Wait Until Dark (37 page)

"You can just let me off here," Val told him as he parked along the side of the dirt road.

"I'll walk you up," he said, turning off the ignition and hopping out before she could protest.

He was there to offer his hand even as she opened the door. She took it and hopped down, landing in the circle of his arms, where she stayed for a very long minute. Then, as if following a script she'd known by heart all her life, she raised her face to his, inviting his kiss.

Sky leaned down and met her mouth with his own, softly, so softly, as if fearful of causing her yet more pain. Holding onto his collar, Val pulled him closer still, and this time he responded to her demand with a kiss that all but took her breath away.

Later, after she'd gotten into bed and pulled the thin cotton blanket around her, she closed her eyes and tried to recall what it had felt like to have him kiss her like he really meant it. She marveled at how just the mere pressure of his lips on hers had caused such heat to spread down to the soles of her feet. She had fallen asleep thinking about how good it had felt, how it was about time that they finally began to explore exactly what had been hanging between them for the past few years, and how maybe just this once, reality had a good chance of proving to be better than fantasy.

8

SKY SLOWLY MANEUVERED THE PICKUP
up the hill, humming along with the tape that played almost inaudibly. Basically a shy man, he was comfortable with silence surrounding him. But he knew that everyone did not share his ease, and wondered if Val had been hoping for a livelier conversation the night before. The last time he and Val had spent any amount of time together alone, there had seemed to be so much more to say. But that was almost two years ago, before her face had appeared on so many of those magazine covers. How much might she have changed since then? He hadn't spent enough time alone with her these past days to call it.

But last night, just about the time he'd started wondering about it, she'd rolled down her window and reached her right arm into the night, raising her open hand as if to catch the moonlight, much as a child might do, and said, "Remember the time Liza and I went camping up near the lake and you and Cale and your buddies dressed up in sheets and came up to scare us?"

And in her laughter, he'd heard the same girl he'd known most of his life, that same girl who'd caught his eye the year she'd turned eighteen. And he remembered that same girl who had, the following year, come home for that first visit since she'd moved to New York. Beneath her big city polish and new, designer clothes, he'd sensed both restlessness and vulnerability, and in her smile, he'd found none of the confidence one would have expected from a young woman who was clearly going places. She'd seemed less excited about her new life than resigned to it, almost reluctant to discuss it, appearing more interested in Liza's experiences as a college freshman than in her own as an up-and-coming cover girl who'd already been photographed in some of the world's most exotic locales. She'd seemed vaguely disconnected from her success, as if baffled by it. The thin layer of fear hidden beneath her insecurity had touched him then, and it touched him now.

Sky'd known about the poverty that the McAllisters' had endured as children. Hadn't Cale once confessed, in the mist of his best year as a professional baseball player, that despite his success, he was never without the fear it could all be taken from him in a heartbeat? In Val, Sky recognized that same hesitancy, that reluctance to believe that all might, in the end, be well. In the tentative eighteen-year-old just trying her hand at a very sophisticated game, it had not been unexpected. In the woman, a ten-year veteran of that game, it came as a surprise.

And yet, for as long as Sky had known Val, he'd never known her to be consciously aware of her beauty, perhaps because it had taken so many years to assert itself.

His earliest memories of her were as a very spindly eight- or nine-year-old who, in worn shorts and bare feet, had sat on the top bleacher at the ball field, watching as her big brother played little league baseball. Her presence there had been a constant, he couldn't recall that she'd ever missed a game. And afterward, Cale would walk her home in the dark to their tiny house across town before returning to the ball field to celebrate a win or commiserate a loss with his teammates. But always, Cale's skinny little sister came first.

Sky could recall in perfect detail the exact minute when he'd noticed that Val wasn't a skinny little kid anymore.

It had been the summer before her senior year in high school. Sky had been a junior in college and reluctant to come home anymore than he'd had to, college life offering so much more than what was to be found at the High Meadow. He'd been hoping to get a job on the rodeo circuit like several of his friends were planning on doing, but there was no end to the work that had to be done on the ranch, and his father had other plans for him. Up until that summer, Sky had never thought of Valerie as much more than his friend's little sister or his own little sister's best friend. He'd had no way of knowing that while he was off at college, she'd been busy growing up.

