All The Way
Beverly Bird
Daredevil Hunter Hawk-Cole had a restless spirit and a thirst for adventure that had always ruled his life.He hadn't planned to stop for anything or anyone - until he came face-to-face with the daughter he had never known about. Liv Slade was a woman who valued home and hearth and family - things Hunter hadn't been able to provide.Now the only man she'd ever loved was back in her life, demanding his daughter. But once he got what he wanted, would this footloose father head out on the road once more? Or would the fiery passion he shared with Liv convince him to stay?
“You were pregnant when you told me to leave!”
“And you left!” Liv shouted back. “You should have just asked me to marry you in the first place!”
“How could I? I didn’t know about her!”
Hunter watched Liv’s expression cave. He saw the tears gather in her eyes, shining and wet.
“Exactly,” she said, clipping off the syllables.
She put the car in gear. Hunter moved around in front of it to stop her from driving off. She wouldn’t actually run over him. At least, he didn’t think so.
“‘Exactly’?” he demanded. “What does that mean?”
Liv stuck her head out the window. “Why did you need to know about the baby, Hunter, to want to stay with me?”
She gunned the engine. He leaped aside just in time to avoid being flattened. He watched her car smoke up the road.
He scrubbed a palm over his mouth, still tasting her. Still wanting her.
He realized he could hate her for that alone.
Dear Reader,
It’s always cause for celebration when Sharon Sala writes a new book, so prepare to cheer for The Way to Yesterday. How many times have you wished for a chance to go back in time and get a second chance at something? Heroine Mary O’Rourke gets that chance, and you’ll find yourself caught up in her story as she tries to make things right with the only man she’ll ever love.
ROMANCING THE CROWN continues with Lyn Stone’s A Royal Murder. The suspense—and passion—never flag in this exciting continuity series. Catherine Mann has only just begun her Intimate Moments career, but already she’s created a page-turning military miniseries in WINGMEN WARRIORS. Grayson’s Surrender is the first of three “don’t miss” books. Look for the next, Taking Cover, in November.
The rest of the month unites two talented veterans— Beverly Bird, with All the Way, and Shelley Cooper, with Laura and the Lawman—with exciting newcomer Cindy Dees, who debuts with Behind Enemy Lines. Enjoy them all—and join us again next month, when we once again bring you an irresistible mix of excitement and romance in six new titles by the best authors in the business.
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
All the Way
Beverly Bird
BEVERLY BIRD
has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.
For Justin,
Jeff Gordon’s good luck charm and greatest fan (mine, too!)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Prologue
Saturday, September 3
Millsboro, Delaware
The murmur of the diners’ voices was muted and pleasant, the air redolent with hints of garlic and bread baking in the open-hearth kitchen. Olivia Slade Guenther was content, enjoying herself and the time with her daughter, then he walked into the restaurant.
His gaze rolled idly over them, then it jerked back to pin them into their flamingo-pink, not-quite-leather booth. Liv felt shock fly through her—icy and hot all at once, searing her nerve endings, then numbing them. Panic gripped her and she thought of running.
It was out of the question. For one thing, Vicky was still digging into her buttermilk-fried chicken, and she was chattering in judgmental tones about the pink rococo ceiling over their heads. And he was between them and the door.
Besides, Liv was damned if she’d let him see her sweat. She gathered air into her lungs and fell back on one of the many lessons she had learned at her Navajo grandmother’s knee. You are what you think you are.
“I’m tough as nails,” she muttered aloud.
“What?” Her daughter looked up at her, still chewing.
“Eat your dinner.”
Vicky swallowed, frowned. “I was.”
“Then concentrate on it.”
“Mom, it’s just chicken—and it’s not even as good as Aunt Kiki’s. How much can I think about it?”
There was that, Liv thought. Vicky was often too smart for her own good—not to mention her mother’s.
Hunter Hawk-Cole was three feet away now, approaching them.
“Don’t say a word,” Liv hissed under her breath.
“How come?”
“Because I said so.” Liv groaned aloud. They were the very words she had promised herself she would never say to a child of hers should she be blessed enough to have one. Then she opened her mouth and they fell out, shattering like fine china on the restaurant table. Less than a minute after he had walked back into her life, Hunter was once again challenging everything she knew about herself.
He stopped beside their table. One glance at Vicky and his midnight-blue eyes narrowed with speculation. No matter that Vicky was small for her age, that she could easily have passed for seven or even six. No matter that Hunter had every reason to believe she was Johnny Guenther’s daughter. Liv knew he’d figured it out that quickly—Vicky was his own.
Her heart started pistoning. Tough as nails indeed.
“Of all the gin joints in all the world…” Hunter’s voice trailed off. “Well, Liv. What were the odds of us running into each other again on the East Coast?”
His voice had always reminded her of smoke. It had a way of sliding over her skin, of heating it to the point where she’d no longer needed promises. Liv grabbed her wineglass and downed half of its contents. “I was hoping for slim to none.”
“Then you’ve turned into a gambler after all.”
His words went through her like a knife that had been passed through flame. Liv was saved from answering by a group of Hunter’s fans.
As soon as they recognized him, diners popped up from the surrounding tables like hyacinths in a May garden. They crowded him, holding out menus, napkins, a few prepurchased race-day programs. He signed each of them without a smile, accessible enough but keeping that look about him that she’d noticed on television. It said there was something inside him that no one would ever touch again.
She knew what had changed him—or at least what he’d probably like her to think it was. Not you, Liv. You’re the only person who ever knew when I was gone. There had been anger and betrayal in his eyes when he had spoken those words to her, eight and a half years ago over a scarred oaken bar. But in the end, he’d gone.
When Hunter handed a menu back to a diner who was surely going to have to pay for it, silence proved to be too much for Vicky. She swallowed the last bite of her chicken. “What are you, famous or something?”
“Or something.” Hunter finally grinned for Vicky’s benefit. The curve of his mouth melted everything inside Liv as though the past eight and a half years hadn’t happened.
“Are you a movie star?” Vicky asked.
Hunter rested his palms on the polished surface of the table to lean closer to her. Liv felt something shrivel inside her as the man and child went nose to identical nose—then there were those same blue eyes, the same onyx hair, that stubborn thrust of both their jaws.
Vicky did not look like Liv. And she didn’t look like Johnny Guenther at all. At least, Liv didn’t think so. She had never forgotten a plane or an angle of Hunter’s face, but she had a hard time recalling Johnny’s features.
“Nope,” he told Vicky. “I drive cars.”
“That’s not special.”
“It is when you do it very, very fast.”
She thought about it. “My mom never does that.”
His eyes angled off her, to Liv. “Still methodical about getting where you’re going, Liv?”
“I’m exactly where I want to be, thanks.” Her nerves were beginning to feel like cut crystal, painfully fragile under her skin.
“Divorced?” His dark-blue eyes fixed on her ringless left hand.
Liv let go of her wineglass as though a snake had suddenly appeared inside it. She dropped her hand to her lap, under the table.
“And touchy about it,” he concluded.
“Now that all the social niceties have been exchanged,” she replied, “you can feel free to go.” Her throat felt too tight for the words.
