It was stupid, going back. And dangerous. She'd probably called the cops. They probably had her place staked out. That was it. The thing on the news about his being presumed dead was a trick to flush him out. And he'd fallen for it. He'd been sucked right into their trap.
A novice would have known better.
But Claire. He couldn't get her out of his head.
Dylan had been waiting years for the opportunity to vanish, and here he was, risking everything to see Claire one last time before he rode off into the sunset. It was nuts. So he'd told himself he'd just swing by her place on the way to wherever the hell he was going, pay for the repairs on her Jeep, plus return the money and backpack.
He bought a car from a guy for a grand. Front-wheel drive. Two-hundred-thousand miles on it. What more could he ask for? He'd also picked up some necessities, like basic clothing and a new jacket.
It was dark when he turned down the snow-packed lane that led to her house. He'd planned it that way. Darkness seemed the way to go in case somebody was watching her house. He pulled up next to her Jeep, deliberately avoiding the motion light's target area. The front door was standing wide open. There were no lights on inside.
A trick? A trap?
He shut off the engine, grabbed the backpack, and slowly got out of the car, his heart pounding a warning. He moved toward the door. The motion light came on, almost blinding him. A second later, Hallie nailed him, hitting him hard in the stomach with both front paws. He rubbed her good behind the ears, all the while keeping his eyes on his surroundings. Hallie dropped back to the ground and circled him, making a whining sound Dylan didn't like at all.
Remaining outside, he reached around the corner and turned on the living room light. He waited a moment, then slowly looked inside. Hallie had been going in and out as she pleased. There were wet spots where she'd tracked in snow.
He told himself to run, to get the hell out of there. Any moment, he was going to be surrounded by a bunch of weekend warriors in jackets, pointing sniper rifles between his eyes.
He spotted something on the floor. A piece of paper. Dirty. Familiar. He stepped inside and picked it up. Even though it was torn and smudged and wet, he still recognized it. Claire's picture. The one of the grasshopper, the one he'd liked so much.
The backpack slipped from his numb fingers. “Claire!”
He ran to the bedroom and turned on the light. Nobody. Nothing disturbed. The bathroom was the same way. In his haste, he'd missed the ladder the first time through. Now he spotted it lying near the wall, as if someone had angrily tossed it there.
He grabbed the ladder and positioned it through the hole in the ceiling. Not wasting time to test its stability, he shimmied up, climbing so fast the top lifted away every time he grasped a new rung.
He jumped from the ladder and quickly found the light switch.
Everything hit him at once. The broken easels, the pictures—Claire's pictures—torn, rumpled, stepped on. This was no random act of violence. It was deliberate, calculated, executed out of hatred or spite.
His gaze fell to the gun.
Holy mother.
It was lying in the middle of the room, half covered by a notebook. He picked it up. He stared at it for a moment, holding it in both hands. He lifted his head, no longer seeing the room but looking into tomorrow, into infinity.
“Claire!”
~0~
Dylan.
Claire pressed a hand to her mouth. In the process, paper rustled. She'd forgotten that she was holding one of her torn pictures.
Her breath caught in her chest, tight as a spring, painful.
Footsteps moved slowly in her direction … until she saw a pair of workboots directly in front of her. Not black shiny boots with pointy toes. These were real boots. Dylan's boots.
She wanted to wrap her arms around those boots and kiss them.
“Claire?”
She'd daydreamed about his coming back. She'd thought of him daily, but she hadn't wanted him to see her like this.
“I . . . I, uh, was just back here looking for something. Just looking for something. Trying to find a pencil. I have this favorite pencil, you know. It's really good for shading in large areas. It has just the right tone to it. Not too dark, not too light. It's soft, too. So it doesn't press into the paper. I don't like it when a pencil actually makes a physical mark on the paper. When you draw, you aren't sculpting, you know. You're drawing. You don't want to carve up the paper. That's not what it's al about. Carving up the paper—”
“Claire, are you hurt?”
