Conquer the Memories (6 page)

“Now, black and white is very conservative,” she informed him.

“Not on you.”

“You don’t like it?”

“You’ll draw eyes,” he said flatly. “In the next life, I’m going to marry a little mouse with a sunken chest who wears only brown.”

She chuckled. “Don’t kid yourself, sexy. You’re not going to be rid of me in the next life, either. Not by a long shot.”

“You’ve obviously had your coffee.”

“In the next life,
I’m
the one who’s going to wake up nice and cheerful.
You’ll
be the meanie.”

“You’ll still be stuck with me,” he said wryly, and swung an arm around her shoulder as they headed for the car.

It was an hour’s drive to the construction site. Anticipation increased in Sonia as they neared the project. She hadn’t been there in months, not only because Craig had been involved in meetings in Washington, but because a site where shale oil was being extracted was hardly the most natural place for a woman to be, unless she wore a hard hat and geologist’s boots.

Craig parked the car, viewing his wife’s antsy movements with a chuckle. “I have this terrible feeling you have a secret wish to run a bulldozer. Are you going to be able to contain yourself while I work through a few things in the office?”

“What do you pay a bulldozer operator?” she demanded.

“I refuse to answer that.”

“You haven’t really told me in a long time how the project’s been going.” She understood the basics. Craig’s
in situ
processing method of extracting oil from shale was ecologically sound as well as profitable. That balance had always been the tricky thing. And Craig’s method, if anyone asked Sonia, was the only one that really worked.

“How long are you going to be?” she asked him as they walked toward the two-story office building.

“No more than an hour or two.”

“I’ll just wander around, then.”

“No,” Craig said swiftly.

Sonia’s eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Craig, I don’t want to get in your way. You know I’m perfectly happy just poking around. Everyone knows me…”

He obviously wanted her in sight, she thought with amusement. Mrs. Heath met him at the door of his office, her crinkly gray hair standing on end as it always did. Piles of crises had accumulated in his absence, all of which Mrs. Heath politely indicated he should immediately resolve.

She served Craig a cup of coffee, then he went about the business of resolving. John was one of his geologists; his crisis had something to do with the marketing of nahcolite, a by-product of the extraction process. After that, Senator Brown wanted to discuss a section of the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act that worried him. After
that,
the director of the Bureau of Mines…

Somewhere in midstream her husband seemed to realize he was holding her hand. He didn’t
look
the part of a lovesick teenager, Sonia thought with wicked humor; he
looked
very much the man in control. Tough and rough and hard and smart. She divested herself of his hand long enough to wander to the window.

Outside was a barren wasteland of sagebrush with the sun beating relentlessly down on it. It always amazed her that such a short distance from home, green rolling landscape turned into gutted gullies and arid rolls of parched land. The aboveground shale-oil workers always argued that messing up the landscape here was hardly an ecological crime. At first glance, of course, one saw no beauty. At second glance, however, one might see a herd of mule deer grazing on one of the hills, an eagle swooping down, a plant bursting into flower. Even the pitted gullies had their own kind of lonely beauty.

Two tall, gray, windowless structures gleamed silver in the morning sun, and a fleet of large trucks, bulldozers and cranes was parked by the office. That was all, though. No one could ever guess that three hundred people were probably working underground at this moment, or what was happening there.

Her feet were itching to take the huge elevators down to see what was going on at the heart of the project. She knew the mechanics…more or less. Oil was down there; that was a given. In conventional mining, the shale was brought to the surface, and the oil separated from it by a heating process called retorting. That method, unfortunately, left a legacy of slag, polluted water and air no one would want to breathe.

When the mining was done underground, very little water was required, no air pollution resulted and the slag presented only minor disposal problems.

It was so simple; Craig had explained it to her a dozen times. Underground, the men dynamited, leaving masses of broken oil shale. The rubble was later exposed to tremendous heat, which caused the oil to separate from the rock. Then the oil was pumped up and sent to the refineries. So simple, to produce a few hundred thousand barrels of oil a day that the country desperately needed…

And not simple at all, Sonia thought absently. Meeting energy needs was never simple. Any sudden increase in fuel supplies was enough to send prices plummeting, enough to destroy national economies as well as oil companies. Craig’s project received funds from the federal government and from private investors, all of whom had the same goals: to produce fuel in a way that would not upset economic systems, didn’t harm the environment and earned profits. Craig’s process was designed to achieve that goal.

Sonia stirred restlessly at the window. She was shamelessly proud of him. When push came to shove, though, she couldn’t care less about the project when her husband’s health was at stake. She turned and watched him for a moment with ruthlessly critical eyes.