He shot a brow up as though considering it, then he shook his head. “I don’t see that happening this time around.”
It was a promise and a threat. Liv had never known him to hesitate to make good on either one.
He straightened from their table, and she watched him stroll to one that had apparently been reserved for his party at the back of the restaurant. Those incredible blue eyes raked her one more time before he was seated. Liv took Vicky’s hand quickly.
“Come on, honey. Let’s go.”
“But I want dessert! That bread pudding—” Vicky broke off when Liv practically lifted her from the booth.
“We’ll stop at an ice cream stand on the way back to the motel,” Liv promised.
Vicky wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck, Mom. Please.”
“For once—just for once—couldn’t you be a normal child?” But it wouldn’t happen, Liv thought helplessly, it could never happen, because her daughter had been born into a lie and, to Liv’s great despair, nothing in her life had ever been very normal at all.
Chapter 1
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.
Chapter 2
His doctor was a small man with a nervous Adam’s apple. Watching the thing bob up and down was beginning to irritate Hunter in a big way.
“Just say whatever it is you’re trying to say,” he warned the man. His voice was still vaguely raspy from the effects of yesterday’s anesthesia. He was in pain.
“I simply can’t clear you to get behind the wheel of a race car in four hours.” The doctor stepped back quickly at the change in Hunter’s eyes, something that could only be likened to a sudden, solar flare.
“Explain to me why I need your permission.”
“I’m your doctor—”
“Do better than that.”
“You had surgery for a ruptured spleen twelve hours ago!”
Hunter made a sound of disgust. “I’m driving.”
“Actually,” said Pritchard Spikes, his longtime friend and team owner, “you’re not.”
“It’s our season! Are you going to throw it away over some stitches?”
“The stitches don’t bother me too much.” Pritch poured a cup of water from the jug on the nightstand in Hunter’s hospital room. “But throw in the fact that you’re now spleenless—and it’s going to take even you some time to adjust to that—I’m not going to let you drive my car.”
“Don’t overlook the seriousness of four broken ribs and a concussion,” the doctor warned hastily.
Hunter glared at him again, then back at Pritch. “Ricky Stall is only sixty-two points behind me in the Cup race.” There was a calm to his voice now, as though he was confident that he could win this by pointing out the obvious. “If I don’t drive today, he’ll gain the lead.”
“Has anyone told you that you’re insane?” Pritch asked. “Stall might well take home the Winston Cup this year. You’re not getting in a car again for at least another month.”
The idea was so absurd that Hunter didn’t even hear it. “I’ll hang back in the pack today. I don’t have to win. Anywhere from fifteenth to twentieth place will do me. I just have to finish so I can keep the points close going into next week.”
“I talked to Alan Carver this morning about running your car. Damn it, Hawk, you’re going to need four weeks to recover from all this—six before your body could tolerate another crash.”
“I heal fast.”
Exasperated, Pritch put down his paper cup. “People won’t forget you if you come in second for the Cup. Is that what you’re afraid of?”
It wasn’t fear, Hunter told himself. It was loathing. Free time was the antithesis of everything he was made of. He hated being still.
Especially now.
Free time meant not losing himself in the pressures of the race as he had done for more than a week now. Free time meant that there would be nothing to quench the fire of fury that burned in his gut whenever he thought about Liv and that little girl.
People wouldn’t forget him because of a few weeks off—and if they did, he could remind them again in a hurry. But he was afraid of what he would find when—if—he had time on his hands to corner Liv Slade for a few answers.
Damn you, Livie, what did you do?
“Find Chillie for me,” he said to Pritch, his throat more raw than ever.
“Your business manager? Why?”
“If I’ve got to take a month off—”
“Six weeks would be my recommendation,” the doctor interjected.
“Stay out of this,” Hunter growled. Then he turned back to Pritch. “I need Chillie to find me a place to stay in Arizona for a little while.”
He’d checked into it once, years ago. She was still living there. She’d left Flag and had opened up a bed-and-breakfast in Jerome with a partner.
It was time to pay Livie a visit.
Liv let her mare choose her own footing down the trail off Cleopatra Hill. Daisy was a champion climber, and all she needed from her rider was to leave her alone and let her do her thing. Liv gave her her head and kept her own attention on the sixteen people riding single file in front of her.
Six of them were guests of the inn. The others were tourists visiting town for the day or staying at one of the more modern hotels. The tours were a side business she’d begun two years ago after being peppered by questions about the area at the tea they served each afternoon at the Copper Rose. Liv knew a lot about Jerome, about Arizona in general. Her knowledge came free with a stay at the inn, but then she started wondering, why not charge the other tourists? Why not combine local lore with a little Western riding?
Riding had never been her strong suit, but she was better at it than most, thanks to Hunter’s relentless tutoring. Her horseback tours of the area had become a thriving success.
Don’t think about him, she warned herself. But her mind had worried over him ever since he had disappeared from the Michigan hospital two days ago. News reports said he was “recovering” at an undisclosed location.
Hunter wasn’t the type to lie about and heal. Liv had the nagging, unsettling feeling that he was up to something.
The walkie-talkie at her waist suddenly crackled and spat noise. Bourne was riding at the head of the pack and his voice came through. He thought that an overweight woman wearing a voluminous pink blouse was starting to seem short of breath. Her poor horse was doing all the work, Liv thought, but she also suspected that the woman’s nerves were screwed up just about as tightly as they could go. She decided it was time for a scenic break.
She told Bourne to stop the group at the next clearing. A few minutes later the riders gathered in a rocky enclave with a spectacular view of the Verde Valley beneath them. In the opposite direction, the homes and buildings of Jerome climbed up the hill like diligent ants.
Liv dismounted. “A hundred and twenty-five years ago, this area was nothing more than a settlement of tents,” she began conversationally. She’d learned never to sound as though she was lecturing. “Our Native Americans were the first miners on these hills, then the Spanish came along, looking for gold but finding copper instead. Along about 1876, Anglos staked the first legitimate claims and Jerome sprang to life. It called itself the wickedest town in the West.”
“Why?” someone asked as Bourne began handing out juice packs.
“The men who came here were—for the most part—young and single and rowdy. They were drawn from all over the world—Mexico and Croatia, Ireland and Italy and China—by the prospect of finding their fortunes here. Jerome became the darling of investors, and there was always some corporation willing to buy these guys out. Then, of course, the men needed something to spend their money on, so more people moved in to provide that. At one point Jerome boasted twenty-one bars and eight houses of…well, ill repute.” She grinned. “And where there are liquor and loose women and men of different cultures, there are bound to be a few fights and a handful of murders.”
“Especially if one of those women played her man like a fiddle.”
The voice was smoky, an idle notch above dangerous. Recognition jolted through Liv. She turned quickly.
Hunter.
Liv had the bizarre thought that at least she knew where he was now. He sat on a black horse just at the mouth of the path. Already his hair seemed vaguely longer than it had on television a week ago. But everything else about him was treacherously familiar.
