The Lies Uncovered Trilogy (Books 4, 5, and 6 of The Dancing Moon Ranch Series) (36 page)

"Do you still hate me, Marc?" she asked.

Marc curved his arm around her again, getting a little more used to the feel of a boney shoulder, and said, "I could never hate you, Mom. Things are okay. They've adjusted, and they've been very supportive of my choice of major. They were there at graduation."

Shit! He felt his mother's shoulders shaking and knew she was crying again. Turning her, he put his arms around her and said, "It's really okay, Mom."

Tucking her face into his chest, she said, "No, honey, it isn't okay. It will never be okay. We were always proud of you and would have been there if we knew." She swiped a finger beneath each eye and dabbed her nose with her cuff.

"Then I'll expect you and Dad and the rest of the family to make a trip to Texas when I get my PhD, okay?" He tucked his finger beneath her chin and lifted, so she'd have to look at him.

She smiled, like maybe it was a little okay, and said, "We'll all be there. Yes, we'll plan a family trip." Then the frown came back, and he knew she was thinking about the ramification of that—seeing the parents of her dead husband, knowing what she'd hidden from them.

Marc gave her shoulders a little squeeze, and said, "We'll work it all out. They know I'm here and they're okay with it."

He looked ahead and saw Kit with her back partially to him. She had no idea they were approaching, and as they neared, she pressed her hands to the small of her back and closed her eyes and raised her face and stretched, reminding him of the makeshift jungle shower again. The more time that went by between those few moments when he'd watched her standing beneath the spray and now, the clearer the image became, which was incongruous, as memory should begin to fade, not sharpen with time.

"She's really very pretty," Grace said.

"Yeah, I guess she's kind of pretty," Marc replied, and tried not to sound too enthusiastic.

Grace looked askance at him. It was the words,
kind of pretty
, that gave him away, and he knew his mother picked up on it. Kind of pretty didn't begin to describe Kit. But if he'd expected to fool his mother he should have said something more like,
'Yeah, all the guys on the dig including me think so, but she's had her fill of guys staring at her
.' and that would have been the kind of answer the mother of six sons would dismiss as males and testosterone.

Still unaware that they were approaching, Kit put on a straw hat with a wide brim and glanced in a mirror hanging by a cord from a tree. Peering at her reflection, she tipped the hat at a sharp angle and smiled at herself, then tipped it another way, and it came to him, as he watched her, that she'd look pretty good in a dress and high heels, maybe walking through a mall. He'd never thought of her that way. He'd only seen her in field boots and work clothes, and usually well covered because of the insects and the heat, except for the vee at her cleavage.

"Archaeology seems an odd field for her to be in," Grace said. "She's very feminine."

When Marc didn't respond, she looked askance at him, and her lips tipped slightly, as if he hadn't fooled her, which he knew he hadn't. "Look, I like her, okay," he blurted out. A little light came into his mother's eyes, like he remembered from the past when she caught one of her teenage sons acting exactly the way he was. Giving a little shrug, he said, "I know that look, Mom, but nothing's going to come of it. Kit already set down the rules, which don't include me in her tent at night. Ever."

"But you'd like to be," Grace said.

"Sure I would," Marc replied. "I'm a guy, and guys like having girls in their tents at night."

"Is that the way it is when you're working at a site?" Grace asked.

"For some," Marc replied. "I choose to..." stay in my tent and play with myself, came to mind, but he didn't think his mother would appreciate the humor. "I stay to myself on digs. It makes life less complicated. Kit's the same way."

But on this particular dig, the last thing he wanted was to stay to himself. He could use some female companionship in his tent about now, and not just for the obvious reason. He glanced over at his single tent standing alone at the side of the Indian mound and imagined himself inside, stretched on his back, staring at the ceiling. And then he imagined Kit in her big tent with the double mattress. But Oregon nights were chilly, so he wouldn't be burdened with images of her sleeping in the raw like it was in Belize. Unless that's why she had the big quilt to crawl under. Kit took off the hat and set it down, then went inside the tent.

"I'm glad she set some standards," Grace said, as they approached the encampment.

Marc sensed his mother was giving her approval, which would be good if he were in the running, which he wasn't. But if he was, his mother would be disillusioned to know that Kit had lived with a guy with small balls for three years.

He snickered as soon as he had that thought, because small balls had nothing to do with why Kit lived with the guy, and Marc Hansen having big balls wouldn't change things.

Kit ducked out of the tent and looked surprised to see them. "I didn't hear you coming," she said, then looking at Grace, added, "Mrs. Hansen, I just put a pot of water on the stove. Will you stay for tea? I also have cookies."

Grace glanced around the area, just as Marc did, and spotted, sitting on a propane burner, a dark green enamel teapot shaped like a duck, with a yellow bill that had steam curling from its nostrils. Kit's table was set with a dark green place mat and a dark green dish with little yellow ducks around the rim, like maybe she'd bought a set. A tin of Scandinavian cookies was placed to one side.

"You're getting pretty upscale, Korban," Marc said. "Do you plan to drag all this stuff to the next dig?"

"Of course," Kit replied. "It beats a one-person tent with no room to move around."

"You'd have a lot more room if you had a single mattress," Marc said, "so why drag along a double one?"

"Not for any reason you might construe," Kit replied, "so don't try to make anything of it."

Marc eyed his mother, who was smiling again. It had been a long time since he'd seen her smile and he realized he'd missed it, and the looks she gave him when she caught him in a little white lie like he did about Kit a few minutes before. And the slightly empathetic look she was giving him now because she knew he liked Kit, and Kit had just laid down her rules. Again.

"Honey, tea would be nice," Grace said to Kit. "I haven't had tea with anyone in a long time. My daughter-in-law, Emily, is so busy with my grandson and the new house she and my son are building, she doesn't have time, and my niece, Sophie, has her hands full with triplets."