And grow up, she had, and done a damned fine job of it, too.

There'd been a party for Liza's eighteenth birthday, a sleep-over with all her friends from town. The plan had been for the girls to picnic and swim in the afternoon, and return to the High Meadow for a barbecue. The girls were due back at the ranch by five, but when, at six-thirty, they still had not arrived, Mrs. Hollister had sent Sky up to bring them back. When he arrived at the lake, the girls were all still swimming, and he'd stood on a rock and with two fingers to his lips, whistled to his sister to get her attention, then signaled that their mother wanted her and her friends to start on home. Liza had waved to let Sky know she'd gotten the message and would comply. He'd turned to walk back to his truck just as the girl closest to shore had stepped out of the water and onto the grassy slope. She'd reminded him of that painting, the one where the woman was walking out of the sea, and he'd stood staring, mesmerized by her beauty and her natural grace, his mouth growing dry.

His face flushed crimson when she'd waved and smiled, and he'd realized that the rush of lust had been inspired by Valerie McAllister. He hadn't had one thought of her since then that had not been accompanied by that same stab of heat. There was something about her, her physical beauty aside, that had captivated him then and there and had never really let go. Oh, there'd been plenty of women in his life, all right. Especially those years he'd spent roping cattle and playing at being a rodeo hero back before he'd had to take his part running the ranch. The young ladies sure did go for that cowboy mystique.

But ever since Val had come back to renovate old Jedidiah's cabin, he'd found less and less of what interested him in the bars down in town or up in Lewiston. She'd come again for Cale and Quinn's wedding, and the time they spent together that week had seemed like a promise given, though no such words had been exchanged. There had just been an air of certainty about them when they were together, and he'd known then that when she was finished doing what she'd been doing, she'd be coming back home. And he'd be waiting for her.

He'd just never figured that she'd be coming back like this, wounded and afraid, the victim of some random act of violence, the kind that had never seemed to hit so close to home, until now. He'd been sickened at the news that she'd been attacked, sickened at the thought of anyone harming her in any way. It had been all he could do when he'd gotten back from two weeks on the Dunham farm not to take off for California as soon as he'd heard, find the person who had hurt her, and beat the living stuffing out of him. But of course, by the time Sky'd heard, Val was but two days away from being flown back with Quinn, and Cale had asked him to wait.

And so he waited at the High Meadow for his sister to bring Val home. Quinn had warned them all that Valerie was most self-conscious of the cut on her face, but even that had not prepared him for the viciousness of the wound. For her own sake, Sky had decided that the direct approach would serve best, and so he'd forced her to let him look at the cut, made her see that he did not flinch nor was he repulsed by the way she looked, as her eyes had told him so plainly that she feared he might be.

How anyone could have done that to her was beyond Sky's comprehension.

But what had all but broken his heart was her fragility. One look at her face and Sky knew that Valerie would not be leaving the hills to return to her old life even once the healing process was complete. She'd come back there to lick her wounds, literally and figuratively, because it was home. It was where she belonged.

But beyond all that, Sky knew - had known for years - that she belonged with him. He hated that her retirement had been forced upon her, that the choice had been taken from her but that was the hand she'd been dealt. It would be up to her now, how she'd play it out.

Sky parked the truck along a row of aspen trees and rolled up the window despite the heat. The bugs had been fierce this summer, and he hated the thought of getting back into the car later this afternoon and finding the cabin filled with all manner of flying devils. He took the picnic basket by the handle and swung it out, slammed the door behind him as he made his way to the front of the cabin.

"Val," Sky called through the open screened door.

"Come on in," Val answered from the kitchen. "I was just starting to make some iced tea to take along with us."

Sky held up a Thermos jug and grinned. "My mother made some this morning."

"And lunch, too, dare I ask?" Val pointed to the picnic basket.

"She referred to it as a snack," he told her.

"Let me guess," Val said. "A little fried chicken. A little salad. A couple of biscuits she made this morning. A few cookies..."