How many times had he ridden up to her hogan looking just like this? With that careless, masculine slouch on a gelding with no saddle…his movements making his hair shift and catch the light. But this time he didn’t grin at her. She had the half-hearted hope that he was in pain—it hadn’t been that many weeks since his accident—and maybe that glare didn’t mean that he had every intention of destroying her for what she had done.
Liv flipped her own hair behind her shoulder. “If she got what she wanted, then I’d say she was a wise woman.”
“Or the man was a fool. I’m no fool, Livie.”
“Don’t call me that.” No one but Hunter had ever called her that.
“Folks are ready to move on here, Liv,” said Bourne.
Liv glanced at him helplessly. It occurred to her that he had no idea who Hunter was. She planned to keep it that way. “Start out again without me.”
“Not sure that’s a good idea. The insurance—”
“Do it.” Liv swallowed carefully and softened her tone deliberately. “Please.”
“You’re the boss.”
She looked back at Hunter. She heard Bourne’s saddle creak as he mounted again behind her, then the plodding sound as seventeen sets of hooves hit the rocky soil, moving out.
Something strange was beginning to happen in the area of her chest, something airy and light that almost felt like relief. They’d settle this now. Liv discovered that she was ready for combat. It was better than living in dread. She couldn’t go on leaping out of her skin every time the phone rang.
“Boss,” Hunter repeated so softly his voice might have been a caress, but there was nothing warm about it.
“You knew that or you couldn’t have found me. Someone had to have told you I was leading this ride.”
“The desk clerk at the Connor suggested where I might find you. You have a few of his paying customers astride.”
“Yes.” It seemed safest to keep things simple until she could gauge his intent.
“I’m staying there.”
She forced herself to nod. “How nice.”
“I thought the Copper Rose might be a little…too close for comfort.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you.”
He made no move to go. She hadn’t expected him to. “Where’s Johnny Guenther? Back at the inn cleaning the toilets?”
“Don’t you dare disparage him!” Outrage hit her with enough force to take her breath away. “He did more for me than you ever did!”
It was cruel, and his eyes showed it. “I thought he might be the type who would jump to do your bidding. That’s what you wanted, right, Livie?”
She clamped her jaw hard, refusing to rise to the bait. “Right.”
“So where is he now?”
She was all out of lies. And there was no sense in them anymore, anyway. She’d devised them all to keep him away. “Flagstaff, I would imagine. We’re not together anymore. You knew that, too. From Delaware.”
He nodded. “Get up on your mare, Livie. Let’s ride a bit. We need to talk.”
“I have to catch up with my group.”
“Do it later.”
She brought her chin up. “No. You need to go.”
He was off his horse in a flash. She’d forgotten how he could move like that, as though he were part of the wind. Liv back-pedaled quickly enough that she almost stumbled. When he reached out to catch her, she jumped again. “Don’t touch me!”
“Scared you might still like it?”
Yes. “I got over you the day I knew you weren’t coming back.”
“Why would I bother? You were the only thing in Arizona worth seeing, and you closed the door.”
It cracked something inside her and she made a sound she despised, something low and throaty and pained. Liv turned away from him. “I’m leaving.”
“Fine. Then I’ll see you at the Copper Rose tonight.”
It stopped her in her tracks. “Don’t come there!”
“Why? Do you think I’ll figure out that that little girl is mine?”
Liv felt her knees fold. Hearing him say it aloud had her reaching quickly for the saddle horn to regain her balance. Her mare sensed her tension and skittered cautiously out of reach. Liv fisted her hands and turned back to Hunter.
She was many things, but she had never been a coward.
“I’m afraid that she’ll figure out she is.”
It stopped him like stone just as he began to approach her again. Liv wanted to see his eyes, had to know what she’d find there. But when he reached up and pulled off his ultradark sunglasses, all she saw in that dark, dangerous blue was betrayal.
“I could kill you for this.” He nearly snarled the words.
Things inside her went cold. It happened gradually, starting in her heart, then spreading out through her limbs. If he had loved her once—and that was a big if—then he clearly hated her now.
Liv told herself she didn’t care. Not anymore. “Cut me a break, Hunter. You’re the last man in the world likely to spend time shaking a rattle over a bassinet.”
“I never knew I had a bassinet worth rattling over.” He moved in her direction again.
Liv rounded to the other side of her horse. Fast. “Don’t you dare take another step toward me.”
“I want to choke you.”
There was enough of a vibration in his tone to tell her that he meant it. “Which is precisely why I want you to stay right over there.”
“I’m not leaving, Olivia. Not until we settle this.”
“You already left. Eight and a half years ago.”
“That was your choice. This time around, I’ll decide.”
It snatched the air right from her lungs. Liv looked into the dark-blue midnight of his eyes. Midnight was when all the most dangerous animals came out in the desert, she thought, the ones that could kill. “If you drag Vicky into this just to tell the world you had a part in it, I will hunt you down and destroy you.”
“Spoken like a mama protecting her cub.”
“I am.”
His grin was slow and cruel. “Damn, Livie, could it be that you’re capable of loving someone after all?”
Then he closed the distance between them. The mare skittered away, spooked. He brought his hand up to close it around Liv’s throat.
His palm was calloused as it had always been, the splay of his fingers broad, and that was the same, too. The thumb stroking under her right ear made something inside her convulse.
“I’m not Johnny Guenther, babe. I don’t know what you did to him or where he went, but I won’t let you snap your fingers and tell me where to go.”
“I’ve got a few good suggestions.” She couldn’t breathe.
“It’s too hot where you’re thinking. And even the devil won’t have me there.”
“He might be afraid of the competition.”
“With good cause.”
Liv slapped his hand away. “I’m not nineteen anymore. You don’t impress me, and you can’t touch me and make me crumble and forget everything I need.”
“We’ll see.”
She spun away from him to find her horse. This time she managed to get hold of her saddle horn. Liv swung into the saddle.
“Eight o’clock,” he said. “Tonight. We’ll finish this then. Meet me in the Spirit Room at the Connor Hotel. I’ll buy you a drink…for old time’s sake.”
Her gaze whipped to his face. “There really wasn’t anything worth commemorating, Hunter.”
“If you’re not there by eight-thirty, I’ll come looking for you.”
Liv didn’t acknowledge the threat with an answer. She put her heels to her mare and trotted past him, then she let the horse break into a canter when they reached the trail. But no matter how fast they moved, she couldn’t get past the fact that he looked much better in person than he ever had on TV—and so much more volatile.
God help me, she thought. I’m in trouble.
Hunter watched her go. That long dark hair of hers, all woven with gold, bounced against her back with the horse’s jog, just the way it had all those years ago. She wore a tight red tank top that told him she hadn’t put on a pound in eight years, except maybe in the right places. Her legs were still trim and lean and long, clasped in denim as her thighs gripped her mount.
What a shame that she could still make his mouth water, Hunter thought, because he had every intention of unraveling her lie, thread by thread, piece by piece, even if it hurt her.
“You’re sitting on that pony like you’ve got one of Dinny’s broom handles down the back of your shirt!” he shouted at her as she rode the horse in circles around him. “Loosen up!”
“I’m loose!” But then the horse broke into a faster gait and she squealed and grabbed the saddle horn.
