Outlaw Carson (7 page)

He’d just told one of the most influential
curators in America that she was pretty, not exactly the
introduction she’d been imagining all day as she’d gone through his
journals and dreamed her little dreams of fame and glory.

“I’ve never known you to . . .” Lois started
to say, then changed her mind. “It doesn’t matter, I’m sure. When
can you come to Los Angeles?”

He picked another book off the desk and
glanced at Kristine. “Do you want to go to Los Angeles?”

Mortified by what Lois Sheperd must be
thinking, Kristine mouthed the word “no” then immediately realized
her mistake.

“Kreestine says no,” he told Lois. “You will
come here.”

The woman’s silent surprise shot through the
office, but with no more force than Kristine’s. Nobody ordered Lois
Sheperd around—except, obviously, Kit Carson.

“So it does matter,” Lois said thoughtfully,
then reverted to a businesslike tone. “I can be there Monday. Is
that too late?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll see you Monday. What’s the
address?”

After he’d given Lois the address and had
hung up, Kit punched in another series of numbers on the phone,
apparently from memory. “May I eat in here, Kreestine?” he asked,
looking up at her again. “We have much work to do before Monday and
I’d like to get started.”

Sure, she thought, why not. Nothing else he
did now would surprise her.

She should have known better.

“Thomas Stein’s office,” a woman said over
the speaker. “May I help you?”

Thomas Stein? Kristine thought.
The
Thomas Stein?

“I’m not going to Chicago,” she said to Kit
to save herself further embarrassment. Then she turned and fled
into the kitchen.

Kit confused people besides herself.
Kristine saw in the faces of the Thursday morning shoppers. At
first glance they dismissed him as a throwback to the sixties, but
he always drew second and third glances, and that was where the
confusion crept in. He was scrupulously clean, and his demeanor was
not one of a lost, searching, or peaceful soul. He was more warrior
than saint, though she’d seen in him enough traits of the latter to
make her wonder.

The riches encircling his arm revealed
wealth in an unaccustomed manner. That wealth was at odds with the
roughness of his boots, which Kristine noticed a lot of people
bothering to get a look at—especially the women who checked him out
from top to bottom.

They had their first disagreement in the
produce aisle, shortly after two gawking women ran into each
other’s carts. One had a toddler strapped into the little seat in
front, and Kristine noticed that the little boy loved the bit of
action.

“Mama, bang bang? Bang bang, please.”

The flustered woman shushed her child and
kissed his cheek, her own face flushing a bright pink. “No more
bang bang. Excuse me,” she said to the other woman, who hadn’t
quite come back to earth. “Excuse me.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course, excuse me.”

Their eyes met for an instant, then they
simultaneously turned their heads and stared at Kit again. Kristine
was beginning to wonder if she had disappeared. Sure, he was
intriguing in an exotic sort of way and good looking in any way,
but he was just a man. The two women looked back at each other and
laughed, a mite breathlessly to Kristine’s ears, before going on
their way.

She turned to the counter of bananas and
started to put a bunch in the cart, then stopped, aghast. Several
pounds already layered the bottom of the cart. “Nobody, and I mean
nobody, can eat that many bananas.”

“I like them,” Kit said, and moved over to
the melons. He hefted one in each hand, raising them to his nose.
Two cantaloupes were within reason, Kristine allowed, but he took
four.

She calmly returned three pounds of bananas
and two of the melons, and he calmly put them back in the cart.

“I like them.”

She had suggested he stay at home while she
did the shopping, and if she’d had any idea of how much attention
he’d receive or how much trouble he’d be, she would have insisted.
Though she doubted it would have done her much good. For some
reason he’d been rather insistent himself about accompanying her.
She’d muttered something about Tibetan bandits being rare in this
particular part of Colorado, but he’d only smiled and followed her
out to the car.

They had their second disagreement in the
personal hygiene aisle, only because she’d given up at the meat
counter. The man was definitely not a vegetarian.

“I think one is enough,” she said.

