Key Of Valor (15 page)

“You okay?” His voice was muffled, and she felt his lips move against her hair.

“I think I was a lot better than okay. I think I was fantastic.”

“You were. You are.” He'd just taken her against the wall. Or she'd taken him. “Can't think yet,” he admitted, and braced a hand against the wall so he could remain upright. “You went for the hoop today.” He ran his other hand down her body until he could skim a finger over the ring in her belly button. “It's so fucking sexy. I had no idea.”

He eased back just enough to watch her laugh. “We moved pretty quick. I seem to have missed your tattoo.”

Dazzled, delighted, she touched his hair. “You're a
funny guy, Bradley Charles Vane IV. All worked up over belly rings and tattoos.”

“I never had this reaction to them on anyone else. Where is it?”

“I'll show you. First, I ought to tell you I'm not finished using you tonight.” She leaned in, ran her tongue in a slow, wet line along the side of his throat. “But you may want to lie down for the next round.”

“Am I still standing?”

She laughed again, then eased around him, tapping a finger to her left shoulder blade as she walked toward the room across the hall.

“Wait.” He put a hand on her arm, coming close behind her to study the image. “It's a faerie.”

“That's right. Sometimes she's a good faerie.” Zoe looked over her shoulder, a small smile playing around her lips. “Sometimes she's wicked. Why don't you come in here with me and see just which she is tonight?”

Z
OE
faced the day with energy to burn and fresh ideas springing inside her head. While the coffee brewed, she hummed and scrambled some eggs.

There was a man in her shower, she thought with a mile-wide grin. A gorgeous man who'd kept her busy half the night. She didn't know the last time she'd felt so . . .
healthy
on less than four hours' sleep. Her body felt wonderfully loose and limber, and so did her mind. She was damn sure she could tackle anything that came her way, one-handed.

People who said sex wasn't important, she decided, obviously weren't having any.

She piled eggs onto a plate, added a slice of toast just as she heard Brad walking into the room. “Right on time,” she said and turned to offer the plate.

“You didn't have to fix me breakfast.”

“Don't want it?” She picked up a fork, scooped up some eggs.

“I didn't say I didn't want it.” He grabbed the plate from her, then the fork. “You having any?”

“Maybe.” She stepped forward, opened her mouth.

Willing to join the playful mood, he fed her a bite of eggs while they stood in front of the stove.

“Go ahead and sit down,” she told him, and poured the coffee. “Eat while it's hot. You said you had an early meeting.”

“Maybe I should cancel it.” He leaned over to press his lips to the base of her neck. “We could have breakfast in bed.”

“The only way you get breakfast in bed around here is if you're sick.” She eased away so she could lay a hand on his brow. “Nope. Eat, go home and change, and get to work.”

“You're awfully strict. But you make really good scrambled eggs. You got plans for the day?”

“This and that.” She snagged a piece of toast, then sat across from him to butter it. “Next time you get a chance, you'll have to come by Indulgence. We're down to the details, and it's really starting to shine.”

“That's the first time you've asked me to come by.”

“It's the first time I've slept with you, too.”

“I like to see it as a pattern emerging.”

“Might be.”

“I'm not interested in being with anyone else. Not in bed, not over morning eggs.”

“I don't sleep around,” she said in a serious tone.

“That's not what I said, and not what I meant.” Reminding himself to be patient, he took her hand firmly. “I'm telling you that you're the only woman I'm interested in. Got that?”

“I'm being—what did you call it—prickly and oversensitive.”

“Yeah, but you still make great eggs.”

“I'm sorry. This sort of thing hasn't been . . . I was going to say a priority for me, but the fact is it just hasn't been. Period. I'm feeling my way.”

“Try this: ‘Bradley'—by the way, my mother's the only other person that always calls me Bradley. It's kind of nice. Anyway, ‘Bradley, I'm not interested in anyone else either.' ”

Her smile bloomed. “Bradley, I'm not interested in anyone else either.”

“That works for me.”

