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Liv didn’t acknowledge the threat with an answer. She put her heels to her mare and trotted past him, then she let the horse break into a canter when they reached the trail. But no matter how fast they moved, she couldn’t get past the fact that he looked much better in person than he ever had on TV—and so much more volatile.
God help me, she thought. I’m in trouble.
Hunter watched her go. That long dark hair of hers, all woven with gold, bounced against her back with the horse’s jog, just the way it had all those years ago. She wore a tight red tank top that told him she hadn’t put on a pound in eight years, except maybe in the right places. Her legs were still trim and lean and long, clasped in denim as her thighs gripped her mount.
What a shame that she could still make his mouth water, Hunter thought, because he had every intention of unraveling her lie, thread by thread, piece by piece, even if it hurt her.
“You’re sitting on that pony like you’ve got one of Dinny’s broom handles down the back of your shirt!” he shouted at her as she rode the horse in circles around him. “Loosen up!”
“I’m loose!” But then the horse broke into a faster gait and she squealed and grabbed the saddle horn.
She’d been afraid of horses from the first moment he’d met her, Hunter thought. Her father had been a college professor, her mother an artist. Though she’d been born and raised in Phoenix, Livie had never set foot near a horse until she landed on the Res.
He’d done his best to ease her out of her fear, if only for the sake of her survival. It had been a long distance from point to point back there in Navajo land. But Liv had always preferred to walk or stick her thumb out whenever she needed to go somewhere.
Now her new job demanded that she know how to manage a horse. She’d been hired by one of the major Flagstaff resorts to work in their stables and guide their group rides. She’d let her past speak for itself, implying that a girl from the high-country could gallop with the best of them. She needed the job, so she hadn’t bothered to mention that she preferred her heels planted solidly on the ground. She’d written him a frantic letter for help instead.
So Hunter had come back from New Mexico. He’d picked her up at dawn at her apartment and they’d slipped out to this isolated ranch north of the city. The owner was the father of a guy he’d crossed paths with in the Army.
Hunter was suddenly struck by inspiration as he continued to watch her critically. “You know what you’re doing wrong?”
“Besides sitting on top of a thousand pounds of unpredictable animal?” But her fingers loosened on the saddle horn.
Hunter grinned. She was the only person he’d ever known who could make him do that—grin himself right out of frustration. “It’s in your hips, Liv.”
She wiggled her brows at him. “You like my hips.”
“Not on a horse, I don’t.”
She sighed and reined the animal in. “Okay. Tell me what’s wrong with them. I’m all ears.”
“You don’t move them right. You’re all rigid. Move them like you do when I’m inside you.”
Her reaction delighted him. Her breath caught and her eyes went wide, then she looked around quickly to see if anyone was close enough to overhear them. They were alone.
She grinned wickedly. “Um, I forget exactly. Better remind me.”
He hadn’t been angling for such an invitation…and for the life of him he couldn’t walk away from it. Hunter started toward her horse with slow, deliberate strides. She made a move as though to dismount. Then something—maybe the snap of a twig as his heel came down on it, or the sudden tension that he could only imagine was zinging through her body—made the horse spook. It reared, and Liv went head over heels off the back of the saddle.
Hunter shouted and closed the rest of the distance at a run. When he reached her, she had a wild look in her eyes and she was breathing hard, but he knew in an instant that she was unhurt. She was spitting mad.
“That nasty beast tossed me!”
“Did it hurt?” He helped her sit up, brushed her off.
“Of course it did! It jarred the breath right out of me!”
“Will you live?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ll never touch me again if you don’t show a little sympathy here.”
“Sorry. But think about it. The worst happened. You got thrown. If you’re going to ride, it had to happen eventually. But how bad was it? Something to be so terrified of that you can’t do this job they’re offering you?”
He could tell by the way she refused to let herself smile that he’d made his point. “I hate you.”
“You love me.”
“Some days less than others. You did that on purpose, didn’t you? You spooked my horse to make a point.”
“Nope. It was an accident.”
She finally let herself grin. “I’m still not exactly sure how to move my hips.”
He had her flat on her back before she could breathe again. “Ah, Livie.” There was no one like her, no other woman who could make him crave and ache and smile during long nights alone in the barracks.
As they began fumbling with each other’s clothes, Hunter maneuvered her to her feet. “Not here.” They weren’t on the Res anymore.
“The barn,” she gasped against his mouth.
They headed that way, trying to walk decorously, but her mind was on other things and she stumbled once. Liv giggled. He caught her elbow and propelled her inside, into a stall. And they laughed and touched and feasted and it ended too soon because he had to leave again, but for that one high noon, everything was the way it had been before. He slid inside her as they rolled on bales of hay, and he whispered the truth in her ear, that she was all he ever needed.
