King of the Mountain (7 page)

Dottie peered in the mirror now, her foxy features puckering in a grimace. “Load sixteen tons and what do you get?”

“Another day older and deeper in debt?” Kitty guessed in her best Tennessee Ernie Ford voice.

“Coal dust in your teeth,” Dottie corrected her friend drolly as she polished her own teeth with the pad of her finger.

Kitty laughed and bit into her bologna sandwich.

Carol didn’t even crack a smile.

Kitty had been trying to corner Carol all week so she could ask her how things were going at home. So far, Carol had successfully managed to avoid her, but her cut lip said it all.

“Is Jamie excited about the game?” Kitty asked her now, trying to draw the other woman out.

“Seems to be,” Carol said shortly, stuffing her half-eaten sandwich back into her lunch pail.

“Jessie was too.” Kitty took a sip of her coffee, thinking it wasn’t nearly as good as Ben’s. “Until
Coach Brown came up with the idea for that ceremony.”

Dottie opened a small jar of cold cream. “What kind of ceremony?”

“The girls are going to give their fathers a rose at the end of the season,” Kitty explained.

“How do Jessie and Jamie feel about that?” Dottie asked, reaching for a tissue.

“Jessie threatened to quit the team.”

Carol closed her lunch pail.

“She also told me that Bob came home.”

Dottie looked at Carol in disbelief. “When?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” the other woman admitted in a near whisper.

Kitty hated putting Carol on the spot like this, but she’d left her no choice. Now she shifted her gaze to the three bruises, each a finger’s width apart, that purpled her neck.

“He’s a good man when he’s not drinking.” Carol flipped up her shirt collar to conceal the bruises as she defended the indefensible.

Dottie rolled her eyes in disgust. “That’s what they said about Dracula.”

“I married him for better or for worse.” There was such a palpable intonation of real and remembered pain in Carol’s defiant statement, Kitty’s stomach turned.

“Well, if you ask me,” Dottie said, taking the top off her makeup bottle with a decisive twist, “you’re getting the worst of it.”

“Who asked you?!” Carol’s temper flared, but
her split lip trembled mutinously. “And what would you know anyway? You’ve never even been married.”

Kitty flashed Dottie a don’t-take-it-personally glance, then tried to reason with Carol. “We’re your friends and we’re worried about you.”

But the battered woman was beyond reasoning. “If you want to worry about something, worry about your own actions.”

Kitty’s headlamp created crazy patterns on the cavern’s dark wall as she shook her head in confusion. “What’re you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Carol came to her feet and hugged her lunch box to her heaving chest. “While the rest of us are wondering how we’re going to buy groceries and make the house payment if we have to take a pay cut, you’re driving a brand new Blazer.”

“I told you that was just a loaner.” Though she hadn’t looked for a different car yet, Kitty was more determined than ever not to keep the Blazer. Her relationship with Ben Cooper was confusing enough. The last thing she needed was to have her coworkers thinking she was colluding with him.

“Well, if you ask me,” Carol said mimicking Dottie’s earlier tone, “that Blazer gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘sweetheart contract.’ ”

A silence heavier than doom suddenly descended.

Kitty understood Carol’s position. In the not too distant past, she’d felt the same resentment toward the Cooper family. And Kitty herself wasn’t certain
of Ben’s motives. She also knew she had nothing to defend, having done everything in her power to keep her dealings with Ben on a strictly professional level.

Kitty also realized that her friend was attacking her to keep her from asking questions. But Carol’s problems at home were no excuse for her unfounded accusations right now. And hearing them from a woman she’d always considered one of her closest friends made her sick at heart.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, Carol.” Kitty’s hands shook as badly as her voice as she poured her cooling coffee back into her thermos.

“You do that.” Carol spun on her heel to leave, then turned back and all but collapsed at the table. Burying her face in her hands, she burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Kitty,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Dottie. I didn’t mean what I said.”

“We know you didn’t.” Kitty wrapped her arms around the sobbing woman and waited for the storm to pass.

Dottie handed her a tissue when it did.