She’d been afraid of horses from the first moment he’d met her, Hunter thought. Her father had been a college professor, her mother an artist. Though she’d been born and raised in Phoenix, Livie had never set foot near a horse until she landed on the Res.
He’d done his best to ease her out of her fear, if only for the sake of her survival. It had been a long distance from point to point back there in Navajo land. But Liv had always preferred to walk or stick her thumb out whenever she needed to go somewhere.
Now her new job demanded that she know how to manage a horse. She’d been hired by one of the major Flagstaff resorts to work in their stables and guide their group rides. She’d let her past speak for itself, implying that a girl from the high-country could gallop with the best of them. She needed the job, so she hadn’t bothered to mention that she preferred her heels planted solidly on the ground. She’d written him a frantic letter for help instead.
So Hunter had come back from New Mexico. He’d picked her up at dawn at her apartment and they’d slipped out to this isolated ranch north of the city. The owner was the father of a guy he’d crossed paths with in the Army.
Hunter was suddenly struck by inspiration as he continued to watch her critically. “You know what you’re doing wrong?”
“Besides sitting on top of a thousand pounds of unpredictable animal?” But her fingers loosened on the saddle horn.
Hunter grinned. She was the only person he’d ever known who could make him do that—grin himself right out of frustration. “It’s in your hips, Liv.”
She wiggled her brows at him. “You like my hips.”
“Not on a horse, I don’t.”
She sighed and reined the animal in. “Okay. Tell me what’s wrong with them. I’m all ears.”
“You don’t move them right. You’re all rigid. Move them like you do when I’m inside you.”
Her reaction delighted him. Her breath caught and her eyes went wide, then she looked around quickly to see if anyone was close enough to overhear them. They were alone.
She grinned wickedly. “Um, I forget exactly. Better remind me.”
He hadn’t been angling for such an invitation…and for the life of him he couldn’t walk away from it. Hunter started toward her horse with slow, deliberate strides. She made a move as though to dismount. Then something—maybe the snap of a twig as his heel came down on it, or the sudden tension that he could only imagine was zinging through her body—made the horse spook. It reared, and Liv went head over heels off the back of the saddle.
Hunter shouted and closed the rest of the distance at a run. When he reached her, she had a wild look in her eyes and she was breathing hard, but he knew in an instant that she was unhurt. She was spitting mad.
“That nasty beast tossed me!”
“Did it hurt?” He helped her sit up, brushed her off.
“Of course it did! It jarred the breath right out of me!”
“Will you live?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ll never touch me again if you don’t show a little sympathy here.”
“Sorry. But think about it. The worst happened. You got thrown. If you’re going to ride, it had to happen eventually. But how bad was it? Something to be so terrified of that you can’t do this job they’re offering you?”
He could tell by the way she refused to let herself smile that he’d made his point. “I hate you.”
“You love me.”
“Some days less than others. You did that on purpose, didn’t you? You spooked my horse to make a point.”
“Nope. It was an accident.”
She finally let herself grin. “I’m still not exactly sure how to move my hips.”
He had her flat on her back before she could breathe again. “Ah, Livie.” There was no one like her, no other woman who could make him crave and ache and smile during long nights alone in the barracks.
As they began fumbling with each other’s clothes, Hunter maneuvered her to her feet. “Not here.” They weren’t on the Res anymore.
“The barn,” she gasped against his mouth.
They headed that way, trying to walk decorously, but her mind was on other things and she stumbled once. Liv giggled. He caught her elbow and propelled her inside, into a stall. And they laughed and touched and feasted and it ended too soon because he had to leave again, but for that one high noon, everything was the way it had been before. He slid inside her as they rolled on bales of hay, and he whispered the truth in her ear, that she was all he ever needed.
There was never any doubt that she would go to the Spirit Room.
Liv prowled her sitting room at 7:30, her hands scraping restlessly through her hair then fussing with the belt of her robe. Her stomach was alternately a knot, then something squishy and weightless. She tried a glass of wine to calm her nerves, but it only made her nauseous.
“Okay,” she whispered aloud to walls that undoubtedly knew many more secrets than her own. “I’m fine.”
All that mattered was Vicky, Liv reminded herself. She would die to protect her, would keep any of this from affecting her, and that was that. Liv paused in her pacing to swig more wine, then her throat closed and she found it hard to swallow.
She had lied to Hunter all those years ago for one reason—to make him go before he realized she was pregnant. She’d known by then that he wasn’t ever going to stay with her, and she would not subject their child to a fly-by-night father slipping in and out of their lives. He would do the same thing now—fade in and out, a tantalizing wish—if she let him. So somehow she had to make him go away again, once and for all.
Kiki was right. She’d given Vicky a reasonably stable life. Maybe it wasn’t everything she’d ever dreamed of for her child, because in the end, she hadn’t had it in her to stay with Johnny. But it was enough. She would not let Hunter change that.
Liv moaned aloud, her stomach heaving. She had never been able to make Hunter do anything he hadn’t wanted to do. That was how she’d known that he’d never really been in love with her. Because when she’d told him to leave, he’d gone.
Liv was so grateful to be out of the stables, she almost didn’t mind the hokey uniform they’d given her for her promotion to barmaid. She ducked into the rest room to check her appearance before her shift started, reminding herself that this was actually a step up.
She’d lasted with the riding operation for five months until it had closed for the season right before Christmas. Hunter had come back three more times to hammer the tricks of the trade into her. She’d done well because she’d made it a point to do well. She’d hadn’t been thrown again. But she wasn’t about to spend the remainder of her life on horseback and mucking out stalls.
In January the resort had transferred her to their child care facility. The tips from road-weary parents anxious for some time to themselves had been great. The children, for the most part, had been impossible. Still, Liv had stuck it out for ten months until this opening had come up in the bar.
She intended to learn the hospitality business from the ground up, from the stables to the food and beverage facilities to the head office. Tonight she would entertain a few drunks and begin to learn the workings of the back of the bar. Unfortunately, she was going to have to do it looking like a cross between a beauty pageant queen and Annie Oakley.
The cowboy boots weren’t bad, she decided, except they were red. Her legs were good enough to tolerate the very short skirt. Personally, she thought the boots would look better with shorts, but it wasn’t her call to make. If she ever had her own place, she thought, the barmaids would wear boots with shorts. And the boots wouldn’t be red.
At the moment, however, she was stuck with petticoats—bustling white petticoats, layers of the damned things—under the full short denim. Liv turned this way and that in front of the mirror, but the contraption really didn’t afford her a good side. It was topped by a tiny denim vest that was laced up the front with red ribbon. In all her years on the reservation, she’d never once seen fit to put on a cowboy hat, but she wore one now.
Liv stuck her tongue out at her mirrored image to show what she thought of the whole getup.
“Yeah, but it presents some interesting possibilities for getting you out of it again.”
Liv squealed and spun away from the mirror. “Hunter!” He stood in the rest room door. “Where did you come from? You didn’t say you were coming back! You can’t be in here!”
“Nobody stopped me.”
“You can’t go through your whole life just…just doing things because no one locked the door on you!”