There was never any doubt that she would go to the Spirit Room.
Liv prowled her sitting room at 7:30, her hands scraping restlessly through her hair then fussing with the belt of her robe. Her stomach was alternately a knot, then something squishy and weightless. She tried a glass of wine to calm her nerves, but it only made her nauseous.
“Okay,” she whispered aloud to walls that undoubtedly knew many more secrets than her own. “I’m fine.”
All that mattered was Vicky, Liv reminded herself. She would die to protect her, would keep any of this from affecting her, and that was that. Liv paused in her pacing to swig more wine, then her throat closed and she found it hard to swallow.
She had lied to Hunter all those years ago for one reason—to make him go before he realized she was pregnant. She’d known by then that he wasn’t ever going to stay with her, and she would not subject their child to a fly-by-night father slipping in and out of their lives. He would do the same thing now—fade in and out, a tantalizing wish—if she let him. So somehow she had to make him go away again, once and for all.
Kiki was right. She’d given Vicky a reasonably stable life. Maybe it wasn’t everything she’d ever dreamed of for her child, because in the end, she hadn’t had it in her to stay with Johnny. But it was enough. She would not let Hunter change that.
Liv moaned aloud, her stomach heaving. She had never been able to make Hunter do anything he hadn’t wanted to do. That was how she’d known that he’d never really been in love with her. Because when she’d told him to leave, he’d gone.
Liv was so grateful to be out of the stables, she almost didn’t mind the hokey uniform they’d given her for her promotion to barmaid. She ducked into the rest room to check her appearance before her shift started, reminding herself that this was actually a step up.
She’d lasted with the riding operation for five months until it had closed for the season right before Christmas. Hunter had come back three more times to hammer the tricks of the trade into her. She’d done well because she’d made it a point to do well. She’d hadn’t been thrown again. But she wasn’t about to spend the remainder of her life on horseback and mucking out stalls.
In January the resort had transferred her to their child care facility. The tips from road-weary parents anxious for some time to themselves had been great. The children, for the most part, had been impossible. Still, Liv had stuck it out for ten months until this opening had come up in the bar.
She intended to learn the hospitality business from the ground up, from the stables to the food and beverage facilities to the head office. Tonight she would entertain a few drunks and begin to learn the workings of the back of the bar. Unfortunately, she was going to have to do it looking like a cross between a beauty pageant queen and Annie Oakley.
The cowboy boots weren’t bad, she decided, except they were red. Her legs were good enough to tolerate the very short skirt. Personally, she thought the boots would look better with shorts, but it wasn’t her call to make. If she ever had her own place, she thought, the barmaids would wear boots with shorts. And the boots wouldn’t be red.
At the moment, however, she was stuck with petticoats—bustling white petticoats, layers of the damned things—under the full short denim. Liv turned this way and that in front of the mirror, but the contraption really didn’t afford her a good side. It was topped by a tiny denim vest that was laced up the front with red ribbon. In all her years on the reservation, she’d never once seen fit to put on a cowboy hat, but she wore one now.
Liv stuck her tongue out at her mirrored image to show what she thought of the whole getup.
“Yeah, but it presents some interesting possibilities for getting you out of it again.”
Liv squealed and spun away from the mirror. “Hunter!” He stood in the rest room door. “Where did you come from? You didn’t say you were coming back! You can’t be in here!”
“Nobody stopped me.”
“You can’t go through your whole life just…just doing things because no one locked the door on you!”
His face changed. For a crazy moment while it felt like the bathroom tilted on its axis, he actually looked confused, Liv thought. She realized that she had never commented on his life before, on the way he flew higher and danced faster and did everything better simply because it was there to be done.
But she had never needed so desperately for him to calm down and stay put before, either.
She wasn’t ready for him, Liv thought, her heart jumping oddly—and that was new, too. She’d always been just purely elated to see him again, but this time nerves scurried in her stomach. She’d been planning to buy a pregnancy test kit this weekend, to be sure. Then she’d thought she would write him, either asking him to come back so they could talk, or putting it right down in her letter.
Hunter, I’m pregnant.
She hadn’t anticipated that he would just show up like this out of the blue.
The rest room tilted back again and Liv felt light-headed. She closed the distance between them unsteadily, framed his face with her hands and kissed him soundly. “Sorry. You just surprised me.”