“They are very difficult to find,” he said,
adding another handful to their burgeoning cart.

“Not in America.”

He nodded slowly, as if considering the
truth of her statement, then just as slowly laid another handful of
toothbrushes in the cart.

“It is a ritual of my first father,” he
said.

“First father?”

“Before Sang Phala took me away to live with
the monks.”

Oh, she thought. His first father before the
monks.
Right
. She couldn’t figure him out for all the gold
in China, most of which he seemed to have brought with him. While
they’d been working the previous night and that morning, he’d
matched her knowledge fact for fact. Yet when it came to plain
living on the planet, he was out of his depth. Or more
specifically, out of his culture. The practical, and probably rude,
thing to do would be to ask a mere hundred or so of the questions
tripping over one another in her mind. Practicality had never been
her strong suit, though, and rudeness even less so. Besides, prying
into his private life implied an intimacy she didn’t wish to
encourage. They were already living together, for goodness
sakes.

In deference to her convoluted logic, she
said nothing and added a large supply of toothpaste to their haul.
She would simply hand the mystery of Kit Carson over to Jenny to
solve. The man’s past didn’t stand a chance against her assistant’s
zeal for extra credit. As an added bonus, she’d give points for
expediency. The sooner she found out more about him, the better for
her peace of mind.

Kit noted the smile forming on Kristine’s
mouth and the light of curiosity burning like the flame of
Muktinath in her eyes. He grinned to himself. It took no special
effort on his part to deduce the cause for either. Everything she
thought was mirrored on her face. He’d relied on her intelligence,
played on her ambitions, and counted on her daring to get him this
far. She understood the stakes if not the repercussions of the game
she’d fallen into, and he was willing to let her set her own
rules—until they clashed with his.

They had their third and final conflict in
the checkout lane.

“No,” she whispered sharply.

“Help me, please,” he said starting to count
bracelets. “How many?”

“None. Zero.”

The jangling of bracelets as he started to
remove them snapped her head around, and she grabbed his arm before
she thought. She snatched her hand back, her fingers burning from
the heat of his skin. Due to the unreliability of her emotional
responses, she had made a firm vow not to instigate any physical
encounters.

“This man will not take your bracelets in
payment,” she said, enunciating every word, “so keep them on your
arm, please.” The man had money, she knew, all kinds of money, none
of which was legal tender in the States. When he’d dumped it out of
his chamois bag and into a pile on her kitchen table, she’d spent
all of two seconds wondering how he’d gotten it into the country.
Then she’d realized the stupidity of the question. The man had
gotten more than yuan, three kinds of rupees, and baht into the
country. Lord, she hoped she could pull off her Chatren-Ma coup
without getting incriminated by the man’s “other talents,” as Dean
Chambers so delicately put it.

She finished writing out her check and
handed it to the clerk.

“He’ll take paper before gold?” Kit asked
perfectly clearly.

“It’s a check, a promise from my bank to pay
his,” she explained in an undertone designed for subtleness, but
his responsive burst of laughter made the attempt fruitless. Heads
turned in three lanes, until once more the man with the braid and
massive gold bracelets was the absolute center of attention.
Kristine smiled weakly at the clerk, wondering if Kit Carson had
ever heard the word discretion, let alone figured out how to
incorporate it into his life.

* * *

Okay, Kristine thought several hours later,
so far so good. He had his neat, collated piles over there, and she
had her not-so-neat piles over here—and suppertime was only a
heartbeat away. Thank heaven.

How a man could be relaxed enough to wear a
braid down to his whatever and more gold than King Tut, and still
be such a stickler for organization was beyond her. He looked so
loose and free, from his quick, easy smiles down to the hoops on
his boots. But those smiles, she’d discovered, had more edges than
curves, and she was sure he was in imminent danger of wearing out
his patient edge.

“I need to cross-reference the February and
March daily journals into the Lamaist Shrine catalogue,” he said.
He walked over to her side of the office and dropped down on his
haunches next to where she’d set up shop on the floor.

