Beautiful Stranger (15 page)

He stopped on the steps, and Marissa waited. “I'm taking your dare,” he said.

“What dare?”

“You want me to prove why this is crazy, I'm going to prove it. Leave your money and your credit cards and come as you are, and you can see what I mean.”

“Right now?”

A sober nod.

There was a dare of his own in that expression. He didn't think she'd do it—drop everything to go on a doomed quest into a dark world. A ripple of fear touched her. What if she found out he was right, that the world he came from was too dark to be borne? What if it shocked her?

But beads of moisture clung to his hair, and even as he stood there, hands loose at his sides, she felt a powerful emotion riding in her. He was worth fighting for.

She stood up. “I'd like to wash my face and call my sister and the school. Five minutes, tops. When will we be back?”

“Seven hours to Albuquerque, seven back. Tomorrow evening at the earliest.”

“Okay. Come in and I'll make the arrangements.”

“I'll wait here.”

She smiled. “Whatever you like.”

H
e insisted upon driving his truck. They drove down out of the mountains, drinking coffee from paper cups that he'd bought for them when they stopped on the outskirts of Red Creek to gas up. The morning held spring and winter in a damp cold mix, the skies dark. As they drove down U.S. 6 along Bear Creek, Marissa sat quietly and admired the views of clouds dropping into little valleys and hovering above the river. “Mornings like this,” she said quietly once, “are the reason I live in Colorado.”

He only nodded. There was a taut air of grim anticipation about him this morning that had nothing to do with Marissa, and she didn't push into it much, just let him drive and think.

They were early enough that they didn't hit much traffic in Denver. He grabbed I-25 south and they kept driving, only the radio between them. Finally, outside Colorado Springs, three hours after they started, they hit the
traffic jam they both had been anticipating—no one ever drove this highway with any regularity without having to face traffic jams—in a construction zone right below Pikes Peak. Or Pikes Peak if they could see it. All that was visible below a muffling of clouds was the blue lower skirt of the mountain.

With an annoyed huff, Robert slowed to a crawl and narrowed his eyes at the sky. “Rain or snow?”

“Smells like snow, I'm afraid.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Damn.”

“We might get ahead of it yet, and the traffic will thin out once we get through Colorado Springs.”

“It's Raton I'm worried about.”

Raton Pass, at the border between Colorado and New Mexico, had good, wide roads, but the grade and its position as a weather center made it hazardous in bad weather. Marissa looked at the sky to the south and saw the same low dark clouds stretching as far as she could see. Lifting one shoulder, she said, “If it's bad, we stop. If not, we go on.”

He glared at her. “I don't want to be at this forever.”

Marissa smiled sweetly at him. “Did you check the weather report?”

He adjusted his hands on the wheel. Cleared his throat. “No.” A reluctant half smile touched the side of his mouth.

Marissa laughed. “Lighten up already!”

“I hate this trip. I've made it a million times, between Denver and Albuquerque.”

She was relieved that he was finally talking. Stuck in the traffic, inching along, there wasn't much else to do, after all. “Why? Do you have family in Denver?”

That betraying pat of the pocket, looking for a cigarette that wasn't there. “No. I used to hitchhike, back
and forth. Denver has better summers. Albuquerque winters are better.”

“This has to be better than hitchhiking.”

“Yeah, a bit.” A faint grin. “I went back to Albuquerque when I got out of the army, and Jake ended up in Red Creek. When he fell off that cliff, I spent a lot of time going back and forth, driving to get my head together, you know?”

Marissa nodded.

“And one day, I just woke up in Albuquerque and wished I was in Red Creek and wondered why the hell I wasn't there. Moved there that very afternoon.”

“You must have been making the trip since then, or Crystal wouldn't have thought to come to you. Or did her mother send her?”

He sighed. “It wasn't that she had so much feeling for me, exactly, as the fact that she had nowhere else to go when her mom kicked her out.”

“Kicked her out?”

“Yeah. She's pretty useless, my sister.” Traffic suddenly began to move, traveled seven feet down the road and halted again. “But it's not like she had any kind of example. She's turned out better than my mother.”

“Where is your mother?”

“Dead. She OD'd on crack when I was nineteen.” A weariness on his face suddenly, and he swore. “I just realized she was younger than I am now when she died—she was thirty-four years old.” A pause, and a slight shake of his head. “Man.”