His face changed. For a crazy moment while it felt like the bathroom tilted on its axis, he actually looked confused, Liv thought. She realized that she had never commented on his life before, on the way he flew higher and danced faster and did everything better simply because it was there to be done.
But she had never needed so desperately for him to calm down and stay put before, either.
She wasn’t ready for him, Liv thought, her heart jumping oddly—and that was new, too. She’d always been just purely elated to see him again, but this time nerves scurried in her stomach. She’d been planning to buy a pregnancy test kit this weekend, to be sure. Then she’d thought she would write him, either asking him to come back so they could talk, or putting it right down in her letter.
Hunter, I’m pregnant.
She hadn’t anticipated that he would just show up like this out of the blue.
The rest room tilted back again and Liv felt light-headed. She closed the distance between them unsteadily, framed his face with her hands and kissed him soundly. “Sorry. You just surprised me.”
He wrapped his arms around her, the moment forgotten. “I had some time off so I came back. The guy out at the bar said you were in here. He said it was okay for me to come after you because they hadn’t opened yet.”
Liv lifted her left arm behind his shoulder to see her watch. “I’ve got five more minutes before they throw the doors open. Come back to the kitchen with me. My locker is there. I’ll get you the key to my apartment. You can wait for me at home.”
“What time do you get off?”
He was nibbling on her mouth, making it hard for her to think. “Um, midnight. But it will be one o’clock before I clean up my station here and get there.”
His lips claimed hers fully. “I can’t wait that long.”
“Then maybe you should stop going away.”
She hadn’t meant to say that, either. Maybe it was just hormones making her shaky. Or maybe it was just that night after lonely night, she watched her friends with their men, aching inside for her own as Hunter chased wild dreams a continent away. He’d spent the past month in New England on a fishing boat. And she’d slept by herself, and sometimes she’d cried with frustration. Why couldn’t she just have a normal relationship? Why couldn’t he love her enough?
Unconsciously she put a hand to her tummy, wondering if a baby would make the difference. She pulled out of his arms.
“Let’s go. I can’t be late starting my first night.”
“Liv, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just wish I wasn’t working tonight, now.” She managed to grin for him. “Why didn’t you write that you were coming back?”
“Because I didn’t know until two days ago, and then I just hit the road. I figured I’d get here before the mail could.”
“There’s always the telephone.” She scowled at him. “Did you get fired?”
“Actually, I quit.”
“You didn’t like fishing?”
“I found something I might like more.”
Her heart lurched. Please, please, please let it be me.
“It’s a long story,” he continued. “I’ll tell you when you get home tonight. You’re going to be late, babe. Better get moving.”
Liv had no choice but to agree. Her shift had started one minute ago.
They went to the kitchen and she gave him her key. She kissed him goodbye at the back door and somehow she got through the night. She didn’t learn much about the bar business, but then, she hadn’t expected to under the circumstances. Everything inside her tugged her toward the door, toward home and Hunter and whatever it was he had finally found. Only a tiny corner of her mind was on the patrons, the bar, the tips she shoved relentlessly and absently into the pocket of her gruesome petticoated skirt.
At 12:45, she fairly burst out the bar door. She jogged to her car and drove home faster than she should have. Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, her mind chanted. He would tell her he was going to stay this time—he had come home unexpectedly, after all, and in the rest room he had hinted that he’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He would stay, and she would tell him about the baby. Her period was a month late. The test was only a formality, after all.
When she parked her car outside her apartment building, her palms were slick with perspiration and her heart felt as though a riot of microscopic beings was going on in there. She pressed her hand to her tummy again as she raced up the stairs to her second-floor unit. He was asleep on the sofa when she let herself inside.
For a moment Liv just stood, watching him. How could a man be so beautiful? He made something ache inside her. Most of it was loving him, but part of it was pure appreciation. Even in repose, one arm tossed back over his head, the other dangling over the edge of the sofa, he looked as arrogant and magnificent as the hawk his mother’s family was named for. Liv went to kneel on the floor beside him. She kissed his mouth to wake him.
“You look just like those ancestors you used to talk about all the time when we were kids,” she murmured. “You look like a warrior.”
“Maybe a dead warrior.” He sat up. “I was out cold, wasn’t I?”
Liv chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to pass the time until you could see me again.”
His eyes narrowed on her as she stood. “That is the ugliest outfit I’ve ever seen.”
She cocked a hip. “Then get me out of it.”
Her gasp turned to laughter when he leaped off the sofa, caught her about the waist and tossed her over his shoulder. A moment later they were in the bedroom, and the pieces of her uniform were strewn all over the floor. And finally, as her hands flew over his skin and she arched up to press herself against him, her nerves were gone and the only thing that ached for him was her body.
When they were spent and wrapped around each other, Liv decided to tell him about the baby now, right now, while her heart was still thudding from their lovemaking. They were so close, skin to skin, heart to heart. It was perfect.
“Hunter.”
“Hmmm.” His fingers played absently with her hair. “Hey, you cut it.”
She frowned, impatient. “I do that every fall. Listen to me. There’s something—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “The thing I started to tell you about at the bar. You sidetracked me with all that white frou-frou there under your skirt.”
Liv set her teeth. “They’re petticoats.”
“They’re still ugly.”
“Well, I’m not wearing them now, so—”
“Come here.” She’d started to sit up, but he pulled her close again. “There really is something important I need to tell you.”
Okay, Liv thought. He could go first. “Spill.” She laid her cheek against his chest.
“I’m heading for California tomorrow.”
For a moment she lay perfectly still. She wasn’t sure she could move. “What’s so different about that? Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine…now California. You’re always heading somewhere.”
“I have a chance there, Livie, a great chance. I met some guy in Bangor. He’s got a garage in Anaheim.”
“A garage?”
“Stock cars.”
“What’s a stock car?”
“Pared-down, fast-as-lightning, zoom around the race track.”
“Zoom,” Liv repeated.
“Livie, I was talking to him. He thinks I have the right stuff. This could be the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Chasing alligators was the one thing you always wanted to do.”
“This is different. I can’t explain it.”
“Try.”
He was quiet for a very long time. “From the time I could walk, people were always putting me somewhere. My parents couldn’t stay together. I lived with relative after relative while they tried to sort out their own mess, until I acted up enough and the auntie or uncle of the week would call them home. You know that.”
She nodded against his body, back in his arms again, waiting, praying…for something, some word that would make all this right.
“My father always said I was trying to kill myself.”
She knew that, too.
“When they finally broke up for good, when Mom stayed on the Navajo res and Dad went back to Tuba City, she sent me with him because I was too much of a handful. Then he sent me right back for the same reason.”
“Hunter,” she said, exasperated. “You went eagle-hunting, fell down a cliff, lay there with a broken leg for three days while the whole town frantically combed the mesas looking for you. Then you practically crawled home on your hands and knees and the Feds arrested you for poaching. You were a handful.”
“I was just looking for…I don’t know, something that made me feel right.”
Tell me it’s me.
“I sort of feel that way when I’m driving. Complete.”
Her heart couldn’t have fallen to her feet any quicker if she had been standing. “This guy let you drive a race car in Bangor?”
