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“Did you get everything in before the rain started?”
“You needn’t concern yourself.” Her answer was immediate and brisk.
“Did you get everything in?” It was a demand, not a request for information.
She shook her head, no Her eyes dropped to his hand, as she realized he had just undone the top two buttons of her jacket. Perri wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of trying to slap his hand away. If she lost her temper with him, she lost. It was that simple.
“Very funny, Matt.” It simply amazed her that she could sound so damn bored while her pulse was scrambling like mad at his touch.
“Just testing a theory I have about those buttons.” He looked so deceptively friendly as the nail of his index finger scraped lightly down from her collarbone to the third button, revealing skin the color of honey above the top of her lace camisole.
Perri breathed in the scent of wind and sun, horses, hay and Matt: an all-too-familiar combination she had worked very hard to forget. It was, at this moment, impossible to forget anything about him, not when he touched her.
Abruptly, he moved toward the back door. She felt the same sick, hollow sensation come over her that she bad felt the day she had learned he was marrying someone else.
“You can button back up, for now. I’ll get the rest of your stuff.” He paused in the doorway. “And you can quit glaring at me, Stone. I’m just being neighborly. After all, we have to work together. I’m looking forward to it.”
She missed him the second he walked out the door. Dear God, how was she ever going to work with this man? She rebuttoned her jacket and finally released the breath she’d been holding. Perri moved through the front door, to the comfort of the covered porch.
The hail was beginning to play out, the small pellets clattering harmlessly off the roof. The brief storm that had passed in Gannie’s living room had caused far more damage than the current weather pattern.
Perri stood there staring blindly at the honeysuckle as it took a beating from the storm. She reminded herself that she was twenty-nine years old now, not seventeen and helplessly in love with a twenty-four-year-old Matt Ransom. Those two individuals no longer existed and the ones who stood on the property today had a job to do.
Surely. they were mature enough to get it done. They would work together because they had to, for something important to both of them. He was just playing with her, she reasoned, nothing more. Just testing her for a reaction. He had made it crystal clear he didn’t want her.
She had seen him change overnight into a man who would enjoy toying with her if she challenged him. Standing toe-to-toe and balding it out might be satisfying; but a calm, dignified approach was the only safe road.
Perri reminded herself that life had surely hardened Matt Ransom, that he had changed in ways she didn’t understand. But no matter what she had heard in the last twelve years, he couldn’t have changed that much. She wouldn’t believe it of him. Intuitively she knew he would never treat a lady with anything less than respect. And, after all, this was just business. Perri Stone excelled at “just business.”
She shivered as chilling rain blew onto the porch. Still mentally reassuring herself, Perri moved back into the hall. The pressure had lessened enough with the storm’s passing for her to shut the door before she started up the stairs.
As she reached the second floor, Matt caught up with her. She wordlessly turned toward the back bedrooms as he automatically moved with her suitcases to the front
He halted in the doorway of “her” room; the room where he had taken her virginity, where he’d taken her heart. “I have a choice of rooms this time and I’ve decided I’d rather sleep in the back.” She spoke quietly, head high, back straight, as she moved down the hall toward the back bedroom overlooking the pecan trees.
Matt stood immobile, just looking into the familiar bedroom. Finally he turned and followed her, his features a complete blank. “Don’t blame you,” he said shortly. “You’ve outgrown the little room.” Bringing in the suitcases, he set them down as she indicated. “You have an awful lot of stuff for somebody just passing through, haven’t you?” It was a challenge.
“What makes you think I’m just passing through?” If she could find a way to slow down and stop answering him like she was a repeating rifle, she might get through this. “It will take some time to honor Gannie’s request, whatever the details turn out to be,” Perri said. “I’m here for a year at least, or something like that, right? That is, unless you’ve already heard the fine points of the will and have got it all figured out.”
She turned and gazed out the window overlooking the backyard. “Have you, Matt?” she asked. “What are we supposed to do?” She didn’t like the way that last question softened her.