She lifted the picture closer to her face. With trembling fingers, she touched what she could see of the frog. “It’s torn.”
He crouched down in front of her. “Who did this?”
The barely controlled rage in his voice scared her. He sounded as if he wanted to kill somebody. “It doesn’t matter.”
She was embarrassed to tell him that the person who’d trashed her studio, who had trashed her life, had been none other than her ex-boyfriend.
“It does matter.”
She sniffled. “Don’t be nice to me.”
“Why shouldn’t I be nice to you?”
“What makes you any different from him? You took my rent money. You wrecked my Jeep.”
“I stopped by Jim’s Garage and settled your bill there.” He pulled something from his pocket. Money. “I'm here to pay back the money I owe you, not destroy your work.”
“Where’d you get that?”
God, he’s robbed a bank
, she thought.
He tucked the bills in the pocket of her shirt. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter!”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t rob a bank, if that’s what you’re thinking. You don’t have that low an opinion of me, do you, Claire?”
She sidestepped that question. Instead, she brought up a couple of other reasons she had for distrusting him. “You tied me up and left me that way all night. You handcuffed me to my own bed. Now that I think about it, you're worse than he is.” She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “I should hate you. I want to hate you."
He slipped the ruined picture from her and put it somewhere behind him. “Come out of there.” Her grasped her by the forearms, exactly where Anton's hands had held her so cruelly. She let out a gasp and Dylan’s hands sprang away.
“I’ll do it myself.” Actually, she wanted to stay right where she was, only with her arms wrapped around his booted feet.
He stepped back while she crawled out from behind the couch. She shoved herself to her feet, dusted herself off, pushed back her hair from her face. “There,” she said breathlessly. “Good as new.”
Apparently Dylan didn’t so, because he let out a strange, choking, sobbing sound. “Jesus, Claire.”
She looked down at herself. Her flannel shirt was torn. The top two buttons of her jeans were undone. He reached for her. When his fingers made contact with the side of her face, she winced away.
“Who the hell did this?”
She shook her head, unable to speak. .
“Why are you protecting the bastard?”
“I’m not.”
He was doing something with her blouse. It took her a moment to realize he was unbuttoning it. He slid it from her shoulders, down her arms. "I’ll kill him,” he said under his breath.
That’s what she was afraid of. It was bad enough that Dylan was wanted for fraud. He didn’t need to add murder to his accomplishments. She looked down at herself, at the blue handprints Anton had left on her arms.
"It was that scurve Anton, wasn’t it?”
"How did you know?”
"It had to be somebody who knew you. It had to be somebody who wanted to hurt you for a personal reason.”
She tried to wrap her arms around herself, half to cover what her semi-transparent bra was revealing, half because she was cold. "H-He didn’t rape me.” Dylan slipped her shirt back over her shoulders, and buttoned what buttons were still there. Then he grabbed a blanket from the couch and wrapped it around her, pulling it tight in front. "Tell me the truth, Claire.”
"He didn’t rape me.” Not physically, were the words she added to herself.
She found herself staring at him. Staring at was better than crying about what had just happened. Much, much better. She looked at him closely, to make sure he hadn’t morphed into someone else the way Anton had.
He was still Dylan. But how had she forgotten that his hair was the color of Burnt Umber? And that his eyes were a cross between Davy’s Gray and Emerald Green. If she were to paint his skin tone, she would have to use Golden Ochre lightened with Titanium White.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
She brought up her hand and touched his face. “Painting you in my mind.” She laughed at his puzzled expression. “I do that sometimes. Would you do something for me?” she asked, looking up at him and reaching for his hand.
“Anything.”
He didn’t ask what she wanted of him first. It was just, Anything.
“Would you hold me?”
He caught her fingers, then brought them to his mouth. His lips were incredibly soft and warm. He kissed her fingertips, then kept her fingers there. And she found herself wishing that her lips were where her fingers were.
“I heard that they aren’t looking for you anymore,” she said quietly.