“No, no. I gave him a ride home from a bar. But there was nearly an accident and I avoided it and he liked what he saw.”
Liv was quiet for a long time. “You’re not coming home, then.”
“Livie, you’re my home. Wherever you are. That’s all I need.”
But I need more. She punched his shoulder as she sat up. “Home is a place you go to each night to lay your head on your pillow!”
“I lay my head on dreams of you.”
“That’s not enough!”
“I want you to come with me this time. Can you?”
Her heart staggered. “Where?”
“I just told you. To California. You can find a resort to work at there.” He sat up slowly, watching her, looking both sad and confused again, maybe even a little angry. “Babe, you’re really off the wall tonight.”
He didn’t understand.
It hit her then, in all its enormity. She was probably pregnant. And he was going to run off to California tomorrow to try his hand at racing cars. When that failed, it would be something else. God help her, it would always be something else.
She wasn’t—had never been—enough to hold him in one place. Whatever it was that he was looking for to make him feel complete…it wasn’t in her arms.
She drove her hands into her hair. She slid out of bed, shaking. “I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
Raise a child like this, while you chase the wind.
This time she didn’t say it aloud. She snatched her bathrobe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door. When was it going to stop? Never, Livie, never, and you always knew that. The voice in her head mocked her and scoured the life right out of her soul.
She’d accepted him on his terms, and their crazy life together, apart more than they were in each other’s arms. She loved him with all of her heart. But how—oh, God, how?—was she supposed to explain his whereabouts to a child when he was gone for months, here for a day? How could they go with him? How could she tell this child, “No, baby, this isn’t home, but maybe the next stop will be?”
How could she pawn off on this little one the same kind of upheaval her parents had destroyed her with when they had died?
“I’ll have to learn the business from the ground up,” Hunter said from the bed, “and a lot of drivers have a head start on me. They cut their teeth in their daddy’s garages. And, granted, they’re all pretty much a bunch of Southerners, so I’ll break the mold. But this guy—his name is Pritchard Spikes—he says he’ll let me test drive at his track in Anaheim and he’ll see what I can do. If I really have the right stuff, he’ll give me a chance.”
“What?” Liv turned to him vacantly, belting her robe. “What are you talking about?”
“The stock car circuit. This chance. This is it, Livie, I feel it in my bones.”
She stared at him. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Liv went to the bathroom to throw up.
Liv found herself leaning against the bathroom sink now, fighting nausea again. Only this time she wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t been with a man since…that night.
She’d done the test kit that weekend after Hunter had gone again. It had turned up positive. That had been in October.
He’d written, once, to tell her that Pritchard Spikes had indeed liked the way he handled his cars. He was going to give him a shot in his NASCAR garage in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Not driving, not yet, but in the background, learning. Hunter told her that starting in February, he’d spend the next ten months in a different part of the country every weekend, on the race circuit.
He’d said he would stop in Flag on his way to the East Coast. She’d told him not to bother. It was over for them.
She had a child to raise. So she had married Johnny Guenther. He’d given her security, a home, everything she’d always needed. She had given him…nothing.
What she had done to Johnny out of sheer desperation had been cruel and despicable. She’d never been able to be a wife to him. She’d ended up alone after all. But she’d raised her daughter in one place, in one home, if not conventionally.
Shuddering, Liv went back to her bedroom and slipped out of her robe. She pulled on a pair of khaki slacks and a sleek, black top. Shoved her feet into black sandals.
She was ready for the Spirit Room now. Hunter had made his choice. She had made hers. There was nothing left now but to say goodbye—for good this time.
Chapter 3
Hunter wished he didn’t remember the look Liv wore when she entered the bar, but he had seen it before.
Elegant, he thought. She’d always been able to look elegant, even in cutoffs and work boots, with dust coating her skin. It had been in the way she moved, in the dip of her shoulder when she would glance back with a cunning grin, in the way she tunneled her fingers through her hair, pulling it straight back from her forehead, then letting it fall. Everything about her said that she’d been born for a better life than the Res.
Sometimes, in their last years together, he’d marveled that a half-breed troublemaker like himself could find her in his arms, skin to skin, that she was his. It had all been a mirage, but it had overwhelmed him while it had lasted.
As Liv paused to look for him in the Spirit Room, she reminded him of an unbroken filly trapped in a corral for her first saddling. He knew that when she stepped closer, he’d see a certain wildness at the edges of her eyes. She’d tremble so imperceptibly that it would be little more than a hum in the air around her. Livie had known fear, but like a proud and wild horse, she would never let it show.
He had trapped her tonight, Hunter thought, as surely as he had ever herded a mustang into a pen. He’d given her the choice of meeting him here or playing this out in front of her daughter. His daughter.
She was right to be afraid.
The mirrors behind the bar were smokey and bronzed. The whole room was brown and gold and dimly lit. Watching her reflection as she spotted him and approached, Hunter thought it looked a little like a tintype. He rolled his stool around to face her as she stepped up beside him and dropped one hip onto the neighboring stool.
“Punctual, Livie. As always.”
She’d already told him not to call her that. She wouldn’t give Hunter the satisfaction of protesting again. She scraped her hair back as the bartender approached and stared at the bar in front of Hunter. It was bare burnished walnut. She wondered how long he had been waiting. “Who’s paying for this little shindig?” she asked.
“I am.” Hunter glanced at the bartender. “Remy. Straight.”
“No more Boone’s? You’ve come up in the world.”
“I’ve always burned it as fast as I earned it. Now there’s just more to burn.”
“In that case, make it two.” She thought Hunter almost smiled, but his mouth was too hard to allow it.
Liv felt dazed. She couldn’t believe she was here with him like this. In a bar. Again.
She’d known he’d come to Flag even though she’d told him not to. Liv willed herself, schooled herself, to be cold when she saw him walk in the door. She could show nothing. Hunter was like a wild cat when it came to scenting doubt, fear, pain. And he’d always known what she was feeling.
He couldn’t know it this time. Her baby’s future depended on it.
She was still angry at him, so angry that it hurt with a physical pain. Maybe that was all he would sense.
It had been a month since he’d left her bed for California, and Liv had already worked her way up from cocktail waitress to tending bar. No more frou-frou for her. She’d graduated to black trousers and a silk vest that nipped her waist and plunged down to her cleavage. She leaned forward when Hunter sat at the bar, giving him a good view of what he would be missing.
If he let her go.
“I told you not to come,” she said, her tone flat. Then her heart sank. He was watching her eyes. Trying to read them.
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t figure out why so I stopped to see for myself.”
“North Carolina is a long way away from Arizona, pal. Better hit the road.”
“After you tell me what’s wrong.”
You won’t stay put. You won’t just stay put and love me! Liv straightened from the bar as someone gestured for another beer. She went to draw the draft.
He was still waiting for her when she came back.
All she could do was take a deep breath and plunge in. A lot had happened since he had left.
“I’m getting married, 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. So go.”
Oh, dear God, the pain on his face. It snatched at her air. She couldn’t bear to see it, so she went to wash glasses instead. But his voice followed her.
“Not you, Livie. You were the only one who ever knew when I was gone.”