Craig was on the phone; Mrs. Heath was in the doorway; John, in a short-sleeved shirt with his hard hat cockeyed, was leaning over Craig’s desk. Her man had loosened his tie twenty minutes ago, rolled up his shirt cuffs even before that. One arm was lazily folded over his ribs, but there were no pain lines around his eyes, no drawn look between his brows that signaled a headache.

And he was busier than a one-armed juggler. Smiling, Sonia slipped toward the door with a wink for Mrs. Heath. She was perfectly content wandering around on her own and hardly wanted to be in Craig’s way.

She’d made it to the end of the corridor before she felt a warm hand slip into hers again. She glanced up to find a very handsome man with a shock of brown hair over his forehead and a very clear pair of blue eyes focused on hers.

“That stuff will wait,” Craig told her. “I’ve got things to show you.”

He did, she admitted. Her husband had a great many things to show her, in spite of being constantly interrupted by people who needed—and claimed—his attention. His hand still remained irretrievably locked with hers.

The dusty workers from underground, talking about tolerances and heat and percussion problems, must have thought it strange.

So did Sonia. Craig had never before exactly tied her to his wrist while he went through the mundane details of his work. She didn’t mind. She’d always liked the simple intimacy of holding hands.

Whither thou goest, I shall go,
she thought whimsically.
Mr. Hamilton, you’re not feeling just a little violently possessive this morning, are you?

She said nothing aloud. He loved her, and sooner or later he’d notice what he was doing. She hoped sooner. She wanted to make a trip to the ladies’ room.

“Come on, Charlie. You know you’ll have a good time if you come with us,” Sonia coaxed. As additional bribery, she handed him a lemon meringue pie to hold, then turned to wrap the bowl of potato salad with plastic wrap. Neither the huge bowl nor the single pie would even dent the hunger of the billions of people she knew her mother had invited for the barbecue—but then, everyone would bring similar offerings. June Rawlings believed in annually celebrating the first of July, for no good reason that anyone worried about.

“I’ll just take this out to the car for you,” Charlie said gruffly. “But I got too much to do to go anywhere.”

She trailed him out to the back of the SUV, which was already loaded with swimming suits, two root-wrapped rosebushes as presents for her mother, a long skirt to wear later, and some tools Craig was lending her father. She stood back up from the truck and blew a wisp of curl from her cheeks. “You’re going,” she told Charlie with an affectionate and most determined gleam in her eyes. “No more nonsense about being too busy. It’s too hot to work, you know my mother will kill you if you don’t show up, and you’re too darned old to be shy. Furthermore, you’re going swimming when you get there.”

Charlie gave her a disgusted look and hitched up his jeans. “I’ll go swimming when hell freezes over.”

“It just did.”

“You’ll have a fine time without me,” Charlie said stubbornly.

“But I won’t
have
to have a fine time without you.”

Charlie sighed. “You used to be agreeable when you first married him, you know. Now suddenly it’s all Miss Bossy and Sure of Herself—”

“Oh, hush.”

“
Now
what are you two arguing about?” Craig demanded from behind her.

“The same thing we’ve been arguing about all morning.” Sonia turned with a sneaky wink for her husband. “If we don’t get going, the lemon pie’s going to melt. We’re not leaving until Charlie gets in the car. The pie’s going to be ruined, I’m going to cry—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlie said disgustedly, and headed for the passenger door. “She could wear down a rock,” he mentioned to thin air.

“He probably won’t talk to me for the rest of the day—dammit, wait a minute! I’ll be right back.” Sonia’s long legs took her flying back to the house. Her mother had given her an article on rose care that she’d promised to return today.

In Craig’s study, she rapidly sifted through the papers on the desk, knowing she’d seen the article there last. Her fingers found the four-page essay, but as she snatched it up, a file folder slid to the floor, spewing papers out.

“Only when I’m in a hurry,” she muttered as she bent over. Her hurried movements stilled when her eyes unintentionally caught the few lines of writing on the page. It was a receipt for services rendered—by a man in Chicago.

A faint frown furrowed her brow. The man was an investigator, according to his letterhead. And the money Craig had paid him was not insignificant.

Craig had never mentioned the investigator to her. Actually, in the past few weeks he hadn’t said anything at all about the incident in Chicago; she was so sure he had finally put it out of his mind. But this…

“Honey?” Craig called from outside.

An odd chill whispered down her spine. Quickly, she shoved the papers back into the file and returned it to the desk, racing with her mother’s article back to a pair of impatient men.

“It’s perfectly okay that you wanted to take the entire day getting ready,” Charlie told her. “I’m holding the melting pie you were so worried about.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” Sonia said solemnly, and slid into the backseat as Craig started the engine.