Marissa wanted to say she was sorry, but something in the rigidness of his face made her halt her tongue and just wait.

“I was in the barracks, in the army, and my sister went into a foster home. It probably saved her life in the
long run, but I always felt bad about it. That maybe I should have done more, but I was so damned glad to get out of there that I—” He broke off, shook his head.

“That you what? Couldn't stand to go back?”

“Pretty much.” He shifted gears, inched forward. “It was selfish.”

“Maybe,” Marissa said, a knot in her chest as she thought of Victoria starving herself. “Or maybe it just took all the energy you had to save yourself.”

He looked at her. “That sounds like the voice of personal experience.”

“Not really. Not like that.”

“Like what, then?”

Marissa shook her head with a smile. “My life is so mild in comparison to yours that my traumas will sound totally stupid. Please don't make me share them after you told me your mother died of an overdose.”

He raised a brow. “Your choice, princess.” The traffic started moving suddenly. “Finally.”

Marissa thought she'd escaped, but as they got to the southern end of the city and the traffic thinned again, he said, “Why is your sister so skinny?”

“Actually, she's gained a lot of weight since the last time I saw her.” She wiped a mark of condensation from the window. “She's borderline anorexic.”

A quickening of his attention. “And nothing happened, right, to make one of you gain a hundred pounds and the other starve herself.”

A rush of images poured into her mind—images and colors and scenes jumbled together in a confusing and emotionally charged mass. “Not one thing, nothing you can point to, exactly, and say, ‘It started right here.”'

“How about a good guess?”

Marissa felt pressure in her chest. “The summer we
were ten, my parents swooped out of their world and dragged us out on a world cruise.”

He chuckled. “Poor dears.”

“I know. It's a rough life. First-class passage on a cruise ship—a room for us and a room for them. We were so excited—to be with them for months on end was the best thing we could think of.”

“You didn't live with them?”

“Well, we didn't
not
live with them. We had nannies and servants, and we lived in the house they called home. They just weren't there very often.”

“That's weird.”

“Not really. My father was terrified someone would kidnap us, so he kept us safe on this gated estate all the time. We didn't even go out to school.” She straightened. “So, there we were, ten years old, and have seen nothing of the world, and our parents swoop down and carry us off to see everything at once.” She scowled.

“You didn't like it?”

“I loved a lot of it,” she said. “The world is beautiful.” She took a breath. “It's also very sad. I had no idea that poverty existed at all—and then we were in these places like India and the Caribbean and Africa, and it was just overwhelming. I was very angry with my father, and Victoria fell apart.”

“I can see that.” Snow was beginning to skitter over the windshield, melting as soon as it touched.

“That was part of it,” she said. “But while we were on the trip, my parents freaked over how close Victoria and I were. We slept in the same bed. We finished each other's sentences. We even had our own language. It was natural, considering, but it scared them, and when we got home they sent us to boarding school. Different boarding schools, in different
countries.
”

He looked at her. “Different countries?”

“It was decided that we needed balance. Because I was so exacting, they chose Barcelona for me, to loosen up my anal attitudes. They sent Victoria to Switzerland so she might learn discipline.” The memory still burned, even after nearly twenty years. “We had no control over any part of our lives, and we both felt like we'd been cut in half. It was awful.” She attempted a grin. “And here's the pop psychology part. She starved, hoping my parents would come get us. I just fed myself constantly, trying to fill up that emptiness.”

To her surprise, he reached over the seat and put his hand on hers, just for a second, a brief, comforting touch, then away. “It's sad.” Then a puzzled little frown. “So, when you went on your diet, did you call your sister and tell her to start eating?”

Marissa laughed. “No. We were both planning a surprise—this is so classic—and must have started at the same time. She went for counseling and I started walking the very same day.”

“That's weird.” He stuck a wooden match in the corner of his mouth. “I don't get why I like you and don't like her at all. No offense, but she rubbed me the wrong way.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“Yeah? She didn't like me, huh?”

“Nope.” She shifted, huddling into her sweater a little as the temperature dropped. “But don't feel bad. She never likes any guy I like, and vice versa.”

On the horizon, another city appeared. “That's Pueblo ahead,” he said. “We can stop for some lunch and check the weather reports.”

