The Last Chance Ranch (30 page)

It would come to him. He’d figure out where he knew her from. In the meantime, he had troubles of his own.

The cook smacked a bell and slid Zeke’s order under the heat lamp. Mary wiped her palms on her apron and headed out to pick it up. Zeke caught her nervous glance in his direction, and taking the chance, frankly watched her breasts move under her blouse. It would irritate her. Push her away.

She pretended not to notice, but he could see by the flush in her cheeks that she had. “Would you like anything else to go with that?” she asked, slamming the thick plate down in front of him.

He looked at her. Big, big brown eyes, snapping now with both desire and fury. The unwilling desire sent a spiral of response through his nether regions, and he almost taunted her, just to see if he could kindle that flame a little bit. He almost said, “Yeah, I want you, nothing on it.”

But along with the desire and wariness in those enormous brown eyes, he saw innocence. It was one thing to play with a woman who understood the stakes, who didn’t expect a man to call back in the morning. Zeke had rules about virgins and innocents. “That’ll be it,” he said. “Thanks.”

She slapped the check on the counter and automatically refilled his coffee cup. Zeke pretended to ignore her, but as she turned back toward the coffee machine, he spied her hands. Burns. It triggered another sense of déjà vu. He frowned. “Mary. Where do I know you from?”

Her face went abruptly, sickeningly white. “You must have somebody else in mind,” she said, and hurried away.

Zeke felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was lying. And she was in trouble. Mary Smith from Peoria.

Right.

* * *

In the kitchen, over the roar of the dishwasher, Roxanne met Mattie. “Figures,” Roxanne said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been trying to catch Zeke Shephard’s eye since he showed up in Kismet. He walks in and takes one look at you and it’s fire.” She leaned over and sniffed Mattie’s neck. “Nope. No perfume .”

Mattie slapped her arm. “Just tell him if you want him. He doesn’t look like the type who’d say no.” She looked at Roxanne. Long blond hair and a lean body, with big blue eyes. “I can’t see too many men that would say no to you, anyway.”

Roxanne grinned. “Thanks.” She folded her arms across her chest and glanced out the kitchen door. “He wouldn’t say no, but I couldn’t catch him like that, either.”

“Catch him?”

“Yeah.” She lifted a shoulder with a coquettish smile. “One taste would never be enough. I’d want to hang on to him – at least for a little while. The woman that can tame him permanently probably hasn’t been born, but he could be coaxed to light for a few months, maybe.”

Mattie stared at her. In her other life, the women didn’t talk about taming men. They talked about engagement rings and weddings and finding a house. She licked her lips, curious. “Wouldn’t you fall in love?”

Roxanne nodded with a slight, one shouldered shrug. “Probably.”

“So how could you just sleep with him, knowing he would leave you?”

“Oh, honey. I pegged you for naive, but I didn’t think you were stupid.” Roxanne tugged Mattie’s sleeve, pulling her over to look out the door to where Zeke sat, eating heartily. Against the backlight of the window, his hair gleamed around the edges with a deep, burnished halo. In a low voice, Roxanne said, “I want you to think about that man in your bed, with nothing on except maybe a sheet.”

Mattie shot her an alarmed glance.

Roxanne smiled. “Just try it.”

Slowly, Mattie turned to look at him. Her heart shimmered in anticipation, a strange danger, but the old ways of living had landed her in more trouble than she could fathom. Maybe Roxanne was right.

She inclined her head and let her eyes wash over the broad shoulders and lean waist, and she called up a picture – his arms bare, with that hair tangling over his shoulders, his skin dark against the white sheet.

“You see?” Roxanne said quietly. “It would be worth it.”

He blotted his lips with a paper napkin, and Mattie noticed his hands were as enormous as the rest of him. For one single minute, she indulged in her first experience with pure lust and let herself imagine what that hand might feel like, gliding over her body.

As if he felt her gaze, he looked up suddenly. Caught in the forbidden thoughts. Mattie didn’t immediately look away. He met her gaze levelly, without emotion, acknowledging her stare without revealing anything of his own. His lips pursed as if in thought and still Mattie couldn’t stop staring.

He winked and blew her a kiss.