She looked up from the sink and steeled herself. “Are you still here?”
“Talk to me.”
“I just did.”
“Why?”
“I’ve thought about it. I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter.” Fight for me. Oh, please, God, let him fight to keep me.
His face went to stone. Any emotion there was just suddenly gone, as quickly as he blinked. He stood from the bar stool. Things screamed inside her.
“I really wanted you to come with me this time,” he said.
“I never had your wings. I just plummet to the ground again when I try to fly. It’s where I belong.”
He’d gone. He’d moved on to North Carolina and a spot on one of Pritchard Spikes’s pit crews, and she hadn’t laid eyes on him again until the weekend in Delaware. Now he was back and he looked…dangerous.
She’d never feared him before, she realized wildly, but she did now. Even that first day when he’d turned up on a piebald gelding in Ama’s grazing yard, his dark-blue eyes narrowed to slits against the sun, his long black hair tickling itself in the wind, looking as heathen as her worst nightmares. Even then, she hadn’t been afraid. He’d asked her if she wanted some help. She’d said sure. She had loved him. Instantly, childishly, with a wild excitement and an obscure yearning for things she didn’t yet understand.
Now the golden light in the bar turned his dusky skin to amber. His hair was swept back off his forehead, but it was long enough in the back to nudge his collar. His cheekbones were still slashes, and his eyes were still narrowed against something, but this time it wasn’t the light. It was her.
“What do you want from me?” she asked bluntly.
His mouth didn’t exactly soften, but he grinned like a shark. “Once you wouldn’t have had to ask me that.”
Heat slid through her. Liv gulped Remy and coughed a little. “That was then. I don’t know you anymore. Now you’re some kind of national sports icon, used to getting his own way.”
“I’ve always gotten my own way.” Except once. But Hunter couldn’t let himself think about how she had sent him away. Not now. It would buckle something inside him. And this was war.
“This brings us back to my original question,” Liv said. “What is it you’re after with this little surprise visit?”
“You weren’t surprised.” He’d thought about it a lot since their meeting that morning. She’d been jarred, yes. But surprised? No. She’d known he’d come.
He watched her open her mouth as though to deny it, then she did that thing with her shoulder. A hitch, then a dip. On any other woman, it would have been called a shrug. With Liv, it meant, I’m not giving you an inch unless you earn it.
So he started back at the beginning. “Tell me about Johnny. The guy who didn’t father your daughter. Tell me why you never mentioned a baby that last night I passed through Flagstaff. Damn it, Livie, you never said anything about being pregnant at all!”
He knew because he remembered every word.
“I never had your wings,” she said. “I just plummet to the ground again when I try to fly.”
No. She belonged in the sky with the sun, Hunter thought, burning bright while he flew. Why couldn’t she see that? “Who?” he rasped. “Who is he? Who had you?” His fists hurt, cramped tight, ready to kill.
“No one.” She brought her chin up to challenge him. “Yet.”
“You’re going to marry someone you’ve never even been with?”
“Sex isn’t everything.”
He laughed, and the reflex was flame-hot sand in his throat.
“I need a picket fence, Hunter. Will you give it to me? Stay here? Get a job?”
“I’ve had jobs, Livie! I’ve always had a job. Is that what this is about? What do you think I’ve been eating with and buying gas with to drive back here all the time?”
Her eyes said it was the wrong answer. They went to charred black. “Go to hell, Hunter Hawk-Cole.”
He was reasonably sure he was already there.
“I called Flagstaff City Hall for your marriage license,” he said now, watching her expression. “About a year later.”
Liv felt bony, white knuckles grab her heart and squeeze. “Apparently, you never bothered checking for the divorce decree, too.”
“I figured you had enough grit to make it last. But I was wrong about a lot, wasn’t I, Livie? Did he know the baby wasn’t his?”
Johnny had known. It was why he had married her. Johnny had been her knight in shining armor. He’d loved her and was decent enough to try to give her what she’d needed most—a father for her child. “That,” she said hoarsely, “has no bearing whatsoever on this conversation.”
She saw him clench his jaw. “I really have a keen interest in finding out whether or not you passed my daughter off as someone else’s.”
She’d never done that. “You have a really rock-bottom view of my integrity, don’t you?”
“Why should my opinion be higher?” He saw her flinch and was glad. But Hunter had always loved the way she could recover.
“He knew.” Her chin came up. Her eyes narrowed haughtily.
“Does she?”
“She has a name.”
“Victoria Rose. I looked that up, too.” He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but the words were out before he could stop them.
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. Just to check. She was born eight months and twenty-nine days after the last time you and I were together.”
“Bingo.”
“You’ve still got that attitude, don’t you? The world can kiss your butt and you’ll give them directions to find it. Why that name?”
He wanted to know everything, he realized, and that surprised him. He had never wanted a child. He knew what adults could do to a kid. His Anglo relatives had dragged him to their churches when he was little. He’d been caught between three cultures—Christian, Hopi and Navajo. But all three of them had one theme in common. The sins of the father…
He had never intended to visit his own shortcomings upon progeny. He was damaged, baggage-laden, and he had always craved anything that would make him forget that for a while. Speed. Alligators. Spitting in death’s face. But whether he’d looked for her or not, Victoria Rose was here.
And he wanted to know about her. Every detail.
“The name,” he said again when Liv didn’t answer. “It’s not in your family, it’s not in mine. Was it his? Guenther’s?”
Liv hesitated, then she got that glint in her eyes. “Desert Rose was a little avant-garde for the life I envisioned for her.”
“So it was supposed to be Desert Rose.”
Again she hesitated. “Yes. But Victoria was more traditional.”
“Was she ever one of those kids who hated her name?”
He watched her expression spasm. “You don’t need to know this.”
“I do.”
“Damn you, Hunter, just go away again!”
He could do that, he thought. Maybe. Maybe. Because letting himself love the daughter meant being near the mother. But he needed to put more pieces together. “Tell me, damn it.”
He watched her gasp for breath, then the words tumbled out. “She always liked the Hawk bit better than Slade. She never took Johnny’s name.”
Hunter sat back suddenly, though there was no part of the stool to support the reflex. Something punched him, something unseen. “Then she does know.”
“She hasn’t watched racing. She makes no connection to you.”
“She will.”
“Over my dead body.” Liv felt things riot inside her. “Leave her alone. What do you have to gain by any of this?”
“I need to see her.”
“Why, Hunter, why?” Liv played her last ace card. “Is what you think you want more important than what she needs?”
“Yes. Because I’m the adult here. Her father. And I have a right to decide what’s best for her.”
“You’ve been gone her entire life!”
“Not my choice.”
There was that, Liv thought. Oh, bless her, he’d never let go of that. “Please. Trust me.”
“Never again.”
It killed something in her soul. “Not as a lover. As a mother.”
“I don’t know what kind of mother you are.”
She felt heat stain her cheeks. “A good one.”
“Prove it. Give us both time to come to terms with this.”
“You and me?”
“The hell with you, Livie. You don’t matter anymore. Me and Victoria Rose.”
He said it tonelessly. Something hot and wet hurt her eyes. She refused to cry.