“I love him, dammit.” Carol wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “The kids do too. Jamie locked herself in her room when he left and cried herself to sleep. And the boys …” She trapped a sob in her throat at the mention of Jamie’s two younger brothers. “They need a man’s guidance, a man’s hand—”

“So they can learn to raise that hand against
their
wives?” Kitty couldn’t help but retort.

“He swore it would never happen again,” Carol said, still on the defensive. She raised a hand to her wounded face but didn’t touch it. “He even brought me a rose …”

The hearts-and-flowers phase, Kitty thought cynically.

“It’s like he’s two people,” Carol continued sadly. “The nice guy and the bad guy.”

“They’re really the
same
guy, though.” Kitty didn’t want to push Carol into doing something she would regret, but she felt she had to confront her with the facts. Her life and the lives of her children were at stake. “You have to take both together, and you have to ask yourself if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want.” Carol balled up her damp tissue and put into her pocket. “All I know is, the harder I try to make him happy, the more miserable he gets.”

Dottie applied blusher to her cheeks with a practiced hand. “Why do women always feel responsible for making relationship work?”

“Beats me.” Carol realized what she’d said and sighed. “Listen to me—practically asking for it.”

The whistle blew, signaling the end of lunch break.

“Already?” Dottie had finally gotten around to unwrapping her sandwich.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Carol quipped as she headed for the exit.

Dottie took a fast bite of her sandwich before
rewrapping it and tossing it back into her lunch box. “You comin’, Kitty?”

“I’ll be along directly,” she promised, waving them on.

Kitty was usually the first one back to work, but she dragged her feet today. Carol’s remark about the Blazer—and by inference, Ben—stung.

Visions of his back and shoulder muscles rippling beneath his shirt as he shoveled coal rose unbidden to her mind. Closing her eyes, she recalled the feel of his finger tipping her chin up, his gentle touch eliciting a tingling sensation in her throat and breasts and lower body.

His words the other morning in the café had touched her in a different way. A deeper way. His tone hadn’t held even the slightest suggestion of self-pity, but ever since, she’d been haunted by the idea of him eating alone.

Granted, she and Jessie didn’t have dinner together every night. But they did share their hopes and dreams for the day, as well as a laugh or two, over breakfast every morning, and she couldn’t imagine—

Kitty came out of her reverie with a bang. The blasting had started again, which meant she had a job to do.

And just as well, she thought, picking up her pit helmet and lunch box. She’d spent almost half her life paying for one mistake. The last thing she needed was another man.

* * *

“Missed you at lunch break.”

“Maybe you weren’t shooting straight.”

Ben didn’t catch up with Kitty until the end of the shift, when she was running to catch the mantrap. He’d wanted to tell her about his car being ready, but her acerbic reply to his affable remark only fanned the coals of his frustration.

A group of miners boarded the mantrap.

He had forgotten now why he’d been looking for her and swung her around by an elbow. “Is it men in general or me in particular?”

She didn’t bother to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “We’re going to miss—”

The door to the mantrap clanged closed.

“I want to talk to you.” He still grasped her elbow—not hard, but with just enough pressure to keep her from getting lost in the new crowd gathering near the mantrap.

She looked down at her arm, imprisoned by those sun-browned fingers that kept invading her dreams, then up at his incisive gray eyes and said calmly, “Let go of me.”

The tension between them mounted to flash point—as dangerous as the swirling dust particles that could be ignited by a single spark.

Peripherally aware that they were attracting attention, Ben dropped her arm, angry at himself now for letting his temper get the better of him.

She backpedaled a step, out of arm’s reach. “What do you want?”

“To tell you that my car is ready.” Shadows settled in the creases around his expressionless eyes and mouth. “And to tell you that I won’t be needing a ride anymore.”

“Oh … well—” She swallowed hard to dislodge the sudden lump of disappointment in her throat. “That’s great. I hope it runs all right.”

The mantrap returned for the remaining miners.

To keep the conversation going, Ben said the first thing that came to mind. “The mechanic said he had a hell of a time finding me a new hood ornament.”

Kitty stepped aside as the other miners boarded, finding that she was in no great hurry to leave. “I’ve heard there’s been a problem with people stealing them.”

