Money Shot (25 page)

“I just got a voice mail. He’s leaving town tomorrow morning. Overnight. Chickens’ll need feeding.”

She studied him. “You up for company on that?”

He jerked a shoulder.

“Rush.” She reached across the counter as if she were going to touch his elbow, but then encountered all the bare skin of his chest and drew back before she made contact. “It’s better to find out than to wonder.”

“Yeah.” He shook himself, shook off the idea that his own cousin, his blood, could have possibly tangled himself up this badly. “Not going to find out today, though.” He pointed his chin at the snowdrift blocking most of the window. “Today, we dig out.” He gave her a speculative look. “Unless you’d rather stay snowbound for a few days?”

“Start shoveling, Rush.”

He sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

 

BY LATE morning, Rush had cleared a path from the door to the woodpile and reacquainted the windows with daylight. In spite of a bright sun and still sky, though, the mercury hovered stubbornly around fifteen below. And conditions inside the cabin weren’t much better, with Maria just as stubbornly ensconced inside the slick, impenetrable Goose. He was losing patience with that, promises be damned.

It was—in Rush’s personal opinion—high time to shoot the shit out of something.

He banged into the cabin on a blast of frigid air, clapped his gloved hands together as if he were a cruise director or a camp counselor and said, “On your feet, di Guzman. It’s time to earn your keep.”

She blinked up at him from behind the glowing screen of her laptop. “Excuse me?”

He grabbed her jacket from its hook near the door and said, “I just got a message from my boss. He gave us the go-ahead to take down the moose.”

“Sir Humpalot?”

“The very one.”

“You’re going to
shoot
him?”

“That’s the plan.” He tossed her jacket toward her. It floated through the air and landed on her head like a purple parachute. “And you’re coming with me.”

She lifted the hem of her jacket and peered at him. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“No?” He gave her a smile that dared her to explain why exactly several hours alone in the woods together wasn’t a good idea.

“I don’t really . . . hunt.”

“I bet you’ll pick it up quick enough, seeing as you’re an expert marksman.” She stared at him and he shrugged. “Again, you’re not the only one who knows how to use the Internet.”

“You read my file?”

“Enough to know that you’re perfectly capable of taking down a bull moose at two hundred yards with the proper equipment.” He gave her a significant smile. “And since
you’ve
read
my
file, I’m pretty sure you won’t be surprised to know I do have the proper equipment.”

“Of course you do.” She sighed and set aside her computer. “You seriously want me to go moose hunting?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing I can say that’ll change your mind?”

“Depends on who you are when you say it,
Maria
.”

She gave him a polite smile. “Give me a minute to get geared up.”

MARIA STUMBLED along in Rush’s snowshoe prints for several frozen, silent hours, a high-powered hunting rifle in her icy hands, a perverse gratitude in her heart.

Not that she was enjoying tracking Sir Humpalot. God, no. Traipsing around the frozen tundra after a moose that had, for all practical purposes, vanished into an alternate dimension was about as entertaining as it sounded. But after last night she was hanging on to her composure by a thin, fragile thread, and the enforced silence of the hunt was nothing short of a blessing as far as she was concerned.

Last night
. Pleasure and fear spurted through her in equal, baffling amounts. It had been so many years since she’d come face-to-face with her truest self, but Rush—
hello, Maria
—had set that woman free simply by refusing to accept that she didn’t exist. Most people saw what you showed them and nothing else, but Rush? Rush didn’t look away until he had the whole picture. And since he knew as well as she did that he didn’t have the whole picture yet, he wasn’t planning to look away anytime soon. Which was precisely why enduring an endless hike in the mooseless wonderland of Mishkwa—minus conversation and eye contact—wasn’t exactly torture.

Rush stopped short and Maria nearly plowed into his back. She jerked the barrel of her rifle to the side and said, “Jesus, Rush, you could
say
something—”

The words died in her throat when he reached out one big hand and, for the first time since he’d all but set her on fire next to the coffeemaker, touched her. But there was nothing loverlike in this touch. He simply spread his big hand on top of her head and stuffed her down onto her knees into a clump of sticks that had probably been a berry bush in friendlier seasons. He cut off her muffled exclamation with a gloved hand and jerked his chin toward the clearing beyond the brush in which she was now crouched.