 

The weather reports only said “light snow” for Raton Pass, so after a simple lunch, they got back on the road.
Traffic was much milder as they headed into the sparsely populated southern end of the state, and there were only periodic bursts of spitting snow, so Robert relaxed a little. He didn't think about what was ahead or what lay behind—the act of driving had always cleared his head in important ways.

And just as it always was, he found it impossible to keep himself aloof from Marissa. She disarmed him completely, always, and he couldn't figure out how she did it. Just now, she was leafing through a magazine she'd picked up at the gas station, something thick and glossy and upscale, for which he'd given her a wry smile. Standing in the aisle of the store, she had protested that the celebrity magazines had extremely intelligent writing. “Sure,” he'd told her. “That's why guys read porn, too.”

She'd rolled up her magazine and smacked him with it, and at that moment, Robert had caught sight of a youth, maybe sixteen or seventeen, eyeing Marissa with appreciation—and looking at Robert with a little envy. Knowing how much it would please her, Robert had leaned close and said, “Don't look immediately, but you have an admirer at two o'clock.”

A moment later, Marissa had looked up and caught the youth in the act. She'd smiled, and the youth had blushed happily. On the way out, Marissa had flashed a wicked grin and winked at Robert.

It had slain him. They'd walked outside, and snow had caught in her dark hair, sparkling like diamonds. He'd wanted to just go somewhere quiet and lie down with her. An urge that scared the hell out of him.

And he'd put up his walls right there in Pueblo, retreating back into silence. He didn't want to hear any
more sad stories from her—and though he'd tried not to show it, that twin thing got to him. He didn't want to like her. Didn't want to tilt his head, listening to that liquid money voice, or thinking about her pearly skin.

But as if she were on to him, she simply opened her magazine and started reading, munching on some julienned carrots she'd charmed out of the waitress at the restaurant. Sometimes she hummed along with the radio.

In the distance loomed a tall, strange hump in the landscape, an abrupt mesa that rose out of the prairie like a fist. “Huerfano,” he said, pointing. “The orphan. In the old days, it was a landmark, a place for people to meet. You can see it forever.”

“Is that the old days as in the West, or the old, old days, as in before?”

“Both, probably. Can't speak to the latter.”

Tongue in cheek, she said, “You don't have stories from the elders about this area? What fun is it to have an Indian guide who doesn't know anything?”

“I do know something. I just told you.”

She waved a hand, flipped another page in her magazine. “I could have heard that from anyone.”

He laughed, and realized even as he did it that she'd done it again—vaporized his walls like they'd never existed. “First of all, my people aren't from around here.”

“Who are they?” She looked at him and pursed her lips. “No, let me guess. Apache?”

“Some. And a little Cheyenne and Ute and Shoshone.”

“Oooh,” she said lightly. “Exotic. I've never met anyone who was Shoshone before.”

He looked at her. “Are you making fun of me, Ms. Wasp?”

That rich, almost bawdy laughter. “I am not a WASP, sir. I'm a Scot, thank you very much.”

“Ah, you guys all look alike to me.”

“That's what you all say.” She lingered over a picture in the magazine, a young woman in a devastating dress.

“Wouldn't mind seeing you in that, princess.”

“Me, either,” she said. “Maybe I'll just fly out to Italy next week and buy it.”

“Really?” He was taken aback.

“No.” She rolled her eyes. “I'm not that spoiled, you know.”

He lifted a shoulder. “You flew into Denver and bought a new dress for some fancy party last week. Why not Italy?”

“Last week, I was the guest of honor at a fund-raiser. I had to have a new dress.” She flipped a page. “But there's a lot to be said for quick plane trips, you know. If we'd flown out of Red Creek, we'd be in Albuquerque by now. No traffic jams, no worry about nasty passes.”

The snow was beginning to pick up and he eyed the sky with some concern. To distract himself, he said, “What does your dad do, anyway? Is he from old money or something?”

“Nope. He made every penny himself.” She closed the magazine and crossed her arms over her chest. A position, he couldn't help noticing, that pushed her breasts up very nicely into the demure sweater.

“Stock market?”

“Everything. He's just a whiz with business. He has incredible instincts—knew when to buy, when to sell, what failing company could be turned around, which foreign investments would pay off.” She shook her head. “And yes, the stock market. He's uncanny with the stock market.”