The door closed, leaving them alone in the mine.

“Crazy, isn’t it?” His voice echoed resonantly in the empty cavern. “Who’d want a hood ornament?”

“Someone who’s building a Cadillac a piece at a time?” she ventured with a smile.

His answering smile died quickly. His gray eyes dropped to her lips, making her emotions veer between the fear that he was going to kiss her and the fear that he wasn’t. She searched for something to say, anything to get her back on an even keel, but her vocal cords seemed to be temporarily out of commission.

The silence swelled with serious life questions that remained unasked; the lanterns at their belts
glowed serenely; their shadows danced on the dark tunnel walls.

Ben reached out to her.

Kitty’s heart revved up for his kiss.

His thumb glided across her cheek, removing a smudge of coal dust and leaving a trail of fire in its place. A fusion of regret and relief slowed her racing pulse.

“Well,” he said huskily, dropping his hand, “I’d better let you go before you stick me for overtime.”

“Aren’t you going up to see how your car looks?” she asked, her voice a whisper of flower and fog as she pressed the button to bring the mantrap back down.

“The mechanic’s not coming till six.” He set his lunch box on the nearby tool shelf. “Besides, I heard a noise in one of the ventilating fans that I want to check out.”

The mantrap came—too quickly!—and she stepped on board.

“Speaking of cars,” she said, holding the door open with her free hand, “I need to talk to you about the Blazer.”

He groaned. “Not again.”

“I can’t keep it.”

“I’m not taking it back.”

“People are talking.”

“About what?”

“About us.”

A rueful smile hiked up one corner of his tempting mouth. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I know that, and you know that,” she said softly. “But they don’t know that.”

“Tell you what,” he said, “we’ll talk about the Blazer tomorrow.”

“But tomorrow is Saturday,” she reminded him.

“Right.” He selected the tools he needed to work on the fan.

“So—”

“We’ll go on a picnic and talk about it.”

“A picnic!” She laughed, not taking him seriously. “I’ve got too much to do to go on a picnic.”

“You want to talk about the Blazer?”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing.” He wasn’t taking no for an answer. “I’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow morning.”

“Jessie’s got a dental appointment at ten.”

“No problem; I’ll just pick you up at eleven.”

“And then I have to go to the grocery store.”

He shot that argument down too. “I’ll bring the food.”

She tried again. “The weatherman forecasted rain.”

“For Sunday.”

“I’m not going,” she said decisively.

“Give me one good reason,” he demanded.

Because she didn’t trust her feelings for him. Or his for her. Because she was afraid of making another mistake, one she might never recover from. Because … “I’m just not.”

“See you at eleven tomorrow.” He spun on his
heel, adding over his shoulder, “Jessie’s welcome to come, too, if she wants.”

The buzzer sounded from aboveground, telling her that the night shift was waiting to use the manshaft.

Kitty let go of the door but edged the last word in before it closed. “I am not—repeat
not
—going on a picnic with you tomorrow, Ben Cooper.”

It was a perfect day for a picnic: amber-aired and spicy as cider. Autumn leaves had spread a colorful crazy quilt over the land, and the aroma of hot dogs and roasted marshmallows lingered long after they’d been devoured.

“I still can’t believe I let you talk me into this.” Kitty shook her head in disbelief as she set the cooler on the redwood table and began clearing away the plates and plastic utensils they’d used to eat lunch. Since Ben had brought the food, she’d insisted on cleaning up.

“Talked you into it, hell.” He plucked a maple leaf out of her lustrous hair and held it to his nose, inhaling the apple scent of her shampoo that lingered on the leafs drying veins. The juices pumping through his body told him it might as
well be spring. “Jessie and I practically had to kidnap you to get you to come.”

“Kidnapping … contributing to the delinquency of a minor—” She slid him a sidelong glance, smiling as she listed his crimes. “You’re in
big
trouble, Ben Cooper.”

From his vantage point on the bench beside her, he watched with growing interest as she stood and reached across the table. Beneath the vibrantly patterned Fair Isle sweater she wore, her full breasts swayed like two ripe pears.