"I see you've done the Catherine Hollister picnic tour of Golden Lake before." Sky nodded.

"Oh, but not for years." Val grinned. "I'm delighted to see that the menu hasn't changed."

"I hope you have your bathing suit on under those shorts," Sky said. "It's going to be hot this afternoon, and that cool mountain water is going to feel really good after a long hike."

"I'm prepared," she assured him. "And frankly, that long hike will feel really good to someone who's been inactive for the past few weeks. I'm looking forward to the walk and the swim."

They left by the front door, Val taking care to make certain that the screened door was shut tightly, though not locked. It was only ten in the morning, but the sun had already begun to bake the hills. Val began to regret her earlier decision, obviously not a good one, to leave her straw hat with its wide, sheltering brim back at the cabin. She'd stood before the mirror, tying it this way and that, trying to cover the red streak that twisted down the side of her face. She had given up with a sigh, and tossed the hat across the room. There was no point in trying to pretend that her face was intact. It wasn't. And there was no sense in pretending that it didn't matter, because it did. There was nothing she could do about it, so she tied her hair back in a ponytail and searched for her sunglasses, reminding herself that she'd spent months pining for the sights and sounds of the hills. As long as she was here, she'd indulge in them. If she could share them with Sky, so much the better.

Sky linked his fingers through hers and set off up the well-worn trail toward the lake.

"I remember one time when Liza and I were little, Trevor told us that if we startled a bear up here, it would turn around and eat us both," Val said, "so we always sang at the top of our lungs all the way from the top of your driveway until we got to the lake."

"Ever see a bear?"

"Nope." She shook her head. "We never did, so I guess all of that off-key singing must have worked."

They paused where the trail crested, giving them a view out over a shallow valley.

"My granddad told us that the Crow Indians used to camp down there," Sky told her. "We used to find arrowheads and all sorts of things after a big rain."

"Cale told me that Old Jed had a Crow wife," Val said softly, "Maybe he met her right down there in that valley."

"I remember Cale mentioning that, that he had an ancestor who'd married a Crow woman and who'd gone into the hills by himself after she and their baby son had been massacred by some white soldiers."

"I don't remember that part." She frowned. "About them dying. I wonder where Cale heard that."

"I think he looked it up in the library for a paper he did in high school. We had to write about our family's ties to the area, if we had one."

"I wonder if he made that up," she murmured. "It's too sad if it's true."

Sky shrugged. "You'll have to ask your brother. Though I do seem to recall he did have an A on that paper."

"What did you write about?" she asked.

"About the Dunhams searching for gold in the streams on the other side of the hill. About how they found the silver mines instead. And about how the silver paid for the spread that my great-grandparents had down on the other side of town."

"The farm that you and Trevor are working this summer."

He nodded.

"It's been in our family for over one hundred years. After my grandfather died, my grandmother started to worry about what would become of the farm, what would happen to their animals. So Trevor and I, and two of our cousins, agreed to share the work to keep things going for a while. At least until a decision could be made about what to do with it."

"It's wonderful that you have such a close family," Val said. "That the four of you would get together and rearrange your lives for your grandmother's sake."

"We couldn't have her being worried at her age." He shrugged as if there was no personal sacrifice involved for any of them, though Val suspected there must be. "And besides, we all love that farm. You know, we all spent so much time there, growing up. I'm starting to realize that I love farming as much as I love ranching. Maybe more. And besides, having the farm on which to grow grain is great for the ranch."

He held her forearm to steady her as they began their descent from the top of the rise to the lake shore.

"One of the reasons why ranching has become so expensive, is that it costs so much to bring in feed. Dairy herds, for example, are just about non-existent out here these days - it's cheaper to ship milk in than it is to feed the cattle. Years ago, when we were little, my dad tried his hand with a small herd, but it was labor-intensive and not profitable. He ended up keeping a few milk cows for our own use, but after experimenting with several types of livestock, decided that the wool-producing sheep were his best bet." He grinned as he helped her down the uneven staircase of rock. "Meat producing animals were out, since my mother couldn't face raising animals to be sent away to slaughter."