“Do you care, Perri?” he countered. “Or do you just plan on going through the motions to fulfill the terms of the will? Gannie is gone. You’re free to run for good now,” he added savagely. Perri’s neck arched slightly as if someone had struck her between her shoulder blades.
Matt crossed to the opposite set of windows, checking the storm’s progress from the east. “Whatever we do will affect the town for some time to come. That was Gannie’s plan, some sort of long-term project for improvement. Not something that can be neglected after a ‘respectable’ period of time.” He turned to face her. The air seemed highly charged around them and suddenly the back bedroom felt very crowded.
“If you think you can get away with just going through the motions before you start looking to sell out and leave, you may as well know now that I’ll buy you out with pleasure,” he declared. “That would suit you, wouldn’t it, Per?” She felt him move up behind her. “Then you could go back to New York or move on to someplace new.”
The small insult didn’t escape her. Apparently Matt figured that no home could ever mean enough to her to keep her from moving on.
“I heard you didn’t even have a permanent job to give up in order to come down here,” he added. “You just ‘consult’ here and there for a bunch of different banks, right?”
The green in Perri’s eyes blazed as she turned away from the window. “Let’s get this much out of the way, right now, Matt,” she said angrily. “I care deeply about Spirit Valley. It was my home. And Gannie was just about the most important person in my world.” The tears in her throat almost caused her voice to fail. But not quite. Perri stubbornly willed herself to go on.
“I owe her more than I can ever express. So don’t think you’ve got any right to chastise me for having left,” she went on. “I don’t feel I owe you any explanations for my way of life. But please, know this: I would have given anything to have stayed home.”
Time seemed to stretch to the snapping point before he gave her a rueful half smile. Her heart broke as she saw she had been right. It never really reached his eyes.
“You’re not the little girl you were the last time we stood in this house,” he said, shoving his hands into his back pockets. “Mistakes were made. I should never have touched you. I knew that, and I take full responsibility,” Matt declared. “I was robbing the cradle but I just couldn’t help myself.” He looked away from the woman she had become.
“However, all that doesn’t change the fact that you left. You are no longer a part of this world,” Matt said coldly. “There are no bright lights here. There is nothing left for you but some stone markers in the cemetery.” The very idea served to make him angrier. He turned back to face her. “What is here in Spirit Valley that could possibly make you want to stay?”
The look of pure longing she couldn’t completely disguise caused them both to blush. The unguarded moment increased his fury. Wanly, she started to move toward the door. Then Perri stopped, turning in frustration and maybe even some fear. Like that night twelve years ago, there was nowhere to run.
“Let’s just find out right now, shall we,” Matt whispered as he moved across the room and reached for her. He held her jaw firmly in his hands, those long fingers biting lightly into the back of her neck. His palms burned her as they slowly moved down her shoulders to her arms, just before his fingers gently circled her wrists.
“Do you taste the same now that you’re all grown up, darlin’?” he asked lightly. “I’ve been meaning to find out ever since you got back into town.” In seconds he had the answer for himself as he ruthlessly pulled her to him and his mouth took hers.
Perri’s shocked intake of breath opened her mouth under his and Matt took full advantage of her surprise. His tongue probed decisively as he cuffed her wrists to the small of her back with one hand.
The electrically charged air seemed to light a spark within her Perri had long assumed to have died. She tried desperately to breathe into her burning lungs. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had had a moment to think about it, or even if he hadn’t molded her firmly to him. She would have opened for him anyway. She hoped that realization could remain her secret, and not a part of the battering her pride was about to take.
For Perri couldn’t completely stop herself from responding as his tongue suggestively moved in and out of her welcoming month. Matt couldn’t have made his intent more clear. She couldn’t have made her assent more apparent. She melted against him and tried not to moan as he played with her mouth, delicately nipping at her lower lip.
Matt was the one who abruptly ended the kiss. He picked up the conversation right where he’d left off.