He wrapped his arms around her, the moment forgotten. “I had some time off so I came back. The guy out at the bar said you were in here. He said it was okay for me to come after you because they hadn’t opened yet.”
Liv lifted her left arm behind his shoulder to see her watch. “I’ve got five more minutes before they throw the doors open. Come back to the kitchen with me. My locker is there. I’ll get you the key to my apartment. You can wait for me at home.”
“What time do you get off?”
He was nibbling on her mouth, making it hard for her to think. “Um, midnight. But it will be one o’clock before I clean up my station here and get there.”
His lips claimed hers fully. “I can’t wait that long.”
“Then maybe you should stop going away.”
She hadn’t meant to say that, either. Maybe it was just hormones making her shaky. Or maybe it was just that night after lonely night, she watched her friends with their men, aching inside for her own as Hunter chased wild dreams a continent away. He’d spent the past month in New England on a fishing boat. And she’d slept by herself, and sometimes she’d cried with frustration. Why couldn’t she just have a normal relationship? Why couldn’t he love her enough?
Unconsciously she put a hand to her tummy, wondering if a baby would make the difference. She pulled out of his arms.
“Let’s go. I can’t be late starting my first night.”
“Liv, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just wish I wasn’t working tonight, now.” She managed to grin for him. “Why didn’t you write that you were coming back?”
“Because I didn’t know until two days ago, and then I just hit the road. I figured I’d get here before the mail could.”
“There’s always the telephone.” She scowled at him. “Did you get fired?”
“Actually, I quit.”
“You didn’t like fishing?”
“I found something I might like more.”
Her heart lurched. Please, please, please let it be me.
“It’s a long story,” he continued. “I’ll tell you when you get home tonight. You’re going to be late, babe. Better get moving.”
Liv had no choice but to agree. Her shift had started one minute ago.
They went to the kitchen and she gave him her key. She kissed him goodbye at the back door and somehow she got through the night. She didn’t learn much about the bar business, but then, she hadn’t expected to under the circumstances. Everything inside her tugged her toward the door, toward home and Hunter and whatever it was he had finally found. Only a tiny corner of her mind was on the patrons, the bar, the tips she shoved relentlessly and absently into the pocket of her gruesome petticoated skirt.
At 12:45, she fairly burst out the bar door. She jogged to her car and drove home faster than she should have. Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, her mind chanted. He would tell her he was going to stay this time—he had come home unexpectedly, after all, and in the rest room he had hinted that he’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He would stay, and she would tell him about the baby. Her period was a month late. The test was only a formality, after all.
When she parked her car outside her apartment building, her palms were slick with perspiration and her heart felt as though a riot of microscopic beings was going on in there. She pressed her hand to her tummy again as she raced up the stairs to her second-floor unit. He was asleep on the sofa when she let herself inside.
For a moment Liv just stood, watching him. How could a man be so beautiful? He made something ache inside her. Most of it was loving him, but part of it was pure appreciation. Even in repose, one arm tossed back over his head, the other dangling over the edge of the sofa, he looked as arrogant and magnificent as the hawk his mother’s family was named for. Liv went to kneel on the floor beside him. She kissed his mouth to wake him.
“You look just like those ancestors you used to talk about all the time when we were kids,” she murmured. “You look like a warrior.”
“Maybe a dead warrior.” He sat up. “I was out cold, wasn’t I?”
Liv chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to pass the time until you could see me again.”
His eyes narrowed on her as she stood. “That is the ugliest outfit I’ve ever seen.”
She cocked a hip. “Then get me out of it.”
Her gasp turned to laughter when he leaped off the sofa, caught her about the waist and tossed her over his shoulder. A moment later they were in the bedroom, and the pieces of her uniform were strewn all over the floor. And finally, as her hands flew over his skin and she arched up to press herself against him, her nerves were gone and the only thing that ached for him was her body.
When they were spent and wrapped around each other, Liv decided to tell him about the baby now, right now, while her heart was still thudding from their lovemaking. They were so close, skin to skin, heart to heart. It was perfect.
“Hunter.”
“Hmmm.” His fingers played absently with her hair. “Hey, you cut it.”
She frowned, impatient. “I do that every fall. Listen to me. There’s something—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “The thing I started to tell you about at the bar. You sidetracked me with all that white frou-frou there under your skirt.”
Liv set her teeth. “They’re petticoats.”
“They’re still ugly.”
“Well, I’m not wearing them now, so—”
“Come here.” She’d started to sit up, but he pulled her close again. “There really is something important I need to tell you.”
Okay, Liv thought. He could go first. “Spill.” She laid her cheek against his chest.
“I’m heading for California tomorrow.”