“How long are you two going to keep this up?” Craig wondered aloud. His eyes flickered back in the rearview mirror, settling on Sonia’s orange camisole with the white satin ribbons that looked precariously tied. Then up, to where her sassy lips curved in a delighted grin.

“It’s pinned very securely underneath,” she assured him.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, Charlie.”

Sonia leaned back for the ride, stretching out her legs, closing her eyes like a sleepy cat in the sun. Heat seemed to have lethargically replaced blood in her veins. The men maintained a steady conversation in the front seat, but she was only quasi-listening, and her relaxed smile was only partly sincere.

Craig had hired an investigator to find their assailants? She didn’t understand. The Chicago police were undoubtedly doing everything they could to find the muggers, and regardless, emotionally and perhaps irrationally Sonia wasn’t certain she wanted the culprits found, if it meant she and Craig had to be involved again. The incident was
done,
over with, and nothing could undo it. Dwelling on it accomplished nothing; the image of the blond man with the strange light eyes only raised nausea in her when she did so—nausea and the sick memory of horror, of feeling so vulnerable and fragile…

Unconsciously, her fingertips rose to her throat. An opal rested in the hollow there, an opal in an onyx setting with a chain so delicate the gold rested like a whisper on her skin. Craig had replaced the original one more than two weeks ago. She hadn’t taken it off since.

She opened her eyes slightly, focusing on Craig in the driver’s seat. Love was in her eyes—eyes that were blue-green like the soft shimmer of water at dawn. Love for the man who had clasped that necklace around her throat in the middle of the night without saying a single word. She’d bring up the private investigator’s receipt with him sometime, but not now. The last thing she wanted on her mind today was the mugging.

Craig’s hair was getting a little shaggy in back, she judged critically. His shirt was white, a short-sleeved knit like a golfer’s shirt; her eyes traveled over his shoulders, muscular and taut, sun-bronzed and strong. As he turned to Charlie, Craig was squinting in the bright afternoon sun; she caught his profile, from the smoky gray eyelashes to the slight bump in his nose to the look of his smooth lips. That chin of his jutted out. Not an easy-to-manage chin.

The chin needed kissing. So did the mouth. So did the eyes, the shoulders. All of him, actually. What he needed, Sonia considered gravely, was to be brutally wrestled to the ground, his clothes ripped from him and very, very soft kisses forced on him, inch by inch.

“Sonia? You remembered the potato salad?”

Her face flushed with color. “It’s right here.” As they turned into her parents’ driveway, she found herself staring at Craig for one more instant. Vitality was beginning to radiate from him again; he exuded energy. And virility. And purpose. His stride was swift and free, no longer inhibited by pain with every movement; the worst of the bruises were gone. His headaches had lasted the longest and still happened sporadically—normal, the doctor had said. But Craig hadn’t had a headache in days, not even a twinge. He’d never admitted to having them anyway, but she’d become an expert at knowing the signs.

They still hadn’t made love. Sonia had simply dropped all sexual thoughts from her mind. To encourage that kind of action when he might be hurting again—no. Craig would have to be the judge of when. So it had been a few weeks, she acknowledged. So? Sonia well knew that Craig liked his loving long and lazy. Very long. Very lazy. Very slow, and on occasion terribly, terribly wild…

“Are you sleeping back there?” Craig opened her door, peering in with an amused grin.

Embarrassed, she bolted up and out of the wagon, rapidly snatching up the potato salad as she did. Charlie had already disappeared. Sounds of laughter and conversation rippled toward her from the side of the ranch house, by the pool. The yard was crowded with little people, big ones, old folk and young…and the smell of roasting pig filled the air. Sonia knew her parents must have started the barbecue at daybreak.

The sun filtered down in long yellow waves, dancing on the pool waters, catching the bright colors of the children’s bathing suits. Laughter resounded in the air; it was a glorious day for a barbecue.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to get here!” June Rawlings descended on them, in white shorts and long legs not unlike her daughter’s, her dark hair pulled back with a cheerful red scarf. She swooped down to kiss Craig, then Sonia, then helped them carry their stuff in from the station wagon. “Where’s Charlie?” she asked with surprise.

“Mike Henning caught sight of him the moment we drove in. They’re already over by the pool,” Craig told her.

“That man,” Sonia huffed. “Getting him off the ranch takes a bulldozer, and you know darn well we’ll have to pry him loose to get him to come home.”

“You don’t think by any chance think Charlie thrives on all the attention you give him, do you?” Craig asked wryly.

“Nonsense.” When Sonia bent over to reach for their swimming gear, her shorts rode up on her bottom, and then slid down respectably when she straightened.