“You do taste the same,” he said gruffly. “I like that. So that’s what we have here,” he declared as he caged her face in his hands. “Heat. That’s all it can be between us, Perri. Just heat.” He allowed himself one more brief, hard kiss before he released her, none too carefully. She struggled to regain her composure as he nonchalantly turned back to the window to check the sky.
“That’s all I have left for any woman. So, if you’re as agreeable as you seem, we could have a good time before you leave.” He turned back to face her, his smile more than just a little arrogant. “But don’t expect love from me, hon. Certainly not for you,” he added. “It’s all been burned away.”
Perri’s embarrassment grew as he blatantly considered her before starting for the door. It was as if nothing of any importance had happened between them. “Matt,” she called, frozen to the spot where he bad left her.
He paused without turning around.
“I never got to tell you how sorry I was to hear about Cadie and the babies.”
He walked out without a word.
Matt was down the stairs and out the front door, his pickup making a fast retreat before she even came close to getting her breath back. “Well, that went really well,” she muttered. Perri sank to the bed and rapidly worked the window open. She needed air. Immediately.
So much for the calm. ladylike approach. She couldn’t have made a bigger fool of herself, if she had thought it out with both hands for two weeks. Perri rested her head against the cold metal of the window screen, inhaling the mingled smells of metal, rain and wet grass. For the longest time she couldn’t move. She just stared at the yard.
It was ridiculous. He’d just kissed her senseless and walked out. Perri wondered if he’d even paused long enough to shut the front door. “I’m good at strategy and logic,” she muttered. “I’ve got tougher clients back in Manhattan to deal with on a daily basis. I’m known for never falling apart.”
Perri stopped. It had come to this—she was justifying herself to a pecan tree. This from a woman who always kept it together. A woman who had never permitted herself to test the endurance of another love.
“This is getting me nowhere,” she whispered. Perri had to move. She couldn’t continue to sit there as daylight burned away.
Out the door of the bedroom and halfway down the stairs. she paused and looked around at the beloved old place. Gannie’s windows needed cleaning. She made a mental note to take care of that first thing. The dusty windows, more than the laying of flowers by a gravestone, caused her to feel the punch of knowing the old woman was truly gone.
Her gaze drifted into the living room as she sank down onto one of the steps. Through the rungs of the staircase she could see the memory box she had made as a gift her sophomore year in high school.
Inside the memory box, the gold railroad spike needed polishing; but the silver-plated engineer’s watch didn’t look quite as tarnished. It gleamed softly in the stormy light, as if just waiting for its owner to descend the stairs and retrieve it, along with his favorite pipe. It was almost as if the Rock Island Line still had some muscle in the old Indian Territory. She had chosen each of Gannie’s treasures for the display with great care, the year before her world had fallen apart.
A picture of Miss Vienna Whitaker and her son, Matthew Lawrence Ransom, hung on the wall by the entrance to the living room. It had been taken in front of the tiny graveyard just outside and down the rise from the front door. Perri had stopped there on her way to the house, placing a single rose on a worn, white marker that said Stone Baby 1889.
Devoid of trees or bushes, with a gate that still stuck at the last, the skeletal, white iron fence and small arch sheltered thirty-one graves. It had served as a final resting place only until the town had been incorporated. Now, it was part of Perri’s inheritance and therefore, her responsibility.
The porch, the pictures, the miniature graveyard, the memory box: so many things that softened the heart. So many symbols of everything she had ever hoped and dreamed of maintaining. Everything she had, at one time, thought she would miraculously have a chance to treasure now was hers by right. Now that the heart had gone out of the dream.
Perri slowly dropped her forehead onto the arm covering her knees and did what she’d been too proud to do that night twelve years before. She cried her eyes out. “Oh, Gannie,” she sobbed as she sat on the stairs.
Iced cucumber slices helped soothe her swollen eyes. The task of repairing her makeup served to pull her back together. Perri armored herself in one of the few business suits she had brought with her. Most everything she had to choose from made her look like she was on her way to a funeral. She didn’t kid herself. She was about to go into battle. As she locked up, she noticed the sun was on its way back. It lifted her spirits to see that for now, the storm had passed. Knowing a drive would clear her head, she headed east past the grain elevators.