The moose was there, maybe twenty yards away, his big nose to the ground, huffing and snuffling in a churned-up patch of snow. His rack arched wide and impressive away from his giant head, and his waggly beard dangled in the snow, white with the frost of his own breath. Awe broke open inside her at the sight of something so huge and wild, so close she could hear it breathing.

Rush’s mouth came down to her ear, his warm exhale sending a completely inappropriate tingle through parts she thought had gone numb hours ago.

“We’re upwind,” he said, his words more breath than voice. “He can’t smell us, but you don’t want to waste time. You have a round in the chamber, so—”

She stared at him, shocked. “You want
me
to shoot him?”

“I didn’t chamber a round,” he said. “He’ll hear if I do it now. But I chambered a round for you when I showed you how to do it back at the cabin.” He nodded at the moose. “It’s your shot.”

A screaming panic filled her brain. Oh God, oh God, oh God. She didn’t want to shoot this moose. She didn’t want to shoot anything. She didn’t care what her file said—she was a computer geek, not a sharpshooter. She’d pointed a loaded gun at a living creature exactly once before in her entire life and she still wasn’t out from under the cosmic debt she’d incurred that day.

But what else could she do? After last night’s debacle, she was holding together Goose’s cultivated composure with duct tape and bravado. Did she really think it would survive one more blow? Did she really think she could refuse to pull the trigger without explaining why?

She slowly shouldered the heavy gun and sighted down the barrel. She breathed, willed her trembling hands to steady, her thundering heart to slow. And she prayed. Prayed to whoever was in charge of desperate wishes that the strength, the courage and the composure she’d perfected the appearance of could be hers in reality. Just this once.

The moose raised its head. He glared at her, as if he’d sensed her intention, and didn’t care one bit for the impudence.
You think you can take me?
it seemed to ask.
You think you have anything that would wound the majesty of
me
?

Her blood thudded in her ears and her body went through the motions without her volition, the action bred into her through years of rigorous practice. She pulled in a shaky breath then squeezed the trigger with her exhale. Squeezed it slowly, deliberately, though her heart beat crazily and her vision started to dapple. She sent up one last prayer, tried valiantly to control her breathing then absorbed the big rifle’s kick with a sense of submission. Her pain—even this small one—was well deserved.

The shot skewed high, cracking a tine off the moose’s rack but otherwise leaving him unmolested. He snorted out a great, derisive raspberry, wheeled and bolted into the brush. Rush patted her shoulder.

“Okay,” he said. “Not bad for a first try.”

“Thanks,” she said, handing him the gun. He sounded like he was talking to her from the other end of a train tunnel. “Hold on to this, will you?”

“Why?”

“I’m going to pass out now.”

“What?”

The dancing black spots closed in on her and she gave herself up to them.

 

RUSH SHOVED a cup of coffee into Maria’s hand as she sat, pale and unhappy, at the tiny kitchen counter of the Ranger Station.

“So,” he said conversationally. “Do you pass out every time you fire a gun?”

“No.” Her lips barely moved. Nothing did. Not her hair, her hands or even the brows that normally animated her face. She looked taut, as if even an attempt to smile might shatter her. “Only when I aim it at a beating heart before pulling the trigger.”

“And how often have you done that?”

“Just the once.” She shook her head, as if rattling things back into place. “No, twice. If you count today.”

Rush fixed himself a cup of coffee. He didn’t want one but he needed something to do with his hands. He still didn’t know why she was wrapped up so tightly in this slippery shell of hers, but he’d bet the farm it had its roots right here in whatever had her going lights-out every time she fired a gun in earnest.

“How old were you?” he asked softly. “The first time this happened?”

“Sixteen.”

“Were you shot?” His mouth went desperately dry at the very idea.

“No.”

Relief flooded him and he said, “Somebody you loved, then.”

“My sister,” she said, her beautiful face wooden. “She died.”

He squashed down the surge of sympathy he somehow knew she wouldn’t welcome. “You saw it happen?”

Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Front-row seats.”

Rush tried to wrap his mind around that, around watching a sibling die and being helpless to prevent it. Around being introduced in that way to the black power of a gun to give and to take away. Around an immensity of pain he knew he himself had caused countless times.

“Okay, so you were really, really young,” he said, trying to feel around, to go gently. “Impressionable. And that’s a pretty huge thing to try to understand when your world-view is still pretty small and self-centered.”