"Well, I'm not burdened with anything right now," Kit said, "so having tea and cookies with a lady friend sounds wonderful."

Grace smiled, like Kit was the short-term answer to her prayers, then turned to Marc, and said, "You'll have to stop in and see Sophie and Rick before you come to dinner tonight. Rick gets home around six if he's not called out somewhere."

"So he's finished vet school?" Marc asked, then realized Rick would have by now, although he hadn't given it much thought during the years he was away.

Grace nodded. "He's working with Dr. Terry, and they're the only large animal vets in the area. You won't see Sam and Jayne though, because they're visiting Becca and Chase right now, but they'll be back in a few days. They'll be surprised you're here. And so happy to see you."

Marc wondered, for a moment, if his mother added the,
And-so-happy-to-see-you,
as an afterthought. After being gone four years without sending word, he knew everyone would be surprised to see him. But so-happy might be stretching it, especially for Sam, the man who'd been his legal father when he was born, then turned him over to his brother and sister-in-law to raise. But he'd stop by and see Rick. They were half-brothers, so that might mean something.

It just occurred to him that if it hadn't been for the sperm mix-up, Adam would have been Rick's half-brother, and the one booted out after birth.

Grace scanned the table, then looked at the teapot steaming on the stove and said, "If I'd known, I could have baked some pecan sandies. My children all love those."

"Then you can do that tomorrow and we'll have tea again," Kit said. She took two green ceramic mugs with yellow daisies on them out of a storage bin beside the cooler and placed them on the table, along with a plastic container filled with an assortment of teas. While pulling out a chair for Grace, Kit said, "This sure beats having beef jerky and Gatorade with a bunch of sweaty, dust-covered archaeologists in a hot, steamy jungle." She gave Marc a playful smile, and sat down with his mother.

As Kit poured hot water into Grace's mug, Grace said, "Honey, this is so nice, and now I want to hear all about you and your family."

Although he was being completely ignored, Marc lowered himself to the ground, propped his back against a tree, and waited to hear what would come, because in the three weeks they'd spent at the dig, he'd never asked Kit any of the questions he knew his mother would.

***

"You never mentioned anything about being a ballet dancer," Marc said, as he and Kit walked from Kit's encampment to Rick and Sophie's house, late that afternoon.

"That was in high school," Kit replied. "My dancing career ended there."

"But you told my mother you danced with the New Mexico Ballet Company," Marc said. "You must have been pretty good."

Kit shrugged. "Ballet every day kept me out of trouble when I was growing up." She jumped into the air, did a complete turn and landed in fifth position, and said, "The
tour en l'aire
works better with dancing shoes."

Marc stared. Of all the things he'd wondered about Kit and never asked, being a ballerina was the last thing he would have expected, but as he again brought up the image of her in the shower, he could imagine her wearing a tutu. She had the long graceful legs of a ballet dancer, and nicely tapered hips, and a small waist, and the kind of breasts dancers had—a couple of nice handfuls—with small pink nipples to match the pink tutu. Maybe a khaki tutu and field boots.

"What are you thinking?" Kit asked when she caught him smiling.

"I was trying to picture you as a ballet dancer," Marc replied. "The field boots didn't work."

"But they're a lot more comfortable," Kit said, while rising onto the toes of her boots. She stood with her arms curved in an arc above her head, then lowered her heels to the ground and continued walking. "It's also pretty hard to do a
relévé
, but I could work on that."

"Why didn't you continue dancing?" Marc asked, while trying to get a handle on the woman who was walking beside him.

"I got tired of sore feet all the time, and by then, I decided I wanted to become a wildlife biologist so I could be a park ranger," Kit replied. "That was the major I started with in college."

"You didn't do that either," Marc pointed out. "But a park ranger seems closer to reality than trying to imagine you in a pink tutu."

Kit laughed. "I don't know. I think I could make it work." Heels touching, she pointed her toes in opposite directions, forming a straight line, and said, "Actually it's easier to do a turnout in boots. They give me a wider base. Maybe I'll pick up where I left off while I'm here."

Marc eyed her with amusement. "You still didn't tell me what happened to the park ranger."

Kit snickered, "My father convinced me interior design was a better major for a woman, so that's what I switched to, but then that led to the study of Byzantine design, which got me interested in ancient petroglyphs and cave paintings, and one thing led to another, but by then my father was happy for me to do anything, just to finish college. He was afraid I'd become a professional student."

"But you were with Wally for three of the years you were in college," Marc said, wondering how the conversation had come back to him again.

"Actually, I started college when I was sixteen," Kit said. "I was homeschooled because my parents thought there might be a career in ballet ahead for me, so I finished my high school requirements early. My sister gave me a bib as a college going away gift. But six years later, I graduated with my age group."

"But you still moved in with Wally before you graduated," Marc said.

Kit nodded. "That's why my father didn't object. It cut college expenses. Then I got a grant for tuition, and Wally insisted on paying for my upkeep, so it all worked out."

"So, who broke it up? You or Wally?" Marc asked.

"Wally did," Kit replied. "He didn't like all the sex I constantly demanded."

Marc looked at her with a start. "Are you serious?"

Kit laughed. "No, Hansen, I'm not serious. He broke it off because of all the reasons I told you before. But why are we on Wally again? I'm beginning to think you're becoming territorial."

Marc laughed, even though he wasn't quite sure what she was implying. Being territorial about her would indicate she thought he was moving in that direction, like lining things up for a committed relationship, which he wasn't, although the idea didn't bother him as much as it had. "If I'm territorial, you'll be glad I am when you meet my brothers," he said. "They're a bunch of cocky, hotshot cowboys who'll be all over you as soon as they see you."