It was working for her, too. And that was just a little scary. “You said once I should ask you why you came back to the Valley. I'm asking you.”

“Okay.” He picked up the jar of strawberry preserves she'd set out and spread some on his toast. “HomeMakers is more than a business. It's more than tradition. It's family. If you're a Vane,” he said with a shrug, “it's HomeMakers.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“Yeah, good thing for me. There were a lot of things to learn, to understand, to train for. I had to go out of the Valley to really get my teeth into the organization, to see it as a whole, beyond its beginnings.”

She studied him. He was dressed casually, and his shirt was a bit wrinkled from her hands, from lying on the floor all night. Still, he exuded power and confidence. The kind, she supposed, that was bred in the bone.

“You're proud of it. Of your family, and the beginnings.”

“Very much. It's grown, and it's still growing. We've done some really good things—again, not just business. Programs, projects, the layers my grandfather and my father built onto the base of it. I wanted to come back here, to the start, and make something for myself. I intend to make a mark, and I intend to make it in the Valley.”

He set his coffee aside. “And I'd better get to it. Are you heading out now?”

“Soon. I've got some chores and errands.” She picked up his plate before he could and took it to the sink, then turned to face him. “You'll make your mark, Bradley.
You're the kind of man who does. The Valley's lucky to have you back.”

For a moment he was simply speechless. “That's the nicest thing you could say to me. Thanks.”

“You're welcome. Now go to work,” she told him, and kissed him. “And make your mark.”

A homey send-off, he thought, and one he could get used to. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, then took the kiss several layers deeper.

Her eyes were blurry when he let her go—something else, he decided, that he could get used to. “Thanks for breakfast. See you later.”

She waited until he'd strolled out before she let out a long breath. “Wow. That oughta hold me.”

A glance at the stove clock had her moving quickly to put the kitchen back in order. It was time, she thought, to get to those errands.

Or rather, to start down the path she'd decided to take first.

Armed with her chart and her notes, she got in her car and drove toward her past.

Maybe this was part of the quest, she decided, dealing with and understanding the past while building a future. Or maybe it was just something she had to do to understand the route to the key.

Either way, she was heading to what had once been home.

She'd traveled these roads before, Zoe remembered, but always with some reluctance and not a little guilt. This time, she hoped, she was heading toward discovery.

 

THE
hills were almost colorless now, just the drab grays of denuded trees, the dull, dead browns of fallen leaves. And those trees speared up into a dreary November sky.

She turned onto the back roads, following the winding,
narrow ribbon through fallow fields, past little houses planted on tiny lawns.

Every mile took her back.

She'd walked this road, many times. Early mornings when she'd missed the school bus because she'd been unable to get everything done in time. She had run across that field, a shortcut, and could remember how
green
it had smelled in early summer.

Sometimes she'd raced across the field when she sneaked out to meet James, raced with her heart flying in front of her in the soft spring air to where he'd parked on the side of the road to wait for her.

The fireflies had danced in the dark; the high grass had tickled her bare legs. She'd believed everything was possible then, if you only wanted it hard enough.

Now she knew the only things that were possible were what you worked for. And even when you did, they could slip away from you.

She pulled to the side of the road, not far from where a boy had waited for her. And ducking through the wire fence, she walked across the fallow field toward the woods.

They'd been her woods as a child. Her forest, full of quiet and secrets and magic. They'd been hers still as she'd grown older. A place to walk, to think, to plan.

And it was there, she believed, on a red blanket spread over pine needles and crunching leaves, that she'd conceived the child who had changed the course of her life.

There were still paths beaten through the trees, she noted. So there were still children who played here, or women who walked, men who hunted. It hadn't really changed. Maybe that was the point. The forest didn't change, not as quickly, not as overtly, as what and who walked in it.

She stood still for a moment, breathing in the quiet, the November scents of rot and damp. Trying not to think, she let her instincts choose her direction.

Loss and despair, joy and light. She'd known all of those here. Blood from the loss of innocence? Fear of the consequences, hope that love would be enough?