“If she knows Guenther wasn’t her real father,” he said, “what does it hurt to introduce me into her life?”
You’ll go again. He was still the same man who hadn’t wanted her enough all those years ago to just stay put and make a life with the two of them.
She’d given him the option. He could have grabbed her back from marrying Johnny. He hadn’t done it. The wind he’d chased had been more important to him than catching her as she fell to earth.
“What are you afraid of, Livie?” His voice was suddenly silken with challenge. “That your little girl will tell you that you made the wrong choice in men?”
Her heels found the pine floor. Liv felt a little jarred, surprised by the impact when she slid off the stool with such force. She was even more surprised to find her snifter in her hand. There was little more than a mouthful of Remy left. She tossed it at him.
He came off his stool like lightning. It was one small thing she’d managed to forget about him, how fast he could move when he was angry. Not angry, she thought, feeling something shrink inside her. Furious. This time when his hand caught her chin, his touch hurt. His fingers did not clench. His grip did not tighten. But there was something there that threatened her, a certain heat that terrified her.
Liv wrenched away.
“There’s an easy way to do this,” he said, “and a hard way. It’s your choice, Livie.”
“Go to hell.”
She took a step away from the bar, then turned toward him, her whole body flowing into the movement. From her expression, he knew that if she had access to another drink, he’d be wearing that, too. When she finally turned away again, Hunter decided to let her go.
And simmer on it some.
That hadn’t solved anything.
Liv’s hands were like claws on the steering wheel as she rocketed her little BMW back up Main Street toward the inn at the edge of town. Even her heart was shaking. He wasn’t going to go.
She knew him far too well to delude herself into wishful thinking. He just wasn’t going to leave their lives again, at least not without kicking up a good bit of dust first.
Meeting with him had been an utter waste of time. All it had done was stoke more old memories. It had rekindled all the old pain. “Damn him, damn him, damn him!” She banged the heel of her hand against the steering wheel, jumping when the horn sounded. She almost swerved off the road.
She couldn’t drive right now, not like this.
Liv pulled over. She let the fury blaze through her, so immense, so alive it literally made red dots dance in front of her vision. How dare he?
She’d given him every opportunity eight and a half years ago to love her enough to stay put. To fight for her. To give her the simple sweetness of knowing that he’d do whatever it took to keep her from marrying another man. Instead, he’d walked out. Out of that bar and the Flagstaff resort, out of her life. He’d gone.
Now he dared to act as if he had some sort of rights in this situation. As a father. He dared to threaten her. To imply that she had done something wrong.
He wanted a fight? He’d have one, Liv decided.
It took Hunter five full minutes to remember that Liv Slade had never been able to drive worth a damn.
He went upstairs to his room and washed the Remy from his face. He shoved his damp shirt into the bag for the laundry. His blood was pumping.
Over the years he had learned to curb his temper. Bumper-to-bumper, quarter-panel-to-quarter-panel traffic at 180 MPH was no time to give vent to anger over some infraction committed by another driver. A retaliatory tap of metal against metal at that speed could send another man to his death. He’d learned to contain anger, to control it, to wait to finish things off after the race if need be. By then his fury had usually waned.
But now it was liquid fire in his blood, scouring the inside of his veins with something painful and blistering, and it showed no signs of abating. He couldn’t get rid of it.
She’d dumped him eight and a half years ago like a minor inconvenience. She’d gone chasing after her picket fences with his child. He’d taught her to laugh, to love, to ride, to drive—
To drive.
She’d once plowed his pickup right into the side of a barn. And she hadn’t been angry at the time. She’d actually been concentrating.
Hunter rubbed the back of his neck at the remembered whip-lash pain and went to the phone on the nightstand. He picked it up, held it for a long moment, then he slammed it down again. Who the hell was he supposed to call to let them know there was probably a maniac on the road? He didn’t quite hate her enough to bring the cops down on her head.
Well, he did, but that would be a particularly low blow. Not his style.
Damn her. She hadn’t needed him eight and a half years ago, and she hadn’t needed him once in all the time that had passed since then. If she was angry now and erratic, that was her problem.
Except she was somebody’s mother. His kid’s mother.
Hunter swore and grabbed a T-shirt out of one of the drawers. He snatched the keys to his rented SUV off the top of the room’s television. He jogged down the stairs and outside.
As he peeled out of the parking lot, he double-shifted for more immediate speed. The engine of the SUV gave a squeal of pure shock at what was being asked of it. Hunter didn’t know what he was looking for as he sped down Main Street. He didn’t know what kind of car she was driving these days. His eyes scanned the roadsides for a heap of smoldering metal. Mountainsides were harder than barn walls.
Then he spotted the BMW pulled to the side up ahead, just idling there. She was fine. She’d had the sense to pull over.
He stopped behind her. His headlights threw the interior of her car into a glare brighter than full noon on the high desert. He saw her fumbling with her armrest as he jumped down out of the SUV, probably trying to find the lock button. He ran to drag the door open before she could manage it.
She screamed.
“It’s me.” Hunter caught her elbow and dragged her bodily out of the little car. She fought him like a madwoman. Maybe his words hadn’t penetrated. Then again, maybe they had, and she really hated him this much.
He caught her wrists as she pummeled his chest with them. “Stop it!” He shouted this time. “Stop it!”
“I hate you!” she screamed.
Right on the second try, he thought. She’d known it was him. “No problem. You’re real low on my list of favorite people, as well.”
She reared back. “What are you doing here?”
Losing my mind. “You can’t drive when you’re upset. Hell, you can’t drive on a good day.” He sounded like an idiot, even to himself.
“This from Mr. Anaheim,” she spat.
He scowled at her. “Mr. Who?”
“Anaheim! That’s where you went when you left me!”
It took him a moment, but he made sense of it. Pritch’s trial track.
“Let me go.” She tugged against his grip.
“Calm down first. And you left me.”
“The hell I did! But I will now if you’ll get your hands off me!”
Hunter let her hands go but grabbed her shoulders. He wanted to shake her. “You were pregnant when you told me to leave that bar!”
“And you left!” she shouted back.
Then she started shaking.
He felt it under his fingertips, tremors that grew and shuddered. Hunter pulled his hands back fast. For more than eight long, cold years, he’d imagined ways to punish her for leaving him as if he was yesterday’s garbage. Now he couldn’t let her emotion rock him.
“I’m going to be a part of that little girl’s life,” he said more quietly.
For more than eight desperate, aching years, she’d imagined ways to make him hurt as badly as he’d hurt her, Liv thought. Her breath chugged a little, then she finally got her voice back. “No. You’re not. Because I won’t allow it.”
He leaned closer, pinning her back against her car. He stopped only when his face was inches from hers. “You have no options here, Livie. I’m bigger than you are. You can’t stop me if I decide I’m headed somewhere.”
“Try me.” Liv’s fist found his gut. She was rewarded by a grunt of breath.
She started to twist away, but then something in his eyes stopped her. His gaze turned heated and speculative at the same time she realized what she had just said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Why, Livie. Was that an invitation?” He pulled her back and his mouth found hers.
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