He lifted a strand of her hair. He brought it to his lips, kissing it. “They think I'm dead,” he said in the same way someone else might say, They think I’m living in Peoria.
“You’ve probably served enough time for your crime, anyway.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Of course.”
“You’ll never take anything that isn’t yours ever again.”
“Oh, no."
Five minutes later, they were sitting on the couch with Claire’s legs draped across Dylan’s lap, his arms around her, her head resting on his shoulder.
She wished he would kiss her. But then he’d made it clear that he didn’t think of her that way. “Can I ask you something?"
“Ask away."
“Do I really smell like mothballs?"
He laughed, pulling her closer. He pressed his face to her hair in what she took to be a brotherly gesture. He sniffed. “I don’t know what you smell like. I can’t place it."
She hoped it wasn’t body odor. There were times when she was working on something and she’d completely lose track of time, when she would forget to take a shower and forget to eat. But she’d just showered and washed her hair that morning. Hadn’t she?
“It’s not mothballs. It’s like ... cedar or some other kind of wood. Now I have it. You smell like a blanket that’s been stored in a chest."
How lovely. She smelled like something old that had been kept in the dark too long.
Claire couldn't get warm.
She'd tried adding more wood to the fire. She'd tried a hot bath. But fifteen minutes later she was shaking all over again. With Dylan in the kitchen banging pans around, she sneaked out the back door to the sauna. Teeth chattering, she turned on the thermostat, rotating it to 200 degrees, thankful that the sauna was electric and would heat up fast.
She sat down and waited, bundled up, her cap pulled down over her ears, her mittened hands tucked under her armpits. And while she waited, she thought about her artwork and the proposal Anton destroyed.
Could she start over?
Did she want to?
The deep chill that had settled all the way to her heart began to dissipate, the heat of the sauna began to seep into her bones. The thermometer on the wall was moving up rapidly. It was already over a hundred.
She took off her coat and mittens, then stripped down to nothing, wrapped a bath towel around her, and. sat back down, her head against the wooden wall, and closed her eyes.
She was drifting in and out of a wonderful stupor when the door flew open so hard it banged against the wall.
She sat up straight, her heart pounding.
Dylan stood in the opening, his coat unbuttoned, head bare, out of breath. “I didn’t know what the hell had happened to you.” He sounded angry and relieved at the same time. “Why didn't you tell me you were coming out here? I've been looking all over for you.”
She shivered. “You're letting in cold air.”
He closed the door, blinking his eyes against the semi-darkness.
She leaned her head against the wall closing her eyes. “There’s another towel there if you’re modest.”
She heard him shrug out of his coat, heard him kick off his boots.
“It’s like a sauna in here,” he joked in a voice was a little breathless. '"I've always wanted to say that, but never had the opportunity.”
“You’ve never been in a sauna before?”
“Nope.”
'"I love it. You feel it all the way to your toes, all the way to your bones.”
“I never could figure out why people would pay money to sit and sweat.”
She opened her eyes just enough to peek through her eyelashes.
He was in the process of taking off his shirt. That was followed by his jeans, then a pair of white jockey shorts.
He was so tan. Where had he gotten so tan? The only place that hadn’t been exposed to the sun was a strip of pale, firm, muscled bottom just slightly wider than his jockey shorts.
How had he gotten so gorgeous?
And why the hell wasn’t he the least bit interested in her? She thought about the horrible things Anton had said about her. Was she really so unappealing? So unattractive? So lacking in sexuality? Maybe Anton was right. Flannel shirts and workboots probably didn't do a lot for a guy.
Dylan was reaching for the towel when she beat him to it, her eyes wide open, her arm stretched toward him, towel in hand.
It was hard to keep her gaze locked on his, to keep her eyes from drifting southward, but she managed. She also had excellent peripheral vision. And she thought she detected some signs of life down there.
Keeping his eyes on hers, he slipped the towel from her fingers. Then, with what seemed to her a studied hesitance, he wrapped it around his waist, low above his hips. Then he sat down, not right next to her, but close. Close enough for her to touch him if she got the notion.