“Check, and check.” She dug the two bound
volumes out of her untidy stacks and handed them to him, breathing
a silent sigh of relief. More than once she’d had to scramble to
find his requests.

“Thank you, Kreestine.” His most patient
smile played at the corners of his mouth, mesmerizing her. “Do you
also have the shrine catalogue?”

“Yes, it’s right . . .” She tore her gaze
away from him and searched the piles of folios and folders. He was
too close, his shoulder almost brushing hers, his thigh definitely
touching her arm. How was she supposed to concentrate when he was
practically breathing on her? “I had finished filling in the April
data and was going onto May, but I couldn’t find May, so I set the
catalogue aside.”

He shifted his body an inch closer, leaning
across her to pick up the catalogue. “Thank you, Kreestine, and do
not concern yourself with May. There are no daily journals for
May.”

He slowly rose to his feet and moved back to
his side of the office, becoming instantly engrossed in the
catalogue and leaving her to wonder what it was about him that so
fascinated her.

She knew a lot of men, all kinds of men. She
worked with them, taught them, and on occasion flunked them without
batting an eyelash. But she’d never met or seen one like Kit
Carson. The mystery of him went beyond his past. It was more than
skin-deep. It was more than his kiss, though that alone made him
unique in her experience. No one had ever turned her into jelly
with just a kiss, or anything else for that matter.

With a little hummph, she turned her
attention back to her work, spending a few minutes tidying up her
area and sipping her cold coffee. She decided to warm it up and
walked over to the pot she kept in the office. While she was there
she sharpened her pencils, opened an envelope from the morning’s
mail, and filed the bill in the URGENT bin on her multilayered desk
baskets.

Now what had she been doing before he’d
interrupted her? she wondered. May, that was right. She’d been
looking for the May journals—which he’d told her didn’t exist.

“Why not?” she murmured aloud. It was more a
question to herself than to him, but he answered.

“It didn’t seem wise to make a record of
where I was and what I was doing in May. But you need not worry. I
have the information I promised you, and the lack of a journal will
not affect the published account of the historical sites.”

“Oh,” was all she managed to reply. The man
had the memory of an elephant. Or he was telepathic, a possibility
that was seeming less ridiculous all the time.

He’d been at Chatren-Ma in May, of course,
and under circumstances she wouldn’t want written down either, for
fear the journals would fall into the wrong hands or even the right
hands. Still, she felt cheated out of the best part of the story.
She’d come across vague references to the monastery in her
professional studies, and more than one account of hearsay in
another scholar’s work, along the lines of “an old man told of a
man he knew whose brother-in-law, etcetera, etcetera.” Pure fiction
for all practical purposes, but to have had a firsthand account,
and from someone with Kit’s capacity for remembering even trivial
details, would have been incredible.

But then, that was what he’d promised her, a
firsthand account, to do with as she wished, all for the price of
three meals a day and a bed. Not only that, he’d insisted on
reimbursing her for the meals as soon as his finances took a turn
to the legally exchangeable side. She’d made worse bargains in her
life.

* * *

After dinner Kit startled her again, but in
a thoroughly different manner. The sun had barely set when he rose
quickly from his chair, crossed the office to the door that led to
the deck, and slipped outside. If she hadn’t seen him, she
certainly wouldn’t have heard him. Not even the silver rings on his
boots had made a sound, or maybe she’d grown accustomed to the
light jangling. No other explanation made sense.

Neither did the way he disappeared on the
other side of the glass door. She held her curiosity in check for
about thirty seconds, then followed him. The night was dark,
waiting for the moon to rise, but light from the door and the
living room windows cast a soft glow over the wood deck.

She padded around the perimeter, skinned her
knee on the picnic table bench, cursed softly, and continued around
to the sunroom side of the house.

“You felt it too?” she heard Kit say.

Stopping at the sound of his voice, she was
on the verge of answering—if only to figure out where he was—when
she realized he wasn’t talking to her.