Craig’s eyes darkened. The tightening in his loins was familiar. A certain loneliness ached inside him for the intimate touch of her, yet an unfathomable bleakness etched sudden tension on his features. Thankfully, neither his wife nor his mother-in-law noticed.

“Have we got it all?” June asked. “Sonia, you sweetheart, you didn’t have to bring a pie.” She gave her daughter an impish grin. “And now we’ll have to hide it. If your father catches even a whiff of lemon meringue, you know there won’t be a bite left by dinnertime.”

“I almost made two.” Sonia let out a delighted burst of laughter as two small children came barreling toward her from the long slope of the yard. Rapidly she filled her mother’s hands, freeing her own just in time to catch two curly towheads, neither much bigger than knee-high.

“Sonie, go swim! Sonie, go swim!”

“They’ve been driving Arlene nuts, waiting for you two to get here,” June said dryly.

“Do my sister good,” Sonia announced. “Where’s Uncle Craig?” she asked the youngsters. “Are we going to give him a good dunking in the water?”

Her niece and nephew launched themselves at Craig then, and he carried one child under each of his arms toward the house, both giggling and menacing him with dire threats as soon as they got him in the pool. He threatened them right back, which only made them giggle harder.

They took care of the food, changed into their bathing suits and greeted the other guests. Arlene fussed for a minute over whether the little ones should be forced to take naps and was hooted down. In the melee of noise and confusion, Sonia found her father. Stephen Rawlings was standing on the front porch with a group of ranchers, holding a glass of lemonade, his weathered face squinting in the sun. He was tall, and his hair was gray these days; a paunch was developing around his middle. And Sonia probably loved him more than life. She collected a kiss and quick squeeze before her husband yelled for her.

“What are we going to do with these urchins now?” he demanded ominously, referring to the one towhead draped over his shoulders and the other hanging upside down in his arms.

For an instant, she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do with the children, but knew precisely what she wanted to do to her husband of the bare brown chest and frayed swimming trunks.
Stop that, Sonia.
“First, we’re going to throw them in the pool,” she announced, and grabbed one warm, wiggling body away from him. The upside-down one. “And
then,
you little troublemakers…”

The July sun beat down in increasingly sultry waves; a horse neighed somewhere in the distance; the smells from the barbecue wafted toward them; the pool waters felt like slinky, cool silk on overheated flesh. It was just that kind of day when all the senses were alive and bursting; Sonia started smiling and didn’t stop. First little Johnny swam between her parted legs, then Susie. Sonia’s father dropped pennies into the pool bottom for the children to claim. The children bullied Craig into doing a somersault underwater, and then they played keep-away with a beach ball. Sonia, laughing, loved the feel of the warm, wriggling bodies and quickly snatched hugs from her niece and nephew. She adored them. The little devils both knew it.

When at last Arlene showed up at the side of the pool, Sonia was gasping, shaking her head free of water as she handed over her niece and nephew. “Nap,” she mouthed to her older sister.

“I actually think they will, now,” Arlene whispered back.

“Not
them,
you fool. Me,” Sonia complained feelingly.

“Want
Sonie,
” Susie told her mother belligerently, the sound muffled as a towel buried her head. “Want Uncle Craig.”

“You only want them because they spoil you to absolute bits,” her mother informed her and, with an affectionate grin for Sonia, carried off the two protesting youngsters.

Craig surged up from the water behind her, his arms sliding around her waist as he pulled her back against him. Water suddenly trembled on her skin in the sunlight. She leaned back, eyes closed. Sensuality seemed to be stalking her like a thief in the night. The hardness of his thighs against the backs of hers; the cool, bare skin of his chest rubbing against her spine; the feel of his hands on her flat stomach, barely covered by the simple red maillot…His cheek nuzzled against hers. “I think you want one of those,” he mentioned idly.

She glanced up at the children before they disappeared into the house with her sister. “I do,” she agreed. They hadn’t talked about babies before, not seriously. She had wanted Craig to herself the first years, and then they’d been busy, gallivanting across the country, building their house…She still wanted Craig to herself, but the urge for babies was growing, the need for their own personal exhausting little Hamiltons to worry over and fret about the way Arlene did about her kids.

Sonia turned in Craig’s arms, her eyes level with the column of his throat. Water droplets curled in the damp mat of hair on his chest like diamonds in the sun; his skin was cool and wet, his hair slicked back. The urge to touch him, to rub her breasts against him until they ached and tightened…No one would see, she told herself. And knew darn well that everyone would see.

“Sonia?”

He had beautiful eyes. Sexy eyes, deep and tender and sweet. His finger curled under her chin, lifting it; she could feel the sudden tautness in his body, a kind of waiting silence as his head bent lower, blocking the sun, coming closer…