“I will.” He wrapped his arms a little more tightly around her. “Livie.”

She rubbed her cheek against his chest, sensing what was coming, trying to savor all the good she could manage before the bad crept in again.

“I love you,” he said. “And you’re the only person who’s ever loved me back.”

She wanted to argue that it wasn’t true, but she was afraid it was. “We’re soul mates,” she murmured. It was a game they had played before. “Two of a kind. Peas in a pod.”

“I’ll always be there for you.”

“I might not always need you to be.” She couldn’t resist the barb. He was leaving again—so soon.

“So when that happens, I’ll go and leave you alone.”

The possibility hurt too deep for words. Liv hugged him fiercely, suddenly. “Are you sorry we did this?”

“I should be.” He kissed her hair. “But no.”

“I’m old enough now to make my own choices.”

“Well, you sure started out with a bang.”

She laughed, her mouth against his skin again. “One more time before you have to go.”

“I’m not going until tomorrow.”

“Then love me all night.”

She rolled on top of him. They didn’t make it inside until dark fell over the desert and small, nocturnal animals began rustling through the tufted rabbitbrush. Then they went into the hogan, their arms still wrapped around each other.

When Liv woke the next morning, he was gone again. But he left a note this time, promising that he would find her in Flagstaff the first time he was on leave.

Liv crushed it in her fist and dropped it into her morning fire.