On impulse, she stopped into the local florist for a half-dozen roses. Perri watched the owner’s daughter take great care to arrange them in leaves and baby’s breath, tissue and ribbon.
Shyly, the girl eyed Perri’s business suit, with its fitted waist and mandarin collar. The severe style of dress might have gone unnoticed, but for how effortlessly it displayed her sleek, trim shape. And the fact that it was black. Nobody wore black at high noon unless they were on their way to a funeral.
Or a gunfight, Perri mused. How appropriate.
“Anything else?” the florist inquired.
“Thank you, no.” Perri smiled. The teenager before her was so fresh and pretty, with the dramatic looks of the Plains Indians.
“Here’s your change then,” the girl chirped, making the purchase. “Y’all come back.”
“I already have,” Perri whispered to herself, halfway to the door.
Back inside the car, Perri placed the beautifully wrapped roses on the seat and headed for the back roads. The sky had cleared to a bright, shiny blue, and it was wonderful to get off the highway. It felt right to wind through little towns, past pastures and railroad tracks, past small ponds and under the gentle arch of the windbreaks. She stopped in the middle of the road until an egret could make up its mind which way to fly.
As she drove on, a red pickup turned onto the road in front of her. A big black rottweiler riding in back seemed to smile as they drove past old Bohemian Hall. Some of her ancestors had settled right here after the Land Run of 1889.
She followed behind as the dog and his pickup led her onto Route 66. Her eyes automatically checked a field of wheat on the driver’s side of the road as she made the turn. “Short oats. That’s not right,” Perri muttered, frowning slightly. The wheat should be solid gold and ready to drop by now. Even she knew that.
The bridge over the railroad tracks into town looked a little shabby, and somehow smaller than Perri remembered. A World War II fighter plane, permanently parked in front of the American Legion Hall, seemed to let the traveler know he had entered another time. Spirit Valley, Oklahoma, announcing right up front that its ideals were as much a part of the past as the old plane, the tracks and the weathered bridge. Perri stopped at a light and tried to make sense of it all.
Elms lining Elm Street beyond the underpass had been planted over fifty years ago and now stood tall as she drove into the cemetery. She unwrapped the roses with her window down, listening intently. The sound of the wind filled the silence. No birds sang. At one time, hundreds of scissortails had inhabited this area.
Perri got out of the car with the separated roses. As she placed single white roses on different graves throughout the section, she asked herself what would they think? What would they do differently?
She approached a marble bench and bent to touch the new marker surrounded by funeral wreaths. Perri stared hard at the stone, before reverently covering it with the last rose. What have you gotten me into, Gannie? Rage, grief and a sort of deep, deep hurt she bad always associated with the loss of innocence, warred within her.
No one but Gannie had known exactly how she had felt. No one but Gannie had ever learned all of the truth about the most important event in Perri’s life: when she had lost him. “Why make it so I have to work with Matt?” she pleaded softly. “You know I’ll always love him. Why put me through this kind of pain?” What plan or project could be that important?
Dry-eyed and thoroughly bewildered at the part she now had been assigned to play, Perri stared at the fluttering rose for a long time. She had wanted a tribute that wasn’t staked in, fighting with the wind in order to stay.
Knowing the roses would most likely be blown apart and away before she made it out of the cemetery, she got back in the car and drove on. The sight of a martin frantically tailgating a hawk kept her from dwelling upon what lay ahead. Perri didn’t look back.
Perri parked in the lot adjoining the courthouse and the professional buildings. She made her appointment dead on time. The lawyer’s secretary eyed her outfit and smiled in understanding. “Go on in, Ms. Stone, please.”
Perri took a deep breath, knocked once and opened the door. Help me through this, Gannie, please, she prayed as she entered the room.