She winced and he hurried on. “Not you personally,” he said. “Just teenagers in general, you know? They tend to think they understand everything when they’ve really only seen a little slice of the world. It would screw up any kid’s head, witnessing a violent death that young—”

“I didn’t witness her death.” Her eyes snapped to his, dark and bottomless and filled with an endless sorrow that stole his breath. “I caused it.”

 

MARIA WAS oddly serene, given that she was having some kind of breakdown. She couldn’t say when she’d first noticed the hairline cracks in her control. Last week, last month, last year? All she knew was that Rush had noticed them, too. And, being Rush, he’d relentlessly wriggled himself into those cracks, pulling them inexorably wider, calling to the hungry, dangerous woman inside her.

And now he’d done it. He’d wrestled from her a single, bald-faced admission—
I killed my sister
—and it had shattered the façade. Shattered
her
. Or what she’d led the world to believe was her for nearly half her life.

The experience was not, she mused with a strange detachment, what she’d expected.

She’d braced herself for a muddy gush of guilt and rage and pain and regret. For a howling maelstrom of destructive energy. For anything but this profound, quiet sorrow. It rolled through her, crushing the air from her lungs and extinguishing whatever small, foolish sparks of hope she’d allowed Rush’s desire to nurture inside her.

Then Rush seized her hands, his touch hot, vibrant and so alive. It burned her, and she closed her eyes against the pull of it. Of him.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice low and steady and full of a compassionate understanding that made her throat ache. “You have to tell somebody. Whatever it is, it’s got you all tangled up inside. It’s got you hiding behind somebody else’s face and laughing somebody else’s laugh.” She felt his thumb brush her cheek, and that harsh voice went impossibly soft. “Maria,” he said. “You can tell me. I need to know.”

Tears threatened at the sound of her true name, and for a long awful moment she didn’t know if she’d be able to swallow them down. But she did. He’d asked for the truth,
her
truth. He’d earned that much from her, so she’d give it to him. She didn’t have anywhere else to hide anyway.

“I killed my sister,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.” He said it with a certainty, an immediacy that sent pain lancing through her. God. She didn’t want to do this. Really,
really
didn’t want to. She wished she could just stay right here, safe in the beautiful cocoon of his trust. But she was out of options. It was time to lay her cards on the table and let herself be judged.

“I didn’t pull the trigger or anything, no. But it was my fault anyway. My own stupid fault.”

He smoothed away a tear she hadn’t been aware of shedding with the pad of his thumb and said again, “Tell me.”

“Marisol was my twin,” she said. “Beautiful, smart, ambitious, with this sense of justice that even high school couldn’t dent.”

“And you?”

“Me?” She forced a chuckle. “I wasn’t. I was geeky, awkward, mathematically inclined. I laughed too loud, I had all these insane curls. And I was
tall
.”

“Totally your fault.”

“Like that matters in high school.” She gave a jerky shrug. “But Marisol didn’t let anybody torture me. She was the type to use her power for good, not evil. Which is why being jealous of her was so wrong. But I was. Jealous. Of her straight perfect hair. Of her curvy little body. Of her giant smile and her gorgeous boyfriend.” Maria sighed. “
All
her gorgeous boyfriends, actually. But especially Ridge.”

“Ridge?”

“Ridge Calloway. She met him when he was fresh out of the police academy and she was doing a summer internship at the station house. Prepping herself for a brilliant career in law enforcement. Marisol was always planning ahead.” She smiled at him, and it was small and wretched but genuine. It was the only kind she had left. “So he was a few fabulous years older, and he had one of those faces that belonged on a recruiting poster for the Marines. They made an astoundingly good-looking couple. The kind who actually stun people with their beauty. To this day I don’t know if I wanted him for myself, or if I just wanted to be Marisol, but when she broke things off with him—she said he was getting too possessive, if you can believe it. Who would complain about a guy like Ridge Calloway wanting you all to himself, Jesus!” She shook her head. “So when he started calling me? Well. It was a dream come true, right? He’d been blinded by Marisol’s physical perfection and her surface charm, but that wasn’t enough to sustain a man of Ridge’s depth. He’d want something more. Some
body
more. Somebody deeper. Somebody more like . . . well,
me
.”