She sat on a fallen log and tried to visualize the roads of her life that led from here, and the key that waited on one of them.

She heard the tap of a woodpecker, and the sigh of wind through empty branches.

And then she saw the white buck standing, watching her with eyes of sapphire blue.

“Oh, my God.” She sat where she was, afraid to move. Afraid to breathe.

Both Malory and Dana had seen a white deer, she remembered, what Jordan had called a traditional element of a quest. But they'd seen the buck at Warrior's Peak, not in a narrow strip of West Virginia woods.

“This means I was right, I was supposed to come here. It must mean I'm right. But what do you want me to do? I want to help. I'm trying to help.”

The buck turned his head and walked away down the rough path. With her knees trembling, Zoe rose to follow.

Had she once dreamed of this? she wondered. Not this exact thing, not of following the path of a white buck, but of magic and wonder and the wish to do something important.

Dreamed, she admitted, of doing something that would take her away from here, away from the tedium and the despair of not being able to see the world beyond these woods.

Had she looked to James for that? Had she loved him, or simply seen him as an escape?

She stopped, pressed a hand to her heart in a kind of shock. “I don't know,” she whispered. “I really don't know.”

The buck looked back at her, then gathered himself, leaped over the rocky banks of a small creek, and bounded away.

Hoping that she understood, Zoe took the left fork, walked out of the woods and onto the packed gravel of the trailer park.

Like the woods, it had changed little. Different faces, perhaps, different units here and there. But it was still lined with homes that would never grow roots.

She heard radios, televisions—the hum and blare of them dancing out of windows—the sound of a baby crying in short, fitful wails, and the gun of an engine as someone drove out of the park.

Her mother's place was a dull, pale green, with a white metal awning over the side door. The car parked next to it had a dented fender.

She hadn't taken the summer screen off the door yet, Zoe noted. It would make a harsh squeaking sound when you opened it, a slapping sound as you let it go. She climbed the stacked cinder blocks her mother used as steps, and knocked.

“Come on in. I'm setting up.”

The screen squeaked as Zoe opened it, and the inner door stuck a bit as she turned the knob. She gave it a little shove, and let the screen slap closed behind her as she went inside.

Her mother was in the kitchen, where she made her living. The short counter by the stove was crowded with bottles, bowls, a plastic box full of colorful rods for setting a perm, a stack of hair towels, frayed at the ends from countless washings.

The coffeepot was on, and a cigarette smoked in an ashtray of green glass.

She looked too thin, was Zoe's first thought, as if life had carved her down to the bare essentials. She wore snug jeans and a skinny black top that only emphasized the sharp angles. Her hair was cut short, and she was wearing it in a hot red these days.

Her bedroom slippers scuffed the floor as she poured
coffee with her back to the door. And were worn, Zoe knew, for comfort.

She was setting up to do a perm, and would be on her feet for a while.

The television across in the living area was tuned to one of the morning talk shows that seemed to thrive on anger and grief.

“You're running early or I'm running late,” Crystal said. “I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.”

“Mama.”

Mug in hand, Crystal turned.

She'd made up her face already, Zoe noted. Her lips were red, her lashes thick with mascara. Despite the cosmetics, her skin looked tired and old.

“Well, hell, look what the wind blew in.” Crystal lifted the mug and drank as her gaze slid past her daughter. “You bring the boy?”

“No. Simon's in school.”

“Nothing wrong with him?”

“No, he's doing fine.”

“With you?”

“No, Mama.” She stepped over, kissed Crystal's cheek. “I had something I had to do out this way, and I thought I'd come see you. You've got an appointment coming?”

“ 'Bout twenty minutes.”

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Help yourself.” Crystal scratched her cheek as she watched Zoe reach overhead for another mug. “You just happened to have business out here? I thought you were starting your big fancy place over there in Pennsylvania.”

“I am, though I don't know if I'd call it big and fancy.” She kept her voice upbeat and struggled to overlook the suspicion, and the criticism, in her mother's. “Maybe you could drive over sometime and take a look. We should be open in just a few more weeks.”