“Are you going to press charges?” he asked.
Anton. Why did he have to bring up Anton? She was trying to forget about him, at least for the moment.
She stood and poured some water on the hot coals. It sizzled, releasing a cloud of steam. When she turned around, Dylan was staring at her, and not at her eyes this time. He swallowed, his gaze tracking back up to her face.
The towel she’d wrapped around herself wasn't all that big. Rather skimpy as a matter of fact, just barely covering the important areas.
So. He wasn’t as disinterested as he pretended to be.
“I don’t know.” Perspiration had gathered between her breasts to form a pool. The pool broke, sweat trailing to her navel. “Probably not.”
She sat back down, retucking her towel, pushing the damp hair back from her face.
She heard him exhale. Heard him mutter something under his breath.
“What?”
“It’s hot as hell in here.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“Since I know you’re not lost or something, I’m gonna leave.”
“You just got here.”
“I changed my mind.”
This time she didn’t even try to pretend she wasn’t watching.
He dropped his towel and reached for his jeans.
“How did you get so tan?” she asked, openly curious. Her gaze moved from his face, down his chest, then lower.
Oh, my. It was her turn to swallow.
He slipped first one leg into his jeans, then the other. He had a little trouble getting the rest of himself situated, wincing as he pulled up the zipper.
“The desert.”
“The desert? Where?”
He shrugged into his flannel shirt. “Arizona.”
“As in Phoenix?”
“As in the middle of nowhere.” He stuffed his feet into workboots, but didn’t tie them.
“And you ran around in your underwear there?”
“Cutoffs.”
He was about to step out the door when she stopped him. “You forgot something.” His underwear dangled from one finger. He grabbed them from her and stuck them into his coat pocket.
~0~
That night, as they sat in front of the fire—Claire curled up in her usual corner of the couch, her feet tucked under her, and Dylan on the floor, his back against the couch—Dylan made an offer Claire couldn't refuse.
“Why not let me take care of everything while you paint, while you put a new proposal together. You won't have to worry about the dog, or the wood, or groceries or anything. Just concentrate on your painting.”
“And what do you get out of this? I can't afford to pay you anything.”
“A place to stay. For a while.”
“A place to hide, isn't that what you mean?”
“I need some breathing space. I need some time to think, to figure out what I should do. And what if Anton comes sniffing around here again? I'd sure as hell like to be here if that happens.”
She wouldn't admit it, but she'd been rather worried about that herself.
“What do you say? I'll be Mr. Mom and you can concentrate on your proposal.”
“I'm not sure I even want to put a proposal together now. I don't know if I can start all over.”
“Come on, Claire. Don't chicken out on me.”
“Maybe I'm just being realistic.”
“You're good. Don't let a fear of rejection keep you from finding out just how good you are.”
When he put it that way, what choice did she have?
~0~
Dylan turned out to be a halfway decent cook— something he’d learned in prison, Claire decided. And he'd been perfectly serious about taking care of everything so she could paint. He repaired the broken easel. He chopped wood. He fed the dog. He got groceries. He cleaned the house. He did the laundry. He even cleaned out the bucket o' barf so he could remove the ashes from the woodstove.
It didn’t take her long to realize that he didn’t go about chores the way most people did. He was either the laziest man alive, or the most ingenious.
He didn't haul the wood he chopped. Instead, he got it to the front porch by way of a conveyor belt he'd put together with an old motor and treadless tires, cut into long strips. He didn't just feed the dog. He made a kind of Mouse Trap Game contraption, that, when you pushed a lever, dumped dry dog food from a coffee can to slide down a trough to finally end up in Hallie's dish. Most of the time. If it snowed, his invention didn't work. That bothered him.
“I need to come up with a way to keep the snow off the trough. Maybe heat tape attached to the bottom so the snow will melt when it hits it.”