Mortified, she turned around and ran into Roxanne’s shoulder. “Oh, I’m so embarrassed,” she said, covering her eyes. “What a jerk.”

Roxanne laughed. “He’s cocky, all right. But that’s part of the game.”

A wisp of her heated imaginings brushed through her. Mattie shifted uncomfortably. “That’s not a game I want to play.”

“Too late, honey,” Roxanne said with a slow smile. “You already made the first move.”

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(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

One

A
blue jay feather lay on the sidewalk as Luke Bernali climbed from his truck. He almost stepped on it. A flash of iridescent blue caught his eye in time, and he bent over to pick it up.

Jessie.

The feel of her and the sense of warning were so strong, he had to resist the urge to look over his shoulder. Luke twirled the feather in his fingers, admiring the shimmer of color banded with sharp black stripes. Blue jays had been her favorite birds. Luke once made her some earrings from a pair of tail feathers.

He half smiled at the bittersweet memory. With the respect usually reserved for the feathers of eagles and hawks and other such birds of power, he nestled it between the folds of a paperback science fiction novel on the front seat of his truck. Jessie had cared little for traditional explanations of the qualities of feathers. Even if no one else in the world valued blue jays, she’d told him, she did. She liked their colors and their sass.

For just an instant, he felt another small wash of warning. He brushed it away. Silly. She’d been gone more than eight years.

With a quick glance at the dark storm clouds gathering in the November sky, he lifted a pile of Navajo weavings from the back of his truck and flung their solid weight over his shoulder. Mountains towered behind the bank of shops along the street, their deep blue color shadowed beneath the clouds obscuring their summits. Luke breathed deeply and smelled snow.

A young Indian girl danced alone on the sidewalk in front of the store he was about to enter. Against the wintry background of the approaching storm, she looked like a wood sprite or a flower swaying in the wind. Grinning at the unselfconscious beauty she projected, Luke paused to watch her.

Long black hair flowed like satin ribbons to her slim hips. Her limbs were lanky and long, promising willowy height one day. In the dusky rose of her cheeks, a dimple flashed, elusive and charming.

She was the spitting image of his sister, Marcia, at this age. Luke stepped forward, intending to ask the child about her clan.

She spun around and saw him watching her. Luke caught a swift impression of beaded earrings flashing in her great mass of hair before his attention was snared by her unusual, exquisite eyes.

Pure topaz.

The color alone was startling in her powerfully Navajo face, against her dusky skin and broad cheekbones. Together with their enormous size and calm expression, they were astonishing.

In that single split second, Luke’s world shifted abruptly. He blinked, took in a breath and looked at her again. She had stopped dancing to look at him with those beautiful eyes.

His jaw hardened. There was only one person in the world who had eyes just that color. This child, beautiful against the dark day, was not just a relative to his clan, as he had first suspected.

She was his daughter.

“Hi,” the girl said. “You must be the guy they’re waiting for.” She pointed with her lips toward the shop selling rugs and pottery and various other Southwestern artworks.

Luke took in another slow, deep breath, trying to keep his emotions soft, quiet, fluid. “Are they waiting?”

Her lids flickered over the topaz irises, then swept up again. Mischief flashed in her dimple. “Not too long. The man in there said you were probably on Indian time.”

Luke chuckled. “Just another kind of time.”

“Where’s Daniel?” she asked.

“He’s—” he cleared his throat “—he’s not feeling well. Is he a friend of yours?”

She nodded.

“I’m Luke. Daniel’s a friend of mine, too—or he used to be, a long time ago.”

“Luke?” The child measured him. Her gaze flickered toward the rugs he carried over his shoulder, then narrowed on his face. “Luke Bernali?”

If he’d had any doubt that one of the people he’d find waiting for him inside would be Jessie Callahan, it was now erased. “That’s right.”

She shook hair from her eyes. “There’s a picture of you in my mom’s office,” she said, as she glanced through the windows of the gallery and then back to Luke. “My mom’s inside.”

“Don’t go away,” he said and pulled open the door.

* * *

Jessie shifted impatiently. She wore no watch at which she could glance with pointed severity, so she folded her arms and sighed. Loudly.