“Hello, John,” Perri smiled at her old friend and Gannie’s champion.
The room’s other occupant had obviously arrived early for their appointment and now stood with his back to the door. She noted that his stance was relaxed, as if this were his turf, not hers. He didn’t turn around upon her arrival, but instead stood staring out the window at the now-defunct railroad depot which housed the Spirit Valley Historical Museum.
Over his shoulder, Perri could clearly see the bronze plaque declaring that this spot had been the western boundary for the Run of the Unassigned Lands. At noon on April 22, 1889, the starting gun had sounded and two million acres of Indian Territory had been opened up for the Run.
By nightfall, a tent city had sprung up on the spot where they now stood. What their ancestors had seen that day, and shortly thereafter, bore no resemblance to the view through the window over which Matt Ransom now brooded.
She crossed to the upholstered chair the attorney indicated for her use. So. It would be a war of silence rather than reproach. Very well, Perri thought grimly.
John Deepwater retrieved the folders from his desk and handed one to Perri. With the dignity and grace that was so much a part of him, he turned to Ransom and said: “Shall we begin, Matt?”
Without a word, Matt took the file and his seat.
“I can read this word for word or just use plain English. You tell me,” John announced.
“English,” Matt said impatiently, not sparing a glance in her direction, “I’ve got a lot to do before sundown.”
Perri calmly nodded her assent. He was going to have to work harder than that to provoke her this time.
“Okay,” John began, “you both inherit the bulk of Gannie’s estate and share the duties of co-executors. The acreage behind the house that borders the Ransoms’ is left to Matt, up to but not including the horse barn. You split the oil royalties.” He paused on a wry smile. “I figure that will keep you two tied up in paperwork with the oil companies for at least a year and a half.
“Perri gets the house and the surrounding acres, from the horse barn to the highway, including the graveyard.” The attorney raised his eyes, as if to check and see how they were taking the fifty-fifty split. “And you both inherit this project of hers—the ‘Donated Land’ out on the lake. The money, accounts, etc., are divided equally, aside from some bequests listed on page two.” Pages rustled as the inheritors followed along.
“If you would like extra copies, just let me know,” he added. John’s gaze lingered on Perri. “And, of course, I will be glad to send a copy on to your attorney in New York, Perri, if you like.”
She returned the look calmly, certain he still couldn’t reconcile in his mind the sophisticated businesswoman she had become with little Perri Stone. Something was going on. She could feel it. Only her abiding trust in John Deepwater and the certainty that Matt didn’t know any more than she did, kept her from tensing up. It was arduous enough to hear John speak about the division of Gledhill. It just about broke her heart to think of it.
“It sounds pretty straightforward, for a piece of legal work,” Matt remarked as he rapidly flipped pages. “But you don’t seem too enthused, John. What is it?”
“Well, there’s one hitch,” John said calmly.
“Then let’s hear it,” Matt demanded.
That did it. “Oh, surely, Matt and I can work it out reasonably, John.” Perri cast a reproachful glance at this stranger she had once known so well. “If there’s something Gannie wanted us to do, I’m willing to make every effort.”
“Yes, well, darlin’,” John began easily, “what she wanted you to do was to marry Matt Ransom. If you decline, the land will be sold for condominiums.”
Two
Ransom wasn’t fooled. John Deepwater, Esq. was making a supreme effort not to smile as they absorbed the news. And allowing as how Deepwater’s poker face was a legend in the county, he almost pulled it off.
It was a successful effort by Matt’s estimation. But Matt had known John too long and too well. And what he knew of the man had him practically hovering over his chair, like a hawk just waiting for the field mouse to blink.
“Did she say why, in the blazes, she made our getting married a part of the deal?” Matt demanded in none too gentle tones. He felt Perri flinch at the word “married.” Well, he could hardly blame the woman for that.
Deepwater took a deep breath. “She said she wanted to get your attention,” he replied calmly. One would have thought little old ladies routinely made getting married a condition for inheriting their estates.