Housecleaning for him was a game. He somehow had it figured so he could dust and sweep the entire house in eight minutes and thirty seconds.
And then there were the dishes. She kept wondering how he got them washed, dried, and put away so fast until one evening she caught him spraying off a plate, then stacking it in the cupboard without drying it.
“You've been washing dishes without soap?” she asked in disbelief.
He shrugged, hosed down another plate, and stuck it in the cupboard.
~0~
“What the hell's this?”
Claire looked up from the worktable to see Dylan standing on the ladder, visible from the waist up. Dangling from one finger was a pair of her panties.
“Underpants.” It was rather erotic to see him holding something of hers that was so personal.
“You actual wear this?”
He, on the other hand, was acting as if the scrap of fabric didn't do anything for him. “What's the purpose?” He held it open with his two index fingers, the elastic stretched tight. It was just a little triangle of nylon attached to a couple of pieces of elastic.
“It's called a thong.”
“Why?”
“I'm not sure. Maybe because of the way the elastic fits ...”
“No, I mean why do you wear this kind of thing? ”
She put down her paintbrush. “I guess it's my one concession to femininity.”
He balled it up and stuck it in his shirt pocket, shaking his head.
“Don't you think it's sexy?”
“Sure, but Claire, you don't need to go around wearing some torture device to be sexy.” It was the first time he’d ever said anything that made her he might find her attractive.
“Actually ...” She gave him a little smile. “They aren't uncomfortable. They’re rather liberating. Almost like having nothing on at all.”
“Is that right?” He was staring at her in a contemplative way.
She picked up her brush. “That's right.”
~0~
With Dylan's help, Claire got her proposal finished. It wasn't as complete as the first one would have been, but it was there—enough, she hoped, to give the card company a solid idea of her capabilities, limited though they might be.
She packaged it up, then drove to Fallon and mailed it to her agent. As soon as it was no longer in her hands, she felt drained, wiped out. Before going home, she stopped at the gas station. She was inside paying, when she spotted a gossip magazine the counter. And right there on the front was a picture of Anton. It seemed he was now living on the Riviera with the rich widow.
Should she tell Dylan? Her proposal was done. Anton was out of the country. There was no reason for Dylan to stay. But if she said something to him then he would think she wanted him to leave. And she didn’t want to him leave.
One of these days she’d tell him.
~0~
The next day she noticed something she may have been too busy to pick up on before. There was a studied aloofness about Dylan. Whenever they were in the same room, he would take off, seeming to have something of the utmost importance to do.
“You're not my slave,” she told him one evening when he wouldn't take the time to sit down and eat. “That's not what any of this was about.”
“I ate earlier. When you were in town.”
“It would have been nice if we could have eaten together.”
“I didn't think about it. Food to me is just fuel.”
She didn't believe him.
Why was he avoiding her?
She took a good long look at herself. At that very moment, she was wearing a pair of bib overalls that were incredibly soft and comfortable. They were also faded and torn and paint-splattered. Her hair—she couldn't remember when she'd last really even thought about it. And makeup? Had she worn any lately? Come to think of it, she'd have to wonder about any man who
did
find her attractive.
The next morning Claire stood at the window, watching Dylan chop wood. Even though it was cold out, he'd stripped down to a T-shirt. And when he stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead, steam rose from his hot body.
She couldn't spend her days mooning over somebody who had no interest in her. You couldn't make someone feel attracted to you.
At least that's what she told herself … until she came across the voodoo doll. She was going through the desk, looking for stamps, when she found it. Until that moment, she'd completely forgotten about the doll. The little pin was still in its chest—proof that it didn't work. Dylan hadn't fallen head over heels in love with her. And would she have wanted him to anyway? No, of course not. Another complicated relationship was the last thing she needed, especially one with somebody who was wanted by the police. She'd let him stay at her place in hopes of helping him find some direction, giving him a chance to get himself together, figure out what he was going to do.
Al the same, she couldn't quit staring at the voodoo doll. Maybe she'd been going about this all wrong.