The man on the telephone didn’t even look up. He’d been absorbed in his conversation since five minutes after her arrival, and it was no accident, she was sure. Geoffrey Wilkes wanted Jessie to know he was a powerful, important man, a force to be reckoned with.

At moments like this, she really wondered why she had given up cigarettes.

She shifted, strolling away from the man at the desk and into the showroom. Just beyond the window, her daughter, Giselle, danced to the imaginary tune playing in her mind, as she always did. Jessie smiled. What a kid.

Her smile faded, though, as her attention returned to the inner walls, where Navajo weavings were displayed to best advantage on adobe-colored walls. Tasteful arrangements of Hopi pottery reclined on pedestals scattered around the natural clay tile floors, and several understated collections of silver and native stone jewelry were exhibited in glass cases. Everything in the store catered to the hunger for original Southwest art that swept the country, and every last article was genuinely American Indian made. Guaranteed.

For a price, of course. The huge rug on the wall dangled a tiny handwritten price tag in five figures. Undoubtedly worth it—the wool had been sheared from a sheep the weaver owned, then combed and dyed by hand, then spun and woven over many, many days and weeks of work. The highest possible quality.

Too bad the weaver had received less than a tenth of the price for her efforts.

A familiar burn welled in Jessie’s chest as she glanced at the man behind the desk. This time, he caught her eye. His expression, to her surprise, showed not the worry or coldness she expected, but a very definite male appraisal. He lifted his eyebrows in suave acknowledgment of her catching him.

Annoyed, she shook her head. Where was Daniel? She could handle the confrontation on her own, of course, but it all went so much more smoothly with someone from the reservation to back her up—someone with fresh, lovely products to display.

Wilkes ended his phone conversation and glided toward Jessie. “I’m sorry, Ms. Callahan, but you must know how temperamental some artists are.”

Dryly, Jessie inclined her head. “One thing after another.”

The glass door of the showroom whispered open.

Jessie murmured a prayer of thanks and turned toward the door. The showroom was dim in the cloudy afternoon, and all Jessie could make out was that the man in the doorway was not Daniel. Daniel wore his hair in a long braid, and he was not as tall as this shadowed man. As he shifted the rugs on his shoulders, Jessie felt a jolt over the way he moved his head, just so, as if—

She frowned, waiting for the man to come forward where she could see him clearly. He paused a moment, then moved toward them with a lazy, loose-limbed grace. His hair caught and reflected all the light in the room. Her knees shivered dangerously. Oh, please, she muttered to the universe at large. Not this. Not now.

But her plea went unanswered. In a softly accented voice, the man spoke. “Jessie,” he said. “I knew there was something familiar about that little girl out there.”

Only Jessie would have picked up the fury in the dulcet tones. And even after eight years, she was intimately familiar with that voice. Not deep, not rumbling, not loud. Indian men rarely had deep voices, and Luke was no exception. His was a voice rich with promises, a tenor of deceptive gentleness, musical with the accents of his first language.

Jessie clutched the fabric of her shawl tight in her fist. A roar of white noise filled her ears as Luke stepped into the light. For long moments, Jessie stared at the once-beloved face, unable to breathe or move or blink. When she felt a prickling blackness at the edge of her vision, she forced herself to breathe deeply.

Her mind cleared. “What are you doing here?” she asked, and her tone was more perplexed than she had intended.

His gaze locked with hers, straight and dark and penetrating. “Daniel is sick. My sister called last night to see if I’d pick up the rugs and bring them over. I drove up to Denver this morning and got them.”

“You think we could have old home week later, folks?” Wilkes cut in. “I’ve got work to do here.”

“No problem,” Luke said. The undertone of anger was now channeled toward the man in front of him. “It’s pretty simple, Mr. Wilkes. Unless you start paying a little bit more up-front, you won’t be selling any more rugs.”

For a pinch hitter, Jessie thought in some surprise, his opening remarks were pretty strong.

Wilkes pursed his lips, eyeing the weavings Luke carried over his shoulder. “I think there’s room for discussion,” he said reasonably.

Jessie swallowed a smile. There was always room for discussion, at first. The gallery owners knew they were soaking the weavers. Another grand wouldn’t cut into their profits much.